Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
‘Voortrekkerstad’ the end of a commemorative trek
16 Some key events from this week in history are reflected in the following reports taken from the archives of the Argus’s 160-year-old titles
DECEMBER 16 has long been notable in the news in signposting telling moments of modern South Africa’s trajectory.
In the old order, the day acquired – or, rather, was given – religious significance as supposedly reflecting divine approval of southern Africa’s conquest by its latest immigrants.
Back in 1838, the Voortrekkers advancing into the interior had been challenged by Dingane’s impis on the banks of the Ncome River, in what later became KwaZulu-Natal.
In numerical terms, the Voortrekkers were vastly outnumbered – 470 to some 10 000 to 15 000 – but miraculously won the battle. The bloodletting (at least 3 000 Zulu warriors perished) led to its being remembered as the Battle of Blood River. For the defenders, the survival of the few against the many supported the belief that divine intercession had won the day – for which, the General Synod of the Afrikaners’ Natal Churches decided in 1864, the date of December 16 should thereafter be kept as “an ecclesiastical day of thanksgiving”.
Within 30 years the date became a public holiday, as Dingane’s Day, and, as time passed, a rallying symbol of white supremacy, and the elevation of the Voortrekker descendants as Chosen People. In 1952, the name was changed to Day of the Covenant, and, in 1980, to Day of the Vow.
By then, however, a countervailing association had been established, for it was on December 16, 1961 that Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) was launched as the armed wing of the African National Congress.
The clash of meanings was subsumed in 1994 in the nation-building project of the country’s first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, when it became the Day of Reconciliation. Fittingly, the first meeting of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission took place on December 16, 1995.
Considering this date’s gathering freight over 179 years, the timing of this weekend’s ANC elective conference achieves a certain irony – not least in the light of commentary in the paper on December 16, 12 years ago (headline: “No place now for cloak-and-dagger politics in leadership race”) which noted that, as the ANC was “inextricably interwoven with our entire political and civic culture… when one of the party’s most respected stalwarts is charged with corruption and fired from his job as deputy president of the country, the shock waves reach far beyond the party”. That man was Jacob Zuma.
On December 14 just two years later, in 2007, the headline, “The choice facing us” – bridging photographs of Zuma and the man who fired him, Thabo Mbeki – signalled the prelude of Mbeki’s fall.
Scrolling back to 1938, it’s a very different South Africa that emerges from the doubtless portentous report of events on December 16 that year at the gathering at “Voortrekkerstad” – the end point of the commemorative centenary trek.
A somewhat more quixotic trek celebration was recorded in the report “Round the camp fire in Kenya” which told of how “Kenya’s Voortrekker celebrations were centred at Broederstroom, near Eldoret, where practically the whole South African community is living in a large camp” formed by “a ring of tents and covered wagons, providing a picturesque and romantic spectacle”.
In what must have been a jarring note at the time, Cape readers learnt of the London Times’s editorial commentary that drew a close association between the Voortrekkers’ going out “into the wilderness in quest of liberty” and the “growing epoch of the long struggle of Wilberforce and Buxton for the emancipation of the negro”.
A little less than a decade later, anyone looking for a signal from the white establishment of a meaningful acknowledgement of this responsibility would not have been heartened by Jan Smuts’s remarks on December 16, 1946.
This report, with the sub-heading, “Solid wall of prejudice”, reflects Smuts’s – and probably South Africa’s – woeful misappreciation of the thrust of history.
It followed the inauguration of the UN, in whose formation Smuts had played a meaningful part. The report began: “General Smuts, in the longest broadcast of his career, last night gave a comprehensive review of the proceedings at the U. N. O. General Assembly as they concerned South Africa …
“We found unbelievable misunderstanding about race and colour conditions and their handling in South Africa. We found a solid wall of prejudice against the colour policies in South Africa which not even the most efficient publicity could have broken down in the time at our disposal.
“The inflammable issues of race swept over the multiplex assembly in a flood of emotion formed by mischievous propaganda, and created a situation which only calm reflection can bring back to reality and to a proper perspective.”
A day later, in a report aptly headlined “Equality the theme at U.N.O”, Smuts expressed with admirable simplicity a post-war scene to which South Africa was evidently ill-suited and seemingly incapable of adjusting.
“For the first time in history you bring together the whole of mankind of whom two-thirds are coloured, into one body, and the other onethird will have to sit up.
“Remember that the majority of mankind is coloured, and therefore in a world par- liament like that you cannot expect things to go your way. You cannot expect your point of view to prevail a 100% or even 50%. You are dealing with a world-wide public opinion that is not favourable and looks on your policies here as unfavourable to them.”
Post- war South Africa’s chronic failure of political imagination is almost pathetically reflected in Smuts’s saying resignedly: “If in such a world setting you find the majority don’t agree with you and condemn you, don’t let it break your heart. You should have expected it.”
Less than two years later, Smuts was pushed aside by D F Malan’s Nationalists.
South Africa’s fate, just a year and a half after the first apartheid government was elected, was captured crisply on December 16, 1949, when Malan himself, speaking at the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, extolled the virtues of the crusading Voortrekkers as the van of “White Christian civilization in a greater South Africa”.
On their descendants, Malan went on, lay “the inexorable demand on the one hand to act as guardians over the non-European races, but on the other hand to see to the main- pictures of Noah’s Ark.
In the fridge sat bars of chocolate and a can of cooldrink. Dried sausage hung outside the door with cooking implements.
Saturday night’s operation in Ad Dawr, 15km south of Saddam’s home town of Tikrit, was characterised by “stealth tenance of their own White paramouncy and of their White race purity.”
If these sentiments appear to rank today as the last word of error, one has only to fast forward to that perceptive commentary of 2005, and especially the observation that “Black South Africans learnt in a short time what took their white counterparts many decades to learn: all politicians have feet of clay.” It went on to suggest optimistically that “Mbeki and his camp were stirred up to face the reality that their aloof, rule-from-above political culture was very unpopular. ”
Just three years later, of course, arch strategist Zuma ousted Mbeki himself – and, this weekend, is the unignorable presence at the ANC’s elective conference in Gauteng. and speed”, Hickley added. “It was very, very fast.”
“He said: ‘I am Saddam Hussein, I am the president of Iraq and I want to negotiate,’ ” said Operations Commander Major Brian Reed.
“The response was: ‘President (George) Bush sends his regards,’ ” Reed said