Jock of the Bushveld

by Percy Fitzpatrick

  I remember very well one moonlight night meeting Alan Wilson in Low’s Creek, and walking out with him along Pettigrew’s Road, close to where Jock and I had our Last Hunt together. It was in the poort, at its shadiest where, it was said, a boy had been taken by a lion a week or so before, and we had just been talking of this when some small buck dashed out of the bush a few yards from us. It was Jock’s attitude – ears cocked and eager to jump off in pursuit – that showed conclusively it was not the lion; and poor old Jock couldn’t hear the laughter that followed.

  There was another Camp of Three a few years later: Farmer Francis and his brother Walter – equally brave and cool – and my young brother George. They broke up camp to join the ILH. They sleep where they fell – Komatipoort, Mafeking and Estcourt in Natal.

  Duncan McKenzie, Woolls-Sampson, Alan Wilson – friends, associates and fellow-pioneers of Jock! Their names are written across the face of half South Africa – Natal, Transvaal, Rhodesia! Links to unite Our Country; so perhaps Jock is not out of place in these pages, after all.

  It was not easy to write the end of Jock and the mere narrator has to acknowledge many reproaches from the tender hearted. There is only one answer. It is literally true. That is no justification, say some. Well, then, put it to the high authorities who sit in judgment – once more to the Little People themselves! It was only when the manuscript was finished that they knew more than the bare fact; then one morning someone with more courage than the mere narrator read it to them, with a warning that it was ‘very sad, but he died before Nelson’. Halfway through, one strolled away, whistling, and did not come back, while another stared hard and palefaced through the open window. At the end there was silence for some minutes, and then with a look of defiance, but a voice not well controlled, he said: ‘I don’t call that a bit sad!’ That was the only comment. It was late that night, an hour when even ‘grown-ups’ nod, that a voice, softened of all defiance, spoke: ‘Tell me how Nelson died – and I’ll go to sleep!’

  To some it is given to die the death they have lived for and of none is this more certain than of Alan Wilson. The comrades of early days will bear witness that a life’s dream was realised that day on the Shangani River. And that is why those who knew him believe the Matabele’s story that, when only five or six of the thirty-five were left, they took off their hats and, under fire from all sides, sang something as the English do, standing up, and then went on fighting. And how at last only one man was left standing – one man bigger than the rest, who wore a broad-brimmed hat; while beside him a wounded comrade reached up to hand him cartridges, until he too went down and the big man fought alone. I have his stirrup-irons now; and his last message, sent the day before he started for Shangani, arrived months later on a birthday which the Little People keep, with his name for remembrance. So the links are forged.

  It is a far cry from Alan Wilson lying near Cecil Rhodes in the Matopos to Jock in the Bushveld, and the link is of the slenderest, but enough to hold one’s thought to this, that such men were of the pioneers and the makers of our country; that they belong to all of us; and that their example is greater even than their work. Who will tell the story of the pioneers? Not one man or one woman, however willing; but many will be needed for the task – each to contribute his or her share, small or great, to preserving a record of which any country might be proud. No one person can do it, or attempt it; for who are the pioneers? Look up again at the old Block House on the shoulder of the Devil’s Peak! They began there. Straight below it stands the monument to Rhodes and two thousand miles north his body lies within a hundred yards of Alan Wilson’s. A thousand miles still further north the pioneers are pressing on today; and to west and east every mile has had its pioneer – men and women, Dutch and English – Our People, who made Our Country. Jock, you see, touched only one little corner, yet through the men who were there the links reach out to the lions at Groote Schuur; to the graves in the Matopos; to many a hard-fought fight, Mafeking and Ladysmith and Mome Gorge, where men who had looked into Jock’s friendly face and patted him have played their part.

  Is it not one country? And ours?

  Two years ago we made a summer trip to the edge of the Berg near Pilgrim’s Rest, that the Little People and others might see for themselves something of the country and life of which they had heard a good deal, and with Bingo for escort instead of Jock. They camped at Tumbling Waters and Paradise Camp; stood on the outermost edge of the Berg at break of day and watched the sea of clouds roll up from the Low Country in snowy billows and creep into the bays and gorges at their feet, and when the clouds had melted they looked down into the wonderworld of the Bushveld and saw where Jock killed the porcupine and the baboons fought the tiger and rescued their wounded comrade. The grenadillas trail in glorious profusion over Jim Hill’s old camp, where the new assayer shot the goat in mistake for a sable antelope. The everlasting mountains – just the same – stare out eastwards across the hazy Bushveld towards the sea, like colossal watchdogs – with the foothills for forepaws. We walked and waded up the Macmac gorge to the falls, sheer three hundred feet, and saw the great walls, as of old, clothed and draped with staghorn moss like exquisite green lace, fold upon fold and tier upon tier, overlapping away up and up until pattern and plan were lost to the eye, and all bespangled with countless millions of glistening drops from the wafted spray – beautiful beyond description when the sun towards midday drove his shafts of light down into the depths of the gorge.

  Above the Falls four of the old hands were at work sluicing the bed of the creek, just as they had been in the days of Jock, four and twenty years ago. ‘The Bo’sun’, with the complexion of a child and the head of Father Christmas, cheery and mudstained, was still at work; and we had reckoned him an old man then! The years between dropped out and the talk was of yesterday – with scraps of news and reminiscence thrown in.

  I’m the last o’ the old uns, now. Most o’ them’s gone long ago. D’ye ‘member Jimmy Bryson – the chap you christened the Corn Merchant the time he bust on mealies? He was always getting’ inter trouble not mindin’ his own business. He was a year younger ‘n me. He went out in 99, jus’ after war begun. Nothin’ would do the shouters in Lydenburg but there must be a salute for Kroojer’s birthday to show they was all right an’ loy’l, even if they didn’t go out ‘n fight like the reel Bores. Twenty-one charges of dyminite! Twenty-one mind ye – jus’ ‘zif he was the Queen. An’ Jimmy bein’ a miner, they guv him the job o’ firing – fer a quid! O’ course number twenty’s fuse runs an’ blows his bloomin’ head off. An’ serve him right fer interferin’ in politics!

  ‘But I’m gettin’ on a bit now myself and don’t know as I’ll stand this wet work many more winters! Eighty-two last month! D’ye ‘member the day you made the ridin’ breeches outer a flour sack? My word I laugh ‘bout that still every time I see your name in the papers!’

  He was one of the members of the camel expedition sent by President Burgers to Delagoa to bring up cannon for the first Sekhukhune war; and it was an odd coincidence that the record of that trek written by William Charles Scully, also one of the party, was published in The African Monthly at the time the Bo’sun was telling us about it. I sent him a copy of Jock, which he says he ‘will keep, as it seems to be the right thing’; adding that it will be some time before he reads it all as he is ‘not much on books’.

  And Jim Makokela is at his old kraal, only a few miles away. Twice reported dead, and indeed twice left for dead, he can still hold his own, as his neighbours unreservedly admit. It must be fifteen years ago that he attacked a gang of Shangaans on the Sabie River, when one of them, coming up behind, laid his back open with an axe, apparently driving it clean through the ribs. I heard of it from one of the old hands at Macmac who saw him as he lay motionless on his face, before his people carried the body away to the kraal; but in a few months Jim was again up and doing. Some years later it was a party of Basutos in Kimberley who rallied and turned on him, and ‘hammered him i
nto pulp’ with their sticks. No one knows how he got over that; but he reappeared at his kraal with a few more scars and the same old spirit to take life as he found it.

  It was on a later trek last year, down in the Bushveld, that I last heard of him. Wishing to make quite sure that it was not his son, the younger Jim Makokela and a real chip of the old block, of whom they spoke, I asked certain questions: ‘Is it the old Jim Makokela that you speak of – an old man?’

  ‘Yes, the old man!’

  ‘Is he a big man – a strong man?’

  ‘Big, and very strong!’

  ‘Has he marks on his head – cuts?’

  ‘Many, Inkos! many – the marks of fighting!’

  ‘Does he still fight?’

  ‘Wow!!’

  ‘Does he ever get drunk?’

  ‘Ho! The Inkos knows him well!’

  In the days of Jock there were very few natives living in that part of the Bushveld and there were practically none in the parts where big game was plentiful; and because of the abundance of big game and the unspeakably wild and trackless character of the country, we used to think of it as a country that never had been inhabited; yet there were and are evidences innumerable of human occupation. Where the grass was burnt off we were puzzled to see, as you may see today, for miles and miles along valleys and hillsides, lines of stones and piles of stones obviously gathered by the hand of man. Some are in the form of kraals or scherms, but most are only the stones thrown out of the old Kaffir gardens when that part of the country was densely populated. In the eighties there were several very old natives who claimed to remember the people and the happenings of the earlier times before the big game reoccupied those parts. One of them was Sandhlan, then prime minister to Umbandine the Swazi king – a man reputed to be about a hundred. He was a full-grown man when Shaka was at his greatest; and more than sixty years later he was still head and shoulders above all others in character and capacity. These old authorities all agreed in saying that it was Shaka who killed or carried off the former inhabitants: Shaka, the Black Napoleon, who is held accountable for two million human lives! There were thousands of Jim Makokelas in those days; there are many still. In the letter from Sir Duncan McKenzie already quoted, he says, ‘Jim Makokela is such a familiar character that I feel I must have known him.’

  You may read in history who Shaka was, where he held sway and what he did. But nowhere in history will you read what Shaka has to do with Jock and Those Who Knew Him! Yet, but for Shaka there would have been no Jock – just as many of the things that concern us greatly would, but for him, never have come about.

  Here is the answer! Along the hillsides, in the valleys and over the wild bush-covered flats where we hunted, there lie those lines and piles of stones – the silent witnesses of a bloody past. Times out of number, and over hundreds of square miles, we must together have clambered and stumbled over them, running after game. It was Shaka who did that; it was his work that left a country silent and a waste – so quiet and peaceful that little by little the big game ventured back again and made it their home until we who came later and those who had come long before us – the real pioneers – entering on a country trackless and wild, thought that it was new and untrodden by the foot of man. There would have been no such hunting there but for Shaka; and, thus, no Jock! And it was there, where we hunted, that Shaka’s last campaign was fought – the Moscow that led to his death.

  If you look into it you will see the stories of the game, the natives and the pioneers, like the threads in a single fabric, all interwoven in the history of our country. But how many trouble to look into it at all? Come then and see whither the threads lead; what like are a few of the details that go to make up the story; and what meaning lies unnoticed and forgotten behind the names that you see today upon the map.

  This Shaka – who has been called the Black Napoleon and the Attila of the Nineteenth Century, and the Alexander the Great of Africa – is surely one of the romantic figures of history! Think of it! Here was a naked savage, so brave, so capable and so masterful that, whilst a mere lad, he rose to leadership and was marked by the Chief, his father, as a rival and would have been murdered but for his mother’s warning to seek refuge with her father, the chief of a neighbouring tribe; who rose to power and favour and, succeeding his grandfather, soon returned to become also chief of his own tribe – Amazulu. Was it merely an accident, or was there some weird prophetic instinct at work when these three were, named in their insignificant infancy? Shaka – the Destroyer – but, to be fair, he was more than that: he was the builder of a nation too! His mother – beloved of her people, so they said Umnandi, the Sweet One! And Amazulu, the People of the Skies! It is told by one of the old explorers that a shipwrecked sailor, the sole survivor of some unrecorded disaster on that coast, repaid the kindness shown him by telling the lad Shaka the story of Napoleon. But even if that be true, the story of the Black Napoleon would be not less but more striking still! He invented discipline and the science of war – for they were unknown in his world, and who could have taught him? From the smallest beginnings he marched from victory to victory until within twelve years, and while still in his thirties, his most terrible arm reached from Port St John to Lake Nyasa; and all Zululand, Natal, Swaziland, Basutoland, Free State, Transvaal, Bechuanaland, Rhodesia and Portuguese East Africa were under his foot and devastated by the savage armies he had raised and disciplined and led. There was no one to say him nay!

  This is not the history of our country; but only of a part and for a fraction of its life. Behind Shaka, in a darkness that is punctured here and there by pinholes of light, lie the centuries away back to, and before, the days when the Queen of Sheba came in barbaric splendour to dazzle the Wisest of the Wise. But take it only from the days of Shaka – say eighty years ago – and look at it with the eyes of today.

  From the northern suburbs of Johannesburg you can see, thirty miles away, a nick in the Magaliesberg Range: it is called Mzilikazi’s Nek. That was the outpost of Shaka’s greatest general who, fearing that the king would deal with him as he had dealt with all others when they became too powerful or too popular, fled in time, taking with him his veteran impis 15000 strong to found a nation and carve out a kingdom for himself. There and thereabout the old Voortrekkers – 135 of them, under Potgieter and Uys – fought the nine days’ fight and drove Mzilikazi from the Transvaal. The scene of the last fight was called by the natives Mali-co (‘Where the Blood Ran’): it is now Marico. Within sight of the spot where now flourishes the greatest gold mining industry the world has ever known, those old Voortrekkers fought out the issue between barbarism and civilisation. That was in 1837, but half a century was to pass before anyone found the gold that they had fought over and trampled under foot. And then – that half century later – when Mzilikazi had gone north and founded his Matabele kingdom, the same old issue was to be fought out between his son and successor, Lobengula, and the white men of Rhodesia, when Alan Wilson fell with his brave thirty-five in the gallant dash at Shangani.

  From Bulawayo (the ‘Place of Slaughter’) you can motor to the Matopos in a couple of hours easily; but some years ago it was not so easy. Rhodes was there once during his lifetime, wandering with a companion or two on horseback, and reached a great bald granite hill where a few huge boulders stood irregularly grouped like sentinels ‘at ease’. It was said that Mzilikazi, the founder of the Matabele nation, was buried somewhere in those hills; but at that time nothing more was known. Long afterwards Rhodes sent someone to find the place, because the view haunted him and he wished to be buried there – at the World’s View, as he called it. After he was buried there they found that the grave of Mzilikazi is also there – so the natives allege, some way beyond the Shangani Monument, in a cave which is closed with stones and hidden by dense bushes; for no one goes there, of course, because it is haunted, or bewitched – as they say. But the most curious thing of all is that the native name for that now famous hill is, and has been since the day of Mzi
likazi’s death, the ‘Home of the Great Spirit’. And nobody knew it until long after the other great spirit had passed and marked it as his own.

  There is something imperial about those savage chiefs that recalls the old Romans. Mzilikazi knew nothing of the Sabine raid, but with his army he cleared a land and he founded a nation, as Romulus had done 2 000 years before. And they had their sports under the same imperial scale. Their coliseums too; but not in marble nor wrought by the hand of man! As Lobengula did, so did the others, and no doubt Mzilikazi hunted in regal style where Pretoria stands today. And the king’s hunting was something to be remembered. The impis would go out to form a gigantic circle, perhaps twenty miles in diameter, round the appointed place, and for two or three days they would gradually close in until, on the king’s day, there would be within the compass of half a mile thousands of wild animals of every kind, blind and mad with terror, racing all ways, crashing into each other and charging over the encircling men. Then into them would dash the fighting men, savages mad with excitement and lust of blood – animals as wildly mad as the beasts themselves. Such a scene was witnessed by one of the great hunters – I think it was Selous – in Lobengula’s time: he had been bidden to be there and to shoot to his heart’s content. As the circle narrowed he stopped, and when asked by the induna whom Lobengula had sent to escort him why he did not shoot, he explained that at that distance there was great risk of killing the men who were closing in. ‘Shoot!’ was the reply, given with a look of offended dignity, ‘the king has plenty of men!’