by Peter Rimmer
Elijah was a Xhosa and far away from his tribe and the place of his birth on the coast next to the confluence of the Indian Ocean and the Kei River. He had ridden the perimeter at breakneck speed with Ezekiel Oosthuizen, the father of the seven boys, the young Elijah leading the spare horses so the circle they rode all day was wider than any other of the Boers laying claim to their land. The two men had ridden from sunup to sundown to complete the ring and proclaim the farm they later called Majuba in celebration of the Boers’ victory over the British in the first Anglo-Boer war. He was an old man now and could no longer count a herd of springbok at two thousand yards but his sons were strong and their sons were strong and the great farm they had pegged out thirty years before had been good to them and never once had any of the families, black or white, known hunger. With a Sotho wife he had bought for five cows given him by Ezekiel Oosthuizen life had been content until now, Elijah knew the history of the tribes that fought for and occupied the territory south of the great Zambezi River and the terrible years of the Lifaqane when tribes slaughtered tribes in an orgy of self-destruction. Before the Lifaqane his wife's people owned the very land that made up the farm Majuba, a source of pride and irritation for his sons and grandsons who still dreamed of the power of their ancestors.
Elijah watched Piers ride away to his new war and was sad that at the end of an old man's life (where an old man should sit under a shady tree while his granddaughters brought him beer to drink) it was all going to happen again. Elijah had never seen an Englishman but he knew of their power and their defeat of the mighty Zulu and now they were bringing great ships full of soldiers to Africa and they would crush the Boers as they had crushed the Zulus and they would never go home again and in the end the war would come to Majuba and Elijah and peace and prosperity would be gone for him forever. From what Piers had told him there was going to be a great battle between the Boers and the British that had nothing to do with the blacks. Elijah shook his head in sorrow: when two lions fought each other in the king's cattle kraal many cattle died, trampling each other unless they could break out of the kraal and run away from the fight. In despair, he looked around him and knew there was nowhere to run. He and his family would just have to wait and see. Talking quietly to himself he went across to his pony, threw a blanket over the animal's back and rode away from the small group of buildings onto the open veld to find his sons and grandsons who were hoeing the acres of maize they had planted with the first rains a week after the white man had ridden out to war.
When he told them the story Piers had told him outside the barn he expected them all to worry about their families just like he had been worrying ever since Piers gave him the news of impending battle. Instead, everyone but Elijah became excited and stopped hoeing the land and went off in a huddle away from the old man and Elijah feared even more for his children. For a brief moment as he looked, he thought Kei, the youngest of his sons, named after the great river near where Elijah had been born, had grown six inches. On his face was a look that looked so far it had no distance: there was always one dreamer in every family and for the first time in his life Elijah admitted to himself he was an old man. There was a new bull in the kraal and nothing he could do to protect the bull from its own destruction. His son wanted to fight the both of them, Boer and British, and win back the land of his ancestors.
A week later when Koos de la Rey was this time digging a twelve-mile trench in front of the hill at Magersfontein, the British having brushed aside the Boers on the Modder River with their overwhelming numbers, Kei rode north from the farm Majuba on the best pony left on the farm. In the saddle holster in front of his right knee was the mauser rifle Karel had taught him to use, left behind by Ezekiel Oosthuizen to protect his wife. Kei had smiled to himself at the idea. The little woman would have knocked herself over backwards if she had fired the gun. Over his shoulder rode cartridge belts from left to right and right to left. In his saddlebag over the pony's rump behind his short stirrup-saddle was a month's supply of dried meat. Beside them trotted a dog that had never left his side since the day Sarie had given him the best of one of her litters: the dog was skin and bones but could run all day beside the pony, a long pink tongue hanging from its jaws.
Once off the farm, Kei felt powerfully elated, drugged by the adrenalin 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 round the camp fires the best days he could ever remember. That Saturday night they sat round 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 round 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, north and south. 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 round 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 down the feed 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 on to the stoep of the farmhouse and 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 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 ann
oyed 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 lounge 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 was 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 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, 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 and 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 exploding lyddite 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 him 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 a feeling mixed with relief and fear he rode out with his brother from the siege lines.
Chapter 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 a bevy 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 burned 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 wielded 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 were 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 up river, 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 av
oid people, black or white.
Kei's odyssey had begun when his meanderings crossed the direct line between Kimberley and Bulawayo when he surprised four black men at their camp fire. 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 round 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 round 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 round 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 moonlight was enough 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 out of 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 round the fire he pleasantly but loudly wished the four men 'good evening', at the same time moving forward so the big man could see the gun pointing at his chest.
