THE LONGEST MARCH: OCTOBER 5-15, 1899

Rapitse Montsho writes independently

The rumor of an Anglo-Boer War in 1899 spread through the Witwatersrand like wildfire, reaching the black and white mine workers alike. The long march that started on the 5th October to the 15th to Zululand put sweat, fear and tears to all.

The battle lines were drawn between the British and the Boers. More brutally the near genocide of more than 7,000 unarmed Natives and women was to unfold. The gold mine owners left the mine workers to die from starvation. Lord Kitchener turned his back on the starving Natives in the name of, “let the starving Natives die”, whilst Lord Chamberlain, the master shoe maker and orator from Birmingham UK gave preferential treatment to the coloured community. All in all it was a savage war against the Natives. Pakenham recorded that the Commandant relented: “With 7000 Natives on the verge of starvation treading on the heels of three thousand armed Boers, there were the elements of a great massacre of defenseless people”. Amongst them were children and stragglers.

When the ultimatum expired on the 11th October 1899, the Chamber of Mines issued its own order – close the mines. The Randlords, Eckstein, Rhodes and Beit, boarded trains to Cape Town and London.

The trains for white refugees were provided, but the white passengers in the train refused to let the Natives go on board. The white women and children were given free tickets to Natal and the Cape. The carriages were guarded by the Imperial Light Horse. When the Native mine workers begged to be allowed onto the coal trucks, onto the cattle trucks, onto the roofs, the white passengers refused them. “No kaffirs on this train,” was the order from the station master at Johannesburg and Volksrust.

Behind the trains they left more than 100,000 Native mine workers locked out of the compounds, without pay, without rations, without a pass to return home. Those who could walk, walked. Those who could not, died.

Pakenham wrote that the roads north to Pretoria and south to Natal became black with men. Women carrying children on their backs, old men who had come from Mozambique, from Basutoland, from Zululand for a shilling a day, now walking 300 miles with no food.

The Boers, fearing that these thousands would join the British, drove them from farm to farm. The British, fearing they would spy for the Boers, refused them entry to their laagers. They were trapped in between – a nation with no guns.

It is in this march from the 5th to the 15th October that the first great crime of the war was committed. Not with a Maxim gun, but with hunger. More than 7,000 unarmed Natives, women counted among them, were left to the veldt. The mission stations at Driefontein and St. Augustine recorded bodies of children and stragglers along the Klip River road.

The White Historians’ Prism

This history was not forgotten by accident. It was hidden by the prism through which white historians told it.

The British prism, led by historians like Leopold Amery and Arthur Conan Doyle, painted the Anglo-Boer War as a noble civil war between two white races for civilization. In their books, the Native is absent.

The Afrikaner prism, led by J.D. Kestell and later Gustav Preller, painted the war as the Tweede Vryheidsoorlog. They rightly documented the deaths of 27,000 Boer women and children. But they never counted the more than 20,000 Natives who died in separate black concentration camps at Dry Harts, at Bell, at Nooitgedacht.

Pakenham himself, though more honest, still looks through a white prism. He records the 7,000 Natives on the verge of starvation only to explain why the Boer Commandant relented.

Fred Khumalo the author of the Longest March gives the African miners agency. They had name, clan totems, character and music. Nduku, Xhawulengweni Nongoloza were real people.

This is where The Longest March breaks completely from the white historians’ prism. In Amery and Conan Doyle, the Native is a number – “100,000 surplus Natives.” In Kestell and Preller, the Native is invisible.

In Khumalo’s Longest March, the miners are not numbers. Nduku was not “Native labourer No. 4317 from Zululand.” He was Nduku ka Mbhudu, of the Dlamini clan, whose totem is the lion, who sang the ingoma yejozi at night to keep the feet moving. Xhawulengweni Nongoloza was not a straggler. He was Xhawulengweni of the Nongoloza, of the people of the Ndebele, who knew the old footpaths from Johannesburg to Pietermaritzburg before there was a railway.

These were real people. They argued on the road, they laughed, they stole mealies from the Boer farms, they carried each other’s children. They had agency. They chose to walk rather than die in the compounds.

And special mention must be made of Marwick and his pony – for in the white histories this pony is scarcely mentioned, yet it carried our history.

Captain John S. Marwick was the Native Affairs officer at Volksrust. He was not a general. He was not a Randlord. He was a junior official who could speak Zulu.

When the Chamber of Mines closed the compounds and left more than 100,000 Natives to starve, Marwick saw what Lord Kitchener refused to see. On the road from Volksrust to Newcastle he met the column – 7,000 Natives on the verge of starvation, treading on the heels of three thousand armed Boers, with children and stragglers falling behind.

Other officials wrote reports. Marwick brought his pony.

It was not a war horse. It was a small, tough Basuto pony he used for dispatches. That pony became an ambulance. That pony became a cradle. The sick old women who could not walk further, Marwick lifted them onto the pony. The children with feet swollen from 100 miles of barefoot marching, he put them on the pony.

For three days on the road to Zululand, that one small pony went back and forth, carrying the weakest.

In Amery’s history, the pony is not there. In Conan Doyle’s, the pony is not there. In Kestell’s, the pony is not there. White historians had no time for a Basuto pony carrying starving Natives.

But in the oral history of the march, in the songs of Nduku and Xhawulengweni Nongoloza, that pony is remembered. They remember the white man who did not turn his back when the white passengers in the train had refused the Natives to go on board.

One white man. One pony. For 7,000 starving Natives. That is the only mercy on a road of 300 miles.

Fred Khumalo Review: The Longest March

If white historians looked at the Anglo-Boer War through a prism, Fred Khumalo would tell you they looked through the wrong end of a bottle – the bottle from the Rand Club.

They taught us in Bantu Education that the Anglo-Boer War was a war between the English and the Dutch. Two bulls fighting over a cow called South Africa. We Natives, were the grass trampled under their feet.

I grew up hearing my grandfather talk about Johannesburg. He did not talk about Kruger or Milner. He talked about the road. “We walked,” he said. “We walked from Johannesburg to Natal. No food. No water. The white man closed the mine and said hamba.”

The Longest March of the 5th to the 15th October 1899 was longer than the Boer Long March. The Boer Long March was armed and on horseback. Our march was barefoot, unarmed, with women and children.

What I love about this work is that it does not ask for pity. It asks for memory. You have counted what white history refused to count: 7,000 Natives on the verge of starvation, treading on the heels of 3,000 armed Boers.

This is not just history. This is our origin story as Native workers in Johannesburg. Before the pass laws, before apartheid, there was this march. The first lesson we learned: in this city of gold, Native life is cheap because the emphasis on African lives was based on property value, whilst for whites it was based on human life. Kitchener and Kruger could easily approve the liquidation of Africans.

SUPPLIED: Rapitse Montsho writes in his full capacity