In the 1830s and 1840s an estimated 12,000 Boer pioneers (voortrekker) penetrated the future Natal, Orange Free State and Transvaal in order to put themselves beyond the reach of British authority. Following the British annexation of the last two Boer republics (1900), the creation of the Union of South Africa (1910) went some way towards blurring the division between British settler and Afrikaner, though the black majority was excluded from equal participation in the affairs of the country until the ending in the early 1990s of the Afrikaner political leadership's policy of apartheid ("separateness" of black and white).