At the Fireside--Volume 1 (9 page)

‘Isivavani'

‘Isivavani'

It seems a pity that, as we go barrelling along the now computerized highway of an ever-faster lifestyle, many of the old ways, customs and facts about this, our ancient land, have disappeared and been forgotten, lost in the mists of time.

Take for instance the fact that many of our older roads follow the ancient game trails that once covered the country, for example, the old road that links Empangeni to Durban, the Great North Road into the interior and the old road from Pretoria to Rustenburg, to mention but a few. All these roads were built upon the seasonal migratory tracks of the elephants. The reason is actually quite simple and logical, for the elephant, being the largest creature on dry land, has the inborn ability to seek out the easiest route across any terrain, including through the mountains. So, for the ancient peoples travelling on foot, it made sense to follow these paths. Then arrived the wagons, which followed the footpaths, and so there evolved dirt roads and, finally, tarred roads.

As you drive along these older roads, you will notice that they twist and turn, sometimes for no apparent reason. Possibly an elephant long ago uprooted a tree along the way. The path was then simply made to go around it and the road still curves, though the tree has long since rotted away. Many people think these kinks in the road were because of landholdings, but the laying out of the farms came very much later.

Along some of these oldest dirt roads, usually at crossroads, you may still come across a cairn of stones piled high by the roadside. These have a special significance in the history of our peoples and are called in Zulu, ‘isivavani'.

In times gone by, when a man had to embark upon a journey of importance, he would bid farewell to his family and the kraal and proceed along the road towards his destination. At the first crossroads he came to he would stop, look around and find a suitably sized stone, close his eyes and hold the stone to his forehead. He would then make two wishes. The first would be for the travellers who had preceded him upon this road, hoping that their journey had been a happy one, as well as successful. The next wish would be made for the travellers following him. He would then place the stone on the pile at the side of the road. You will notice that, in this most ancient ritual, he did not make a wish for himself. According to the belief of Ubuntii, your needs are covered by the people who have gone before you, as well as by those who will follow.

So these ‘isivavani' are a very special part of our heritage. They should be respected and preserved, and their significance explained to future generations, so that their meaning may be carried forward.

On one occasion, people who were not aware of the importance of these cairns found what they saw as a handy pile of stones next to the Mzinyathi River. They were in the process of re-interring the remains of Lieutenants Melvill and Coghill, British soldiers killed while trying to save the Queen's colour of the 24th Regiment after the battle of Isandlwana. They removed the stones and built them into the new graves. To the white people's horror and dismay, the local people ‘desecrated' the graves by removing the stones. It took the owner of the farm, David Rattray, to discover the root cause. It just serves to show how much we all still have to learn about differences in our country's cultures.

The wreck of the Doddingtong

The wreck of the
Doddingtong

People who have been to Port Elizabeth will probably know Bird Island, which lies north-west of the city, across the Algoa Bay and off the coast of a place now called Woody Cape. However, not many are aware of a submerged rock, called ‘Doddington Rock', which lies just south-west of Bird Island. The African Pilot, a publication of the British Admiralty, states the following:

Between and around these rocks and islands, the depth is irregular, and in bad weather, a heavy sea rolls over the whole area, breaking in from 8 to 10 fathoms to the seaward of the group. In heavy weather, a vessel should not approach them in less than 60 fathoms.

The Captain of the East Indiaman
Doddington
, unfortunately, did not have a copy of these instructions when, at 12:45 a.m. on 17 July 1755, she passed the entrance to Algoa Bay. William Webb, the ship's third mate, kept a diary which tells how he was woken as the ship struck the rock. It was in heavy seas and the rock split her hull like a butcher's cleaver.

She broke up in a matter of hours and the survivors made for Bird Island in the pitch darkness. Of the 270 souls aboard, just twenty-three made it to the island, a desolate, barren speck of land, where they could anticipate only death from thirst and starvation. But as the day broke, they began to take courage – stores were being washed onto the island's shore and they collected necessities such as flour, casks of water, salted pork, barrels of brandy, rolls of sailcloth, canvas, candles, seven live pigs, gun flints and even dry gunpowder. They started to build a camp. A couple of days later, three iron-banded chests were found. Some of the treasures from India, hundreds of thousands of pounds in gold and coin, had been washed up.

The story I am about to tell you was researched by the late Frank Cooper, one of the Port Elizabeth's Library's most professional maritime researchers. It remains one of South Africa's queerest treasure tales.

On that day in 1755, when the castaways saw the ironbound chests lying on the beach, something changed. Till then everyone had got on extremely well and they had even commenced laying the keel of the sloop that they were going to build from the flotsam. The chests had been placed under the charge of an officer, but some while later a disturbing discovery was made. One of the chests had been forced open and the contents removed. All were paraded before Evan Jones, the first mate (the Captain had drowned in the wreck). However, as was the law in those days, being bereft of a ship, they were no longer under the oath of obedience and the officers had no authority over them. No one stepped forward and the matter had to be dropped.

Work progressed on the sloop and on 17 February 1756 the
Happy Deliverance
, as she was named, set sail for Delagoa Bay. Aboard her were all their remaining stores, including kegs of water, seabird eggs and the remains of the treasure. They put in at places along the coast to barter for food and, sixty-one days after leaving the island (their last act before leaving had been to christen it Bird Island), they sailed triumphantly into Delagoa Bay. There were anchored two English trading vessels, the Rose and the Snow, belonging to Captain Chandler. It is recorded that Chandler bought the
Happy Deliverance
for 500 rupees and the three vessels sailed in company to Bombay. What happened to the stolen treasure remained a mystery – it definitely was not on the sloop.

The scene now shifts to Cape Town in 1757, where a Dutchman, Gerrit van Bengal, was sitting in a waterfront tavern drinking and talking to two sailors. They turned out to be survivors of the wreck of the
Doddington
and related the following tale.

They had taken one of the surviving small boats to go fishing and had strayed too close to the back line of the waves. The boat capsized. One of their mates was drowned, but they managed to reach the shore of Woody Cape, then called Kwaaihoek. In a cave near the waterfront they said they distinctly saw ironbound chests half-buried in the sand. The boat had been washed ashore and, agreeing not to say a word about their find, they rowed back to Bird Island. Unfortunately, the
Happy Deliverance
was completed before they could get back to the beach at Kwaaihoek and they sailed away, never to return. Gerrit van Bengal managed to obtain a passage on the
Zwaardfisch
which anchored off Bird Island during bad weather. By offering a share of the treasure, he managed to persuade three crew members to row him ashore. However, the place was not called Kwaaihoek for nothing. The boat capsized in the surf and Gerrit managed to hold on to the keel and was washed up on the shore. The other three men drowned.

Undaunted, he recognised the place from the description given to him and there he found a Dutch blunderbuss, along with an old cutlass, heavy with rust. He hunted and dug around for days but found nothing more. The ship, presuming the men all drowned, sailed away and Gerrit van Bengal began the 1 000 km walk back to Cape Town.

Upon arrival he went to Governor Ryk Tulbagh and told him the story. The Governor was sceptical. But Gerrit had become obsessed with the tale and the Cape authorities, thinking he had gone mad, sent him back to Holland. Upon arrival, he wrote the adventure down. He then slowly lost his mind and eventually ended his days in an asylum.

Nearly 100 years later, Advocate Simeon Proof found the manuscript in a second-hand hand bookshop, and edited and published the pamphlet which he entitled,
Singular adventures of Gerrit van Bengal, principally on the South East Coast of the Cape of Good Hope in the years 1748 to 1758
. Copies are extremely rare as they were published in Holland in 1860.

There is a curious aftermath to the tale, for in 1824, more than sixty years after the wreck, a Jan Trichard of the faun Olifantshoek, not far from Woody Cape, discovered a huge iron treasure chest on the beach.

He hurried back to the homestead, blurted out the news to his wife and son and took a span of oxen to the beach. While his attention was concentrated on inspanning the oxen to pull the box out, a massive wave engulfed both him and the span and, barring his son who was a safe distance away, all were washed out to sea. The place was not called Kwaaihoek for nothing. The box was never seen again.

The well-known diver, Dave Allen, dived there during the 1970s and was able to identify the
Doddington
wreck from the large quantity of ‘pieces of eight' that matched the official ship's manifest in England. But as for the chests in the sand, nothing has ever come to light – maybe, like the
Grosvenor
, which was elusive for so long, its time is drawing near!

The legend of Hendrick Schoeman

The legend of Hendrick Schoeman

Hendrik Schoeman owned the faint ‘Schoemans Rust', adjacent to the now historical monument ‘Groot Plaas' once owned by the famous Andries Pretorius. Schoemansrust is today the site of the Hartebeestpoort Dam in Gauteng. As a young man Schoeman had fought in the First Anglo-Boer War of 1880-81 and, as a Commandant, proved both his bravery and his loyalty to the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR). He was the commander in charge of the siege of Pretoria that kept the British pinned down so effectively, and was an acclaimed Afrikaner hero.

With the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War in 1899, Schoeman once again served his country. However, when Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, fell, followed shortly by Pretoria, capital of the ZAR, Schoeman argued that the British were deadly serious about the Oath of Neutrality and, to prevent hardship and the deaths of the Boer women and children, it would be better if the Boers surrendered. The ultimatum came from Field-Marshal Lord Roberts on 10 June 1900, that infamous statement which was to cause such bitter and abiding hatred between the English and the Afrikaner, surviving even to this day. The ultimatum read:

If the Boer forces do not surrender and sign the Oath of Neutrality, we will raze their farms to the ground, remove all food and livestock, and intern the women, children and farmhands in internment camps.

The prospect of such destruction distressed Schoeman and he warned his colleagues of the terrible fate that would befall the nation. He stopped fighting, went to Pretoria, and signed the Oath. The British, true to their word, allowed him to return to his farm Schoemansrust.

The Boers were so incensed by this that a commando arrived on Schoeman's farm and arrested him on a charge of high treason. Jan Smuts was the Attorney-General of the Transvaal at the time and, upon reviewing the charges, he refused to prosecute, saying that they could not be seen at this juncture to be prosecuting their own heroes. Smuts sent him, under guard, to General Louis Botha who was fighting east of Pretoria, along the Delagoa Bay railway line.

Botha was so disgusted with what Schoeman had done that he immediately re-arrested him on a charge of high treason. He was tried in Barberton, but acquitted and allowed to go back to his farm. However, fate had not nearly finished with this man. He had been away from his farm for nearly three months and the British, suspecting that he had reneged on his Oath, burnt his farm to the ground, looted his cattle and completely destroyed all he possessed.

Broken in spirit and dejected, he returned to his house in Boom Street, Pretoria, and there he sat on the stoep and watched as his worst nightmare took place before his very eyes. The Boer women and children were being herded into concentration camps all over the Transvaal, Natal and Orange Free State, at Middelburg, Klerksdorp, Winburg and Irene, to name but a few. By October 1901 there were some 120 000 people in those camps, and conditions were far from sanitary. By the end of that war, well over 20 000 people had died in the camps, mainly from diseases such as typhoid, dysentery and measles.

So distraught did Schoeman become in witnessing this terrible tragedy befalling his people that he mounted his horse and galloped into the Magaliesburg, where the ‘bittereinder' Generals, De La Rey and Beyers, were still fighting on. He intercepted Beyers at Sterkstroom, and pleaded with him, for the sake of the women and children, to surrender. The British troops numbered in excess of 400 000 and the Boers not many more than 80 000. Beyers would not listen to the old man. He had him arrested him and thrown into gaol, this time in Pietersburg, in what is now the Northern Province. There he stayed until Colonel Plummer captured Pietersburg in April 1901.

Schoeman returned to his house in Pretoria, where he came to a sad end. An old artillery shell, that he had kept from his First Boer War campaign days, was set off by a spark from the fireplace and exploded, killing him and his eldest daughter. There is an urban legend that the Boers actually killed him, for the ‘bittereinders' could not stand the ‘hensoppers', but we shall never know for sure.

Nevertheless, the townsfolk from the little village that had sprung up on the far side of the Hartebeestpoort Dam had a large memorial stone cross erected upon a hill, overlooking the place where his farmhouse had been, and there it stands to this day. The inscription tells how very hard it must have been to be so prophetic, but yet be rejected by your own people.