Incwadi Yami; or, twenty years' personal experience in South Africa

by J. W. Matthews

And why?

Because it was found to be indubitably certain that the answer to every question as to the cause of the rebellion would be “land.”

In the month of August, 1878, all the volunteers, including “our boys,” returned to Kimberley, the latter having been more than nine months in the field, when the proceeds of the prizes captured throughout the campaign were equally distributed among them.

The reception given to the volunteers by the Kimberley people and the inhabitants of the Diamond Fields generally was most cordial and enthusiastic, reviews, balls and dinners being the order of the day.

As a resumé of the events of the war, I may here state there had been during the campaign fully twenty engagements, attended with considerable slaughter in the rebel ranks, from whom vast herds of cattle and numberless wagons were captured, while on the side of the volunteers the average loss amounted to little more than one man per engagement.

The rebellion brought attendant miseries in its train. The prisoners, including old men, women and children, were removed to Kimberley as soon as captured, and miserable objects they were.

In piercing cold weather, it being the middle of winter, with scarcely a stitch of clothes to their backs, they were sent up in wagon-loads, and penned like so many sheep in a yard adjoining the jail. In all they numbered some 700. During their confinement, extending over some fifty days, at the rate of three a day more than one-fifth died, and the survivors were exposed to public gaze in order that the townspeople might select those whom they chose for domestic service. The ravages of syphilis among these Griquas were perfectly astounding, scarcely a man, woman or child being free from its secondary effects. These prisoners of war, virtually slaves, soon one by one made their escape to their homes, and the government very wisely, on peace being proclaimed, did not enforce the terms of their apprenticeship.

But notwithstanding the victory achieved by our arms, native disturbances were not altogether finished. Shadows of a disturbance among the Korannas at the Salt Pan, near Christiana, darkening the air, Colonel Warren thought it better to nip any rising among these people in the bud. In this case there was “much ado about nothing.” The émeute commenced through a difference of opinion between a Koranna and a Dutch farmer concerning a cow, in which a German missionary took the part of the native.

The affair was so much magnified that Colonel Warren went up to Christiana accompanied by volunteers in January 1879, and sent for Hermanus Lynx, the captain of the tribe, and the German missionary to come before him. After inquiring into the affair Colonel Warren deemed it sufficient to put the missionary on his parole d’honneur, which parole the German missionary incontinently broke.

It then was deemed necessary to take more decisive steps, and a body of men were next day sent to the Salt Pan to arrest the “reverend” violator of the first law of honor, which was done, and he was brought back to Christiana, not, however, without the loss of one of the volunteers, who was killed by the accidental discharge of a gun by a Koranna.