LOOKING BACK

Foreword by Dr Willem P Steenkamp

As a born and bred “Natal boytjie” myself, having grown up in Durban but with strong family ties to Newcastle (on my mother’s side) it has been easy for me to identify with Lieutenant-Colonel Mardall’s recollections, since he spent many a year in Durban and, as a young trooper in the Natal Police, also participated in the 1st Anglo-Boer War (which saw most of the action take place near Newcastle).

Being myself also from a police family (my father Maj-Gen Frans Steenkamp, plus my brother & wife) and hailing as well from Natal, I could therefore appreciate Lt-Col Mardall’s interesting recollections which we are now making available here to our Nongqai readership as a free e-book (No. 2 in our special free e- book series, after the first e-book that dealt with the S.A. Police Security Branch and the Armed Struggle, published in December 2021 – which you can download free by clicking on this link: https://www.samirror.com/uploads/1/0/7/1/107110645/nongqai_vol_12_no_12b_1.pdf ).

A point that we stress in every edition of Nongqai is that we publish texts as received (i.e., not trying to “correct” them for either historical fact or “politically correct” perspective and sentiment).

Our goal is that everything that we publish, should be authentically reflective of how the author of any given contribution experienced a particular historical event. In other words, his or her personal “truth”, told as in the oral tradition of historiography, to illustrate the human dimension – not necessarily the objective historical facts, as trained researchers may have established, but how events at the time were actually experienced and perceived by the participants.

In some instances, therefore, what Lt-Col Mardall wrote down as his memory of a significant historical event, serve precisely to show how such personal observations are almost inevitably coloured by the writer’s own individual angle of approach to the conflict that was playing out – by his youth or prior experience, position in the hierarchy, and especially which side he fought on.

Mardall’s recollections of the 1 st Anglo-Boer War are thus somewhat gung-ho jingoist (understandably so, for a then twenty-year old trooper) if read now with modern eyes. His sentiments about the humiliating British defeats in that war (as related in the chapter titled Fort Amiel) are obviously at odds with my own sentiments of ignorant youthful glee, walking among the gravestones of fallen British soldiers buried at that same Fort Amiel, located at the lower end of what was then our family’s homestead farm.

Location of farm and maternal grandparents in British Concentration Camp

As a young boy I regularly visited that farm of my maternal grandparents, Tom and Annie O’Reilly, which was known to us as “Rusoord” (just outside Newcastle, incorporating also “O’Reilly’s Vlei” as marked on the following map). Those O’Reilly’s were “Boer Irish”, who were interned in the British concentration camp at Pietermaritzburg during the 2 nd Anglo-Boer War, mainly because of my fiery great-grandmother’s regular altercations with the Tommies.

That is the beauty and complexity of history: perceptions will vary, and therefore it is all the more necessary (and interesting) to publish such authentic first-hand recollections.

To me, the account by Lt-Col Mardall of his life as a colonial policeman in Old Natal gives a great insight into how that era was perceived by such a noteworthy participant. We at Nongqai are therefore proud to publish it.

I also thank my fellow-editor, Brig. Hennie Heymans, for allowing me the space (and, in fact, encouraging me) to relate here my own family’s ties to those places and times – here my greatgrandparents are at the Pietermaritzburg concentration camp, their faces “radiating their joy” at being there, with my grandfather Tom the youngster standing front right.

Enjoy the read!