Another entertaining True Believer

I was recently made aware of a classic outburst from an especially ignorant True Believer. Seemingly a fellow called Anton Lombaard took to one of the Facebook Boer War echo chambers to proudly trumpet his complete lack of knowledge of the Boer War:

As normal for these people, he starts off with an unverifiable claim that his ‘great great grandfather and his brother’ fought at Blood River. Though completely irrelevant to the debate, this is the usual thing these types love to squeal; indeed, if all such boasts were true, I reckon a quarter of a million men would have had to squeeze into the Voortrekker laager on that ‘Holy Day’ back in 1838.

With his (probably made-up) claim to fame out of the way, Anton builds up a head of steam, and treats us to an unbroken string of lies, myths and nonsense.

Firstly, despite claiming to have been born there, Anton clearly knows nothing about the history of Natal, and it most certainly did not ‘belong to the Voortrekkers first’. In reality, the area was under the control of the Zulus – who presumably don’t count in Anton’s world. In 1824, King Shaka granted a concession of a ‘25-mile strip of coast a hundred miles in depth’ to Henry Francis Fynn[i], one of the British traders who had set up a post at Natal Bay (later Port Natal, and now known as Durban).

Then, in the August of 1824, further negotiations between the British settlers and King Shaka confirmed the ceding of an even more sizable chunk of land, centred on the trading post at the Bay of Natal and extending 10 miles to the south, 25 miles to its north, and 100 miles inland. With these negotiations concluded, the British settlers raised the Union Jack, and fired a Royal Salute.

So, given that the Voortrekkers didn’t even leave the Cape until the mid-1830s – the Great Trek being a reaction to the ‘wicked’ British banning slavery in 1834 – it is clearly ridiculous of Anton to pretend that Natal ‘belonged to the Voortrekkers first’. Of course, none of this actually matters to people like Anton, as they have zero interest in what really happened in the past, and only see history / the Boer War as a way to play the victim. What happened, and in what year, means nothing to the likes of Anton… why would it, when they can just make things up, and then bang away on their little drum of victimhood.

What is more, Anton employs one of the favourite tricks of the Defenders of the Myth, sneakily attempting to equate the short-lived, violently-acquired and chaotically-run Voortrekker republic of Natalia with the colony of Natal. In reality, the former (which had been grabbed from the Zulus by the invading Boers) only covered a small part of what ultimately became Natal, and did not include Durban or the ‘Klip River Country’, ie. that part of Natal to the north of the Tugela River.

Anton then repeats the Apartheid-regime-approved myths about Kimberley, pretending that the area was ‘part of the [Orange] Free State’, until the ‘wicked’ British snatched it following the discovery of diamonds. This is another falsehood which has been repeated so often by True Believers, that some of them might even believe it.

In reality, back in the 1860s, diamond deposits were discovered in the lands belonging to the chief of the Griquas, Nicholas Waterboer, whose territory lay between the poorly defined borders of the newly independent Orange Free State, the Cape Colony, and the Transvaal – one has to bear in mind that none of these were long-established polities in the area, and borders were shifting and expanding all the time. True to form, in 1870 the Transvaal simply announced that the area belonged to them, and President Marthinus Pretorius personally lead an armed force to snatch the diamond fields.^[ii] This attempt was foiled by the diggers themselves, the majority of whom were of British extraction. The Transvaal flag was seized by an angry mob before it could be hoisted, a few shots rang out, and, tails between their legs, the Transvaalers beat a hasty retreat.

Though the Orange Free State certainly had a strong claim on the area, they by no means controlled it and in the wake of the Transvaal’s attempted invasion, the diggers actually set up their own diggers’ republic and elected an ex-seaman, Stafford Parker[iii], as their ‘president’. The little-known Free Diamond Republic existed for almost a year[iv], until an increasingly nervous Waterboer, counselled by an extremely able and intelligent / devious Cape Coloured lawyer called David Arnot,^[v] requested that his territory be taken under British protection. Even the diggers were relieved to see the end of their short-lived, bizarre, and rather lawless republic, and ‘President’ Parker greeted the first British resident magistrate under a banner that read, ‘Unity is Strength’.^[vi]

Far from anyone being desperate to grab it, Griqualand West was initially administered as a separate entity. A bill annexing it to the (self-governing[vii]) Cape Colony had been passed by the Cape Assembly in 1877, though nothing was really done to effect this; as strange as this will no doubt sound, there was actually a good deal of reluctance on the part of the Cape government to assume control of Griqualand West as it was heavily in debt, and it was not until 15 October 1880 that Griqualand West was officially incorporated into the Cape Colony. Despite the fact that Waterboer had asked to be taken under British protection, and the fact that the diggers wanted this, the British Government nevertheless voluntarily forked out £90,000 in ‘compensation’ to the Orange Free State.^[viii]

The third, and most entertaining, bit of rubbish Anton treats us to is his ridiculous claim that ‘The Boers invaded to meet the approaching British forces marching up from Cape Town head on’. There is no way that Anton has ever read this anywhere, and instead – in the time-honoured fashion of a fanatical True Believer who suddenly realises he is out of his depth – he simply pulled it out of the air. Anything, indeed, to excuse Kruger’s blatant aggression, and the inconvenient fact that it was the Boers who started the war.

Of course, there were no ‘British forces marching up from Cape Town’ in October 1899 – that is pure, ludicrous, fantasy from Anton. What is more, at the beginning of the war, the leaders of the Orange Free State even promised their counterparts in the Cape Colony that they would not invade the Colony proper – ie. they would only invade Griqualand West. The promise was broken, and Boer forces crossed the Orange River to invade the Cape Midlands on 1^st November 1899[ix] – almost three weeks after the Boers started the war by invading Natal and Griqualand West.

One wonders how much Klippies one has to drink to see things through Anton’s resolutely blinkered eyes; in his crazed interpretation of events, the bulk of the Boer forces were committed to the invasion of Natal, err… well… ‘to meet the approaching British forces marching up from Cape Town head on’. This is the sort of self-deluding mental gymnastics that Defenders of the Myth have to resort to in order to keep their much-loved National Party fantasies of victimhood staggering on a little longer. The fact that Anton didn’t mind publicly humiliating himself on Facebook by spewing out all this nonsense is all the more remarkable.

Even a broken clock is correct twice a day, however, and poor old Anton at least managed to get something right. His assertion that ‘War was inevitable’ is undoubtedly true, though this was not the fault of London, but entirely due to Kruger’s determination to replace Britain as the paramount power in the region. That antediluvian flat-earther had been plotting and planning for war against the British Empire since at least 1887[x], and it was he, and his equally corrupt and ignorant inner circle, who were to blame for plunging the region into war.

But that uncomfortable reality simply doesn’t suit Anton and his ilk.

NOTES:

[i] Henry Francis Fynn (1803 – 1861). Born in London, Fynn moved to the Cape as a young man, and – after a few ventures – joined another British trader, ex-Royal Navy officer, Francis George Farewell, at a trading post in the Bay of Natal. Fynn befriended Shaka Zulu after treating him for a stab wound, and would end up taking four African brides. He later took an English wife too.

[ii] Roberts, Kimberley, Turbulent City, p. 29

[iii] Parker, who would later serve as mayor of Barberton during the 1884 gold rush, is perhaps better known for his Saturday night duties in auctioning off Cockney Liz, a barmaid who had previously worked in Kimberley.

[iv] Welsh, A History of South Africa, p.237

[v] Roberts, p.27

[vi] Roberts, p.32

[vii] Great Britain had granted self-rule to the Cape Colony in 1872, which meant that whichever territory the diamond mines ended up being in was of no direct benefit to HM Government

[viii] Botha, From Boer to Boer and Englishman, p.15

[ix] Amery, The Times History of the War in South Africa, Vol.2, p.280

[x] Cook, The Rights and Wrongs of the Transvaal War, p.92