Roots of Outrage

The British were mighty unwelcome amongst the rough and ready Boers. And with the Redcoats the Age of Enlightenment arrived at the wild and woolly colony, in the form of the London Missionary Society and British justice. The missionaries blamed the frontiersmen for the Kaffir Wars, and the British magistrates busied themselves with cases of mistreatment of slaves and servants, which was deeply resented. A handful of Boers plotted a rebellion after one of their number was shot dead resisting arrest, and their leader stole across the Fish River to make a treasonous pact with the dreaded Xhosa: Join forces with me, together we’ll drive the British into the sea and then divide the land between us. The wily Xhosa chief declined. The rebellion was quickly put down by the redcoats, but the British took treason seriously and their ringleaders were sentenced to death. Their ghastly public execution at Slagter’s Nek followed.

It is bitterly remembered to this day. And history was to repeat itself.

At about the same time, far away on the lush coast of south-east Africa, there arose a warrior king called Shaka, who welded together the nation of the Zulus, the ‘People of Heaven’. The Zulus made war on neighbouring tribes, who fled and made war on their neighbours, all killing and plundering for food. This period was called the Mfecane, which means the ‘crushing’. It was a time of chaos, the veld blackened with burnings and littered with skeletons. One of Shaka’s generals, Mzilikazi, rebelled and led his people up onto the highlands, making mayhem more terrible, and established a new nation called the Matabele, which means the ‘destroyers’. The dislocations pressed upon the Xhosa, who had no place to go but across the Fish River into white man’s land; the cross-border thieving, raids and counter-raids got worse.

The government decided to settle thousands of British immigrants on farms along the Fish, to form a buffer zone, and forts were built; but the thieving continued and in the next decade there were two more full-scale wars. The missionaries blamed the frontiersmen and raised a furore in London, so the imperial government hesitated to act decisively against the Xhosa. And then the missionaries forced the repeal of the Vagrancy Laws, so now blacks roved the frontier at will, thieving. And then the Abolition of Slavery Act was passed: all slaves throughout the British Empire would be emancipated at midnight 31st December 1834. This would wreak great hardship on the Cape’s frontier. On Christmas Day 1834, six days before the slaves were to be freed, the Sixth Kaffir War broke out. It was the bloodiest of all.

As the frontiersmen celebrated Christmas, there was a massive eruption of Xhosa warriors across the Fish, burning, killing, plundering. They swarmed over thousands of square miles before they were driven back across the Fish by British troops and frontier commandos. It was the costliest war in the frontier’s bloody history; eight hundred farms destroyed, hundreds of thousands of cattle stolen. It took six months to drive them further back across a distant river, for the British commander intended to create a militarised cordon sanitaire to keep the races apart. There was rejoicing on the frontier, for it looked as if a new order was being ushered in at last.

But it was not to be. The missionaries blamed the frontiersmen for the war, and so the imperial government ordered that the newly annexed buffer zone be abandoned. It seemed towering folly: the thievery and wars would continue. There was outrage on the frontier. And then the news came that the British government had reneged on its promise to compensate slave-owners fairly: the sum of three million pounds that had been allocated for the purpose was reduced to one million, and would only be given to those who journeyed to London to claim it.

The sense of outrage redoubled on the frontier, amongst Boer and Briton alike, for who would leave his farm unprotected from marauding Xhosa for a year to make an expensive journey to London?

And so the Great Trek began. And Ernest Mahoney, from New York, enters our story.

The Great Trek was not a sudden, stormy mobilization of an angry people, as romantic chroniclers like Ernest Mahoney have suggested, it was the slow culmination of bitter debate that had been going on since the terrible Slagter’s Nek hangings: the thievery, the repeal of the Vagrancy Laws, the ‘ungodly’ attitude of the British towards master-and-servant relationships, the injustice of the missionaries, the Abolition of Slavery Act which defrauded them, the terror and devastation of Kaffir Wars, the British government’s refusal to fight them decisively. The Great Trek was a gradual consensus of people who had been bitterly tried, God-fearing folk who knew little other than the Bible and the gun, who had finally had enough of their incompetent, duplicitous government. In part it was the old trek spirit of their forefathers coming back, the quest for pastures new and the Lekker Lewe, but more important was the resentful determination to set their world to rights. One after another the hardy Boers packed up their wagons, rounded up their herds and set off. Out of the mauve hills of the frontier they rolled northwards, up into the highveld of Trans-Orangia, to find their Promised Land.

It was in Piet Retief that the people found their Moses. It was he who published the Voortrekker Manifesto:

… We despair of saving this country from the threat posed by vagrants ... nor do we see any prospect of peace for our children … Be it known that we are resolved, wherever we go, that we will uphold the just principle of liberty; but whilst no one shall be in a state of slavery, it is our determination to maintain such regulations as may suppress crime and preserve proper relations between master and servant … We shall not molest any people, nor deprive them of the smallest property; but, if attacked, we shall consider ourselves fully justified in defending our persons and effects to the utmost …

It was a profession of faith, an enunciation of constitutional principles for a democratic Boer republic. Much of the turbulent story of South Africa is a betrayal of that manifesto.

Enter Ernest Mahoney of New York, sent thither by the Harker-Mahoney Shipping Company to investigate trading opportunities in this opening-up of the African hinterland. A hundred and twenty years later, when Ernest’s great grandson, Luke Mahoney, read his forebear’s journals of that epic time, he could visualise the meeting of shareholders in New York, the rotund old chairman, Ernest’s grandfather, saying:

‘The Mahoneys were amongst the first to transplant the principles of our magnificent American Revolution across the oceans ... Amongst the first to seize the unspoilt virtue of our frontier heritage and reject the wiliness of the Old World, “its useless memories and vain feuds”, amongst the first to shun the tawdry lures of Europe and export our American Enlightenment by the adventurous prows of the Harker-Mahoney clippers to replace wars and so-called diplomatic treaties with the benign embrace of commerce … the first to join with those Massachusetts poets in their cry:

Preserve your principles, their force unfold

Let nations prove them and let kings behold.

EQUALITY, your first firm-ground stand;

Then FREE ELECTIONS; then your FEDERAL BAND.

‘We were amongst the first to see that political happiness would eventuate throughout the world from the simple principle of free oceans, free trade, and the free dissemination of American inventiveness by Yankee vessels, and that, in return, the world would unfold its treasures … The Mahoneys were amongst the first to turn America’s eyes to the Pacific, and to Africa, to probe dark regions of alien religions which would, through our worthy commerce, fall to the influence of our Enlightenment … And we all know what the result is: Harker-Mahoney has, without firing a shot except in self-defence, an empire upon which the sun never sets … And now there is a new frontier for Harker-Mahoney to add to their empire, brethren shareholders! It is the hinterland of southern Africa!

‘“The hinterland”? you ask. We have traded profitably with the Cape of Good Hope for years, but how do we penetrate the hinterland? Ah … It is being penetrated for us by the Dutch Boers, just as our west is being opened up by our pioneer wagons! Whole new lands that will one day stretch to the Nile, vast new untapped markets for our goods, vast new resources, lands bigger than the whole of China …’

And so now here is nervous Ernest Mahoney, twenty-two years old, lanky, wan – a graduate of a Presbyterian seminary but feeling unable to take holy orders because of lusts of the flesh – disembarking with a big bagful of silver dollars, buying two horses, hiring a Dutch guide (paying twice what he should and thinking it cheap), setting off timidly into the wilderness to spread the American Enlightenment through worthy commerce. Ernest riding up into the highveld, overtaking Boer wagon trains, eventually coming upon the high mountain called Thaba Nchu, the foregathering place. The hundreds of wagons outspanned, the thousands of Boers waiting for their leader, Hendrik Potgieter, who had trekked on to the north to explore, for Piet Retief to come up from the south. There is Ernest fearfully riding on north with his guide to look for Hendrik Potgieter’s wagon train, following his tracks; the veld is littered with evidence of the Mfecane, whitened skeletons, burnt huts. Ernest eventually finds Potgieter and his people feverishly preparing for an imminent attack by Mzilikazi, lashing their wagons into a circle, stuffing thorn branches into the gaps. And so Ernest, four weeks in Africa, never having fired a shot in anger, who just wants to get the hell out of this land, finds himself plunged into one of South Africa’s most famous battles. And he meets Sarie Smit, the feisty Boer girl assigned to him as a loader because she speaks English.

The Battle of Vegkop. The veld black as ink with five thousand of Mzilikazi’s warriors loping across the veld chanting Zhee Zhee, encircling the wagons, sharpening their assegais, humming, humming for hours until Potgieter tied a red rag to a stockwhip and waved it above the wagons as a challenge. Then their terrifying battle charge, thousands of glistening warriors hurling themselves at the laager, stabbing, slashing, hurling, the wagons shaking under their tumult midst the cacophony of the trekkers’ muzzle-loaders, the smoke and stink of gunpowder. And there is Ernest, sick-in-his-guts terrified, blasting straight into the savage faces through the thorn branches, thrusting the spent gun at Sarie and grabbing the reloaded one she thrust back – bang – grab – bang – grab – bang – There is sweaty Sarie Smit and her mother pouring the powder down the hot muzzles, ramming in the lead with a wad of cotton on top, thrusting the gun in Ernest’s trembling, outstretched hand – bang grab bang … For hours the cacophonous battle rages, and the bloody black bodies are piled high around the laager before Mzilikazi’s warriors withdraw, round up all the voortrekkers’ thousands of cattle and drive them off northwards. Potgieter sends horsemen galloping back to Thaba Nchu to call for oxen, and Ernest volunteers to ride with them. It is regarded as a courageous offer, for more Matabele impis may be waiting, but Ernest just wants to get the hell out of there. And when, eight days later, he arrived at Thaba Nchu, he would have kept going, heading south to the faraway sea to take the first ship back to America, except that no way was he going to ride alone through this fearsome country.

Piet Retief had arrived at Thaba Nchu, where he had been elected Governor of the ‘United Laagers’, and he sent oxen up to Vegkop to haul Potgieter’s wagons back. But the United Laagers were disunited at the outset, a characteristic of the Boers throughout their history. Retief wanted to establish the republic in the east, with a land grant from the Zulu king, while Potgieter wanted to recover his cattle stolen by Mzilikazi, drive him from the land and establish the republic in the north. So there is vengeful Potgieter setting out northwards to deal with Mzilikazi, there is Piet Retief setting out eastwards to the land of the fearsome Zulus. And with Retief’s wagons rolls that of Sarie Smit’s family. And Ernest rides with them. And his fate is sealed.

‘I at last know the meaning of love,’ Ernest breathlessly confides to his journal. There is Ernest having the first real live sexual affair of his life, waiting excitedly each night outside the glow of the laagers’ campfires for Sarie to come creeping out. There is Ernest earnestly proposing marriage in the moonlight (after praying to the Lord for guidance), ‘begging her to return with me to the comfort and security of America once my duties are completed – but alas, she insists her loyalties are to her volk …’ There is Ernest travelling on his delicious illicit honeymoon across the highveld until Retief’s convoy of wagons stands on the lip of the towering Drakensberg, looking down on vast, misty, mauve Zululand far below. Ernest looks down at the daunting descent, at the long shadows cast by the mountain, and he is filled with foreboding: ‘Woe unto the land whose borders lie in shadow’ he records.

Ernest’s sense of duty to Harker-Mahoney compelled him to ride down with Retief’s advance party to parley with King Dingaan for a grant of land. The foreboding stayed with him as they picked their way down into rolling, wooded Zulu country. After many days they arrived at Dingaan’s royal kraal of Mgundgundlovu, ‘the place of the Elephant’.

‘A mighty circular village,’ Ernest records, ‘fenced with high poles, in sidé of which are many concentric rows of beehive-shaped huts all dominated by the Great Place, the huge hut of the king, surrounded by those of his many wives… Beyond is the Hill of Executions where vultures circle, feeding on the bodies of people slaughtered daily. I am filled with trepidation as we wait outside for the king to receive us …’

Ernest’s fear was well founded: King Dingaan was afraid of these Amaboela, these white men who rode swift ‘hornless cattle’ and used strange weapons with devastating effect; men who – his spies told him – had recently routed Mzilikazi, and who now wanted to settle on his borders. When Dingaan finally received these people midst great pomp and praise-singing he spent three days impressing them with his might, by military displays and frightening dancing by his magnificent regiments, the earth shaking under the synchronised stamping of their feet, their battle cries rising up to the skies. But finally he announced he would consider the request for a land grant favourably if Retief recovered cattle that had been stolen by a distant tribe.

Retief and his men were in high spirits as they set out to fulfil the bargain, but Ernest was a very worried young man: he was fearful of the Zulus, ‘deeply suspicious at how simply a grant of land the size of England was arranged. The whole thing reeks of blood …’ When Retief set off he sent two horsemen back to the Drakensberg with the tidings and Ernest seized the opportunity to ride with them, to persuade Sarie to leave this frightening land and go back to America with him.

The voortrekkers’ joy was unbounded when the horsemen toiled up the last crest of the Drakensberg with the news, but the most joyful was Sarie Smit, who had big news for Ernest: ‘I am pregnant …’

Love-sick Ernest was overjoyed. But Sarie refused to go with him to America: her place was with her volk. And so, because his heart and honour ruled his head, Ernest Mahoney went back down the Drakensberg Mountains. And the roots of the Mahoney clan in Africa were set down.

Retief recaptured the stolen cattle and returned to Dingaan’s royal kraal to claim his grant of land. Dingaan made his mark on the deed Retief proffered, then leapt up and shouted: ‘Kill the wizards!’ Warriors fell on Retief and his men from all sides, dragged them up to the Hill of Executions and clubbed them to death. Then, plumes dancing, assegais flashing, the impis set out across the land to slay the voortrekkers encamped at the foot of the Drakensberg. Hundreds were slain in the terrible massacre that followed, hundreds of wagons burned, twenty-five thousand head of cattle driven off. Ernest and Sarie survived because they were encamped miles from the main killing grounds but the whole of her family was butchered. The surviving voortrekkers were in a dreadful plight as they awaited the next onslaught and desperately hoped for reinforcements to arrive from the highveld. ‘Is there a curse on this land that lies in shadows?’ Ernest chronicled.

At last, the prestigious Boer Andries Pretorius descended the Drakensberg and rallied the beleaguered trekkers. He mounted a commando of five hundred men and set off to do battle with Dingaan. En route a Holy Covenant was taken that if God gave them victory they would forever hold the anniversary of the battle-day hallowed, that they would build a church in thanksgiving and forever live according to His laws.

Pretorius chose his battleground on the banks of the Blood River, where two sides of his laager were protected by the confluences. In the ensuing battle five hundred Boers defeated twelve thousand magnificent Zulu warriors, killing three thousand of them as they hurled themselves against the laager. Not one Boer life was lost. And thus was the conviction born amongst these simple, God-fearing folk that God had entered into a covenant with them, as He had with Moses and his Israelites, and that henceforth everything they did would be with His blessing. Thus was a theocracy born. It was to survive a hundred and fifty years.

Ernest took part in the Battle of Blood River. That night he wrote in his chronicle:

… while I am as thankful to the Lord as any, it can only be said that it was not a battle in the normal sense, but a mass execution of a magnificent army heroically taking on superior weapons. No army of white men, I believe, would have been so valiant, so disciplined, as these Zulus today … The Boers are convinced that the Lord has accepted their Covenant. But as a trained theologian, albeit a poor example, I am by no means sure: it was surely the musket that won the day – as it is winning in America against the Indians, for why should the Lord make a bargain with one tribe at such tremendous and heartless expense of another? And while I admire these Boers, and applaud their piety, it worries me that they are fond of referring to Genesis where it says that God made the sons of Ham black, to be hewers of wood and drawers of water …

And so the Boers set up their republic of New Holland, electing their volksraad, building their church. Ernest married his beloved Sarie (‘Such happiness as I have never imagined possible …’ his chronicle records). They built a hut as storage for Harker-Mahoney and began to trade in ivory and hides with what few vessels braved the sandbars. Sarie was pregnant again when the British came sailing up the coast to put an end to this impertinent new republic.

The Boers are outraged. They left their farms in the Cape Colony and trekked into the savage unknown because of Britain’s unjust maladministration, they braved the dreaded Mzilikazi, overcame the steep Drakensberg Mountains, suffered the bloody treachery of Dingaan, braved his fearsome Zulus at Blood River, and now that they have at last got their republican freedom along come the lordly British to take it all away. Personally, I understand the British view-point: the Boers are Her Majesty’s subjects who have established an illegal regime and, I hear, have seized Zulu children to work as ‘apprentices’ in a thinly disguised form of slavery … But my Sarie does not understand: she rode over to the beach as the British disembarked and, astride her horse, pointed at her swollen belly and informed the commanding officer and his admiring men that her forthcoming son was not only an American citizen but a Boer to boot and that they would have to trample over her dead body, and numerous of their own, if they imagined that the young Queen Victoria was going to deprive her unborn child of its republican birthright. ‘I would rather walk barefoot over the Drakensberg again than submit to British rule!’ cried she …

The Boers furiously laid siege to them at the lagoon, but reinforcements arrived overland and the Boers were defeated. And Sarie Mahoney kept her pledge.

So the Boers abandoned their new homesteads, trekked back over the Drakensberg and established their republics on the highveld, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal Republic. The British government was unwilling to spend money on military campaigns and administration so, after a few skirmishes and considerable bluster, it formally recognised the legal independence of these two republics, in 1852 and 1854.

And so the Great Trek was over, twelve years after it began. The Boers at last had their republican freedom, without the accursed British laying down the law, without missionaries meddling and blaming them for the savagery of Africa, without vagrants roaming unpunished. There was no more egalitarian nonsense: a black man knew his place again. It was the Lekker Lewe once more, limitless land again, proper labour again, and security at last. Mzilikazi had fled across the Limpopo, and the distant Zulus were the British government’s problem now, like the infernal Xhosa.

And a problem they were: in the following decades the British had to fight three more Kaffir Wars and re-annex the land across the Fish right up to the border of the new colony of Natal. And the British had plenty of trouble with the Zulus too. Dingaan’s grandson, Cetshwayo, began to weld his people back together, and there was cattle-thieving, and warlike noises again. Then, on the eastern frontier, came the Great Cattle Killing, and there was chaos.

It was a desperate act by the Xhosa to rid themselves of the British: it was national self-immolation. A Xhosa girl had a vision that if the Xhosa nation slaughtered all their cattle and destroyed all their crops, all would return a hundred-fold on 18th February 1857 all the ancestors would return from the dead, soldiers from Russia would arrive, and together they would drive the British into the sea. So the destruction began. The grazing lands became littered with rotting carcasses, the clouds of smoke barrelled upwards. The colonial government sent officials across the Fish to dissuade the Xhosa, but there was only black euphoria that paradise was at hand. On 17th February the last beasts were slain, the last maize burned, and the people waited for the glorious morrow.

The great day dawned silently, for there was no lowing of cattle or bleating of goats to be heard. The people searched the horizon for the hordes of ancestors driving great herds of cattle. As the sun approached its zenith excitement was intense, but the sun began to descend and no hordes appeared, no Russian ships were sighted. Then sunset came, and panic swept the land, weeping and wailing. The promised day was gone, the country was devastated, and tomorrow the starvation would begin.

The months that followed were horrific. Out there beyond the Fish the stench of decomposing flesh fouled the air, blackened maize fields turned to dust; eighty thousand Xhosa died of starvation, their unburied corpses rotting amongst the carcasses of their animals. And across the river staggered the wretched starving people, begging the colonists for food. Harker-Mahoney had opened a branch on the eastern frontier; the manager wrote to Ernest in the Transvaal:

… once fed, they plead to stay but we have to deny them, and they stagger on towards the Cape. I have heard reports of cannibalism, and starving children abandoned by their parents. My neighbour, McPherson, has found a Xhosa baby left by his mother in a fork of a tree …

What could he do with a starving abandoned baby but take it in? He named the boy Felix. Several years later, visiting American preachers converted Mr McPherson and his family to Mormonism, so they decided to emigrate to America, where the religion had taken strong root. So Felix became the first Xhosa to emigrate to America. Many years later his great granddaughter was to return to South Africa to set it to rights.

But the crisis of the Great Cattle Killing had little impact on the Boer republics in the north – that was Britain’s problem now.

It was a rough-and-ready but pleasant life up there; the republics were bankrupt and inefficient, but it was the Lekker Lewe again. Farming was the only real economy. In the pleasant village of Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal republic, Ernest had established a trading depot for Harker-Mahoney, exporting cattle, hides and ivory, and importing American products. Life in southern Africa muddled along in comparative peace after Britain gave up on the bankrupt Boer republics. And then diamonds were discovered, and then gold. Fortune hunters from around the world descended, and the Boer War came about.

Gold – that was the reason the mighty British Empire waged war on the tiny Transvaal Republic. The whole balance of power in the region had changed, Britain was in danger of losing her paramountcy in southern Africa to these undeserving Boers, and Britain needed gold to maintain her position as the leading banker in an industrially expanding world. Further, she intended to extend her colonial power from Cape Town to Cairo, and this tinpot Boer republic stood in her way. The only solution was to make it part of the empire. First Britain tried economic strangulation, encirclement to cut the Boers off from the sea so that they would be forced to rejoin the Cape Colony. When that failed Britain promoted a rebellion by the foreigners on the gold reefs, demanding the vote. When that was crushed Britain mobilised her imperial army on the excuse that British subjects were being treated ‘like helots’.

It was a vicious, scorched-earth war the British waged: Boer farms were put to the torch, their crops and homesteads sent up in smoke, their livestock shot or driven off, their women and children herded off to concentration camps where twenty-eight thousand of them died of malnutrition and disease. For three years the war raged, 1899 to 1902. Only devastating attrition drove the Boers to discuss peace. The British offered the Boers financial aid and self-government in a few years in a union with the Cape and Natal colonies; but the most significant concession concerned the status of black people: the question of whether blacks would be given the vote in the new South Africa would be decided only after self-government had been granted.