Has the time come for Namibia to honour the heroes of its past? James Ambrose Brown looks back at the bloody conquest of legendary Bondelswart rebel leader Abraham Morris whose lust for liberty took him to his grave
Abraham Morris was the last of the fiercely independent Bondelswart fighting generals. With his handful of ragged, badly armed men, he fought the Germans in the grim Fish River Canyon and on the barren heights of the Richtersveld mountains. Six thousand Germans could not bring him to surrender in their bloody war of conquest. On the heights and around the waterholes their dead are still evidence of the struggle.
It was when the Germans lost their grip on South West Africa, after the 1914 to 1918 war, that Morris returned to Guruchas, his stad (town) in the Bondelswart reserve, to find himself the leader of a rebellion that he knew could only have one ending …
A photograph of the great guerrilla fighter shows him lying in his stony grave, uncovered to make sure people were aware that Morris was indeed dead and would not become a legend.
In his late 40s, his face showed the mixed Orlam and Scots blood. Pale and gaunt in death, the quality of the man was still to be seen. His foes were deeply moved, particularly the man who’d delivered his death wounds.
The date was June 4 1922.
At about midnight he bled to death from three bullet wounds that could not be staunched by men who carried no medical supplies. The man who had given him his death wounds was a young police captain, Hendrik Prinsloo. He knew Morris well and bitterly regretted that it had come to this. He knew Morris had been unjustly treated and for him it was a bitter irony that duty had forced him to hunt and kill a man he admired.
As he stood with bared head, Prinsloo vividly remembered his encounters with Morris, especially this last one at the waterhole in the Bergkamer. Going ahead of his exhausted men, Prinsloo was first to be greeted with a volley from the hidden Bondels. Seven of his troopers were wounded, one of them with shattered legs.
It was a deathtrap of continuous firing. The police horses were being killed and they were running low on ammunition when he saw Morris mount his horse, Vonk, and order his men to pull back.
Prinsloo fired at 637m. Morris’s horse was killed under him. On foot, the Bondel leader urged his men to safety through the narrow nek, each one crossing against the last of the light. Morris, scrambling to follow, fell with Prinsloo’s next shot.
Prinsloo counted seven men returning to help him. Three were killed in the police fire, the other four were wounded. Morris was hit twice more. Then darkness closed in. Both sides carried away their wounded.
Prinsloo moved forward in the dark to give water to the Bondel wounded … but found no one. His constable, Van Zyl, rode in agony supported by troopers. “His cries and moans over that terrible track I will never forget.”
Up there in the crags, Morris was carried by men who knew he could not live the night. Almost his last words were: “If you have to move, shoot me … don’t let me be taken.”
Morris had fought for his concept of freedom all of his adult life … hunted, a price on his head. Exiled.
The white men who hunted him in this frontier engagement had a grudging admiration for him. They knew his people shared their blood and language and religion. They wanted the same thing: independence. But this, in the unsettled frontier of the time, made him too dangerous.
Morris had been dangerous since early manhood. He had taken up arms against the German occupation and learned under Hendrik Witbooi the business of killing the red- cheeked volunteers who had sailed from the fatherland to secure Germany an empire in that faraway, harsh land. With flower- garlanded rifles they had marched to the docks, promising to come home with trophies.
The Germans claimed that it had all begun to go wrong when settler families were murdered. The patriotic press howled for revenge against the murdering savages. Lithographs showed fearless women with blonde babies around their skirts being struck down, their farms ablaze. It was clearly necessary to exterminate the Herero and civilise the land.
Why should England have so much of Africa and Germany nothing?
The Herero possessed the best grazing lands on the few rivers of white water. Seduced by drink and trade goods they had gradually bartered away their best land. Their cattle had been driven off in punitive expeditions; their leader reduced to impotence by schnapps, weakness and the domination of missionaries and powerful German leaders.
Once the Germans had obtained a footing, their colonisation had gone ahead with characteristic skill and energy. They pushed south, surveying, building the railway, setting up telegraph and police posts. Soon they encountered the people who had been masters of this vast territory for 100 years.
The Witboois were a clan of restless freebooters of mixed Khoi and white blood who rode sturdy horses and were well-armed. Their leader was a highly religious man and literate. Hendrik Witbooi saw himself in the role of a Moses, his people as the Children of Israel. Years before, the young Hendrik had heard the voice of God telling him he was to be the ruler of the entire land and king of Great Namaqualand. And so he was, by right of conquest.
His people had a fierce, ineradicable love of liberty. Like the Children of Israel and the Groot Trek Boers they moved across vast empty distances, herding their flocks, quarrelling among themselves and settling their feuds in bloody forays.
In Hendrik Witbooi the German colonists met their first opponent. He was then a man of 70 who saw that if the various clans did not unite against the invaders, all would be lost to them. As the invaders spread their outposts and their settlers ever farther south, he began to resist from his stronghold in the Naukluft Mountains on the edge of the Namib desert.
Commander Von Francis, appointed commissioner and military commander, could not bring him to terms. In his regal rejection of the offer of German protection, Witbooi wrote in his quaint High Dutch: “What is protection and from what danger and difficulty and need is one chief protected against another?” He would not swear loyalty to Kaiser Wilhelm.
When the Germans stormed his eyrie he escaped in his nightclothes to live among the rocks on fruits, fieldmice, lizards and the larvae of white ants. His daughter told her captors: “Before long my father will come down on you like a lion and take his revenge.”
But later in life, forced into German vassaldom, Witbooi had to send his men to kill the Herero and petty Khoi chiefs. It preyed on his conscience to witness the drumhead executions of Herero chiefs and listen to the drum beats that accompanied the volleys. The German-language settler press made it clear that the extermination of the indigenous people was their aim … that or permanent servitude. All feeling of Christian philanthrophy must be repudiated.
As the weaker Khoi clans fell to the invaders, men who had for decades enjoyed their own form of government, spoke and read High Dutch and were deeply religious, talked of revolt.
As Morris well knew, “every German policeman and every farmer seemed to be the government … able to do to us what they pleased, flog us and take our women … no one was punished. We were called liars.”
In prisons many died of starvation and floggings, others died by forced marches – 224km to Keetmanshoop in gangs, iron rings round their necks, connected by chains to one another. As they trotted to keep up with the horses, blood came through the soles of the toughest feet. Those who fell were dragged.
Morris saw it all. He knew that in their own courts a man had a right to defend himself. Under the new German form of justice accused persons were never allowed to give evidence. A white man’s letter of complaint about a lazy or sullen servant was enough to secure a conviction. Evidence on oath was not accepted.
Morris had seen the chain gangs and knew the graves of those buried along the broken tracks. It could not go on.
The white settlers were aware that they were living in an explosive atmosphere among a subdued but resentful people with a long history of being their own masters.
Hendrik Prinsloo, the young police officer, knew his thinly manned outposts were too weak. He knew of Morris as a shepherd living in a settlement with his wife and three daughters and knew his reputation. He was not surprised when Morris came to offer his services to “the king of England” now at war with Germany.
Morris knew every metre of that grim territory. He knew the graves and burnt-out supply wagons still marking the struggle with the German columns when he was Witbooi’s lieutenant. Who better to be made chief scout of the South African Intelligence Corps! Commanders quarrelled to claim the services of this bitter, gaunt-faced man who seldom spoke, and never before strangers.
As Morris hunted the Germans and saw the Boer and settler volunteers retaking the old Khoi lands, there can be little doubt he believed he was fighting for the restoration of the old independent days. He believed the new English administration would restore to the Bondleswarts lands reduced by the German treaty to a 20th of their former size.
When a commander flattered him that he was no “Hottentot” he replied, “No, commandant … I am a Hottentot … my mother was a Hottentot … my father was a Scotsman.” Taller than his people, some said he was more European than native. He was hard as nails, taciturn and very religious.
After the war, Prinsloo made Morris a present of a rifle – for service and his personal estimation of the man’s quality. It was a Lee Enfield. This was considered to be a rare mark of esteem in a territory where the once free hunters had shot as they pleased but were now rationed to five cartridges a month. And every empty shell had to be accounted for.
Morris guarded other men’s flocks and waited. The Nama people were seething with resentment. Victory over the Germans had brought them nothing … indeed, they were barely allowed to keep what they owned. The Bondel territory was never to be restored and what remained was being nibbled away. Settler windpumps and surveyors’ beacons were now landmarks.
At this hour there arose in Griqualand a Moses. A martyr who had served 14 years in prison for rebellion in 1898. He was a brilliant man who mingled a flair for business with messianic pretentions. Morris came under his spell. He saw Le Fleur as the saviour of the Nama … the one to lead them to defy the new English laws.
In the growing climate of unrest, messages from Guruchas, his stad in the Bondel reserve, urged Morris to return and lead. The people were chafing to revolt.
He did not at first react. It was an act of petty authority which cast the die. When he claimed to be unable to pay his 1 a year tax, he was expelled from the territory. He asked permission to cross the Orange River and settle in the Union with his family and stock.
Prinsloo, as police commissioner, told him this was refused. Now a man without a place … forbidden to return to Bondel territory he was asked to surrender his rifle. It is recorded that he did so reluctantly. And with it two rounds of ammunition.
Police reports say that Morris crossed the Orange River with his family and four others with children and stock, winding up into the hills. Defying the law. The order was given for his arrest.
Only a few months before this, a police sergeant had been sent to Guruchas to arrest a brother of the chief. This man, Nicholas Christian, had been a fugitive hiding in the Fish River canyons. Upon tracking Christian down in Guruchas, the police sergeant had laid his hand on the fugitive’s shoulder in token of his arrest. The people swarmed around the sergeant. He was alone with only a Nama constable who warned him of his danger. As the policeman rode away he said: “The government will return and rain melted lead on you.”
The Bondels took this as a declaration of war and began to gather in their fighters to the stad, driving in their livestock and preparing for siege. Fighters were sent to raid white farms for firearms for a struggle that could only end one way.
Chief Jacobus Christian sent out messages of defiance. “Let us all gather here together and die quickly.” About 1 200 men, women and children came in to Guruchas … the entire clan. They had some 40 firearms, many of them ancient muzzleloaders.
The white commandos gathered … farmers, civil servants, war veterans stiffened by South West African police with two German mountain guns and four Vickers machine- guns. The plan was to encircle the Bondel territory.
From South Africa, General Jan Smuts ordered Colonel Pierre van Ryneveld to entrain from Pretoria with three DH9s armed with bombs and machine-guns. He and his pilots were all decorated air aces of the battles in France. It was seen as a chance to demonstrate the power of the new air force as a weapon of control.
The troops moved into positions below Guruchas and waited for the coming of the warplanes. Prinsloo, now in command of 400 men, had suggested to Van Ryneveld that the airmen should bomb the Bondels’ livestock. No doubt a demonstration of air power would bring a quick surrender without loss of human life.
The first aircraft circled over the huddle of huts and the church. It met with rifle fire. The great bird flew away, but returned with another. Van Ryneveld had duelled with German Fokkers in France and been severely wounded. Now 30 years old, he was leading four comrades of the war. He had been given 24 hours by Smuts to get ready for action and this was it … the dropping of 9kg Cooper bombs on a village.
As the bombs exploded, the commandos’ mountain guns opened with shrapnel and high-explosive shell. Hundreds of panic- stricken animals charged downhill. Scores were killed or eviscerated. When the dust cleared, some figures were seen emerging under a white flag. Morris surrendering? It was only a group of elders with women and children.
In a raging sandstorm the disgruntled commandos sacked Guruchas, burning the pondoks. Hunting dogs slunk about the carcasses of donkeys and sheep. Old Chief Christian had led a group into the kloofs but was soon spotted from the air. Crouching among the rocks they were convinced that the firebirds could see. Eyes were the painted rondels on their wings!
The airmen dropped about 100 bombs and fired several thousand rounds of Vickers machinegun fire. The surrendering Bondels said they didn’t mind “as die vol drol kak [if the bird dropped shit]”, but in the machine-gunning “dan is ons gebars [we are done for]”.
It is told that when the prisoners were brought in, Van Ryneveld looked appalled at a woman with a bundle of bloody rags on her back.
“Artillery work … not mine,” the famous victor of many a duel over the trenches of France was heard to say. Indeed, in this operation there were mixed elements of anger, fear and shame. Anger at Bondel intransigence, fear of another Khoirising that would engulf the whole territory – and shame at the way it had to be done. Bibles and tobacco were handed out.
The commandos were hungry, thirsty, badly led and pressed to the limit to cut off the fugitives in awful terrain that broke the legs of horses. Hardly a beast was fit to ride from exhaustion and injury.
The exhaustion of men without rations and water allowed the Bondels with Morris to keep ahead in territory they were well familiar with and hardened to by their lives there.
But the commando net was now closing all around and he knew he must make for the Gungunib kloof in the Dead Mountains where he had wiped out a German detachment in 1906 as they searched for water following the dried-out riverbed. Morris knew no white man had ever seen the pools at Bergkamer. He knew that they too were short of water. They would meet him there.
The final scene became a duel between Morris and Prinsloo. It was winter in the barren mountains. Morris’s band crouched over fires on the small rock-girt plateau about 915m up, lanced by icy winds. Their horses and donkeys were finished … the dead were eaten.
Then before first light the DH9s’ engines spluttered into life and Van Ryneveld and Lieutenant Hector Daniel took off into the still dark hills. They saw the fires of the Bondels and circled to drop bombs. Circled away and returned to machine-gun. The canyon walls reverberated and shook with explosions.
Morris buried his dead and pushed on … hoping to break through the cordon to the Orange River and even reach Warmbath. One last gesture of defiance would surely bring them independence.
Prinsloo had followed for 80km. Men and horses dropping. He pushed them relentlessly, following the bloody footprints on the rocks. Finally, he went on alone on foot, far ahead of the rest, pausing only to light fires to guide them.
In the maze of dried watercourses, the boulder-strewn emptiness, he passed the graves of more than 100 German soldiers. He knew that if his last 25 men did not catch up with him he would face Morris’s ambush alone.
About 27m short of the waterhole he was joined by two of his men. At that moment he sensed a trap and dropped from his horse at the split second Morris opened fire. There were more than 200 rebels ahead … but only one in seven had a rifle.
Prinsloo saw Morris taking reckless chances under fire to direct his men, riding from group to group. Where they had to fall back they left 49 dead … Prinsloo was to find that many had been shot in the head as they took up a firing position. The next man crawled up to take the rifle as it was dropped. The sniping duel went on all day.
As dark approached, a message came out with a wounded lad.
“My kaptein Abraham Morris ordered me to surrender to you and I must tell you that he is not afraid of aeroplanes and that you will never take him alive … nor will any of us surrender while he lives.”
Morris was bleeding, weakening as he was carried up into the hills. Prinsloo’s first bullets had pierced both legs. Another shot had hit his arm. At about midnight of June 4 he died. His men made a sarcophagus of stones and laid him in it, his arms crossed, and piled on stones. Around him they buried the dead they had carried from the fight at the waterhole. Then they scattered away.
Six days later Prinsloo and a small party followed the spoor to the site of the grave. In the icy cold, Morris’s body had not deteriorated. He seemed to be at rest. His men had pulled off his riding boots to deal with his wounds. He lay barefoot in his blood-darkened trousers.
Prinsloo wrote: “His appearance was a terrible reproach to us.” The few words he spoke to honour the dead man were noted by Captain W Urquhart, the correspondent of The Star newspaper who had covered the entire campaign. Van Ryneveld stood by to hear the air force medical officer Major Porteus confirm the cause of death as loss of blood.
Years later, Van Ryneveld, now a sir, wrote: “I remember the picture from the air of the forbidding Gungunib kloof gashing its way through the mountains to the waters of the Orange River … it was easy for us floating above the operation dropping our bombs. We made the canyon reverberate.”
Yes, it was finished and there was an air force party.
“Prinsloo was not there. He was still in the saddle tying up loose ends … he has accomplished the seemingly impossible,” wrote Van Ryneveld.
Smuts later told a gratified Parliament in Cape Town: “A great bloodletting has been averted by prompt action.”
And Abraham Morris? Do Bondelswart children at Guruchas tell stories about their hero, or is he forgotten?
— James Ambrose Brown is a novelist, historian and journalist of many years’ standing