CHAPTER FIVE

BLACKS WHO BACKED THE BOERS: REPUBLICAN AUXILIARIES IN THE ANGLOBOER OR SOUTH AFRICAN WAR, 18991902

Bill Nasson

Interviewed many decades aft er the end of the South African War in 1902, a Boer Republican commando oudstryder (veteran) named Klasie Grobler showed that he knew something about the fi delity of war memory. In recalling experience of the sterling service of Willem Gorrel (or Gullet), a personal family commando agterryer (aft er-rider), Grobler sketched a telling picture of the richness and variety of identities caught up in the war, and of how this knowledge was slipping below the horizon of acknowledged history: Soon now there will be no more witnesses to attest the loyalty of our agterryers, for no monument will be raised to them. One of them was old Willem Gullet, agterryer of my late father, Commandant H. S. Grobler. Born in about 1860, this Coloured man became known as Willem Gullet because of his large Adam’s apple. His father was white, one Forley, and his mother was from one of the Coloured peoples. He was tall, strong, athletically built and he walked with a slight stoop. And what a walker! He was fairly reserved in his manner but was always courteous and addressed everybody as “little master,” whereas my father was always “old master.” He was particularly partial to a rifl e, a drink and his quid of tobacco . . . He badly wanted to take part in battles but was never allowed to do so. One morning during the Battle of Onderbroekspruit he took my father some food, but since my father was at the far end of the battlefi eld, somebody gave old Willem a rifl e and he fi red away . . . When our commando was operating among the bare hills of the highveld, old Willem drove my father’s cart, which carried his provisions and a lot of important documents . . . On the night of 13 April 1902, when 73 Bethal burgers and I were captured among the blockhouses at Slagkraal near , old Willem got away. He hid somewhere in a pool of water and, thanks to his stamina as a walker, rejoined his old master safely two days later. Aft er the peace my father gave him £2 and he went off to to fi nd his family. We never saw him again.1

1 Pieter Labuschagne, Ghostriders of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902): Th e Role and Contribution of Agterryers (: UNISA Press, 1999), 103–4. 124 bill nasson

Back in the 1960s, when Klasie Grobler was reminiscing about the intimate associational bonds between Boer fi ghters and the mounted black servants who accompanied them to the front, the absence of any monument or memorial to their role in the Anglo-Boer struggle was probably the least of it. Th ese combat auxiliaries in republican ranks had never been counted as part of the fi ghting forces of the (Transvaal) and the . As a predictable con- sequence, despite having been mobilized in substantial numbers, the incorporation of agterryers was barely, if ever, alluded to in campaign accounts, except, that is, in one or two notable earlier exceptions. In the war’s most distinguished personal memoir, Deneys Reitz’s Commando, fi rst published in the late 1920s, the author threw light on the duties of trusted black retainers as an essential element in preserving the rituals of Boer household comforts of men in the midst of war. Reitz’s narrative recounts that shortly before his invading Pretoria commando crossed the Natal border in October 1899, his father des- patched an African family servant to join him and his brother, Joubert, at their camp. Charley, a Sotho family worker who had been in the employ of the Reitz family for many years in both , had returned to the Transvaal from Swaziland at the outbreak of Anglo- Boer hostilities to off er his sworn loyalty and services. For the weary Reitz brothers, Charley’s arrival was a boon, for they were immediately able to turn over to him cooking chores and the burden of tending to their horses. Relief from menial labor was not the only blessing provided. During the lethargic republican siege of Ladysmith, Charley wormed his way in with local Africans in order to procure extra rations for his grateful Boer masters. Horsemen with servants enjoyed perks that were much envied by fellow . And, in turn, deferential, hard-working, and foraging black servants could fi nd friendliness and favor from commandos to whom they were personally loyal. As Reitz recalled of an battle that had gone badly for the Boers, in terrifi ed fl ight he and his brother found their “only crumb of comfort being our native boy, Charley, awaiting us beside the road, his voice quavering with emotion.”2

2 Deneys Reitz, Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War (London: Faber, 1929), 211.