The Great Trek (Afrikaans: Die Groot Trek; Dutch: De Grote Trek), starting in 1836 in southern Africa, was a mass migration of Dutch-speaking inhabitants of the British-run Cape Colony, who left the Cape and travelled eastward by wagon train, into the interior of the continent, in order to live beyond the reach of the British colonial administration. Both the Cape Colony and the area newly colonised by the migrants later became part of what is today the country of South Africa. The Great Trek was spurred by rising tensions between rural descendants of the Cape's original, mostly Dutch, European colonists, known collectively as Boers, and the later, mostly British, colonists, who had taken control of the Cape on behalf of the British Empire. It was also spurred by an increasing yearning amo