What had happened was this: The sub-chief Segale, who has since been known as Lentsue's fighting general, had closely watched the movements of the Dutch and studied their plans, till he was able to anticipate the coming of this convoy and to waylay it. He captured enough ammunition in this and succeeding attacks to enable the Chief Lentsue to arm his men. Thus they repulsed two invasions of the Boers, followed the enemy into his territory, and came home with numbers of head of cattle, and Lentsue's territory was never again invaded by the Boers.
This isolated action of the Bakhatla Chief and people in a remote corner of the Empire, on the boundaries of the late Boer Republic, had its moral and material value. The Boers, who virtually owned the whole of Bechuanaland to the south, except Mafeking town, found that it would pay them better to adopt a friendlier attitude towards the other Bechuana tribes. Thereby a Dutch Field Cornet pronounced all the Bechuana Chiefs as the original Afrikanders — with the exception of Lentsue of the Bakhatla, and Montsioa of the Barolong in Mafeking. These two chiefs, the Field Cornet said, were traitors to their country as they had joined the foreign Rooineks against their black and white fellow Afrikander. But the armed Burghers ceased to help themselves to native property, and the Government's huge compensation bill at the end of the War became less formidable in consequence. Furthermore, the task of that unacknowledged hero — the native dispatch runner — became so appreciably easier that an almost regular bi-weekly communication was maintained between headquarters at the Cape and the siege garrison at Mafeking, for the native runners after crawling through the lines of the investing Boers, under cover of the night, could move through the peasant villages with much less danger of detection by Boer patrols.
But it must be confessed that Chief Lentsue's defensive activities were wholly illegal, inasmuch as the Boers, although they had declared war against Lentsue's sovereign Lady, Queen Victoria, were not at war with him. It was defined, by an uncanny white man's mode of reasoning, that the war was a white man's business in which the blacks should take no part beyond merely suffering its effects. The Natives' retort to this declaration was in the words of a Sechuana proverb, viz., "You cannot sever the jawbones from the head and expect to keep those parts alive separately." It was this principle, we presume, that guided Lentsue's action. Still from the standpoint of white South Africa, the Chief's operations were a purely filibustering adventure; and while it seemed difficult to indict Lentsue on any definite charge, some of his men were arrested for having taken part in a cattle-raiding expedition in Transvaal in the course of which they shot and killed a German subject of the Transvaal Republic. These men were tried at Pretoria after peace was declared, and three of them were sentenced to death. All through the trial the Chief stood by his men, who pleaded justification. He accompanied them in the first instance to Pretoria, and afterwards paid for their defence at the trial, and it was evident that he took the verdict and sentence very much to heart.
If the verdict strained the loyalty of the Bakhatla, it had the effect of satisfying the Boers across the Bechuana border, in the Western Transvaal, who had to live down the sad memory of a victory gained by a black chief over their white army and of their purposes thereby. From a Dutch point of view nothing could be more humiliating than that black men should have gained such a signal success over them, and they are constantly crying out for the repression of Lentsue and his "proud" Kafirs. The Boers' demand that the Union authorities should make the thraldom of the Natives more effective, forgetting that the armed forces of the Boers when left to themselves during the temporary British evacuation of Bechuanaland were unable to do it. Notwithstanding this fact, the newspapers, especially the Rand Sunday Press, seem always to have open spaces for rancorous appeals to colour prejudice, perhaps because such appeals, despite their inherent danger, suit the colonial taste. Preceding the introduction of the Natives' Land Act, the clamour of a section of the colonists and most of the Transvaal Boers for more restrictive measures towards the blacks was accompanied at one of its stages by alarming reports of "Native disaffection", "Bakhatla insolence", and similar inflammatory headlines. One Sunday morning it was actually announced in the Sunday Press of Johannesburg that the Bakhatla had actually opened fire on the Union Police and were the first to draw blood. Our own inquiries proved that the British Protectorate, in and around Lentsue's territory, where the Bakhatla dwell, was abnormally quiet. All that had happened was that two Dutch policemen had unlawfully crossed into Bechuanaland with firearms; that the Natives had disarmed them and taken them to their chief, who in turn handed them over to the British authorities at Gaberones, where they were tried and sentenced.
It is not suggested that Sunday papers in giving publicity to disturbing reports lend their space to what they know to be untrue; but the fact remains that, right or wrong, their editorials seem ever ready to fan the glowing embers of colour prejudice into a blaze; and after arousing in this manner a most acute race feeling, the editors, upon discovering their mistake, if such it was, did not even trouble to tell their readers that they had unwittingly published exaggerated accounts — since after a fair trial before the British tribunal at Gaberones, the offending Union Police were fined 50 Pounds. The fact is that while under the quasi-Republican laws of the Transvaal a native policeman dare not lay his "black hands" on a "lily-white" criminal, even if he caught him in the very act of breaking the law: in British Bechuanaland, "there shall be no difference in the eye of the law between a man with a white skin and a man with a black skin, and the one shall be as much entitled to the protection of the law as the other," and so in spite of scaremongers' ravings to the contrary, Chief Lentsue proved himself once more on the side of the law of his Empire.
Go mokong-kong ko Tipereri,
Go mokong-kong gole;
Go mokong-kong ko Tipereri,
Go mosetsana montle.
Dumela, Pikadili,
Sala, Lester-skuer,
Tsela ea Kgalagadi, Tipereri,
Pelo ea me e koo.
"Tipperary" in Rolong.
The Barolong and the War
The Barolong and other native tribes near Mafeking were keenly interested in the negotiations that preceded the Boer War. The chiefs continually received information regarding the mobilization of the Boer forces across the border. This was conveyed to the Magistrate of Mafeking with requests for arms for purpose of defence. The Magistrate replied each time with confident assurances that the Boers would never cross the boundary into British territory. The Transvaal boundary is only ten or twelve miles from the magistracy. The assurances of the Magistrate made the Natives rather restive; the result was that a deputation of Barolong chiefs had a dramatic interview with the Magistrate, at which the writer acted as interpreter. The chiefs told the Magistrate that they feared he knew very little about war if he thought that belligerents would respect one another's boundaries. He replied in true South African style, that it was a white man's war, and that if the enemy came, Her Majesty's white troops would do all the fighting and protect the territories of the chiefs. We remember how the chief Montsioa and his counsellor Joshua Molema went round the Magistrate's chair and crouching behind him said: "Let us say, for the sake of argument, that your assurances are genuine, and that when the trouble begins we hide behind your back like this, and, rifle in hand, you do all the fighting because you are white; let us say, further, that some Dutchmen appear on the scene and they outnumber and shoot you: what would be our course of action then? Are we to run home, put on skirts and hoist the white flag?"
Chief Motshegare pulled off his coat, undid his shirt front and baring his shoulder and showing an old bullet scar, received in the Boer-Barolong war prior to the British occupation of Bechuanaland, he said: "Until you can satisfy me that Her Majesty's white troops are impervious to bullets, I am going to defend my own wife and children. I have got my rifle at home and all I want is ammunition."
The Magistrate duly communicated the proceedings to Capetown, but the reply from headquarters was so mild and reassuring that one could almost think that it referred to an impending Parliamentary election rather than to a bloody war. But the subsequent rapid developments of events showed that the Natives of Mafeking were in advance and that those at headquarters were far behind the times. In a short time after the interview of the chiefs with the Magistrate, the Boers, following the terms of their ultimatum, crossed the border between the Cape and Transvaal, cut the lines of communication north and south of Mafeking and, before any arms could reach this quarter, Mafeking (a little village on the banks of the Molopo) was surrounded, with Montsioastad, a town of 5,000 native inhabitants. The population of these places was largely increased by refugees, both white and black, from outside the town, and also from the Transvaal.