At the Fireside--Volume 1 (3 page)

The SS Mendi

The SS
Mendi

It is my belief that our written history has done a grave injustice to Shaka and the Zulu people. We have received a jingoed and biased version of that particular era, fed to us by the likes of Fynn and Owen, etc. who had agendas of their own. The discipline, the sense of self-worth and courage instilled in that people was still evident nearly a century after the death of their great warrior-king. On the night of 20 February 1917 the commandeered liner SS
Mendi
was carrying hundreds of black South African troops, the majority of them Zulus, across the English Channel, bound for Le Havre and then on to the front line in Flanders. Under wartime regulations, she was ploughing through the Channel with no lights when another darkened vessel crashed into her and she began to sink rapidly. Every man as he came up from below, went straight to his appointed place, stood to attention, and awaited further instructions. The scene that followed was one of the most extraordinary and heroic of that terrible war.

A Zulu clergyman addressed the men: ‘Be quiet and calm my Countrymen, for what is taking place is exactly what you came to do – you are going to die... Brothers, we will drill the Death Drill. I, a Zulu, say that you are my brothers. Swazi, Pondo, Sotho. We die like brothers. Let me hear your war cries!'

On the tilting, darkened deck those black soldiers stripped. Barefoot and naked, the way their ancestors went into battle, against the noise of the wind, crashing seas and creaking plates of the doomed vessel, they began stamping their bare feet in the death drill, celebrating their onrushing death with the war songs that Shaka had taught them. It was a scene, the survivors declared, that would be burnt into their memories forever – those singing men slipping into their cold grave in the English Channel.

Back in South Africa, the Prime Minister, the renowned Boer War General Louis Botha, moved a motion of sympathy for the bereaved families and friends and, spontaneously, the entire white Parliament rose to their feet and bowed their heads in respect for those brave warriors, the only occasion on which such a tribute to black example was ever paid.

I believe the time has come to rewrite our magnificent history. This time much more objectively and to recognise blacks as truly worthy in their own right.

Women's roles in Pilgrim's Rest

Women's roles in Pilgrim's Rest

Fist-fighting and wrestling matches there were in plenty, and a great deal of drunkenness. But no reports of murders or serious assaults. There was none of the brandishing of pistols and exchanges of shots at short range that made the gold diggers in other parts of the world notorious.

The diggers had a sense of comradeship. They were not very free with information when it came to pegging claims, for then it was ‘every man for himself', but they helped one another and were generous when a man was down on his luck. There was one ghastly exception to this rule and the story is still being told over a hundred years later.

An Englishman named George Grey and his partner set out one day in 1873 to walk the 240 km to Delagoa Bay, where they were to buy supplies and then tramp back to the diggings. Somewhere in the foothills of the Lebombo Mountains, Grey developed malaria and became so ill that he could not walk any further. His companion made camp, put food and water and a loaded rifle beside the sick man and then made a dash for Delagoa Bay, intending to return with more food and medicine.

He arrived at the little Portuguese settlement and went into a canteen for a drink ... and another ... and another. He was drunk for ten days. When at last he sobered up and walked back to camp, Grey was dead and hyenas surrounded the remains of his body.

The scandal of the day was the importation of African women from the Portuguese territory. Before the wagon road to Delagoa Bay, supplies were carried to the diggings by porters. Among them would be a bevy of buxom girls who thought nothing of walking 300 km through the bush (today the Kruger National Park) with cases of squareface' gin, on their heads. The Portuguese who ran these caravans were not content with selling the gin. They sold the girls too. Many of them never returned to their own country, but settled down as ‘housekeepers'.

The Reverend Gerald Herring, in his history of Pilgrim's Rest, describes a Christmas Eve outside one of the pubs:

... [A] number of men came into camp to celebrate the festive season. A number of their dusky ladies had the temerity to wander in too, but for this freedom they had to pay. A large barrel stood in the middle of the street. It was half full of water. Into it the men dropped coins for which the women struggled. The awkward and inelegant posture taken up by necessity by each competitor in turn furnished the diggers with their opportunity. The valley echoed with laughter and the smack-smack of hard and heavy hands.

It was obviously time for the first white women to appear upon the scene, to turn the shacks and tents into homes and reshape the manners and morals of the community. The first woman there was Mrs Tom McLachlan who lived in a stone house at Mac-Mac. She was there in 1872 and helped many a fever-stricken traveller who had crossed the Lowveld from Delagoa Bay, only to collapse on the track that led up the mountainside to the diggings.

Mrs Dietricks, wife of a German officer, arrived with her husband in 1873. Dietricks was the assistant to MacDonald, Mining Commissioner of the district. They had two daughters, one of whom became Mrs Elsa Smithers, who set down her recollections of Pilgrim's Rest in a book called March Hare.

Elsa recounted the story of Miss Elizabeth Russel who lived in a tent on the diggings and worked on a claim of her own, often standing knee-deep in water. There were two Russel girls – Elizabeth, who was called Bessie, and Annie. They were the daughters of Mr H B Russel, a well-known citizen of Heidelberg and Pretoria, in both of which towns he established himself in business as a miller and merchant during the 1870s.

Mr Russel* forbade his daughters to go to the diggings, but Elizabeth defied him and she and her brother Alfred, better known as ‘Tucker' Russel, made their way there and acquired a claim in the creek. Their father was extremely angry when he found out that he had been disobeyed, and the rest of the family was forbidden to communicate with the runaways. The two were warned that if they could not pay their way, they should not expect help from the family. Mr Russel must have forgiven them at some stage, however, for Elizabeth was later married from the family home in Pretoria.

She certainly earned her place in the history of the Transvaal, for she not only went to the diggings, and worked a claim there at a time when such conduct by a young woman was regarded as scandalous, but she made a success of the venture. As a schoolteacher her salary had been £25 per annum. One of her claims at Pilgrim's Rest is reputed to have earned her a profit of £200 per month for some considerable time.

All in all, Elizabeth seems to have been a young woman well ahead of her time. She had been born in London on 29 May 1850 and came to South Africa with her parents in 1855. They settled in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, where Mr Russel ran the Boston Mills and the girls were sent to Cheltenham House School in Pinetown. She left school at the age of sixteen to become a governess and later taught at Caversham in Natal. Her father and the rest of the family settled at Heidelberg in the Transvaal, where Mr Russel opened a store. Elizabeth went to Harrismith where she ran a private school of sorts and took in music pupils as well. She worked her income up to about £25 per month and managed to buy a piano for £75. Then came the news of the discovery of gold in the Lydenburg district. She and her brother Tucker decided to try their luck at the diggings. She sold her piano, bought thirty bags of wheat, picks and shovels, blankets and food. She also made a tent of heavy canvas. At last the two of them set out, with the reproaches and warnings of their parents still ringing in their ears.

Elizabeth had shown sound business acumen in taking with her a cargo of wheat. She had it milled on the way down to Lydenburg and sold the flour at a very handsome profit.

The young Russels found to their surprise quite a number of their Natal acquaintances in Pilgrim's Rest. They pitched their tent near that of Captain Dietricks and his wife, who were old friends of the Russels. Elizabeth was fortunate in finding that Yankee Dan, one of the best known of the old diggers, was prepared to act as her advisor and he guided her around many a pitfall.

She and her brother had no luck with the first claim, so they decided to move to the middle of the camp, where she pegged another claim. They were employing eight local men to do the hard labour and their funds were beginning to run out, so Elizabeth set up another business on the sideline, the manufacture of sausage rolls and ginger beer, which sold remarkably well. While she was busy with this, young Tucker started slacking. This precipitated a family row and Tucker left in a huff

Elizabeth then moved her tent to the middle camp and fired all her staff except one man, nicknamed ‘Basket', whom she set to work under her supervision. One day, after much fruitless digging, he rushed into her tent doing a war dance and handed her a nugget weighing four ounces. Basket had saved the day! The claim was a rich one and Elizabeth, joined by her other brother Harry, began to make substantial profits.

Working a claim near them at that time was a young American named William A B Cameron. Elizabeth liked his enterprising spirit and his looks and they were soon engaged. President Burgers attended the wedding and the local paper, Die Volkstem, described it as a golden wedding, a subtle reference to the fact that both the bride and groom were gold miners. The paper's reporter referred to Miss Russel as ‘the young lady genius of the diggings'. The President proposed the toast to the bride and groom.

Soon after this, Cameron was elected to represent the Lydenburg diggers in the Volksraad. In 1876, he and his wife went to the United States to attend, as official representatives of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, an international exhibition being held in Philadelphia.

After their return to South Africa, Elizabeth and her husband found that they were incompatible and separated, never to meet again. She was left with five children and her struggle to feed, clothe and educate them would make a story in its own right. This fearless, forthright woman, one of the true pioneers of our beautiful land, to whom Pilgrim's Rest must raise a monument one day, was eighty years of age when she died in Volksrust in May 1931.

Thomas Burgers

Thomas Burgers

When Martinus Wessels Pretorius resigned as President of the Transvaal Republic, many Volksraad members were in favour of President Brand of the Orange Free State taking office in order to promote closer unity between the two Republics. But he wisely refused and recommended Thomas Francois Burgers.

Thomas Burgers was thirty-seven, fond of music, well educated, with liberal and progressive views acquired through study and extensive travel, and happily married to a Scots lass, Mary Bryson. His only blemish was that he had fallen out with his church by saying that the Devil had no tail, but he eventually won the argument in the Cape Supreme Court and was reinstated by the Synod.

On 1 July 1872 he was sworn in as President. He inherited a bankrupt Republic and the first of his many heroic actions was to borrow £60 000 from a Cape bank, guarantee it personally, buy up the worthless blue-back banknotes and stave off the financial crisis. But alas, this was to be one of the many instances that proved to him the truth of the old proverb that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions'.

He had passed the Education Act instituting an extensive Government Education system, the first ever in the Transvaal, introducing also non-doctrinal religious teaching. The Boers, most of them staunch Calvinists, called these Godless schools! Many conservative Boers did not like the fact that he had married an English-speaking woman and when he eventually moved a piano into his house, this was felt to be the last straw.

Singing was done only on Sundays in Church. Poor Thomas Burgers enlightened visionary – that insidious political poison took its toll.

He went abroad and negotiated a loan to build the railway line from Pretoria to Delagoa Bay, but upon his return, found the Transvaal in a complete mess. The Mac Mac Goldfields had been discovered in 1873 and the miners wanted roads and provisions. The Doppers said that the train was the anti-Christ. The Venda were attacking the still lawless Soutpansberg area and the Pedi were killing and plundering in the Lydenburg district. Very few men volunteered for commando duties and Paul Kruger, who had disliked Burgers from the outset, refused to lead the commando. So Burgers did it himself and with the help of some 2 500 Swazi volunteers, was successful until the commando got ‘huis toe' disease and melted away.

Burgers decided to build two forts in the Lydenburg district and to raise a mercenary ainty. He appointed Conrad Hans von Schlickman as Commandant to head up the Lydenburg Volunteers at Fort Burgers and Ignatius Ferreira of the Middleburg Volunteers to garrison Fort Weeber. Unfortunately for Burgers, the English were watching all this from Natal and on 12 April 1877 Sir Theophilus Shepstone rode into Pretoria to annex the Transvaal in the name of Queen Victoria and none other than the author, Rider Haggard, raised the Union Jack.

Thomas Burgers died in the Cape Province in 1881, embittered, broken and impoverished. One of his last requests was that he be buried at the entrance to the sheep kraal so that the hoofs of the animals would obliterate the grave of a man who had failed. He was a decent, conscientious man who had tried desperately to save the Boers from their own folly and in-fighting, which inevitably lost them their country, and set the stage for two tragic wars that embittered the politics of the country for a century afterwards.

In 1895 his body was disinterred and with due honour taken to Pretoria where he now rests in peace.