by Peter Rimmer
Once off the farm, Kei felt powerfully elated, drugged by the adrenaline of freedom. He was going north with no certainty of his destination except that north was away from the white men who were going to destroy themselves and leave him free for the rest of his life. From a distance, Kei looked like any of the Boers out on commando, and when a British patrol away from the railway line fired at him, his surprise turned to anger as he spurred the pony and cantered away from the danger, bent on his one-man crusade of launching a black rebellion.
On the 9th December, when Kei was riding north thirty miles west of Mafeking, Karel, despite the rumours of the British advance to relieve Kimberley, was enjoying his war. Long ago the brothers on the farm Majuba had run out of new stories to tell each other, and the fresh ears that sat spellbound while Karel told them the highlights of his life made the camaraderie around the campfires the best days he could ever remember. That Saturday night they sat around the fire smoking their clay pipes while a burgher from Potchefstroom told them how he had fought a lion with his bare hands. It was a good story and well told and no one around the fire believed a word of it, which was why Karel had never told them the story of his elder brother Frikkie, the biggest of the Oosthuizen family. Waiting politely for a lull in the conversation to see if his new friends had something better to say, Karel entered the conversation. Behind them, Kimberley was quiet and further to the south nothing had been heard from the British guns for days and some of the burghers were convinced de la Rey had chased Methuen back over the Modder River on his way to the Cape.
“Frikkie, that’s my brother Frikkie, the really big one in the family,” began Karel, pleased by the titter that ran around the fire at the idea of an Oosthuizen bigger than Karel himself. “Frikkie shot a pair of leopards that had been killing our calves on our farm Majuba, sometimes eating the calves as they came out of the womb, the smell of the birth blood bringing the leopards down from the hills. We skinned the big cats and the pelts still lie on the floor in the farmhouse.
“Well, a day later, we were checking on the cattle, me and Frikkie, when a leopard cub, not six weeks old, came walking towards us and we knew that yesterday we had killed the little fellow’s mother and father. So Frikkie picked up the cub and put him in front on the saddle which was nearly a mistake as the horse didn’t like that at all. To a horse, a leopard smells just the same at six weeks old. When we got home, there was one mistake we did find… The cub was a girl, not a boy. Frikkie tried feeding the cub cow’s milk, but the milk was too strong and only when we watered it down would the food stay in the cub’s stomach. So Frikkie had a new pet and his dog went off and sulked but the leopard thrived and week by week grew bigger. By the time the cub was three months old, wherever you found Frikkie you found the leopard. Inseparable, quite inseparable.
“The year before Sarie came on the farm with all her dogs, Piet van Tonder from the next farm invited all us Oosthuizens to his wedding, and Mrs van Tonder, Piet’s mother, makes the best mampoer in the Transvaal. Kicked like an elephant, so they said. When we got ourselves dressed up in our Sunday suits with the nice black hats, we were ready to go, up there on the horses, when the leopard who was used to following Frikkie around the farm made it plain she was coming too, which father said would cause a problem with the van Tonders and the rest of the guests. So Frikkie got down from his horse and walked back onto the stoep of the farmhouse, pushed the leopard inside and locked the front door, and off we went to the wedding in high spirits, the sun not up an hour.
“It was the best wedding I ever went to and that mampoer of Mrs van Tonder’s was the best I ever tasted and lucky the horses knew how to ride us home as the only sober ones were young Piers and Ma, Ma never having touched a drop in the whole of her life. But when we got back, there was the leopard sitting on the stoep outside the front door, and Frikkie was so annoyed the animal had got itself out of the house he gave her a big fat klop round the side of its ear and sent the leopard off into the bush to sulk. Then Frikkie fumbled with the key and just before Ma was going to take the big key and open the door, the key clicked the lock open and in we went to the sitting room and there in front of the cold fireplace was Frikkie’s pet leopard. It took just a moment before Frikkie understood what he had done and then he passed right out, poleaxed flat on his face on the floor. You see, the leopard my brother Frikkie had reared from a cub had just come on heat.”
“What happened to the leopard?” asked the man from Potchefstroom after a moment of silence.
“Which one?” asked Karel, and everyone but the man from Potchefstroom laughed.
The next day being a Sunday, no one took their rifles to look down on besieged Kimberley as both sides had agreed at the beginning of the war that Sundays were the Lord’s day and hostilities would be suspended. Karel was enjoying a cup of coffee an hour and a half before sunset when they all looked at each other with fear and then a certain amount of indignation.
“But it’s Sunday!” exclaimed the man from Potchefstroom. “We’re Christians. We don’t fight each other on the Lord’s day.”
From ten miles to the south the distant cannonade built up, and a cheer rose from the town of Kimberley. For an hour and a half, Karel listened to the terrible artillery barrage and knew instinctively who was firing the guns. The war that was going to be over by Christmas was not going to be over for a very long time. A vicious stab of fear wrenched around in his stomach. The British Army had arrived in Africa and was less than ten miles away from where he was no longer enjoying his coffee, and Karel knew that Oom Paul, President Kruger, had made a terrible miscalculation by declaring war on the British. Karel, as he listened and listened to the bombardment, felt very small and vulnerable. Then came the silence soon after dark. For half an hour there was no sound from the battle raging to the south and then they all saw a great light shining up at the sky, the first time any of them had seen a searchlight. For the rest of the night, no one slept and very little talk was heard among the burghers. By the time the long night had passed for them in fear and light revealed their faces to each other, Karel noticed the man from Potchefstroom was nowhere to be seen and when Karel looked, he found the man’s pony gone. He knew the horse well as it stabled with Karel’s pony and was the only one with a white blaze down the front of its face. They were all free to come and go as they pleased and for a moment Karel was tempted to saddle up and ride away back to Majuba and bury his face in the welcome skirts of his little mother, but then he told himself he was a man and not a small boy and walked back to his friends. No one talked about the men, many of them, who had left in the night.
All through the night, Karel had been thinking of his father and brothers who were with General Cronjé and Koos de la Rey at Magersfontein ten miles to the south. The terrible bombardment the night before, the lone searchlight and the endless silences of the night, told him they were all dead, and even though he knew from reliable rumour that a long trench had been dug in front of the complex of hills, through which ran the railway line to Kimberley from the south, he was sure no one could have lived through the bombardment. Any moment he expected to see khaki down below and checked yet again his gun was loaded. There was fear in everyone’s eyes and no one spoke.
As suddenly as the guns had stopped the night before, a sharp crack of rifle fire came to them from the south and three of the men stood up and threw their hats in the air.
“They’re Mausers,” shouted Karel in his excitement and relief, and everyone down the siege line began to cheer.
By noon the word had reached Kimberley the British had been stopped, but the battle raged. The siege was tightened to make sure the British could not break out and join the battle. All day long cannon and rifle fire came to them on the wind and after dark, word reached Kimberley. The British General Methuen had not broken through the Boer trenches and thousands of British were lying dead on the battlefield, cut down by accurate Boer rifle fire from the safety of their trenches that had protected the burghers from the e
xploding shells the night before. Trench warfare had won the battle for the Boers and the next day cheers ran again around Kimberley and hats were tossed in the air. Lord Methuen, the British general, and his army of thirteen thousand men were retreating back to the Modder River, and when at lunchtime Piers found Karel with an order to join the family commando at Magersfontein, there was only one brother slightly wounded by British shrapnel and the rest of his family were alive and well.
With mixed feelings of relief and fear, Piers rode out with his brother from the siege lines.
3
December 1899
Two weeks later and two days before Christmas, Billy Clifford sailed from Southampton on the Dunnottar Castle with Lord Roberts, the new British commander-in-chief who was being sent to South Africa to replace Sir Redvers Buller. On board were bevvies of fellow war correspondents. Winston Churchill, who at the age of twenty-six was being paid two hundred and fifty pounds a week by his newspaper, a sum ten times greater than Billy’s salary from the Irish Times, was not on board, having been captured by the Boers. But as Billy reflected impatiently as the liner separated from the tugs, his father had not been the British Chancellor of the Exchequer and his grandfather the Duke of Marlborough any more than he had stood for parliament at such a tender age. Billy was excited at the prospect of following a war but he was even more excited at finding Sarie. Ever since freeing himself of his father’s chains by becoming a journalist and finding a way of using his degree in English, he had been saving his pennies to one day sail back to South Africa and find the girl whose memory still burnt in his heart like the all-consuming fire of hell.
Using his brief weeks in the Boer capital of Pretoria as his credential for following the war, even white-lying his knowledge of what the Boers were now calling the language of Afrikaans, he had wheedled his editor into giving him the job at the salary of twenty-five pounds a week.
As the boat sailed down the English Channel into the Bay of Biscay his heart beat faster, and instead of war and bullets all he saw in his mind’s eye as he looked over the rail at the ship’s wake was a cool stream, a blue sky and the most beautiful girl he had ever known in his life.
While Billy was dreaming about Sarie, the Mashonaland Scouts were crossing the Limpopo River from Rhodesia into the Transvaal. The water flowed around the bellies of the horses and Henry Manderville fired his Lea-Enfield twice into the river to dissuade the crocodiles from attacking the horses. The temperature was well over eighty degrees and being first light as they crossed, the tsetse fly was cruel to men and horses, the bites at neck and wrist like red-hot needles. The horses, at Henry and Gregory Shaw’s insistence, were salted having been previously bitten by the tsetse, infected and recovered. Even though the heat so early in the morning was intense the Scouts were covered from head to toe, their slouch hats pulled down over their faces, their hands protected by gloves. Even then the flies found flesh.
Henry’s uniform was the same one he had worn on the Pioneer Column that had occupied Rhodesia. Gregory, a much thinner Gregory after weeks of intensive training, had discarded the trappings of the Indian Army and was dressed in the same patchwork dark grey and black that camouflaged well with the bush. The nine horsemen, led by Major James Brigandshaw, were the first under Colonel Plumer’s command to cross into enemy territory. Their instructions were to sabotage the Boer railway line from Pretoria to Delagoa Bay three hundred miles to the south through enemy territory.
From thick bush half a mile upriver, Kei watched the soldiers ride their horses out of the river. When they were out of sight, swallowed by the heat haze, he pointed his pony at the water and crossed into Rhodesia. With him were four other black men on ponies like his own and like Kei, they were armed with stolen rifles. Two of the men were from the Sotho tribe, one Ndebele and one a Matabele. Across the river, they made camp and rested. Then they rode on north towards the old capital of Lobengula, King of the Matabele, careful to avoid people, black or white.
Kei’s odyssey had begun when his meanderings crossed the direct line between Kimberley and Bulawayo and he surprised four black men at their campfire. Kei watched them from the time the sun went down until the moon gave him enough light to see what he was doing. To his surprise, the four men around the fire conversed in Afrikaans. After three weeks on his own he was lonely and missed his family back on the farm Majuba, but his pride stopped him turning the pony round and riding home, the wrath of his father a strong reason for keeping his resolution. The four men were renegades like himself but each had a good horse and a rifle of a type never before seen by Kei. Judging from the distance and the timbres of their voices Kei thought the four men his own age. One was much taller than the others and paced around the fire at regular intervals. His nose was long and straight like his chin. One of the men, when he got up on the other side of the fire, had a gap between his legs even when he walked standing straight. Their rifles, like Kei’s, were in bucket holsters that were lying around a tree away from the resting horses. That night there was no sound or sense of wild animals. When the meat began to roast on the open fire, Kei’s mouth watered. The question he asked himself as the night darkened and he waited for the moon was how to introduce himself into the company of the four men without being shot.
When he judged the men to be asleep around the fire and there was enough moonlight for him not to tread and crack every piece of fallen wood on his way to the fire, he made his slow approach. The big man with the straight nose had taken his rifle to the fire where it lay next to him on the ground. Just beyond the firelight Kei stopped and braced himself, his Mauser pointed at the big man’s chest. In the same language the four men had been speaking around the fire, he pleasantly but loudly wished them ‘good evening’, at the same time moving forward so the big man could see the gun pointing at his chest.
The words from the night woke all four men instantly. The bow-legged man was first to scream and run away into the bush imagining the Devil. The big man, equally frightened by the voice of a ghost from the night, left his rifle on the ground and ran away with the rest.
The remains of the roast bush pig that had been left on a tripod next to the fire were the best food Kei had eaten since leaving Majuba. Three times he called into the night and each time heard more crashing further and further away into the bush. With the Mauser across his legs, Kei waited for the dawn, having removed the bolts from their four guns. He also checked their horses. When everything was safe, Kei whistled for his dog. With the animal on guard next to him and wood stoked on the fire, he slept till morning, waking to a wet rough tongue licking his face.
Two hours later the dog barked long before Kei heard anything. The dog’s intelligent face was pointing northeast, and the ears were pricked to catch the slightest sound. The big man was the first to break cover.
“Good morning,” said Kei in Afrikaans. “As you can see I am not a ghost. And thank you, your meat was delicious.”
The four men had worked in the Big Hole at Kimberley digging for diamonds when the town had come under siege. They worked on a gang deep in the earth for a wage that gave them food and something to save so they could go home and buy cattle and with the cattle buy themselves wives, put the wives to work in the fields, their sons to looking after the cattle, and drink beer under the shade of a tree with their friends. The main way to wealth was to steal some of the diamonds they found in the earth to sell to elicit buyers for a small fraction of their worth. The process had been going well for all four men when the Boer army had besieged the town and food became more valuable than diamonds.
A week before Kei had joined them, the four men had been armed by the British, told to slip through the Boer lines at night and drive as many cattle back to Kimberley as they could find. The mine owner for whom they worked had promised a reward that would make them rich once the British had won the war. The big man being a Matabele of pure Zulu descent had no doubt in his mind the British would win. Shaka, as the mine owner called the big man, was to lead t
he foraging party, hiding their holsters and guns under blankets draped over the horses’ necks. With the British and Boers in agreement that the blacks were to be kept out of the war, they would be safe. Once through the Boer lines, which they found easy as the besiegers sat around their fires at night and black men were black men who belonged to neither side, Shaka and his three companions never looked back. With four rifles and four hundred rounds of ammunition, Shaka had a better plan for getting rich.
Shaka had been one of the last to see Lobengula, King of the Matabele, alive, and had seen the indunas take the sick old man up into the hills, the great king lying in the back of an ox wagon. Two days later the indunas came back and slaughtered the biggest black bull in the king’s herd that had been driven in front of the army as it retreated further and further into the mopane forest away from the British in 1893. Everyone then knew the king was dead, and the regiments lost heart. Two days before the king’s wagon had gone, the wagons loaded with crates of rifles and the king’s treasure of ivory, and some said gold, had been taken somewhere into those hills below the Zambezi River: this was the prize Shaka had convinced the others to help him find.
When the band of five men crossed the Limpopo River and moved off into the great mopane forest, Shaka felt at home.
“Their soldiers are going south,” he told them. “We will have no problems. Maybe with the gold and ivory and the king’s guns, the Matabele will rise and kill the British. It is always better to kill a man when he is looking the wrong way.”
