Olympians keeps us guessing
ner of the original African cakewalker, with a plain yellow cur of an American watchdog running a close second, with prospects of a speedy union between the cavernous display of canine molars and the rearmost portion of the ‘lion’s’ garments,” reported the bemused journalist.
Both Tswana athletes had their names butchered by reporters struggling to render their far-away names phonetically. Taunyane, who placed ninth, is variously named as “Leentonro”, “Letorew”, “Letouw”, “Leentouw” and “Leetouw”. Mashiane, who came twelfth, is quoted as “Yamasina”, “Yamasani”, “Yamasaria” and “Yamasini”.
Writing i n a 1999 edition of the Journal of Olympic History, Stellenbosch University sport historian Floris van der Merwe first restored a modicum of dignity to these unremembered men. Van der Merwe was researching the history of sport in prisoner-of-war and concentration camps during the South African War when he came across the story of Mashiane and Taunyane. He later travelled to St Louis where he found a photograph of the two runners at the Missouri Historical Society.
Van der Merwe, whose 1998 book The Boer War Show of St Louis is an important reference, is not the first writer to find profit in this weird fragment of South African history. American playwright Eugene O’Neill, in his 1946 Broadway play, The Iceman Cometh, set in a New York flophouse, revisits this history through his down-at-heel characters General Piet Wetjoen and Jimmy Tomorrow, a former South African War correspondent.
More recently, novelist Sonja Loots has repurposed this history in fiction. Her novel, Sirkusboere (2011), is partly set in St Louis and includes a black character. Jan Windvoël (Fenyang), a support rider, straddles a difficult position between collaboration and selffulfilment in the novel.
It is hard to know whether Mashiane and Taunyane were haunted by similar dilemmas. Their voices are entirely absent from history.
During the run of the South African War circus, a group of black participants “escaped” from the circus encampment. They were later “captured” in a black neighbourhood in St Louis. Lester Walton, a prominent black journalist and later US diplomat in Liberia, reported on the incident.
“The negroes had visited their untutored brethren in their huts and kraals in the Boer War camp,” he wrote at the time. “They learned that they were being held as prisoners. They thought that, if they assisted their South African relations to escape, they would only be exemplifying the doctrine of the emancipation proclamation.”
In her 2008 biography on Walton, Colored Memories, historian Susan Curtis tells that the circumstances of the black South Africans in St Louis “stirred memories of their own struggle” among African-Americans, who had been railroaded into endorsing the outlandish fair project. Moved by their plight, some African-Americans offered food to eat and places to stay, even jobs so that they could set themselves up independently.
Curtis also quotes Walton as writ- ing that local African-Americans were “very much excited over the holding in bondage of their brethren by the Boer War concession, and another attempt at their liberation would not be unexpected”.
Walton also quoted the South A f r i c a n B o e r Wa r E x h i b i t i o n Company’s ominous response: “The Boer officer states, however, that hereafter the savages will be con- stantly under heavy armed guard, both night and day.”
The noisy Boer circus continued to intrigue and delight white audiences in St Louis until December 1. Loud action-driven entertainment aside, the appeal of the exhibit owed a great deal to its ideological basis.
Framed as a “libretto” in which two white warring nations are eventually able to reconcile, the pro- gramme keyed into a familiar postCivil War theme of estrangement and reconciliation, a dynamic theme that glorified conviction, bravery and whiteness — “without having to consider what their struggle meant to men and women over whose land they fought”, adds Curtis.
After its successful run in St Louis, the circus headed for Kansas City. In January 1905, after a layover in Chicago, it moved to New York, where it settled in a suburban development in Coney Island. Recognising profit in the mixing of entertainment and suburban landscaping — think Canal Walk in Cape Town or Mall of Africa in Midrand — promoter William A Brady’s Brighton Beach Development Company underwrote the spectacle. The show was a hit.
“Twice a day,” reported the New York Times in May 1905, “rain or shine, an understudy for [General] de Wet makes his marvellous escape through a cordon of 50 000, more or less, British soldiers, while the multitude cheers, just as it will again cheer a few moments later when fickle fortune has transferred the good fortune of war to the other side ... It is not an unpleasant way, this, to enjoy a conflict; not too exciting; not the least bit dangerous, and very, very noisy.”
But public interest soon waned and, in late 1905, a court-appointed sheriff seized the costly spectacle. One of the show’s big names, 69-year-old General Piet Cronje, had sued to recover an unpaid salary of $2 429.
Cronje, who had surrendered his troops at the Battle of Paardeberg, was a disgraced figure in his homeland. Showmanship was a final play for this defeated man. With the South African War spectacle shuttered, he swallowed his pride and returned to South Africa, where he is today remembered as a “circus Boer”.
Others reverted to what they knew best: opportunist enterprise and war. McGowan ended up in Hollywood, whereas Ben Viljoen, the other general, founded a Boer colony in Chamberino, New Mexico. US president Theodore Roosevelt personally aided in the resettlement.
Sympathy for the Boers was relatively widespread in the US at the time, where they were likened — sometimes unfavourably, notably by black journalists — to Southerners, although there was a political agenda to enabling Viljoen. The smallest of the many Boer diasporas, Viljoen’s settlement formed part of a political play by Roosevelt’s government to expand US territory in the New Mexico border region.
In 1911, a year before New Mexico became part of the US, Viljoen fought in the Mexican Revolution, on the side of wealthy landowner and future Mexican president Francisco Madero González. The force of pro-Madero “foreign legionaries” also included the grandson of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi and AW Lewis, the man who had originally hatched the idea of a travelling Boer circus.
But nothing is known of the fates of Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiane. Were they, as Van der Merwe speculates, farm labourers employed by Cronje? Or, equally possible, did they decide — like Ota Benga — to stay in the US? Perhaps they were part of the troupe of “thoroughly traditional rural-traditional dancers” left stranded by choreographer Frank Fillis in New York, as is detailed in a 1915 letter to liberal politician WP Schreiner? Who knows?
The subjective experiences of these two athletes is intriguing. What were their thoughts about the florid neoclassicism of the newly emergent American empire being staged in St Louis? Did they meet Geronimo, the Bedonkohe Apache leader who was invited to the fair and allowed to sell photographs of himself in an ill-fitting suit for 25c? What did they say among themselves about the dizzying verticality of Chicago and New York? History is silent about these questions.
There was no heroic welcome for Taunyane and Mashiane, only the imprecise accolades and belated redress of historians. As it stands, the singular and divided lives of Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiane possess the certainty of rough pencil sketches. But there is that photo.
It attests that, long ago, two men wearing cut-off trousers and the numbers 35 and 36 pinned to their shirts entered a running race. That photo, that proof beyond words, is a fragile archive against forgetting. It affirms what cannot be fully told in words.