Late last year I purchased a copy of the Diamond Fields Advertiser, Illustrated Christmas Number of 1901. It is a remarkable document — a window into a mature Kimberley returning to normal life after the trauma of the South African War (Anglo-Boer War). The town had endured the long months of siege (14th October 1899 – 15th February 1900) and although the war was still in progress at the time of publication, it was already receding as a front line. British authority had been reasserted, and a process of civic recovery was underway.
The publication offers a vivid contemporary lens through which to view Kimberley at this moment of transition. Advertisements, group photographs, and civic commentary reveal a community re-establishing itself — socially confident, commercially active, and unmistakably shaped by a single dominant industry. There was only one enterprise of consequence, and the entire local economy revolved around it: diamonds.
Among the many articles, one drew my attention. It described a proposed memorial to the curiously named Honoured Dead, designed by Herbert Baker. Even on the printed page, the project conveyed an architectural ambition far beyond that of a conventional monument.
Cover of the 1901 Edition
It was a moment in time when Baker had a well-established practice in...
Even in the age of imperial chicanery, the audacity of the Jameson Raid was astounding. Imagine, two sizeable groups of well-armed mounted men, departing from Pitsane in present-day Botswana and Mafeking (now Mahikeng), respectively, at sunset on 29 December 1895, for a three-day canter to Johannesburg to overthrow Kruger’s government and proclaim it a colony of the British Empire.
Perhaps the closest modern counterpart is the so-called ‘Wonga Coup’ of 2004, to replace the President of Equatorial Guinea with an exiled opposition leader in return for preferential oil rights to corporations affiliated with those involved in the coup.
Ever since that death-or-glory ride, the fate of several of those men of the Mashonaland Mounted and the Bechuanaland Border Police units, who comprised the Jameson Raiders, have been lost in the fog of history and war. This article investigates where those bold policemen who were killed in clashes with the Boer burghers were buried.
By the mid 1890’s it was obvious that in the area immediately south of Johannesburg the world’s richest and greatest gold reefs ever, have been discovered. To the chagrin of Cecil John Rhodes, it also became clear that the extensive gold reefs he and other investors had hoped to find north of the Limpopo River, did not exist.
To Rhodes and other like-minded Randlords, it was intolerable that an ignorant and corrupt Boer government should rule the country where all this immense underground wealth existed. Gradually plans were laid to seize, if not the whole of the...
In 1905, two nearly identical memorials were erected to commemorate the Scottish Horse Regiment, a unit that served with distinction during the South African War (Anglo-Boer War). These monuments, located on the Esplanade of Edinburgh Castle in Scotland and atop Caledonia Koppie in Johannesburg, South Africa, honour the officers and men who lost their lives during the war.
Scottish Horse Memorials in Edinburgh (left) and Johannesburg (right)
Plaque on the Edinburgh memorial (The Heritage Portal)
The Scottish Horse was established in late 1900 when Lord Kitchener asked the Marquess of Tullibardine to raise a regiment of Scotsmen in South Africa. The regiment grew quickly, expanding into two regiments, and saw active service in the Western Transvaal. After the war ended in 1902, the regiments were disbanded at Edinburgh Castle following the repatriation of Australian volunteers and discharge of South African members.
Edinburgh Castle from below (The Heritage Portal)...
The ‘Northern Rhodesia Great War Memorial’ just inside the entrance to the Victoria Falls World Heritage Site, at Livingstone, Zambia, was erected in 1922 to ‘The Memory of Northern Rhodesians who gave their lives for the Empire in the Great War 1914 – 1918’.
The red sandstone slabs of this Memorial were quarried at the Pasipas Quarry, near the railway line to the north of Bulawayo.
According to Rob Burrett, a Zimbabwean archaeologist and historian, the Pasipas Quarry was one of two great quarries that provided building stone for the fine buildings of Bulawayo, during the period 1893 to 1920. This Quarry also served as an important supplier of sandstone gravestones during this period.
It furthermore supplied the sandstone slabs for the Honoured Dead Memorial at Kimberley and the old Siege Memorial in Mafikeng (now Mahikeng), and possibly other memorials and tombstones in South Africa, as well.
Siege Memorial at Mahikeng
Honoured Dead Memorial at Kimberley
The Bulawayo architectural partnership of Frank J Scott & James Roberston was responsible for designing the impressive Memorial...
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...
In August last year, Flo Bird, SJ de Klerk and I started planning a memorial to the victims of the 1922 Strike / Rand Revolt. As far as we know, there is no other memorial still standing in South Africa, and we wanted to mark the centenary of this tragic event. We first approached the Minerals Council (originally Chamber of Mines) for financial support but they refused on account of it being a racially sensitive subject – their words. In the end, we were able to fund this memorial with generous donations from the City of Johannesburg, Johannesburg Heritage Foundation, SJ de Klerk and some of our Friends. It was to be a joint venture with the Friends of Johannesburg Cemeteries.
There were initially several ideas for an inscription and for the stone we would erect. Many ideas fell by the wayside but one thing we did know was that it should be erected in Braamfontein cemetery where it was less likely to be defaced and vandalized.
Braamfontein Cemetery (The Heritage Portal)
There are far more 1922 Strike graves in Brixton but conditions are so bad there that no-one would visit a memorial there. Towards the end of last year, we had decided that the stone should be a rough block of granite, preferably with the drill holes on...
Three times in its history, the Free State went to war against the Basutos and their king, Moshoeshoe. That was 1858, 1865-66 and 1867-68. It was a turbulent time for both sides, which included the time in between the wars.
In this article I am reporting on some of the trekker monuments, graves and fortifications that still exist from that time. This is not a complete collection, it is just items I have come across in my travels.
First a summary of the historical events. Conflict between the Basutos and the trekkers started as the first trekboers crossed the Orange River to seek better pastures.
The confusing boundary situation between the Basutos and the Free State
Underlying the conflict was the confusing situation regarding the boundary between the Free State and the Basutos. The map above illustrates this. There was the Napier line, the Warden line, the various attempts in between to get some agreement and finally the present borders. When the first trekboers came over the Orange River they saw this as empty, uninhabited land, but the Basutos viewed it as the land of their ancestors. When the British took over the Free State in 1848, the Warden line was declared as the boundary between the Free State and the Basutos. Little heedance was given to this border by the...
Our recent year-end holiday trip to the South Coast of KZN provided a perfect excuse to overnight at the popular bird watching village of Wakkerstroom. If you are not a birder or a ‘twitcher’ as some call it, you may be excused for not being quite sure of the whereabouts of this quaint village, some 26 kilometres east of Volksrust. Wakkerstroom boasts an impressive variety of birdlife consisting of wetland, grassland, and forest species and around its extensive wetlands there are four strategically placed and well-maintained bird hides. It is said the village can provide accommodation to nearly 300 tourists, many of whom arrive for the birding, hiking, mountain biking and off roading opportunities here. Although we overnighted in the Wakkerstroom Hotel, I think we would have preferred, if we stayed for any longer period, one of the nicer self-catering cottages or houses available in the village.
Nowadays, most Gauteng visitors to the popular beach resorts of KZN race along the N3 to Durban, forgetting the journey forms an integral part of any holiday. Years ago, long before the N3 became a beautifully graded and levelled toll road, the alternative R23 via Standerton was promoted as a slightly longer but more scenic alternative route and so it proved on our journey.
I had previously visited Wakkerstroom in 2016 with the Mpumalanga Heritage Society when erstwhile Town Clerk and later Mayor, the then sprightly octogenarian but now sadly the late, Chris Smit pointed out various sites associated with South African War...
This article "Slave Sales and Cape Town's Slave Tree Memorial" by Jaqueline Lalou Meltzer was previously published in the Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa volume 73, number 1 (June 2019): 17-36 and is reprinted with the permission of the Editor of the Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa. Click here to download the original article containing footnotes.
A quaint custom was observed in the Cape in the old days by the less inhibited citizens. They used to “bury the old year” a few minutes before midnight and immediately afterwards they greeted the New Year with shouts of: “The year is dead – long live the year!” That was in the days when New Year revellers of Cape Town belonged mainly to sporting clubs, and the Afrikaans name for them was klopse (clubs). The ceremony was preceded by festive marches to the yew [sic] tree that used to stand on Church Square. There they gave the old year, with all its disappointments, its fears and its sorrows, a symbolical burial, and one old writer describing the event in 1888 said that their torchlight processions with “impromptu bands innumerable” added “to the grandeur of the rites of the dead year.” Cape Times - 29 December 1979
Located on the traffic island in Spin Street in Cape Town is a memorial inscription which, built into the paving, is now almost illegible owing to the heavy flow of pedestrian traffic. It is just possible to make out the apartheid-style...
A stunning new mosaic with a message of Ubuntu has brought hope and dignity to a landmark site which has in recent times been mired in squalor and decay. Highly visible to passing traffic, the small park occupies a busy corner opposite Darras Centre in Kensington.
After suffering repeated vandalism, the war memorial that occupied the space was successfully restored and relocated to Bezuidenhout Park earlier this year. Now settled at its new site, the war memorial has been given a new lease of life in spacious and tranquil surroundings.
The vandalised Bezuidenhout Valley War Memorial in 2018
Dignity restored: the Bezuidenhout War Memorial at its new home in Bezuidenhout Park (Mayat-Hart Architects)
Back at the mini-park, the newly-created mosaic wall marks the site where the old memorial stood, which continues as a place of memory and reflection. A side panel carries an outline image of monument, with the words:
First erected on this site in the 1920s, the Bezuidenhout Valley War Memorial remembers men of this suburb who died in World...
A casualty rate of 10% of forces engaged in battle is today considered as catastrophic. British casualties at Isandlwana number some 70%, which constitutes annihilation. Zulu numbers have always been exaggerated, but current thinking is approximately 3000 dead out of an attacking force of about 20000, which works out at more than 10%. So the battle may also be considered catastrophic for the Zulus, although they did come away with the entire contents of the camp, which was their ultimate objective.
Zulu King Zwelithini has asked on a number of occasions why the names of the Zulu dead are not recorded somewhere? The answer is that there were no written records at that time, and thus the names have sadly blown away into the winds of history.
In 1999 a monument to the Zulu dead was erected at Isandlwana to coincide with the 120th Anniversary of the battle. It consists of a gigantic representation of a warrior’s necklace or isiQu, the Zulu equivalent of a campaign medal. A “been there, got the T shirt” award, NOT the so-called “Zulu VC” so beloved by some historians. Traditionally the necklace is either made by cutting up one’s walking stick and stringing the blocks together or else specifically from imsimbithi wood (Natal Olive).
The necklace is shaped in the bull’s horn formation, pointing towards the hill where the warriors died. Around the base are a number of sleeping pillows or iziqiki, symbolizing that the warriors are “sleeping”, and this is thus a monument...
Last weekend (Sunday 3rd February 2019) I joined ten heritage stalwarts of Kensington who came together to acknowledge history and pay homage to a remarkable war memorial and the men whose names once appeared on it. We gathered because during January 2019 the memorial had been extensively and probably irreparably damaged. Erica Lűttich had together with her students created an art installation by wrapping the memorial in cloth. We Johannesburg residents and heritage protectors are saddened, shocked and appalled by this latest assault on one of Johannesburg best known war heritage landmarks with a rich history. It is one of Johannesburg’s earliest war memorials, erected in 1905 - making it 114 years old this year.
A damaged section of the memorial (The Heritage Portal)
Missing plaques and graffiti (The Heritage Portal)
