16. That we will keep the day and date each year

16. That we will keep the day and date each year

With these words the commitment starts concerning the day on which they would receive their deliverance, which then after seven daily repetitions thereof, would seem to must be 16 December: “...that we will keep the day and date each year...” on a specific manner. “Day of the Vow” shows on what is decisive for the people by that concerned in remembering what happened. Simultaneously the sustained commemoration of it makes it a dear obligation and a delightful privilege, namely the Vow to the Lord.

The name, Dingaans day, which very soon by itself became current in the people’s mouth for the day and date, was earlier already, but in wide ranks especially around the Symbolic Ox-wagon Trek during the Voortrekker Centenary in 1938, experienced as less satisfying. It was therefore through a purposeful combined effort by the organised Afrikaner cultural society replaced by Day of the Vow(Geloftedag).

What gives eternal meaning to that history, is not a glorious military triumph, but the covenant of grace with God, which have been presented by our ancestors and confirmed by Him.

Simultaneously the name Day of the Vow presents a built-in protection mechanism for the religious character of what Sarel Cilliers called the “keeping” of the day. To connect the day in his name to the person of Dingaan, who came off worst in the commemorated event, could easily open the door for Dingaan’s day celebrations on the manner of the English Guy Fawkes affair. Dingaan’s day would be still a thousand times preferable than Reconciliation day! It would at least have kept the boundaries visible - between light and darkness.

If the Boer People cease to keep the day and date humbly, thankfully, knowingly with wholehearted input of all they are and have, with the re-commitment to what became reality on that day and date in the year 1838 at Blood River, and with that alone, they cease to be Vow People and make themselves totally obsolete at the south end of Africa.