The British government, acting largely at the behest of the missionaries and their supporters in Britain in the 1820s, abolish the Hottentot Code.

Ordinance 50 of 1828 states that no Khoikhoi or free black has to carry a pass or can be forced to enter a labor contract.

Five years later, the British Parliament decrees that slavery will no longer be permitted in any part of the empire.

After a four-year period of "apprenticeship," all slaves will become free persons, able, because of Ordinance 50, to sell their labor for whatever the market would bear.

Moreover, slaveowners are to receive no more than one-third of the value of their slaves in official compensation for the loss of this property.

The Boers feel further threatened when, in 1834 and 1835, British forces, attempting to put a final stop to Boer-Xhosa frontier conflict, sweep across the Keiskama River into Xhosa territory and annex all the land up to the Keiskama River for white settlement.

In 1836, however, the British government, partly in response to missionary criticism of the invasion, returns the newly annexed lands to the Xhosa and seeks a peace treaty with their chiefs.

The majority of Voortrekkers, however, neither settle between the Orange and the Vaal nor trek to the north, but move northeastward around Lesotho and travel down toward the sea into Zulu-ruled areas of southeastern Africa.

The leader of this group, Piet Retief, attempts to negotiate with Dingane for permission to settle in relatively sparsely populated areas south of the Tugela River.

Dingane is at first receptive to Retief's entreaties, but then, apparently fearing that the introduction of European settlers will undermine his authority, he has Retief and seventy of his followers killed while they are at his capital in February 1838.

Dingane now sends out Zulu regiments to eliminate all Voortrekkers in the area; they kill several hundred men, women, and children and capture more than thrity-fibve thousand head of cattle and sheep.

Not all of the settlers are killed, however, and in December the survivors, reinforced by men from the Cape Colony, march five hundred strong to avenge the deaths of Retief and his followers. Commanded by Andries Pretorius, the Voortrekkers pledge that they will commemorate a victory as a sign of divine protection.

They then meet and defeated Dingane's army at the Battle of Blood River.

Their victory will be celebrated each year on December 16, the Day of the Vow.

The first groups of Voortrekkers move into the southern Highveld, skirting the powerful Lesotho kingdom of Moshoeshoe to the east, and pasture their herds on lands between the Orange River and the Vaal River.

A large group moves farther north to the grasslands beyond the Vaal River into territory where Mzilikazi had recently established a powerful Ndebele state.

Competing for the same resources—pasturelands, water, and game—the Voortrekkers and the Ndebele soon come into conflict.

In 1836 the Voortrekkers fight off an Ndebele attempt to expel them from the Highveld.

In the following year, the northern Voortrekkers ally with the Rolong and the Griqua, who are known for their fighting skills.

This time the northern Voortrekkers succeed n defeating Mzilikazi and forcing him and most of his followers to flee north into present-day Zimbabwe, where he conquers the Shona and establishes a new state.

Boer families, together with large numbers of Khoikhoi and black servants, gather up their belongings and travel by ox-wagon up into the Highveld interior to the north of the eastern Cape frontier, beginning in 1836. (Travel farther east is blocked by the Xhosa.)

All told, some six thousand Boer men, women, and children, along with an equal number of blacks, participate in this movement in the late 1830s.

Fewer Boer families migrate from the western Cape, where they are more prosperous on their grain and wine farms and therefore less concerned about land shortages and frontier pressures.

The exodus from the Cape is not organized in a single movement at the time, but it will later be termed the Great Trek by nationalist historians, and its participants are called Voortrekkers (pioneers).

Dutch speakers denounce these actions as striking at the heart of their labor and land needs.

Those living in the eastern Cape, most of them among the poorer segment of the Dutch- speaking population, are particularly impassioned in their criticisms, and many decide to abandon their farms and to seek new lands beyond the reach of British rule.

Forty farmers (Boers) have been killed in the Sixth Xhosa War and four hundred and sixteen farmhouses burnt down.

In addition, amaXhosa people have plundered fifty-seven hundred horses, one hundred and fifteen thousand head of cattle and one hundred and sixty-two thousand sheep.

In retaliation, sixty thousand amaXhosa cattle have been taken or retaken by colonists.

On September 17, 1836, with the signing of a new peace treaty, all the country as far as the River Kei is acknowledged by the Xhosa to be British, and its inhabitants declared British subjects.

A site for the seat of government is selected and named King William’s Town.

The end of the war leaves seven thousand people of all races homeless.

Having restored confidence among the whites by his energetic measures, Harry Smith has been appointed governor of the newly created Province of Queen Adelaide, where he has gained unbounded influence over the native tribes, whom he has vigorously set himself to civilize and benefit.

Cape governor Benjamin d'Urban takes far-reaching steps to prevent similar conflict in the future.

These are however not to the liking of the British minister of colonies, Lord Glenelg, who revokes all the measures and accuses the Boers of instigating the conflict.

As a result, the members of the Boer community loses faith in the British justice system, often taking the law into their own hands when cattle rustlers are caught.

Having reversed d’Urban’s policy, over the protests of land-hungry British and Afrikaner settlers, the ministry in London, to quote Smith's own words, directs the Province of Queen Adelaide to be restored to barbarism.

Smith himself is removed from his command, his departure being deplored alike by the Bantu and the Dutch; and numbers of the latter, largely in consequence of this policy of Lord Glenelg, begin the migration to the interior known as the Great Trek.

Many frontier farmers, impelled by repeated losses suffered in the Sixth Xhosa War, become Voortrekkers (literally those who move forward) and migrate to new lands in the north.

Piet Retief authors their 'manifesto', dated January 22, 1837, setting out their long-held grievances against the British government, which they feel has offered them no protection, no redress, and which has freed their slaves with recompense to the owners hardly amounting to a quarter of their value.

This is published in the Grahamstown Journal on February 2 and De Zuid-Afrikaan on February 17 just as the emigrant Boers start to leave their homesteads.

Like other Boers, Retief had acquired wealth through livestock after moving to the vicinity of Grahamstown but had suffered repeated losses from Xhosa raids in the period leading up to the Sixth Cape Frontier War.

Apart from such losses, Retief is also a man in constant financial trouble.

On more than one occasion, he has lost money and other possessions mainly through gambling and land speculation.

He is reported to have gone bankrupt at least twice, while at the colony and on the frontier.

Dingane has executed many past supporters of Shaka in order to secure his position in the years since ascending to the Zulu throne.

One exception to these purges is another half-brother, Mpande, who is considered too weak to be a threat.

Resentment of Anglican British rule and the emancipation of enslaved people has spurred a mass exodus of the fiercely Calvinist Afrikaaner Dutch farmers (known pejoratively as Boers) from the Cape to the interior in the so-called Great Trek beginning in 1835.

They initially settle in the Natal area.

In October 1837, the Voortrekker leader Piet Retief visits Dingane at his royal kraal to negotiate a land deal for the voortrekkers.

In November, about a thousand Voortrekker wagons begin descending the Drakensberg Mountains from the Orange Free State into what is now KwaZulu-Natal.

King Dingane, kaSenzangakhona of the Zulu people, asks that Voortrekker Piet Retief and his party retrieve some cattle stolen from him by a local chief.

This Retief and his men do, returning on February 3, 1838.

The next day, a treaty is signed, wherein Dingane cedes all the land south of the Tugela River to the Mzimvubu River to the Voortrekkers.

Celebrations follow.

On February 6, at the end of the celebrations, Retief's party are invited to a dance, and asked to leave their weapons behind, which they do willingly to show good faith.

At the peak of the dance, Dingane leaps to his feet and yells "Bambani abathakathi!" (isiZulu for "Seize the wizards").

Retief and his men are overpowered, taken to the nearby hill kwaMatiwane, and executed.

Some believe that they were killed for withholding some of the cattle they recovered, but it is likely that the deal was a ploy to overpower the Voortrekkers.

Dingane's army now attacks and massacres a group of five hundred Voortrekkers—men, women and children—camped nearby.

The site of this massacre is today called Weenen, (Afrikaans for "to weep").

The remaining Voortrekkers had elected a new leader, Andries Pretorius, after which Dingane suffers a crushing defeat at the Battle of Blood River on December 16, 1838, when he attacks a group of four hundred and seventy Voortrekker settlers led by Pretorius.

An estimated three thousand Zulus are killed, while three Voortrekkers are slightly wounded.

Dingane's commander at the battle is Ndlela kaSompisi.

Following this defeat, Dingane burns his royal household and flees north.