Olive Schreiner attacked by English newspapers in South Africa and in Britain for daring to criticize the Empire. Shown with het is the reverend Steytler of the Grootte Kerk in Cape Town who complained about the war atrocities committed against his fellow Afrikaners in the Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

The following is a speech Olive Schreiner which was read at a meeting of South African Women at Somerset East on October 12, 1900. At the time she was ill and could not do so herself.

I deeply regret that I am unable to be with you personally today.

I trust that strongly-worded motions, demanding fromEnglandan amnesty for all political prisoners inSouth Africa, and condemning the annexation of the Republics will be passed by you.

Twelve months ago today, the war began. Great and overwhelming have been die losses ofSouth Africaduring this time. Thousands of our bravest South Africans have died upon our battlefields; farmhouses have been destroyed, and women with young children turned homeless into our veld; thousands of men bound to us by the ties of kinship and friendship have been exiled to distant islands, many of them there to die, far from home and kindred; on every hand those we have known and honoured languish in prison as political prisoners.

Great and overwhelming have been our losses during this year. Yet, great as they have been the loss ofEnglandhas been greater.

Englandhas lost among the officers and men, who, far from their native land, have fallen in this, to them, foreign country, many of her noblest and bravest sons.

I myself have lost personally, in one of the English officers who died in the Free State, one of the oldest and most valued of my friends; a man whose humanity, and whose generosity of feeling towards a brave foe, were worthy of the best traditions of the England of the past.

England has lost heavily in her best; while her worst, the men of greed, ambition, and cunning who shaped this war, are with her still to do her further injury. Great and irreparable has been her loss in this matter.

But in another direction, she has had yet greater loss than this. She has lost forever the faith and the affection of the bulk of people in the Colony. Fourteen months ago, in spite of much that had taken place in the past, we, the bulk of the people in this Colony, believed in England, and in the power of the more righteous element in her people ultimately to overpower and control the baser and more servile. Fourteen months ago I sat in a little up-country Boer farmhouse; and when we spoke of the possibility of war, men and women alike said, “There can be no war, our Queen would never allow it. She has always loved us and been good towards us, she would never allow them to kill our kindred in the Republics. Rhodes and Chamberlain and Milner may wish for it, but Lord Salisbury has said they do not want the land or the gold of theTransvaal.Englandwould never do us this great wrong.”

Olive Schreiner in 1898, just before the Anglo-Boer War broke out.

Fourteen months ago, as you all know, there was hardly a farmhouse in the length and breadth of the Cape-Colony where the picture of the Queen was not to be found hanging on the walls. There were sad old memories of Slachtersnek, and the first attack on the independence of the Transvaal Republic, but Gladstone’s wisdom in restoring it had healed the wound; and there was a strong feeling through the length and breadth of our land that the speculator-monopolists and not the Queen and the English people were responsible for the Jameson raid.

The faith of our people inEnglands’ ultimate rectitude and desire to act with honour was, in spite of many mistakes, unshaken. “Rhodes and the speculators may desire to take their gold and land from our brothers in theTransvaal,” said an old Boer to me, “but our Queen will not let them. I have known her for more than 50 years.”

Fourteen months ago if any man had stated to me that it was possible for those things to take place which have taken place in the Colony under Martial Law, and in the neighbouring Republics, during the last year, without arousing a passionate and determined protest from the bulk of the English people, I should have laughed him to scorn. That the bulk of the people of England could sit silent and unmoved while private houses were burned down and women and young children turned homeless into the wilds in order that through wounding the affections and sympathies of the men their arms might be paralysed for further warfare – while quiet private citizens were forced into trains that their presence there might guard the lives of English soldiers at the risk of their own – while the honourable uniform of the British officer was pawned to civilians, that masquerading in that guise they might avenge themselves upon their political enemies – had one told me that these things could be, and the bulk of the English nation sit by silent and unmoved I would have regarded him as one who dreams in a fever.

That there might be war, that battlefields might run red, that fortified places might be bombarred, these things I recognise as possible, but, that the mightiest Empire that the world has seen, would expend its gold in purchasing informers; that in England itself the right to free speech would be so dead that howling mobs of thousands would attack single individuals merely endeavouring to express their thought with regard to a public matter, and life itself be endangered; that in South Africa the man or woman who exercised that primary right of the Englishman, the right to free speech, would do so with the vision of a manaole at his or her elbow, and that the very prayers of the people would be listened for by the spies of the Government – this I had not dreamed possible.

Now the bond of affection and confidence that boundEnglandtoSouth Africahas snapped.

This is how the loyalist English newspapers in South Africa and in Britain mocked the mass protest meetings of concerned South Africans who regarded Britains war on the two Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State as a disgrace and a disaster for humanity.

For myself, I have lovedEngland. Ten years of my youth were passed there; many of the men and women most bound to me by the ties of affection and sympathy are still on English soil. During those ten years I, in common with thousands of other young men and women believed that theEnglandwe loved and laboured for was a power which made for justice and peace. That she who had wept over Poland, who had sent aid to Greece, who had backed Italy in her struggle against Austria; whose writers had chanted the praises of Marathon and Thermopylae, of Wilhelm Tell and Arnold von Winkelried; whose people had expressed shame and abhorrence at the crime and blunder of George the Third and his servile Ministers when they sought to crush by force the instinct for independence and self-government in the men and women of the American Colonies; and whose people have loudly professed to glory in their blood relationship with Washington, Adams, and Franklin, the men who led the American nation in their resistance to England, that she who had done these things could ever in her old age fall into the hands of unscrupulous men, and under their guidance attempt to set her knee of the necks of two small, brave peoples, striving to force life from them, while with eager hands she grasped their gold and lands, this was a thing I, at least, had never believed possible.

Now, Englandis dead to me.

Olive Schreiner

I shall always think with love and honour of the great Englishmen of the past, who have made the name of England honoured by the Liberals of all the world; from Pym and Hampden, Milton and Sir Harry Vane, to Shelly and Gladstone, I shall always feel it an honour (as I suppose every freedom loving Englishmen does) to remember that the same blood which run in the veins of Washington and Adams and Jefferson I have the right to call mine; I shall always regard with undying affection that heroic band of men and women who today in England are fighting, at infinite cost to themselves, for the honour of England and for Justice.

But for me, theEnglandof my love is dead.

I know not how it is with you; but for me – though I should live to be a very old woman, never again while I live shall I hear the name ofEnglandspoken or see it written but I shall hear a whisper – THE OPPRESSOR!

“Life’s night begins; let her never come back to us;

“There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain;

“Forced praise on our part, the glimmer of twiligh’;

“Never glad, confident morning again.”

If a little child lay in its bed, and woke up suddenly, and saw bending over it the mother it had loved and trusted, with a knife in her hand, with which she stabbed to death the little stepbrother lying beside her, do you think, however long it lived, it could look at that hand again without seeing the knife and the blood?

The Englandof our love is dead.

But Englandhas yet lost more than the trust and confidence of the majority of CapeColonists. The day is coming when she will realise that great and irreparable as has been her loss in the death of her own bravest sons, her loss by the death of the Republicans has been yet heavier. Not a bullet has taken the life in an open breach in the defences of the Empire.

You have all read in your spelling books as little children the story of the lion, who having one day a mouse in his power, spared its life; and who on another occasion, when caught in the hunter’s snare, was saved by the mouse, who gnawed the cords for him.

But there is also a South African version of this story: There was a lioness once into whose claws fell a red African Meerkat. And the Meerkat prayed her saying: “Let me Go.” But the Lioness refused. And she tore it, and mauled it, and the meerkat crept away to its hole in the red earth. And one day the lioness walked into a stone trap, such as we build in this country, and the door closed on it. And the lioness called: “Little stepson meerkat, come out of your hole and scratch a place that I may get my paw under the door and lift it!” But the meerkat answered, deep from its hole: “Oh, good stepmother lioness, the marks of your claws are on my side, your tooth is in my brain; I cannot come”. And so the hunters came and found the lioness; and the story ends.

The day is coming when England will know what was the price of the life of every South African she has taken.

Time was when, had a foreign foe landed on the shores of Africa, the white men and women would have risen as one soul and body from theLimpopoto the southern coast and hurled the intruder back into the sea. How impregnable wasSouth Africa, is shown by the fact that a moiety of our people in the two Republics alone have been able for one full year to hold at bay the gigantic and well-equipped army of the mightiest Empire on earth.

Had England maintained a close, friendly, and generous alliance with the two Republics, in her hour of need she would but have had to raise her hand, and the finest fighting race of the modern world would have stood beside her.

The time is coming whenEnglandwill realise that in losing for ever the friendship and alliance of those free Republicans she has lost what all the gold of theTransvaalcan never repay to her.

With her own guns she has herself blown away one of the bulwarks of her Empire. There is not a beardless Boer boy, or an old man of 70 who has stained with his blood the kopjes or dongas of his native land, butEnglandwould have found it cheap to buy his life at the cost of a million of pounds.

When that day comes, and will come, when foreign troops – Russian, French, or German – are upon the soil of England, when Englishmen gather to defend Richmond Hill and Hampstead Heath, as we have gathered to defend the hills and passes of our native land – when the tramp of foreign soldiers is heard in the streets of London, and the ground is wet at the Marble Arch and the Hyde Park Corner with the blood of Englishmen, when the cup she now presses to our lips is pressed to hers; and England stands where we stand today; then let her remember – South Africa.

ButEnglandhas lost more than the lives of her own brave soldiers, more than the confidence and affection of theCapeColonists, more than the alliance and friendship of the heroic Republics.

England has lost her honour.

Today England stands naked before the nations, the mantle of assumed virtue which she had carefully wrapped about her torn open. She, who cried aloud to the nations: “I am not as thou art, my aims are not as thine”, stands today exposed; Russia, Austria,France, Germany have not sinned. They never crossed 6,000 miles of sea to find a small, brave people bound to them by the ties of a common religion and common Aryan descent; and the cry: “We seek not gold! We seek not land!” set a knee upon their throats and clutch with greedy fingers at the land and gold. Today, in her unlovely and unlovable old age, all the nolber (nobler) and more generous instincts of her youth extinguished, she stands naked and shrivelled before the nations, with her name branded upon her forehead – a hyprocrite among the peoples.

The hour of Englands repentance and remorse will come. But it will be that form of remorse, the most awful which can visit the soul of the individual or the nation – the remorse which comes too late.

My friends the life of the individual is short; but the life of a nation is long.

The men who have produced the war, and into whose hands England has fallen in these sad times, will pass away.

Rhodes, Chamberlain and Milner may attain the gold, or the power, or the titles, or the glory to which they have aspired; then they will pass away. But the young South African people, now coming to its birth in these days of stress and anguish; and which today lies prostrate with the blood upon its forehead for baptismal water, weighing down its eyelids – the young South African people will live and grow. It will wax with the centuries, and to it belongs the future.

It is said that the British Generals have been ordered to scatter the heap of stones gathered by the hands of the Transvaal fathers at Paardekraal on that day, when each man swore as he placed the stone down to maintain the Independence of his land, or die; It is said, I know not with that truth, that they have been ordered to break down the monument built over it; It is said that the flags of the Republics are to be furled, and that a flag, once our pride, now a Commercial Asset and our shame, is to take their place.

But that ink has not yet been invented with which by a dash of his pen a politican, financier, or even general, can strike out the independence of a brave people.

The men that have died inSouth Africafighting for the land in which they were born have no need of any masoned monument to keep their names in remembrance. While Paardeberg and Amajuba, and the thousand hills and kopjes inSouth Africaon which South African men and boys have died for their land, stand, their memorials will remain.

 ”For our mountains will be their monuments;

“Though ye give the winds their dust!” 

But they have another and more enduring record that any of rock or earth can ever be: On the hearts of the people ofSouth Africatheir names are engraved: To be re-engraved on the hearts of each rising generation.

There are many stones yet left in SouthAfrica. And the day will come when, though it be by the hands of those who are today but little children, the stones will be re-gathered and piled high in the clear light and air ofAfrica.

I know not how it is with any of you, but for myself personally, as long as I live whenever I look into the recesses of my own heart I shall always see there, waving free, the gallant flags of those two little Republics said to have been furled for ever, enshrined there in my sympathics and affections.

And if there be in South Africe another two hundred thousand hearts, in which those flags are enshrined, then I know the day will come when hands will rise, which will in actually unfurl, and they will float free acrossSouth Africa.

We may not live to see it; many of us may go down amid tears and blood and sorrow to our graves, but the future is with the Republicans.

One of the mass protest meetings Olive Schreiner addressed on the war crimes of the Empire in South Africa. This picture wat taken in 1900 at Worcester.

To you, the women of South Africa gathered here today, I would say one word before we part: You and such as you are mothers of the South African nation of the future, and the shaping of that future lies in your hands. WhatSouth Africahas ultimately to fear is not the sword, or the cannon, or the rifle bullet, or the match which sets alight the roof over the heads of women and children. These things but harden and anneal a brave people. That which South Africahas to fear is the unscrupulous men.

While we, the people ofSouth Africa, hold by the old, simple, brave ideals and manners of life of the first founders of the South African race, the future ofSouth Africais assured. It is for you, the women ofSouth Africa, to transmit these ideals to your children. Freedom first, and wealth, ease, luxury last, if it all.

It has been said inSouth Africathat “every man has his price”. But he lied who said this. It is for you, the women ofSouth Africa, to show that the heart ofSouth Africais unpurchasable by any gold from bloodstained hands. The heart of the womanhood of a nation is the treasure house where its freedom is stored. A fearless, indomitable, unpurchasable womanhood, a fearless, indomitable unpurchasable race.

Finally there is but one word more I would say: Bathed in blood and swathed in sorrow asSouth Africais today, the time is yet coming when this land will be the home of a strong and independent nation. It will take its place besideFrance, andRussia, andGermany, and theUnited States of America, among the nations of the future. I have a great ambition for that nation of ours.

I do not covet for it wealth, nor that it should stand first among the world’s peoples in size or density of population. I have a loftier ambition for it than this. In one matter I would have it excel all peoples, and be excelled by none.

When that day comes, when we, a free and united people, dominate in these southern seas and on this southern Continent, and other and weaker nations and races are thrown into our hands, I would have it that we, who in the youth of our people have drunk to its dregs the cup of sorrow and groaned beneath the oppressor’s heel, remembering what we have endured, should deal mercifully with all weaker and smaller peoples.

It is righteousness that exalteth a nation.

In the two decades before the uprising of 1976, Afrikaans had become identified among blacks in Soweto as the language of the oppressor – the medium used, for example, when white policemen arrested pass offenders or when white civil servants issued permits or ordered blacks out of their houses or out of the urban areas. The Black Sash gave this evidence to the Cillié Commission that investigated the causes of the Soweto uprising: ‘We suspect that . . . Afrikaans has tragically come to be seen as the language of the minority oppressor who enforces the pass laws upon the subject majority.’

The formal policy towards the language of instruction outside the homelands was that Afrikaans and English had to be used on a 50-50 basis in black secondary schools, but it was not rigorously applied. Vorster himself did not object when homeland leaders in 1974 requested that the official language in the homelands (in practice, English) also be used in black schools else where.

Yet some of the officials of the Department of Bantu Administration and Development had almost become a law unto themselves. Andries Treurnicht, leader of the National Party’s right wing and deputy minister of Bantu Administration and Development, held the view that the government had the right to decide the medium of instruction in black schools because white taxpayers subsidised the schools. This position was sure to provoke hostility, particularly in Soweto, now with a population of well over a million. Most jobs in Johannesburg required a command of English, and a 1972 survey of young Sowetans found that 98% of them did not wish to be taught in Afrikaans. Half of those polled considered Afrikaners ‘the most cruel and least sympathetic people in South Africa’.

Ignoring all this, the Department of Bantu Administration and Development early in 1976 decided to push ahead. Inspectors in Soweto and other schools in the southern Transvaal area gave instructions that mathematics and arithmetic had to be taught in Afrikaans alone, despite the fact that most teachers and pupils probably had no command of Afrikaans.

Teacher organisations and black parents on school boards in the townships protested strongly, but the government ignored these protests and the warnings by the official opposition that a volatile situation was building up in Soweto.

The Irish Volunteer Monument was erected on Brixton Hill near the Hertzog Television Tower in Johannesburg. The architect was Jan van Wijk. Photo: Henk Oosthuyzen, Afrikanerbakens, FAK

By MARTHINUS VAN BART

In July 2011 the world media took prominent notice of the official visit to Ireland of the British queen, Elizabeth II. This should have been a non-event for the media, as Ireland has been a colony of England since 1177, when the Norman conquerors invaded and subjected Ireland. But the bloody history of English-Irish relations ever since, made this visit by the monarch very newsworthy. And then, in September 2011, it was world news again when in the wake of the apology of the prime Minister of Britain, David Cameron, for the massacre of 13 unarmed Irish protesters against the occupation of Ireland by British forces, London announced it was to pay compensation to the families of those killed in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, by the British Parachute Regiment on 30 January, 1972, also known in Ireland as “Bloody Sunday”.  The families of the martyrs declared that they could not be bribed with money, but that they wanted justice seen done in the courts. The killers had to be prosecuted. Over the 30 years of unrest in Ireland on the independence issue, more that 3 600 people has died. A precarious peace deal was clinched in 1998 which temporary ended the hostilities, but it Britain persists in refusing to bring the killer-parabats to jusctice in an open civil court of law, this offer of compensation could very well be seen as a gross insult to the Irish people and spark off renewed protests and massacres.

At the end of September 1899, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War on 11 October 1899, some Irish nationals living in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (Tranvaal Boer Republic) in South Africa published an Irish Manifesto which was circulated among the Irish community of the Transvaal.

In this Manifesto the age old suppression of the Irish under the heel of England was sketched. It tells of the incredible suffering of the Irish folk – mothers, fathers and their children – their country devastated and it’s children moneyless and homeless driven to all the outskirts of the world.

“During the 60 year reign of Queen Victoria some 1,5 million Irish perished from famine whilst England forced  2,5 million pounds surplus revenue from Ireland at the point of the bayonet. A member of Her Majesties Privy Council  (probably refering to Cecil John Rhodes) has since 1895 been conspiring with British capitalists and hirelings to overthrow the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek and to steal the beautiful, rich country of the Boers so that it could be added to the British Empire. Will you allow it that the self same catastrophe which devasted Ireland also lay the Transvaal to waste? Revenge Irishmen! We are calling you up to fight againt the nation who mercilessly suppresed your people for 700 years! The Irish must be the avengers and not the fellow-conspiritors of such crimes! “ (Breytenbach J.H.: Gedenkalbum van die Tweede VryheidsoorlogBreytenbach, Nasionale pers Beperk, kaapstad, 1949, 284-285)

The members of the Irish Brigade were notorious for handling dynamite to blow up bridges and supply trains of the British army during the Anglo-Boer War. Many were mine workers who knew how to get hold of dynamite and how to use is. Others were well versed in sabotage from their days in Ireland fighting against the occupational British forces.  The Boers called them “Het Wrekers Korps” (The Avenging Corps).

The Irish Brigade who fought alongside the Boers against the British army in the Anglo-Boer War. The commanding officer was Col. Y. Filmore Blake, sitting in the front row to the left of the accordion player.

After the Irish Brigade was formally introduced on 28 September 1899 in Johannesburg its officers were sworn in on the 2nd of October 1899. Col. John Y. Filmore Blake (an American Irishman) was elected by his men as their supreme commander. Blake was trained as a professionale soldier at the American Military College West Point and he saw action in many battles against the Redskins on the American Prairies. John McBride, one of Blake’s officers, was an exceptionally brave soldier. After the war he went back to Ireland and fought against the English occupational forces. In 1916 he was captured and shot by a firing squad.

Other Irish officers were Maj. Thomas Madden Menton, Capt. James Laracy and Capt. John Joseph Mitchell. They had one Boer officer in the corps, Capt. Charles Francois Coetzee, who organised the arms, equipment and food for the corps. The Irish Brigade consisted of some 200 men.

The supreme commander of the Irish Volunteers, Col. John McBride, formed three commando’s from the Irish Brigade:

1.) The first commando, consisting of 300 men,  fought in Natal under command of col. John Blake and distingued themselves at the Battle of Nicholson’s Neck and the Battle of Colenso.

2.) The second commando, under col. Arthur Lynch, from Australia,  consisted of 20 men who fought at Ladysmith and Glencoe.

3.) The third commando was actually an amulance unit consisting of 50 men, from America, under command of capt. O’ Connor. They were part of the Irish-American Ambulance Society,  Clan-na-Gael. Ten of these men were highly trained first aid attendants.

During the second fase of the war (called the guerrilla fase), after the occupation of Pretoria and Johannesburg mid 1900, the Irish volunteers joined whatever Boer commando they wished, were thus dispursed and no longer operated as three definite Irish commando’s or units.

American volunteers who joined the Boers against the British Empire. Col. Arthur Alfred Lynch, commander of the Irish Brigade, stands in the centre of the back row, wearing a white jacket.

Breytenbach mentions on page 296 that about 50 Americans decided in middel Feruary 1900 to come to the aid of the Boers.  J.A. Hassell, an American who lived in Vryheid, Orange Free State, took it upon himself to organise the  American  Reconnaissance Corps. He telegraphed this undertaking on 10 Februarie 1900 to the State Secretary of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (Transvaal Boer Republic) FW Reitz, and requested arms and equipment if the ZAR will be interested in this corps. His offer was accepted and JA Hassell was sworn in as commander of the American Scouts.

(Athough Breytenbach does not state so, it can be assumed that some of these Americans were of Irish descent.)

The following version of the Irish Manifesto of 13 September 1899 can be read on: http://www.blogstudio.com/woodgnome/irishboerwar.html :

The Irish Manifesto of Sept 13th 1899:

“The Government of the Transvaal being now threatened with extinction by our ancient foe, England, it is the duty of Irishmen to throw in their lot with the former, and be prepared by force of arms to maintain the independence of the country that has given them a home, at the same time seizing the opportunity to strike a good and effective blow at the merciless tyrannic power that has so long held our people in bondage. The position in the Transvaal to-day is exactly similar to what it was in Ireland at the time of the Anglo-Norman invasion.
The memory of the massacre of Drogheda by order of the infamous regicide Oliver Cromwell is still darkly remembered in Ireland, and England of that day applauded and justified the cold-blooded butchery as a righteous judgement executed.
With the story of Ireland’s wrongs and sufferings before them, no wonder the Boer people refuse to surrender their cherished independence to the hateful sway of Britain. England has been a vampire, and has drained Ireland’s life-blood for centuries, and now her difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity. The time is at hand to avenge your dead Irish. England’s hands are red with blood, and her coffers filled with the spoil of Irish people, and we call upon you to rise as one man and seize upon the present glorious opportunity of retaliating upon your ancient foe. Act together and fight together. Prepare! The end is in view. The day of reckoning is at hand. Long live the republic! Irishmen to the rescue! God save Ireland!”

The Irish Volunteer Monument was re-erected at Orania in die Northern Cape. Photo: Orania

IRISH VOLUNTEER MONUMENT:

In 1975 an important monument was erected in honour of the 500 Irish Volunteers, the Irish Brigade, who came from Ireland, America and Australia to South Africa to fight alongside the Boer freedom fighters against the professional army of the British Empire during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902).

The monument was inaugurated at the top of Brixton Hill in Johannesburg. This monument was an abstract work of art executed by Stocks Construction (Rand) in hammered concrete.

The recognition of the benevolent helping hand the Irish extended to the Afrikaners to defend home and hearth against the callous Empire, came a long way: In 1952 an Irish Commando Remembrance Fund,  Ciste ar son Briogaid na nGael, was created. Many important Irish and South African personalities served in the committee. They started collecting funds in aid of erecting some sort of monument in honour of the Irish volunteers who served with the Boer forces. In 1973 a firm of architects, Jan van Wijk & Associates, was asked to design a fitting monument in remembrance of  “The Irish Volunteers who fought with the Boers for Freedom.”

A peace of ground to the north-east  of the SABC Brixton Tower on top of Brixton Hill belonging to the SABC was swopped for an erf in Cottesloe. This was the chosen site for the monument. The Johannesburg City Council agreed to take ownership thereof and to see to the upkeep of the monument.

The architect, Jan van Wijk, studied Irish monuments through the ages and then decided to make use of Irish monumental symbolism to create the one he was contracted to do. He used the circular shape of the Irish berm, an earthern wall adjacent to a ditch, creating a bastion of support, as the basic plan for the monument. Pillars of fifferent sizes were then placed on a circular podium in the centrum. The berm’s diameter was 22 meter and covered by grass. To the western side an opening allowed the visitor to approach the centrum of the monument with its pillars.

The Irish Volunteer Monument was re-erected by a contractor, mnr. Danie Crafford, in 2002 at Orania in the Northern Cape. Dr. Pieter Mulder of the Freedom Front Plus intervened at the Brixton heritage site at Auckland Park when a developer wanted to demolish the monument with the permission of the Johannesburg City Council. Photo: Orania

On the podium four pillars of hammered concrete were erected,  all along the circular brim of the podium.  Anticlockwise the pillars were placed from great to small. The three small pillars are symbolic of the three Irish commando’s, supporting each other and leaning towards the huge pillar, symbolic of the Boer forces and Freedom. The diameter of each pillar is 900 millimeter. The huge one stands 3,5 meter high. It weighs 5 ton.

At the entrance a plaque in Afrikaans and Irish, crowned by an Irish harp, was placed. It read: “Erected in remembrance of the Irish who fought for the Boer nation in its hour of need 1899-1902. may their sacrifices for Freedom and Right cast an everlasting bond between the Irish people and the Boer nation, and may this monument be a symbol thereof.”

Jan van Wijk was also the architect of the Afrikaans Monument on the Paarlberg mountain-side at Paarl.

(Afrikanerbakens, Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge, 1989, 138)

An act of brutal vandalism and a national scandal:

In 1998 an investor/developer bought the monument site from the Johannesburg City Council, who resoned  it from heritage site to business site. The Monument’s Council didn’t do anything to prohibit this willful transgression of the Heritage Act. The new owner, a Mr. Vic Scott, planned to demolish the monument so  that he could re-sell the site and make a good profit.  Clearly he had no sympathetic feelings towards the heritage of the Irish, nor that of the Afrikaners, the descendents of the Boers. “If the City Council have no feelings for the sentiments of yesteryear, why should I,” he told a reporter of Rapport, Elize Smith (Rapport,11 February 2001)

A culture and heritage sensitive person who at the time lived near the site in Brixton, mnr. Sebastian Biehl, saw that Scott was planning to demolish the monument and alerted Dr. Pieter Mulder, leader of the Freedom Front Plus (VryheidsFront Plus), a political party, of  what was going to happen. In June 2002 Dr. Mulder intervened and raised R20 000 to pay for the basic transport and hoisting costs of mnr. Danie Crafford, a contractor, to remove the monument to Orania, Afrikaner town in the Northern Cape. (Beeld 24 June 2002) The monument was re-erected and re-inaugurated shortly after.

What the British have done over 700 years to the Irish, they did to the Afrikaners in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War - burning down homesteads, wrecking farms, destroying livestock and molesting the women and children, killing more than 27 000, mostly children, in concentration camps all across South Africa.

Why would an important heritage site such as this Irish-Boer-monument be treated with such contempt and callousness by the Johannesburg City Council? Why did the Johannesburg conservation societies not bat an eyelid? Where was the South African Heritage Resources Agency? Where was the Department of Arts and Culture? Can it be that the irrational contempt some people have for the Irish and the Afrikaners was a factor in this disgraceful act of blatant vandalism?

During the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) British soldiers removed the rocks at the Paardekraal Monument in Krugersdorp which were placed there shortly before the outbreak of the First Anglo-Boer War of 1880-1881 when the Boers vowed “to cast off the yoke of England” and re-take their beloved Republic of Transvaal, the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. The British soldiers dumped these rocks into the Vaal River at Vereeniging.

The Paardekraal Monument, erected by the Boers at Krugersdorp after they took a vow to free their beloved Transvaal from the clutches of the British Empire. They fulfilled this vow during the First Anglo-Boer War (Eerste Vryheidsoorlog) of 1880-1881. Photograph: Hannes Oosthuysen

Also during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) British soldiers demolished a beautiful Dutch Language Monument at Burgersdorp, erected by the Boers in honour of their “Holy Language of the Bible and the Church, High Dutch” and buried it in the Eastern Cape.  After the war Afrikaners located and dug out the broken statue, had a replica cast, and re-erected it at Burgersdorp. The broken statue was mended as best they could and re-erected it next to the replica. The head and one arm was never found.

What became of the Irish heroes?

After the war McBride went back to Ireland to fight against the British occupational forces. In 1916 he was caught and shot by a firing squad.

Arthur Alfred Lynch went back to France to continue his journalistic career at Journal, his original reason for coming to South Africa to cover the war for this influential newspaper.  It was genl. Louis Botha who convinced him to join the Boers and help fight for their freedom, right and continued independence. He helped to establish the Irish volunteer corps.

Getting back to France, he was contacted by his Irish compatriots and asked to stand as Independent nationalist for election by the citizens of Galway, although he was born in Australia.

His opponents found out he was involved in the South African War and that he fought with the Boers against the British army. He, however, wrote a letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons explaining that he accepted the terms of peace between Britain and the Boers. According to Edward Majoribanks’s biography Edward Carson QC, re-published by The House of Emslie, Edinburgh, 2011,  Lynch asked, in the words of Themistocles, that his fellow-members might nog beat him, but hear him.

Lynch then left France for England to take up his place in the British House of Commons as member-elect for Galway. Arriving at Newhaven on 1 June 1902, he was immediately arrested, charged with  treason under the old statutes dating from the 13th Century under Edward III. He was tried in the Court of the Lord Chief Justice before three judges, Chief Justice Alverstone, justice Wills and Justice Channell. Edward Carson, QC, also an Irish Nationalist MP and Attorney General prosecuted. Lynch was found guilty and condemned to be hanged from the neck until dead.

A short while later his sentence was commuted to one of penal servitude for life, but he was relase after an few months to take up his seat in Parliament. From 1909 to 1918 he was Parliamentary member for Clare, and he fought in the First World War for Britian as a full Colonel in the British Army.

An Irish poem in Gaelish for Boer-heroes

A poem for the brave Boers who fought against England during the Anglo-Boer War was written in Augustus 1902 by the Irish poet Tomás ó Flannghaile of Mayo. He was a teacher and publisher who lived in England.

The British soldiers came from all over the Empire across the globe to fight against a mere handful of Afrikaner farmers - who taught them no end of a lesson, as Rudyard Kipling wrote. Field Marshall lord Frederick Sleigh (Bobs) Roberts, was the supreme commander of the British army in South Africa during 1900. He gave the order to burn down farms, exterminate livestock and incarcerate all suspects. His greatest ordeal in this campaign was when he fell from his horse breaking his arm. His wife and two daughters accompanied him all across the country in his special white Emperial train. The only shots he ever fired, were his daily shots of whisky. So Bobs Roberts and his thousands marched to Pretoria declaring the victory was theirs, only to learn from a firebrand Boer teenager, Johanna Brand: "The war has just begun, Tommy Atkins!"

Caoineadh na g Curadh

– Tomás Ó Flannghaile (1846 – 1916)

Mo bhrón go deo, mo chreach mo chrádh!

Na leómhain fé dheoidh faoi neart a námhad –

An tsaoirse thíos, ’s laoich á gclaoidheadh,

A dtír fé chíos ’s a ndaoine ag caoidh!

Caoin, caoin, a chinneamhain ghéar,

Is bí go faoidheach ag sileadh dear,

’Na luighe tá mílte groidhe-fhear tréan

’S a sliocht gan bhrígh mo loma léin!

’S bhuaidhir mo chroidhe im’ chlí thar meodhan,

Gan truagh at tsaoighil do shíol na mBóer,

An domhan go dúr, gan rún gan báidh

Gan cabhair gan súil le congnamh d’fhagháil;

Caoin, caoin, an tsaoirse ar lár,

An comhthrom thíos, an claon ar bhárr,

Neamh-shuim ’sa cheart, ’san neart go géar,

Na gaiscidhigh theas, gan reacht gan réim!

Acht bíodh gur buaileadh líon a bhfear,

Is gidh gur chuaidh sé díobh le seal,

D’fhág siad a rian go dian go trom,

I lár na ndiabhal do chiap tré feall;

Cian, cian, bheidheas cumha na nGall

I ndiaidh an ghéar-chrádha fuair siad thall,

The Burgersdorp Monument for the Dutch Language (Hooghollands), erected in 1882 after High Dutch was recognised as an official language of South Africa next to English. High Dutch was the printed language of the Netherlands State Bible (Nederlandse Statebijbel) and also the written language of the courts and officialdom. Afrikaans was the spoken language, but was only formalised much later. The first Afrikaans Bible was printed in 1933. The picture shows the vandalised statue (by the British soldiers during the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902) and the replica to the left, erected in 1907. The mutilated statue was only found in 1939 in King William's Town, Eastern Cape, where it had been buried by the soldiers. The head and one arms was missing. The podium was removed by order of lord Alfred Milner. The broken statue was re-erected at Burgersdorp in 1957. Photo: Hannes Oosthuysen

Minic do theicheadar le n-a sluagh

Cois abhann is sléibh’ ó faobhar na mBuar.

Tá dóchas fós don laochraidh i ndán –

Ní neart i gcómhnaidhe bhéarfas bárr –

Fulaing fear groidhe don tsaoirse is síol;

Agus muinighin chroidhe ’seadh is treise brígh;

Éistigh le ciall, ní buan droich-riaghail,

Má’s tréan an diabhal, is tréine Dia,

Iad féin, leo féin, le congnamh Dé,

Beidh Bóeir fós saor ’na ndúthaigh féin.

Translation into  English

Lament of the Champions

My eternal sorrow, my strife my torment!

The lions at last put down by the strength of their enemy -

Freedom defeated, the heroes vanquished,

Their land under taxation and their people mourning.

Weep, weep, oh bitter fate,

And patiently be shedding tear,

In their graves lie thousands of strong men true

And their dynasty lifeless, oh my woe!

It worries my heart in my side beyond measure,

The absence of worldly pity for the Boer race,

The grim world, without intention without sympathy

Without help, nor hope of receiving aid;

Weep, weep, freedom absent,

Justice defeated, prejudice victorious,

Disinterest in right, in the bitter strength,

The southern heroes, without regime without power!

But be it that their men were beaten,

And although success evaded them recently,

They left their mark firmly and heavily,

In the heart of the devils which tormented them through treachery.

Sorrowful, sorrowful, will be the homesickness of the foreigners [Englishmen]

After the bitter-torment they received yonder,

Oft they fled with their crowds

By river and mountain from the blade of the Boer.

There is still hope for the heroes –

It is not always strength which brings victory –

Brave men suffer for freedom and race;

And confidence of heart yes and the power of their worth;

Listen to sense, no bad-rule is permanent,

If the devil is strong, God is stronger,

Themselves, alone, with the help of God,

The Boers will be free yet in their own homeland.

* For more about the former Irish Brigade Memorial in Brixton click here.

This article tries to disaggregate the changes in South Africa’s rugby ideology during and after the Rugby World Cup tournament of 1995. The nature of supportfort hevictorious Springbok team which in a rare historical moment seemed to transcend race, is explained in the light of contextual influences. Likewise, the significance of subsequent events till the middle of 1997 which appeared to contradict the sense of unity generated during the tournament is assessed.

Download full article .

Despite a rapidly changing political environment since the African National Congress (ANC) ascended to power in 1994, rugby in South Africa has by and largemaintained its particular cultural space and is regarded by the government as a predominantly white, especially Afrikaner redoubt. The game has received renewed prominence with the 2007 Springbok Rugby World Cup victory, achieved with mainly white players.

In the South African context it has been argued the prominence of white rugby on the public stage can be related to the particular power configurations which held sway over the country during the late 19th century and throughout most of the 20th century – a constellation of forces which inhibited black rugby to gain the same kind of exposure.

Political changes in the country since the 1990’s have not, however, had an appreciable effect in a re-acculturation of the game along markedly different racial lines. Of course it can be claimed that the period was too short to bring about significant change, but beyond that it is necessary to look at the changing dynamics of the game and in particular how a new variable, professionalisation, has affected the situation since 1995.  The impact of professionalistion is also explored in terms of what the process meant for “ordinary” rugby clubs away from the revenue generating urban centres as well as how “player culture” changed from the amateur era.

Download full article here.

C. Louis Leipoldt

By TREVOR EMSLIE

A few weeks ago, at a rather grand garden party in Bishopscourt, I fleetingly bumped into an acquaintance who is an attorney.  Seeing me, he stopped and told me, fairly abruptly, how he had recently discovered Leipoldt’s trilogy of historical novels set here in Clanwilliam and the Cederberg, how wonderful he thought it was, how he thought Leipoldt was South Africa’s Dostoevsky, who had said it all, and how fascinating it was to be living in this interesting time in South Africa’s history.

 One of the few things I am proud of is having published, for the first time ever, Leipoldt’s trilogy of novels entitled The Valley.  Leipoldt tried but failed to get The Valley published during his lifetime, his friends again failed to achieve this after his death, and it was only in 2000 – after it was brought to my attention by Paul Murray, a history teacher at Bishops – that The Valley saw the light of day, with Paul and me as editors.  It is long, and it is not easy reading, which is no doubt why it wasn’t published before, but it is incredibly rewarding for those who make the effort, and you can imagine that to hear my attorney friend call Leipoldt South Africa’s Dostoevsky was music to my ears.

 When just one person connects with The Valley, as my attorney friend obviously has, it makes the long hours of proofreading worthwhile; and I hope I can encourage those of you who have not yet done so to discover more about this man Leipoldt, who captures so quintessentially the problems and the poetry of our beloved country.

 In August 2003, I flew from Cape Town to London, arriving at the flat of friends at about eight or nine o’clock on a Saturday morning.  The purpose of my trip was to meet with Dr Peter Shields, one of the two youngsters who had lived with Dr C Louis Leipoldt in his house in Kenilworth in the 1930s, at exactly the time when Leipoldt wrote The Valley.

 The Shields family had sailed from England to South Africa, but tragedy struck during the voyage and Peter’s father, also a medical doctor, died on board ship in 1925.  His mother arrived in South Africa a widow, with five young children to care for.  After first settling in the Transvaal, as it then was, she moved with her children to Stellenbosch, where she struggled to make ends meet.  It was for this reason that her son Peter came to live with Leipoldt, and spent his teenage years in Leipoldt’s home.

And so it was that some seventy-five years later, I arrived in London on a mission to meet with Dr Shields in order to hear from him his stories about Leipoldt.  Having exchanged post-flight Saturday morning pleasantries with my London friends, I phoned Dr Shields to inquire when it would be convenient for me to come and see him.  He replied, “What about this afternoon?”  And so I cast about unsuccessfully for a tape recorder, succeeded in borrowing only a video camera which also recorded sound, caught a train from London to Berkhamsted, not far north of where I was, and phoned Dr Shields from the Berkhamsted station.  The sprightly eighty-something year old came to fetch me in his car, and we set off for his home not far away.

 Thus at about two thirty on that Saturday afternoon I found myself, weary after a sleepless night on the aeroplane, clumsily trying to point a video-camera not too obtrusively so that I could record our discussion, and enjoying a welcome cup of tea with Dr and Mrs Shields.  Dr Shields pointed out a Hugo Naude portrait of a French woman hanging on his wall, which used to hang on Leipoldt’s wall.  Leipoldt always referred to the subject of the painting as “the lady of the house”, he told me, and he said that he truly cherished this painting.  After showing me the two gold medals that Leipoldt had won while a medical student at Guy’s Hospital in London, the two of us settled down to discuss Leipoldt.

 I am not an experienced interviewer, except perhaps in preparation for litigation, and I had no list of questions or prompts to assist me.  My only strategy, if you can call it that, was to say as little as possible and let Dr Shields do the talking.

 The time flashed by, and after about three hours Dr Shields kindly took me back to the station, and I entrained for London.  It was such a lovely long summer’s evening, with the sun still shining, that I decided to walk from King’s Cross Station back to my friends’ flat rather than take the tube, and I dawdled at such a leisurely pace, drinking in the late English summer air and thinking about our discussion of matters Leipoldtian, that I must have sent out mixed signals – for I was propositioned by a lady of the night on an early shift, and was also offered drugs for own consumption.  This had never happened to me before, and it has never happened since.  Undeterred, I dawdled on, lost my way, and eventually arrived at my destination, able to relax at last.

 Over the next few days I typed up Dr Shields’s comments, laboriously winding and re-winding the tape in the video camera, until I had down what I considered to be a reasonable version of what he had said.  Dr Shields had told me that he was not a writer, and could not put pen to paper about Leipoldt, and this is why I typed up the contents of his share of our conversation.  I then sent him my transcript of what he had said, he confirmed that it was accurate enough and that I could use it as an introduction to Leipoldt’s Food & Wine , and thus I am able to relate what he told me about this amazing South African, Christian Frederik Louis Leipoldt.

 Before I quote Dr Peter Shields, let me say three things about Leipoldt.

 First, Leipoldt was a man of the world in the sense that after he left Cape Town in the closing stages of the Anglo-Boer War, he lived overseas for about twelve years, travelled widely, and acquired a wide international experience that he was able to bring to bear in his writing and his life generally on his return to South Africa in 1914.

 Secondly, Leipoldt was quintessentially South African.  Given his status as one of the major early Afrikaans poets, no one is likely to quarrel with this statement.  Indeed, it almost goes without saying, but not everybody appreciates how broad his South Africanism was.

 Thirdly, Leipoldt was, to the depths of his soul, a man of Clanwilliam and the Cederberg, until the end of his life.

Let me turn now to what Dr Peter Shields authorised me to say, in his words, about the man he called “Doc”.

 I was twelve years of age when, in 1930, I went to live with Leipoldt at his house, Arbury, in the Cape Town suburb of Kenilworth. ‘Doc’, as we called him, had an adopted son, Jeff, a few years younger than me, and the three of us lived together until Jeff and I went off to fight as volunteers in World War II.

 Although I have now lived for the past –twenty-five years in England, where I was born, my impression is that most South Africans think of Leipoldt as an Afrikaans poet, but do not know enough to appreciate the many other sides of this versatile man.

 Doc was very liberal for his time.  He was also great fun and was very, very mischievous.  You never quite knew whether he was pulling your leg – it was always a problem to know whether or not to take him seriously.  For instance, I remember him telling us that in China it was considered a delicacy to take a live baby mouse by the tail, dip it in honey, put it in your mouth, and let it scamper down your throat!

 Doc claimed to be a Buddhist.  I think he needed to break free of the dictates of his strict Protestant upbringing, remembering that his father had been the dominee of the Dutch Reformed Church in Clanwilliam and that he never went to school – he was taught by his father and could recite long extracts from the Bible.  We didn’t go to church.  Doc wasn’t against organised religion – he just wasn’t interested in it.

 Doc played a lot of tennis.  I remember that Mr Justice van Zyl often came to tennis on Sundays (we had a court at Arbury) and that his daughter was a very good tennis player. Doc did no running on court, but was nevertheless an effective and dangerous player:  he would stand there and place his lobs with great skill.

 He was a brilliant billiards player; and played a great deal of bridge, often with Mrs Bolus – I think the Boluses were like family to him.  He must have been a very good bridge player as he had a formidable memory.

 Doc had no dress-sense whatsoever.  I remember going swimming with him at St James pool, and his swimwear was so ghastly that Jeff and I didn’t want to be seen near him.  He probably didn’t care.  One Saturday evening he ventured forth in a dinner jacket with his bowtie so unbelievably skew that I instinctively went up to him to straighten it.  He stopped me, saying: ‘Don’t.  They won’t recognise me if you do that.’

 For many years we didn’t have a wireless at Arbury – Doc wouldn’t allow it.  But in 1937 he suddenly went out and bought a very large one.  He would sit and listen to Adolf Hitler’s speeches, getting very angry.  Of course, he could understand German, whereas the rest of us couldn’t.

 We spoke mainly English at home, and Doc actually did a lot of his writing in English.  He wrote several poems in English that were published under the pseudonym Pheidippides.  I would say that about half of Doc’s friends who visited the house were English-speaking, and the other half Afrikaans.

 We used to go for wonderful trips in the countryside, and one always met lots of interesting people in his company.  I remember visiting General Smuts on his farm at Irene, outside Pretoria, and thinking that his wife, Ouma Smuts, was the maid, so unpretentious was she.  We often visited General Smuts.

 Doc loved Clanwilliam and the Cederberg, and went there fairly often.  They were his spiritual home.  He knew a teriffic number of people in that part of the world, and wherever he went he would call on friends.

 Doc would always sing while he drove.  He would tease me about the Irish Republican song, the one about hanging men and women for wearing the green, and he would often sing this song while driving.  He wasn’t really musical, but he loved church music and would go to church to listen to musical performances.

 After the war Doc didn’t drive much, and he gave me his car when I was demobilised and returned to Cape Town.  Occasionally he would borrow it to go off botanising, and it was always filthy when he returned it.

 Doc used to tell wonderful ghost stories, especially when we were out camping.  Of course he would tell them at night, just before we went to bed.  They were always made up on the spot.  I particularly remember one about people being poisoned by mushrooms, and about the horrible deaths they died.  (Needless to say, Doc used to collect mushrooms himself when the opportunity arose.)

 Doc did not cook on an everyday basis.  He employed a cook for this purpose.  One cook he employed just before the war was a German woman, and I remember that we gave her quite a hard time.  I didn’t then give much thought to the food we ate; and while I can say that we always ate extremely well, I cannot say that it was particularly exotic.

 Doc himself cooked when he gave a dinner party, which he did fairly often.  There were always interesting people at his dinner parties, and Jeff and I were always included.

 Doc loved arguing.  He would have made a great lawyer.  He was also a great talker, continually asking questions – usually pulling your leg.  He would suddenly decide to give you a hard time, and then the temporary verbal assault would begin.  He loved to present you with an alternative view of whatever point you were making, even if you were merely stating a fact.

 There were rules in the house, but Jeff and I were never afraid of Doc.  He instituted a sort of ‘prefect’ system with older boys, usually medical students, looking after us, as he was often away lecturing at the University of Cape Town Medical School in the evenings.  He instituted a ‘black book’ system, something I think he had picked up at Rugby School in England.  Five black marks meant a hiding – but Doc wasn’t really a disciplinarian and the hiding never materialised.  Where he was strict was on one’s attitudes to people.  If Jeff or I commented disparagingly on other people, he would always say:  ‘Don’t be such a snob.’

 Doc had worked as a medical inspector of schools in England and he held a high opinion of English public schools.  He approved of them.  He would say to Jeff and me that we really ought to be at school at Rugby in England.

 He did get fed up with us at times, for instance if one of us trod on one of his best flowers.  Then he would storm off in anger, but generally he was very even tempered.

 Doc would set Jeff and I ‘exams’ approximately once a month.  He didn’t test what we knew, but set us tasks to find out and discover things before the next ‘exam’.  In retrospect I think this was very worthwhile.

 I think Doc was reasonably comfortably off, but not wealthy.  He left cash of about £20 000 in his estate, and Jeff and I each inherited some £10 000.  (I was the executor of his literary estate, and in this capacity I assigned the copyrights owned by his estate to the University of Cape Town when I left South African in 1978.)

Doc always had wine with his meals, and Jeff and I were also always given wine.  Doc used to make us describe it, something I wasn’t much good at.  He considered wine to be a good thing, and we all enjoyed it.  My recollection is that Doc’s preference was for red wine.  He was never snobbish about wine, or about anything else for that matter.  I never saw him ‘tight’.  He seldom had more than two glasses of wine.

  Doc would have loved to see the current state of development of South African wine, which was still very ordinary in the 1940s, and he would no doubt be pleased to know that in the twenty-first century I remain very fond of wine.

 Doc used to come home with his medical bags stuffed full of books, having stopped off at the library on his way.  He was a very fast reader and would borrow about five books at a time, often reading all five in one night.  Sometimes he would toss one at me, saying as it flew through the air:  ‘Here, this might interest you.’

 He had many books.  One wall of his study was lined with them.  These he bequeathed to the South African Library.

 Many people seem to think that Doc was, or might have been, homosexual.  I must say that I cannot see that it matters; but if he was, we never saw anything of it at all.  Not a hint.  Of course one didn’t discuss such things in those days, at any rate not in the way people do nowadays, but quite frankly the possibility never crossed our minds, and I am absolutely certain that there was nothing like that at all in our household.  There is no question of it being otherwise.

 It is true that he didn’t have much to do with women, except women friends of long standing.  And he didn’t have women in the house, except our German cook.  I remember him kicking up a fuss when her daughter came to stay, but I imagine that that had more to do with us – he was afraid one of us might get her into trouble.

 Doc had a Hugo Naude portrait of a French woman handing on his wall at Arbury.  He found it stuffed behind a couch at Naude’s house, said to Naude: ‘Don’t you want this?’ and Naude asked him whether he would like it.  It now hands on my wall, and I love it.

 On the subject of the Anglo-Boer War, my impression is that towards the end of the war Doc had blotted his copybook, so to speak, in the eyes of the British.  He was reporting on the war from the Boer side, and he had annoyed the military authorities.  I think it was important for him to leave Cape Town when he did, or he would have landed in trouble.

 Oom Gert Vertel and other poems dealing with the war were, I think, based on real incidents.

 I imagine that living in England must have changed Doc’s attitude to the English, whom, until then, during the war, he had had every reason for regarding as the enemy.

 A lot of things Doc said were taken up the wrong way, for example the controversy over his statement that it would be better for schoolchildren to be given wine than milk.  At that time milk was dished out to schoolchildren in mugs, and it was often contaminated.  This was the context of his remarks about wine being better for schoolchildren than milk.

 I was a Medical School after my return from the war, when they called me out of a lecture with the news that Doc had had a heart attack.  I went straight to see him, and visited him every day until his death about five days later.  I used to take him books.  I think he sensed that the end was nigh for he said to me: ‘I see the little goblins.  They’ve come to get me.’  (He always used to joke about goblins or little something-or-others.)

‘Oh nonsense,’ I replied, but he died during the night.

 I greatly enjoyed living in Doc’s home, and I learned an immense amount from him.  Thinking back, I was exceedingly fortunate – I had lost my own father, also a doctor, who died in 1925, and whom I adored; but Doc stepped in and provided me with a good, wholesome, easy childhood.

 And yes, I loved him.  He was like a big bear, with a somewhat gruff voice.  I always think of him as a big bear.

 Doc was happiest, I think, when he was out on the veld botanising.

 Christian Frederik Louis Leipoldt, who was born in 1880 and died in 1947, was an amazingly versatile man. It is no exaggeration to call him a poet, playwright, paediatrician, botanist, journalist, novelist, cook and connoisseur of food and wine. The evidence is manifest: there is a Louis Leipoldt Medi-Clinic in Belville, there is a restaurant called Leipoldt’s in Pretoria, there are botanical plants that bear his name, and there is a body of published work – in both English and Afrikaans – that establishes him as a seminal writer and poet.

In 1829 Leipoldt’s paternal grandfather founded the Rhenish mission station at Wupperthal, about 75 kilometres from here in the Cederberg mountains.  Leipoldt’s father, who was sent to Germany at a tender age to be educated there, also became a Rhenish missionary and served, with his wife, in Sumatra, returning to the Cape Colony about a year before Leipoldt was born in Worcester on 28 December 1880.  After a few years of service in Worcester, Leipoldt’s father joined the Dutch Reformed Church and became the dominee here in Clanwilliam, where the family moved in June 1884, when Leipoldt was three years of age.

 Leipoldt’s father was a talented and accomplished violinist, and when he first came to the village he used to play the music of Mozart, Beethoven and other composers on his violin in the twilight of evening. After a while he received a deputation from his congregation requesting him to stop playing godless music on the fiddle. He listened to their complaints, gave the members of the deputation coffee and cake, and with almost unbelievable acquiescence locked his violin case and never opened it again until the day he died.  Years later, as he lay on his deathbed, he called for his violin and actually died holding the instrument that was so dear to him.

 Leipoldt’s father had been educated in Germany and had wanted to pursue a musical career, but bowed to the wishes of his father and became a missionary instead. One imagines that the entire Leipoldt family must have experienced the psychological consequences of the repressive silencing of the talented violinist – who first sacrificed a musical career in favour of becoming a missionary, then sacrificed his instrument altogether for the sake of harmony in his congregation.

 Leipoldt never attended school – a fate he shared with Olive Schreiner, South Africa’s first writer to achieve international acclaim. Mrs Leipoldt took the somewhat haughty attitude that her children would not be educated at the local school here, and so the Leipoldt children were educated at home, principally by their father, a learned and sophisticated man who spoke German, English, Dutch, French and Batak, and was in addition something of a classical scholar.  Thus from an early age the young Leipoldt learned the classics as well as French and German, and by the age of twelve he was fluent in Dutch, German, English and French, and knew Latin and some Greek.  He later said that he could not have told you which of German, Dutch or English was his home language – they spoke all three interchangeably.  Needless to say, the quality of his education was uneven – his maths, for example, was never what it might otherwise have been, a shortcoming that manifested itself in his matric exam results and again when he studied medicine. But he was widely read and his linguistic ability was outstanding.

 When he was eleven years old Christie – as he was known to his family – entered a competition for a ‘Story Needing Words’ in The Boy’s Own Paper, sending his entry to England from here, and about three months later he received a postal order for ten shillings and six pence, and a certificate stating that he had won first prize in the age group twelve to sixteen years. When his mother discovered that he had won a money prize, for his parents had not known that he had entered the competition, she insisted that he donate his prize to the missionary fund. This experience, the brutal silencing of the violinist in his father, and his strict Protestant upbringing help explain Leipoldt’s lack of interest in conventional religion.

 What Leipoldt, who experienced a lonely childhood, was interested in was the whole world of nature that surrounded him in the Cederberg.  His botanical expertise was evident when as a youth he accompanied the German botanist Rudolph Schlechter on an expedition into the veld, and he conversed with Dr Daniel Hahn, Professor Peter MacOwan and Dr Harry Bolus, bringing samples with him when he accompanied his father to synod meetings of the Dutch Reformed Church in Cape Town.  His love of natural beauty captivated him as a child and brought him refuge as an adolescent.  It embodied both practical knowledge and poetic love of the world around him, and throughout his life it was an important example of what one might call the Leipoldtian duality – ars practica et ars poetica.

 Leipoldt submitted articles which were published in Cape Town newspapers while he was still a young boy in Clanwilliam, and years later when he was in Cape Town the journalists concerned expressed astonishment when they discovered how young he had been when his articles were first published in the press.

 Having matriculated, Leipoldt left Clanwilliam at the age of 17 years, worked in Cape Town as a full-time journalist for first De Kolonist and then for The South African News, in addition freelancing for several overseas publications on the subject of the Anglo-Boer War, writing in particular about conditions under martial law in the Cape Colony.  He was, for example, present at the court martial of Gideon Scheepers, who was sentenced to death, in Graaff-Reinet.  He later acted as editor of his pro-Boer English newspaper, The South African News, when his predecessor, Albert Cartwright, was arrested and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, serving as such until the newspaper was closed down by the Cape Colonial authorities.

 Thereafter he wisely departed for London in January 1902, four months before the end of the Anglo-Boer War, or his fate might have resembled that of Albert Cartwright.  He enrolled as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital, and continued with part-time journalism for many varied publications while he was a student at Guy’s.

 Leipoldt did not have a good relationship with his mother, and I think it is correct that he did not see her again after he left Clanwilliam for Cape Town.  She died not long after he moved to London.  His father also died while he was still in London, but he certainly did see his father again.

 Leipoldt’s medical studies were financed by Dr Bolus, the Cape Town botanist, which says a great deal about the friendship that blossomed between this young boy growing into manhood, and his intellect, which was obviously advanced for his age.  Dr Bolus saw the potential in Leipoldt, knew that he wanted to study medicine, and so he offered to finance Leipoldt’s sojourn at Guy’s Hospital.  Leipoldt repaid what had been advanced to him, and also worked part-time as a free-lance journalist and washed dishes in London’s top hotels – where he met the famous chef August Escoffier, not by coincidence but because his lifelong interest in food had already been kindled way back in Clanwilliam – to keep himself afloat in London.

 Leipoldt’s letters to Dr Bolus are published in the book entitled Dear Dr Bolus.

During the Anglo-Boer War, opposition to the war had been expressed in The New Age, a weekly journal published in London.  Six South Africans, Leipoldt, Betty Molteno, Alice Greene, Albert Cartwright, Friedrich Kolbe and Anna Purcell, all of whom knew each other and operated almost as a small secret society, together with Maria Koopmans De Wet and Olive Schreiner (who was however under house arrest in Hanover in the Karoo), published pro-Boer, protest poems anonymously in The New Age.  The poems written by the South Africans were anonymous because of martial law.  They could have been charged with treason if it had become known that they had done so.  After Leipoldt’s arrival in London, it was decided to publish in book form some of pro-Boer poems that had appeared in The New Age, and in this way Songs of the Veld and other poems appeared just after the end of the war in June or July 1902.  We think Leipoldt was the driving force behind this publication, and it contained his first published poem, entitled The Executions in Cape Colony, a fragment.  It reads as follows:

 “The gibbet and the grave gave life, and will

Give life again to those that strive and strain

For freedom and its cause; nor strive in vain

Those whose desires need force and cords to kill.

 The thing is done; or right or wrong ’tis done

And only the remembrance shall endure.

But not the memory of a wrong shall stand

More firm or rooted faster or more sure.

And it shall serve to keep this dismal land

More dismal till the final aim is won.”

 Interestingly, and ironically given what happened decades later, the consignment of Songs of the Veld was destroyed when it arrived in Cape Town on board ship, and the book was banned by the British.  Only a few copies were smuggled in to South Africa – enough, however, for the book to be unearthed years later and published as a facsimile edition in 2008.  After 106 years, then, it became freely available in South Africa.

 After finishing his medical studies, Leipoldt stayed in London, working as a medical inspector of schools.  But he also travelled widely on the continent, and spent six months as the personal physician to the American publisher Pullitzer, after whom the Pullitzer prize is named, on his private vessel.  In truth his services were required more as a conversationalist and man of letters than as a doctor, but this was his designation while he was employed by Pullitzer.

 Leipoldt visited the East, where his father had been a missionary, and it seems that both father and son had a fascination for the East throughout their lives.

Eventually Leipoldt returned to South Africa in 1914, taking up a post as the first medical inspector of schools in the Transvaal.  It is from this experience that his book in English, Bushveld Doctor, emerged.

 For a while during this period Leipoldt shared a house in Pretoria with Eugene Marais.  He also stood unsuccessfully for Parliament for Smuts’s South African Party.

 Later, in the 1920s, Leipoldt returned to Cape Town, where he obtained a lecturing post in paediatrics at UCT, became editor of the South African Medical Journal and secretary of the SA Medical Union.  He had charge of a paediatric ward at the Somerset Hospital near what is now the Waterfront.

 He set up home in the Cape Town suburb of Kenilworth, at a house called Arbury, just below the railway line, and it was during this time that he adopted a son, Jeff Leipoldt, and opened his home to Peter Shields, who was not formally adopted, presumably because his mother was nearby in Stellenbosch.

 It was also while at Arbury that Leipoldt became well-known – in Cape Town circles – for his dinner parties and his culinary expertise.  (He had of course written Kos vir die Kenner in Afrikaans in 1926.)

 After Arbury was sold, Leipoldt boarded at the home of a fellow-doctor, Dr Bobby Forsyth, in Newlands (just off Palmyra Road), and then later in Sea Point, which was where he died.

 It was said of Leipoldt after his death that: “He preferred to contradict. He was the apostle of the opposite view.”  The concept of “political correctness” would have been anathema to Leipoldt, who might also have been termed the apostle of political incorrectness.  He would have enjoyed the jest – when in Rome, do as the Carthaginians do.

 Teetotalism was not only foreign to Leipoldt, but one of his pet hates. He held strong views about abolitionism and the damage done by its advocates.

 Although he was indifferent to conventional religion, Leipoldt accepted the need to live life according to a code; and he claimed to be a Buddhist.  It is tempting to dismiss this claim as simply another instance of his contrarian instincts, but it seems that his missionary background – his parents and both sets of grandparents were missionaries – exerted a strong influence on him, and all the evidence supports the view that Leipoldt’s own closely held belief in the power and endurance of the highest form of love – that which expects nothing in return – was the code that he chose to live by.  He certainly believed in the endurance and supremacy of this kind of love, and this, together with the value of service to others he must have imbibed from his own family, explain much about the way he lived his life, often taking groups of boys on camping outings or travelling with them.

His remains lie in a beautiful place of stillness on the Pakhuis Pass, not far from here.  This was organised by his friends after his death.

 If you read The Valley, which is made up of the three novels Gallows Gecko, Stormwrack and The Mask, you will find strongly biographical elements in all three novels, which cover the period 1820 to 1930 in the Clanwilliam area, which is however never mentioned by name.  When he discusses, as he does, matters such as botanical, medical or culinary matters, it helps to know that the author was an expert in all these fields.

 Let me read you an extract from chapter 8 of Stormwrack, where Leipoldt describes how the villagers of Clanwilliam used to gather twice a week for wait for the post-cart to arrive with their mail and their newspapers.  Clanwilliam was an isolated village then, and the nearest railway station was about a hundred miles away.  What Leipoldt describes is a mail day early in January 1896, just after the Jameson Raid, with the villagers anxiously waiting for more detailed news of what had happened, and it is almost certain that Leipoldt himself would have been present on this occasion.  Note the reference to the Reverend Christian Uhlmann, one of the main characters in Stormwrack, who is based on Leipoldt’s father, the Reverend Christian Leipoldt. Leipoldt writes as follows:

 “Here, in front of the courthouse, the village, or at least the adult, adolescent and older juvenile male portion of it, congregated on mail days. Some of them came to get their letters and parcels, but the majority had no expectation of any postal harvest and loitered for the simple reason that attracts any crowd – the chance of gossip, of novelty in some form or other, of interest, of mild excitement, a chance ever present when the only link between isolation and the larger civilisation three hundred miles away lies in the arrival of the weekly mail. Such occasions were made the opportunity for the interchange of opinion, for discussion between the older and more sedate members of the community, and for mild bickering and horseplay between the juveniles, who on these weekly gathering-days were allowed more liberty of action than was usually considered advisable in so conservative a community.

 The post-cart was scheduled to arrive promptly at four o’clock in the afternoon, but the experienced knew well enough that the schedule was never strictly adhered to and that considerable latitude was granted to the driver. In winter, when the air was cold and rainy, few grouped themselves around the thorn tree much before sunset, and the gatherings were always smaller. In summer, when the heat of the day had died down and the air was pleasantly cool, it was another matter. Then there was no discomfort in loitering underneath the thorn tree, chatting with one’s acquaintances, observing with mild interest what went on, and smoking – in leisurely satisfaction – the fragrant home-grown tobacco whose smoke curled lazily into the air. There was no loss of dignity attached to that democratic intercourse, and in consequence the village had no scruples in attending. On such occasions one could see not only the magistrate, the chief constable and the local attorney among the little throng that clustered in the vicinity of the thorn tree, but practically everyone who counted for anything at all in the village, including the Reverend Mr Mance-Bisley, who took advantage of these opportunities to discuss the various questions with the parents of his scholars, and the Reverend Christian Uhlmann who, with a gravity befitting his position and with a childlike shyness that was temperamental, stood modestly aside and engaged in conversation only when he was directly approached. It took some time to sort the mail, and when the doors of the post office were opened there was a rush towards the counter and a quick dispersal of the waiting crowd homewards.”

 Isn’t it wonderful? And it was just a short distance up the road outside from where we are now, 112 years ago.

 I am still asked by people whether I translated The Valley into English, which only goes to show how Leipoldt has become typecast and pigeonholed as an Afrikaans writer and poet.  No one other than Leipoldt could have written the English contained in the The Valley, and South Africans have yet to truly discover Leipoldt in English.  What many people also don’t know is that several of his Afrikaans poems were first drafted in English.

 Leipoldt’s real triumph is that he truly understood the South African predicament, our tendency in all sorts of contexts to divide ourselves into “us and them”, and the subtle but strong message of The Valley, for those who read between the lines, is that redemption lies in overcoming the divides between, say, English and Afrikaans, or black and white.  In this Leipoldt was prophetic; and, writing about the past in 1930, he has a remarkably modern message for us in 2010.  But never simplistic, never didactic, always balanced, human, endearing, subtle, sympathetic, and always debatable.

 Leipoldt reminds us of the obligations we owe to the past – the obligation “of living for this country”, as one of his characters, old Charles Quakerley, puts it in Gallows Gecko – even as we face the future.  This includes the obligation to transcend the divisions of the past, including but not limited to the divisions between English- and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, exacerbated by the Anglo-Boer War; to set aside the “us and them” attitude; and to work for the common good of this country.

 This is why Leipoldt continues, not only to charm, impress, entertain and fascinate us, getting under the skin, as it were, of his characters, and of South Africa and her problems, but challenges our views and the way we live our lives in South Africa today, one and all.

* This article is based on a speech delivered at the Yellow Aloe, Clanwilliam, 1 May 2010