Incwadi Yami; or, twenty years' personal experience in South AfricaMatthews, J. W. (Josiah Wright)
History
Incwadi Yami; or, twenty years' personal experience in South Africa
Matthews, J. W. (Josiah Wright)
Diamond mines and mining -- South Africa; South Africa -- Description and travel
In the month of August, 1878, all the volunteers, including “our boys,”
returned to Kimberley, the latter having been more than nine months in
the field, when the proceeds of the prizes captured throughout the
campaign were equally distributed among them.
The reception given to the volunteers by the Kimberley people and the
inhabitants of the Diamond Fields generally was most cordial and
enthusiastic, reviews, balls and dinners being the order of the day.
As a _resumé_ of the events of the war, I may here state there had been
during the campaign fully twenty engagements, attended with considerable
slaughter in the rebel ranks, from whom vast herds of cattle and
numberless wagons were captured, while on the side of the volunteers the
average loss amounted to little more than one man per engagement.
The rebellion brought attendant miseries in its train. The prisoners,
including old men, women and children, were removed to Kimberley as soon
as captured, and miserable objects they were.
In piercing cold weather, it being the middle of winter, with scarcely a
stitch of clothes to their backs, they were sent up in wagon-loads, and
penned like so many sheep in a yard adjoining the jail. In all they
numbered some 700. During their confinement, extending over some fifty
days, at the rate of three a day more than one-fifth died, and the
survivors were exposed to public gaze in order that the townspeople
might select those whom they chose for domestic service. The ravages of
syphilis among these Griquas were perfectly astounding, scarcely a man,
woman or child being free from its secondary effects. These prisoners of
war, virtually slaves, soon one by one made their escape to their homes,
and the government very wisely, on peace being proclaimed, did not
enforce the terms of their apprenticeship.
But notwithstanding the victory achieved by our arms, native
disturbances were not altogether finished. Shadows of a disturbance
among the Korannas at the Salt Pan, near Christiana, darkening the air,
Colonel Warren thought it better to nip any rising among these people in
the bud. In this case there was “much ado about nothing.” The _émeute_
commenced through a difference of opinion between a Koranna and a Dutch
farmer concerning a cow, in which a German missionary took the part of
the native.
The affair was so much magnified that Colonel Warren went up to
Christiana accompanied by volunteers in January 1879, and sent for
Hermanus Lynx, the captain of the tribe, and the German missionary to
come before him. After inquiring into the affair Colonel Warren deemed
it sufficient to put the missionary on his _parole d’honneur_, which
parole the German missionary incontinently broke.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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