By the time the British began making their own claims on the Cape at the end of the century, the Dutch and the Huguenots, along with an infusion of German immigrants, had already transformed themselves from rogue splinter groups into an entirely new ethnic group—neither European nor African, but Boer. “In their manner of life, their habits…even in their character,” a journalist for The Times would write, “they had undergone a profound change.” The Boers even developed their own language, Afrikaans, which mixes Dutch with everything from French and Portuguese to KhoiKhoi.
