Issued by: Office of the Deputy President
MAFIKENG 10 OCTOBER 1999
The Premier of the North West Province
Deputy Minister Bridgitte Mabandla
MEC's present
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen,
For a long time, the cultural landscape of South Africa has been out of balance. To this day, one does not often see, around the country, the memorials and monuments that represent the heritage of most South Africans. It is only now that the first tangible moves towards redress are being made - to re evaluate "the conventional" wisdom of history, and to listen anew to the narratives and experiences of our elders.
Today, here in Mafikeng, we are honouring a rich heritage, made visible by a growing rediscovery of sites of historical significance. These are beginning to be identified by the community of Mafikeng. Now, on the centenary of the siege of Mafeking, the Anglo Boer/South African War too is being revisited, and viewed through the lens of post apartheid, democratic South Africa. A hundred years ago, a twenty four-hour ultimatum from Paul Kruger to the British agent in Pretoria, expired. The next day, the country was at war. The first shots were fired by a Boer commando, at the Kraaipan railroad, south of Mafikeng, on Friday the 13th October. The Anglo-Boer War, an important episode in the long saga of a three-hundred-year long "South African War", was launched. Today, we are here to venerate the many victims of that thirty-six month war - the Boer, the British and the black people who perished in Mafikeng. We are here also, in the interest of redressing the historical record, to honour Kgosi Besele Wessels of the Tshidi Barolong. It was mainly his people who successfully defended the city - without them the Boers might have taken Mafikeng within a few days.
Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, the earliest major confrontations of Anglo-Boer South African War took the form of tree sieges - in Ladysmith, Kimberly and Mafikeng. The Boer military tactic to surround the enemy, blocking their exit and entrance, then waiting for them to surrender, had succeeded more than once in Boer efforts to conquer local African kingdoms and was to be, once again, their main strategy. In that war, Mafikeng was the first to come under siege.
Mafikeng, home of the Barolong, had seen many significant battles over many generations, mainly skirmishes for control of this strategic terrain between the Barolong and the Khoisan. These were later to be followed by skirmishes with a succession of missionaries, traders, Boer trekkers, whit entrepreneurs and British colonisers.
With this checkered history, Mafikeng was at the centre of a territory of many diverse alliances. On the second day of the war, on 13 October 1899, the Boers surrounded Mafikeng and the siege soon became a microcosm of the war.
In the embattled town, cross-sections of men and women were thrown together; forced to struggle in co-operation against increasingly grim conditions - soldiers, traders, housewives, farmers and traditional leaders - black and white people. Mafikeng, during the siege, produced two great innovators, one a pioneer of the scout movement that continues to flourish in South Africa and many other countries today, Colonel Baden-Powell. The other is our first black novelist, diarist, rapporteur and linguist, Sol Plaatje. It is Plaatje's Boer War Diary, written in Mafikeng that gives us a unique black perspective of the war. Nearby stands the home of the renowned Molema family, where Plaatje stayed while he wrote his diary. It is now in the process of being declared a National Monument.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Sol Plaatje's book and other accounts are full of many examples of the contributions made by black people during that war, from simply bearing arms, to providing intelligence, to digging trenches around the whole perimeter of Mafikeng.
In his account of the war Plaatje writes about the role of the Barolong people, of Freddy, the "black Sherlock Holmes", the Barolong herdboy, and the Black Watch regiment composed of "a mixture of Zulu, Shangaan, Tembu and other Transkean breeds". Those labourers, reported an English diarist, had done "stupendous work". Sadly this appreciation soon Faded as rations began to run out and Baden-Powell adopted a "Starve or Leave" policy towards the black people. Well over a thousand black people, many of them small children died during the seven - month siege and towards the end Boer forces took pity on them and allowed them to pass through their lines unharmed.
Finally, the war ended up on the negotiating table as all wars must - inevitably, but sadly, the reconciliation excluded black people. Sol Plaatje, who had loyally supported the war, eventually became disillusioned with the post-war regime, the Union of South Africa. He began to use his pen to oppose the injustices of the system. His powerful book, the Native Life in South Africa, exposed the inequities of the 1913 Land Act.
In 1912 he became one of the founders of the South African Native National Congress, and thus the struggle in the long South African war continues.
Ladies and Gentlemen, you might ask yourself the question "Why have we recalled in painful detail Mafikeng's past?" The answer is simply that it is important to acknowledge the truggles and sacrifices made in the name of liberation, by both Boer and black and to try to understand the historical forces that led to these on-going confrontations.
We need also to learn the lessons that they impart - that distressing as our past may be, it is a shared past that excludes no South African. The stories that are written and those that have been passed on from generation to generation through a vibrant and informative oral tradition must find themselves in our collective memory of the war and of our history. We need to tell these "ghastly tales" not in order to forget, but so that we may liberate our hearts from the agony of silence.
It is our historical responsibility to reconcile and heal those old wounds - for us to understand that the survival of the Afrikaner is bound up with the survival of the South African nation as a whole. We need to tell the story of those heroic Afrikaner and also acknowledge those that betrayed the Boers. We need to reveal the stories of black people who fought in the war, and why they participated in what to some was a "white man's war".
In all its complexity and multitude of narratives, the South African War can teach us a lot about ourselves and give a greater understanding of the history of our country over the last century. It can help us to understand the place that we have reached today and to know that the history of the South African War belongs to all of us. Our memory of the war, as we reconcile as a nation, must aspire towards an inclusive story for all its participants.
Thank you.