At the Fireside--Volume 1 (13 page)

The ‘towenaar' of Humansdorp

The ‘towenaar' of Humansdorp

Hendrik Spoorbek, born at Dortmund in Germany, arrived at the Cape in 1811 as a sailor and promptly ‘jumped ship'. Four years later, in 1815, we find him in Humans dorp. We know this because ‘ Spoorbek se Erf' was registered as a quitrent farm and cost five rixdollars per annum. Unfortunately, the farm is no longer visible as it forms part of the dam on the Krom River.

Ou Spoorbek was a ‘Towenaar', or magician, in the folklore of the Afrikaners of the Eastern Cape. In 1901, a schoolteacher by the name of J R van der Merwe, recorded many of the tales told about Spoorbek, and fortunately these have been preserved.

Spoorbek was an untidy, woolly-haired, bearded, eccentric hermit who rode a white horse and loved to teach people manners. In one story he had stayed overnight at a farmhouse. As he left the following morning, he heard the farmer's wife say to her husband, ‘Look, the old pig has forgotten his tobacco pouch.' Spoorbek returned later that day and said to her, ‘Look, the old pig has forgotten his tobacco pouch!' The couple were deeply embarrassed.

On another occasion, as he was walking down one of Humansdorp's dusty streets, a young couple passing by, said, ‘Look, there goes the old Towenaar.' Spoorbek froze, then turned and said, ‘You two think that you will marry – you never will.' It is not surprising therefore to learn that, as the priest was reading the wedding service, the bride left the church by one door and the groom by another. The service was never completed.

Spoorbek made a measly income by casting spells on the thatched roofs of homesteads. Many a tale is told of how the contents of the house would burn, but never the thatch, and his fame spread throughout the district.

One such recorded incident took place in the little hamlet of Alexandria, then called Kerkplaats, east of Port Elizabeth, during the Sixth Frontier War of 1834-35. The Xhosa attacked the settlement when Spoorbek happened to be there. Homesteads were plundered and burnt. Three hundred head of cattle and sheep were taken and the settlers retreated into the local schoolhouse for a last defensive stand. Across the road was the church and everywhere Xhosa warriors were running, shooting, shouting, looting and burning the town. The people in the schoolhouse fired and reloaded and fired again. The Xhosa set fire to the church's thatch roof and Spoorbek said, ‘Be calm – the schoolhouse roof will not burn.' The Xhosa came with burning branches an& flung them onto the roof. The settlers kept firing, the Xhosa were driven back and, miracle of miracles, the roof did not burn.

The church, which was built in 1830 by that well-known Voortrekker, Karel Landman, was razed to the ground and had to be rebuilt, but the schoolhouse remained standing.

Years later, in 1873, the schoolhouse roof was replaced with corrugated iron by Martinus Scheepers, an elder of the Church, and the townsfolk all gathered around for the now familiar test, but the thatch would not take the flame. The townspeople gathered the thatching and carried it away to their homes.

Such was the folkloric fame of this strange man. He was buried on his farm on 13 June 1845 and, although the farm was flooded, his grave stays above the water-level. I trust that the old schoolhouse and church are now monuments to his memory.

The strange Ohrigstad phenomena

The strange Ohrigstad phenomena

It is not very often that I record non-human stories, but the one I am going to describe is, I feel, well worth a mention. Quite some time ago, whilst visiting the Lydenburg district of Mpumalanga, ferreting out aspects of our country's magnificent peoples and their histories, I came upon the story of the strange phenomena.

My friends, Alistair and Marion Moirs, and I were travelling from Burgersfort towards Ohrigstad when suddenly Alistair pointed to a mountain range up ahead. It was a short range, but quite high. ‘Have I ever told you the story of the farm up there?' he asked. When I said no, he stopped the car and proceeded to tell the most incredible story.

This saga started about thirty-five years ago when a local farmer in the area, Duppie Papenfus, bought the farm Nooitgedacht 487 KT. Straddling the top of the highest part of the mountain, it had never been farmed before. It was virgin bush. Duppie acquired a bulldozer at a local auction and proceeded to carve a road up the side of the mountain. At night he used to camp out in a small tent next to the Vyfenhoekspruit, originally called the Mamatali, which has its source at the top of the range. Some years later, when the farm was running and the homestead completed, the Moirs often were invited over for a Sunday braai. The scene was a very familiar one in our country, with the children playing and the adults chatting over a few cold beers. The children would always come to Duppie and ask for some bread. ‘What for?' he asked one day. ‘To feed the hungry snake in the river', was the reply. The adults just laughed and carried on their conversations and off the children would go, to return some time later.

One day Duppie's curiosity got the better of him and, after giving them the requested bread, he followed them at a distance. Down to the stream they went and then, keeping dead quiet, the eldest of the children put her index finger into the water and moved it up and down and side to side. Suddenly a head appeared out of the water, and Duppie stood dumbfounded as the children proceeded to feed an extremely large freshwater eel!

The Papenfus family was so amazed that they called in freshwater zoologists from a university and the following amazing facts emerged. These freshwater eels, upon reaching maturity, leave the peaceful ponds of that far-away mountain and travel down the Vyfenhoekspruit. They journey with the stream that flows down through Casper's Nek (named after Paul Kruger's father) into the Blyde River, and then into the Olifants. This eventually links up with the Limpopo and goes down all the way through Mozambique to reach the sea at Xai Xai! The eels then swim away from the Mozambique coastline, travelling eastwards until they finally reach Morondava Bay on the west coast of Madagascar. Here they mate and spawn. The total distance travelled is 1 870 kilometres.

The second half of the story is even more incredible. The young eels or elvers start the journey back to Mozambique and, by some still unexplained DNA memory bank cell, these elvers reach Xai Xai. Up the Limpopo they go, against the current all the time, up into the Olifants, then left into the Blyde and eventually the Vyfenhoekspruit and up the mountain – back to those self-same ponds from where their parents started the long journey many months before. This means that these eels, in their lifetime, complete a total of over 3 700 km, travelling half of that entire distance against the current.

I was ignorant enough to doubt the story until, some months later, I watched a BBC TV programme on the Scottish freshwater eels. These eels come down the Firth of Forth, go south around Britain and then head westwards – to spawn in Massachusetts Bay, off the east coast of the United States, over 6 000 km away! And then the young start on the return journey.

That excellent reference book
Smith's Sea Fishes of Southern Africa
tells us that these eels in the Ohrigstad mountains could be any one of four varieties of South African freshwater eels and can attain 1,5 m in length and weigh up to 20 kg. They have been observed wriggling up wet vertical cliffs and scaling dam walls. On the Vyfenhoekspruit there is a 10 m waterfall. No wonder they make the uphill journey and climb whilst still young and very small.

What an astounding country we live in!

Steinacker's Horse

Steinacker's Horse

In the late 1890s, having got into trouble with the South West African Government, Ludwig Steinacker wandered down to Alfred County on the South Coast of Natal. There he managed the faun of Charles Reed, near Ivy Bay. He very soon sickened of the solitude and wandered off again to Marburg, Port Shepstone and became a barman in a local pub. Then the Anglo-Boer War broke out and Steinacker's moment in history had arrived.

Late in May 1900, a notice appeared in the British recruiting office in West Street, Durban:

WANTED

40 men for service in the Low Country.

Must be able to speak Dutch, a black language, and ride a horse.

All the volunteers were sent up to Pietell iaritzburg and after the recruiting officer weeded out the unfit, five men were told to go to the Prince of Wales Hotel. There (surprise, surprise) they met the gamecock Steinacker, a very short, spare, bumptious man, who had convinced the British military authorities that he could raise a corps for a special task. They were treated to dinner and put on the overnight train to Durban, to be kitted out.

Then the adventures started. Without telling his men what their task was, Steinacker rode them up through Zululand, avoiding for security reasons all contact with human settlements. The first village they visited was Ubombo, way up in northern Zululand. All the way, Steinacker was recruiting frontiersmen – the toughest and hardest he could find. Very soon this corps was dubbed ‘The Forty Thieves' and you will soon see why. They rode on up to Lomahasha on the northern border of Swaziland. There he revealed the plan, which was to blow up the bridge at Komatipoort on the Transvaal Republic's railway line to Mozambique. This was to prevent the retreating Boers from taking their big guns, stores and equipment out of the country.

One of the guards along the line was sympathetic to their cause and told Steinacker that he was too late – the Boers were already at Komatipoort. Steinacker and his men thereupon withdrew into the Swaziland bush and concocted an alternate plan to save face. On 17 June 1900 they blew up a culvert bridge near Malelane. When the pursuing British arrived they assumed that the Boers had blown up the culvert.

Steinacker once again retreated into Swaziland. On the strength of his ‘success', he was promoted to the rank of Major and allowed to form a corps of 450 men, to be called Steinacker's Horse. They were given the task of creating as much of a nuisance as possible in Swaziland. They had their headquarters at Lomahasha and built a small fort with a heliograph station on Stegi Hill. In March 1901 they raided Manzini, or Bremersdorp as it was then called. Eight Boers were captured and the village was taken possession of. The whole place was ransacked. Buried under the floor of Gustav Swartz's store they found £600! Roving around Swaziland, they ransacked the store of one Stuart at Oshoek and found £3 500, also buried under the floor. Their actions resulted in notoriety and fame, depending upon which side you were on. Their cattle raiding expeditions into the Transvaal made them many enemies.

Steinacker's Horse consisted of 450 men and was one of the wildest corps ever known. It was, as the Boer General Viljoen said, ‘A Corps foluted of all the desperadoes and vagabonds scraped together in the North, including storekeepers, smugglers, spies and scoundrels of every description.'

There were certainly incredible characters present, including ‘Devils Own' McKenna, the brother of a British cabinet minister and Frank Lindh, who had deserted from both the British Brigade of Guards and the Royal Navy and had spent time in most of the gaols in South America. Others were Neville Edwards, George Bunting, Karshagen the German, Gaza Grey, Harry Wolhuter (later to become the famous game ranger), Little Evan Banger, one-time storekeeper from Merry Pebbles at Ry Koppies, Tommy Rathbone, Dave Buchanan and 400 others, along with a lanky Australian sergeant, with a cadaverous face and a mouth just made for drinking beer, who sported so many feathers in his hat that Steinacker called him ‘a bloody fowl'. The corps was later expanded to 600 men and he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.

Steinacker's Horse was essentially a border guard and had posts at Ingwavuma, Isitigi, Lomahasha and pickets under Sergeant Robinson at Matibiskom and Komatipoort. North of Komatipoort they had outposts at Metsimetsi and Crocodile Bridge, one at Sabie Bridge, another on the Olifants River and one way up north at Shingwedzi, where old Corporal Perry and Sardelli the Greek were stationed. Some of these posts were supplied by the Selati Railway line, which is itself another interesting part of our past. Tom Boyd drove the steam engine, until he drank himself to death and then ‘Clinkers' Churchill took over.

The Boers were now sick and tired of the havoc caused by this motley crew and General Tobias Smuts, with 150 men of the Ermelo Commando, set out on 23 July 1901 from Belskop. They rode throughout the night, encircled Bremersdorp and then, at 3 a.m. attacked from the south. However, during the night some Swazis had warned Steinacker and he had hotfooted it up to Lomahasha, leaving only thirty men in Bremersdorp. After a brief fight in which four of Steinacker's men were killed, they surrendered. The Boers spent the day celebrating, drinking and looting. They set fire to the town and all but the school and the gaol, which were built of stone, were razed to the ground. Then they rode away.

General Tobias Smuts was subsequently court-martialled by General Louis Botha for this incident and, at the end of the war, Bremersdorp was rebuilt and given the name Manzini, which it bears to this day.

Far off to the north, some 15 km north of Bushbuckridge, on the farm Orinoco, Steinacker's men built a fort they called Mpisanas with its garrison commanded by Captain ‘Farmer' Francis. This garrison was particularly active in raiding cattle from the farms along the escarpment and General Ben Viljoen decided to liquidate them. Early on the morning of 6 August 1901 the commando crept towards the fort, jumped the trench and fired over the walls. The fort was taken and Captain Francis was killed. The Boers also captured fifty black cattle-guards and summarily shot them. However, they did not capture the cattle as these had been sent to Komatipoort some days before. This was the last action in which Steinacker's Horse took part. Steinacker received the Distinguished Service Medal and his corps was disbanded, in spite of his efforts to have it made into a permanent border guard.

Sardelli the Greek went off and sold the guns that he had accumulated during his service. Dougal McCorkindale went back to the Lebombo Mountains with many other frontiersmen and Steinacker himself went farming on ‘London', just north of Bushbuckridge, where he tried to grow tobacco and cotton. The venture failed, he became bankrupt and was kicked off the farm. Jack Travers of Champagne Farm took him in as a handyman, where he earned enough for food and pocket money. Travers eventually asked him to leave. The request was ignored and Travers called the Bushbuckridge police, who came to arrest him and remove him to an internment camp. Steinacker told the police to wait whilst he gathered his belongings. After a few moments, he stumbled out of the door foaming at the mouth. In the heat and the dust he fell to the ground, dying, having swallowed strychnine. All he possessed was a revolver, a diary full of abuse and not a penny to his name.

The little gamecock was buried out there in the bush, with only a cairn of stones to mark his grave. Nobody was there to mourn his passing. But, I suppose, that is the way it usually was with frontiersmen. They lived hard and they died hard.