meet Moshoeshoe
Stephen Gray
TWO hundred years ago a pair of lowly lads was born in Scotland, that great producer of emigrants. One was the son of a humble joiner in the northernmost Highlands, the other of a mere shepherd in the Border area. Both were self-educated, ambitious enough to make something of themselves in Africa as it opened up, and both were called what else but Andrew.
Today, how does one commemorate those rather unfashionable coeval pioneers – Andrew Geddes Bain, the poet and pass- builder, and the other Andrew with the even plainer surname of Smith? At least the former is remembered with Bain’s Kloof mountain-pass into the Cape interior – about as far as he could get from Edinburgh, in his youth still the Athens of the North, capital of the Scottish enlightenment. Perhaps it is now the latter’s turn.
Andrew Smith (pictured below) founded – and in 1825 became the first superintendent of – the South African Museum in Cape Town, the first of its kind in the expanding land. He was, of course, a collector of the bagging and stuffing variety. Some of his specimens are still snarling and pouncing on the public in the Royal Museum of Scotland on Edinburgh’s Chambers Street. Such zoological trophies he eventually lived off exhibiting there, as evidence of the Darwinian tooth and claw-type of world view. During the Imperial heyday, natural history was best kept in glass cases. Smith himself, however, was an altogether calmer negotiator of political affairs, a peacekeeper.
Museum styles have so altered that they seem reversed. Nowadays one goes back out to original sites, checking if there is anything left of their history in the open air. In homage to Smith, I decided to tramp out one of his routes – up Lesotho’s Thaba Bosiu, the mountain recently declared a national monument. Preservation is in progress there.
For a modest fee, friendly guides are supplied by the tourist information centre near the Mmelesi Lodge outside Maseru, at the base of the ascent. They willingly give one a hand over the basalt boulders and sandstone bricolage, tending themselves to bound up the narrow frontal defile, the Khubelo Pass, where the burgher commando, Louw Wepener, was felled.
An alternative coward’s pathway winds up more sedately. Either way, the ceremony of arrival has not changed since King Moshoeshoe first settled on his impregnable plateau in 1824 – adding a stone to the cairn above the entry. Defensive weapons.
On behalf of the Cape of Good Hope Association for Exploring Central Africa, Smith ventured up there in October, 1834, to interview this formidable Moshoeshoe. He had visited Dingane in Zululand and was en route (like Bain) to consult with Mzilikazi in the Western Transvaal.
Accompanying him up what he called the “escalade of the pentagonal hill” was the French missionary Eugene Casalis, who well knew Moshoeshoe the Shaver (or Leveller), with his capital rising out of the bone- strewn plains – this Mountain of the Night.
What the present-day guides tell you about it all is a rather prejudicial, Peter Beckerish fantasia, far from archivally verifiable truth. One great eucalyptus that has dried up the original springs could not possibly be where the king used to hold court; gum-trees were not yet imported. Nor is the stone cottage the ruins of Moshoeshoe’s polygamous palace; more likely it was a later trading-goods store.
When sombre, bearded Smith and his entourage sweated up past that cairn, the plateau was smoky with wood-fires. He was escorted by Moshoeshoe’s “shrieking praise- singer” and many “clamorous women” keeping others off him. Moshoeshoe’s raging and senile father had to be beaten off.
Among the “novel and interesting scenes” he records was the sight of an entire wicker village so labyrinthinely designed that the king’s residence at the core was hidden from strangers.
And there was Moshoeshoe himself awaiting the procession, the lissom potentate, ruler of the Berg. Above the waist he wore only a string of glass beads about his brow, with a tail of small feathers. His lower half was swathed in panther skins. Distribution of tobacco commenced, in return for baskets of curdled milk.
Days pass as they tour the defences of the Sotho redoubt together: “almost uniform perpendicularity … which bids defiance to the further advance of the foe”, notes Smith.
At last he enacts what he has been commissioned to do: presenting to an ally the British goodwill tokens of a royal cloak and medal. These were bestowed at a mass gathering, the likes of which had never been seen in these parts.
Moshoeshoe, who ruled throughout most of the 19th century, was never unseated from that lofty fastness. His grave is still up there, not unvisited. A Western-style tombstone among amaryllis flowers, centre of the national shrine.
Other details of Smith’s sojourn at Thaba Bosiu stick in the memory. In the event of a siege those magical springs could never have sustained the whole retinue with cattle, so the stronghold was secretly permeable. The watchmen, patrolling the plunging cliffs, barking right through the night like dogs to prove to the community they were awake
Smith, Moshoeshoe’s unlikely recorder, had to move on. As an army surgeon he designed ambulances for the Crimean campaign. Like Bain, for his footwork in the colony he was eventually elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. His cordial journal, from which the details above are taken, was published by the South African Museum only in 1975 – too late to influence the more racist popularisers – and has not been reprinted.
But his account of how diplomatic exchanges actually occurred merits re-reading today for its exactness. How else may one trace his dusty footsteps all the way up that magnificent Thaba Bosiu to meet with the real past?