Vincent Carruthers

The Battle of Diamond Hill took place on the 11 and 12 June 1900. Sir Ian Hamilton, one of the generals who took part in the battle, described it as the turning point in the South African War, so in this Memoir we look at what happened and why it was so important.

The Battle of Diamond Hill (from V. Carruthers. The Magaliesberg)

An earlier Memoir told how, as Lord Roberts, Commander in Chief of the British forces, prepared to occupy Pretoria on 5 June 1900, General Louis Botha left to rally the remnants of the Boer army. Botha had been persuaded to continue the war by the Free State President Martinus Steyn and further encouragement now came with the news that Christiaan de Wet’s Free State commandos were wreaking havoc with the extended British line of communication between Pretoria and Cape Town. British columns had been defeated at Lindley and Heilbron and rail links were repeatedly being disrupted. The Transvaal commandos were despondent and exhausted after months of defeat and retreat and many had returned to their farms thinking that the war was over. But, encouraged by Botha’s revived determination and the news from the Free State, a core of about 5000  burghers were still willing to fight on. They assembled at Donkerhoek pass, which today carries...

Magalies Memoirs focus on incidents in the Magaliesberg region and perhaps not everyone knows that it was here, in the heart of the Magaliesberg Biosphere Reserve, that gold was first discovered in the Transvaal, decades before diggers rushed to Barberton or George Harrison stumbled on the Witwatersrand Main Reef. “Discovered”, of course, needs to be qualified. We know from artifacts found at places like Mapungubwe and Thulamela that gold has been mined, treasured and traded for more than a thousand years – probably much longer. It was rumour of pre-colonial gold workings that lured 19th century prospectors into the interior of southern Africa. So this memoir really tells of the first re-discovery of gold in the Transvaal – an event that ultimately led to the metal becoming the backbone of the South African economy for the next century and a half.

Journey to the Magaliesberg

That important discovery was made by Pieter Jacob Marais, son of a wealthy Paarl family, well educated, enterprising and, although suffering from mild epilepsy, an intrepid adventurer. In 1847, aged 22, he left the Cape on the start of a voyage that took him around the world. First, he went to Liverpool where he heard about the California gold rush and immediately re-embarked for America. He failed to strike gold, and like many Californian diggers, he moved on to the newer goldfields in Australia. He returned to southern Africa in 1853 intent on applying his prospecting experience on home territory. The Sand River Convention, granting...

On the southern bank of Hartbeespoort Dam lies the archaeological site of one of the oldest farming and herding settlements in South Africa. It comprised several small interlinked homesteads and was first excavated by the pioneering Wits University archaeologist Revil Mason in the 1970s.

The inhabitants of this settlement at Broederstroom were the first Iron Age people in the area, and another leading archaeologist at Wits University, Tom Huffman, later used styles and patterns on potsherds from the site to trace their origins via the KwaZulu-Natal east coast through East Africa and back to the birthplace of the Bantu languages east of Nigeria. The site reveals that people were practicing agriculture, farming livestock, making pottery and smelting iron in South Africa 1,600 years ago. They brought with them the linguistic roots of the Bantu languages now spoken by 80 per cent of South Africans, and introduced methods of farming and animal husbandry that gave them considerable advantages over the Stone Age nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life that had, until then, existed in the region.

Farming and animal husbandry

The people of Broederstroom tilled the land and stored their produce in sealed underground pits lined with cattle dung. Methane gas from the dung lining of the pit controlled insect infestations, and grain stored in this way could last for several seasons. For daily use, grain was also kept in wicker storage bins raised on stones to keep out the damp.

Later Stone Age artifacts were found at the site, and it...

At the time of writing, the coronavirus Covid-19 is still disrupting life in South Africa. In this article we recall an earlier pandemic, the so-called ‘Spanish’ Flu that devastated the world of our great-grandparents a century ago. It had a major impact in South Africa and disrupted the building of Hartbeespoort Dam. In writing this Memoir I have relied heavily on the recent Van Riebeeck Society publication (2018), In a Time of Plague: Memories of the ‘Spanish’ Flu Epidemic of 1918 in South Africa by Howard Phillips, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Cape Town. Phillips's authoritative book was timed to commemorate the centenary of the 1918 Flu epidemic but its publication shortly before the emergence of Covid-19 has been fortuitous.

A cartoon from Die Burger, 16 October 1918 reproduced in Howard Phillips’ In a Time of Plague: Memories of the ‘Spanish’ Flu Epidemic of 1918 in South Africa.

The magnitude of the 1918 flu epidemic is sometimes forgotten. In the 18 months between March 1918 and August 1919 more than 50 million people worldwide died from the disease. This far exceeded the 14 million deaths resulting from World War I itself and the 36 million who have died in the past 15 years from HIV/AIDS. South Africa was one of the worst affected countries with more than one person in 25...

The Magaliesberg has a distinguished but little-known history in astronomy. Fifty years ago, three world class observatories were located in the region. Many prominent astronomers came here to observe the southern skies and their observations had far-reaching consequences; the estimated age of the universe was doubled, moon landings were controlled, and South Africa became a leader in astronomical science.
 
In 1903 the Transvaal Observatory (later the Union Observatory) was established in Johannesburg, the first major South African observatory outside the Cape. The director, Robert Innes, initiated a working collaboration with Leiden University in Holland that lasted over seventy years and a building for the exclusive use of Leiden astronomers was built in the Union Observatory grounds in 1936. However, by the 1950s the city lights began to impair observations and a new site was found on the southern shore of Hartbeespoort Dam near Broederstroom. Coincidentally, the locality is adjacent to the Early Iron Age archaeological site later excavated by Revil Mason and Tom Huffman.

Observatory Ridge, Johannesburg (The Heritage Portal)

The historic Franklyn-Adams...