wanted to establish the republic in the east, with a land grant from the Zulu king, while Potgieter wanted to recover his cattle stolen by Mzilikazi, drive him from the land and establish the republic in the north. So there is vengeful Potgieter setting out northwards to deal with Mzilikazi, there is Piet Retief setting out eastwards to the land of the fearsome Zulus. And with Retief’s wagons rolls that of Sarie Smit’s family. And Ernest rides with them. And his fate is sealed.
‘I at last know the meaning of love,’ Ernest breathlessly confides to his journal. There is Ernest having the first real live sexual affair of his life, waiting excitedly each night outside the glow of the laagers’ campfires for Sarie to come creeping out. There is Ernest earnestly proposing marriage in the moonlight (after praying to the Lord for guidance), ‘begging her to return with me to the comfort and security of America once my duties are completed – but alas, she insists her loyalties are to her volk …’ There is Ernest travelling on his delicious illicit honeymoon across the highveld until Retief’s convoy of wagons stands on the lip of the towering Drakensberg, looking down on vast, misty, mauve Zululand far below. Ernest looks down at the daunting descent, at the long shadows cast by the mountain, and he is filled with foreboding: ‘Woe unto the land whose borders lie in shadow’ he records.
Ernest’s sense of duty to Harker-Mahoney compelled him to ride down with Retief’s advance party to parley with King Dingaan for a grant of land. The foreboding stayed with him as they picked their way down into rolling, wooded Zulu country. After many days they arrived at Dingaan’s royal kraal of Mgundgundlovu, ‘the place of the Elephant’.
‘A mighty circular village,’ Ernest records, ‘fenced with high poles, in sidé of which are many concentric rows of beehive-shaped huts all dominated by the Great Place, the huge hut of the king, surrounded by those of his many wives… Beyond is the Hill of Executions where vultures circle, feeding on the bodies of people slaughtered daily. I am filled with trepidation as we wait outside for the king to receive us …’
Ernest’s fear was well founded: King Dingaan was afraid of these Amaboela, these white men who rode swift ‘hornless cattle’ and used strange weapons with devastating effect; men who – his spies told him – had recently routed Mzilikazi, and who now wanted to settle on his borders. When Dingaan finally received these people midst great pomp and praise-singing he spent three days impressing them with his might, by military displays and frightening dancing by his magnificent regiments, the earth shaking under the synchronised stamping of their feet, their battle cries rising up to the skies. But finally he announced he would consider the request for a land grant favourably if Retief recovered cattle that had been stolen by a distant tribe.
Retief and his men were in high spirits as they set out to fulfil the bargain, but Ernest was a very worried young man: he was fearful of the Zulus, ‘deeply suspicious at how simply a grant of land the size of England was arranged. The whole thing reeks of blood …’ When Retief set off he sent two horsemen back to the Drakensberg with the tidings and Ernest seized the opportunity to ride with them, to persuade Sarie to leave this frightening land and go back to America with him.
The voortrekkers’ joy was unbounded when the horsemen toiled up the last crest of the Drakensberg with the news, but the most joyful was Sarie Smit, who had big news for Ernest: ‘I am pregnant …’
Love-sick Ernest was overjoyed. But Sarie refused to go with him to America: her place was with her volk. And so, because his heart and honour ruled his head, Ernest Mahoney went back down the Drakensberg Mountains. And the roots of the Mahoney clan in Africa were set down.
Retief recaptured the stolen cattle and returned to Dingaan’s royal kraal to claim his grant of land. Dingaan made his mark on the deed Retief proffered, then leapt up and shouted: ‘Kill the wizards!’ Warriors fell on Retief and his men from all sides, dragged them up to the Hill of Executions and clubbed them to death. Then, plumes dancing, assegais flashing, the impis set out across the land to slay the voortrekkers encamped at the foot of the Drakensberg. Hundreds were slain in the terrible massacre that followed, hundreds of wagons burned, twenty-five thousand head of cattle driven off. Ernest and Sarie survived because they were encamped miles from the main killing grounds but the whole of her family was butchered. The surviving voortrekkers were in a dreadful plight as they awaited the next onslaught and desperately hoped for reinforcements to arrive from the highveld. ‘Is there a curse on this land that lies in shadows?’ Ernest chronicled.
At last, the prestigious Boer Andries Pretorius descended the Drakensberg and rallied the beleaguered trekkers. He mounted a commando of five hundred men and set off to do battle with Dingaan. En route a Holy Covenant was taken that if God gave them victory they would forever hold the anniversary of the battle-day hallowed, that they would build a church in thanksgiving and forever live according to His laws.
Pretorius chose his battleground on the banks of the Blood River, where two sides of his laager were protected by the confluences. In the ensuing battle five hundred Boers defeated twelve thousand magnificent Zulu warriors, killing three thousand of them as they hurled themselves against the laager. Not one Boer life was lost. And thus was the conviction born amongst these simple, God-fearing folk that God had entered into a covenant with them, as He had with Moses and his Israelites, and that henceforth everything they did would be with His blessing. Thus was a theocracy born. It was to survive a hundred and fifty years.
Ernest took part in the Battle of Blood River. That night he wrote in his chronicle:
… while I am as thankful to the Lord as any, it can only be said that it was not a battle in the normal sense, but a mass execution of a magnificent army heroically taking on superior weapons. No army of white men, I believe, would have been so valiant, so disciplined, as these Zulus today … The Boers are convinced that the Lord has accepted their Covenant. But as a trained theologian, albeit a poor example, I am by no means sure: it was surely the musket that won the day – as it is winning in America against the Indians, for why should the Lord make a bargain with one tribe at such tremendous and heartless expense of another? And while I admire these Boers, and applaud their piety, it worries me that they are fond of referring to Genesis where it says that God made the sons of Ham black, to be hewers of wood and drawers of water …
And so the Boers set up their republic of New Holland, electing their volksraad, building their church. Ernest married his beloved Sarie (‘Such happiness as I have never imagined possible …’ his chronicle records). They built a hut as storage for Harker-Mahoney and began to trade in ivory and hides with what few vessels braved the sandbars. Sarie was pregnant again when the British came sailing up the coast to put an end to this impertinent new republic.
The Boers are outraged. They left their farms in the Cape Colony and trekked into the savage unknown because of Britain’s unjust maladministration, they braved the dreaded Mzilikazi, overcame the steep Drakensberg Mountains, suffered the bloody treachery of Dingaan, braved his fearsome Zulus at Blood River, and now that they have at last got their republican freedom along come the lordly British to take it all away. Personally, I understand the British view-point: the Boers are Her Majesty’s subjects who have established an illegal regime and, I hear, have seized Zulu children to work as ‘apprentices’ in a thinly disguised form of slavery … But my Sarie does not understand: she rode over to the beach as the British disembarked and, astride her horse, pointed at her swollen belly and informed the commanding officer and his admiring men that her forthcoming son was not only an American citizen but a Boer to boot and that they would have to trample over her dead body, and numerous of their own, if they imagined that the young Queen Victoria was going to deprive her unborn child of its republican birthright. ‘I would rather walk barefoot over the Drakensberg again than submit to British rule!’ cried she …
The Boers furiously laid siege to them at the lagoon, but reinforcements arrived overland and the Boers were defeated. And Sarie Mahoney kept
