At the Fireside Read online

  Next day Colonel Wiltshire’s scouts reported that the surrounding hills were thick with Xhosa warriors, all converging on Grahamstown. It is believed that this was the largest Xhosa force ever assembled for an attack on a single objective (unlike the Zulus, the Xhosas preferred mobile thrusts rather than head-on assaults when the circumstances allowed). It was concentrated on the ridge of hills and extended from what is now called Makana’s Kop in the south towards Beaumont Valley.

  This was to be no mass attack, however. Makana had divided his army into four regiments, each with a different task. One regiment of about 1 000 men he sent out to intercept a commando from Swellendam under a Commandant Botha, which he knew had arrived at Blaauwkrans, and keep it out of the attack. Another regiment was tasked to attack the East Barracks while the remaining two would attack Grahamstown directly by way of the Kowie Ditch.

  Makana applied some psychological-warfare tricks. The Xhosa warriors massed on the hills next to their shields instead of behind them in order to make their numbers look even greater, and the rearmost ranks rhythmically banged their knobkerries on their shields, producing a steady, unending, dull booming which was calculated to scare the daylights out of even the most battle-hardened of troops.

  Wiltshire, on the other hand, had ridiculously scanty resources with which to beat off this terrifying host – no more than 300 soldiers and 30 civilians, the latter the entire male population of the village capable of bearing arms. He did not panic, however. He detailed 60 men to defend the East Barracks and deployed the rest under a Captain Trappes in a long line stretching from the barracks along the Kowie Ditch (in today’s Grahamstown this would run from the railway station to the end of the Ditch). Anchoring the ends of the line were two field artillery pieces loaded with grapeshot or canister rounds which sprayed out a murderous swathe of musket balls when fired.

  No doubt it made a brave enough show for its size, but the fact was that Wiltshire’s assets were so sparse that Makana actually held the little settlement’s fate in the palms of his hands … except that the over-confidence which had prompted him to send that boastful message to Wiltshire lulled him into making two more literally fatal mistakes.

  Firstly, he planned to attack in broad daylight across open country, something the Xhosas tended to avoid for obvious reasons, because he had anointed his warriors with medicine which, he assured them, would turn the defenders’ bullets to water. Secondly, he told his warriors to break off the shafts of their throwing spears so they could be used as stabbing assegais in the close-quarter fighting which he expected would take place.

  This last was more or less was in line with standard Xhosa battlefield tactics, but the usual practice was for a warrior to advance to within range and launch all his assegais except one, whose shaft he would then break off for the final rush to contact.

  The usually serene hills surrounding Grahamstown must have presented the most terrifying sight on the eve of St George’s Day. Thousands of Makana’s warriors waited for the signal to attack. On the left arm of each man was a large, sturdy, oxhide shield, and in his right hand his bundle of assegais. On their heads nodded the plumes of eagles, cranes and other birds, the species depending on the wearer’s rank.

  Makana climbed the hill that now bears his name and made a final frenzied appeal to his men, his impassioned oratory whipping them into a frenzy. ‘Men of the Amandhlambi!’ he screamed. ‘The Uhlanga (the ‘Great Spirit’) has promised that the spirits of our ancestors will rise and lead us in this magnificent fight, and today we will drive the hated Amanglezi across the rivers and into the sea!’

  He raised his hand and, with blood-curdling battle cries, the vast horde rushed down the slopes of the hill towards the thin line of defenders. One can imagine what was going on there. This was the age not of individual marksmanship but rather the volley – the single crash of musketry that filled the air with thumb-thick musket balls and could mow down an entire rank of attackers as if they had never existed.

  One can hear the officers shouting: ‘Hold your fire! Hold your fire!’ because the smoothbore muskets of the day were not accurate enough for long-range fire. This was the ultimate test of discipline, but fortunately for Wiltshire the coloured and Khoina soldiers of the Cape Corps were a well-drilled fighting unit.

  Trappes let the Xhosas come to within 45 yards of his line – almost assegai range – and then gave the order to fire. Puffs of powder-smoke jetted out along the line as the big Brown Bess muskets boomed, and the charge slowed as a great gap appeared in the Xhosa ranks.

  ‘Forward! Forward to drive the white men away!’ the indunas screamed and the charge picked up momentum again. The soldiers reloaded, their hands deft from long practice – a well-trained soldier could load and fire several shots a minute – and more Xhosa warriors fell. The two field guns were firing now, their loud retorts adding to the noise of the battle, their shots ravaging the increasingly battered Xhosa line.

  A chronicler known only as ‘Tiger Tom’ says that when the Xhosa attack was finally checked after several volleys it was not more than 30 to 35 yards from the troops. There Makana’s warriors kneeled, trying to duck the unseen bullets being fired at them. They had not given up; their right arms remained upraised, assegai in hand, but they could not bring themselves to look directly at the muskets and not many assegais – crippled by their truncated shafts – were thrown.

  It was more than flesh and blood could stand, even if you were a brave Xhosa warrior, and for what must have seemed like a long time but probably was not (in combat the minutes seem to stretch into hours), Makana’s men broke and ran.

  In the meantime the assault on the East Barracks was in progress, and there the fighting was fiercer, if anything, and more recklessly sustained, so much so that at one stage the Xhosas overran part of the fortifications and burst into the central barrack square itself. But here, too, their efforts were in vain and eventually they withdrew, leaving more than 100 dead in the barrack square alone.

  By 3.30 pm it was all over. Makana’s great army had become a disorganised mob whose members were hastening back to where they had come from. Foraging parties from Wiltshire’s main defence line later picked up well over 1 000 assegais and a number of guns.

  How many Xhosas died? At this remove nobody knows. It has been estimated that Makana lost over 2 000. War casualties are sometimes exaggerated because a careful count is not always possible or advisable, but that there was a great bloodletting cannot be denied. The Cowie Ditch was completely choked with dead and dying tribesmen, and for years afterwards the men of Grahamstown would tell their children and their children’s children how the river literally ran red with blood on that day.

  Small wonder that the large piece of fenced-off ground where the main attack took place is known as ‘Egazeni’ – the ‘place of bloodshed’. That is the Xhosa name for Grahamstown.

  The defenders’ losses, on the other hand, were very small – three whites killed and five wounded. It would be easy to say that Grahamstown was saved because of the disciplined steadiness and fighting spirit of Wiltshire’s troops combined with the firepower of their muskets and the two artillery pieces, but it would be an inadequate answer. All that certainly played a role, but the odds were so massively uneven that by rights Grahamstown should have been overrun.

  In fact the main author of the Xhosa defeat was none other than the vainglorious Makana himself. His over-confidence led him to throw away the advantage of surprise, attack en masse over open ground and negate his warrriors’ only distance weapons, and his spurious special medicine, of course, did not work. The bottom line was that he allowed the defenders rather than the attackers to dictate the way the battle would be fought, a sure recipe for defeat.

  For practical purposes that was the end of the Fifth Frontier War – and of both Ndlambe and Makana. The aged Ndlambe did not resume his three-decades-old warpath and retired to the Mount
Coke area where he died in 1828 at age 80. Makana, who had fled across the Fish River, redeemed himself to some extent for his bungled attack on Grahamstown by surrendering to the British in order to prevent the suffering and hardship further resistance would bring down on his followers.

  He was imprisoned on Robben Island along with some others, but his defiant spirit remained as untamed as ever, and one day he and a number of compatriots overpowered a guard, seized a whaleboat and launched it with the intention of reaching the mainland. The boat capsized in the surf, however, and Makana disappeared; later that afternoon his drowned body was washed ashore.

  But the memories of Makana did not die with him in the Robben Island surf. For many years afterwards the Xhosas believed vainly that Makana was still alive although no-one knew where. Today his memory lives on in the shape of Makana’s Kop outside Grahamstown from which he launched the attack. And of course Grahamstown is still there, although it has changed vastly and become a place not of blood but of higher education and culture.

  South Africa’s Spanish Lady

  SOUTH AFRICA’S SPANISH LADY

  Not many South Africans are aware that in our history we have a beautiful Spanish lady of noble birth who was universally loved and left an indelible footprint on our maps. Let me tell you her story which is so full of drama and romance that it sounds as if a novelist cooked it up. But it’s true – every word of it.

  The story of our Spanish Lady – Juana María de los Dolores de León, to give her full name – starts in the Spanish city of Badajoz during the ferocious ‘Peninsular War’ which raged from 1808 to 1814 between Napoleon’s French armies and the British and their allies under the Duke of Wellington.

  On 6 April 1812, just before Juana’s 14th birthday, Badajoz was stormed by Wellington’s British and Portuguese troops who captured it from the French in a battle so fierce that it is remembered to this day in the European armies. Overwrought by their terrible ordeal and still full of battle spirit, the troops threw discipline to the winds and embarked on an orgy of drinking, looting and raping.

  It was a terrible time for Juana. She was of noble birth, descended from the famed explorer Ponce de Leon, who is still remembered for his search for the fabled Fountain of Youth in what is now the American state of Florida. Yet now, on the day after Badajoz’s capture, she and her sister were orphaned refugees, fleeing from the rabble which was sacking the city, their clothes torn and Juana’s ear bleeding where a looter had tried to wrench off an earring. The only thing she and her sister had been spared so far was being raped … but for how much longer?

  Then Providence intervened. Just outside the city was camped the famed green-jacketed 95th Rifles, and there the terrified girls ran almost into the arms of a 23-year-old captain named Harry Smith – and something flared between them. It is said that the young rifleman was immediately smitten by Juana’s impeccable character, good looks and noble bearing. And so, amid the terrors of Badajoz, was born a lifelong love affair.

  And Harry Smith was not the only one to be charmed by her. That stern and dutiful soldier, Lord Wellington, who had set up his headquarters at Badajoz, became so fond of her that he called her as ‘my little Juanita’, and not only gave permission for the lovers to marry, less than a fortnight after she and Harry first met, but walked her down the aisle himself.

  Juana’s staunchly Roman Catholic family severed all contact with her because she had married outside their church, but she was not deterred and accompanied her husband on adventures that have enshrined him in the history books, enduring hardship and dangers that would have broken the spirit of many a grown woman of gentle birth.

  She refused to go to England to live with her husband’s family which would have been the customary thing to do. Instead she went wherever ‘mon Enrique’, as she called him (‘my Henry’) was sent, riding with the commissariat wagons that transported food and ammunition to the troops, sleeping rough when necessary and sharing all the privations of campaigning.

  She showed her spirit at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 at which Napoleon was finally crushed. Word reached her that ‘mon Enrique’ had been killed in action. She refused to believe it, and plunged headlong into the death and destruction of the long battle to look for him.

  But she could find no sign of him. Hours later she returned to camp, distraught and broken-hearted … and found her sweetheart waiting for her, alive and well!

  Many years and battles passed. Harry Smith made a great name for himself, and after the victory over the Sikhs at the Battle of Aliwal in India in 1846, he was knighted and in 1847 appointed Governor of the Cape Colony. Naturally Juana was always at his side. Everybody loved her, and many of the things she said and did were recorded for the enjoyment of later generations.

  Among other things she left an enduring mark on the South African vocabulary. Sir Harry loved a solid bacon-and-eggs breakfast, but Juana disliked bacon and preferred cantaloupes … and very soon they were renamed ‘die Spaanse spek’ (the Spanish bacon). To this day South Africans who have never heard of a cantaloupe know exactly what you mean when you speak of a ‘spanspek’.

  The Oxford English Dictionary says that the term ‘Spanish bacon’ dates from at least the 18th century, but so what – we were the ones who turned it into ‘spanspek’.

  Today historians argue about Sir Harry’s failures and successes during the frontier wars of the ever-turbulent Eastern Cape. But none doubt his sincerity of purpose or the enduring love between him and his Spanish Lady,

  It is said that every night, before he could greet her with a kiss, she would look at him and say, ‘Have you done all your duties by your men?’ And not till he replied that he had would she kiss him. This caring nature was why she was beloved by everybody who met or knew of her, and that is why there are two towns in South Africa named after her – Ladismith in the Cape and Ladysmith in KwaZulu-Natal.

  There was another place that bore her name, although few South Africans know about it – Juanasberg, a frontier settlement in the Amatola Mountains near Hogsback. It was ransacked and burnt down during the Frontier Wars, along with Auckland, Ely and Woburn. But people who know where to look in the upper Tuyme valley can still find its remains.

  Sir Harry has left his own imprint on our maps – Harrismith in KwaZulu-Natal, Smithfield, Fauresmith and Aliwal North. For a short while there was another; when Mossel Bay was officially proclaimed in 1848 it was renamed Aliwal South, but this never ‘took’, and it went back to its centuries-old name.

  The departure of Sir Harry and Juana Smith from South Africa was suitably colourful. They arrived from the east coast in HMS Styx on 14 April 1852, to be greeted by a warm reception, and on leaving were given a glorious send-off.

  The merchants of Cape Town presented Juana with a solid silver platter, and when they left the Castle to board the Styx again on the 17th the crowd stopped the procession amid cheers from all and sundry. Some Capetonians unhitched the horses from the Smiths’ carriage and pulled it all the way to the jetty. It is recorded that Juana wept, and afterwards always said that the years she had spent in South Africa had been the happiest time of her entire life.

  Sir Harry and Juana lived happily ever after and were not parted till ‘mon Enrique’ died in 1860, 48 years after the two had been united in wedlock in the blood-soaked city of Badajoz. Lady Smith survived him by exactly 12 years and mourned him till the day she, too, left this earth. They lie buried side by side in the town of Whittlesea just outside Peterborough in Cambridgeshire where he spent his youth (and after which, incidentally, Whittlesea in the Eastern Cape is named).

  Perhaps we should raise a monument to Juana. People erect monuments to soldiers and politicians; why not to one to a gentle but resolute woman from far away who conquered the people of South Africa not with sword or gun but with the simple goodness that filled her heart?

  FOOTNOTE: Long after Juana’s passing ano
ther town was named ‘Ladysmith’, this time in British Columbia. That came about as a result of the siege of Ladysmith in Natal during the Second Anglo-Boer War in which more than 7 000 Canadians fought. Back home in 1904, they decided to commemorate the great siege.

  The River of Diamonds

  THE RIVER OF DIAMONDS

  If you every have the opportunity of travelling along the N12 down from Johannesburg towards Kimberley, passing old towns like Jan Kempdorp (formerly Andalusia), then Windsorton (formerly Hebron), you are about to pass into some of the most fascinating history our country has to offer.

  It was in this area, which lies in a natural loop of the Vaal or Lekoa River, now called Barkly West, that the first diamond diggings were founded in the latter part of the 1860s – the ‘Wet Diggings’, as they came to be known. On the northern bank of the Vaal River lay the small hamlet of Klipdrift or Parkerton, and on the southern bank was Pniel, location of the original Berlin Mission Station, the most far-flung outpost in the almost unknown hinterland.

  From every corner of the globe people sailed to Cape Town, travelled by train to the railhead and then set off on foot, bicycle or stagecoach, all aiming to reach the Vaal River, stake their claims and – so they hoped – make a fortune.

  Only a few did, but there was never any shortage of hopefuls. If you stand there on the banks of the river and allow your vision to blur, you can picture the horde of hopefuls wielding pick and shovel on their claims. Settlements sprang up westwards all along the river – Canteen Koppie, Gong Gong, Winter Rush, Webster’s Pools, Waldeck’s Plant, Delport’s Hoop, Sydney-on-Vaal and others.