Barman and the bliksem and their chase across the Karoo
• Graaff-Reinet was the setting for the forgotten Battle of Paardenfontein
Graaff-Reinet is rebel country. From 1795 to 1801 there were three revolts against colonial rule. During the Boer War, Afrikaner rebels roamed the district in guerrilla campaigns against the British and locals.
More recently the town produced two prominent antiapartheid rebels, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and Beyers Naudé.
Today the only sign of rebelliousness is in its history, which is all around.
The house in which Naudé grew up as the predikant’s son may be poorly renovated, its Oregon pine features have disappeared, but at least it bears his name, as does the local municipality. Further along Murray Street is the more dignified Reinet House, the original pastorie, once occupied by a succession of dominee Murrays, father and son, themselves something of evangelical rebels.
Sobukwe’s ties to the town of his birth and burial can be found in two museums. One is in Umasizakhe, a reminder of the Group Areas Act and just over the hill from the town centre. The house was begun by his son Dinilesizwe, who died in 2019, and it remains unfinished. A more complete tribute is in the Old Library Museum where a former curator, Hermi Baartman, an Afrikaner woman, devoted an entire wing to his memory.
Sobukwe’s grave is not so easy to find. It lies neglected on the fringes of Graaff-Reinet, near the entrance to the Kroonvale township. His funeral there in 1978 was a huge political event. Often forgotten is that at the time of his death Sobukwe and Nelson Mandela had equal status in the liberation struggle. I n 2007, mayor Daantjie Japhta was asked why there were no signs to the grave, unlike those to the execution site of Gideon Scheepers, best known of the Boer rebels. He said a historical walkway was planned that would give directions. Sixteen years later there are still no signs, but then Japhta was ANC and Sobukwe PAC. In a rejoinder to Japhta’s understanding of struggle history, the PW Botha House, once a local commando headquarters, is now named for Sobukwe.
Another site of rebellion that’s hard to find is not because of neglect or political indifference, but topography. It lies in the mountains to the east of Graaff-Reinet where a barman-turned-rebel leader had a bloody showdown with his pursuers. To find it you’ll need a good guide and a good book. David McNaughton can take you there and Chris Schoeman can give you the full story of Hans Lötter.
McNaughton, whose family has been around Graaff-Reinet for more than 100 years and where members still farm, grew up a farm boy who came to town and stayed. Today he deals in property, takes care of tourists and runs one of the best bookshops in the business. He also knows people and places.
Schoeman grew up in Somerset East and as a small boy was intrigued by stories told by his father and uncles of the Eastern Cape, of hunting and of places called Bruintjieshoogte, Swaershoek, Daggaboersnek, Sheldon, Longhope and Mortimer. Now he has made his own story of the Battle of Paardenfontein and Hans Lötter.
Lötter is not as well-known as Scheepers, but his story is just as tragic. He was the second youngest of 11 children and the sixth son, the seventh being his brother Zirk, who joined him on commando having forsaken medical studies in Edinburgh.
The war between the British and the Boer republics, and variously called the Anglo-Boer War, the Boer War, the SA War, or in Afrikaner nationalist circles the Second War of Freedom, was the making and the demise of Lötter, according to Schoeman’s biography, Rebel: Die Lewe van Kommandant Hans Lötter, 1873-1901 (Protea).
As Schoeman shows, the war gave a restless soul direction in life. Lötter was a tolbos, a tumbleweed who wandered about the district taking work where he could find it. Until the war’s outbreak in October 1899, Lötter had been barman in a Noupoort hotel a two-day horse ride from Graaff-Reinet
— and a salesman at a bottle store in Middelburg on the same road north.
He was swept up by the emotions of the time that sharply divided English and Afrikaner (at that time still mostly Dutch speaking). He was among the Afrikaners caught in the war’s crossroads: citizens of a British colony owing allegiance to Queen Victoria but with ties closer to those of the republics on matters of family, religion and language — and a strong belief that Britain had provoked the war in a lust for Joburg’s gold.
When war broke out, Lötter and his brother Zirk threw in their lot with the republics. The Boers recruited sympathisers in the Cape to create a fifth column in colonial territory. The British would regard men like the Lötters as traitors, liable to be sentenced to death if captured.
But catching them would not be easy: Lötter emerged as a natural leader, rising in the Boer ranks and leading his band in ambushes of the enemy, sabotage of its rail links and intimidating the locals. He and his men became a scourge in the area. He would be accused of murdering two “native scouts”, black men who were vital elements in Britain’s intelligence network that would lead to his capture.
Schoeman’s book is a gripping story of a small tragedy in a greater SA one that would poison race and language relations for years and delay a full democracy for almost a century.
It is also the story of dogged pursuit by a man whom Thomas Pakenham describes as “perhaps the most dashing of all the column commanders” on the British side. Colonel Harry Scobell was “a rattling good man” in the eyes of his troopers, writes the author of The Boer War, widely regarded as the definitive single-volume account of the conflict. Before he began his sweep against the rebels, Scobell gave a ball in Cradock, where, according to a colonial trooper who accompanied him against Lötter, “champagne flowed like water”. Officers and men alike were invited and would later pay for such indulgence by having to stick with Scobell on his gruelling ride.
Scobell, says Schoeman, had once farmed with his brother in New Mexico. The state is mountainous and arid, an area Schoeman got to know when he studied in the US. There the Scobells worked on dry, unforgiving land similar to the Karoo “so he understood the terrain in which he was operating against Lötter”. He was also, says Schoeman, a harde bliksem (a hard bastard) who was relentless in driving his men.
By the time Scobell’s column arrived in the Groenkloof valley that lies between the Tandjiesberg and the Bouwershoek mountains to the east of GraaffReinet his men were gatvol, says Schoeman. It had been five days into their trek and a storm had broken and soaked the soldiers. It was September 1901 and peace was still eight months away.
Henry Timson Lukin, then a colonel in the colonial forces and later brigade commander of SA troops at Delville Wood in World War 1, is quoted by Schoeman on the conditions. Lukin was not at Groenkloof, but understood what pursuers and rebels would have endured: “I have seen the men, after dismounting in the pouring rain ... throw themselves down in spite of mud nearly ankle deep and snatch a few minutes’ sleep.”
In one account, Scobell, having received good intelligence from his “native scouts”, was certain that Lötter’s band were up on the Kondoa plateau of the Bouwershoek mountains. In another, Schoeman says the rebels believed they had been betrayed by local farmers and one of those, Lewies van Niekerk, was later assassinated by the Boers. Van Niekerk, the rebels claimed, had led Scobell’s column up a kloof to the top of the Bouwershoek mountains where the farm of Paardenfontein lay.
Scobell was not about to let the weather stop him from running the rebels to ground. His column of about 1,100, made up mostly of the 9th Lancers and the Cape Mounted Rifles, outnumbered the enemy about 10 to one. It was an advantage that comes seldom to a commander in the field.
The rebels had come from the south, near the town of Pearston, where a descendant of Lötter’s family, Lood Lötter, farms to this day. The British had come from the north, using the bridle path through Petersburg, which lies at the centre of the Groenkloof valley.
They would have to lead their horses up a steep ravine that runs from the valley floor, between prickly pear groves, to the plateau and deploy at night, and in pouring rain. Scobell’s column was travelling light; he had eschewed a wagon train for pack mules to keep up with the speed at which the rebels moved. Another advantage was Lötter’s complacency.
The rebel commandant, through sheer fatigue and a belief that the owner of nearby Paardenfontein farm was sympathetic, did not post sentries on the night of 4/5 September. His band had found refuge in a sheep kraal with a corrugated iron roof that protected them from the rain.
While Lötter’s men dropped off to sleep, Scobell was driving his with grim determination. Before dawn, Scobell had deployed his forces, ensuring that there would be no escape, but he still had little idea of the rebels’ exact location.
There are conflicting theories of how the battle began: by the noise of a British officer, Lord Douglas Compton, dropping his heavy revolver at the opening of the kraal or by troopers galloping past. Whatever the reason, it was “one of the strangest sights of the war”, according to Pakenham. “From sheep into lions.” A rebel fusillade cut down six Lancers, but somehow missed Compton.
The subsequent battle was bloody but brief. The rebels lost 19 killed and 50 wounded of about 114 men; 18 British troopers were killed, after a rebel attempted to wave a white flag. The rebels were soon overwhelmed and it took four days for the prisoners to reach Graaff-Reinet.
They walked for the first two days, sleeping a night in the shearing barn of Charlie McNaughton’s farm. David McNaughton’s great-great grandfather then took them on his wagons into the town where the locals turned out in numbers to witness and perhaps even jeer at faces they recognised; once a scourge now in chains.
The rebels were convicted by a military court and because they were considered traitors, were accused of murder for every soldier they had killed on the British side. Death sentences were handed down, including to Hermanus van Meyeren, 14, and Johannes du Plessis, 16. Both were commuted to imprisonment and Van Meyeren given 12 strokes with a cane.
Neither boy was armed when captured. Du Plessis, who had joined Lötter’s band just three months before, had been helping Zirk Lötter treat the rebel wounded during the battle.
Zirk Lötter had been shot in an eye, which he cut out with his penknife in the belief at the time, even for a medical student, that one bad eye could affect the good one. Nevertheless he carried on treating the injured.
After exile in Bermuda, he returned to Edinburgh after the war to complete his medical studies and later worked as a GP in Pearston until his death.
His elder brother was executed by firing squad in Middelburg a month after capture. Hans Lötter was 28 years old. The execution of Lötter and Scheepers just a few months apart marked the end of the Cape rebellion.
Scobell became a majorgeneral and the last officer to command British troops in the Cape colony before the union of SA. He died in Rondebosch 11 years after the Battle of Paardenfontein, aged just 53.
During a visit to the battle site, our group was lucky not to encounter weather like the Tandjiesberg storm. In spite of good rains in the district, and rain all the way from Cradock to Somerset East and GraaffReinet, the sun was out on the day. But at the top of the Kondoa plateau at the height of summer, it was cold enough to require blankets. In early September of 1901 it must have been freezing as well as wet.
With McNaughton as guide and Mount Camdeboo head ranger Letishia Kleinschmidt as driver, negotiating a tricky road hacked out of the ravine, we reached the heights of the Bouwershoek mountains a lot easier and quicker than Scobell’s men 121 years before .
The sheep kraal is still there, as are the bullet holes in its roof. Its pristine condition is what first attracted McNaughton to the site when he guided visitors from the Samara and Mount Camdeboo private reserves.
Those reserves, along with the Asante Sana private reserve, occupy the land in the Groenkloof. When the main road was rebuilt to the west of the Tandjiesberg after the war, Petersburg became a ghost town on what was once a busy shortcut from Graaff-Reinet to Cradock. Today Groenkloof’s wildlife and quiet isolation are attracting visitors who can walk a forgotten battle site and gaze across at the plains of Camdeboo beyond. And there’s a good story to go with it too.
SCOBELL’S COLUMN OUTNUMBERED THE ENEMY 10 TO ONE, AN ADVANTAGE THAT COMES SELDOM TO A COMMANDER IN THE FIELD