Val is a tiny place with a big history. It has a permanent population of eight. The Easter weekend was chosen for the 2024 Boer and Brit Day festivities. This annual cultural festival of all things Boer and British circa 1900 is the brainchild of Rita Britz who owns the Val Hotel and most other old properties in the small town.
Val Hotel (Kathy Munro)
The small hamlet of Val comes alive once a year when it hosts its unique Boer and Brit Day. The event has been on the calendar for Boer War history buffs since 2007. Rita’s efforts are strongly backed by military historian and Johannesburg lawyer David Scholtz. The festival takes place in late March or early April as it was in April 1902 that Val earned a unique place in South African history (read on to find out why).
The main railway line runs through the town and the dominant structures on the landscape are the giant grain silos. Surprisingly a train on its way to the coast rumbles through. It is the proverbial one-horse town, but not on its day of celebration when the farmers and their families arrive on horseback in their four by fours, towing horseboxes and farm trucks. Word has spread and a few hundred people gather to enjoy a festival and fair on an autumn day in the...
The Hardijzer Photographic Research Collection (HPRC) contains a considerable number of Cabinet Card format photographs of Anglo-Boer War soldiers, both Brit and Boer. Images in these formats are popular collector’s items, more so when the soldier whose likeness has been captured is known.
The Cabinet Card format photograph replaced the smaller Carte-de-Visite format photograph. The Cabinet Card format became the preferred photographic format produced by studios worldwide, also during the Anglo-Boer War.
The first South Africa-based photographer to have introduced the Cabinet Card format photograph was the Cape Town-based photographer SB Barnard (September 1867). This format only became universally adopted in 1868 and was in use until the early 1900s.
Ironically, even though introduced in 1867 in South Africa, the Cabinet Card only superseded the Carte-de-Visite format in South Africa from 1872 onwards. Although the popularity of this format waned internationally by the early 1900s, South African photographers used this format until the mid-1910s.
Once the photograph was captured and developed, it was pasted on a standard-sized cardboard (15.9 cm x 10.8 cm). The resultant Cabinet Card often contained the preprinted details of the photographer as well as the town where the studio was located. South African photographers mainly ordered these pre-printed cards from the UK or France.
During the Anglo-Boer War, soldiers, mainly British soldiers, had their likeness captured either before they left their hometowns in the United Kingdom, or whilst on South African soil, or their return home – these surviving images provide for a rich documentary military...
A motto developed by myself over the years in my ongoing search for elusive historical photographs is: “Do not underestimate what could be found in drawers or little boxes”, resulting in me always curiously opening drawers or boxes when visiting antique shops, charity stores or attending car boot sales in that they may just contain some photographic surprises.
It then so happens that I opened a small Royal Arms Specials cigar box in a coastal antique shop a few years ago. What did it contain?
Some one hundred photographs from the Anglo-Boer War period. This cigar box was found in one of my favourite antique shops in Kalkbay (a shop that sadly no longer exists). Kalkbay, a coastal town in the Western Cape, has always been a reliable source for finding antique South African photographs.
On analysing the content of the cigar box, the original amateur photographs (8,5 x 8,5 cm in size) were found to be images captured by the war correspondent David Steward Howie. Howie was attached to the newspaper Times of Natal.
The photographs are not of professional quality but have become valuable historical documents in their own right.
Most of the photographs, with some duplication, were pasted onto pieces of paper on which Howie captured handwritten notes. Although McCrachen (2015) only has Howie recorded as a reporter for one publication, the assumption must be made that the duplicated images were possibly meant for another publication.
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Remembrance tourism is all about visiting battlefields, fortifications, war cemeteries, memorials, etc., and is fast becoming a popular pastime.
During the last few years, Lorraine and I engaged in this type of tourism by viewing some Anglo Boer War sites and memorials at Colesberg, Noupoort, Middelburg, Aberdeen, Nieu Bethesda, Willowmore and Uniondale.
We omitted Graaff-Reinet because to view its historical sites would have added considerably to an already hectic travelling schedule.
Colesberg, Aliwal North, Burgersdorp and Stormberg were about as far south-east as the Boer forces advanced during their 1st invasion of the Cape Colony, upon the outbreak of war. During this buoyant early period, possibly misled by Republican hubris that the war would soon be over, 10 000 Cape Rebels enthusiastically joined up. But despite victories at Colesberg and Stormberg, by early 1900 the Republican forces were retreating across the Orange River to try and stem the advance of the powerful Imperial army along the railway line to Kimberley and from there to Bloemfontein. Abandoned by the retreating Boer commandos, many Cape Rebels quietly returned to their farms.
From October 1900, captured Cape Colonial Rebels were charged under the Special Tribunal’s Act. Rebels sentenced by these Special Courts were treated so leniently that it bordered on amnesty. Unfortunately, these lenient sentences encouraged rather than prevented Cape Rebels from joining the fray once the war proved far from over.
To the British, the war appeared to be won once they had captured Bloemfontein and Pretoria. So much so, that following the...
Philaphotographologist – what a highfalutin word! The word does not actually exist. Rackham (2022) applied his creativity and constructed the word following some discussion on the internet.
Personally, I rather like the word. It did take me a minute or two to get my tongue around the pronunciation though (feela-foto-grafologist).
Rackham (2022) constructed the word as follows: Phila (to love), derived from French, followed by the two Greek words phōtós (light) and graphê (drawing) and concluding with the Latin word logia (branch of knowledge).
The word philaphotographologist translates into more understandable language, namely photograph enthusiast or photograph collector. That is what this article is about, an early South African photo enthusiast.
As a psychologist, I am intrigued by the visual orientation, or the lack thereof, in the human race.
Some of us are more inclined to a heightened visual curiosity compared to others. Those of us who have a lower level of aesthetic visual appreciation will be less inclined to give much attention to visual imagery, in this instance photographs, whilst to the visually curious, photographs provide visual stimulation.
In my mind, a person has to be visually curious to be referred to as a photo enthusiast, or a philaphotographologist for that matter.
One such person was Frederick William Willis. British-born, he became a South African citizen, initially attached to the South African Constabulary.
He loved photographs – so much so that he passionately constructed photo albums containing various themes.
South Africa is a country rich in heritage. We have incredible paleoanthropological and archaeological sites, wonderful geoheritage, and a spectrum of historical spaces and places that reveal the multi-layered stories of our past. Some of this heritage we take for granted such as the historical buildings in our towns and cities that we pass every day. Many are in a poor state but some have found new uses that have helped them to thrive into the 21st century. But what about sites and buildings in remote areas that aren't protected or have yet to find new uses?
I have been studying the blockhouses of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) since 2009 when an article in The Getaway Magazine sparked an interest which lit a passionate fire to discover more about these structures. Since then, I have documented and visited the vast majority of the survivors and written a couple of books in the process. It has been quite an adventure and one which started, right on my doorstep. The closest surviving blockhouse to my house is the one at Witkop, 30km south of Johannesburg near Walkerville on the R59 next to the Engen Garage. A trip to this blockhouse for a wreath laying on the anniversary of the signing of the Vereeniging Peace Treaty on 31 May, has prompted me to write about the sad decline of these unique heritage sites.
Recently I came across what may well be classed as the first example of what we now call "electronic warfare". It was described by no less a writer than Winston Churchill and it appears in his book "London to Ladysmith via Pretoria" (1900).
This intriguing incident occurred during the attempt by the British Army to relieve Ladysmith, then under siege by the Boers. I shall leave it to Churchill to describe what happened:
That night we tried to congratulate or encourage Ladysmith, and the searchlight perseveringly flashed the Morse code on the clouds. But before it had been working half an hour, the Boer searchlight saw it and hurried to interfere, flickering, blinking, and crossing to try to confuse the dots and dashes, and appeared to us who watched this curious aerial battle - Briton and Boer fighting each other in the sky with vibrations of ether - to confuse them more effectually. Next morning, however, the sun came out for uncertain periods, and Ladysmith was able to tell her own story briefly and jerkily, but still a vey satisfactory account.
It occurred to me that the searchlight used by the Army signaller in tapping out the Morse code, was most likely mounted on an armoured train and somewhere in my collection of Boer War artefacts was a photograph of just such a train. Not only was there a "shutter telegraph" mounted upon a searchlight on an armoured train but the train carried two significant sign boards attached to its...
This article is based on a talk by Dr Mpho Manaka to the Archaeological Society on 1 June 2023. It was titled: Herstory lost in Memory: The Amnesia on the Commemoration of African Women in the South African War .
Dr Mpho Manaka, who recently completed her PhD at the University of Pretoria, presented an illustrated talk on a neglected aspect of our history, namely the experiences of African women in the concentration camps set up during the South African War of 1899-1902.
It is a difficult aspect of the war to research as, unlike the rich trove of recollections and diaries left behind by Boer women interned in these camps, Black people left no record of their camp experience other than a handful of testimonies collected by researchers at Wits University during the 1970s. The only recorded recollection by an African woman is that of the nonagenarian Emilia Mahlodi Pooe who as a young woman was interred at the Vredefort Road camp for two and a half years. For the remainder, the experiences of black women must be sympathetically inferred from those of their counterparts in the white camps.
Shelters at the Black camps (War Museum of the Boer Republics)
Recently, returning from a tour to Mapungubwe through the Archaeological Society, one of our travelling companions requested a brief stopover at the Jewish precinct in the old Polokwane Cemetery, to visit the graves of his late maternal grandparents.
This suited me, as I wished to photograph the memorials to the casualties of the British Empire, who had died in the Northern Transvaal during the South African War 1899 - 1902.
The cemetery in Dahl Street was surprisingly well maintained and it was comforting to note the presence of a nearby security guard.
The Jewish precinct and Military Garden of Remembrance are near one another and while my friend visited his grandparents’ graves, I browsed around the war graves.
The main South African War Memorial, to the left in the above photograph, appears to have been erected by the SA War Graves Board and contains the legend, ‘In Proud Remembrance. Soldiers originally buried at Chuniespoort, Fort Edward, Haenertsburg, Naboomspruit, Nylstroom and district, and Warmbaths now lie buried here at Pietersburg.’
The names of 133 Imperial soldiers from 32 military units are engraved on this memorial. Unusual for memorials to the South African War, it also refers to three unknown soldiers from the First World War and names three members of Geyser’s Commando killed during the 1914 Afrikaner Rebellion.
During the 1950’s and 1960’s, the War Graves Board relocated the remains of numerous Imperial soldiers from some of the more outlying and isolated battlefields and cemeteries to the nearest towns to ensure...
There’s a war out there! Picture this…A dark smoke-filled room, the smell of burning oil, and the near-rhythmic sound of an instrument in use – the magic lantern.
The dimly lit room is filled with a curious audience eagerly awaiting the start of the show – a projection of images on a blank wall or screen.
What follows has them mesmerised. War-related images are projected one after the other from a single light source, fuelled by an oil lamp or by an electric light source. Occasional gasps and murmurs of awe can be heard from those in attendance.
The theme for the evening – The Anglo-Boer War.
The audience has a boundaryless interest in examining the sketches and drawings, alive with movement, which conjures scenes of their countrymen’s heroism and sacrifice, the Tommy Atkins of Britain.
The atmosphere is one of excitement, wonder, and anticipation. Ultimately there is even a parent in the audience who states: “My son is there”, adding to the patriotic emotions and stirring the curiosity of the remainder of the audience.
The audience hangs onto every word uttered by the ‘storyteller’ standing and narrating the images being projected one by one, and in doing so, assisting in creating mental images for the audience of the war down south.
Narratives became important during these magic lantern show evenings. Given the theme of war, the narrator, or storyteller, was in all probability triumphant, patriotic, and at times melodramatic in approach.
