October 29, 2004
By Lucille Davie
IN the Slovo Courtyard at the Old Fort in Johannesburg, little altered in decades, writer Thomas Pakenham, dressed casually in open-neck shirt and slightly crumpled trousers, introduced his Boer War talk this week with: "My wife went to see Michael Cain in the movie 'Zulu' - that rubbish - and came back with shining eyes and said: 'Why don't you write a book about the Boer War? And I did'."
Pakenham published "The Boer War" in 1979, after 10 years of painstaking research, and hearing him talk, he sounds like he's scrawled (his description) the last paragraph of the book just last week. He's eloquent, bright as a Boer guerrilla on the scent of a Brit, charming and funny.
Pakenham, an Anglo-Irishman who lives in a castle in Ireland, authored "The Scramble for Africa" too, and in recent years has turned his attention to trees, another of his passions, writing several books on unusual trees. Two weeks previously he spoke at the Constitutional Court about one of his books, "Remarkable trees of the world".
The Constitutional Court at night
The fort, although a very significant Johannesburg building, played no role in the war, aside from a place where three prisoners were executed and buried in its grounds, after the British took control of Johannesburg on 31 May 1900. They were: Burger Vermaak, who was court-martialled and shot in October 1901, and buried not in a coffin but a shroud.
Cornelis Broeksma visited concentration camps and smuggled out information to European newspapers concerning the horrifying conditions of detention of women and children. He was found guilty of high treason, shot by firing squad at the Fort in September 1901 and buried in the courtyard. His body was later exhumed and he now lies in the Braamfontein Cemetery.
And, David Wernick was shot for being a Boer sympathiser.
The fort, designed and built by President Paul Kruger's architect Sytze Wierda in 1899, was planned by Kruger to keep an eye on the burgeoning gold-mining town and the over-zealous uitlanders, who threatened to upset Kruger's relatively orderly Transvaal. It was not built to defend the town - guns faced towards the town - but in its 105-year history not a single shot was ever fired from its ramparts.
It was only after the war that the fort came into its own . . . as a prison, its primary function until the 1980s when it was finally closed. In the early 1900s it played horrible host to a range of people: Mahatma Gandhi, who was held within its walls four times between 1908 and 1913; the white mine workers in the 1922 Rand Revolt; the fascist Afrikaner movement of the 1942 Ossewabrandwag; the 1956 Treason trialists, including Oliver Tambo, Helen Joseph and Nelson Mandela, and those picked up from the 1976 student uprisings.
Over the past two years it's undergone a major transformation and is now the site of the country's Constitutional Court, with construction continuing on the site to eventually house a range of human rights organisations. It's notorious No 4 "Native Goal" is now a significant museum and the Old Fort is an exhibition, conference and function space, retaining its distressed look of peeling, high walls, enclosing courtyards and prison cells.
Interviews and research
Around 100 people attended the talk, sitting at white-bedecked tables lit by flickering lamps, with tasty finger foods and a cool glass of wine, in sober contrast to the solitary confinement cells alongside the courtyard, the thick doors of which stand wide open, inviting visitors in to gasp at the closeness of the space.
Pakenham interviewed 70 people, all over 86 years in the 1970s and now dead. He learnt Dutch and Afrikaans so as to translate accurately from diaries and clippings. But there was something even more enticing about researching the book. "I loved the treasure hunt of research, it was thrilling."
He adds: "Even more exciting was when someone tells you they have their grandfather's diary - voyeurism of the very highest order."
Pakenham, speaking without notes, then highlighted some snippets that don't appear in the book.
Like that Lord Alfred Milner (high commissioner for South Africa, 1897-1905) kept a mistress back in Crystal Palace in London, a woman by the name of Cecile.
"Does he look like a man with a girlfriend? Good luck to him," says Pakenham, with a broad smile, obviously very taken with the mischievousness of it.
He continues: "Milner was a German trying to be an Englishman, he spoke with a slight German accent, and he longed to belong . . . he was an English race patriot." But in almost the same breath Pakenham says that the war was avoidable, but that Milner was the "main driving force" behind its commencement.
He writes in his book: "It would have been easy, Milner later confessed to his intimates, to patch things up with Kruger, and settle those difficulties with the Uitlanders in a Great Deal that could have lasted five, ten or fifteen years."
In love
Pakenham says that one morning he woke up and said to his wife: "I've fallen in love." The lucky recipient of that love was Sir Redvers Buller, Commanding Officer of the 1st Army Corps, and for Pakenham, it was a "passionate love affair".
"I was determined to show he wasn't as stupid as people thought." For starters, Buller opposed farm burning, a war policy perfected and refined by Field-Marshall Kitchener, who introduced the scorched earth policy, in which everything was razed, including fruit trees planted by farmers.
What was distinctive about the Boer War was that it was the first time guerrilla warfare was used, and the British had no counter-measure to it. The Boers, says Pakenham, were "natural hunters" who knew their terrain very well, making it very difficult for cumbersome battalions with heavy military hardware, to close in on them. It was Buller, says Pakenham in his book, who "was the innovator in countering Boer tactics. The proper use of cover, of infantry advancing in rushes, co-ordinated in turn with creeping barrages of artillery: these were the tactics of truly modern war . . . " which Buller evolved in battle in Natal.
"Buller didn't actually win wars, he won ground, he repulsed the enemy so that at the end of the day he wasn't where he'd begun at the beginning of the day."
Pakenham met Buller's nephew while doing his research, and "he invited me to stay over - poor fool. Early the next morning I looked around the house and under the billiard table I found a bundle of amazing letters to his wife - that's history".
Blacks in the war
Pakenham recounts an extraordinary interview in North West province: he interviewed a Colonel Meyer in Potchefstroom in 1970, who called his black labourer, Piet, to chat to Pakenham. Speaking Afrikaans, Piet talked of "we Boers", and Pakenham thought there was some mistake, and turned to Meyer. "Yes, he is saying he is a Boer, he was a Boer, he is one of us." Pakenham simply says: "It was very moving."
Unlike many authors on the Boer War, Pakenham set out to investigate the contribution of blacks in the war.
"Blacks were deeply involved in every level of the war, and suffered much more than whites." Pakenham says that there were at least 100 000 blacks "fighting" on the British side, and 50 000 on the Boer side - blacks were engaged as trench diggers, runners, wagon drivers and farm labourers.
"Kitchener admitted that 15 000 blacks were killed," says Pakenham, adding that it was in fact much more than that. "The black contribution was simply air brushed out of the war." There were some 80 black concentration camps throughout the country, two of those in Johannesburg. Historians indicate that the true figure of black deaths is closer to 24 000.
But one place black involvement was well documented was at the siege of Mafeking, where there were 1 000 blacks and 1 000 whites under arms. Here the most serious issue was food, and blacks not assisting in the defence of the town were offered an alternative: stay in the town and starve, or move to the next town about 110km away, through the Boer lines, possibly facing starvation along the way. Hundreds stayed and starved to death.
In fact when the siege ended after seven months, with the British coming to their compatriots' rescue, there was plenty of food, enough to feed the blacks as well, says Pakenham.
Boer War lessons
Pakenham considers the lessons of the Boer War for modern leaders, and wonders whether, if George Bush had read about the Boer War, he would have invaded Iraq.
"Both wars were avoidable, sanctions were containing Saddam. Both wars were about strategically important resources - gold and oil," says Pakenham.
But what drove the aggressors in both wars was a "liberationalist feeling" - liberating Iraqis from Saddam, and liberating citizens from the "iron heel" of Kruger.
Pakenham contemplates the question: "How would it have helped if we'd had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the Boer War to calm things, to allow the wounds to heal?"
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