Curious story of the first African
was later exhibited in the Bronx Zoo).
“Native villages were arranged in ascending order of race and cultural progress, capped with a demonstration of American efforts at inducing general progress through a model school,” writes Gilbert in his 2009 book, Whose Fair?
South Africa was represented in this human circus by men who signed up to re-enact key scenes from the South African War. They included two real-life Boer generals, Benjamin Viljoen and Piet A Cronje, and demobilised soldiers from both sides.
Conceived by AW Lewis, an artillery captain with battle experience in the war, the spectacle was given artistic credibility by the involvement of South African circus impresario Frank Fillis. The show, which was performed twice daily and included ample explosions, reprised two key battles, Colenso and Paardeberg, the former a Boer victory.
The programme also included displays of swordsmanship, circus acts, musical shows and horse racing in a purpose-built pavilion with a small river and seating for 15 000 visitors. Cost of entry: 50c. Billed as “the greatest and most realistic military spectacle known in the history of the world”, the concession opened on June 17 1904. The scale of the enterprise is recalled in numbers: the day before opening, 600 performers from the “Boer War spectacle,” as it was known, participated in a street procession through St Louis.
The performers included two future Hollywood heavyweights: JP McGowan, an Australian-born diamond prospector who fought with the British and pioneer of the railroad action genre, and William Boyd, a circus “rough rider”, who later achieved fame for his role as cowboy Hopalong Cassidy.
The street procession also included 50 women in wagons and ox carts, two brass bands and a contingent of black South Africans in traditional dress. The latter included Mashiane and Taunyane, who many decades later were identified only as despatch runners. For many of the South Africans in St Louis, the performance of their identities came to define who they were, at least in the eyes of gullible spectators.
Mashiane and Taunyane first garnered notice during a two-day event organised by the fair’s department of anthropology. These “Anthropology Days”, as they were billed, were intended to test “startling rumours and statements that were made in relation to the speed, stamina and strength” of “several savage tribes”, to quote its organisers.
To this end, men in native costumes threw spears for the amusement of white men in bowlers and boaters. Benga and several of his countrymen participated in a mud fight. The aim of these displays of athletic ability was not singly for white amusement but also intended to vindicate white athletic ability and intellectual progress.
A news summary in the St Louis Post-Dispatch suggests the intellectual compass of this crackpot uni- versity on the plains of the Midwest: “Barbarians meet in athletic games; Pygmies in mud fight, pelted each other until one side was put to rout. Crow Indian won mile run; Negritos c a p t u r e d p o l e - c l i mb i n g e v e n t and Patagonians beat Syrians in tug-of-war.”
Although the fair’s chief anthropologist, William McGee, felt vindicated by what he described at the time as the “utter lack of athletic ability on the part of the savages”, Taunyane nonetheless caught the eye of Olympic organisers. The taller of the two unremembered marathon runners, Taunyane was placed third in the “intertribal” marathon behind men from Syria and India.
On Tuesday, August 30, a hot summer day, both he and Mashiane were invited to participate in the Olympic marathon. The invitation was by no means philanthropic. Despite its ostentatious styling, St Louis was an unattractive destination for competitive athletes. Few foreigner competitors travelled from Europe to compete.
“Except our own athletes, practically nobody came except some Canadians, two Greeks and Felix Carvajal, the quaint little marathon runner from Havana,” recalled a New York Times reporter in 1932 of the marathon event he had witnessed. His recollection ignores the presence of three South Africans in the race.
RW Harris, from Aliwal North, was described in the local St Louis press as “the best long-distance runner of the country from which he hails”. Harris, however, dropped out of the Olympic marathon shortly after the halfway mark.
Mashiane and Taunyane, who ran barefoot and were described as Zulu men, both completed the race, which was a far from orthodox affair. Held on a hilly course, its dusty roads used by cars, the marathon’s route enabled one participant to hitch a ride in a car for a quarter of the race.
Thomas Hicks, a doped-up Briton running for the United States, eventually won the race. Strychnine cocktails and brandy shots did the trick.
Carvajal, a former mail carrier who had lost all his money in a crap game in New Orleans and hitchhiked to St Louis, might have done better had he not eaten some green apples from an orchard en route. He is reported to have got “a stomach ache” and finished fourth.
Mashiane could have done far better had he not been chased off course by a dog. A newsman with the St Louis Daily Globe-Democrat reported on the incident. He mistakenly identified Mashiane as “Lentauw” (Taunyane), whose Tswana surname is a compound: tau denotes a lion. Perhaps their names were simply switched to allow the journalist to indulge in some purple prose.
“The ‘Lion’ was cavorting wildly across a stubble field, after the man-