by Peires, Jeff
The Waterkloof
The 50 or so square kilometres of mountain, valley and forest collectively known to the British as the Waterkloof formed a south-western extension of the Amathole range situated well within the borders of the Cape Colony. The Waterkloof itself was a deep valley a little over ten kilometres long, enclosed by almost perpendicular hills crowned with masses of stone and intersected by a succession of precipices and kloofs. The deeper one entered the Waterkloof, the denser the vegetation became. Gigantic yellow-wood, assegaaiwood and sneezewood trees blotted out the sky, suspending tangled masses of creepers and monkey-ropes from branches 50 or 60 metres high to merge with the dense undergrowth of acacias and other thorny bushes. The few open spaces along the only track merely served to turn the invading soldiers into standing targets for their invisible enemies. Mount Misery, the Iron Mountain and other aptly-named parts of this extraordinary complex struck fear into the hearts of the British soldiers who were compelled to enter it. This mighty natural stronghold, provided moreover with caves capable of sheltering upwards of one hundred people, was occupied around April 1851 by the Xhosa chief Maqoma and a band of Khoi rebels led by Hans Brander. The very Maqoma whom Smith had mocked in public as a ‘drunken beast’ had turned on his persecutor. ‘I want the whole country to know that Maqoma is not mad,’ he said, ‘for that time of the Axe War they said I was mad.’5 Shrugging off a decade of degradation, impotence and alcohol-inspired confusion, Maqoma stood tall and clear-eyed, the greatest military mind of his or any other Xhosa generation. Operating out of their impregnable fastnesses in the Waterkloof, Maqoma and Hans Brander burned farmhouses and raided cattle deep into the Colony, rendering large tracts of Somerset and Cradock districts uninhabitable by the white man.
For more than 18 months the small Xhosa-Khoi force, estimated by some colonists to number no more than 200 fighting men at any one time, defied more than 4 000 of the British Army’s finest troops.6 On 4 November 1851, Colonel TJ Fordyce, commanding the 74th Highlanders, was killed in the Waterkloof to derisive Xhosa shouts of ‘Johnny, bring stretcher! Johnny, bring stretcher!’7 This stunning disaster did not stop Governor Smith from informing his superiors in London that his generals had ‘well succeeded in driving from their strongholds of the Waterkloof etc the greater portion of these numerous bandits’. But the Colonial Secretary had long ceased to believe Sir Harry:
It is my painful duty to inform you [the Colonial Secretary wrote on receiving the dispatch in which Smith announced the death of Colonel Fordyce] that … you have failed in showing that foresight, energy and judgement which your very difficult position required, and that therefore … the Government of the Cape of Good Hope and the conduct of the war should be placed in other hands.8
Sir Harry Smith was recalled in disgrace, his glorious career ignominiously destroyed. Truly, the ‘drunken beast’ Maqoma had inflicted a terrible revenge on the ‘hero of Aliwal’.
The Fish River bush
As soon as war broke out, Stokwe, Tola and a number of other minor chieftains who had been displaced by Smith’s annexations returned to their own country and took up strong positions in the Fish River bush, a chaos of ‘disrupted, bush hills with intervening deep and rugged kloofs and ravines’.9 Unlike the Waterkloof, the Fish River bush was not a true forest, but consisted of thorny acacia bushes, pelargonium creepers and stunted euphorbia trees. Nevertheless, these grew so thickly upon each other that the bush was passable only by old tracks made by elephants in former years but now invisible to the unknowing eye. For those who knew the paths however, these elephant tracks provided rapid access from one part of the bush to another and linked up with similar bush along the Keiskamma, Kat and Bushmans rivers, affording easy opportunities for cattle-raiding all the way from King William’s Town in the east to Alexandria near Port Elizabeth in the west and Alice/Fort Beaufort in the north. The colonial forces made several attempts to burn the acacia down, but it was too succulent to catch fire.
While Stokwe, Tola and a daring band of Khoi rebels headed by the Pockbaas brothers threatened the lines of communication between Grahamstown and Fort Beaufort, the Ndlambe Xhosa chief Siyolo planted himself firmly astride the main road between Grahamstown and King William’s Town. The position of the Ndlambe Xhosa was unenviable. Their country was flat and open, the complete reverse of the Ngqika Xhosa stronghold in the Amathole Mountains, and they had taken heavy casualties during the War of the Axe. Mhala, the senior Ndlambe chief, was eager to fight but his councillors refused to permit it. His neighbour Phatho, the powerful chief of the Gqunukhwebe Xhosa, had been left to fight alone by his neighbours during the War of the Axe, and he therefore refused to join in the War of Mlanjeni. Most of the other Ndlambe chiefs, such as Toyise, Siwani and Mlanjeni’s chief Mqhayi, allied themselves with the Colony. Nevertheless, declared Siyolo, Mhala’s fiery nephew, ‘I will fight for my country,’ and he stationed his men in the ‘thick thorns’ of the King William’s Town road to cut off the ‘Government flying papers’, as the military express mails were called. Siyolo’s generalship was second only to Maqoma’s, and Governor Cathcart did him the honour of calling him ‘personally the most active, warlike and inveterate enemy we have to contend with’.10 In November 1851, Siyolo’s men, greatly aided by the cowardice of Colonel Mackinnon, cut down 60 of the inexperienced Queen’s Regiment in the Fish River bush, the greatest loss of life by a British regiment in any engagement of the war. In October 1852, Siyolo was captured, like Hintsa and Sandile before him, by the time-honoured British trick of inviting him in for negotiations. The first chief to fall into British hands during this war, he was sent to a military prison in Cape Town and thence to the leper colony on Robben Island, where he remained close on 17 years.11
The northern front
North of the Amathole Mountains lay the flat and open country of the Thembu chief Maphasa, much of which was annexed by Smith in 1847 and named North Victoria. North Victoria also brought the Colony into direct contact with the personal domain of Sarhili, the Xhosa King, who was still independent of colonial rule but whose political authority was recognised by all the subjected Xhosa chiefs in British Kaffraria. The flat plains of North Victoria did not lend themselves to the Xhosa mode of fighting, and as many as 12 unsuccessful attacks on the town of Whittlesea were easily repelled (January–February 1851). At the battle of Imvane (April 1851) more than two hundred Xhosa and Thembu were killed when the colonial forces managed to draw them down into open combat.12 Disillusioned by these setbacks, King Sarhili withdrew into sullen but passive hostility, offering encouragement and refuge to fleeing Xhosa warriors and cattle. Two major expeditions (December 1851 and August 1852) were launched by the colonial government to punish Sarhili for his continued opposition to their interests. Sarhili’s Gcaleka Xhosa did what they could to barricade the drifts of the Kei River by building breastworks out of rock and throwing stones at the troops, but there was a limit to what they could do with their bare hands in an invincibly flat country, and the Imperial forces got away with 30 000 head of cattle on the first occasion and more than 10 000 cattle on the second.13
Xhosa successes during the war were crucially dependent on the terrain where they fought. Any effort to make a stand on open ground was doomed to failure as the 200 dead at Imvane clearly demonstrated. Attempts to storm fortified positions were likewise fruitless, as the 12 battles of Whittlesea or the three attacks on Fort White (‘a mere collection of wattle and daub huts erected to shelter the men from the weather’) showed.14 Given the meagre weaponry at the disposal of the Xhosa, such attempts were aptly compared by one commentator to ‘shooting at Table Mountain with a pop-gun’.15 Even the Christmas Day massacre of the military villages was possible only because the defenders ran out of ammunition. Apart from the weapons carried off by deserting Cape Corps mutineers, the Xhosa depended on inferior guns made specifically for the African trade.16 The inexhaustible munitions and supplies of the British troops were even more vi
tal than their enormous technical superiority. To give but one example: the 73rd Regiment was able to fire away more than 77 000 rounds of ammunition in a single day, while the Xhosa rushed out under heavy fire to collect spent bullets or bits of shell and Khoi women prostituted themselves and risked their lives to smuggle a mere 80 rounds or a cannister of powder to the Kat River rebels.17 As far as technical inferiority is concerned, it goes without saying that the Xhosa had no artillery of their own, and no defence against the cannon of the Imperial forces.
So at last we came to the top or den [of the Waterkloof], and such a sight I never saw before in all my life. Men, women and children that was killed and wounded by the shot and shell, some with their arms, others with their legs off. It was a terrible sight to see but such is war.18
Xhosaland was also used as a testing ground for the very latest in long-range weapons, the rocket and the Minie rifle.
Maqoma and Siyolo seem to have left much of the gunnery to the skilled marksmen among the Khoi rebels, while the Xhosa concentrated on the guerrilla tactics they had evolved during the earlier frontier wars. The essence of their strategy was so to conceal themselves in the natural bush cover that they only engaged the British troops when they had a good chance of victory.
Day after day officers and men tore their way through the thick jungle [of the Waterkloof] without seeing an enemy and yet as we approached or left the kloof the shots fired at us showed us they were there. Colonel Fordyce of the 74th Highlanders … was positive that the place was deserted. He had come through it with his whole regiment in skirmishing order without firing a shot. The next day he was killed.19
Often a regiment would spend the day scouring the bush with no result, only to find their rear under heavy attack as they attempted to withdraw in the dusk. The Xhosa gathered on the edges of narrow paths where the soldiers were forced to march in single file, and jumped them at a range too close to permit them to use their rifles. Sometimes the Xhosa managed to pull the soldiers into the bush by their waistbands, and in the Fish River bush, Siyolo’s men trained fierce wolfhounds to drag their enemies down. In the open, the Xhosa were vulnerable, but on their own ground they reigned supreme, daring the troops on with shouts of ‘Yiz’apha! Yiz’apha!’ (‘Come here! Come here!’) and other taunts.20
Such tactics could not, ultimately, defeat the British Army, but they certainly baffled Sir Harry Smith. We have already seen how Smith, infuriated by the unexpected defiance of his Xhosa ‘children’, frantically called on the settlers to ‘exterminate’ the savage beasts. He had daydreamed of marching triumphantly through Xhosaland at the head of a volunteer army of colonists, repeating once again his imaginary victories of 1835.21 But the settlers did not step forward to risk their necks. ‘The general feeling [among the colonists],’ wrote one settler who did volunteer, ‘was to rob the Government as much as possible’ and to let the British Army do all the fighting.22 Much of the heavy fighting in previous wars had been done not by settlers or troops, but by black auxiliaries, many of whom were now in open revolt. It was indeed the ongoing succession of Khoi army mutinies which kept the Xhosa war effort going through the dark period of disappointment in Mlanjeni’s prophecies. In July 1851 Smith was forced to discharge his remaining Khoi conscripts for fear of further mutinies and to prevent a general Khoi rebellion throughout the Colony.23 When Maqoma’s men destroyed 200 farmhouses, captured 5 000 cattle and cut the road to Cradock, neither Smith nor his incompetent commander-in-chief ‘Old Jack’ Somerset could do a thing about it.24 All the new regiments that a worried War Office threw into the fray could not stem the tide. Many of the ordinary soldiers were sunk in despair, as this diary entry written on the first anniversary of the war clearly shows.
This hateful drudging unsatisfactory war has lasted now a twelvemonth and God only knows how much longer it will continue, for our chiefs appear to be either unable or unwilling to do anything that may bring matters to a finish. Poor old Sir Harry is I fear too superannuated to be able to do anything now …
Sitting cross-legged in my little tent cursing the Colony, Kaffir War and my ill hap in being here. All the little zeal I ever had by this time quite oozed out … I am sick, tired to death’s door of wandering about these savage wilds, doing no earthly good …25
A correspondent of the Illustrated London News did not stop short of predicting outright mutiny by the British troops. ‘Many [soldiers] openly declare they will go there [the Waterkloof] no more to be butchered like cattle … Courage here is of no avail; discipline and steadfastness under fire only render the men better targets for the lurking savages.’26
And yet, even before Sir Harry Smith had left the Cape in disgrace, the Imperial forces had effectively won the war. The man who was above all responsible for this dramatic change in fortune was Lieutenant-Colonel William Eyre, and he won the war by evolving a style of combat capable of matching the Xhosa guerrilla tactics.27 Eyre was tall, bespectacled and physically not at all a strong man. When he first arrived in South Africa, he thought it was ‘both unsoldierlike and unEnglishmanlike’ for British troops to lie in ambush, but as soon as a little experience had convinced him that the method was effective, he adopted it wholeheartedly. It was an article of faith with Eyre that there was no such thing as a natural obstacle. He it was who invented the technique of rolling pack-animals down hills where they could never have walked. He lost a lot of pack-animals, he stuck fast in a lot of thornbushes, he exhausted himself to such an extent that he could no longer stand up and on one occasion he very nearly drowned, but he completely changed British perceptions of what was and what was not possible. Eyre taught British soldiers to fight an African war by making them do things which had previously been dismissed as impossible. When they complained that they were tired, he burned all their blankets and made them sleep in the cold. When they feared to enter the bush, he lashed them on with a sjambok and a knobkierie. The spirit of ‘yocking’ (apparently a hunting term) permeated the Eyre camp. The Colonel was said to be ‘as keen after cattle as any [Xhosa]’, and his men shamelessly plundered whatever they did not burn. They nicknamed Eyre Inkosi, the Xhosa word for chief.
It cannot be imagined that such a man would treat his Xhosa enemies with compassion. ‘You are too damned sensitive!’ he told a subordinate who informed him that his troops had killed two unarmed Xhosa women working in the fields. No one could accuse Eyre of excessive sensitivity, as these references to his military style make clear:
Colonel Eyre amuses himself by ‘yocking’ [Xhosa] and the other day his CC shot a poor unarmed boy, which seems a very barbarous proceeding to one but is applauded by most people in this country.
Colonel Eyre called for the [Xhosa] guide, but he was prostrate on the ground with terror, and Eyre, who was highly excited (for there was no retreat open) ordered Mr Conway, our guide, to shoot him. Conway pretended not to hear; then Colonel Eyre ordered him to bring him his pistol out of the holster. Conway fumbled, and pretended he could not find it. ‘Bring him dead or alive, Conway!’ Conway dragged him along by his blanket; Colonel Eyre smashed his knobkerry on his head, and then the man pointed with his hands in the direction of the [Khoi rebel] Lager …
An unfortunate old [Xhosa] half dead with hunger was taken by the Fingoes at the drift and hanged by Eyre’s orders, a piece of wanton cruelty I think. A story of his trying to steal a horse was trumped up but was I believe untrue.28
Eyre, or the spirit of Eyre, wakened a new ruthlessness in British warfare. For all his talk of ‘extermination’, there was something in Sir Harry Smith that recoiled from the logical extremes of war to the death. He was much abused by his officers for his lenience towards Xhosa prisoners, releasing them after only 50 lashes of the whip, and, as late as November 1851, he was still blocking proposals to burn the Xhosa crops and starve the enemy out.29 But by January 1852, with defeat staring him in the face and his letter of dismissal already on its way, Smith yielded to Eyre and
the others. A massive campaign designed to systematically eliminate the Xhosa means of subsistence was launched.
The burning of crops and dwellings had long been a part of frontier warfare. Throughout the period of Smith’s command in 1851, the British troops had destroyed and laid waste wherever they had passed. What made the campaign of January-March 1852 so different was that it was a co-ordinated, deliberate plan aimed exclusively at the Xhosa fields and gardens. Unable to gain a straight military victory over an active and elusive enemy, the British Army now turned its attention to the exposed and immobile host of maize and sorghum located in the Amathole Mountains. The accounts of the soldiers who participated conjure up the picture far more effectively than the words of a historian:
We are going on vigorously with the work of destruction, and I have hitherto encountered no opposition. The country appears almost abandoned … The cultivation here has been most extensive but we have cut it all down – many hundred acres – with a facility and rapidity that astonished us all … This will complete the entire destruction of the crops in the Keiskamma Hoek … I cannot conceive that the Enemy will hold out if we persevere in this system of devastation, the practicability of which is now proved … Our men are very healthy, and do not seem to dislike this work at all.
Our two troops and three troops of Lancers with Colonel Pohi went out on a garden and kraal destroying expedition and we certainly did an immense amount of mischief. When we came to a garden, generally found three or so together, halted, formed troops and dismounted, then the work of destruction began, for some 100 men slashing away right and left with their swords make short work among mielie stalks.
