Description:
This cabinet card conveyed a strong political message on behalf of the South African political party Het Volk, probably in the run up to an important election in the Transvaal colony in 1907.Het Volk had been founded by two Afrikaners, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, as an exclusively white party in the Transvaal in 1904. One of the main planks of the party's platform was reconciliation between the Afrikaner people and the British, who had fought against each other in a brutal war—commonly known as the Boer War--between 1899 and 1902. The Afrikaners had fought for their independence from British rule, but the British ultimately won the war and incorporated Afrikaner territory into the British Empire. Although Botha and Smuts had played leading roles in the fight against the British, they subsequently decided that the best way forward was to establish a cooperative alliance between the Afrikaners and the British in order to maintain white minority rule over the vastly larger population of black South… Read More
