At the Fireside Read online

  They succeeded, and very slowly his illness ebbed and the dominee began to recover. Then, just after he had made a full recovery, a terrible blow struck Maria: she was told that her husband had been killed by a British bullet and that she was now a widow. But the bread they had cast on the waters now returned in full measure. The dominee had had a complete change of heart about the two women and he was there to provide the deep spiritual comfort Maria needed as desperately as he had needed the tireless care nursing the two women had provided during his illness.

  The inevitable happened: Dominee Oosthuizen fell in love with Maria and in due course they were married. For a short while they lived in complete happiness, Maria and Sabrina continuing to practise as herbalists and constantly expanding their knowledge of the African healing arts. But then the dominee accepted a call to the Greytown district in the southern part of Natal Colony, and after sad but fond farewells to the people of Matatiele, the three of them set off for their new home.

  There the dominee managed to buy a small farm and they spent a number of arduous but fruitful years. The dominee rode out on pastoral visits among the local population, sometimes only returning late at night. Then one Friday evening he rode in after visiting an outlying part of the district and fell from his horse, desperately ill.

  When the two women had carried him into the house and made him as comfortable as they could, he told them that the Zulus were dying in their hundreds from an unknown disease – obviously the deadly influenza epidemic which was sweeping through the world and was killing thousands of people in other parts of South Africa.

  That much he was able to tell them although he was so ill that Maria and Sabrina held an all-night vigil at his bedside, trying to reduce his raging fever. But all their efforts were in vain. The fever had taken too great a hold on him and at first light his life slipped away. Maria was a widow again, for the second time in less than 20 years.

  The tragedy would have crushed a lesser woman, but Maria spent three days locked in her study with the books in which she had compiled the healing wisdom she and Sabrina had accumulated over the years. Then she emerged, called for her horse and rode off into Zululand.

  For two weeks she rode tirelessly from village to village and kraal to kraal, stopping only for the food and shelter which was always willingly offered to her, telling the chiefs and headmen that she was the preacher’s widow and that they had found a natural cure for the dreaded disease: the people, she said, must drink their own urine. The chiefs and elders did what she asked, and when she had completed her lonely task she returned to the farm.

  There she rested up and then started all over again, this time visiting the kraals and villages to see whether or not her belief had been correct and the remedy was working. Everywhere she went she met with particular care, respect and consideration; like most people undertaking a selfless mission she did not realise that by now she was beginning to be seen as a saint among the Zulus.

  Did it work? Now, I’m not an expert on homeopathic medicine, but I believe that if you introduce a small dose of a disease into your body it will produce a natural antibody which will neutralise the disease. And so it was, the historian told me, that the Zulu nation was saved from the pandemic that killed so many hundreds of thousands of people in the world during 1918 and 1919.

  But Maria was still devastated by the loss of her husband and, when she could not stand the pain any longer, she sold her beloved farm and moved to Johannesburg with her friend Sabrina. There she took lodgings in a boarding house in Booysens where she and Sabrina lived for years.

  And then, in her old age, Sabrina disappeared. Maria was broken-hearted. How could her lifelong friend and companion simply desert her in her hour of greatest need? What she did not know was that Sabrina had not deserted her at all; she had seen how frail Maria had become and so she had set off to walk all the way back to Zululand to tell the chiefs and headmen that the woman who had saved the Zulu nation was dying and that they must come quickly.

  Immediately an impi set out at all speed for Johannesburg, carrying Sabrina on a litter. When they arrived at the front door of the boarding house in Booysens it was locked. They broke it down, only to find that Maria had died. With loving care and respect they took her from her bed, wrapped her in a blanket and took her home to Zululand.

  There she was given a royal burial in the hallowed ground of eMakhosini, the valley where only the kings of Zululand are laid to rest. There, to this day, sleeps the brave Afrikaans woman who turned her back on her own dreadful sorrow to fight for the lives of an entire nation.

  The Bhambatha Rebellion of 1906

  THE BHAMBATHA REBELLION

  OF 1906

  The year 2006 marked the 100th Anniversary of the Bhambatha Rebellion in the Mvoti District of Natal, although ‘Bhambatha Rebellion’ is now being replaced by ‘Bhambatha War’, and in truth this is not just another nauseating example of political correctness but a far more accurate description.

  It was not a long war. It started with an attack in the Mpanza Valley on 3 April 1906 and ended in the Mome Gorge on 10 June that same year. But while it lasted it saw some considerable fighting and left thousands dead. Yet surprisingly little is remembered about it today, and it would be fair to say that the Bhambatha War has become little more than a footnote in the country’s military annals.

  As a result, almost none of us knows what happened, and even fewer know why it happened. The latter is as important as the former because the Bhambatha War was not simply a spontaneous outbreak of faction fighting such as has been going on sporadically for generations in KwaZulu’s Msinga Valley. It was, in fact, the last old-style tribal war to be fought in South Africa.

  To understand why these people went into revolt one has to know little about the background prior to that fateful decision being taken.

  In August 1905 the political coalition under the Honourable CJ Smythe, which was then governing Natal, was faced with an embarrassing budget deficiency, so it did what politicians tend to do in such cases and imposed a new tax – in this case a poll tax which had to be paid by every black male, whether employed or not.

  In concept it was simple enough: the chiefs in every area would be responsible for collecting the poll tax from their subjects and then pay it over to the government. No big deal! But it was a big deal. If history teaches us anything – here in South Africa and in fact anywhere in the world – it is that taxation without representation is a recipe for trouble. Alas, politicians tend not to remember the lesson and try it time and again. Perhaps they’ll learn better at some stage, but don’t hold your breath.

  But back to Natal in 1906. The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 had broken the power of the Zulu kingdom and brought the nation Shaka had built under the power of the crown colony government. But there was an area outside Zululand, the traditional grounds of the Qwabe clan, which the colonial government ruled in conjunction with the clan royalty and the Amakhozi, the minor chiefs and headmen. This was vastly different from the rest of Zululand which was ruled directly by the government and not by consensus.

  The poll tax imposed on the tribesmen was virtually the last straw for the Qwabe clan who had experienced some bad times for several decades. The disruption caused by the 1879 war had resulted in collateral hardship, as wars tend to do. Then there was the devastating rinderpest epidemic of 1896 which had caused such widespread devastation to the country’s livestock that to this day a common expression to describe an event of long ago is ‘that was before the rinderpest’.

  There was also a huge locust plague and the disruption caused by the Second Anglo-Boer War, which broke out in late 1899 and kept southern Africa in an uproar till May 1902, followed by a general depression resulting from the British ‘scorched-earth’ policy which impoverished the Boers and many others besides.

  On top of all that, there was an epidemic of East Coast fever which swept through the
various crown colonies. This is a virulent cattle disease which is so difficult to combat that the first truly effective antidotes were not developed till the 1990s. South Africa’s first recorded outbreak was in the Transvaal in May 1902, the month the Anglo-Boer War ended. From there it spread rapidly to the rest of the colony and then into Natal. The government there acted swiftly, restricting the movement of cattle and taking all healthy animals to uninfected veld, and by 1906 it had managed to temporarily halt the spread of the disease.

  By this time the Zulus, like pastoral farmers almost everywhere, had suffered painful losses of livestock and were feeling the economic pinch, and many chiefs and headmen – and, I am sure, whites who were aware of the tribespeople’s plight – approached the government in Durban to advise Smythe and his henchmen that Zulus simply did not have the money to pay the poll tax because they were still trying to recover from all the disasters that had befallen them.

  Their pleas fell on deaf ears. The government was not even willing to discuss the matter; the chiefs would have to collect the tax from their subjects, and that was that. In their arrogance they obviously did not consider the fact that the chiefs and headmen, a major factor in maintaining peace, were now placed between a rock and a hard place.

  As if this were not bad enough, the local magistrate refused to give the Qwabe people the necessary passes to migrate to the diamond and gold mines unless they first paid the poll tax. What this meant was that those who were willing, however reluctantly, to pay the tax were now prevented from their only possible way of earning the money to pay it.

  These are some of the underlying causes that led to the uprising. No doubt there were many lesser niggles which added fuel to the flames of resentment, but now everything had reached critical mass, thanks to the insensitive and downright foolish attitude of the colonial government which had only itself to blame for what happened then.

  Zululand began turning into a powder keg. The people were at their wits’ end and deeply resentful, and the colonial government seems to have forgotten that their fighting spirit had not been crushed along with their kingdom: memories of the great British defeat at Isandlwana in 1879 just 27 years before were still fresh. In short, the Zulus were not in a mood – or economic condition – to be trifled with.

  In October of 1905 the acting chief of the Qwabe people, Itshingumuzi ka Mkwetu Qwabe, assembled his people at eNkanini, his homestead on the middle reaches of the Nonoti River, in the lower Thukela division of the right or eastern side of the Stanger–Maphumulo road.

  In the cattle kraal, about 500 men carrying dancing shields and sticks formed themselves into an umkhumbi, a semi-circle which was the precursor to a social activity like dancing, a religious ceremony, or even a fight. When the men had assembled, an inyanga (herbalist) named Mbombo ka Sibindi Nxumalo came out of the hut carrying a smoking brand, and moved back and forth with it among them.

  He picked up a broom in either hand, dipped each into a basket called an iqoma which contained medicine or intelezi to ward off the danger of the Abatagati, better known as the white people, wizards who owned the force of evil.

  Having sprinkled the men with its contents, the inyanga withdrew into his hut, and his assistant carried the basket down to the river for a cleansing ceremony. The men cleansed themselves internally by drinking water from the basket which contained an emetic that made them vomit (ukuphalaza), and externally by washing themselves in the river.

  When the process of purification was complete, they reassembled and formed another umkhumbi, raised their shields and sang their ihubo, or clan anthem – an extremely powerful and emotional evocation of their past glories which was designed to draw the shades of the ancestors close to them in their time of need.

  Now they took medicine to make them strong and firm. It had been placed on a fire and heated on potshards or udengezi, and each man dipped his fingers in and then licked them clean. Then the inyanga delivered a final invocation. It was the end of the ritual, and Itshingumuzi ordered them to return to their homes and wait for further instructions.

  The significance of this ritual cannot be over-emphasised. It was not a demonstration or a show of solidarity but the final preparation for war by rural people who were still tribalised and had been pushed too far. Few white people yet recognise the great power of such ceremonies, but that power is still there, as we saw recently at Marikana where the attack on the police was preceded by a long ceremony on a nearby hill, presided over by a sangoma (diviner). But preparation for what sort of war? That would emerge much later.

  I have looked long and hard at the circumstances, trying desperately to find any sane reasons for the actions taken by the Natal government in those tense days. I can’t find any. All I do find is a total lack of understanding, a total lack of respect for people and property, and an all-consuming arrogance that is surpassed only by the need to dominate.

  Sometimes I feel that it is a very deep-rooted cause, not dissimilar to our approach to farming – we must bring the earth to heel, and it must grow what we want! Not the more gentle way we find in most indigenous peoples who tend to say, ‘What does the earth want to grow?’ Harsh words, I hear you say, but let’s look at some of the facts.

  The storm broke on 17 January 1906, three days before the first date for the collection of the poll tax. A farmer from Umlaas Road named Henry Smith tried to induce his labourers to pay their tax in advance and was stabbed to death for his trouble. That one act of murder was enough to set the wheels turning for the Bhambatha War and lead to its inevitable tragic outcome.

  The actual fighting started at the beginning of February when a magistrate of the Umgeni district named TR Bennett went to collect taxes from Chief Bveli at a place called Henley near Pietermaritzburg. What he collected instead was a death threat and a blunt refusal to pay on the grounds that the people had no money.

  On the 8th a small force of mounted police set out to arrest the group that had threatened Mr Bennett. The result was a skirmish in which a sub-inspector called Hunt and a trooper called Armstrong were killed. The Governor of Natal, Sir Henry McCollum, immediately proclaimed martial law throughout the colony and mobilised the militia.

  Soon the real fighting started. I am not going to go into every action that took place; suffice it to say that between February and July there were actions of one kind or another fought in the Mpanza Valley and at Bobe, Mpukunyoni, Manzi, Pambana, Mome, Otimati, Peyana and Isinsimba – most of which, let it be added, also being an excuse for looting, rape and general pillage.

  When martial law was declared, about 1 000 men under Lieutenant-Colonel Duncan McKenzie, reportedly a vicious man by nature, concentrated in the Richmond area. After several minor engagements the so-called ‘rebels’ were arrested. McKenzie wanted to have two leaders, Meseni and Ndlovu, shot by firing squad, but the Governor commuted their sentences to life imprisonment with hard labour, an action with which McKenzie plainly did not concur.

  He is quoted as saying: ‘I do place on record … my opinion that if this golden opportunity of inflicting the most drastic punishment on all leading natives found guilty of treason is now lost, the opportunity may never re-occur.’ Lovely sentiments indeed!

  Colonel George Leuchars moved into the area around Stanger and Maphumulo with a contingent of what was euphemistically called ‘mixed forces’ which were made up of the down-and-outs from the Rand, the dregs of the bars and saloons. Governor McCollum had a somewhat better opinion of these low-lifes whom he described as ‘men who abandoned the ploughshare for the sword and placed at our disposal their lives, their hearts and their strong right arms’. Which was, to use a favoured term of the period, balderdash!

  They came for the pay and the booty. Harriet Colenso, the very able daughter of that brilliant bishop, John William Colenso, described them as ‘out-of-workers and weary willies’, and the evidence to be found in their diaries and correspondence – an
d in the vast amount of recorded evidence of their actions – is that they were nothing more than armed racists at the apex of the age of British imperialism who were ever ready to loot and kill with no regard for the consequences.

  Colonel Leuchars took his troops to Maphumulo where the chiefs were ordered to attend a meeting at which the magistrate, one Maxell, gave Chief Ngobizembe six days to hand over all the defiant men. Ngobizembe could not comply, so on 5 March, the military and police swept into the chiefdom, arrested Ngobizembi, seized hundreds of head of livestock, surrounded the chief’s homestead, brought up their artillery and razed it to the ground. By the time the one-sided action was over more than 500 so-called rebels had been killed without any loss to Leuchars; Ngobizembi died a year later in a Pietermaritzburg gaol cell, a broken man.

  Many of the fleeing black warriors were seen to be wearing the shokobezi (item of clothing symbolising the Zulu royal family). McKenzie crossed over the Tugela River to join his acting commanding officer, Major-General Sir John Dartnell, a veteran of the Indian Mutiny half a century earlier as well as the 1879 British invasion of Zululand. With him, of course, were Leuchars and Sir Aubrey Wools-Sampson, who had already gained some notoriety among the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War.

  Itelezi, or medicine, which would protect them against the bullets of the white man, had strengthened the resolve pf the Qwabe troops, but the white men’s bullets had their own non-medicinal protection.

  The cartridges used in the Bhambatha War were the .303 Mark Vs, loaded with an expanding bullet (‘dum-dum’ in popular parlance) which had been outlawed by the 1899 Hague Convention for use in international warfare. Since the British were signatories (albeit reluctant ones) to the Hague Convention, the use of the Mark V bullet presents a conundrum which arms historians have not yet solved.

  It is known that after signing the Hague Convention the British Army undertook to use its vast stock of Mark Vs for target practice only. It is also known, however, that during the early stages of the Second Anglo-Boer War the British used Mark Vs, presumably brought over from India with some of the regiments which were rushed to South Africa – possibly because that was all that was easily to hand – but soon stopped using them. Could it be that the Mark Vs used in 1906 were taken from the stocks brought out during the Anglo-Boer War just seven years earlier and placed in storage at the end of hostilities?