Two Suitcases: Colonialism Crumbles

By Mike Bellis

European settlers in colonial Africa did not have an easy time, depending on what they came with. Theirs was a life of adventure, hardship, homesickness, disease and sometimes, war.

The title is Two Suitcases because that is what most Europeans arrived in Africa with, and subsequently left with. Two Suitcases; Colonialism Crumbles, tells the stories of two normal families with different aspirations, beliefs and backgrounds, one family being British and one being Afrikaans, and their experiences in Southern Africa. The story covers the Boer War to settling in Rhodesia, through the First World War and the hardships of the Great Depression followed by the Second World War. And then, Ian Smith signs Rhodesias Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Great Britain.

Much of the Two Suitcases trilogy has been inspired by three great writers, Wilbur Smith, James Mitchener and Stuart Cloete. Watch out for Two Suitcases Part Two; The Leap into Uncertainty, covering Rhodesias UDI and Bush War years, followed by Two Suitcases - Part Three; Descent into Darkness, covering the birth of Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe to the present day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524668099

Mike Bellis

Mike Bellis was born in the UK in the early 1950s and emigrated to Rhodesia with his parents when he was six months old. He was schooled in Umtali (now Mutare), studied agriculture, served in the Bush War, and farmed in Zimbabwe until 2003. He and his wife, Carol, have a son and daughter. This is the third book in a trilogy.

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© 2017 Mike Bellis. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 02/03/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6785-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6786-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6809-9 (e)

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Contents

Two Suitcases

Colonialism Crumbles

Prologue

Colonialism Crumbles

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

TWO SUITCASES

When Robert Mugabe ran white farmers off their properties, starting soon after the millennium celebrations, I met some of these displaced farmers around Chimoio, Mozambique. The Mozambique authorities had offered them virgin land to start a new life and up to fifty displaced farmers took up this offer. Internationally, few knew or bothered about their plight, or the plight of their half a million farm workers plus their families who had lost their jobs and homes. European and American liberals trotted out the tired old story that whites had stolen the land from the blacks in the first place and black, nationalist politicians eagerly jumped on this bandwagon.

The trilogy, the first of which begins below, is named ‘Two Suitcases’ because that is what many immigrants arrived in Africa with, and that was all they left with. It is a story that many people who lived in Rhodesia will connect with. It is not purely a story about the military and war because life is more than that – a civilian’s life can be just as boring or exciting as any soldier’s.

For over a century, there has been a senseless animosity between English and Afrikaner. I am a born Pommie who is married to an Afrikaans Boeremeise so, hopefully, this story is without bias.

And it is a novel.

The politically incorrect ‘k’ word (kaffir) crops up occasionally because that word was in common use a hundred years ago, as Negro was only fifty years ago. Kafir is the Arabic term for non-believer and has nothing to do with apartheid, Ian Smith or Hendrik Verwoed (as many liberal activists would have us believe). It not used in a racist or derogatory way, being only factual for that period in time.

The first book, ‘Colonialism Crumbles’, traces the lives and backgrounds of two typical Rhodesian families, one Afrikaans and the other, British, from their times in South Africa and Britain before the Boer War, through to Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Great Britain.

The second book, ‘The Leap into Uncertainty’, describes these families’ lives through the turbulent years of Rhodesia’s independence from 1965 to 1980 when the country was stretched to the limit by United Nations sanctions and a vicious terrorist (or bush) war that claimed the lives of over 20,000, mainly civilians. ‘The Leap into Uncertainty’ covers, for the first time, farm homestead attacks and the unglamorous, but vital, role Internal Affairs and its District Commissioners and staff had to play in the Bush War.

The third and last book, ‘Descent into Darkness’, follows the families’ experiences in the new Zimbabwe where the economy under President Robert Mugabe collapsed like an economy has never collapsed before in the history of the world after white farmers were driven off their farms that fed the nation and beyond.

COLONIALISM CRUMBLES

Introduction

From when history began, there have been populations invading, colonizing and settling beyond their borders. From the days of the Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs to Roman Caesars, Attila the Hun, the Vikings, Persians and Genghis Khan with his Mongol hoard, armies conquered lands that were settled by the conqueror. It is accepted that the Negroid/Angoni/ Bantu migrated south from the present day regions of Nigeria and Cameroon but there is no written record of this migration. The Island of Britain, the infamous colonizer, was itself previously colonized by Romans, Vikings, Saxons, Angles and, lastly, Normans. So, according to Mugabe’s and other African politicians’ philosophies on land ownership, those British of Norman ancestry are not entitled to own land in the UK! Later, European seafarers discovered far-away territories, naming the most prominent ones America and Australia. These territories attracted boatloads of adventurous Europeans, many escaping religious persecution and poverty.

While this was going on, the Bantu continued migrating south, displacing other populations and settling on ‘conquered’ land. They pushed the Pygmies into the jungle, the Bushmen (now known as San in more politically correct jargon) into the desert and the Hottentots to the continent’s southern beaches. The Bantu reached the Great Fish River in eastern South Africa and didn’t bother crossing it. During their journeys, they had formed tribes, the most well-known being the Zulus, whose infamous leader, Shaka, lost no sleep while wiping out over two million fellow Bantu to take their land, women or cattle, or because there was not enough grief shown when his mother died. Today, an international airport commemorates Shaka glorious legacy while the statue of Cecil Rhodes, one of Africa’s great philanthropists, is torn down from the grounds of a Cape Town university he sponsored. It is even accepted theory that man originated around the Rift Valley in Africa and, from there, migrated across the planet. So, did colonization originate in Africa?

The Europeans who settled in the Americas lost no time displacing the indigenous people there, multitudes of whom perished from disease, starvation or the bullet. The Spanish conquistadors annihilated the advanced Aztec and Inca civilizations which, today, are no more. And the same happened in Australia, New Zealand and other territories (but at least the indigenous American people got some revenge when they passed on syphilis to their conquerors who took the horrible disease back to the Old World!).

The Portuguese seafaring discoverer, Bartholomew Diaz, rounded the southern tip of Africa in the late fifteenth century, naming it the Cape of Storms, closely followed by Vasco de Gama who made it to India and its treasures of spices. Europeans craved these spices (and many more products of the east) and another great seafaring country, Holland, by way of the Dutch East India Company, established a victualing base at the African cape, now named the Cape of Good Hope, to supply its trading ships with fresh produce. The first governor was Jan van Riebeck and he encountered no truly Negroid people there, only a few Hottentot ‘strand loopers’ (beach walkers).

During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain added Cape Town to its overseas possessions. More Europeans settled at the Cape of Good Hope and some looked at the vast, vacant expanses to the north, gathered their families and possessions into ox wagons, and ventured into these unpopulated territories. These pioneers were called ‘trekboers’ (travelling farmers).

While this was going on, Bantu warlords were busy selling their own people to slave traders, predominately Arab and Portuguese, along the coast of what is now Mozambique and Tanzania. Christian missionaries in the forms of Livingston, Moffat and Baines ventured into the central interior of the continent to spread the word of God and improve the life of ‘the savage’. They encountered a land of slave markets and slave caravans where the mechanics of the wheel was a mystery, there was no written word and there was no infrastructure apart from mud huts and foot paths. Slavery was only criminalized in Mauritania in 2007 and Liberia, named after the liberated American slaves that settled there, abolished slavery in the 1930s. But, today, another story trotted out by liberals is about how the white man enslaved the blacks and that must not be allowed to escape his conscience. What is hardly mentioned is that it was the British Royal Navy that put an end to the slave trade, not Omani dhows or African makoros (canoes).

More Europeans from colonial powers Britain, France, Germany and Portugal ventured into these sparsely populated lands to make their fortunes. Some were scoundrels, some were remittance men, some were shopkeepers, some were farmers and some were miners. Wives and families followed and so did prostitutes. All were determined, tough and adventurous.

Cecil John Rhodes, millionaire philanthropist, visionary and patriotic adventurer, looked over the Limpopo River at the vast, empty lands where the population of what is now Zimbabwe did not exceed a quarter of a million souls. Rhodes made a deal with Chief Lobengula to obtain mining concessions and the first, formal settlement of the country, Rhodesia, took place.

Greed for Johannesburg gold contributed to the spat between Britain and the Transvaal and Orange Free State Boers, which led to the Boer War that gave Britain a ‘wake up’ call. Then came World War One where British colonial settlers, especially those from Rhodesia, were the first to volunteer to fight for the ‘Mother Country’. Per population head, this country volunteered the most and this was repeated in the Second World War that followed. Rhodesians were ‘more British than the British’.

Meanwhile, Europeans and, to a lesser extent, South Africans, continued to settle in booming Rhodesia. This European influx gained further momentum at the culmination of World War Two when British ex-servicemen were offered ‘Crown Land’ on which to farm. Now, the indigenous population, benefitting from European medicine, law and order and food abundance, was increasing at an annual rate of around 4 percent. But while this was going on, Britain, spent and bankrupt after fighting a war for six years, was pressured to abandon its colonies and hand them over to black, nationalist politicians, which they proceeded to do. Rhodesians took one glance at the chaos, corruption and genocide occurring in black governed countries that had been granted independence and knew this was no choice for them.

The Rhodesian Front political party was conceived to insist on responsible independence from Britain. It gained power democratically and a new government was formed, first under the premiership of Winston Field and, later, Ian Smith. Field and Smith had numerous meetings with British premier, Harold Wilson, and his appointees to get a written commitment regarding Rhodesia’s independence, but with no success. These leaders of this new RF government, for the most part, had distinguished service records while fighting for ‘the British way of life’ twenty years earlier’. They had been through the mill of war and were be-medalled war heroes, saviours of democracy and feted by Britain until 1965. Unlike other world leaders, they didn’t attend Oxford University to escape the Vietnam draft or join the National Guard to avoid meeting the enemy. While Rhodesian Premier Ian Smith was flying Spitfires over Italy and Libya during WW2, British Premier Harold Wilson was behind a desk in London. While Smith was recovering from severe wartime injuries after his Spitfire went down, Wilson might have been recovering from writer’s cramp or having his piles removed. The contrast could hardly have been greater.

And so Rhodesia declared unilateral independence from Britain in November, 1965.

Colonialism Crumbles follows the stories of two families, one of British ancestry and one of Afrikaans ancestry, from the late eighteen eighties, through the Boer War and two World Wars to Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965.

The Afrikaans family, the Krugers, could trace its history in Africa back through generations. They trekked north from the Karoo to find new opportunities and escape the heavy hand of British governance and put their roots down on ‘Lilliefontein’, a farm they established from virgin bushveld. Then came the Boer War and the infamous British ‘internment camps’ where over twenty thousand Boer woman and children perished. Cornelius Kruger, while on commando fighting the British, learned that his wife Anita, together with his family, had been interred and only discovered at the war’s end that they, apart from son Abel, had succumbed to disease and died in Dipponsvlei camp.

Upon his release from Dipponsvlei, young Abel wanders to Kimberley, finding work as a menial diamond digger, and to Johannesburg, mining gold. He meets and marries Lettie and circumstances force them to leave Johannesburg and head north by ox wagon to empty Rhodesia, a place Abel has heard is littered with gold. Instead, Abel finds employment with hated British ‘Rooineks’ as a farm manager during World War One while the farm owner’s sons are leading Tommies ‘over the top’ in the hell of Flanders mud. Abel’s hatred of anything British cools down and his family of a wife, daughter and son move onto their own property south of Wedza, a tiny settlement north of the source of the Sabi River in Mashonaland. Another son, Andries, is born into the Kruger family and they make it through the extreme hardship and poverty of the 1920’s depression.

World War Two arrives and Andries joins the Royal Rhodesian Air Force as a Hurricane pilot, which puts him at odds with his elder brother, Petrus, who harbours staunch hatreds for anything British. Andries is shot down twice, once over Libya and once over Italy, and ends up in a POW camp after being burned in his cockpit. Meanwhile, Petrus prospers in Rhodesia trading in black market goods. Upon the war’s end, Andries returns to Rhodesia and acquires a farm that adjoins ‘Slagters Nek’, his father’s farm.

Andries marries Colleen, the daughter of an Irish immigrant family and they start a family beginning with Rudolf and followed by Willem, Yvette and Suzette. The Kruger’s farm prospers from producing tobacco while their children are educated in boarding schools and the future looks bright until Britain starts casting away its colonies. They, along with most others, do not want their country to end up as another Congo and support Ian Smith and Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from London.

The British family, the Morgans, hail from North Wales where Aled mines slate and his wife, Megan, has been made deaf from years of working in clattering cotton ginneries. They are staunchly religious and patriotic, proud of anything British despite their lives of drudgery and hardship.

Their son, Glynnis, joins the ‘Welsh Lancers’ and heads off to fight the Boers where, after many actions, the Lancers are given the odious task of dispatching Boer families to internment camps, one of these families being the Krugers. Abel later recognizes Glynnis at Kimberly and shops him for being involved in illegal diamond dealing and Glynnis scurries back to Wales. He sails to America to seek his fortune in the steel mills and returns to Britain’s call when World War One is at its peak, just in time for the Somme offensive where he loses a hand.

Glynnis starts a family with his wife, Nia, and they try their hands at farming sheep and pigs. The great industrial cities of the United Kingdom are hard hit by the Depression, but the rural Morgans ride it out, largely unscathed. World War Two breaks out and one of their sons, Gareth, a qualified mechanic, is called up and ends up in North Africa fighting Rommel’s Afrika Corps. He is later attached to the Long Range Desert Group where his commander is from Rhodesia, and Gareth’s interest in that country is sparked.

Gareth is captured by the Germans and consigned to a POW camp until the end of the war when he is ‘liberated’ by the Soviet Red Army. He and a group of other released POWs tramp west towards the British and Americans and witness the horrors perpetrated on the defeated German civilians by the Soviet conquerors. These images will live with him for a while.

He marries Barbara and they decide to leave the dreariness of Britain and find a more promising future elsewhere. He remembers his LRDG commander’s description of life in a beautiful country called Rhodesia and they choose to move there. Gareth is employed by the civil service and Barbara joins him later with a baby son, James. Gareth is attached to the road construction ministry hacking a road through the wilderness between Umtali and Melsetter, and the young family follows the road’s slow construction living in mud huts along its route.

When the road is completed, they purchase a house in Umtali and Gareth begins the slow civil service promotion climb. Rhodesia appears full of promise and the Morgans sever their ties with ‘back home’ and work hard for the future while James and younger brother Eric attend school.

Harold Macmillan delivers his ‘Wind of Change’ speech in Cape Town that forewarns the end of British colonialism in Africa and, later, Gareth is filled with concern and foreboding at what happens when African countries are granted independence. He hears horror stories about the chaos in the Congo and the experiences of Belgian refugees fleeing the terror there for the safety of both Northern and Southern Rhodesia.

A new Rhodesian political party, the Rhodesian Front, is formed, which takes over the reins of the country. After repeated, tiresome negotiations with both Conservatives and Labour governments in London, the Rhodesian leader, Ian Smith, decides there is no other option other than to declare independence from Britain. The Morgan family rejoices at this decision, albeit a leap into uncertainty, along with the rest of the country.

map%20of%20colonial%20equatorial%20Africa.jpgmap%20of%20colonial%20southern%20Africa.jpg

The Main Characters

Note; Some of whom only appear in Books Two and Three

                                 Robert – James and Suzette’s son

                                  Jane – James and Suzette’s daughter.

Some Other Characters

                Jairos Mapulanka – ZANLA cadre, alias Comrade Hitler Stalin

                Comrade Mahuri – ZANLA female cadre and Stalin’s future wife

                Comrade Kid Dongo – Hitler Stalin’s comrade-in-arms

                Mohammed al-Ashram – Yemeni gun-runner

The Principle Politicians in the Game

World War Two had great relevance with regards as to what happened to colonial Africa. Imagine if Germany had won … . . And Britain only finished paying back America’s ‘Lend/Lease’ aid/debt 60 years after the end of the conflict. So was shattered Britain pressured by her ‘special ally’ that hated colonialism (because the British Commonwealth/Empire was a potent trading block that competed with America?) to abandon her colonies and her people who lived in them?

South Africa

Paul Kruger – Leader of the Boers during the Boer War with Britain

Jan Smuts – Prime Minister during WW2

Hendrick Verwoerd – Prime Minister and architect of apartheid.

John Vorster – Prime Minister and President during Rhodesia’s UDI years

PW Botha – President when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe

Nelson Mandela – ANC leader and South Africa’s first black president.

Britain

Lloyd George – Prime Minister during WW1

Winston Churchill – Prime Minister during WW2

Clement Attlee – Replaced Churchill at the end of WW2

Harold Wilson – Prime Minister when Rhodesia declared independence in 1965

Edward Heath – Prime Minister after Wilson, and then Wilson became PM again

James Callaghan – Prime Minister after Wilson’s second spell in the late ’70s

David Owen – Callaghan’s Foreign Secretary.

Margaret Thatcher – Prime Minister when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980

Peter Carrington – Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary who oversaw the demise of Rhodesia

Tony Blair – Prime Minister during Zimbabwe’s 2000AD turmoil

USA

Franklin Roosevelt – President during WW2

Richard Nixon – President during Rhodesia’s UDI years

Jimmy Carter – President when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe

Andrew Young – Carter’s ambassador to the UN and David Owen’s sidekick. He maintained that the tens of thousands of Cuban troops and sophisticated military hardware Castro despatched to Angola

was a stabilizing influence in Africa, and Mugabe was a mild, peaceful, incorruptible man.

USSR

Josef Stalin – Communist Party General Secretary during WW2

Leonid Breshnev – Communist Party General Secretary during Rhodesia’s UDI years.

Supported ZAPU (armed wing being ZIPRA)

China

Mao Tse Tung – Now spelt Mao Zedong. Supported ZANU (or ZANU-PF, the armed wing of which was ZANLA)

Germany

Adolf Hitler – Fuehrer during WW2

Australia

Malcom Fraser – Prime Minister during Rhodesia’s transformation to Zimbabwe who was Mugabe’s staunchest Western supporter at the time, teaming up with Nigeria against Thatcher to oppose Zimbabwe-Rhodesia’s UN recognition despite democratic majority rule in that country.

Rhodesia

Cecil John Rhodes – Founder of Rhodesia, which was born in 1898

Charles Rudd – Negotiated a treaty with Lobengula, on Rhodes’s behalf, leading to colonisation of Rhodesia

Godfrey Huggins – Prime Minister during the 1950s

Winston Field – Founding leader of the Rhodesian Front and Prime Minister

Ian Smith – Succeeded Field. Prime Minister through UDI to birth of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia

Abel Muzorewa – Prime Minister of short-lived Zimbabwe-Rhodesia

Joshua Nkomo – Leader of ZAPU

Herbert Chitepo – Early leader of ZANU with Sithole

Ndabaningi Sithole – Early leader of ZANU with Chitepo

Robert Mugabe – deposed Sithole and took over from Chitepo as leader of ZANU. All very confusing politics

Zimbabwe

Robert Mugabe – First Prime Minister and then Executive President

Canaan Banana – First President. Later exposed as having an affair with his bodyguard despite Mugabe’s hatred of homosexuals

Ian Smith – Leader of Conservative Alliance representing Zimbabwe’s whites during Lancaster House agreement years

Joshua Nkomo – Took up position of Deputy President after ZANU neutralised/paid off ZAPU

Morgan Tsvangirai – Trades Union leader and leader of MDC, Mugabe’s only real opposition since 1980

Mozambique

Samora Machel – FRELIMO leader and first President upon independence from Portugal

Zambia

Kenneth Kaunda – President for Life

PROLOGUE

1885AD

Orange Free State, South Africa.

Johannes Kruger gazed with haunted, burning, tired eyes across the barren, flat, Orange Free State landscape surrounding him. His six oxen, the survivors of the team that had dragged his wagon all the way from the Karroo, were now condemned to a different toil – pulling his mouldboard plough. The soil was rock hard and dry, and the sum of their labours was a pathetic pattern of scratches across the veldt. They were resting in a forlorn little group under an Acacia tree to escape the baking October sun. The rains would start soon and Johannes knew he must get the field prepared before their onset, normally in November, accompanied by huge claps of thunder and blinding forks of lightning stretching from the heavens to the horizons. Hail the size of marula pips might fall, as if God had fired a continuous volley of giant grapeshot from the sky.

He finished off his lunch of cold mielie-pap (maize meal porridge) and washed it down with the remainder of his tepid water before trudging over to in-span the oxen back into the plough traces. He righted the one-furrow plough after connecting the chains onto the yokes of the oxen and flicked his whip over their bony backs shouting ‘loop’ (walk), dragging the word out in a mournful groan. The oxen strained into their yokes and plodded forward leaving a dusty wake behind them and Johannes tried to ignore the fiery ache spreading through his back muscles.

At the end of the day, when the sun was a glowing fireball resting on the western horizon, he out-spanned the oxen and led them back to the kraal near the homestead for them to rest overnight. Tomorrow they would be grazed on the sun-burned veldt under the care of a piccanin (young black boy) to regain some of their strength to repeat the tedium the following day.

He stepped onto the stoep (porch) of the white-washed mud hut he called home, slapped the dust from his hat before hanging it on a peg and pulled his braces off over his shoulders. He collapsed into a riempie (rawhide) chair and eased off his veldskoene (home-made bush boots).

Mariejkie, Johannes’s wife of ten years and mother of their six surviving children, came to join him bearing a cup of strong coffee and homemade mielie rusks, but little conversation followed. He was too exhausted and life was hard since leaving the Karroo to escape the Rooineks (rednecks ie British) and their stupid laws, especially those concerning tax and how the Boers should treat their Kaffir servants. What is tax and where did it go? Who had been living with the Kaffirs the longest? Who knew their customs? Who could speak their language? Who looked after them when they were sick? Not the Rooineks who bring laws from Britain, which the Kaffirs, savages who did not know the workings of the wheel, were being encouraged to adopt - the same laws the most advanced, civilized, and powerful country in the world practiced.

Later, Johannes and Mariejkie sat at the table with their children, thanked the Lord for what they were about to receive, (Johannes pushed away the blasphemous thought that there was little to thank the Lord for) and got on with eating a meal of roast venison, pumpkin and sweet potatoes. After the meal, Mariejkie took her four boys and two girls to say their prayers before going to bed, and returned to her husband who sat repairing a stock whip in the weak light of an animal-fat candle.

When repairing the whip was over, it was time to change into their bedclothes, say prayers, and climb onto the riempie-sprung bed. The bed’s previous home had been in the wagon during the trek from the Karoo. Johannes’s hands lifted Mariejkie’s sleeping gown up to her hips and she murmured the third prayer of the day - that she would not get with child again. When he was finished, Johannes rolled over and fell into heavy slumber accompanied by loud, fitful bouts of snoring, his body recovering from the torment of following the plough in the relentless sun. Tomorrow, while the oxen were resting, he would dig tree stumps out the rock-hard ground to increase the cropping capacity of his farm. Mariejkie planned to line the track to their farmhouse with an orchard of lime and lemon trees with the help of the male servants’ wives, and planting out the saplings would begin the next day. The saplings would be hand-watered with buckets from the homestead well to establish them before the onset of the rains the following month.

It was hard toil but Johannes and Mariejkie were putting down roots for their children, and their children’s children, for generations to come.

North Wales, UK.

Aled Morgan strained his eyes in the pitch black of the slate cavern, the darkness relieved only by the feeble glow of the candle, which he adjusted to cast a flickering light on the slate face he was carefully chipping away. He, together with the other miners working in the black hell, provided their own candles and the luxury of burning two was unthinkable despite punishing their eyes in the gloom for twelve hours a day.

He warned his son, Glynnis, who was waiting below him, Another piece coming off now, boyo. His eldest son, now thirteen, emerged out of the darkness into the dim orb of yellow candle light and took the slab of slate from his father, placing it carefully in a wooden barrow where it would remain until the barrow was full.

Here, Glynnis, hold the candle. It will not balance on the slate, Aled instructed as he prised another sheet of slate off the cavern’s face.

When the barrow was full, Glynnis slipped his cold feet into wooden clogs to push the barrow, sloshing through freezing water, to the mine entrance and unload it onto his father’s pile to be later quantified by a foreman. Thus, Aled’s daily wage was calculated accordingly.

By 6pm, the day’s work was over. They waited in the cold and dark for their slate to be tallied and recorded by the foreman before trudging back to their cottage four miles away, their clogs slipping and sliding on the icy pathways. Apart from Sundays, they had not seen sunlight for three months. At the risk of losing his job, Aled clocked in at 6am every working day, which was a few hours before the sun rose in winter, and clocked out at 6pm, a few hours after sullen, grey daylight had disappeared.

Megan, Aled’s wife and Glynnis’s mother, stirred a pot suspended above coals in the fireplace in the common room of the four-roomed cottage. One of Glynnis’s sisters cleaned Brussels sprouts and potatoes for adding to the stew. Aled and Megan slept in one room in the cottage, the daughters shared a room, the brothers shared a room, and the rest of the household’s activities took place in the common room, which included bathing, cooking, storytelling, and eating. It was also the warmest room, being heated by the stove when food was cooked. The roof was of one-foot thick thatch. Animals, normally cats and sometimes dogs, would shelter in the warm thatch and occasionally fall out during a storm, ‘raining cats and dogs’. Behind the dwelling was the pit latrine that stood in splendid, unsavoury isolation, being visited as few times as possible and only when really necessary. ‘Willie the Shit’, together with an old nag pulling a cart, collected the contents of the pit, now politely termed ‘soil’ because most of the content had degraded from raw shit, for onward selling as manure to farmers.

The family of ten comprising of Aled, Megan, Glynnis and seven other brothers and sisters took their seats on benches around the stout, wooden table that had survived generations and waited for Aled to read from the family bible. This precious book had been handed down the Morgan family through the ages, and family histories were recorded on sheets of time-yellowed paper secured within it. They clasped their hands and bowed their heads as he read a passage, followed by grace thanking the Lord for what they were about to partake in.

Megan placed the stew pot in front of her husband who carefully shared out their evening meal of potatoes, turnips and Brussels sprouts, flavoured with the remains of the salt pork bones from Sunday lunch. Megan had added glistening, creamy chunks of bacon fat to improve it as much as possible. It was Thursday and Glynnis looked forward to tomorrow when, hopefully, their meal might be centred around fish, usually cod, brought down from Rhyl harbour before dawn on Fridays. And then, only one day until Sunday, which meant chapel followed by Sunday lunch, sometimes a roast, and then rest, recovering from the previous six days’ toiling in the slate cavern.

After their meal, they departed to their respective beds. Before the sun rose, those boys old enough to work, would trudge off to the slate caverns or, hopefully, find work on the estate where their home was situated. But it was winter now and not much was happening on the estate. One sister had a cleaning job in the estate’s manor and she was the envy of her female siblings who, six mornings a week, would rise before the others to catch the steam train to Liverpool’s Wirral area where they worked twelve hours a day in the clattering hell of a cotton ginnery. They were thankful for this because Manchester, two hours beyond Liverpool by steam train, was where most cotton ginning was carried out.

On Sundays at chapel, the congregation was warned about the sins of alcohol, promiscuity and indolence. They were reminded how lucky they were for what the Lord had provided and all looked forward to Sunday lunch, still attired in their ‘Sunday best’ chapel attire.

Before lunch Aled, still consumed by religious fervour, would deliver an extra-long bible reading. He believed chapel kept many men out of the various pubs, ‘bawdy houses’ and ‘gin palaces’ where they might otherwise have spent their time-off together with any spare cash.

One Sunday afternoon, after his daughters had cleared the table, Aled spread out a map of the world, illustrated with frightening wild animals and evil looking fish and other monsters of the deep. Blue-eyed angels from heaven with puffed out cheeks and blond, wavy hair blew fair winds across the oceans, driving tall ships north, south, east or west. Of course, all the ships were British. With scarred fingers and broken nails, Aled pointed out the areas shaded in red.

All these places belong to the British Empire, he explained, and this is India. His gnarled forefinger indicated a large, triangular land mass with an illustration of an ornately decorated elephant upon which a moustachioed British officer in glorious red attire and white cork helmet sat. An Indian mahout pointing his goad at a ferocious, sabre-toothed tiger launching itself out of the vivid-green jungle, garnished with exotic, colourful flowers, to eat them completed the picture.

And this is Africa, Aled indicated. Africa was illustrated by a dhow sailing through pyramids on the banks of the Nile River at the north of the continent and a sailing ship in the harbour at the Cape of Good Hope, the south. The interior of Africa was depicted simply by the snarling face of a gorilla in West Africa displaying long, curved canines protruding out of a salivating, gaping mouth, and a roaring, black-maned lion in East Africa landing on top of a giraffe. Africa seemed an amazing, sinister, empty place. A savage place. A place of adventure, opportunity and promise.

Glynnis was awestruck at how fortunate he was to be British and his heart swelled with pride, disregarding the daily misery he endured in the icy, gloomy slate cavern. That the greatest people on Earth endured such misery never entered his head.

The Morgans retired to bed and Aled lifted up Megan’s nightdress and rested his palm on her hairy, pubic mound for a moment. A minute later, it was over. In Victorian Britain, foreplay was frowned upon and never discussed. If a woman suffered from hysteria, this could be cured by a doctor and it was even rumoured that a physician in London had patented a device called a ‘Vibrator’ to relieve women of the frustrating malady. Sex with his wife was for her to produce babies, not something to enjoy. Enjoyment could be had for a shilling a go with the gin-sodden prostitutes in Liverpool who would cater to any perversion for an extra farthing or two. Not that Aled had been there, of course. . . …

Aled had rarely seen his wife naked and she always covered her private parts when he mistakenly caught her changing. Megan re-adjusted her gown, closed her eyes and prayed she was not conceiving again – life was already too much. She fell asleep with the clattering of the cotton mills in her ears. She had left employment at the Manchester mills thirteen years previously to give birth to Glynnis and the dreadful, monotonous racket of a hundred power looms had remained trapped in her ears twenty four hours a day, twelve months a year, ever since.

Glynnis, meanwhile, was dreaming about defending far off lands of the British Empire as a red-uniformed soldier of Christianity and civilization.

COLONIALISM CRUMBLES

‘All Friends Now’ – Field Marshal Kitchener accepting the final Boer surrender at Vereeniging, 31/5/1902.

‘Only remain in this Country to look after Us’. – The Chief Matabele Spokesman to CJ Rhodes after the Matabele Rebellion.

‘War never determines who is Right, just who is Left’. – Bertrand Russell.

‘Let’s remember the Trust you emphasised. If you break it, you will live to regret it.’ – Ian Douglas Smith to British Envoy Rab Butler, referring to Rhodesian Independence Promises given by Britain, which were subsequently broken.

CHAPTER 1

Mariejkie Kruger watched as her son, Cornelius, checked the girth was tight on Seunjkie, his tough, shaggy pony, and checked the provisions in his saddlebags, which included food, ammunition, and mielies for his horse. Fredericks, his half-breed servant agteryer (behind rider – assistant) did the same. He would be accompanying Cornelius to join a commando, two days ride away, which was fighting the British. Mariejkie’s late husband, Johannes, had died three years ago after disturbing a Black Mamba, resting in the gloom of a termite mound, with his plough. The enraged, nine feet long serpent had exploded from the mound displaying its gaping black mouth, reared up and buried its small fangs in Johannes’s chest. The venom quickly travelled through his nervous system, paralysing vital organs and resulting in death a few hours later.

The widow Mariejkie was confident the Boers would chase the British out of their promised land despite the few setbacks they had recently suffered and she believed, implicitly, that theirs was a good cause endorsed by no one less than God. The Rooineks referred to it as the ‘Boer War’ but to the Boers it was the ‘Vryheidsooloe’ (Freedom War). After the incident at Slagters Nek nearly a hundred years ago, the Boers had trekked from the Karoo to escape the heavy hand of British rule that interfered in all they believed in, especially how they treated their Kaffir servants. Many Kaffirs had been with Afrikaans families through generations. Johannes and Mariejkie’s servants called them ‘Father and Mother’ and regarded themselves as part of the family. They reared the Krugers’ children who played with their children, attended the ‘kerk’ (church) with the family on Sundays, ate the same food as their masters and now Fredericks was going to war with his boss. Mariejkie thought it bizarre that the British accused the Boers of ill-treating the Kaffirs when such a huge number of blacks were willingly fighting with the Boers against their so-called liberators. She suspected false concern for Kaffirs was an excuse for the Rooineks to advance their power, wealth and influence in South Africa, especially since the discovery of infinite amounts of gold at Johannesburg. This had led to the British annexation of the Transvaal in 1879 and the ‘First’ Boer War a year later.

The Boers believed gold to be the big trouble maker, especially since the then Prime Minister of the Cape, Cecil Rhodes, had been implicated in an attack on Johannesburg, the ‘Jameson Raid’, to gain from trouble between the ‘Uitlanders’ (foreigners) and the resident Burgers (Afrikaans citizens). Before the discovery of gold, the British had left the Boers in relative peace to do as they pleased in their simple, rural existence. British greed (read gold) together with Rhodes, whose dream was to construct a railway from ‘Cape to Cairo’ establishing British influence throughout the Dark Continent, would not allow the Boers to live in peaceful, backward poverty.

Anita, the girl from two farms away, who had married Cornelius ten years previously in 1891, emerged from the cool, whitewashed gable of the stoep carrying a small sack of rusks and biltong for him to tie onto his saddle. Their two children, Abel and Magdelena, followed in her wake. Abel proffered five ounces of tobacco stored in a box he had whittled from piece of Stinkwood for his Pa, and his sister produced a saddle blanket she had made for Seunjkie. Anita removed her bonnet and shook her long, blond hair free of a ribbon so that Abel would remember her at her most sexy and kissed him, ensuring her breasts pressed hard against him. Cornelius kissed his daughter, Magdelena, and solemnly shook hands with Abel, "Well, son, look after Ouma (Grandmother), Ma and Delena. Come Fredericks, ons ry (we ride)."

His servant, Fredericks, pried himself from the clutches of his wailing wife, Maggie, and mounted his pony. Cornelius shook