Jock of the Bushveld

by Percy Fitzpatrick

  There are many still living among us who remember the Rand when the big game were a hundred times more plentiful than anything described in Jock; when rhinoceros, eland, ostrich, giraffe, roan, sable, gemsbok, quagga, bontebok, hartebeest and wildebeest roamed in their hundreds and thousands; and when springbok and blesbok were in millions in the open uplands of the Transvaal and Free State. We have paid for civilisation – in various ways – in the work and the lives of our Pioneers; in the native wars; in the disappearance of the game; in the changed conditions – but we cannot eat our cake and have it; else it would not be strange that our people live and work in peace and unguarded where Mzilikazi and Lobengula reigned in terror; or that the farm on which Langlaagte and Crown Mines are now being worked was once exchanged for an old waggon, and could not be bought today for ten millions sterling; or that old Bezuidenhout shot a lion where the Observatory now stands (he showed me the spot!) and lived to see Johannesburg built on it and mines of fabulous wealth developed there.

  But what has become of the game? Was it possible to destroy such vast quantities? Well, the destruction is terrible even now when most Governments are trying to preserve the paltry remains of the greatest, most wonderful, most varied and most beautiful assortment of wild animals the world has ever known; even now wicked, wanton, wasteful slaughter goes on – a slower but no less sure extermination. The natives are as merciless as wolves; the trekking, poaching Boers spare nothing that will yield hide or biltong; the traders and butchers in Rhodesia kill ruthlessly to trade meat for mealies or to undersell cold storage mutton, and they keep gangs of native hunters to do their work. Last year I saw lying at one railway siding the hindquarters and heads of five eland – two bulls and three cows – and of several roan, sable and kudu, being sent in to Salisbury: it did not pay to take any but the best parts – not one fifth of the noble animals; the rest was left to the natives. But what need you expect from such as these when hunting parties of ‘sportsmen’ set out to make record bags and bring back whole truckloads of trophies? They cannot plead ignorance, hunger, poverty or even business! Only vanity and the lust for blood move them to their wicked butcheries. And their piles of trophies tell nothing of females killed for meat, of the ‘poor heads’ thrown away, or of the wounded – by far the greatest number – that escape only to die.

  But what became of the millions before white men came in numbers, when breech-loaders and small-bore rifles were unknown?

  The late Mr Barrett, who was a well-known trader in Harrismith, told me that during the years 73, 74 and 75 there were exported from Harrismith district alone over one million hides per annum, and that Vrede district produced as many, but Kroonstad always beat them. These were springbok, blesbok and black wildebeest in the main. He added that on one occasion he saw herds of them driven into the vlei below the village and killed with stones and iron bars to save ammunition; for of course the cost of a shot was to be considered when the value of the whole animal – its hide – was only a shilling. The vlei, which was an impassable swamp then, has, like many others, disappeared and the spot is marked by a dusty donga which is scoured by floods of an hour or two’s duration when the summer thunderstorms sweep the Platberg. Even the country has changed – but that is another story!

  The old farmers in these districts will tell you that everything they bought from the traders in those days was paid for in hides, and boys grew up with the idea that they must pay with the gun for what they wanted to buy. Besides this there still survives the significant saying, ‘You cannot farm stock and springbok’. But there was yet another terrible engine of destruction at work. General Botha, who grew up in the adjoining district, tells me that he remembers, once when there was a drought in the West, seeing a migration of black wildebeest. They moved slowly across the farm in a steady stream for two and a half days; and bodies of mounted Basutos hung on their flanks and followed them up, driving thousands of them into swamps and pools where they were drowned and trampled to death, for the sake of hides worth a shilling a piece! Who can name the sum of such a slaughter? Five years ago I bought six black wildebeest calves at £20 a piece for my farm in Harrismith district – only a few miles off – and they have increased to fifteen now; but in the four adjacent districts there are no others! Elsewhere in the ORC there are about a couple of thousand – probably as many as the Basutos killed in one day in the migration of which General Botha tells.

  But enough about the game! Turn now another way, or it may appear that there are not other things better worth remembering than the record of destruction.

  Within a few miles of me in Harrismith district there lives a man named Palmer, who is now in his hundred and fourth year: he came out as a boy of fifteen with the 1820 settlers. And on the next farm there lived until recently an old lady, Mrs Truter, who was one of the two girl survivors of Dingane’s terrible massacre at Weenen in 1838. Just think how much of the history of our country is covered by the lives of these two old neighbours! Think what they represent and what it all means to us, to whom they and their life stories both belong. Will no one give us the human story of those days? Not the cold hard thing of facts and dates, of ink and parchment, but the life as they lived it; with its joys and sorrows; its trials, triumphs and tragedies; warm with the life blood of those who lived and died for us to make Our Country, and – though they know it not – to make it one! The history that gives life and inspiration to a people is not learned in the works of the historian, but told in stories and heard in the nursery; and here in South Africa we have hidden treasure ‘beyond the dreams of avarice’ in the old archives, in the letters and diaries of those now dead, and in the memories of many who are with us still and can speak with knowledge.

  A month or so ago I read a notice of the death of Captain Godfrey Armitage at the age of eighty-four. He was commandant in Alice district when the villages of Auckland and Woburn were destroyed and our people massacred by the Kaffirs on Christmas Day, 1850. They spoke of him as ‘the last of the old settlers’, yet here is old Palmer – twenty years his senior and still alive. Surely there are scores of the second generation, who have the tales of those days at first hand, able and willing to pass them on to us whose right is to know them! But it would be travelling too far afield to wander off into the Old Colony. There is enough in this little corner of Shaka’s country to fill more space than the smiling editor can afford to give in The State!

  Come back to the old lady who lived at Truter’s Rest – one of the two survivors at Weenen, the Place of Weeping! Little People, if you do not know the story, read it now that you may for ever remember what those pioneers of ours, the old Voortrekkers, went through, and that you may understand why we should all keep the 16th of December – Dingane’s Day – green in our memories. When Piet Retief and his little band had been treacherously murdered at the Peace Conference, after the treaty had been signed, Dingane sent out his impis to wipe the white people off the face of the country. Men, women and children were surprised in little camps or groups, in families trekking or on their farms, and were massacred without one hint or sign to warn them. Then on the following days, when small parties of two or three or a dozen men got round to give warning or succour, they found nothing but butchery and desolation. In one camp only were there any left alive! In a heap of stripped and mutilated corpses they came upon the bodies of two young girls ‘eleven and thirteen years of age’, riddled with nineteen and twenty-one assegai wounds respectively; but they still showed signs of life. The Two Survivors! One of those girls lived to be the mother of Commandant Henning Pretorius in the Transvaal and the other – my neighbour – was the mother of Commandant Truter, a man of six foot three who weighed 320 lb. and fought through the late war. I believe both survivors lived to see their great-grandchildren!

  The farms on which my two old neighbours – the 1820 Settler and the Survivor – lived have one beacon in common; it is the peak of a hill called Verkykers Kop. It is one of the places where it is good to go up alone and think; f
or the same reason that ‘He went up on to a high mountain to pray’ – which really means the same thing! There are other such places, if you know a little of what they can tell; and Table Mountain, the World’s View and Majuba are among them.

  A few weeks ago the Little People climbed Verkykerskop with us to look at history where it was made, and to understand what is meant by the Union of our country and how it came about.

  Come you, too!

  From that point eastwards, you overlook the Drakensberg, those rugged buttresses of the uplands of South Africa facing the sea from the Cape to Kilimanjaro; on the south are the mountains of Basutoland – the Switzerland of South Africa; westwards, merging, through a bluish haze, in a bluer sky are the plains of the old Free State; and north lies the Transvaal. Turn first to the south! There is a hill capped by a huge block

  of solid sandstone, in shape somewhat resembling a baker’s paper cap – Rensburg’s Kop: it lies between Van Reenen’s and Olivier’s Hoek passes; and that is where Mzilikazi and his impis came up from Zululand and Natal to escape Shaka’s rule. It is also where the Voortrekkers got their first view of the land of promise. You may see now from the windows of the railway carriages what they saw seventy years ago when the first waggons outspanned on the Berg, and you can realise – perhaps – what that panorama of surpassing beauty meant to them, who had trekked so far and endured so much to find a home. A little to the right, and only half as far away, is the Platberg – with Harrismith at its feet – Sir Harry Smith, who fought under Wellington and rescued from the drunken mob of looters the beautiful Spanish girl after whom Ladysmith is named. That gap – you cannot call it a valley – through which the Wilge River flows is one of the great passes in South African history, for through it also flowed opposite ways two streams of people, Black and White. Below the Berg – away in Zululand, and before the first Voortrekkers appeared – was Shaka the source of all unrest, like some great volcanic force whose mere existence kept all awake and whose every movement sent tidal waves of savage humanity fleeing or pursuing, each as destructive as the other, rolling across Africa, unspent until they reached the deserts a thousand miles away. One such wave was Mosilikatse – properly Mzilikazi – and his army. It struck against the blue mountains of Basutoland and swept off west and north along the course already shown over the Rand and Pretoria, to Bulawayo and even beyond the Zambesi.

  From your perch on the rocky pinnacle of Verkykers Kop – looking south a little to the right of Harrismith, where Mzilikazi turned aside – you will see Mont-aux-Sources, the highest mountain in South Africa. It was well named by the old French missionaries, for there, within the compass of a mile, rise four rivers, spurting out north, south, east and west – the Elands, Orange, Tugela and Caledon. Twelve thousand feet high, it towers above all others; and it is the corner beacon of Basutoland, Natal and the Orange River Colony. Did you know that there was a mountain in South Africa where you could do ‘glacier’ climbing on the frozen crest and slopes in winter, and be snowed up occasionally on Christmas Day? There you may still see eland in their native state and haunts; for the Natal Government, in their reserve on the eastern slopes, have managed to save – and all thanks to them! – a herd of over six hundred.

  Behind Mont-aux-Sources is Ntaba Bosigo, the impregnable stronghold of the Basuto chiefs. There is only one way up – a steep narrow path that ends in a deep slit in the perpendicular krantz through which ordinary men can climb with difficulty, and only one at a time. It is the scene of an act of bravery which ought to be remembered. When the Free Staters stormed the mountain in the Basuto War three men – Wepener, Webster and Holwell – found their way up here, but no others could follow. It was on the top that Wepener fell; the other two fought their way back again. That is where the great Moshesh held his own – against White and Black, even against Shaka himself, to whom, however, with unfailing diplomacy he always sent valuable presents; and from there that wisest of all native chiefs gathered together tribes and fragments of tribes and fugitives from others’ rule and moulded them into the Basuto people. A ruler in the civilised world, with all the world’s experience, who combined courage with caution, resolution with foresight, power with restraint, and a clear purpose with wonderful patience, would be called remarkable if not ‘great’; and here was a savage who showed these qualities, and must have developed his policy from his own character and individual wisdom: example and precedent, as known to him, were all the other way.

  When Mzilikazi came to conquer Basutoland, the wise one showed the strength of his fastnesses – and sent a present of several days’ food for the invading army. They moved on! He gave refuge and protection to those whom others had, through fear or jealousy, expelled, and they proved the best of allies, having no one else to look to, and their people and others followed after to add to Moshesh’s strength. It is said that he refused shelter to no one, and that once when it was discovered that among a party who had fled to him for protection were some of the wretched cannibals who had killed and eaten his own grandfather, he still refused to break his rule of sanctuary, but gave them food and home, saying to his protesting people: ‘Let them be and respect them! They are the graves of men!’ One longs to have looked into the eyes of the Old Inscrutable for the glint of humour that must have lurked there. They called him the Lord of the Mountains!

  When Mzilikazi moved on, it was with the purpose of leaving between him and Shaka the Terrible hundreds of miles of utter devastation so that pursuit should be impossible; and those whom he drove out behaved in like manner. Thus did the waves of devastation push each other on. It is on record that one great tribe, led by a woman, moved on north-west across the Vaal from this very spot, fleeing from the Amagwane who were themselves fleeing from Shaka, and left in their trail – nothing! Some refugees who reached Basutoland gave the names of twenty-eight well-known tribes wiped off the face of the earth in that one retreat.

  It was in 1828, the year of Shaka’s assassination, that Mzilikazi swept through that gap from east to west, and it was eight years later that the Voortrekkers appeared and the white stream began to pour through it the opposite way.

  Turn now to the west, for we are still on Verkykers Kop! Somewhat to the right and about forty miles away you can see Vechtkop. That is where Mzilikazi made his attempt to exterminate the whites, and sent an impi, 5000 of his best under his fighting general Kalipi, to do the work. Some small parties were caught unprepared and murdered; one laager of thirty-five was attacked without success; and then under Sarel Celliers the others gathered hurriedly together under this hill in a laager of fifty waggons, locked and laced with brushwood. There were forty men and boys who could use arms. All that day the women were moulding bullets and slugs and, when the actual storming of the laager began, they cleaned and loaded the spare rifles and handed them up to the men, so as to ensure continuous firing; and the children in the inner laager were told not to cry, but to lie still in their places to avoid the whizzing assegais, of which it is said eleven hundred were afterwards picked up. A gun against an assegai makes heavy odds! True! But so are five thousand against forty. It is also true, as the old Boers themselves say, that the Matabele packed so densely in their rush that they had not room to throw freely and that the laager was so small that they overshot the mark and killed each other. But think what that meant when the defenders’ weapons were muzzle-loaders! Powder poured from a horn or scooped by hand from the pocket; bullets wrapped in greased rags, each separately rammed home; flints to be adjusted, or caps to be fitted and nipples cleared; and then, the first defender’s shot – Celliers’ signal to begin – fired at thirty yards, with an effective range of two hundred yards at most. If they were good shots in those days it was because of the care and pains prompted by vital necessity, and not because of unlimited practice; for they had to buy, and bring from Cape Colony, all their powder at five shillings a pound and their lead at a shilling a pound; and money was not plentiful then! The old lead bullets went four to the pound, but t
hat was so ruinous that they put round stones in the mould and coated them with lead.

  Paul Kruger was a boy of twelve and took his part in the fight when they beat off Mzilikazi’s army; and in one of the laagers further back there was a very little girl – the mother of General De la Rey, happily still with us, a hale and honoured representative of the Voortrekkers. They called it Vechtkop, or Battle Hill, for remembrance; but despite the victory they had lost all their stock, and were for a time even without oxen to move their waggons.

  It was in the following January that the Voortrekkers gathered in commando under Potgieter and Uys, one hundred and thirty-five strong, and rode from Vechtkop here, across the Vaal, over the Rand, into Magaliesberg, to Mzilikazi’s Nek near Pretoria and in the nine days’ fight finally broke Mzilikazi’s power at Marico.

  So great was the desolation wrought by the Matabele that a few months previously Potgieter and a party of eleven had journeyed for eighteen days beyond the Vaal River, as far as Piet Potgieter’s Rust, without encountering a single human being, and in many days more they met only a few wild hunted creatures – the survivors of hundreds of thousands. Is it any wonder that they had thought the land empty and free of danger? The Promised Land awaiting them!

  For three and a half months the party of eleven were away seeking the port on the east coast of which they had heard. At Zoutpansberg they turned back, having learned enough for their purpose. But in all that time and in all that way they had seen nothing of the ‘terrible Matabele’ of whom they had heard – the fabled Matabele, as they thought. They had, in fact, passed along the huge strip of desolation that Mzilikazi had put between himself and Shaka. Is it any wonder they were startled on their return to find that the fabled monster was a reality, and had swooped down behind them and begun the massacre of their people?

  Vechtkop was a victory indeed; but one that cost them all they had, and one that revealed undreamed of tasks and dangers yet to be faced. Yet there was no turning back. What was it that led them on? Not the call of a religious leader, so powerful in other great migrations, for it is recorded that not a single clergyman joined in the Great Trek; and it would almost seem that their influence was against it. What was it then? Courage, Faith, Ignorance? Call it what you will! Ignorance there was, of course; but that makes their Faith and Courage the more remarkable. What could these people have known in those days? Their education was surely less than now, and the whole world’s knowledge of South Africa was worth but little.