Timothy Couzens - South African Battles

Sketch map showing the locations of the sites

F OR

MY FRIENDS

C HARLES VAN O NSELEN

AND THE LATE

T ONY T RAILL

LIST OF MAPS

INTRODUCTION

History, n. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devils Dictionary

Old men ought to be explorers.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (East Coker)

There is a Zulu proverb that goes, Ukuhamba kuzal induna kuzal insikazi . Translated, it means Travelling begets a male and begets a female.

Its meaning is that when an animal is heavily pregnant you cannot tell whether it will give birth to a male or female calf.

It is used about the fortunes of a journey. You may be lucky, you may be not. Anything is possible. Expect anything.

In Zululand or in Mpumalanga a hidden cow may jump out from unfenced bush and you might crash into it.

My book Battles of South Africa was published in 2004. It has been out of print for a good while now. So when a new, enlarged edition was suggested to me I had no hesitation in agreeing. It gave me the chance to take once more to the open road, full of possibilities and unpredictabilities, mingling with the old road and past roads.

The original edition consisted of 26 chapters, each dealing with a separate battle. These have all been included here. Ten completely new chapters have been added. They are chapters (Mushroom Valley). Except for a single paragraph taken out because it was factually wrong, almost nothing has been changed in the old chapters. The new chapters, perhaps by chance, have been thematically and strategically placed. In the light of the new chapters, the old ones can be read with a new eye.

This enlarged edition has also enabled me to deal once more, and perhaps for the last time, with certain stories and themes I have long pursued, and has given me a chance to complete certain areas of research done over many years. For instance, the first (and new) chapter handles three kinds of research (the search for objects, including people; oral witness; and documentation), and the stories linked to them that have long engaged me, and (Blood River and Ophathe Gorge), inspired by an episode in historian John Labands book Rope of Sand , lets me examine a protean figure in literature and life, the alchemist and the fox, the prankster and the hustler, to which Chaucer, Ben Jonson and Herman Melvilles brilliant last novel introduced me long ago.

Many of the battles presented here are almost completely unknown, certainly to popular consciousness. Nakob, Middelpos, Mome Gorge or Mushroom Valley, for instance, are hardly household names, but each has its curiosities and fascinations and may even inspire a flash of recognition for some readers. The choice of subjects depended entirely on what interested me and where I detected an interesting story, nothing more.

As with the earlier edition, this is not an in-depth expert analysis of warfare in South Africa, nor does it offer a complete history of the country and its conflicts. Although the battles are presented chronologically the book does not offer any over-arching theory of this or that or whatnot, though there are linkages, some secretive, between chapters.

The book has three main aims. The primary one is entertainment. Each chapter can be read separately and like a short story. It is, in fact, a bedside book.

The second aim is to encourage readers, especially those slightly more adventurous (though not overly so) to travel to places they might not otherwise visit (and hence bring benefits, in the process, to out-of-the way areas that need tourism). The alternative route home, or a diversion of a couple of hours, can often breathe life into long journeys. The best moments in travel are those when you accidentally stumble across things youve never heard of. They stand out in the mind like calvaries on high promontories. And sometimes, while standing on a tall rock, as William Hazlitt suggests to us in his essay on journeys, we can overlook the precipice of years that separates us from what we once were. Only a few of the destinations are not accessible by ordinary car (though the reader should be aware that some of the directions I give, especially in the older chapters, some of which I havent revisited, may be partially out of date). Many of the places are exquisitely beautiful, all in their different ways. There is a prize (modest and appropriate to the seeker) awarded by the author for anyone who visits all 36 sites and produces tokens to prove it. After all, I did it, so why cant you?

Thirdly, South African Battles does not try to compete with any books of a similar kind, either military or travel. Quite the contrary. There are plenty of books better than mine. The whole tenor is to encourage further reading. I have learnt over many years that the more one knows about a subject and its location the more intense is the quality of the visit. These chapters are really appetisers best to go and see for yourself.

The 36 battles offered here are organised, as has been mentioned, in purely chronological order. The first chapter is on Dias because that is when written and other sources are first available. It is in no way meant to suggest that conflict in South Africa, as it is so often portrayed, begins with blackwhite confrontation, so it is not an origins myth. South Africans have no doubt been killing each other long since before whites and Arabs arrived in southern Africa perhaps for millennia.

The varying nature of the evidence in each chapter has sometimes demanded a moveable feast of styles or perspectives. The chapter on Khunwana, for instance, is a double, if not a triple, picaresque. That on Blouberg concentrates on the consciousness of a single participant. The story of Amalinde I found so astonishing I did not want to withhold my surprise. Thaba-Bosiu, on the other hand, is not a single battle but a series of events over a period of a century in which the only consistent witness is the mountain itself. In at least two battles, Salem and Nakob, not a shot was fired.