At the Fireside Read online

  As a matter of history, some Boers also used expanding bullets early in the 1899 war, but arms historians believe that this was probably due to the fact that they went to war with the only ammunition they had on hand which included hunting ammunition.

  It is also interesting to note that the prohibition on expanding bullets in the Hague Convention applied only to international warfare; it is only comparatively recently that an amendment to the later Geneva Conventions specifically prohibited the use of expanding bullets in non-international armed conflicts as well. But let that be as it may. Let us end this story by recounting the fate of Chief Bhambatha after whom this war is named.

  On 14 June 1906, north-east of eNkanini, a small party of men, led by Bhambatha ka Mancinza, the chief of the Zondi clan and the most prominent figure of the 1906 rising, left their camp in the Nkandla Forest and made their way down to the Mome River. Behind them they left a forest that stank of death. Four days earlier, more than 1 000 men had been caught there by the colonial forces. Maxim machine guns had thrown storms of bullets at them, artillery shells rained down and heavy rifle-fire barked from the surrounding hills. Men died by the hundred; the wounded sought refuge in caves and crevices, pursued by the colonial troops and their tribal levies intent on finishing them off with rifle, bayonet and assegai.

  One party of soldiers from the Zululand Mounted Rifles was searching for Bhambatha whom they eventually found a few metres away from the Mome Stream. There were signs that he had gone down fighting in a fierce hand-to-hand struggle; he had been speared with such force that the assegai’s blade had bent and was still lodged in his body. Stabbed again, he had grabbed hold of the shaft, but was then killed with a bullet fired into the back of his head.

  One, Sergeant Willie Calverley of the ZMR, cut off the dead man’s head, rammed it into his saddlebag and carried it back to the force headquarters where it was identified as that of Bhambatha. His head was buried with his body the following day, but even now there is a belief among many of his descendants that he did not die on the banks of the Mome River, but escaped and lived out his life in Mozambique.

  For practical purposes this was the end of the Bhambatha War, which had left 8 500 tribespeople dead, with a colonial loss of only eight militiamen.

  Now let’s look at what happened then. Who were called to account? Who were held responsible for failing to gather the poll tax from a people who had been defeated in physical terms but never in their hearts?

  Well, Colonel Duncan McKenzie was knighted for his efforts, and a general amnesty was passed which ensured that no members of the militia could be brought to justice and tried for committing the atrocities that had taken place.

  Needless to say, the identified ‘ringleaders’ of the rising fared rather less well when they were placed on trial for their lives in the Natal Supreme Court. The jury had to be scared into accepting that the uprising was totally evil, and this was done by invoking the role of the so-called ‘war doctor’ Mabalingwe (the name translates as the rosette marking on a cheetah’s fur).

  The initial ceremony at eNkinini, which I described earlier, was pivotal in the evidence led. It was portrayed as a ‘shown’ ritual that would turn the white man’s bullets into water, after which it would be possible to drive all the white settlers out of Natal once and for all.

  This sounds remarkably like the situation in which the Xhosas had been brought to heel before the invasion of Zululand, but on closer scrutiny we find that this is not the case. The ceremony was not part of a preparation to attack and kill the white settlers – it was for fending off an attack by the colonial militia. Let me explain.

  In an offensive ceremony, the inyanga sprinkles the men with medicine from his basket as they stand formed up in their various impis outside the kraal. The impis then immediately leave the ceremony and go straight to the frontline. There is no communication with anybody else from the time that they are sprinkled.

  But the ceremony that was held inside the kraal in an umkhumbi or semi-circle was something else altogether. The men were not regimented in impis, as they would be for war. Secondly, when the intelezi or medicine was sprinkled on them, they did not march immediately away, but moved down to the stream to clean themselves by vomiting – ukuphalaza – and washing themselves externally. Having returned and sung the ihubo, they were instructed to go back to their kraals and their women. This is in absolute contradiction to war preparation because the Zulus believed that any contact with women or children after a warrior had been prepared for war would dissipate the strength of the medicine.

  So it is pretty conclusive that the ceremony which did take place was for the defence and protection of their land, their cattle and their people. Unfortunately, it follows exactly the same pattern as the British invasion of Zululand of 1879.

  King Cetewayo explicitly told his troops not to cross the Inyati or Buffalo Rivers into the colony of Natal as he was the defender of Zululand and not the attacker of the colony. It didn’t help the Zulus then, and neither did it help the Qwabe, whose leaders were sentenced to be hanged.

  Of course, the use of dum-dums by the colonial militia never came into the equation because, thanks to the general amnesty, the atrocities of the colonial forces – the looting, the rape, the pillage and the destruction of thousands of homesteads by fire – were not under scrutiny or discussion.

  Was justice done? Well, judge for yourself. Agreed, an armed rebellion is and must be against the law, or a country would fall into anarchy. On the other hand, taxation without representation is wrong, and in any case there is an unwritten compact between the government and the governed that the former will be treated decently and the latter will not abuse its powers. If that is not the case, all bets are off. It is axiomatic that anything can be expected of people with no protection by the law who have little or nothing to lose.

  Apply this to the situation in 1906. Through your own incompetence you go into the red and try to save yourself by summarily introducing a poll tax that few can afford to pay. You then ignore the pleadings and reasoning of the leaders of the affected people, who have their noses close to the ground, and instead send policemen to collect the hated tax. Almost inevitably there is a clash and two policemen are killed.

  Your response is not to seek a last-minute solution that will rescue you from the consequence of your own folly, but to declare martial law, mobilise a force of scallywags, raze hundreds of square miles by the use of artillery, machine guns, bayonets and assegais, killing 8 500 people in the process, and violate the corpse of a revered chief after he has fought valiantly to the end. Then you hastily declare an amnesty so your troops’ misdeeds cannot be punished, scare the daylights out of a jury with false information and sentence 18 so-called rebel leaders to the gallows.

  The only positive thing I can find to say about this whole sorry affair is that the rebel leaders’ death sentences were commuted and they were sent into exile on Saint Helena. It’s not much, but that’s all there is. So all I can do is tell the truth and nudge people a little into remembering a shameful episode in our history.

  As a footnote: The Zulus’ travails were not over yet. Thanks to the disruption caused by the Bhambatha War, the Natal authorities’ measures to segregate healthy cattle were disrupted. Refugees from the fighting trekked out of harm’s way with their cattle without regard for whether the veld they were passing through was clean or infected; transport oxen used by the colonial forces went from one to the other with equal disregard for boundaries, and in spite of strenuous objections from veterinarians there was no restriction on cattle looted by the soldiers being sold at auction.

  Then it really got a kick-start when the Natal Government ran out of money again and retrenched some of its veterinary officers. Before long the entire colony was infected. The Cape Colony managed to keep the fever at bay for a few years by completely closing the Natal borders to cattle movement – at least
till March 1910, when it reached the eastern regions and did great execution among the Xhosa cattle herds. But thankfully all that is another story for another day.

  Olive Schreiner

  OLIVE SCHREINER

  There was a time in South Africa when protests were handled in a far more civilised manner than what we see today. We did not have people violently cavorting down our city streets, tossing rubbish everywhere; we did not have people calling a news conference, then swearing at a foreign journalist and demanding that he leave because he was asking uncomfortable questions.

  But, believe me, protests were made, and in a far deeper and more meaningful intellectual manner, so that even then they carried a greater weight and had a far more significant impact than the loutish behaviour we experience today.

  Gone are the days of getting a hiding at school, going home and not daring to tell your parents because you would get another one! We have dropped the standard to the absolute lowest common denominator and societies across the world are now paying the price. It reminds me, rather, of something Oscar Wilde once said: ‘In time gone by, books were written by people of letters and read by the public. These days books are written by the public, and read by no one.’ And this was more than a century ago!

  One of the people who protested about the rights of women was our own Olive Schreiner who was not only a South African writer of note but gained fame and an international reputation as an author, a feminist and a person who championed the cause of the oppressed. She was greatly admired by General Jan Smuts, one of our leading intellectuals himself, who referred to her as ‘a national possession of South Africa’.

  People often do not realise that writers with passion are usually very tortured souls who mostly find no rest or respite in our mundane world. Theirs is a world of impassioned speeches spelling out the abuses of power and the human rights of people. Their world is above good or evil; they live in the world of the spirit which mere mortals never even glimpse.

  Olive Schreiner lived through two wars which tore her apart. She understood and felt deeply about the plight of the Boers, but had a natural affinity for England, and this tormented her continually. As a feminist she championed the rights of all women, but never became anti-male, and it was, I believe, the juxtaposition of these strong opposing forces that led to her incredible writings. That was why she could make the dreary Karoo come alive like no other writer, and breathe life and vitality into her characters.

  Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner, to give her her full name, was born on 24 March 1855 on the mission station Wittenbergen which is near Herschel in the Free State. She was one of 11 children, of whom three achieved renown in their fields: Olive herself, William Phillip who became Prime Minister of the Cape, and Theophilus Lyndall who became a senator. Later her family moved to a wattle-and-daub house in Bethelsdorp, then to Philippolis and Thaba Nchu, and eventually back to Wittenbergen.

  You might be surprised to hear that this fine writer had very little, if any, formal education. But she had something more important than mere book-learning – an incredibly intellectual mind which was exercised daily through her voracious reading. It is said that as a young girl she could be found pacing up and down on the family’s veranda, her hands clasped behind her back while she talked to herself with her eyes riveted to the far distance, totally oblivious of anything or anyone around her and living the experiences of her mind.

  At the age of nine the death of her two-and-a-half-year-old sister had a dramatic impact on Olive and sowed the seeds of her most renowned work, The Story of an African Farm, which expressed the intense feeling of women’s vulnerability in the Victorian era. After she left school she spent time in Queenstown and then Dordrecht, as well as Barkly East where she was governess to the Orpen daughters. Then at 16 a disastrous affair led to a suspected pregnancy which, like her sister’s death, left an indelible impression on her mind.

  Her brother had headed for the diamond fields and it was in this dusty, flea-ridden place that she wrote most of her novel Undine. Now, an ‘undine’ is a water spirit who gains a soul if she attracts and marries a mortal man and has offspring by him; if she does not, she is condemned to live on in yearning for the experience of mortality and all the lessons it brings. But the problem is that gaining a soul meant losing the gift of immortality and therefore starting to age. One can relate to the pain and loneliness she was experiencing.

  Olive left Kimberley for Cradock where she entered the employ of the well-known Cawood family on the farm Gannahoek and completed Undine. Then she moved to Lily Kloof, the farm of her friends the Fouché family, and here she wrote the greater part of The Story of an African Farm.

  Determined to have the book published, she saved up enough money to sail for England – and succeeded in her aim.

  Olive stayed in England till 1889, then returned to the Cape and settled in Matjiesfontein, on the edge of the Karoo, an important stop-over on the railway line to Kimberley. Her return coincided with the rise to fame of Cecil John Rhodes. At first she was enthralled by his vision and dynamic personality, but slowly she started to recognise his true attitude towards the exploitation of people and resources, and became a bitter foe.

  In the meantime there was another great turning point in her life. On a visit to Gannahoek she met a Cradock farmer named Samuel Cronwright and fell in love with him. They married in Middlelburg in 1894 and then left for his farm, Krantz Plaatz. Olive was enchanted with the farm, and particularly a hill on it called Buffelskop, and declared that this was the spot where she and ‘Cron’ would be buried one day.

  But their stay was short. The Eastern Cape climate was not good for her chronic asthma and so Cron sold up and moved to Kimberley, a decision he lived to regret because he was never again able to raise enough money to buy another farm. At first they lived with Olive’s sister at ‘The Homestead’, but eventually bought a house and that was where she wrote her novel Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, a scathing criticism of Rhodes and his Mashonaland Chartered Company which cost her most of her English-speaking friends.

  To make matters worse, she and Cron became openly sympathetic towards the Boers after the ill-conceived Jameson Raid of 1896; they were no fools and could see the writing on the wall of British imperialism before most other English-speaking southern Africans.

  In 1895 Olive gave birth to a daughter, but the infant lived only for a few hours and she mourned her dead child for the rest of her life. She went off to London again, leaving Cron at De Aar, and did not return till 1920, well after the end of World War I. She was near the end of her life by then. On her return to Cape Town she took lodgings in Wynberg and when her long-standing friend Mary Brown went to see her she was shocked to find a broken, prematurely aged women whose asthma made every breath a struggle.

  On 10 December that year Olive died in her sleep. True to his word, the faithful Cron came down to Cape Town to take her home. Earlier she had bought a morgen of land on top of Buffelskop and on 13 August 1921 he laid her to rest there along with her little daughter and her favourite dog.

  In the fullness of time Cron was buried next to her on the Cradock kopje she had loved so dearly, and they lie there to this day, she one of South Africa’s most famous activists and a writer whose work is as relevant today as it had been in her time and the husband who had not begrudged her the space she needed to live her extraordinary life.

  For Capetonians, reminders of Olive Schreiner can be found much nearer to home. There are her books in the libraries and shops, of course, but if they visit Matjiesfontein – a Victorian time capsule off the N1 which was beautifully restored by the late David Rawdon in the late 1960s and declared a national monument in 1975 – they can visit the house where Olive lived after her triumphant return from England as a published author.

  South African Coinage

  SOUTH AFRICAN COINAGE

  Fate and friendship both play an inter
twined role in one’s life. Let me give you an example.

  One morning I received a phone call from a good friend of ours who had had lunch with a certain Clive Dean. Somehow we got to talking about the sparrow on South African coinage – and this led to the discovery of a fascinating tale that I am sure you have never heard. But, by way of general background, let me make a few remarks about the earlier history of South African coinage.

  The most popular coins in circulation when Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape in 1652 were the Spanish dollars – the ‘pieces of eight’ that feature in innumerable pirate stories – which were silver coins about 38 mm in diameter, worth eight reals. In those days Spain was a world power, and the Spanish dollar became a sort of international currency because everyone knew what it was worth.

  Still, there were many other gold and silver coins in circulation, and determining the exact value of each was not always easy, which caused problems as the Cape outpost began to grow and service more and more passing ships of several nations.

  This led to the introduction of the rix-dollar (‘king’s dollar’), a silver coin used all over Europe under various names – reichsthaler in the German states, rijksdaalder in the Netherlands, rigsdaler in Denmark and riksdaler in Sweden. Now, no matter what coin was paid over a counter at the Cape, its value against the rijksdaalder was known.