He let change a small island in
the Nile at Aswan into a tropical garden
full of exotic plants?
The misanthrope — as a garden-fan?
I have to scribble it down … here
where it smells of soot and of oil.
That’s for my nose.
For my eyes, both of it produced some
iridescent film …
on scattered glass-pieces, sitting in the
rusty sieve of a roof …
hovering over this draughty hall …
each fragment reflecting a dazzling
recollection …
1
In 1897, we celebrated Queen Victoria’s
Diamond Jubilee with a grand procession
of floats through the streets of
Johannesburg. Mr. Harry Clayton’s
float, a wagon drawn my mules featured a
wonderful new bicycle with the first
pneumatic tyres.
On that great day, the bicycle of our
eight years old son still had solid
tyres. He took part in the bicycle
section of the procession, riding with
the other pioneer children behind the
grown-ups. He paddled along somewhat
sheepishly in a spotless white satin suit
with a large white felt hat adorned with
ostrich plumes, and collar and cuffs of
the George III era. His finery did not
long stand spotless. As he was
approaching Chudleigh’s corner a man
stepped out and tossed an armful of
coloured streamers over him. In a second,
the pretty mess had twined around his
wheels, and down he fell. He was
convinced, it would not have happened
with pneumatic tyres.
For a while, the golden city feasted and
danced and drank loyal toasts to the
great Queen far away. But beyond its
horizons, grey with the dust of the
mine-dumps, a cloud was rising: a cloud
spewed from Pretoria, where the old
implacable enemy sat smoking and brooding
on his stoep …
By that time, we Uitlanders formed
roughly seventy-three per cent of
Transvaal’s population. The Boers,
whose land it was, were a minority of a
mere twenty-seven per cent. Hatred and
resent plucked at the hearts of Boer and
Briton, and there were dark murmurings
that the limit of endurance had been
passed, and the storm was bound to break
soon.
But as Christmas drew near, many people
thrust their forebodings away, and
determined to enjoy the great festival
with as much goodwill as they could
master. There was calm in our home, and
much talk was between me and my wife of
sending our son to boarding school in
Maritzburg. The Oval was so far from the
wanderer’s club where I had given up
cricket and taken up tennis. Nearly every
house around us had its own court, so
there was plenty of opportunity to enjoy
the new game.
Then came December 1889
On Sunday before Christmas, a sudden
spurt of flames ripped through the town’s
outward calm into the explosive passions
beneath. It flashed from a revolver shot
fired by a Boer policeman into the body
of a British subject named Tom Jackson
Edgar. A homely name, to be sure; but one
destined to take its place in history
among those murdered ones who have set
nations at each other’s throats and
dragged thousands after them to the
grave.
Edgar, a strong, fearless man, was on his
way home about midnight when a sick,
drunken man snarled an abusive remark at
him. Edgar’s retort was a blow,
which knocked the fellow senseless. His
two companions rushed for the police, and
Edgar went calmly home.
Presently four policemen were thundering
at his door, bursting it open without
even calling on Edgar to come out to
surrender. Edgar, who had been sitting in
his bedroom talking to his wife, came out
into the passage as a Boer policeman
named — incongruously — Jones,
burst in. Later it was alleged that Edgar
struck Jones on the head with an
iron-stick. But other witnesses declared
he did not have time to strike at all,
for Constable Jones fired at him, and he
fell dead in his wife’s arms.
Next day Jones was arrested and
immediately released on surety of £200.
Between four and five thousand people
gathered in the Market Square to hear a
petition to Queen Victoria praying for
protection. Twelve years ago, I had
helped to organise another meeting of
gold diggers so that they might form
themselves into an orderly body to
command the ear of the government. Twelve
short years ago! In that time a fine
lusty town had sprung from the dusty
tents of the diggers’ camps: a town
to which the eyes of not only South
Africa but the world were drawn by the
glitter of its gold. Homes by the
thousands sat snugly on the ridges; and
the busy machinery of the mines bore
witness to the incomputable wealth
beneath.
Was this the end? Would it all vanish in
the merciless swirling hatred of one
nation for another?
The petition was read to the meeting, and
the crowd then marched quietly to the
office of the British Vice-Consul, who
heard and accepted it.
The die was cast. There followed days of
almost unbearable anxiety for those who
knew its portent — and then the blow
fell.
The petition had been refused!
The reason given to the people was that
the petition should never have been
published before its presentation. There
were murmurs of a breach of diplomatic
etiquette.
But now the tide of hatred was running
full spate. Policeman Jones was tried for
culpable homicide and acquitted. But the
organisers of the meeting, which heard
the petition read, were arrested and
released upon bail of £1,000 each.
There came a brief easing of the strain
with the news that the British High
Commissioner, Sir Alfred Millner, and
Boer-President Paulus „Ohm“
Kruger were to confer at Bloemfontein and
try to arrive at some settlement of the
Uitlanders’ grievances. But the
different viewpoints were now utterly
irreconcilable.
Most of our relatives had decided not to
move. All their children were young, and
they saw no reason why the Boers should
molest them. Our son was now at a
boarding school at St. Charles’
College in Maritzburg.
 The political causes
of the tragic struggle were many and
intricate. However, the basic causes were
simple enough. The gold and the diamonds
were at the bottom of all. Britain not
only wanted its share, it was fearing
that the Boers who had become rich
together with us Uitlanders would pose,
together with their potential German
allies, a threat to the other British
territories in Southern Africa.
1
In October 1899, the war began.
With the coming of the war, hundreds fled
from Johannesburg.
My problem was solved in a way that
brooked no argument. I simply went home
one day and said:
„Agnes, pack up. We’re going to
Durban.“
„They have been at you, haven‘t
they?“ she demanded.
I nodded. „They were quite
reasonable. Gave me two days to get out
or to be taken prisoner. So I just locked
my office and came home. We‘ll have
to move fast, because the trains are
crammed and I don‘t want to lose a
chance of getting away. No Boer jail for
me if I can help it!“
„But what am I to pack? What will
happen to the house?“
„The house will have to take care of
itself. We‘ll take what we can with
us and the rest — we‘ll just
lock the door and leave it to Providence.“
So, like countless others in the fateful
half-century then dawning, we took our
two children and became refugees from
war. The train took us to that city at
the sea from where it once had taken me
into Africa — then as a very young
immigrant from Europe, now as a refugee
within Africa.
I found Durban keyed to a feverish pitch
of excitement. Troops from England were
pouring off ships that arrived regularly
in the Bay. Sometimes there would be a
parade with bands marching through the
streets — as much for the benefit of
the Zulus as the Boer sympathisers.
Town guards were formed, and
accommodation of any kind was almost
unobtainable. Fortunately, I had friends
in the town and was able to find a room
at the Royal Hotel. But I was practically
penniless, with many legal accounts
outstanding. Money had to be earned
somehow. I managed to get a small office
in Acutt’s Arcade and with the help
of friends secured furniture for it, and
clothing for the family. Many of our
Johannesburg friends had also sought
refuge in Durban and we formed a little
Goldfields community.
At first most of my work consisted of
settling the affairs of men who
volunteered for the forces. Then an
important High Court case came my way, in
which I defended an Indian client against
an opposing solicitor who was none other
than Mahatma Ghandi. Ghandi was already
very much in the limelight for his
championship of the Asians’ rights
in South Africa. The Britons would come
to know him better when he, other than
the Boers, would stand against them not
with force but with civil disobedience,
wrangling from them power in the Jewel of
the British Crown-colony, in India.
When I won this case against Ghandi, it
brought a welcome change in our fortunes.
Before long, I decided to leave the hotel
and install us in a comfortable house at
the back of Point Road, not far from the
modern Addington Hospital
There was a military hospital nearby
— a collection of big marquee tents,
and many friends in khaki came to visit
us — men who had been wounded or
sent back from the front with fever or
dysentery. One of them was a young man
named Ellis who had been in my office in
Johannesburg, and who now held us
enthralled with his war stories …
Here, in my hall, I use electrical power
to operate a computer, which brings me on
the screen: THE FILE KITCHENER
Kitchener arrived in
Durban with Lord
Roberts on the RMS Dunottar Castle and
the massive British reinforcements of
December 1899. Officially holding the
title of chief of staff, he was in
practice a second-in-command, and
commanded a much-criticised frontal
assault at the Battle of Paardeberg in
February 1900.
Following the defeat of the conventional
Boer forces, Kitchener succeeded Roberts
as overall commander in November 1900,
and after the failure of a reconciliatory
peace treaty in February 1901 (due to
British cabinet veto) which Kitchener had
negotiated with the Boer leaders,
Kitchener inherited and expanded the
successful strategies, including
concentration camps and the scorched
earth policy, devised by Roberts to force
the Boer commandos to submit.
In a brutal campaign, these strategies
removed civilian support from the Boers
with a scorched earth policy of
destroying Boer farms, slaughtering
livestock, building blockhouses as
defence along important traffic lines,
and moving women, children and the
elderly into concentration camps.
1
During that time, I was busy with
church work among other things, doing all
I could to help Bishop Jolivet, who had
by now celebrated his golden jubilee, and
hoped to build a cathedral in Durban
before retiring. Although the town was
busy collecting funds for soldiers’
comforts, we managed to obtain some funds
for the new cathedral. I organised
concerts in the Town Hall.
There was no time to reflect, I had to
take care of my family, of the bishop’s
cathedral … That Kitchener had
established fifty concentration camps
where almost twenty-seven thousand women
and children died of measles, typhoid
fever, malnutrition … all this I
read now in this file.
The camps lacked
space, food,
sanitation, medicine, and medical care,
leading to rampant disease and a
staggering thirty-four point four per
cent death rate for those Boers who
entered. The biggest critic of the camps
was the Englishwoman, humanitarian and
welfare worker Emily Hobhouse. She
arrived at the camp at Bloemfontein on
24th January 1901 and was shocked by the
conditions she encountered:
„They went to sleep without any
provision having been made for them and
without anything to eat or to drink. I
saw crowds of them along railway lines in
bitterly cold weather, in pouring rain,
hungry, sick, dying and dead. Soap was an
article that was not dispensed. The water
supply was inadequate. No bedstead or
mattress was procurable. Fuel was scarce
and had to be collected from the green
bushes on the slopes of the kopjes (small
hills) by the people themselves. The
rations were extremely meagre and when,
as I frequently experienced, the actual
quantity dispensed fell short of the
amount prescribed, it simply meant
famine.“
When she returned to England, she
received scathing criticism and hostility
from the British government and many of
the media but eventually succeeded in
obtaining more funding to help the
victims of the war.
The British Liberal leader at the time,
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, denounced
what he called the „methods of
barbarism“.
The British government eventually agreed
to set up the Fawcett Commission to
investigate her claims, under Millicent
Fawcett, which corroborated her account
of the shocking conditions.
Once I switch off the computer, the dark
monitor will reflect my own face, ageless
… then I bow again over my notebook
and scribble down …
After having studied
the KITCHENER FILE, I visited Elria
Wessels. She is director of the
Boer-War-Museum in Bloemfontein. She
showed me the location where the camp
existed. She described to me how it had
looked like …
Many Britons, including myself, did not
want to face this chapter of our history.
The Boers elevated it to the level of a
folk tale.
Both attempts deform history.
Emily Hobhouse was able to see with
her own eyes the British concentration
camps. She was able to return und to tell
the British public about the horror and
to accuse British authorities —
without endangering her own safety or
freedom.
Charles Aked, a Baptist minister in
Liverpool, was not that lucky. He said on
22nd December 1901, Peace Sunday: „Great
Britain cannot win the battles without
resorting to the last despicable
cowardice of the most loathsome cur on
earth — the act of striking a brave
man’s heart through his wife’s
honour and his child’s life. The
cowardly war has been conducted by
methods of barbarism ... the
concentration camps have been Murder
Camps.“ Afterward, a crowd followed
him home and broke the windows of his
house.
But the difference with Nazi-Deutschland
is: individual protest there against
barbarism of the state would have lead
the protesters themselves into
concentration camps.
Therefore:
The cattle-wagons remain on the track.
Kitchener’s victims need their
voices to be heard as well.
Valid is the spoken word!
Click!
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