Jock of the Bushveld

by Percy Fitzpatrick

  They had no maps, for none existed! They had no science and no instruments for observation – nor could they have used them. But they sallied out across an unknown continent with their families and their flocks to make a home and find the ‘port’ that would be their own. Would you measure the extent of their ignorance? Well then look at Nylstroom on the map – north of Pretoria! The Bible was their guide, and when they came to a river running northwards they thought it must be the Nile; and Nylstroom it is to this day! It is not laughable, but pathetic! Do you wish to know what they suffered? Then take the record of the foremost Voortrekkers of all – Trichardt, whose party consisted of eight men, seven women and thirty-four children; and Van Rensburg’s party of ten men, nine women and thirty children. Earlier in the same year, 1836, in which Potgieter made his journey, they too reached Zoutpansberg and there separated. They, too, had found a country uninhabited, and knew nothing of Mzilikazi and his Matabele to the south-west; nor had they heard of Soshangane on the east – also a refugee from Shaka – who had devastated the Bushveld where Jock spent his life, and had even driven the Portuguese completely out of Africa south of the Zambesi. His Zulu people took his name, but have degenerated by mixture with inferior races into the Shangaans, for whom Jim Makokela – pure as Shaka’s self – had such profound contempt. Trichardt went east, and two years later four men, three women and nineteen children only of the forty-nine composing Trichardt’s party reached Delagoa in a state of utter destitution, after incredible hardships and sufferings.

  But of Jan van Rensburg and his party no trace was found, no word even of a single soul for over thirty years. Then one day in 1867 a Swazi chief sent in four white people – a man, a woman and two children, whom he had obtained from another chief further north. General De la Rey has told me, just as he heard it from those who saw them – and you will read it in history – that they were of pure white blood. But that was all: they knew nothing of their origin; they had no names but their native ones; they knew no customs but those of ‘their people’; in life and habit and dress and thought – in all but colour – they were Kaffirs! Their hands were soft and delicate as those of leisured people; for they had never been allowed to work, but had been treated as superior beings, mated together and kept as the pride and it may be as the mascots of the tribe. That is all that can be guessed of Jan van Rensburg and his brave pioneers.

  So! We have travelled far from Vechtkop over there. Turn now eastwards, towards the sea. That dark, flat-topped hill, slightly peaked at each end, north-east of where we stand and less than fifty miles away! That is Majuba – Amajuba, the Home of the Doves.

  In 1884, the year before Jock was born, we trekked with waggons from Maritzburg to Lydenburg. It took seven weeks, half in winter dryness, half in the cold spring rains; and one night we outspanned at the foot of Laing’s Nek, with the heavy, slippery climb before us for the morning trek. Long before dawn I left them and, striking off to the left, climbed Majuba. From its lead-spattered rocks I watched the sun rise, and then for hours sat and looked the whole land over, with only one thought. That was the first time. The second time was in 1899; and as we stood on the western edge and overlooked the ‘great spaces washed in sun’, the heart-wrung prayer of old Gert de Jager came, silent but insistent, to haunt a troubled mind: ‘Oh, God! Is there not room in this great land for both of us?’

  Today from Verkykers Kop you can look past Majuba, and there, in a country as beautiful as bloodstained – small wonder the Natalians love it so – you will find the answer spelled out in history.

  Here it is!

  Eastwards, further than the eye can reach, is the Bluff, where Dick King swam his two horses across Durban Bay ‘to ride five hundred miles and swim a hundred rivers’, alone in unknown country, where hostile savages and wild beasts held divided sway, to find King William’s Town and get assistance for the British against the besieging Boers. White against White, and the struggle was an old one, even then! Dick King did his work without help or rest, or guide or road – in ten days. His widow died last year!

  A little northwards up the coast, at Dukuza, is Shaka’s grave, which the Zulus honour still! That is where his great kraal stood, with the ‘killing place’ nearby, where on the big rock that overhangs the long black pool the King had his victims bound and tossed to the expectant crocodiles. Shaka, Lord of the Millions Dead!

  But Dukuza lives only in fact and in the mouths and memories of the people. It is not ‘officially’ recognised, because an unseeing somebody ran his pen through the historic native name, and wrote in its place – the name of one who had surveyed it! Just as they stripped old Van der Stel’s country home of its handworked teak to make way for something nice and modern in the way of machine-made windows and japanned furniture. Vergelegen a suburban villa! We are progressing in our utilitarian way; but we are not pioneers: the fellaheen found that the four thousand year old papyri from the Pharaohs’ tombs made passable fuel for their sugar mills; the Turks took the Greek masterpieces from the Acropolis to make lime!

  It was at Dukuza that Shaka fell, stabbed in the back by his brother Dingane and two others, and a wonderful career was ended when Shaka the Terrible was at the height of his power and in the very prime of life. There is one account of that scene which fits in better than others with what we know of him. It tells of how he fell and, dying, turning on his side to glare at the assassins, gasped out the words: ‘Dogs, whom I fed at my kraal!’ It was there, they say, that he was then planning the still greater kraal which was to be called Gungunhlovo – the Circle of the Elephant. One of his names among his people was Nhlovo, the Elephant, but Dingane, who seized his throne, took his name as well, and Gungunhlovo is now marked elsewhere on the map as Dingane’s Great Kraal.

  Westward of Dukuza, coming inland, is that Hill of Execution, Kuluma Mabuta, overlooking Gungunhlovo, where Dingane, vilely treacherous, less wise and even more cruel than the great founder of the Zulu nation, murdered the brave Piet Retief and his comrades as they sat unarmed in his inner kraal to drink beer with him as evidence of friendship and in public celebration, according to native custom, of the treaty of peace which had been signed the day before. Of the sixty-six, not one escaped. Ten months later the avengers found the bodies impaled at the Killing Place, and in the pouch of the intrepid leader – the Treaty of Peace!

  Nearer still – and on a clear day, you may see the rest quite plainly from the turrets of the Berg – is Weenen, the Land of Weeping, where one hundred and twenty men, fifty-six women and one hundred and seventy-six children were massacred on the days following the murder of Piet Retief, when Dingane sent his impis out, just as Mzilikazi had done at Vechtkop, to kill all they could find and, once and for all, to clear the whites off the face of the land. It was there that the Two Survivors – the little girls with their two score assegai wounds – were found among a pile of dead. Who can speak of the terror of those days when, having already received assurances from Dingane, most of the men were away with Piet Retief to ratify the Treaty of Peace; when others were out hunting to provide food; when not a whisper or a sign reached any to tell them of the appalling treachery and disaster already accomplished and the more terrible butchery still to come? In that Land of Weeping there stood some small camps which escaped untouched, overlooked among the hills and thorns; and in one of them there were two children – the father and mother of General Botha! So close is it all to us.

  It was to avenge these massacres that some months later the white people of Natal, British and Dutch, united against the common enemy. (It was Piet Retief’s work to bring them together, backed by the word and example of that brave old Englishman, Alexander Biggar. See how the pact was kept! Retief was murdered on the joint mission of peace; Biggar’s two sons fell in the long, desperate struggle that followed; but the old man himself held on bravely to the end. He fought through Blood River, on Dingane’s Day, through all the following rout, and on to that day of disaster just escaped, on the Umfolozi River, to be caught i
n the quicksands and stabbed to death within sight of the hill where lay the body of that murdered comrade, Piet Retief, to whom he had passed his word.)

  The little band of Dutch from the camps of the Voortrekkers, as far up as Harrismith, and the smaller band of English from Durban, set out by different routes. Both were ambushed by Dingane’s men. Of the seventeen Englishmen who were leading a thousand or so ‘bastard’ and native allies, thirteen fell in the fight. And in the Boer camp occurred the first of the tragedies associated with the name Piet Uys, bringing grief to a whole community but lasting honour to an already honoured name. Leader of one large section which was not in harmony with Retief and escaped the massacres, Piet Uys, already famed for his part in the Mzilikazi fights, joined Potgieter, taking with him every available man, including his fourteen-year-old son. It was in the effort to extricate his men from the ambush that Piet Uys fell, and the brave lad turned back to help his father, and died with him.

  To the left of Weenen is Blood River.

  There, on the 16th December, 1838, the Voortrekkers met Dingane’s impis, mad drunk with blood lust and victory; and the little river earned its name! A handful of men – four hundred and seven in all – armed with old muzzle-loaders and flintlocks (with a range of about two hundred yards), and three small cannon, against thousands of the finest savages in the world. None can say how many Dingane sent to do his work: it is estimated that there were ten or twelve thousand, and that about three thousand were killed. That was the day of days; but the taking of Gungunhlovo and the battle of the White Umfolozi – the ambush and eight hours’ running fight, so nearly a complete annihilation – and even another campaign were yet to be gone through before the power of Dingane was finally crushed and the traitor met his most deserved fate. Do you wonder that they remember ‘Dingane’s Day’? Do you wonder that they love a country so won?

  Some day it will come – the real life story of the Voortrekkers who set their faces to the unknown world and entered on the Great Trek! Some day the dry bones of history which have been preserved to us will be clothed in living flesh, and we shall know then all for what they were: the men who had the courage and faith to face it, the leaders who conceived the project and inspired such trust, and the women – the web and the woof of it all!

  Blood River feeds the Buffalo, and the Buffalo the Tugela; and the marks of history lie thick hereabout. Forty years after the Boers crushed Dingane, the British crushed Cetshwayo and finally broke the Zulu power; and all within a radius of a few miles. Isandhlwana, where the 24th Regiment was annihilated, lies only a little way to the left, as we look from Verkykers Kop. Rorke’s Drift, where Chard and Bromhead with some seventy men in a laager of biscuit tins and flour bags beat off five thousand of Cetshwayo’s best men fresh from the Isandhlwana victory, is not more than five miles from the spot where the Boer laager stood on Dingane’s Day. Kambula and Hlobane Mountain – so nearly another disaster – are close by; and further back to the left is Ulundi, where Cetshwayo learned from the British what Dingane had learned from the Boers. Jim Makokela played his savage part in most of these fights, before he came as a waggon driver to me.

  It was at Hlobane that the second of the Piet Uys tragedies occurred. He with his five sons joined Sir Evelyn Wood, as is recorded, ‘to take vengeance on the Zulus for the death of my father and brother’. Once more it was an ambush and a retreat, and once more it was a Piet Uys doing all that bravery could do to avert disaster; but this time it was the father who went back, hearing of the son’s distress – and gave his life for the son. It was that same day that Colonel Weatherley, fighting off the foremost Zulus to give his thirteen-year-old boy a chance to escape, fell wounded and, as in the case of the first Piet Uys, the gallant youngster went back and stood over his father until he too fell. They found the boy’s body lying across his father’s.

  Little People! Look back for a moment on what you have seen. In the siege of Durban it was British against Boer – White against White. In Dingane’s day it was Boer against Black; and once, under the influence of Retief, and later to avenge his murder, Boer and British united against barbarism. In Cetshwayo’s time it was British against the common enemy – barbarism; and once again, in the work of Piet Uys and his people, there was one brave effort to make common cause.

  But only one year later it was White against White in a struggle obstinate and inevitable, because of qualities splendid and invincible in union but terrible in conflict – a struggle that lasted twenty years: history so new that it needs no recalling; but – did you know that you could read it all from the pinnacle of a single hill?

  There, only a few miles from Isandhlwana, are the battlefields of the first Boer War, Ingogo, Laing’s Nek and Majuba – the black sentinel of the border; and, like milestones on the road, stand the monuments of twenty years after: Talana, Dundee, Elandslaagte, Nicholson’s Nek, Ladysmith, Waggon Hill, Long Valley, Spion Kop, Colenso, Pieters Hill, Willow Grange!

  There they stand! The records of over sixty years of cutthroat struggle – Boer and British and Zulu: beacons in one great bloodstained panorama from the Berg to the Sea!

  On Verkykers Kop, looking eastward to the sea, there comes back to you old Gert de Jager’s question-prayer: ‘Oh, God! Is there not room in this great land for both of us?’

  And it from Durban by the sea that the answer comes: ‘Equal and Together!’

  For there, in Natal, the lasting peace was made, where men of both races died for the faith that was in them.

  ‘Yea! and made their burial place.

  Altar of a Nation!’

  Good night, Little People! The smiling editors have had their way and we have strayed at times far from Jock and Those Who Knew Him. It is two in the morning now and the moon is shining so brightly that one can see the Block House on the shoulder of the Devil’s Peak. An old familiar sound – the groaning, grunting sound that reaches one through all others – comes down the mountain from the lions’ den; and with it, Jock’s face and figure, alert and watchful, come back as readily as if there were no years between.

  But it is time to go to bed, or the procession which started from the old Block House will move on through the night: Van Riebeeck, Rhodes, Alan Wilson, Piet Retief, the Piet Uyses – father and sons – the Two Survivors, Alexander Biggar and his sons, the Trichardts, Van Rensburg and the White Kaffirs, Richard King, Weatherley and his boy, Francis and the Camp of Three, Rocky, the Old Settler and the men of the Last Long Struggle!

  And jogging along behind them a little red dog with one cocked ear, knowing nothing about heroes, unconscious of admirers, content to look into his master’s eyes and know that he, too, has done his best.

  (First serialised as ‘Jock of the Bushveld, and Those Who Knew Him’ in The State, Cape Town, in the first three numbers of the first volume, January-March, 1909; collected as ‘Postscript to Jock’ in The Saturday Book, edited by Eric Rosenthal in 1948 and included by Cecily Niven on the sixtieth anniversary of the first publication of Jock in her Jock and Fitz, 1968.)

  The Creed of Jock

  To Mrs Warriner and to Certain Little People in America who are friends of Jock and who sent to Jock’s Master and Companion a writing pad with the request ‘We want some more Jock!’, which writing pad is now returned by Jock’s own people – Little and Big – with gratitude for the compliment and sincere hopes that the Little People in America will remember South Africa as their earliest and their Happy Home.

  J Percy FitzPatrick

  On Board RMS Adriatic

  8 January, 1920

  Jock, you will remember, dies doing his duty. So did many of his friends. The little group of us who knew Jock well, his intimate circle, did not include from first to last more than about a score of men and in the early stages there were only half a dozen: for, although he was well known by sight and by reputation to most people in those parts, his intimates were not numerous. He did not hold friendship cheap or make intimacy easy. But although the circle was not large, one ca
n look on the roll of the comrades of thirty-five years ago – and their sons – with pride and satisfaction, knowing that there is not one who failed to ‘Play the Game’. They were prospectors, traders, transport-riders, hunters; they came from places half a world apart; they foregathered and made friends because of what they held in common as a creed – that a man must play the game! They were just pioneers of the race.

  As I look back I see that three of them now bear titles bestowed on them for services to their country in time of trial. One stands high in the list of the world’s heroes. Three became soldiers of rank and gained distinction in the field and decorations for bravery.

  Six of them fell while fighting in the wars and others served, unchecked by age limit or anything else. The sons of all the old group volunteered to a man and three of them gave their lives as Jock had done – doing their duty – faithful to their trust. You will understand then why we hold that Jock, in his life and in his death, expressed the creed of his friends.

  It was near the place where we saw ‘the eyes in the Bush’ and we were looking for a prospector’s camp on a newly discovered reef called The Malalene (pronounced Maa-laa-lain by the English). My companion was Bill Maby – a little man with a very long stride and a smile that would not come off. He was a prospector and lived in the Bush but, unlike most others, he was always losing his way. He undertook to guide me as I had never been to the place. I was wearing riding breeches and heavy riding boots that day as we were away from the waggons. I left my horse – old Snowball – at a friend’s camp because Maby said we had no distance to walk. Jock was with me but evidently he knew from my get-up that we were not out on real business, but only on one of my stupid excursions in which he had no interest except the duty of looking after us. He came along cheerfully as always – he wouldn’t have stayed behind – but he didn’t throw a half somersault and give a gentle wowwow below his breath, as he often did when he knew we were out for the real thing.