John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
‘Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say,” the late John Lennon once jingled on the subject of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth.
This week we had the pleasure of Her Majesty’s company in our humble country for the second time in five years. Last time she came she didn’t have a lot to say about the Boer War. This time, she still didn’t have a lot to say about the Boer War, but at least she said something.
She said she was sorry that so many people had died in that shameful conflict that started a hundred years ago, making particular reference to the fact that it was people of all the wonderful races that inhabit South Africa who perished and suffered in this manner. In the words of her spokesperson at the British high commission in Pretoria, the queen was speaking “in the context of reconciliation” and in the spirit of looking forward to the future.
I think it was jolly nice of her to say what she said, but I am a little astonished that she, of all people, should have been called on to intervene in the controversial issue I raised in this column four weeks ago, namely that the war in question was a white thing, and that the rush to make it seem like an inclusive thing that could have a unifying effect across this rainbow nation was a rather peculiar revision of our history. The Boer War, I said, is hardly the thing to conjure up in the spirit of reconciliation between black and white.
Someone has obviously been making calls to various British institutions, including Buckingham Palace, to set me straight on the issue of this war. Less than a week before the queen delivered her barely concealed broadside in my direction, a certain Dr Iain R Smith of Warwick University delivered a rather limp slap on the wrist in the pages of this very paper. My contention that it was a “white man’s war”, he says, “contradicts what historians have revealed during the past 20 years”.
He is somewhat sketchy about what these mysterious historians have, in fact, uncovered over the past 20 years that makes any difference. He cites cases of Bakgatla, Pedi, Swazi and Zulu combatants who used the apparent cover of the white man’s war to settle old scores and try to gain advantage for their own long-term agendas. But none of this amounts to those black populations having any real stake in what the British and the Boers were fighting about, namely control of the land and riches of South Africa. Whether they were inspanned into bearing arms for a cause that was not theirs, or whether they truly believed that their involvement would bring about a dispensation that was favourable to their people, those black soldiers, spies and porters were literally fighting a losing battle, whichever side they threw in their lot with.
My great-grandfather was one of them. Family oral history tells of this man’s heroic exploits on behalf of the British army in the Eastern Cape. He used his “kaffir invisibility” (who on either side took the natives seriously?) to glean information about Boer movements and supply routes, information he passed on to his red-coat handlers, who used it to devastating military effect.
The Boers finally got wise to his antics, and put a price on his head.
A Boer kommando came close to achieving this objective, tracking great-grandpa down to a rocky area out in the countryside, and slowly closing in on his hideout.
Like all of his descendants (ahem!) he was a quick-thinking man. He knew that the information the Boers had been circulating about him described him as “a kaffir with a full beard”. Hidden among the rocks, he scrabbled around for a sharp stone. He used this sharp instrument to scrape off that giveaway beard. When he was done, he emerged from his sanctuary and calmly walked right into the path of the hunting party.
The hunting party glanced at him and rode right on by, still searching every nook and cranny for some sign of the naughty African with a bushy beard. They had no interest in the clean-shaven darkie who shuffled past under their very noses.
So what did my great-grandpa get for taking such risks for Lord Kitchener and Queen Victoria, grand-mum of the present, reconciliating queen? Mucho da zilcho. By 1913, 10 years after the end of hostilities, the final dispossession of the native had been effected by the mono- racial Land Act. The final removal from the voting roll of those few non-whites who had somehow gained limited voting privileges followed.
My grandfather Samuel, one of the sons of the one-time British spy Nquma Matshikiza, was allowed to own a house on Scanlon Street in Queenstown, and had permission to run a small shop, serving black customers almost exclusively, in the neighbourhood. His neighbours were the Moeranes – the maternal grandparents of Thabo Mbeki and his siblings.
In the early 1950s, Nationalist Party legislation removed this last zone of dignity, imposing the forced removal of the Matshikiza and Moerane families, among others, from Scanlon Street because it had been rezoned for Indian use. There was no compensation. The Matshikiza home was demolished, and the plot where it stood stands empty to this day.
That was the net effect of the ironic triumph of the defeated Boers.
We are slowly moving towards the reclamation of that fragment of land. But please, Dr Smith and Mrs Queen, don’t try and make me feel that, because I am now allowed to start that tortuous process of reclamation, I should feel anything but distaste for the war that made that dispossession inevitable.
It was, I repeat, a white man’s war, ultimately fought for the benefit of white people in general. Full stop.