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The land between the Limpopo and Vaal rivers was originally inhabited by the Sotho, Venda, and other Bantu-speaking peoples. In the 1820s and '30s they were unsettled by invasions of the Ndebele and other Bantu tribes fleeing from the warring Zulu. Another migration was that of seminomadic pastoral Afrikaner farmers called Voortrekkers, or Boers, who in the mid-1830s began to probe northward beyond the borders of the Cape Colony with the aim of organizing an exodus from British-controlled territory. Some 12,000 of these Boer emigrants moving northward from the Cape crossed the Vaal River and entered the area, where they settled in isolated farms. After driving the Ndebele north of the Limpopo River in November 1837, the Voortrekker leader Hendrik Potgieter was able to claim all of the land between it and the Vaal River. More Boers moved to the Transvaal when Great Britain annexed the nascent Boer republic of Natal (1843) and established the Orange River Sovereignty (1848). Rivalries between Potgieter and his fellow leaders Andries Pretorius and W.F. Joubert prevented the Boers from forming a strong government in the Transvaal. But because the area lay out of reach of the administration in the Cape Colony, the British in 1852 recognized the independence of the Afrikaners north of the Vaal River under the terms of the Sand River Convention.