Harrismith

Most Gauteng holiday makers break their journey to the KZN Coast at one of the Ultra City or Star Stop facilities at Harrismith or Van Reenen’s Pass. Once fortified with fuel, fast food and soft drinks, they continue on their way, aware they are halfway to Durban.

This is a pity as they miss the opportunity to visit one of the more interesting and historical cemeteries in South Africa. This is the old Harrismith Municipal Cemetery, situated north-east of the corner of Laksman and Greyling Streets.

Harrismith was established in 1849 and is one of five towns in South Africa named after Sir Harry and Lady Juanita Smith. The other four towns are Ladismith in the Western Cape, Ladysmith in KZN, Smithfield as well as Aliwal North, which commemorates Smith’s victory over the Sikhs in 1846. But I digress. 

The Harrismith Cemetery contains a number of historical graves which link us to momentous events in our history: 

1. The now almost forgotten War of 1865 to 1868 between the Free State and Basutoland, also known as the Sequiti War;
2. The Anglo Zulu War of 1879;
3. The South African War of 1899 to 1902;
4. The 1914 Rebellion; and
5. World War I.

When entering this cemetery, the British Garden of Remembrance, about half an acre in extent, lies to the right of the cemetery roadway.

It contains the graves of 437 imperial soldiers of which, 111 were killed in action or died of their wounds. In the Free State Province, only the President...

During the South African War of 1899-1902 blockhouses formed an essential part of British military strategy against Dutch forces. Initially these were fairly substantial and were used to guard key military points, but once the war moved into its final stages, they were used, together with barbed wire, as a means of limiting the movement of Republican commandos. All in all, some 8000 blockhouses were built over a period of two years, and although most were eventually dismantled, a number still remain in silent testimony of a bitter and foolish war.

When war broke out in October 1899 the British army was faced with the problem of engaging an enemy in the southern African interior with lines of communication stretching some 800-1200 km. The nearest available ports were Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and East London, and the only rapid means of reaching the theatre of war available to them was the Cape’s newly-developed railway system whose lines had only reached Colesberg in 1883, Kimberley in 1885, and Mafeking in 1894. The shorter route from Durban had been cut off early on in the war by the Republican invasion of Natal, and in order to limit the threat of Republican attacks upon the railway infrastructure further south, the British began to build a series of blockhouses to guard key railway points and bridges.

At first the men on sentry duty lived in either army tents or in corrugated iron sheds provided by the railways. However these structures offered little protection from...