At the Fireside Read online

  Each was populated by ever-hopeful souls digging in the ground or fossicking away under boulders for the elusive hiding places where the river’s waters might have deposited a diamond or two untold centuries ago; men of an astounding variety of nations, united by only one aim: to find that one big stone which would set them free.

  As I’ve said, though, very few of them ever found that passport to a new life and, just as it was to be on the as yet non-existent gold diggings on the Witwatersrand, tales of heartbreak, bankruptcy and starvation were a dime a dozen.

  It is recorded that one hopeful soul who had been trudging doggedly inland from Algoa Bay was within just 20 miles of the diggings when he met some former diggers similarly trudging, but in the opposite direction. That night he sat at their campfire, listening with horrified fascination to the stories of their dreadful experiences – endless hard work for little reward, the general hardship, the disease, the flies, the lack of sanitation, the ubiquitous dust that clogged and grimed everything. Later he gave the matter some hard thought and when the others set off for the coast next morning, he turned his back on his dreams and joined them.

  The diggers who stayed were men of spirit. Most of them were used to hard physical labour, but the work on the diggings was backbreaking. It became even more arduous when it was discovered that the river’s banks were not the only source of riches; further away there were areas that once had been part of the original watercourse and they also held diamonds.

  Canteen Koppie was one such. Every day gravel had to be ripped from the unfriendly earth, then transported to the river by mule cart. There the gravel would be washed and sorted by passing it over a series of sieves called a ‘baby cradle’ so named after its inventor Jerome Babe, an American digger from the San Francisco gold rush of 1849 (that is where the song ‘Oh My Darling Clementine’ comes from, incidentally).

  Men (and some women) whose names are enshrined in our records of the early times today got their start on the diamond diggings. Among them were the two Struben brothers, later of Witwatersrand gold fame; Gustav Lilienfeld, the famed diamond buyer; Ikey Sonnenberg; Stafford Parker, the diamond-digger president; Cockney Liz (later the famous barmaid of Barberton); John X Merriman, later Prime Minister of the Cape Colony; multimillionaire Abe Bailey; and, last but not least, the greatest magnate of them all, Cecil John Rhodes.

  The area did not officially belong to anyone, although traditionally it was the ill-defined stamping grounds of the Korana, Batlhaping and Griqua clans – in fact, there is a strong belief that today’s Bloemfontein was originally named ‘Jan Bloem se Fonteyn’ after the Griqua chief Jan Bloem long before the first diamonds were discovered. As a result it was not long before the ownership question was raised. The diggers had their own ideas about the matter, which did not include being interfered with by any neighbouring government, and they got together to form the ‘Klipdrift Republic’, with Stafford Parker being elected as its first President.

  They were very serious about it and even designed their own flag – a red ‘field’ or background with a black horse in the middle and a small Union Jack in the top right-hand corner (a copy can be seen in the Macgregor Museum in Kimberley). Parker made peace with the local Korana robber-chief and formed a part-time army which actually warded off a commando under President Marthinus Wessels Pretorius of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek when it arrived to claim the territory for the ZAR.

  By all accounts Parker ran a tight ship, as the saying goes, and nobody would have been able to accuse him of being soft on crime. He never hanged anybody, but he put up stocks for the punishment of drunkards and assorted villains, and the more serious malefactors could be dragged through the river or even publicly flogged.

  One of the most successful of the early diggers was JB Robinson, later one of the fabled ‘Randlords’, and the story of how he made his original fortune is a fascinating one. He and his partner, Maurice Marcus, had a trading store in Bethanie in the Free State and while on a hunting expedition in the Korana country – this was before diamonds were discovered – he came across a chief who was on his way to see King Moshweshwe I, the king of the Basutho, but had fallen on extremely hard times along the way.

  Robinson fed and clothed the chief and his followers, and gave them food for their onward journey. That single act of kindness would later change Robinson’s life. Years later, when the chief heard that Robinson had arrived at Klipdrift to dig for diamonds, he sent his Korana to show him exactly where to peg claims – the Korana had known all along where the diamonds were; they just didn’t know that they were valuable!

  Robinson made a fortune, only to lose it all, but he had got to know Alfred Beit (after whom Beit Bridge, north of Musina, is named), and Beit loaned him £10 000 to make a fresh start on the newly discovered Witwatersrand goldfields where Robinson and his partner became multimillionaires … and this time hung on to their cash.

  The ‘Keate Award’ eventually ruled that the area belonged to the Griqua clans under Nicholas Waterboer, and the Klipdrift Republic was no more. But it didn’t matter. Bigger and better ‘dry diggings’ had been found at Bultfontein and Du Toit’s Pan, and most of the river diggers abandoned the old diggings and rushed down the road to the new sites, which later became Kimberley.

  But the old diggings have not been completely abandoned. People dig there even today and occasionally make a modest score. They are a breed of their own, as can be seen from the story of one Jannie de Bruyn. De Bruyn scratched out a meagre living for 25 years and then one day had what he modestly termed a ‘small find’ as he called it.

  It couldn’t have been so small because for the next 30 years he would go into Kimberley every Thursday and buy provisions and household goods, not to mention things like clothing and school shoes for the children. Then he would go around to the diggers, asking them what they required, for he knew which of them had had no finds during the week. And he never wrote down what any man owed him.

  Before Jannie de Bruyn’s death some years ago, he was interviewed and was asked how he kept track of what he was owed. And he replied: ‘You don’t understand the diggers! Those who made money would seek me out and pay me back, and those who didn’t hadn’t made any money and therefore couldn’t pay!’

  That was the unwritten code of the diggings, personified by a man whose suffering had purified his soul instead of embittering it. Hardship can ruin some men forever but uplift others to a new plane. You don’t see that so often any more, but it’s still there if you know where to ferret it out.

  The 19th century was the apogee of Freemasonry and well-attended lodges sprang up at all sorts of places. The rituals were the same as those practised in Europe, but there was one big difference: when the collection-plate came around, many a mason would drop in a diamond rather than a note or coin – anything less than a carat would do.

  Then, as soon as the lodge had completed its business for the evening, waiting diamond buyers would value the stones on the spot and pay cash for them, then and there. One wonders how many beneficiaries of the Freemasons’ charitable handouts realised that some of the money they received had started off as a diamond casually tossed into the collection-plate at a lodge meeting.

  The British, Basuto and Moshesh

  THE BRITISH, BASUTO

  AND MOSHESH

  When the Christmas holiday season falls upon us, and as we Transvaalers make our annual pilgrimage to the coast and pour like motorised lemmings over the escarpment and down to the low coastal plains of the Natal shores, spare a moment on your trip to reflect on the fact that those flat, seemingly never-ending plains of the Free State on either side of the highway are full of history.

  Warden was named after a Major Warden, a British officer. If you think having a town named after him was to honour his great deeds, you are wrong. If you have the time and patience to examine the three volumes of the Basutoland Records, you will find th
at in fact he was a bungling incompetent of the first water.

  Let us travel back in time for a brief moment, to 1851, when the area between Warden and Harrismith was being surveyed for farms by none other than Joseph Orpen who is commemorated (rightly, this time) by the Kruger National Park’s Orpen Gate.

  At that time southern Africa stood on the brink of great changes. The following year would see the proclamation of the San River Convention, in terms of which the British government guaranteed the independence of the Voortrekkers beyond the Vaal River. It was a great day for them because at last they had escaped forever from under the heel of the Empire. Or so they thought, because when diamonds were discovered in another distant part of the country, it suited the British to brush aside that solemn undertaking … but that is another story for another time.

  In the 1850s this area was teeming with lion, all the way down to Philippolis, as a matter of fact, which is why the famous Adam Kok used the standing male lion as the symbol of his Griqua people. Farmers would band together in commandos to go out and shoot these marauders, and skins were to be had in abundance.

  It is good to recall that what are now farming areas west of the Caledon River, right up to the Vaal, were inhabited by various sub-tribes which ultimately became the subjects of the Basotho leader Moshesh I (more correctly Moshoeshoe) who, as our real and unbiased history starts coming to the fore at the hands of writers like Dr Peter Becker and Tim Cousins, is finally being revealed as a man of immense diplomatic skill, leadership and statesmanship.

  These fertile plains were eventually settled by the immigrant farmers in terms of a treaty with the British which said that settlements in that area could only take place with the written consent of the local chiefs, but they were not allowed to till the soil! So it’s a case of, subjugate the local tribes, drive them back over the eastern border, namely the Caledon River, with the ones remaining becoming indentured labour. What’s new?

  In 1852 Governor Sir George Cathcart wrote to Moshesh and said that various allegations had been made and he wanted to investigate. He sent two commissioners named Hogge and Owen to conduct the enquiry, and among other things they found that:

  • The British administration had committed great wrongs against the Basothos.

  • Moshesh was not really an enemy of the Queen and therefore all hostilities must cease.

  • Major Warden must be removed from office.

  • They would direct the apprehension of one Captain Bailie, who, with a party of Boers, had seized 60 Basotho children and carried them off into slavery (see above).

  • There would be an alteration of the boundary of the Caledon River district, which had been fixed to the injury of the Basothos, who had lost their fertile grounds west of the Caledon River

  • All stock captured from the Barolong Chief Moroko by the Basotho and the Batung before 30 June 1851 must be returned.

  And so on and so on. I shall not go into detail about what happened then except to note that not one of these points was ever adhered to, which is what led indirectly to the Battle of Berea.

  To the right of the town of Harrismith is an interesting sign inscribed with the name ‘Phuthditjhaba’ which means ‘the meeting place of the tribes’ in Sotho. A pleasant enough name, in all conscience, but up to quite recently Phuthditjhaba was known as ‘Witsieshoek’ which was a reminder of a fascinating bit of history.

  The name commemorated a Sotho chief of the Makholoko named Oetse (one of several variations), or ‘Witsie’ as the emigrant farmers of the future Orange Free State Republic pronounced it), who lived near a hill called Korf’s Kop from 1839 to 1856.

  The memory of a recent dark deed hung around Korf’s Kop at the time when the surveyors got to work – in March 1851. Witsie’s nephew Letlatsa directed the massacre of one Chief Ratikunene and 24 of his people in the vicinity. It was an incident the causes of which ran deep and strong.

  Letlatsa was the son of Witsie’s elder brother, but many years earlier he had been killed at Thaba Kholukwe which lies between modern-day Heidelburg and Standerton, by one Mashaobane, whose son was the bloodthirsty Mzilikazi, later founder of the Matebele tribe. Witsie became the regent of the Makholoko, brought the tribe together again and trekked to Zululand where he placed himself under the protection of Dingane of the Zulus.

  But then Dingane fell, and the Makholoko lost their defender. Witsie had no intention of allowing his tribe to fall prey to marauding Zulu bands, so he led his people and all their cattle to a rugged and inaccessible area at the source of the Elands River near Harrismith. Here they lived for the next two decades and became proficient cattle rustlers who made frequent descents on the emigrant farmers to steal their livestock.

  Letlatsa was very jealous of Witsie and another sub-chief called Malope, and this led him to commit his ghastly deed. Ratikunene had been driven out of the later Transvaal by the immigrant farmers and had been invited to join forces with Witsie.

  Letlatsa’s response was to go out on the pretext of hunting and meet up with Ratikunene; he placed his men so that one of them would be next to each of Ratikunene’s men, and at a given signal, the latter were clubbed or assegaied to death. Letlatsa then took possession of Ratikunene’s women, children and other possessions. A ghastly mass murder, without a doubt, but it was typical of the internecine tribal wars of those days (when I look at the Near and Middle East these days, I wonder if anything has really changed!).

  Letlatsa had no regrets about what he had done. It is recorded that when confronted with his abominable act, his response was that since Moshaobane had killed his own father, and he had been an orphan from babyhood onwards, he felt nothing – certainly an early ancestor of the modern plea for mitigation of sentence on the grounds of an unhappy childhood!

  Witsie and his people occupied their remote glen till 1856. Then a group of farmers of the newborn Orange Free State Republic, driven beyond endurance by the constant cattle-raiding, got up a commando and bearded Witsie in his den. Witsie and his men retreated to a cave in which they were promptly besieged, but the records say that he escaped through a secret tunnel and fled deep into the mountains of Lesotho, never to return.

  The Free State government made sure of that by keeping careful control of the glen and allowing friendly Kwena and Tlokwa tribespeople to settle there. But Witsie’s memory did not die away entirely because his former stronghold retained the name of ‘Witsiehoek’ … well, till the present day, anyway.

  Such are the vast untold histories of many areas of our country which were only touched on in the lightest pro-British vein when I was at school. The true history of the Basotho wars against the encroaching migrant farmers has yet to be told in its entirety.

  Each of the frontier garrison towns set up by the British and the emigrant farmers in defence of that land which was taken from Moshesh – Fouriesburg, Ficksburg, Ladybrand, Wepener and Zastron – all have their awful stories to tell. And much more can be told about another of Moshesh’s skills. He was a military thinker who took the ragbag of odds and ends that he turned into a new nation and then taught it how to defend its mountain kingdom which was never conquered by either the Boers or the British.

  Mrs Catherine Jardine

  MRS CATHERINE JARDINE

  For many years now I have kept coming across the name ‘Jardine’ in South African history. It pops up in the ownership of a Wayside Inn on the old Johannesburg–Durban dirt track, it pops up as the cognomen of a local schoolmaster, and so on. But it has somehow always remained strangely elusive. Well, I have tracked down Mrs Catherine Jardine and guess where we find her? On the diamond fields of old Kimberley!

  Mrs Jardine was a truly remarkable woman and the story of her life is equally remarkable. She first came out here from Scotland at the start of the diamond rush and that is where she ended up. By 1871 the largest portion of the so-called ‘wet’ diamond diggings were to be
found on the south side of the Vaal River at a place called Pniel (which, as nobody now knows, means ‘Face of God’).

  This was Pniel’s heyday, with many outstanding stones being found. It wasn’t much of a place to look at since it consisted mostly of a variety of tents, but its importance was not to be doubted, and it was in constant communication with the outside world by way of mule-drawn post carts. And right in the middle of the camp, next to the post cart halt on the right-hand side of the main road, we find a store and Wayside Inn, owned and run by none other than Mrs Jardine and her husband James.

  James Jardine was the local agent for the Inland Transport Company’s ‘Passenger Carts’ by which hopeful new diggers had arrived and hopeless (or sometimes wealthy) veterans left. As time went by, James concentrated more and more on the transport business, leaving Catherine to run the inn which she did superbly well.

  Its official name was ‘The Royal Arch Hotel’ because James was a Freemason, but it was known to all and sundry as ‘Mother Jardine’s’. In truth, it did not compare well with, say, the grand Mount Nelson in Cape Town – consisting as it did of a line of windowless corrugated-iron rooms with stable doors – but in Pniel it represented a haven of comfort.

  The bedrooms were comfortable, with large beds, and there was an unlimited supply of fresh water in which to soak off the dust and grime which were a digger’s constant companions. The inn’s greatest virtue was not the accommodation, however, but Catherine’s cooking. Diamond diggers tended to eat poorly as well as live rough, and so a meal at Mother Jardine’s was something to look forward to.

  Her menus included green peas and lettuce, a great luxury on the diggings, and she served pudding twice a week which included a profusion of fruit puddings, cabinet puddings, blancmanges and custard that, as one appreciative digger once remarked, would have been a credit to any table anywhere in the colony.