Winston Churchill spent more than an hour at the same bend on the railway tracks near Chievely, outside Estcourt in KwaZulu-Natal, but he was being shot at for most of the 70 minutes he spent there on November 15 1899.
We had it easier; soaking up a Castle each as we sat on the embankment thinking of the dozen or so Englishmen buried under the slab across the tracks, and the Boers who took Churchill prisoner after the armoured train debacle. Being a drinking man himself I’m sure Churchill would have approved.
One of the best things about living in KwaZulu-Natal is that there’s so much history on your doorstep. If you love motorcycling that’s a bonus, and if you enjoy riding on dirt roads you can end up virtually orgasmic at the prospect of a weekend away. We’d left Durban two hours before, on our way to Newcastle, where we were to join a group of enthusiasts on dual-purpose machines for a tour of the local battlefields. Majuba Lodge would provide the accommodation and the guide, while we would need simply our machines and our enthusiasm.
By the time we bade farewell to Churchill and his comrades-in-arms the sun was slinking off towards the horizon, and we still had some hard riding to go, so we turned up the wick and sped past a score of military monuments and cemeteries on our way past Colenso, and then off down the Ezakheni road to bypass Ladysmith. This took us along the front where the final bitter fighting took place just before Ladysmith was relieved after 118 days, on February 28 1900. Our BMW 650s cruised comfortably at 140kph or so, and we arrived in Newcastle in time for supper.
On Saturday morning nine motorcycles rolled through Dundee towards the first gravel section of our ride, to Blood River — a trio of BMW 650s, a KTM 640 adventure, a 750cc Honda Africa Twin, a Honda Transalp 600, two R1100 GS BMWs and an R1150GS. The road was good gravel, and those who wanted could cruise at highway speeds. About 130kph on gravel provides more of an adrenalin rush than 230kph on a tar road, and there’s very little other traffic to worry about. Twenty dusty minutes or so were sufficient to get us to the scene of the 1838 battle that saw Andries Pretorius and his hundreds of Voortrekkers rout thousands of Zulu warriors.
Since 1994 the KwaZulu-Natal government has upgraded hundreds of kilometres of almost impassable roads to a level that they’re now acceptable for normal traffic and perfect for the machines we were riding. From Blood River we travelled east along one of these, and then swung south along the tarmac to Nqutu before hitting the gravel again en route to Isandhlwana. This battlefield is festooned with the graves of those who gave their lives for their empires, British and Zulu. And as we rode slowly between the piles of white-painted rocks I imagined ghostly heads popping up to look at the bikes. I think the 2 500 or so men who fought to the death in the shadow of the hill would have been unified in their approval of our steeds.
About half an hour’s ride from Isandhlwana we enjoyed a picnic at Rorke’s Drift, where a small British contingent held off about 4 000 Zulus in the aftermath of their loss at Isand-hlwana. The Brits lost 17 men and the Zulus around 500, and 11 of the Tommies were rewarded with the Victoria Cross. This is still the most awarded in a single action, and for the people back in Britain the relatively small victory became bigger news than the loss of their 858 British soldiers and 470 black allies just hours before. The military mind has always been adept at magnifying victories and playing down defeats, and the British Empire was particularly talented in this field.
After Rorke’s Drift we were scheduled to make a stop at Talana battlefield and museum in Dundee, but tour guide and historian Dave Sutcliffe offered us the choice of skipping that and moving on to the Farmers’ Brewery at Hattingspruit, about 20km away on the road to Newcastle. Thanks to the man’s compassion we now know lots about the ability of German beer to cut the dust from your throat, and very little about Talana. From there it was back to the lodge before heading back to Ladysmith the next morning.
All in all we covered 1 100km, about 400km on dirt, and nobody fell off or broke down. Our only regret was that there wasn’t enough time to visit any of the other historic sites in the neighbourhood — the grave of the Prince Imperial, Eugene Louis Joseph Napoleon Bonaparte; Spioenkop and Colenso. And, of course, the Farmers’ Brewery once more.