The Voortrekker coinage.

South African numismatic literature has, for most of its existence, started its serious work with 1874 — the Burgerspond — or with 1892, the first dated ZAR coinage. The decades before are usually treated as pre-numismatic, the work of historians rather than coin specialists. The result is a strange silence around what was actually circulating in the interior during the formative decades of the inland Boer Republics.

The Great Trek of the late 1830s and 1840s carried thousands of Cape Dutch out of the Eastern Cape, across the Orange River, and eventually north of the Vaal. The trekkers took with them whatever money they had — partly Cape Colony issues, partly British colonial silver and copper, partly the older Dutch and Portuguese silver that had circulated in the Cape since VOC times. None of this was struck for the trekkers, and none of it carries any visual mark of its trek-era use. But it is what the trekkers used. The question of what the inland Boer Republics ran on before they had mints of their own is precisely the question of what trekkers carried with them and what subsequently circulated in their hands.

Pierre Nortje's WCNS treatment is the first sustained attempt to treat this seriously as numismatic history rather than economic background. The work synthesises the documentary record — trekker diaries, trader correspondence, missionary station accounts, Cape Colony Treasury statistics — with what can be inferred from the population of recovered coinage in the archaeological record. It is the foundation on which any future page in this library on the inland-republic monetary history will rest.