Day of the Vow

The Day of the Vow (Afrikaans: Geloftedag or Dingaansdag) is the name of a religious public holiday in South Africa until 1994, when it was renamed the Day of Reconciliation.

The Day of the Vow traces its origin as an annual religious holiday to The Battle of Blood River on 16 December 1838. The besieged Voortrekkers took a public vow (or covenant) together before the battle, led by either Andries Pretorius or Sarel Cilliers, depending on whose version is correct. In return for God's help in obtaining victory, they promised to build a church and forever honour this day as a holy day of God. They vowed that they and their descendants would keep the day as a holy Sabbath. During the battle a group of about 470 Voortrekkers defeated a force of about ten thousand Zulu. Three Voortrekkers were wounded,and some 3,000 Zulu warriors died in the battle.

Two of the earlier names given to the day stem from this prayer. Officially known as the Day of the Vow, the commemoration was renamed from the Day of the Covenant in 1982. Afrikaners colloquially referred to it as Dingaansdag (Dingane's Day), a reference to the Zulu ruler of the defeated attackers.

No verbatim record of the vow exists. The version often considered to be the original vow is in fact W.E.G. Louw's ca. 1962 translation into Afrikaans of G.B.A. Gerdener's reconstruction of the vow in his 1919 biography of Sarel Cilliers (Bailey 2003:25).

The wording of the Vow is:

The official version of the event is that a public vow was taken by a Trekker commando on 16 December 1838 at Ncome River (Blood River) which bound future descendants of the Afrikaner to commemorate the day as a religious holiday (sabbath) in the case of victory over the Zulu. In 1841 the victorious Trekkers built The Church of the Vow at Pietermaritzburg, and passed the obligation to keep the vow on to their descendants.

As the original vow was never recorded in verbatim form, descriptions come from the diary of Jan Bantjes (possibly written on 9 December); a dispatch written by Pretorius to the Volksraad on 23 December 1838; and the recollections of Sarel Cilliers in 1871. A participant in the battle, Dewald Pretorius, wrote his recollections in 1862, interpreting the vow as including the building of churches and schools (Bailey 2003:31).

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