At the Fireside Read online

  Then, down in the south-east corner, lies the forlorn grave of the woman about whom Herman Charles Bosman wrote another of his famous stories. The story goes that she had married a man whom she loved very much, only to find out on her wedding night that he had an illegitimate child by a local black woman. In shame and grief, she took her life that very night. Such were the times then.

  I have stood on that selfsame dusty track that runs from Mafikeng (the former Mafeking) through the centre of Ottoshoop and on through Zeerust, snaking its way across the veld to come out eventually in Commissioner Street, Johannesburg.

  It is nothing remarkable to look at now, but if you stand on that deserted little track today you can almost taste the stale beer on your tongue, and if you concentrate your mind you can hear the honky-tonk pianos in your inner ear and in the blur of memory see the ghosts of the Malmani gold rush of 1879.

  Mary Fitzgerald – a Woman of Purpose

  MARY FITZGERALD –

  A WOMAN OF PURPOSE

  In 1939 the City Council of Johannesburg approved the renaming of the old market square in the suburb of Newtown to ‘Mary Fitzgerald Square’, although it took till 1986 to finalise the process and fix an appropriate plaque to the Museum Africa Building. City councils usually don’t regard renaming as a minor matter, so we are entitled to know a little more about this remarkable South African woman.

  Like many people who left their mark on our history, Mary Fitzgerald came here from elsewhere and then went on to serve her adopted homeland with her whole heart. She was born in Ireland in 1885, and in 1900 she and her father emigrated to the then Cape Colony and settled in Cape Town. She got a job as a typist at the Castle of Good Hope, which was then still a main military headquarters, but in 1902 she married John Fitzgerald and moved to Johannesburg.

  There she found employment as a shorthand typist for the Mineworkers’ Union, but soon became involved in raising money for the funerals of victims of phthisis, a chronic lung disease due to the inhalation of fine particles of ground rock which eventually line the lungs, so that over time the afflicted person slowly suffocates to death.

  Modern South African mines have to adhere to strict health and safety regulations, but things were different at the beginning of the 20th century. Miners’ working conditions were, quite frankly, appalling. Phthisis and other lung diseases were rife – but no treatment was provided when a miner fell ill, and if he died there was no compensation for his dependants. In addition, mine accidents were on the increase as more and more shafts were opened.

  There was little the miners could do about it. These days they have a channel to management through their trades unions, but at that time unionism on the mines was in its infancy. Mary helped to change all that. Being Irish born and bred, she was not only politically aware – since Ireland had been rumbling for years about such burning issues as self-rule and religious intolerance – but eloquent as well, and before long she was making rousing speeches as South Africa’s first female union organiser.

  In typical fashion Mary did not confine herself to merely organising union action but plunged into the thick of it. She was heavily involved in the miners’ strikes of 1913 and 1914, and in between the two she took part in the 1911 tramway strike – in fact, when the strikers marched through the city centre, she was leading them!

  At the market square – the one which was to be named after her so many years later – they ran into a contingent of foot and mounted policemen who had armed themselves with pick handles obtained from nearby road workers, this being long before the era of water cannon, tear gas and rubber bullets. Chaos followed when the strikers grabbed the road workers’ wheelbarrows and strung them out to prevent the mounted policemen from getting close enough to use the pick handles.

  The police were so heavily occupied in keeping control of their horses that they started dropping the pick handles. Immediately, Mary and the strikers pounced on the pick handles and fought back … and the firebrand from Ireland gained a nickname she bore proudly for the rest of her life, ‘Pick-Handle Mary’. From then on, the strikers carried pick handles to all their protest meetings, with Mary still leading what became known as ‘The Pick-Handle Brigade’.

  That same year she met the well-known unionist Archie Crawford and eventually attended an international union conference with him. In 1914 she struck another blow for the workers when Crawford and some of his colleagues were deported during the labour troubles of that year. Mary led protests to the South African government, and it caved in; the deportations were rescinded, and Archie and the others returned.

  Late in 1915 Crawford encouraged Mary to run for election to the Johannesburg Town Council (her official campaign photograph shows her brandishing a pick), and that November she became the first woman to join the City Council … quite a feat, considering that at that time women did not even have the vote!

  Her activities as a ‘city father’ did not mean an end to her labour activities. Thanks largely to her untiring efforts, union membership increased by more than sevenfold between 1915 and 1918. This success brought a new problem, however: their pamphlet, The Voice of Labour, needed to be printed in ever greater numbers. Mary’s solution was straightforward: she got herself trained as a printer, acquired a modern press and started cranking out The Voice of Labour in the quantities required.

  All this furious activity, coupled with the strains of World War I, inevitably took its toll. John Fitzgerald had long since distanced himself from Mary’s actions, of which he disapproved, and in 1918 they were divorced. But Mary had long had a kindred spirit in Archie Crawford and in 1919 they married.

  While Archie worked on in the trade union movement, Mary continued with her career as a city councillor and in 1921 she was made chairman of the Public Health Committee and Deputy Mayor of Johannesburg, the first woman ever to become either. This did not quench her fire, however, and during the violent 1922 miners’ strike she was arrested for allegedly leading a group that set fire to the Park Railway Station.

  But Mary was becoming disillusioned and slowly started to lose interest in public life. The crunch came when the South African Communist Party took over the leadership of the South African Industrial Federation and ousted Archie. He remained active in the union movement, but Mary turned her back on it all and settled into domesticity to raise their little daughter.

  Then, in 1924, Archie was struck down by enteric fever. Mary went to visit him in hospital – only to find that he had died before her arrival. It was a crushing blow from which Mary never really recovered. She retired completely from public life and devoted herself to her daughter. In 1930 the franchise was extended to women for the first time, and although she was no longer an active part of the labour struggle, it was a day of joy for her.

  Mary died in the 1960s at the ripe age of 75, having stamped an indelible footprint on South African history and set the standard for all the many women of all races and ages who came to the fore after her in both public and business life. She was buried in the Brixton Cemetery … It is amazing to think about how much untold history lies between the Brixton and Braamfontein Cemeteries in Johannesburg, the final resting place for a tough-spirited bunch of pioneers who came to make a living and a new life for themselves, and ended up changing the course of the country’s history.

  Conrad Frederick Genal, 1875–1939

  CONRAD FREDERICK GENAL,

  1875–1939

  Not many people today know the fascinating story of Conrad Frederick Genal, the wandering German painter who left behind a legacy of hotel friezes and church decorations scattered over a huge swathe of southern Africa, from Zambia (Northern Rhodesia in his day) to Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) to our own Grahamstown.

  Conrad Genal was born in Ulm in 1875. When he turned 19, he fulfilled a childhood dream of adventure in Africa when he and two other young art students made their way to North Africa to join the F
rench Foreign Legion. Or so he thought. Genal succeeded in joining but – in the way of armies all over the world – the Legion could not care less about his personal preferences and posted him to Asia instead of Africa.

  Genal served for some time in Asia, but his dream still called him to Africa so strongly that he decided to desert. It was a perilous way to part company with the Legion, and no doubt he knew how hard it came down on recaptured deserters, but his mind was made up. So when the troopship in which he was travelling was passing through the Suez Canal he seized his opportunity, dived overboard and swam for the bank, pursued by bullets from the sentries.

  One of them hit him, but he managed to reach the bank and scramble to safety. Genal was taken to a hospital in Cairo and, while recuperating there, so he recounted later, he had a vision: an angel visited him and told him to walk through Africa, painting friezes on the walls of hotels to pay for his keep, and churches for the love of God.

  And Genal did just that. Disguising himself as an itinerant Somali trader, he then walked south along the Nile, through Egypt, the Sudan and Uganda, and into Kenya. How he managed this difficult trek, avoiding myriad dangers and somehow keeping body and soul together, remains a mystery. Perhaps he was a holy fool, like a real-life Forrest Gump, or enjoyed the good fortune of the legendary princes of Serendip to whom marvellous things happened at regular intervals.

  A painter’s technique is not a static thing and Genal’s continued to develop as he travelled and worked. Finally he reached the Rhodesias where he met a girl called Alice Watts and fell in love with her. To show that he was not just a rolling stone he took a job as a railway guard, and in 1901 he and Alice were married.

  Unfortunately, like the famed Huberta the Hippo, it turned out that Genal’s wanderlust had not died but merely slept. The monotony of his railway duties finally became unendurable, so Genal threw up his job and he and Alice headed south to the Transkei. They settled in Umtata, but his feet still itched, and before too long he was on the road again with his growing family.

  He and they wandered all over Rhodesia, the Transvaal and Natal. Then World War I broke out and his travels were temporarily interrupted when he was interned in a prison in Durban for a while because he was a German national. Genal managed to escape and was never recaptured, and at the end end of the war went back to painting murals wherever there was a blank wall and a client ready to pay for it to be decorated. Public buildings, private houses, hotels, churches – everything was grist to his mill.

  He painted hotel friezes and church murals in such places as Greytown, Ermelo, Piet Retief, Newcastle, Pretoria, Kestel, Harrismith, Warden – where he decorated the Dutch Reformed Church in 1924, although its churches are usually fairly austere – and Clocolan, where he decorated the town hall and also several private farmhouses such as those of the Newberry and Naudé families.

  He travelled up and down the Great North Road, painting his murals in such places as the Crested Crane Hotel in Mpika, the Roman Catholic Church and the Great North Hotel in Broken Hill at a standard fee of 10 shillings per yard of completed frieze. The sad thing is that many of these friezes are now gone forever because the buildings have been demolished.

  Back in the Transvaal he decorated the Impala Hotel in Barberton with a ‘Jock of the Bushveld’ theme. At Noordkaap he gave the local hotel – now the Digger’s Retreat – a series of monochrome scenes of hunting and the American-built Zeederberg stagecoaches which provided the first scheduled transport of the early goldfields.

  The echoes of the wild old frontier days had not yet died away and it is quite possible that at Barberton he sat at one time or another under the notorious ‘Hanging Tree’ where various unruly prospectors met their end, and he might well have watched gold-seekers hopefully panning on the banks of the Noordkaap River below it.

  He also painted murals in the reading room of the old Springs Library, across the road from the hotel, which in 1933 were featured in a promotional brochure of the town. In the Riverside Hotel in Swaziland’s Bremersdorp – now Manzini – he livened up the lounge with a colour frieze of the great lakes and the walls of the bar with a monochrome rendering of a medieval town scene which depicted a procession of quaint-looking people going to a fair. Then in Grahamstown he decorated the house of one of his daughters, Florence, who had married the waterworks engineer at Howieson’s Poort.

  But the wandering artist’s travels ended in June 1939 when he died of asthma in Durban (one wonders if he would have been interned again when World War II broke out a few months later – and, if so, whether he would have escaped again, old age or not).

  But Conrad Genal lives on through his work almost a lifetime after his death. He has become one of the legends of the Lowveld, and the owners of the buildings where he did his work treasure their Genals.

  By the way, just as I was writing this story down to make sure Genal and his work would not be forgotten, I was telephoned by the owner of the Val Hotel, which is located between Greylingstad and Standerton. A friend of hers owns the Botrivier Hotel, just east of the Sir Lowry’s Pass down in the Western Cape, and they had discovered more of Genal’s work hidden behind a layer of wallpaper!

  Thank goodness Rita was there to be able to identify it for what is was, so that it, too, will now be preserved with pride and displayed once more to visitors together with its amazing story. It would have been fascinating to find out exactly how far and wide this itchy-footed artist travelled in his time in fulfilment of that that duty the angel laid on his willing shoulders as he lay in hospital in Cairo.

  Colourful Characters

  COLOURFUL CHARACTERS

  During the course of this book, we shall be looking at some of the more interesting and colourful people who came out to this country after the two great discoveries of diamonds and gold. They came from the four corners of the earth – the rich and the poor, the learned and the illiterate, good men and bad, speaking many languages and adhering to many faiths. And in the crucible of this strange new country they were all melted down and recast as South Africans.

  One of the new arrivals in the Pilgrim’s Rest area in 1873 was a young Hungarian Jew named Alois Hugo Nellmapius. He was a qualified mining engineer and soon put his expertise to such good use that he became a very wealthy man.

  But unlike many of his fellows, Nellmapius’s mind roamed far beyond the confines of mining regions like Pilgrim’s Rest and examined the ZAR’s broader business horizons. In fact, he started branching out while he was still mining at Pilgrim’s Rest, starting and successfully running a mule transport service which ran from the little mining town through the dreaded tsetse fly-infested country to Delagoa Bay.

  The transport service’s main purpose was ostensibly to transport the mails to and from the coast, but Nellmapius had a much more profitable sideline – importing cheap contraband Portuguese liquor. It is recorded that Nellmapius did not confine himself to using his mules for the purpose, and that many a case of vile, fierce, ‘squareface’ gin arrived on the heads of shapely Shangaan maidens who would then be sold into service, allegedly as ‘housekeepers’ for the diggers. Nellmapius also became a successful farmer who owned a large tract of land just south of Pretoria which he named after his daughter Irene.

  These successes soon attracted the attention of the notables in the Transvaal, and he formed an acquaintance with many of them; among other things he became a personal friend and confidant of Paul Kruger. But Nellmapius’s restless mind had still greater ideas, and it was he who introduced the old President to the concept of granting concessions to the appropriate people … like himself.

  The result was that on 3 October 1881 the Volksraad passed article 44 which granted Nellmapius a concession that gave him a 15-year ‘sole right to manufacture from grain, potatoes and other products growable in the Transvaal, with the exception of tree fruits and grapes, the right to sell in bulk and bottle, free of license, such sp
irits’. Considering the number of Transvaalers who thirsted after stronger waters, this was a sweetheart deal that would not be even remotely legal today.

  On 17 June 1882 Nellmapius ceded this concession to a partnership consisting of himself, the cousins Isaac and Barnard Lewis and Barnard’s brother-in-law, one Samuel Marks, retaining a 20% share for himself. With this capital they formed the ‘Eerste Fabrieken in die Suid-Afrikaanse Republiek Limited’, and just one year later President Paul Kruger proudly opened the new distillery and christened it ‘Volkshoop’ – the People’s Hope.

  What happened is a classic illustration of the proverbial ‘law of unintended consequences’ that reminds one a little of the United States’ liquor wars in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to slaking the ZAR’s legitimate thirst, it encouraged various lobbyists with their own agenda. These included the mining magnates who encouraged the migrant labourers on the mines to spend their money on liquor so that it would take them longer to save the money they had come to earn and therefore they would extend their stays.

  But there was also a strong anti-liquor group, consisting mainly of local residents, who had become extremely concerned about the rise of unrest, crime, rape and general drunkenness.

  The enterprise flourished on its 4 000-acre site on the banks of the Pienaar’s River, some ten miles east of Pretoria, on what had been Sammy Marks’s Hatherley Farm. Eventually there was a reservoir holding 170 000 gallons of water, a 30-horsepower plant for generating electricity, a four-storey central distillation plant, a boarding house for accommodating the white workers, houses for the married employees and a suitably prestigious separate dwelling for the distillery manager.

  What was particularly attractive as far as the ZAR’s farmers were concerned was the fact that there were three large grain stores, each with a capacity of 5 000 bags – a massive economic shot in the arm in those days of undeveloped marketing networks and proof of the owners’ contention that the large farming community would benefit.