With public anger boiling over and governments across the world at their wits' end, Andries Pretorius and Representative Young Kuldre were happily drinking together.
After only a few drinks, though, old Pretorius burst into tears.
"First our king abandoned us Boers, then our masters drove us out. I never imagined that today so many people with nothing to do with us would be willing to help us stand against the most powerful nation in the world."
Note: The Boers were originally Dutch settlers in the Cape Colony. After the Napoleonic Wars, however, the father of the current king, William I, the "Merchant King," sold them to the British for six million pounds sterling.
The British then became the masters of the Cape Colony, but they disliked the indigenous people—and it had nothing to do with their skin color.
Young Kuldre had been drinking, but he was far from muddled.
After all, the two men had lived in very different worlds. Old Pretorius had dealt mostly with poisonous insects, wild beasts, and primitive tribes. Most of his enemies made their hostility plain. Representative Young Kuldre, on the other hand, was a politician who faced countless open and hidden attacks every day.
Old Pretorius had spoken without thinking, but to Young Kuldre, his words were like a bolt from the blue. Only then did he realize he might have been deceived, and that his national sentiments had been played upon. A chill ran down his spine, and his voice turned cold.
"How can we have nothing to do with them?"
The older man began to see the problem, too. He realized that what he had said was indeed inappropriate. In truth, "Boers" was what they called themselves; other nations did not recognize the term.
And the words "nothing to do with us"