feature / the new year coup
Matthew Blackman
Botched effort: Not all the telegraph lies were cut as planned Supplied
D
ecember may, for some, be a time to set off to another part of SA with a bag of light summer attire and a decent book or two, with the only troubling thought being where to spend New Year’s Eve. For others in our history, it’s been a time to relocate — with some heavy military hardware in tow, and the goal of displacing a people or overthrowing a government. The first, third, sixth and eighth of the nine frontier wars all began in the December/January period. And let’s not forget the Battle of Blood River on December 16 1838 (a day that’s accrued more names than Gqeberha: Dingane’s Day, Day of the Vow, Day of the Covenant, Day of Reconciliation). The First SA War also started in December (and ended with the Boers kicking the British out of the Transvaal, in 1881). On a less brutal note, some may recall December 31 1987, when a 32-year-old Bantu Holomisa led a bloodless coup in the Transkei while homeland prime minister Stella Sigcau was on holiday in Durban. Holomisa’s military intervention was a response to the level of graft in the Transkei. Under his subsequent rule, former leader George Matanzima was charged with nine counts of corruption and spent three years in jail. But if there’s one event in SA’s history that truly joined the holiday spirit to catastrophic effect, it’s the Jameson Raid. Cecil John Rhodes’s attempt to overthrow Paul Kruger over New Year 1895/1896 would reverberate for years, politically and socially. “Before the Jameson Raid my father used to write to my mother in English,” judge Kowie Marais said some 80 years after the event. “After the Jameson Raid he never allowed English to be spoken in the house again.” A special bond In our research for Rogues’ Gallery: An Irreverent History of Corruption in South Africa, from the VOC to the ANC — and the soon-tobe-published Spoilt Ballots — Nick Dall and I were surprised at how often we came across Rhodes’s partnership with the anti-imperialist Afrikaner Bond in the Cape Colony. In fact, Rhodes had become prime minister of the Cape largely because of the rural Afrikaners of “Onze” Jan Hofmeyr’s group. But that was all before December 29 1895, when Rhodes’s “best man”, Leander Starr Jameson, rode into Kruger’s ZuidAfrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) with about 40
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December 16 - December 22, 2021
HOW NOT TO SEE IN THE NEW YEAR
The Jameson Raid was a dangerous, drunken affair, with a hangover that would plague SA for years
