Who was this Rhodes character? You cant travel far in South Africa without coming across the name Cecil Rhodes, so here is a little information about him to arm yourself with. A key player in South Africas colonial history, Cecil John Rhodes was an Englishman who made his fortune in diamond mining and fought for the expansion of the British Empire at all costs with visions of British colonies stretching from the Cape to Cairo. R = Rhodesia. Modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia were former colonies developed by Rhodes and the British South Africa Company for their mining potential and named Southern and Northern Rhodesia in his honour. H = Hertfordshire. Where he was born, in England in 1853. A sickly child, he was sent to South Africa in 1870 to farm cotton with his brother in Natal, before later moving into diamond mining and politics. Not necessarily the obvious remedy for a sickly child! O = Oxford. He returned home in 1873 to attend Oxford University but took some years to complete his education there, so busy was he with his South African exploits. Today, money from his will funds the Rhodes scholarships for students from former British colonies, Germany and the U.S. (of which Bill Clinton was one). D = Diamonds. Prospecting around Kimberley made him financially independent by 19. By 35 he controlled 90% of the worlds production of diamonds through the De Beers mining company. E = Elections. Rhodes was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1895 when he resigned after implication in the Jameson Raid (1895-96), which aimed to overthrow Paul Krugers government in the Boer Republic of Transvaal. S = Siege. During the South African/Anglo-Boer War, Boer troops besieged Kimberley for 124 days, with Rhodes in it. Towards the end, with the expectation that bombardments would worsen, Rhodes ordered the townsfolk into the diamond mine shafts for protection. Rhodes never saw the end of the war, dying in Cape Town in 1902. For more information on Rhodes visit the Rhodes Cottage Museum at 246 Main Rd, Muizenberg. Its the humble home where he died and is free to visit Tues - Sun, 10am - 1pm and 2pm - 5pm. Afrikaans Afrikaans emerged originally from the Dutch spoken by the Capes first settlers. From the late 17th century their Netherlands Dutch began to change in pronunciation and vocabulary adopting new words from indigenous African languages as well as Portuguese and Malay from imported slave labourers. New French Huguenot and German settlers soon spoke the creolised Cape Dutch and it became recognised as its own language by the 19th century, though Afrikaans and Dutch are still - more or less - mutually intelligible today. Frontier Country Boer and Zulu war history pervades much of the countrys cultural background, but the Eastern Cape was also the scene of violent cultural clashes where British and Boer settlers collided with the resident Xhosa. The Eastern Cape was an area of rich grazing land, ripe for colonial expansion, but the Great Fish River that fed it also divided it, becoming a bitterly fought over frontier. Over almost a century, from 1779 - 1878, nine frontier wars were fought and today the region is littered with old forts and buildings of historical interest. Grahamstown itself has more than 70 heritage sites and its Albany Museum makes a good starting point for avid history hunters. The Battle of Blood River The British were by no means the only ones to clash with the Zulus - the Boers had been at it for ages. During the Great Trek of the mid-1800s, while many headed north west, thousands of Boer farmers came east of the Drakensberg to present-day KZN. The struggle for land once again led to war and in December 1838, on the banks of the Blood River, 10 - 20,000 Zulu impi attacked some 470 Voortrekkers led by Andries Pretorius (hence the capital Pretoria). Remarkably, thanks to their rifles and strong laager or wagon-ring defensive position, not a single Boer lost his life, while some 3,000 Zulus were killed. The Battle of Isandhlwana and the Zulu Wars Tension between the British and Zulu kingdoms and an unmet ultimatum sparked the Zulu Wars of 1879. On January 22 some 25,000 Zulu warriors attacked and slaughtered 1,300 British troops encamped at Isandhlwana, killing fleeing survivors at nearby Fugitives Drift. On the same day another Zulu force attacked a British magazine and field hospital at Rorkes Drift where the heroic hundred fought off 4,000 Zulu warriors for 12 hours, losing 17 men and earning 11 Victoria Crosses. A tour of the battlefields is a must and most years there is a re-enactment at Isandhlwana on the Saturday nearest to January 22nd with a major event every five years. Check details with Isandlwana Lodge. The Anglo-Boer Wars - a very potted history The British and the Boers just never seemed to hit it off, finally settling centuries of strife in two wars. It was the discovery of gold and the explosive growth of Johannesburg that was their final undoing. British colonial expansion and the annexation of the Transvaal sparked the first Boer War or War of Independence, when the Boers revolted, defeating the British at the Battle of Majuba Hill in February 1881 after three months of confrontation. The Second Boer War or South African War was to be a far more bloody affair. The Transvaal became autonomous and the strongly pro-Afrikaaner Paul Kruger the leader of this impoverished but strongly independent state. The discovery of a huge gold field in the Witwatersrand (the Rand) south of Pretoria, changed its fortunes overnight. Hoards of British outsiders or uitlanders descended on the Transvaal and Johannesburg was born. To prevent their inevitable insurgence on Transvaal politics the British were denied voting rights. British gold mine owners complained bitterly of unfair taxation and overpriced black labour and tension grew to bursting point after a failed coup attempt backed by Cape Colony premier Cecil Rhodes. Aware that the British were lining up for war Kruger made the first move and, allied with the Orange Free State, declared war on Britain in 1899. Some 500,000 British soldiers faced 65,000 Boers with black soldiers recruited by both sides in a war that dragged on until 1902 and was fought right across the country. The Boers adopted a style of guerrilla warfare that made them almost impossible to defeat and it was only through a scorched earth policy and the first concentration camps that the British finally ground them down. Some 24,000 Boer women and children and 14,000 black and coloured people died in appalling conditions in the camps, which decades later would stamp their mark on history during World War Two. Paul Kruger had it right when he reputedly said his countrymen should cry rather than rejoice at the discovery of gold in the Transvaal, as it would cause our land to be soaked in blood. Shaka Zulu Shaka was a Zulu king and Shakas Rock, so the story goes, is a rock from which he made his warriors jump to show bravery… or threw prisoners to the sharks (depending on what you read). Whatever he did there, he was certainly central to fomenting a still-thriving Zulu culture. Born the illegitimate son of the clans chief in 1787, he developed into a formidable warrior and became ruler when his father died in 1816. Honing his military skills, Shaka expanded the Zulu kingdom and identity to include more than 100,000 people with almost half of those recruited into the army. Through wars with neighbouring tribes the Zulu kingdom grew to cover a large area stretching north to the Mozambique border, west to the Drakensberg and south to the Wild Coast (pretty much modern-day KZN). Shaka welcomed British farmers and sent emissaries to Britain, but was assassinated at the height of his power in 1828 and succeeded by his half-brother. Tensions between the British and Zulus led to the Zulu wars of the 1870s.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 09:45:37 +0000
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