There's a passage I can't find right now that's quoted in the early chapters of Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart which describes how Boers were seen by Europeans in the 1700s and 1800s... basically, speaking a broken, pidgin language, living in very rough circumstances, rejecting the civilization of the coastal cities (or, I suppose, city) and intentionally turning away from the Enlightenment.

The scene I'm remembering being described is children pawing curiously over rifles just like "ignorant savages."

At any rate, the white/black divide was primarily a struggle for survival, for control of grazing land for cattle (and who's been stealing cattle from whom), waged between two groups of migrating people.

The Boers (Dutch Calvinists, French Huguenots, a few Portuguese colonists/sailors/settlers) were moving east and north from where Cape Town now stands, and the Nguni were moving south from East Africa. The indigenous people living where the first Europeans landed, the Khoikhoi (known at the time as Hottentots) are now essentially gone – the only survivors in South Africa are mixed-race groups like the “Cape Coloureds” and the Griqua. There were also the San people (once called “Bushmen”), who are still around in the Kalahari Desert. So while the conflict between the Boers and the Nguni… specifically, to begin with, the Xhosa people, the same group Nelson Mandela belonged to… was growing ever hotter, the British Empire decided it needed to control the Cape of Good Hope.

Bear in mind, the original settlers here were not so different from the Calvinists who landed on Plymouth Rock to get away from the British. Americans fought their revolution and won decisively. The Boers had a rebellion called Slagtersnek which didn’t go so well, and subsequently retreated into the hostile interior in what’s called the Great Trek, and set up Boer republics. And, basically, turned their back on the Enlightenment ideals that guided the American revolutionaries – Malan cites the Doppers, named for the Dutch word for a candle-snuffer in a church, a thing that turns out the light.

The British colonists were from a political entity that embraced the Enlightenment and humanism. They'd abolished the slave trade in 1807, and slavery itself in 1834. Although slavery wasn’t a huge part of South African culture the way it was in the American colonies, some farmers did keep slaves (they outnumbered Europeans at one point), and any laws giving rights to other races were basically seen as offering support to the enemy, those people who are out there trying to kill us and take our futures away. Abolition was a big deal in South Africa. This isn’t to say the British weren’t out there being racially enlightened all the time, but they went about things very differently. The Boers also had military allies among the tribes they encountered – they helped the Rolong in fights against the Ndebele, for example. And the Griqua were fighting alongside the Boers as well.

Anyway, if this seems complicated, it is, very, and I'm sure /u/khosikulu could do a much better job trying to clarify things.