In the center of Fazenda Jamba, surrounded by strawberry plants, the small cemetery is delimited by a simple wall and a gate without a lock, to prevent animals from entering. With two dozen Boer graves, all buried there for practically a century, the cemetery has been looked after for three generations by the Yudo Borges family.
The family took over the farm, which is visited every year by caravans from the south -Africans and Namibians, countries where their descendants still live.
"Because they were all leaving, leaving", the young farmer begins by explaining to Lusa, remembering the departure of the last Boers, in this case the proximity of the end of the Portuguese colonial period.
A 20-minute drive from Lubango, capital of Huíla, a province in the south of Angola, Humpata is an essentially agricultural town, with large farms, and the installation, more than a century ago, of the Boers contributed to this.
" They came here, produced, worked hard and when they got bored they picked up and left again for South Africa", recalls Yudo Borges, the current administrator of Jamba Farm, which he inherited from his father and grandfather.
The Boers, or Afrikaners, are descendants of the Dutch who settled in South Africa, particularly in the Cape Colony, in the mid-17th century, and of French Protestants who fled the religious wars in Europe.
They even developed their own language - Afrikaans, currently one of the official languages of South Africa -, but after wars with the British, in dispute over the colonization of that territory, the community, highly specialized in agricultural production, began the so-called "Great Journey" to the north.
Part of the group continued their journey through the current territory of Namibia, reaching and traveling along the banks of the Cubango and Cunene rivers, arriving in Angola at the end of the 19th century.
After understanding with the Portuguese colonial power, they were authorized to cultivate land in Humpata , as was the case with the farm then, it is thought, created by the family patriarch, Johannes Van Der Merwe, still buried today in the farm's cemetery.
According to the inscription on the tombstone placed in the grave, he was born in 1752 and died in Humpata on June 9, 1884.
Van Der Merwe or Botha are the surnames of the Boer families buried several decades ago in the cemetery on that farm, the only one of the several that existed in Humpata that is properly preserved.
In just one week, the farm can produce up to nine tons of strawberries weekly and the ambition of Yudo Borges, 35 years old, heir to the family business and who graduated in farm management in South Africa, is to start exporting, after farm certification.