Farmer's Weekly (South Africa)
A massacre in KwaZulu-Natal
In early 1838, Zulu warriors surprised Boer laagers in what is today’s KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, killing more than 500 people, including 185 Voortrekker children. It was the merciless slaughter of these children in particular that drove the memorialisation
On the night of the 16th and morning of the 17th February 1838, thousands of assegaiwielding Zulus overwhelmed scattered Boer laagers in today’s Colenso and Estcourt districts of KwaZulu-Natal. Arguably the most ferocious attacks befell the families that had outspanned along the Bloukrans River, which is why the killings have become known collectively as the Bloukrans Massacre.
DINGANE AND THE MURDER OF RETIEF
By 1838, the Voortrekkers in KwaZulu-Natal were aiming to secure land through negotiations with Dingane, king of the Zulus. At the forefront of this diplomatic venture was Boer leader
Piet Retief who, in early February 1838, set off with a party of about 100 men to the Zulu capital of uMgungundlovu.
On 6 February, Retief and his party were clubbed to death on the instruction of Dingane, who thereafter ordered his warriors to annihilate the Boer laagers
250km to the south-west along the Tugela, Bloukrans and Bushman’s rivers.
TERROR AT MIDNIGHT
By that time, the Boers had fragmented from their defensive laagers, leaving them vulnerable and isolated, and when the Zulus eventually attacked at around midnight on 16 February, most of the Boer families were asleep.
The consequences of the surprise attack were dreadful, and as the Boers began to come to terms with the scale of the assault, those who were able to launched counter-attacks. These included Boers along the Tugela River, who had been left untouched, and the following day commandos pursued the retreating Zulu warriors, killing approximately 500.
Many of the surviving Voortrekkers were subsequently forced to face the horror of treating the wounded and burying the mutilated corpses of around 40 men, 56 women and 185 Boer children, as well as those of 250 servants (many of them children themselves), who were mainly of Khoikhoi, Basotho and Ndebele descent.
A certain Maria Maré located some 18 severely wounded children, 17 of whom later died. The surviving child was a seven-year-old Ndebele girl named Aia Jana, who had been stabbed many times and left for dead in a heap of corpses under an ox wagon.
Maré would go on to adopt Jana. Poignantly, Jana (then about 81) attended the opening of the Voortrekker Museum in Pietermaritzburg on 16 December 1912, and planted a Natal mahogany tree at the ceremony. She died in 1924 at the age of 93.
MEMORIALISING THE HORROR
The massacre was commemorated as early as April 1838 when the town Weenen (Dutch for ‘weeping’) was laid out along the Bushman’s River.
In the 1890s, a memorial near the Bloukrans River was erected over the remains of victims, who had been reinterred in a mass grave. A cornerstone ceremony was held on 16 December 1895, exactly 57 years after Andries Pretorius led the Boers to victory over the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River.
On 17 February 1897, the 59th anniversary of the Bloukrans Massacre, the memorial, featuring two harrowing marble friezes, was unveiled.
In the mid-1900s it was proposed that a relief depicting a scene from the massacre be included in the Voortrekker Monument near Pretoria. However, when The Rand Daily Mail criticised the proposed inclusion of a Zulu warrior bludgeoning an infant to death against a wagon wheel, it sparked a debate about the desirability of such a graphic scene. In 1946, then prime minister Jan Smuts resolved the issue by ordering that the motif be removed from the proposed relief.
Today, although altered, the relief nevertheless captures the sheer horror of the Bloukrans Massacre, a particularly grim chapter even in a country with more than its fair share of blood-soaked history.
• Sources: ‘Bloukrans’. Battlefields Route – KwaZulu-Natal. Retrieved from ‘battlefieldsroute.co.za/place/Bloukrans; Rankin E and Schneider RM. 2020.
From Memory to Marble. Retrieved from bit.ly/3IByELh; and ‘Bloukrans: 16-17 February 1838’. Retrieved from anglo. 50megs.com/Bloukrans.htm.