At the Fireside Read online

  Description

  After a sabbatical of eight years, with an all-new volume of his Fireside Stories, Roger Webster is ready once again to capture our hearts and imaginations with more tales of people, places, patriots, battles and heroes who changed the course of our history.

  Roger needs very little introduction to lovers of South African history. He has been reading his ‘chats’ on SAFM for well over ten years. Since 2002 he has written several volumes of stories on the subject closest to his heart – South African people – their lives, their legends, their ancestors, their battles and their triumphs. His books have also been translated into Afrikaans and German and have sold in excess of 80 000 copies.

  South Africa is a cornucopia of history and Roger has travelled the length and breadth of this country, often accompanied by his wife, to find the stories at first hand, which have been passed down through the generations and that we can now enjoy for the first time.

  Roger began his career in mining and stock broking and is today an historian, a reconteur and an award-winning public speaker. He spends a lot of time in libraries and archives all over the country, but enjoys most hearing the little-known oral histories that he garners on his travels. These are sometimes alarming, intensely interesting and often controversial. Rodger ‘has a nose’ for South African history.

  Title Page

  AT THE FIRESIDE

  Roger Webster

  JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

  JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN

  Dedication

  As I trod the winding staircase of life, I came across a companion and we have walked our paths together … my cariad.

  FOREWORD

  FOREWORD

  Picture Roger Webster crouched low on his haunches at the edge of a slow-flowing stream, tin plate in hand and leather hat tilted against the sun. He’s panning not for gold, but for stories – and very soon his pan will have more in it than a prospector’s richest dream. Because Roger has a nose for a good story. He can spot one coming from a mile away – and the river rushing past his feet is jumping with them.

  But that’s just a whimsical image. Webster is, in fact, an excavator of stories. A career in mining and stockbroking gave him some fertile ground to get started in, but it’s as an itinerant historian that he operates now. Battered, strapped suitcase in hand, he climbs down from a weary wagon to walk the dusty track to yet another abandoned dorp, in search of the last wizened resident who harbours the remaining piece of the puzzle to some heinous tale as yet untold.

  He settles into a creaking chair on the old codger’s stoep and listens till the sun drops behind the purpling mountains. Sorry, that’s just another image – chances are he booked a flight, hired a car and called the old boy on his cell – it’s just that when you read Roger’s days-of-yore stories, you kind of get carried away.

  However he unearths them, the thing about Roger’s stories is the way he relates them. Devilish detail, language that’s quaint, narrative that’s colourful – in every sense – and spiced with opinion that is not afraid to rise to the occasion if piqued by injustice. And it’s in the name of justice that many of his characters finally get an airing after decades – even centuries, sometimes – of being overlooked by official history.

  If you’ve heard Roger deliver one of his stories on radio, as you read, you will also be able to hear his rounded, deeply decibelled voice rising and falling in delight or disdain. You may also be able to see him perched on a bum-worn stool in front of a dimly lit men’s bar hung about with dubious trophies in a Royal or Standard Hotel in a town that never made it onto a map – swapping anecdotes with a pipe-smoking Piet and making mental notes, brandy tot in hand.

  Oops, done it again, the image thing. Actually, rumour has it he prefers a good, matured merlot – and you can be sure that in the men’s bar is his wife, without whom he never travels, and who is his co-excavator and scribe. Now there’s a story.

  Nancy Richards

  The Second Frontier War, May 1793

  THE SECOND FRONTIER WAR,

  MAY 1793

  As I have mentioned previously, the conduct of the Prinsloos in the Zuurveld Bruintjieshoogte area of the Eastern Cape was one of the major causes of the First Frontier War, and an enigmatic man called Coenraad Buys, or de Buys, was equally responsible for the Second Frontier War in May of 1793.

  He was a prominent member of a group of freebooters – the others were the Prinsloo and Bezuidenhout families – which the fed-up authorities rightly called a ‘cabal of rebellious frontiersmen’, violent and treacherous men who played all sides against one other for their own vicious and self-serving interests.

  Today the best-remembered of them is Buys. A huge man who reportedly stood almost seven feet tall in his very large boots, Buys spent his life doing exactly what he pleased, whether other people liked it or not. Single-handedly, so to speak, he created a clan of his own – the so-called ‘Buysvolk’ – by siring a great number of children by a variety of wives, concubines and captives. One of them was the vastly corpulent mother of Ngqika, the Xhosa boy-king, whom Buys served as councillor at one time.

  In the late 1820s Buys moved his vast family – the ‘Buysvolk’, as they came to be known – away from the Eastern Cape frontier and eventually penetrated deep into the Soutpansberg area of what would eventually become the Transvaal. There, in the malarial northern elephant country, he founded a little town called Buysdorp which exists to this day.

  In the late 1970s Buysdorp gave rise to great hilarity when PW Botha told a National Party meeting at Pietersburg that there were absolutely no non-white towns in the surrounding area, at which the inhabitants of Buysdorp fell about laughing. But that’s another story.

  On the Eastern Frontier, as Martin Legassick pointed out in his study of the South African frontier historiography, the earlier frontiersmen did not view the black man solely as an enemy or servant, and there was little if any clear distinction in parts of the social system, for the Xhosas demonstrated a high degree of military skill when the circumstances arose; and since the Xhosa nation was racked by continual factional fighting there was scope for some interesting combinations and alliances.

  But military alliances were only one aspect of Boer-Xhosa relations. The Boers adapted easily to Xhosa life when it suited them, and what foreign visitors of the time might have recoiled at, the frontiersmen took for granted. Skin colour was not a problem in those early days. They had black concubines and Khoina women, and sometimes even took up residence in Xhosa kraals under the authority of the local chief. Proximity and intimacy achieved familiarity – sensual gratification, a shared lifestyle and mutual convenience.

  But strangely enough, this did not promote either tolerance or understanding. It must be remembered that in the early 1780s, this far-flung frontier was still administered entirely from Cape Town, and everything – including disputes, farm rentals, judicial summonses and marriages – had to be settled there. It was only after continual representations following the rather cursory First Frontier War that Graaff-Reinet was founded in 1786 as a seat of government, with a landdrost, or magistrate, and a small military headquarters.

  This did not mean that peace had come to the Eastern Frontier. Everybody – the trekboers and various tribes, clans and factions – laid claim to the lush grazing of the Zuurveld along the Fish River, although the only rightful occupants were some increasingly harried Khoina clans. The first war had allegedly cleared all the claimants out of the Zuurveld, but they soon started moving back, and in fact it is doubtful if one group, the Gqunukhwebe, even left in the first place. The situation was not improved by the fact of a drought so terrible that in 1789 one trav
eller reported seeing several thousand Xhosa and over 16 000 head of cattle concentrated on just one farm.

  And then, of course, there were the interminable bouts of factional warfare among the Xhosa clans. The Gqunukhwebe and Mbalu were harassed by Ndlambe’s Rarabe clan, who had usurped his throne from the rightful heir, Ngqika. Ndlambe used a classic divide-and-rule strategy by using the Mbalu to help him defeat the Gqunukhwebe. This caused more trouble because it pushed the Gqunukhwebe up against the Boers, who complained that the newcomers were using up all the grazing and scared all the game away.

  A patrol was sent up from Graaff-Reinet to ask Gqunukhwebe to leave the Zuurveld. The Gqunukhwebe politely refused, and the Zuurveld was racked by both war and drought. The Gqunukhwebe, impoverished by both, sought new pastures – and food – and as a result the theft of trekboer livestock increased markedly. As far as Buys and others of his mindset were concerned, this provided for cattle raids on the Xhosas, since Graaff-Reinet could quite clearly do nothing about maintaining any sort of order.

  The landdrosts of Graaff-Reinet preached caution, but the trekboers began taking matters into their own hands from the end of the 1780s through into the 1790s. The chiefs of the Gqunukhwebe and Mbalu claimed that their cattle and households were raided at a whim, and that when their people went to complain, they were either whipped to within an inch of their lives or shot.

  How much of this was true was not known, of course, but there is no doubt that many raids on both sides took place, and there was certainly some severe humiliation of both chiefs.

  In one case Buys carried off some women to press them into service as concubines, which was bad enough, but what made it worse was that one of them was a wife of Chief Langa of the Mbalu. On another occasion Langa stopped off at a Boer’s house while on a hunting trip, expecting the usual bushveld hospitality. Instead, he said, the Boer locked him up in the house, took away his assegais and forced him to barter away his cattle. In yet another incident, the infamous Bezuidenhouts locked up a senior chief called Chungwa in their grain mill and forced him to provide its motive power, which was usually the work of a draught animal.

  It was a bad time for the chiefs, and particularly for Langa, the brother of the late great Rarabe, and what made it worse was that he began paying the price for helping Ndlambe against the Gqunukhwebe who now regarded him as their quarry. So the Zuurveld was like a fuse which was steadily burning down to where it would set off two related but separate explosions: Xhosa against Xhosa and Xhosa against trekboers. On top of all this, the Bushmen – everybody’s enemy – still regularly stole cattle from the Boers and others along the length of the frontier.

  And so the scene was set for the Second Frontier War. This was to be a much more serious one than its predecessor, which was more a drawn-out series of raiding back and forth rather than a real shooting war. But things had changed. The heavily bushed terrain meant that the Boers’ commando system was less effective than it was in more open country, and the Xhosa had also taken to fighting with horse and gun in addition to their traditional weapons. As always, there was no clear line between the belligerents. Some of the recruits to the Gqunukhwebe ranks were former workers of the Boers, who had found their terms of employment with the Boers close to forced servitude. In other cases the Khoina, who had received little mercy from the Xhosa clans, stood firm.

  So once more the frontier trembled on the brink of war. Theoretically it would be possible to bring justice and peace to the frontier, but that would require a huge influx of troops to quell all sides of the argument, and the Dutch East India Company was in such steep decline that it could barely afford to garrison the Cape of Good Hope. So every time the resident Boers asked for permission to form a commando, and the necessary support for it, the Graaff-Reinet landdrost refused. The situation wound up tighter and tighter until it reached breaking point in May of 1793.

  The point I’m making is that inevitably there are reasons behind the reasons that really set a situation towards spiralling out of control, but only rarely do these baseline reasons get aired.

  Just look at the start of the Somaliland pirates. Very few people know that it was the rape and devastation of their fishing fields that then drove the fisherman to piracy to be able to survive! That’s the part that is swept under the carpet of convenience.

  Nice Places, Even Nicer People

  NICE PLACES,

  EVEN NICER PEOPLE

  I am often asked about which places I particularly enjoy as I travel around South Africa, ferreting out the stories of its people and places. Well, one of my favourite destinations is George, just along the coast from Knysna, and let me tell you about why I enjoy going there so much.

  Getting there is simple. George Airport is just one and a half hours’ flight away from Johannesburg’s OR Tambo. You arrive there, pick up a small hire car, go into George itself for some shopping and thereafter it takes a mere 20 minutes to get to the smallish cove named Victoria Bay.

  And when I arrive at ‘Vic Bay’, as the locals call it, the place I head straight for is ‘Land’s End’, the nearest B&B to the sea in all Africa. And it is a splendid place to be, with the sea literally metres away from you, beautiful accommodation and unsurpassed hospitality from the owners, Rod and Shanell (Miss World!) Hossack.

  It even has its own ghost – Mrs Marais. And here’s her story.

  Many years ago a Mr Marais and his wife Daphne came to what is now ‘Land’s End’ to retire, and in the course of time she died, as we all do sooner or later. But Mrs Marais never left her home, not even when it was turned into a guesthouse.

  The Hossacks tell me that on specific occasions they have felt an unseen presence in a certain part of the house. But it is a benign one, and they got used to it. What the presence was remained a mystery, however, till a clairvoyant came to stay there and asked if they were aware of the elderly women who would come down and sit at a breakfast table in one corner. This was new to the Hossacks and they asked her what the old lady looked like … and when she described the unseen visitor, there was no doubt about who it was – Mrs Marais!

  Some B&B owners might throw a wobbly at hearing such tidings, but not the Hossacks. Instead, Rod – being the natural gentleman that he is – has made her welcome. He always sets a place for her and every morning pulls out her chair. So far she has not thanked him. Should she ever do so, I expect he will simply say: ‘You’re welcome, Mrs Marais …’

  Victoria Bay was originally called Gunter Bay, and it might have looked quite different from the way it does now. In August 1847 there was a meeting at George to discuss the viability of building a harbour there and one, Captain Allen, voiced the opinion that it was as practicable as Algoa Bay. In due course it was patriotically renamed after Queen Victoria, but fortunately that was as far as the development plans went.

  So instead this beautiful little bay became what it is today, a quaint, picturesque resort with a marvellous and well-used beach which is a great place for surfing, and no unsightly congestion because only local residents’ cars are allowed through the booms. The word ‘idyllic’ could have been coined to describe Vic Bay.

  Part of Vic Bay’s charm is directly due to an amazing stroke of good fortune which befell a struggling bookkeeper named Bramwell Butler more than a century ago. Butler decided to have a flutter on the last of the great Calcutta Sweepstakes, renowned throughout the British Empire for their fabulous payouts. Being decidedly thin in the wallet, it was a real struggle to cough up 10 shillings – a sizeable sum at that time – to buy a ticket from the local agent, a jeweller named Lipshitz.

  Butler was so broke, in fact, that he tried to acquire a partner or two to share the cost of the ticket. Nobody was interested, and in fact he was told he was mad even to try. So Butler bit the bullet and put the entire half-sovereign on his choice, a horse called Tiga at 22 to 1.

  Well, it turned out he wasn’t mad. Tig
a romped home (no doubt against all expectations) and Butler was richer by £250 000 – a truly enormous sum at a time when the average working man took home only a few pounds a week if he was lucky. To his credit, Butler tried to spread his good fortune and offered to donate £10 000 to the local Dutch Reformed Church which – possibly after some agonised spiritual wrestling – declined the donation on the grounds that it was ‘gambling money’.

  Butler then offered it to the local Methodists who were normally as strict as their Dutch Reformed brethren but proved more amenable, on the rather thin grounds, theologically speaking, that all of life was a gamble. The rest of his windfall Butler invested in property on the seafront which is how Vic Bay acquired its tidal pool and jetty in 1929.

  Twenty-five minutes away, on the way to Ernie Els’s Oubaai and just 10 minutes from the airport, is a wonderful restaurant called ‘Down to Earth’. The entire restaurant is beautifully made of clay and straw, wooden beams and thatch, and it boasts a lovely central bar and a marvellous choice of cuisine … not at Johannesburg prices either, I can assure you.

  I keep on going back there, and it has got to the point that on my last visit but one the owner came up to ask if I lived in George because he had seen me so often! He was floored when I told him I lived in Johannesburg.

  Another lovely spot is, of course, Herold’s Bay, or Dutton’s Cove, to use its old name. George Dutton came to the Cape in 1840 at which time he was already a man of considerable means. He commenced his rather colourful South African career as the gaoler of George in 1841, but very soon became a man of property when he acquired the Avontuur estate. Apart from Avontuur, which he eventually sold, he also owned Woodville, the land on which St Mark’s Cathedral was built (and which he sold to Bishop Grey for £45 in 1848), and several other properties in nearby Mossel Bay.