Cape Dutch

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Cape Dutch, also commonly known as Cape Afrikaners, were a historic socioeconomic class of Afrikaners who lived in the Western Cape during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The terms have been evoked to describe an affluent, educated section of the Cape Colony's Afrikaner population which did not participate in the Great Trek or the subsequent founding of the Boer republics. Today, the Cape Dutch are credited with helping shape and promote a unique Afrikaner cultural identity through their formation of civic associations such as the Afrikaner Bond, and promotion of the Afrikaans language. At the onset of British rule in the Cape Colony, the preexisting population of European origin settled during the Dutch era was universally classified by the new colonial government as "Hollanders" or "Dutch". In 1805, a relative majority still represented old Dutch families brought to the Cape during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; however, close to one-fourth of this demographic group was of German origin and one-sixth, of French Huguenot descent. Nevertheless, to the British authorities they represented a rather homogeneous bloc which could be easily distinguished by their common use of the Dutch language and shared adherence to the Dutch Reformed Church. Among the colonists themselves there had developed a notion of a Boer people; although the term could denote any Dutch-speaking white settler it was usually only the impoverished pastoral farmers on the colony's frontier who applied this concept to themselves and formed a unique subgroup accordingly. In response, British immigrants and officials adopted the informal moniker "Cape Dutch" to distinguish between the better educated, wealthier Dutch speakers concentrated in the Western Cape and the self-styled "Boers", whom they considered ignorant, illiterate, and uncouth. "Cape Dutch" may thus be regarded correctly as an English description rather than any sense of self-concept. When first introduced, the term was not actually used by Dutch-speaking whites in the Western Cape to describe themselves, and the idea of a unique Cape Dutch identity did not find widespread expression until the 1870s.