At the Fireside Page 2
But he is mainly remembered as the co-founder (with Captain Thomas Horn of Knysna) as the founder of Dutton’s Cove, George’s seaport, on the farm Buffelsfontein. Dutton’s Cove, situated about 20 kilometres east of Mossel Bay, was an ideal outlet for export merchandise from the George area, and was opened with much pomp and splendour on 9 October 1852; appropriately, Dutton was the commissioner in charge when the schooner Musquash arrived to offload and take on cargo. Within the first year the schooner had loaded wool and other goods to the value of £5 000, a tidy sum indeed.
The old cave at the beach is a melancholy memorial of sorts: This was where they found the last skeleton of the Cape Bloubok, or Bluebuck (Hippotragus leucophaeus to give it its official name), which had become extinct in the 18th century. But there is still an abundance of wildlife in the area. Here you can spot the very rare Knysna turaco or loerie, and in the winter months you can sit with a pre-lunch gin and tonic on the verandah of the very nice little restaurant, which overlooks the entire bay, and watch the Southern Right whales playing behind the backline, not to mention visiting shoals of dolphins and barracuda.
Go a little further down the road which runs westwards towards Cape Town and you come to Fransmanshoek which will delight you with unspoilt scenery and a fine story – it is named after an old four-masted French windjammer which was wrecked in the bay many years ago.
George’s airport has really opened that whole area, as you can see from the development that has taken place. Many a businessman commutes from wherever to spend an extended weekend with his family in these lovely surroundings. Makes a lot of sense when you think about it!
Road of No Return
ROAD OF NO RETURN
This story captures one of the most tragic episodes in the annals of missionary history in southern Africa. Yet it remained unrecorded and would almost certainly have ended up on the scrapheap of our history, like so much else, if not for Stella E Kilby who emigrated to England and died a few years ago after making a new home for herself at Southend-on-Sea.
Stella Kilby became aware of it when she returned to South Africa on a visit and was asked by her cousin, Grace Norton, to look after a cache of letters and documents which were part of the family’s history. Stella did more than stash the papers in a safe place. She read them – and found herself immersed in an engrossing tale.
The story concerned a missionary couple, Holloway and Anne Helmore, and several of their colleagues, all members of the London Missionary Society. Anne Helmore (née Garden) was born in London’s Islington in 1811 and Holloway at Kidderminster in 1815. They grew up, Holloway was ordained, and they married on 21 January 1839, just five days before they set sail for South Africa with absolutely no idea of what awaited them.
Holloway and Anne did not know what their ultimate destination in the Cape Colony would be – the London Missionary Society had left that to the veteran Dr John Philip. He decided that the greatest need for a missionary was beyond the Orange River in Griqualand on the Cape Colony’s northern boundary – Batlhaping country ruled by a chief called Mothibi.
Slowly – because in those days nobody travelled quickly – they made their way inland and on 14 October arrived at Klaarwater (today’s Griquatown or Griekwastad) where there was a small mission station run by Peter Wright and Isaac Hughes. Most of the residents of Klaarwater were Griquas, one of the distinct ethnic groups which had arisen at the Cape since 1652 from a mingling of whites, Khoina and others.
In 1750 a remarkable man of mixed ancestry named Adam Kok led a group of like-minded pioneers – who were then still called ‘Bastaard-Hottentotten’ or ‘Basters’ – into Namaqualand. There they stayed for several decades, pursuing a nomadic existence, before trekking eastwards into what later became known as Griqualand.
In 1813 the missionaries persuaded them to settle down and adopt the name ‘Griqua’. The result was the Klaarwater (‘Clear Water’) mission village which became Griquatown or Griekwastad. Adam Kok had died in 1800 and his place as chief of the Griqua nation, now several thousand strong, was taken by Andries Waterboer.
From Klaarwater Holloway and Anne moved on to their first place of work, the Batlhaping Mission Station at Lekhatlong (better known today as Delportshoop) on the confluence of the Vaal and the Harts Rivers about 120 kilometres – four days’ journey – from Griquatown.
Chief Mothibi welcomed their arrival because, in 1817, he had become a devout Christian after being converted by Robert Moffat who built up the mission at Kuruman into the most successful and active station in the whole of southern Africa, and was destined to become one of the most famous missionaries in our African history.
On his first Sunday, Holloway conducted a service for more than a hundred people and instantly realised that getting to grips with the Tswana language was an urgent priority. Anne took charge of a school of 140 children while Holloway himself took on the task of teaching the older children to read and write, and also ran evening classes for the adults. All these activities took place in the open air or in the little church that had been hastily built of reeds and mud walls with a thatched roof in the traditional style.
It was satisfying but exhausting work, even though they had servants to help them, and they were both keenly aware of their isolation, thousands of kilometres away from family and friends, with no one to turn to. But as devout Calvinist Christians they accepted what they believed God had destined for them.
On 4 April 1841 their feeling of isolation must have lifted slightly when Anne gave birth to a baby daughter, but she ailed from the day of her birth and lived just 10 days. Grieving, Holloway and Anne buried her in the aching hot sands of the Kalahari and then carried on working.
After many months of hard work their labours began to bear fruit. Holloway was beginning to get his tongue around the Tswana language and he had 70 candidates being prepared for baptism. They still felt desperately lonely and isolated, reading and re-reading the letters and magazines that arrived infrequently from England, but Anne was pregnant again.
All was not well, however. A dispute had arisen, as happened so often in the politics of missionary work. Should the hitherto independent Batlhaping Mission Station fall under the auspices of Kuruman or not?
Chief Mothibi greatly feared Waterboer’s Griquas – understandably, because they were notoriously efficient warriors and many had resorted to plunder and livestock theft – and he realised that the dispute had been deliberately engineered to place the Batlhaping under Griqua control.
The upshot of the dispute was that Holloway and Anne were advised to leave for Borigelong, an outpost of the Kuruman Mission some 50 kilometres north of Lekhatlong. A distraught Mothibi begged them to stay, declaring that he would rather follow Holloway to Borigelong because the Batlhaping did not want a new missionary from Griquatown, they wanted the Helmores!
But there was nothing for it. The Helmores took leave of a grieving Mothibi and spent a few weeks at Kuruman before leaving for Borigelong. It was a rare treat to meet fellow Europeans and hear all the latest news: that the young Queen Victoria had married Prince Albert and already produced a son and heir, and that the Tories had returned to power under the leadership of Robert Peel.
They also met two new young missionaries who had recently arrived from England. One was William Ross; the other was David Livingstone who was destined to become a famous African explorer. A familiar face was missing, however: Peter Wright, one of the missionaries who had welcomed them to Griquatown on their arrival from England, had died at the untimely age of 45.
Then it was on to Borigelong. There they toiled hard in a hostile and unhealthy environment. There was a lack of fresh water and no fruit or vegetables, which seriously affected their digestions, and Anne and their new baby daughter, Olive, showed symptoms of undernourishment.
But it did not stop them. Holloway earned the respect of the people, and one of his greatest achi
evements was the setting up of a church amongst the people under the notorious Korana robber-chieftain Jan Bloem the younger (there is a belief that the later Bloemfontein was named after him, but this is only one of several unverified stories).
Then in 1843, the dispute which had landed the Helmores at Borigelong was resolved, and in October they returned to a warm welcome at their beloved Lekhatlong and resumed work on the new church they had been building on their departure. To Holloway and Anne, this place was their home. Humble, remote and extremely primitive it might be, but these were their people, and they loved them.
But their absence had brought a serious problem. Holloway found that while he and Anne had been in exile at Borigelong, many of their Batlhaping converts had reverted to the old beliefs and practices under the new chief, Jantjie, and his head deacon, Thabi. The nights were often disturbed by the doleful sound of drums that made children scream and dogs howl.
When he questioned Jantjie and Thabi, he was told that ‘it is the voice of our god who is evil, and we are trying to drive him from the village’. Things happened that horrified Holloway. One night a man was dragged from his sickbed, beaten and left to die; sometimes pregnant women were trampled on until they aborted and died; at other times children were strangled. When Holloway confronted Jantjie, he was told to go back to his own country because ‘you have your religion and we have ours’.
But Holloway and Anne persevered; they ministered to their converts and spread the word of God, taught the Batlhaping to read and write, and introduced better farming and irrigation techniques. By and large these were happy, industrious years during which they were able to spend some time with Robert and Mary Moffat at their house at Kuruman, which still stands after almost two centuries, and their baby daughter Ann Sofia was baptised in the little church there.
One of those at the baptism was David Livingstone who was recuperating from a near-death experience at his mission at Mabotsa, about 320 kilometres north of Kuruman, near what was to become the border of Botswana. A lion had attacked him and severely mauled his arm and, but for the intervention of his companion and fellow missionary, Roger Edwards, Livingstone would surely have been killed.
Holloway did not like Livingstone very much. He found him far too fiery and completely restless, talking endlessly about setting up new mission stations all over the north and west. Holloway was much quieter by nature and favoured a different approach; to him there seemed much to be gained by improving and consolidating the existing stations, and creating continuity within a settled mission and stable environment in which their work could be promoted by good deeds and word of mouth rather than by charismatic conversion.
I spoke of Livingstone in depth about a year ago and, after many hours of research, decided that I did not particularly like his attitude and approach. As a missionary he failed; it was only after he resigned from the London Missionary Society and joined the Royal Geographical Society that he attained his fame. I shall not go into his story here, but his sojourn as a missionary in our country was destined to be relatively brief as he sought to gain the fame and fortune he so desperately craved. Little did the Helmores realise then, however, that the strand of their destiny would eventually be plaited into Livingstone’s.
But first, a slight digression. In 1838 the British had already abolished slavery at the Cape – a process which had been initiated in 1803 by the short-lived Batavian regime but then stopped after the invasion of 1806.
The abrupt transition and a bungled compensation scheme brought great hardship and discontent to the Cape farmers because slavery and indentured labour were pillars of the economy, and over a few years an estimated 6 000 of them plunged into the unknown with everything they possessed. Some trekked northwards over the Orange River and others went eastwards towards the Zulu kingdom Shaka had established so bloodily a few years earlier.
Inevitably there were clashes with some, although not all, of the tribes they met along the way. There were skirmishes about land rights and borders, there were back-and-forth cattle raids and other sources of friction that fell into an ever more vicious cycle, and the missionaries found themselves involved.
The Boers accused the missionaries of inciting the local people, supplying them with firearms, and siding with them in disputes. The missionaries’ sympathies lay with the local inhabitants, and the missionaries retorted that land treaties were often obtained through trickery and that sometimes farm boundaries were extended in spite of the treaties.
The deciding factor was that the trekboers had firearms and the local people did not. But it was not as simple as that. On one occasion or another, the local chief would enlist the help of some Boers in conquering one of their neighbours. The end result was usually the decimation of one or both of the tribes concerned.
It reached the point where the ZAR spawned two independent satellite mini-states, Stellaland and Goshen, the result being internecine wars between the chiefs Mankoroane, Botlasitsie and Gasibone, and, to the north, the well-respected old Chief Montshiwa in the area of Mafeking. This chaos finally ended when Colonel Sir Charles Warren annexed Bechuanaland as a British protectorate and chased the freebooters back into the ZAR.
In the meantime, in the winter of 1849, Livingstone set out from his newly opened mission station at Kolobeng (near today’s Kanye in Botswana), with William Cotton Oswald and Chief Sechele, to find the fabled Lake Ngami (he did not discover it since it had not been lost and was just invisible to the outside world). There he met Chief Lechulatebe who, with his Batswana tribe, had fled south from the Makololo tribal area around Linyanti on the Chobe River to settle on the lake’s shores.
Now Livingstone set his sights on establishing a mission station far to the north, among the Makololo in the Linyanti area near the great Zambezi River, and so in April of 1850 he ventured northwards from the Kolobeng mission into the semi-desert Kalahari to make contact with Chief Sebituane of the Makololo.
This time he took his wife Mary, the Moffats’ daughter, and their three little children with him, even though Mary was well into her fourth pregnancy – and those of you who have taken on the Kalahari, particularly through the Makgadikgadi saltpans, will realise what that must have meant for travellers bumping along in an ox wagon through the December heat which sometimes reached 48 degrees in the shade – if any could be found!
But after a long struggle they eventually reached Lake Ngami. It was a hollow victory. It was an unhealthy place and all of Livingstone’s children came down with fever. In spite of all the hardship and deprivation, Mary gave birth to a baby daughter after they had returned to Kolobeng. They christened her Elizabeth Pyne, but now the trek to Lake Ngami exacted its price. It had seriously weakened Mary, and the little girl lived only a few days before succumbing to fever that her small body could not fight off.
Broken-hearted and afflicted with facial paralysis, Mary went off to convalesce at her father’s mission station at Kuruman and many months passed before she had recovered enough to return to Kolobeng. Her mother never forgave Livingstone for putting her daughter and grandchildren through the ordeal of the journey to Lake Ngami.
In the meantime, the relations between the Boers and the missionaries had worsened. In the September of 1851 William Ross sought sanctuary at Lekhatlong, having been obliged to abandon his mission station at Mamusa on the border of the Transvaal (later the town of Schweizer-Reneke).
By his telling there had been a dispute between Mahura, the chief of the Batlhaping at Mamusa, and a party of Mahurutse, and Ross was blamed for distancing himself from Mahura’s murderous actions, and for causing trouble with the Boers. The Boers took advantage of the situation and ordered Mahura to pay a fine of 2 000 oxen for shedding blood on their lands. So Mamusa was abandoned and Mahura took up residence at Taung, further west. This is how the boundaries of Boer influence slowly increased, bit by bit.
In the meantime Livingstone had reached t
he Linyanti River and had realised his wish to meet with Sebituane of the Makololo. In a series of conversations which Livingstone recorded in his journal, Sebituane described the amazing 1 800-kilometre march that had brought him and his followers to the Linyanti about forty years earlier.
It had started, he said, with the ‘Difaqane’, the years of wasting, which had set off a mass movement of Bantu tribes and clans – or what remained of them – from what is now the South African midlands. Today there are some disputes as to the causes of this period of very bloody internecine tribal warfare, but the accepted version is that the refugees were fleeing the Zulus under Shaka, who was expanding his kingdom by fire and sword.
Sebituane, who was then about 20 years old, took 10 000 of his people, the Bafokeng, from their homeland in the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains, and like the Voortrekkers they set off with everything they possessed – wives, children, cattle – in search of a place where they could live in peace and tranquillity.
It was a great ordeal that nearly brought them to their end. They crossed the (later) Vaal River and ran into Mzilikazi and his Matabele tribe, breakaway ethnic Zulus who had struck terror into other tribes over a vast area. A skirmish followed which ended with Sebituane losing all his cattle.
Sebituane recovered from this setback by taking his people west of the Vaal into what is modern-day northern Botswana, raiding, looting and conquering, so that his tribe grew larger and once more had its own herds. Then one day at Dithakong – Lattakoo as it was called then – he was told that an enormous mass of people were advancing on him from the direction of Kuruman. Sebituane responded by taking his tribe further northwards through the lands of the Baralong, the Bakwena and the Bangmangwato, fighting and robbing all who stood in his path.
Eventually he reached the banks of the Chobe River where he found the Batswana people living in the swamps at Tshoroga in the Linyanti marshes. Sebituane soon realised how unhealthy the region was; malaria attacked his men and the tsetse fly destroyed his cattle. So he went even further north, crossing the Zambezi and subjugating the tribes he found there, including the powerful Barotse. The Barotse’s lands were wonderfully green and fertile and he realised, he told Livingstone and Oswell, that ‘this was indeed the paradise I had sought’.