At the Fireside

by Webster Roger

  In any case, when Bophuthatswana was declared an independent homeland the boundary was the northern farms over the road from Vlakplaas, 11 of which were bought by the government. The previous owners banked their money, packed up and moved away, leaving all of their properties in full working condition with all the necessities – tractors, ploughs, seeders, harvesters, boreholes in good working condition, fertiliser and enough seed for the ensuing year. All courtesy of the long-suffering taxpayer, whose pocket-pain might have been somewhat assuaged if the new farmers had taken up where their predecessors had left off, armed as they were with everything needed to ensure that the farms would continue to produce.

  Everything, that is, except the will. Maybe there’s truth in the old saying that when you get something for nothing it’s worth nothing to you.

  Only three of the new farmers actually took possession of their farms. The rest stayed on in various nearby towns, turning all their assets into cash. The machinery and implements were the first to go, sold off to pay for flashy new cars. Then the fertiliser and seed went the same way, soon to be followed by the pipes, pumps and whatever else could be disposed of. Then the vandals and squatters moved in. The outbuildings were dismantled and carried away piece by piece till only the broken walls and foundations remained. Eventually there was nothing left, and I mean nothing.

  The three farmers who actually occupied their new land tried to make a go of it with the assistance of their long-established farming neighbours, but the theft of livestock and anything else that was saleable eventually broke their spirit, and when I visited there only one was left.

  My friend leased a portion of land from one the new owners, ploughed it with his own tractor, fertilised it out of his own pocket and planted seed he had bought himself. The rains were good that year and the crop went through to maturity. But when he went to harvest it, he found to his horror that only the first 10 rows were still intact; the entire crop behind them had been stolen and carried away during the hours of darkness.

  He didn’t bother trying again … what was the point?

  I have personally stood and looked across 40 kilometres of barren wasteland; in the far distance I could see the huge silos, with their own railway siding, which had been built to accommodate the enormous grain harvests that had once been brought in every year.

  The silos were now only a ghostly echo that told of more prosperous days when the district had been a vibrant and productive place. Now I stood looking out over all those thousands of hectares of wasted farmland and I felt the tears running down my face.

  How can we be doing this, how can we allow this to happen? Doesn’t anybody realise that when a nation has to rely on importing food, it becomes a nation on its knees which has to bend to the demands of both East and West in order to feed its hungry mouths? Can we not see and learn the lesson that has been shown to us time and time again in the other countries to the north of us, that this is the road to nowhere?

  The truth of the matter is that we are very busy making agricultural paupers of our nation, and believe you me, we will pay the price in time to come. No, worse still, our children will pay and curse us as we lie in our graves.

  The examples I have given are not figments of my imagination. They are happening to real people. Some years ago, TV’s Carte Blanche programme focused on what was happening in the Natal Midlands, describing the intimidation, the threats, the violence and the murders that have driven farmers off their land. And remember that I am not talking about Zimbabwe under Mugabe. I’m talking about South Africa – all of us, right now.

  When I have raised these issues I have had a few critics contacting me saying I’m one-sided, I’m not telling the truth. To them I say: Come with me if you dare, come and stand on those barren lands, come and listen to the people tell their stories; don’t sit in some air-conditioned office pretending to know what it’s all about.

  As I have stated before, I don’t care who owns the land, but I care deeply about what is happening to it from a productive point of view, for I am an historian and an author, not a politician.

  The Outback

  THE OUTBACK

  Deep in the Western Kgalagadi district of the Kalahari Desert is a single town – old, remote and isolated. Its name is Ghanzi. The name Ghanzi comes from a dog mascot written about by Rudyard Kipling – that should give one a clue as to what it is doing there.

  Its story takes us back to the closing years of the 19th century. Ghanzi was founded by none other than Cecil John Rhodes, and if you look at the old Bechuanaland Protectorate maps, it is marked ‘Boer Settlement’ which is only partly correct – equal numbers of Boers and English settlers trekked out to this faraway place.

  Actually the story begins a long time before they outspanned their covered wagons at what is now Ghanzi on Christmas Eve of 1898, but its story began long before that. An explorer named Isaac Bosman brought Rhodes the news that good cattle-ranching country was to be found in a distant corner of the sprawling new Bechuanaland Protectorate.

  There had been a couple of adventurers in that area such as one Lewis, who had been killed by a leopard, and one Van Zyl. Van Zyl was evidently someone who thought big. Long before the 1898 trek he had built himself the first house in the area, and it was not your customary modest bushveld dwelling but a luxurious mansion with stained-glass windows and polished wooden floors.

  But sad to say, Van Zyl did not get to enjoy his house: not long after this he was ambushed and shot by dead Damaras, leaving this splendid home to go to ruin in the back of beyond.

  The news of all that good grazing at Ghanzi slotted well into Rhodes’s greater plans. His ambition, like that of various others imperialists, was to see a British African empire that stretched from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo. The problem was that there was a certain lack of enthusiasm among the powers that were.

  So Rhodes, who thought that there was nothing like a little fear to get things moving, came up with a compelling argument which rang a lot of bells in that era of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in which various world powers were vying for positions of advantage on the continent.

  According to him the Germans, who now occupied South West Africa, were casting envious eyes eastwards toward the vast open spaces of Bechuanaland. To nip any such ambitions in the bud, he suggested, there should be a buffer state under the Union Jack which would keep the German latecomers in their place.

  The ultimate consequence was that in December 1884 Major-General Sir Charles Warren was appointed a ‘Special Commissioner’ and sent with 4 000 troops to assert British sovereignty and demolish the Boer freebooter states of Stellaland and Goshen. (Warren had some cutting-edge military technology with him, incidentally, in the form of three observation balloons, the first ever used by the British Army.) Warren sent the freebooters packing without difficulty, and during 1885, Bechuanaland was declared a British protectorate. As they say, so far, so good!

  Now Rhodes made his offer to land-hungry people of the south – free farms of 10 000 acres each, free water-boring machines, all the necessary equipment for the distant trek – from pipes, tobacco, needles and cloth for the women to sacks of meal and other necessary provisions.

  The response was not too good, so in addition he offered each family £200 in cold cash, a small fortune in those days. Sixty families finally accepted the offer and started from the railhead that eventually became the Cape-to-Bulawayo railway line and then set of westwards.

  The trek was a disaster. The trail became dotted with stone-covered graves and the rinderpest devastated the wagon-oxen and herds. When they reached the swamp areas, malaria left more victims’ names to be carved into the baobab trees. Now they turned south towards the plains of Ghanziland and eventually reached the Ghanzi Pan. There they halted, seven months after leaving the railhead, and gave thanks for their safety. But their troubles were only beginning.

  To the
west the Germans were at war with the Hereros and the Namas. It was a savage affair, with little quarter given, and eventually many Hereros drifted over the border into the protectorate and settled in the area that is now known as Sehitwa and Toteng on the shores of Lake Ngami. To the east, the Second Anglo-Boer War had broken out while they had been struggling over the endless plains, and so their eagerly awaited supplies did not arrive.

  Bereft even of basics such as tea and sugar, the new settlers set about living off the land using skills picked up from the Bushmen, the ultimate survival experts. One of the primary requirements in that dry land was water and they learned that you could dig for it under a certain type of tuber-rooted bush.

  I am sure they didn’t care about the reasons why the water was there, but we know now that flat outcroppings of rocks become eroded by the wind-blown sand and, over a long period of time, large bowl-shaped structures are ‘sanded’ out and eventually buried. When there is rain it filters through the sand until it comes to a layer of rock where it forms a type of underground reservoir.

  To get at the water you insert a reed into the sand, then another plugged into it, and down you go until you hit the water, which you then suck up. This might sound like the laborious process that it is, but it is a lot better than having no water at all.

  To compound their problems Rhodes then died at his cottage at Muizenberg and for years the Ghanzi settlement was left to its own devices. In these times it is difficult to grasp how isolated it was. Picture the scene. If you wanted to get married you had to travel 800 kilometres to Mafikeng. If you needed a doctor, the nearest was at Maun, 350 kilometres away. If someone in Cape Town wrote you an urgent letter, it took five months to reach you.

  The Ghanzi settlers became so despondent that when parties of Boers trekked away from their defeated republics into the wilds of South West Africa some of the more adventurous (or desperate) Ghanzi spirits joined the ‘Dorsland Trekkers’. It was no bargain – the Thirstland Trek was another saga of unbelievable hardship.

  Trekking in the Kalahari was an ordeal until well into living memory. Only 25 years ago I travelled to Ghanzi in a 4 x 4 and met Angela Hardbattle, a daughter of a real old-time pioneer named Tom Hardbattle. (Angela’s appearance was quite interesting, by the way. Her mother, Tom’s wife, was a pure-blooded !Nara Bushman woman, but you would never think it to look at Angela who was fair-haired and blue-eyed. Genetics can play all kinds of tricks.)

  In the pre-diamond days, Angela reminisced, when they used to drive their cattle to the Botswana Meat Commission at Lobatse, her husband would be on the trek for about three months – if the going was good, that is. If the going was bad, make it four months. And as if that were not bad enough, the cattle had to go to Johannesburg before Lobatse.

  They would drive the cattle, Wild-West-style south from Ghanzi to Lehututu, then west to the railway line and then to a vast area, 200 kilometres wide, which they called ‘The Thirst’, and which had no water at all. This sounds totally daunting, but people who knew the Kalahari could get the cattle to Johannesburg in satisfactory condition if the veld was good. But of course that wasn’t always the case.

  These days the roads are tarred. There is a trans-Kalahari highway right to the Namibian border and to get to there from Ghanzi only takes a couple of hours. Ghanzi itself now has all the mod cons of the technological age – I remember visiting a farm where the owner had an embryo transplant unit for his cattle!

  Years ago I saw the end of an era when I encountered a herd of about 15 000 head just outside Jwaneng, with mounted outriders chivvying them towards Lobatse. It must have been one of the last of the traditional cattle treks; nowadays they ride to their ultimate doom in huge cattle trucks.

  The cattle herders are not the only people in Botswana whose lives have changed radically. The Bushmen in the Ghanzi area are culturally endangered as the world catches up with their traditional structures and lifestyles.

  The Bushmen in the Ghanzi area are or were of four major clans: the Monarwa, the Mokwikwi, the Xgon and then the strangest of all, the Makoko. The Makoko were traditionally regarded as wizards and to this day there are still stories of Makoko shape-shifters who can change from man to lion and back again.

  But the Bushmen, like indigenous people all over the planet, will eventually be integrated into the broader national culture. Their fate, I have no doubt, will be no different from that of other indigenous peoples in the same situation. I do know that there are big interest groups who are documenting the cultures, beliefs, social structures and stories of these inoffensive hunter-gatherers before they are entirely integrated in the Western world and lose their identity. It is a sad thing, but an inevitability.

  A friend of mine, Patricia Glyn (the same one who walked from Durban to the Victoria Falls), is currently working with a clan in the southern Kalahari, north of Upington, which was led for many years by the late David Kruiper, arguably the best-known Bushman personality of our time. She tells me she will be writing a book about her experiences and I reckon it will be one that is not to be missed.

  The Last Anglo-Boer War Memorial

  THE LAST ANGLO-BOER WAR

  MEMORIAL

  Quite some time ago I received a phone call from a friend of mine, Robin Binckes, asking if I would take a couple of Johannesburg businessmen on a tour of the Western Transvaal that would cover the alluvial diamond rushes that made places like Lichtenberg (or Bakerville), Wolmaransstad, Bloemhof and Christiana so famous, even if only for a short while.

  While explaining the geology of these ancient alluvial washes I introduced them to Oom Boet Percival, one of the last remaining old-time diamond diggers in the Bloemhof area. Everybody in Bloemhof knew Oom Boet and I knew he had a wealth of stories to tell, going back to the first diamond rush in the area when no less than 35 000 people descended in and around the vicinity of the old Hayward’s Store.

  Hayward’s Store was famous in its own right because at one time it was robbed by Scotty Smith, the most notorious horse thief in South African history. Scotty is remembered to this day, not just because of his rascally exploits but because he was also an engaging personality (when he was not stealing your horse, that is) with a celebrated sense of humour.

  As Oom Boet told it, Scotty stationed himself at the door and carefully noted down every item that his followers carted away in an early example of what today’s wits call ‘ad hoc shopping’. Then, at a later date, he turned up to pay his bill in full! The fact that he paid with the profits from some cattle rustling is, perhaps, a subject for a discussion on ethics which it would not profit us to go into right now …

  They were heady days, Oom Boet recalled, with thousands of delwers (Afrikaans for ‘diggers’) gripped by the disease jocularly called diamantsiekte (diamond disease). The symptom of diamond disease was an obsessive fossicking for gravel and processing the results through your old Babe Jerome sieving jig, muttering the mantra ‘just one more day’, regardless of how long it had been since you had found something worthwhile. While it gripped you, you would sell anything and everything you owned just as long as you had another few shovel-loads of dirt.

  It was a sickness that could be cured in only three ways. You made some good finds, you descended into utter ruination or you ended up six feet under. There was nothing in between. And there were lots of sufferers: thousands upon thousands of optimistic, high-hoping, hard-drinking diggers of all kinds. There were wild drinking parties, enlivened by out-of-tune pianos, and dancers and shady ladies of dubious repute who came up from the coastal towns by stagecoach to ply their trade and share in the spoils.

  But all parties come to an end sooner or later, just like diamond deposits, and slowly things started to calm down. Many of the diggers moved on in search of better prospects, and numbers dwindled drastically. A few diggers had become rich or mildly prosperous; the vast majority either just managed to keep body and soul together
or went under. Some left their bones there.

  Malmanie was another one of these fleeting backveld boom towns, except that here ‘gold!’ was the rallying cry. Malmanie sprang up virtually overnight just outside Ottoshoop and was a mere continuation of Bloemhof, except for what was being dug out of the ground. But Malmanie’s life was short, even by the here-today-gone-tomorrow standards of the myriad little boom towns.

  After just eight months news came of the immensely rich strikes on the Witwatersrand and the effect was immediate. The miners struck their tents and left, the corrugated-iron hotel was dismantled and packed onto wagons along with its piano (carefully secured to withstand the terrible roads), and the shady ladies stowed their frills and furbelows in their trunks. Within a fortnight Malmanie was no more. Somewhere, a lone relic of its existence is still to be found – a solid silver plate which was a prize for the handful of horse races held during its brief existence. But it was auctioned off by Sotheby’s some years ago and where it is now nobody knows.

  Nature has completed its repair work and covered the scars, and if you stand there in the veld today you would never know that under your feet were the bones of a little mining town. But if you know the story of Malmanie and where to find it, and you have a little imagination, it is as if you can still hear the raucous singing and laughter, punctuated by the tinkling of the tuneless piano above the sound of the wind blowing gently over the veld.

  Back to our travels from Bloemhof down through Jan Kempdorp (originally Andalusia), Warrington and then Barkly West, the site of the first real diamond find in South Africa. The area is overflowing and steeped in events in our history – the formation of the Klipdrift Republic under its one and only President, Stafford Parker; the diamond-rich soils on the banks of the Vaal River where fortunes were to be made – and sometimes lost.