It had been a disappointment at the beginning of the war that the Cape Afrikaners had not, as hoped, risen in rebellion. Here and there small areas revolted, and when Free State commandos actually rode into Cape Colony they were cheered and aided; this gave the fighting burghers some hope that they might yet strike the sparks that would ignite their blood brothers to do more than give them bread and sympathy.
Cape Colony was the most populous British possession in South Africa, and probably half or more of the white colonists were Afrikaners. Had there been a mass uprising it would indeed have been a serious matter for the British, a civil war on a large scale. Besides, the Cape was the British invasion base, and all of the supplies for Roberts’s army came from or passed through the colony. The desire of the Boers to carry the war into British territory was strong, and as the war progressed there was the additional lure of plentiful supplies and fresh sources of manpower to be found there. The British, well aware of Boer ambitions, made strenuous efforts to keep commandos north of the Orange. They were so vigilant that the Boers were never able to pass any large force over the river.
An early invasion of Cape Colony in the Prieska area in February and March 1900 had achieved some success initially, but it was easily thrown back, the invaders all retreating over the border except for one commando filled with rebels and led by twenty-four-year-old Chaim David Judelewitz, an uitlander. He and his commando, about 300 strong, were able to remain and operate in the Prieska area until 28 May 1900 when he was surprised in laager by a British column with four guns under Colonel John Adye. Most of his men fled when the first shells landed, and Jedelewitz was killed. There was no more trouble for the British in the Prieska area.
In mid-January 1901 De Wet marched south to try another invasion, but the British were vigilant, and two weeks later he was forced to abandon the attempt. Although De Wet failed, other Boer leaders did manage to make incursions into the Cape with smaller forces. Pieter Henrick Kritzinger (1870-1935) and James Barry Hertzog (1866-1942) led two of these. Kritzinger was a powerfully built man with a luxuriant moustache, small ears, and a massive chin. Although born in Cape Colony, he had been taken to the Free State by his parents when he was twelve and he grew up in the Rouxville district. When the war began he rode off with the Rouxville Commando under Commandant J. H. Olivier, and after Olivier’s capture in August 1900 he was elected commandant.
Kritzinger made three excursions into Cape Colony. Then on 16 December 1901 his career as a guerrilla came to an end. Racing from pursuing troopers he ran into heavy fire while crossing the railway near Hanover. While attempting to rescue some of his wounded men, he was himself shot, a bullet tearing through the muscles of his left arm and passing through his lung, and he was captured.
Hertzog was a quite different type. He was a scholar, and with his wire-rimmed spectacles he looked more like a professor than a soldier. Deneys Reitz described him as “a thin high-cheeked man with angry eyes” who was “a fierce hater.” He possessed a brilliant mind and had studied law at Amsterdam. At the age of twenty-nine he had been appointed a judge in the Orange Free State and he was always called Judge Hertzog—except by British soldiers, who called him Hedgehog. He was to prove himself one of the most audacious of the Boer guerrilla leaders, and he was never captured. After the war he became the champion of Afrikaner nationalism in the Union of South Africa, and he served for fifteen years as prime minister.
These and other commandos in Cape Colony were a source of great anxiety to the British authorities. Perhaps nothing did more to convince the British that the war was not yet won than these guerrilla bands roving about in their oldest and most heavily populated South African colony. To succeed guerrillas must have the support of the people, for, as Mao Tse-tung has so aptly put it, guerrillas are like fish swimming in the sea of the population. A sympathetic population is the guerrilla’s natural element; he cannot exist without it. The republican Boers succeeded as well as they did because they had the sympathy of a substantial portion of the farmers and villagers in the Cape. The Cape Afrikaners would not rise in revolt, but they made no secret of their sentiments. At Graaf-Reinet in the eastern Cape there had even been a riot when the British tried to celebrate Roberts’s victory at Paardeberg with a fireworks display.
MOUNTED TROOPS WERE ESSENTIAL FOR SCOUTING.
On 17 January 1901 martial law, which had before been put into effect only in the most disaffected parts of Cape Colony, was extended to include the entire colony except the ports and the Bantu areas. The British had been reluctant to impose martial law in Cape Colony, and in the beginning its application was strictly limited and mild. It was intended merely to supplement the civil authority, and military courts tried only clear cases of treason, sabotage, or trafficking with the enemy. Although district commanders could make their own regulations for preserving order and protecting their troops, they were instructed “to interfere as little as possible with the civil rights of peaceful inhabitants and their freedom to pursue their ordinary occupations.”
At first the British living in Cape Colony welcomed martial law, many feeling as did the “lady contributor” to The Owl (published in Cape Town) that this would put the Afrikaners in their places:
Martial law has driven home to the Dutch in a way that no other method could possibly have accomplished, the fact that Britain means to settle once and for all the question of superiority in the Colony.... I stood outside the Dutch Church and listened to their singing. The old defiant ring and sonorous gladness were no longer there, and every now and then a strong man’s voice trembled.2
The Afrikaners, with their hatred for any restriction of their liberty, did indeed resent what they, finding the English words difficult to pronounce, called Martie Louw. Eventually, everyone came to resent the new order, for it applied to the just and the unjust, British and Afrikaners alike, and it grew more and more restrictive and onerous: passes were required to enter, leave, or move from a district; a curfew was imposed; sale of liquor was controlled; bicycles were registered; neutrality became unacceptable and farmers were ordered to give information and actively aid British columns; all horses not actually needed on farms had to be given up; the licences of travelling pedlars were suspended; hotels had to file daily reports on their guests; and there were harsh restrictions on a long list of “prohibited goods” that included food for men and animals (only a limited amount could be kept on hand), leather goods, blankets, tobacco, and horseshoes. H. W. Wilson complained:
Martial law in many of the districts was administered with a want of tact which added fuel to the secret fire of indignation. Business was impossible; chaos ruled in place of order; and the freaks of some of the military despots were such as to irritate almost beyond endurance those who were devoutly loyal to the flag.3
It was the military courts which brought the realities of war to the farmers and villagers of Cape Colony. After the annexation of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal all of the burghers in the field became technically rebels, but to avoid mass executions of men who were in fact prisoners of war the British did not attempt to apply this logic. They were adamant, however, in the case of Cape Colony Afrikaners who took up arms and joined the enemy; some 700 of these were tried and sentenced to death as traitors, although only 35 were actually executed.
The execution of Cape rebels did not begin until 1901. It was an expression of the new feeling of bitterness which marked the last year of the conflict when, as Conan Doyle observed, “The war had lost much of the good humour which marked its outset. A fiercer feeling had been engendered on both sides....”4 It is difficult to say whether the executions accomplished their purpose, whether they deterred Cape Afrikaners from joining commandos, but it is certain that they engendered in the Afrikaners a sense of outrage and a bitterness against the British which persists among many to this day.
To make their point, the British usually compelled leading citizens, and sometimes the entire population of a town, to witness the reading of t
he death sentence and, in a few instances, the actual execution.
The executions of Johannes Lötter and Gideon Scheepers attracted the most attention and are today best remembered. Lötter had been a successful guerrilla leader until he was captured on 5 September 1901. He had become a Free State burgher after the war started, but the British brushed this aside and claimed him as a traitorous subject. He was convicted on nine counts, two for murder and one for flogging a British subject. The British subject in question was J. van der Merwe, a Cape Afrikaner who had fought with a commando and then voluntarily surrendered. Given a light sentence, he offered to try persuading his brother in Lötter’s commando to do the same. He was caught in the attempt, and on Lötter’s orders he was whipped with wet stirrup straps and then released. Without considering what would be their treatment of a soldier who deserted and tried inducing others to desert, the British were incensed. Ivie Allen, a photographer at Graaf-Reinet, took a picture of Van der Merwe’s lacerated back and it was widely reproduced in British journals.
On 11 October 1901 at Middelburg in Cape Colony all business was suspended and leading citizens were ordered to appear in the public square. In what one correspondent called “a most impressive ceremony,” the death sentence was read to Lötter, who fainted and had to be carried back to the gaol. The next day he was taken to a kopje just west of the town, tied to a chair, and shot. The following day Piet Wolfaardt, another Cape rebel, was executed on the same spot.
The execution which most stirred the hearts of men and women around the world was that of young, handsome, dashing Gideon Scheepers on 18 January 1902. He was not, as the British claimed, a British subject, for he was born on a farm near Middelburg (formerly Nazareth) in the eastern Transvaal on 4 April 1878, the second of ten children. When he was sixteen he enrolled as an apprentice telegraphist in the Transvaal staatsartillerie, and four years later he transferred to the Orange Free State staatsartillerie to organise their telegraphic and heliographic corps. During the early months of the war he served under Cronjé and took part in the battles against Methuen. Later he served under De Wet and established a reputation as a scout. When De Wet’s attempt to invade Cape Colony failed, he sent Kritzinger and Scheepers with smaller forces there with orders to encourage Cape Afrikaners to join them, to wreck trains, and to burn the farms and homes of Afrikaners regarded as traitors to their people.
It was hard for a Cape Afrikaner to be law-abiding and at the same time safe, to obey his conscience and to obey the law. If he obeyed Martie Louw and helped the British soldiers he earned the enmity of his neighbours and his home or farm was likely to be burned to the ground by a visiting commando; if he helped the commandos he ran afoul of the British authorities and risked gaol.
Farm burning in the Cape was in part a retaliation for the policy of wholesale farm burning which had recently been adopted by the British in the conquered territories, but this did not prevent the British from finding it heinous. The two situations were not comparable, they said, and H. W. Wilson, using some peculiar logic, tried to explain. Speaking of the burning of public buildings and private homes by Scheepers at Murraysburg on 6 July 1901, he wrote: “The case was altogether different from the British burning of farms in the Boer territories, where there was a strategic purpose and an ulterior aim, which could only be secured by such acts.... This savage and senseless act of his caused fresh panic throughout the colony.”5
For months Scheepers and his commando ranged over Cape Colony from Aliwal North to Wocester pursued by British columns, and Scheepers, only twenty-two years old,l made himself into a living legend. His commando was filled with boys and young men who had left off helping their fathers farm or had abandoned their schoolbooks to join his bold, far-ranging riders. More than half of his “men” were in their teens.
Petronella van Hearden was a little girl when Scheepers and his commando, dirty and unshaven, with tattered clothes, rode into her village. The villagers took them into their homes, and a few hours later Petronella saw them emerge, clean and shaven, their clothes mended and washed. When they rode out that night Petronella’s older brother Alec went with them.
Not all the inhabitants of Cape Colony were happy to see the commandos. There were, after all, a great many people of British descent as well as some thoroughly loyal Afrikaners. Mrs. Sarah Glueck, a twenty-six-year-old widow with two children, was the postmistress in the town of Lady Grey. When a Boer commando rode in and demanded the keys to the post office she refused to part with them. When the Boers posted a proclamation on the post office notice board, she tore it down and put up one of Milner’s, underlining the parts referring to the obligation of subjects to support the crown, and above it she wrote RULE BRITANNIA—“to add further zest to it,” she said later. The story of her bold defiance, much embroidered, was told throughout the Empire, and Mrs. Glueck found herself a heroine. A truthful woman, she was not responsible for the additional colouration given her story. Popular versions made her into a British Barbara Fritchie who refused to haul down the Union Jack or who actually pulled down the Vierkleur and hoisted the Union Jack.m
Johannes Smith grew up to be an artist and a trustee of the National Gallery of South Africa, but when he was only a fourteen-year-old boy he and some companions slipped between the strands of barbed wire which surrounded the village of Aberdeen, cut across an ostrich farm, and sought out Scheepers’s commando. The British army, in spite of constant searching, had not been able to find Scheepers, but this fourteen-year-old Afrikaner boy and his friends appear to have had little trouble. Young as they were, Scheepers allowed them to join him.
Typical of Scheepers’s operations was his occupation of Uniondale. The town was unguarded and he rode in unopposed. He released all the Afrikaner prisoners in the gaol, locked up the local magistrate, burned all the records he found, hauled down the Union Jack, and hoisted the Vierkleur. Then in celebration he galloped down the main street of the town with the Union Jack tied to the tail of his horse.
To blow up a locomotive was fun, and to ride into a village where one was welcomed by admiring young girls who willingly darned worn stockings and sewed up patched shirts was romantic, but for the most part the life of the Boers on commando in the Cape was that of fugitives. They were hunted and harried relentlessly. Although it is doubtful there were ever more than 3,000 men on commando in Cape Colony at any one time, nearly 45,000 British troops were deployed to guard military assets and to track down and destroy them.
With little time for sleep, never free from tension and danger, men had to ride on in all weather, sick or well, wounded or not, if they wanted to escape capture. It was, then, a serious matter when Scheepers developed pains in his abdomen and right side. In his diary he wrote: “Have been ill from 28 Sept. [1901] and on 4 Oct. the pains increased to such an extent that I could not mount a horse.”6 In a few days he was too ill to travel at all, and on 10 October 1901, Kruger’s birthday (as Scheepers noted), he had to be left behind at a farmhouse. He was quickly captured.
He was removed to a hospital, and his illness was variously diagnosed as gastric fever or acute appendicitis. While still weak and in much pain he was sent to Graaf-Reinet. He wrote in his diary: “The real reason why I was transferred from Beaufort West is a mystery to me. My only conclusion is that I am considered a very important criminal.”
He was indeed. On his arrival he was taken to a gaol and searched: “After my name and everything had been written down, I was taken in another direction and put in a hospital room, a most pleasantly cool room, but oh, the bars, the bars!”7 Here Scheepers learned that he was to be tried by a military court: “On 16 December the final evidence was read out. Thirty accusations were brought against me of ‘murder,’ seven of ‘arson,’ ‘rough’ handling of prisoners, ‘barbaric’ treatment of kaffirs, etc.”8
In his defence Scheepers maintained that he had a right to flog or shoot spies and that in burning farms he had been following orders from his superiors. He denied ill-treating soldiers
taken prisoner, and he denied some of the killings laid to him; they had been the work of other commandos. He freely admitted that he had flogged “kaffir spies” and he admitted too that he had executed Afrikaner “traitors.”
Obviously some of the responsibilities which fell upon the head of the young commandant had been too heavy. Judgement, particularly moral judgement, is difficult to exercise, especially for a youth with life-or-death responsibilities, a god unto himself with his roving band of young men, and Scheepers’s decisions sometimes made justice quixotic and cruel, however logical they seemed to him. When two Afrikaner spies (or so they were thought or judged to be) were once caught by his men, it seemed to him that with no courts or gaols available he either had to shoot them or free them. Arbitrarily he decided to release one to carry a letter back to the officer who had sent them and to shoot the other. They were made to draw lots. Perhaps Scheepers felt, as had Jozua Joubert at Colenso, that the choice of the lot was the will of God, but whatever the reasoning, one man drew the short straw and was shot; the other was freed.
Charges that he mistreated Bantu incensed Scheepers, not because the charges were untrue but because they seemed to him unjust; it seemed to him monstrous that Bantu were allowed to testify in court and, even worse, that they were allowed to be gaolers and order about white prisoners. In his diary he wrote: “We Afrikaners will never find justice under the English. Everything is for the kaffirs; their own soldiers go short and the barbarian, the kaffir, gets all the benefits.”9
Great Boer War Page 49