Kop that!

I was recently made aware of a crackpot letter which has apparently appeared on one of the Boer War battlefield discussion groups. It is so completely beyond ridiculous and, indeed, Pythonesque, that it is difficult to believe it is genuine, but I include it in full below, so at least everyone can have a laugh:

Subject: The Kop Must Not Stand on Our Graves

Dear Liverpool FC,

We write to you as BaTwa—not as participants in a shared narrative, and not as stakeholders in a plural memory—but as the original custodians of the land you invoke every time you speak of the Kop.

The hill known to you through the Battle of Spion Kop is, to us, Spioenkop within the Ntabamnyama-Nobomi mountain system: a sacred ancestral site. Long before it became a symbol in football culture or a reference point in colonial war history, it was—and remains—our burial ground, our place of ritual, and our spiritual boundary.

The summit is not an abstract landscape. It is a defined ancestral polygon formed by the highest ridges and saddles of the mountains—a geomorphological and spiritual unit that holds the remains of our people. Within this space, approximately 60 BaTwa men were killed. They were not soldiers in the war you commemorate. They were protectors of graves. They died defending the resting place of their ancestors.

Today, those graves are not visible. They have been overlaid—physically and symbolically—by Anglo-Boer War burials. The dead of those who waged war now sit on top of the dead of those they sought to erase. This is not remembrance. It is occupation.

We do not recognise this as respectful. There is nothing respectful about the continued presence of those who attempted to wipe you out, buried over your ancestors. There is no reconciliation in being asked to share sacred ground with those whose violence sought your disappearance.

We are not asking to be included in a broader narrative. We are rejecting the very premise that our ancestral resting place can be shared, layered, or negotiated. Our right to rest in peace is not plural. It is not symbolic. It is absolute.

The Polygon

The polygon is a natural, topographic boundary formed by the highest ridges and saddles of the two mountains. It is not a political or administrative line, but a spiritual and ancestral boundary. The boundary was delineated using ridge-line extraction principles based on visible topographic highs and saddle junctions identifiable in digital elevation data and high-resolution imagery. This approach ensures that the polygon reflects a geomorphologically coherent unit, consistent with watershed divides and natural landscape segmentation.

Table 5: The Polygon – Final Defensive Band of BaTwa Grave Protectors

Point

Latitude

Longitude

Description

1

-28.6340

29.5030

North-West edge of Nobomi summit

2

-28.6340

29.5290

North-East edge of Nobomi summit

3

-28.6460

29.5450

Eastern rim approaching Ntabamnyama

4

-28.6670

29.5380

Southern summit edge of Ntabamnyama

5

-28.6670

29.5150

South-West rim below Ntabamnyama summit

6

-28.6550

29.5030

Western saddle / connecting ridge

Anglo-Boer War Graves Overlaying BaTwa Ancestral Graves

The Ntabamnyama-Nobomi summit, sacred BaTwa heartland, hosts ancestral graves and ritual sites. Anglo-Boer War graves overlay them. This is a spatial erasure. At the crest, our warriors once rallied; now, colonial dead obscure Indigenous memory. The polygon above frames this sacred plateau, where funerary rites and war cries once echoed, now silenced beneath foreign burial. This overlay is not coincidence. It is jurisdictional violence.

Table 6: Beyond the Polygon – Militarised Overlay and Historical Layering

Site ID

Category

Site Name

Location

Violation Type

Perpetrator

Legal Status

Cultural Impact

NTB-MO-001

Militarised Overlay

Anglo-Boer War Graves over BaTwa Graves

Ntabamnyama-Spioenkop region

Superimposition of colonial graves onto BaTwa burial sites

Colonial military burial practices

Not investigated under NHRA

Layered erasure of original burials

The Kop, as it stands in places like Anfield, carries a name drawn from this land. But that name has been detached from its truth. Beneath the story of battlefield loss lies a deeper, unacknowledged reality: Indigenous dead, unmarked, unrecognised, and overridden.

We therefore state clearly:
The Anglo-Boer War graves that overlay our ancestral burial sites must be removed and repatriated to United Kingdom and Netherlands.

This is not a matter of symbolic recognition. It is a matter of restoring the integrity of a violated burial ground and the erasure of a beautiful burial culture which was reciprocal to Mother earth.

If the Kop is to remain a symbol, then it must confront the truth of what it stands upon. Otherwise, it remains a monument not only to memory—but to erasure.

We do not seek dialogue that dilutes this position. We seek action that restores what has been taken.

BaTwa Custodians of Ntabamnyama-Nobomi
Dr. Lethiwe Zondo
Independent Researcher & Community Knowledge Holder
Ntabamnyama Heritage Project
35709103@mylife.unisa.ac.za
0712770903

Well… Bloody hell: where to begin!?

if you managed to wade your way through that bottomless ocean of utter gobbledygook, I am sure that a couple of things will have crossed your mind.

Firstly, one of the core features of the Battle of Spion Kop was that the British troops who stormed the summit were then unable to dig decent trenches:

‘as soon as a few inches of top soil was dug out, the spades struck solid rock and the standard entrenching tools of the infantry were of little use.^[1] Unsurprisingly, crowbars and pick-axes also failed to make much impact,^[2] and the best efforts of the sappers were ‘baffled by the immovable boulders and the adamantine ground’.^[3] Even today, nothing less than pneumatic tools would have helped: the fact that the trenches were so shallow was due to geology, not a shortage of entrenching tools’.

And yet, we are being asked to believe that, the BaTwa chose the solid rock of this hilltop as their burial site, and somehow carved dozens of graves into the ‘adamantine ground’, beneath these few inches of soil?

Secondly, it is rather strange that this chap ‘corrects’ the Anglicised spelling of the feature, by claiming: ‘the Battle of Spion Kop is, to us, Spioenkop’… so he is ‘correcting’ the Anglicised spelling, and… err…  insisting upon the Dutch / Afrikaans spelling of the name instead.

Thirdly, it is highly entertaining that this farrago of nonsense was addressed to ‘Liverpool Football Club’ – does this ‘Independent Researcher & Community Knowledge Holder’ seriously believe that Liverpool FC are the custodians of British army war graves in Natal?

Furthermore, and though some will scream that this is sacrilege, the link between Liverpool FC and the Battle of Spion Kop is tenuous at best, and it is truly bizarre that some Liverpool fans view a visit to Spion Kop as some sort of essential pilgrimage or ‘rite of passage’. The practice of solemnly placing Liverpool FC scarves at the site is especially peculiar given that the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment did not see action there[4] – and the name of the Liverpool regiment is all the more ironic, given the modern-day penchant of some low-class Liverpool fans to boo during ‘God Save the King’.

Instead, the troops who stormed the summit were drawn from these various (non-Liverpool) regiments:

2nd Lancashire Fusiliers – which recruited in the Bury / Salford area of Lancashire
Six companies of the 2nd Royal Lancasters – which recruited in and around Lancaster in Lancashire
Two companies of the 1st South Lancashires – which recruited in the Warrington / St Helens / Widnes area of Lancashire
A 180-strong contingent of Thorneycroft’s MI – raised from ‘South African’ loyalists
Half of the 17th Company, Royal Engineers – which recruited across the UK

These were reinforced by:

2nd Middlesex – which obviously recruited in Middlesex
2nd Scottish Rifles – which recruited in the Hamilton / Lanark area of the Scottish lowlands
The Imperial Light Infantry – raised from ‘South African’ loyalists

So while Liverpool has historically been part of Lancashire,[5] less than half of the men on the summit that day were from Lancastrian regiments. And while I am not denying that plenty of these – especially those of the (very small) contingent of South Lancashires – would have been Liverpool FC fans, there is no reason to think there were any more of these than there were, for example, fans of Everton, Tranmere Rovers, Burnley, Oldham Athletic, Manchester City, Preston North End, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, or a whole host of other ‘Lancastrian’ football clubs. There is thus no logical reason for people to pretend there is some sort of ‘spiritual’ link between the club and the battle – and certainly no more reason than for there to be a link to, say, Manchester United, St Helens rugby league club, or even Hamilton Accies and Middlesex County Cricket Club.

The whole thing started simply because, when Liverpool FC’s Anfield ground was being reconstructed in 1906, the stand at the Walton Breck Road end (which would later become known as the Kop) had a notably steep incline, which, some claimed, resembled the shape of Spion Kop hill. As a result of the comparisons, the Liverpool Echo’s sports editor, Ernest Edwards, referred to the stand in this way, and the nickname stuck – though was only officially adopted in 1928.

An interesting story, perhaps, but as well as the city of Liverpool having no specific military link to the battle, the act of naming a stand of a sporting ground after Spion Kop is far from unique – and nor was it even the first such use. Back in 1904, a rather imaginative reporter had noted the resemblance between what was then a large earthen embankment where supporters stood at Arsenal’s Manor Ground[6] and the battle of Spion Kop.

And, what is more, there are / were dozens of ‘Kops’ / ‘Spion Kops’ at other grounds too:

Wigan Warriors RLFC’s Central Park (demolished in 1999)
Derby Country’s Baseball Ground (demolished in 2004)
Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road
Sheffield United’s Bramell Lane
Northampton Town’s Country Ground
Preston North End’s Deepdale
Leeds United’s Elland Road
Wolverhampton Wanderers’ Molineux
Leicester City’s Filbert Street (demolished in 2003) and King Power Stadium
Portsmouth’s Fratton Park (the stand has since been renamed)
Coventry City’s Highfield Road (demolished in 2006)
Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough
Plymouth Argyle’s Home Park (demolished in 2001)
St Helens RFC’s Knowsley Road (demolished in 2011)
West Ham’s London Stadium
Woolwich Arsenal’s Manor Ground (demolished in 1913)
Notts County’s Meadow Lane
Barnsley’s Oakwell (demolished in 1998)
Tranmere Rovers’ Prenton Park
Wrexham’s Racecouse Ground (demolished in 2023)
Chesterfield’s Recreation Ground (demolished in 2012)
Birmingham City’s St Andrews
Spurs’ Tottenham Hotspur Stadium
Warrington Wolves’ Wilderspool Stadium (demolished in 2014)
Bradford City’s Valley Parade
Linfield’s Windsor Park

And even, across in Europe:

RC Strasbourg’s Stade de la Meinau
Paris St. Germain’s Parc des Princes
Borussia Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion

So, if this clown truly believes that Liverpool FC has any say in who gets to remain buried on Spion Kop, one has to assume that he has also sent similarly lunatic communications to all these other sports clubs?

All in all, I am not sure which is more ridiculous: that this ‘Independent Researcher & Community Knowledge Holder’ actually believes that Liverpool FC is the custodian of war graves on a battlefield in South Africa… or that Liverpool fans genuinely think that the Battle of Spion Kop has some sort of unique and mystical link to their football club.

NOTES:

[1] Amery, The Times History of the War in South Africa, 1899–1902, Vol.3, p.252

[2] Maurice, History of the War in South Africa 1899‒1902, Vol.2, p.381

[3] Maurice, History of the War in South Africa 1899‒1902, Vol.2, p.382

[4] The 1st battalion of the Regiment was bottled-up in Ladysmith during the Siege

[5] This changed in 1974, with the creation of ‘Merseyside’

[6] Globe and Mail, 25 June 2010