Great Trek
Differences between the Boers and the Cape Dutch increased as a result of the end of Dutch rule and the Great Trek. The Netherlands formally ceded its South African colony to Great Britain around 1815. While most of the Cape Dutch community accepted British rule and embraced the status of British subjects, the Boers remained fiercely independent and felt alienated by the new colonial administration. This culminated in the Great Trek, a mass migration of between 12,000 and 15,000 Boers deep into South Africa's interior to escape British rule. Four-fifths of the Cape Colony's Dutch-speaking white population at the time did not participate in the trek. The Dutch Reformed Church, to which most of the Cape Dutch and Boers belonged, explicitly refused to endorse the Great Trek as well.