Jacob Eksteen returned to his family farm an embittered man. He played a minor part in the Rebellion of 1914, when disgruntled Boers took up arms against the former Boer general Louis Botha’s then pro-British government. In a strange twist of history, the Boers effectively took control of a united South Africa a mere eight years after they had lost the war. The country was led by a succession of former Boer generals until the formal advent of apartheid in 1948. Eksteen himself was elected to parliament in 1924, serving one term as an independent. He did not seek re-election and lived out his days on the farm in increasing isolation. According to a notice in the Bloemfontein paper Die Volksblad, a housemaid found his body lying in the hallway just after New Year’s Day in 1939. It was unclear how long he’d been dead.
When she left the concentration camp, Esther Calitz tried to resurrect the family farm, but her heart wasn’t in it. Eventually she took up with Ignatius Ferreira, a big-game hunter of some renown. For the next three decades, the couple were on a more-or-less permanent safari up and down the Great Rift Valley, until they both contracted chikungunya fever in the late 1930s. He died, she survived. Having no money, children or the desire to start afresh, she settled at the site of their last camp near the northern tip of Lake Nyasa, devoting her days to farming and her evenings to writing a book of her life. The manuscript was still unfinished when she was murdered by cattle thieves in 1956. It was called Tales of a Lost Lamb.
Sol Matzdorff left Bethlehem two years after the war, setting off for German Southwest Africa without his wife or daughters. He opened a dry-goods store in Mariental that remained in business long after he had moved on. Passenger records show he was on the steamship Gertrud Woermann when she left Swakopmund on 26 April 1911, bound for Hamburg.
The last surviving witness of these events died in 1960. Wilhelm ‘Klein’ Steyn never left the north-eastern Free State, making a modest living as cobbler in the town of Marquard. He became something of a local pariah for fathering at least eight children of mixed blood.
Gideon Lancaster returned to New Zealand, but never again felt at home in the country of his birth. He moved to Jakarta and worked on merchant ships plying routes in the Java Sea. In the Great War, he volunteered again and served with the New Zealand Division in France. Regimental records note a meeting between Sergeant GS Lancaster and a certain Brigadier General Bryce of the British Expeditionary Force near Armentières on Bastille Day 1916. A few days later, during the Battle of the Somme, Gideon Lancaster’s name was added to the list of those missing in action. He slipped from history and his name never again appeared in a public record of any kind.
THE BEGINNING
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First published by Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 2014
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Copyright © Zirk van den Berg 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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ISBN: 978-0-143-53123-4
Half of One Thing Page 25