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Updated: August 21, 2024
So next day I embarked on board the Basuto, and in the afternoon of the day following reached my destination. After a short visit to Breidbach, near King William's Town, where my people were at that time staying, I returned to East London and entered the service of the boating company. The work was not congenial.
The Colonial Office soon however tired of the new possession and gladly scuttled out in 1854 in order to avoid the task of reaping the harvest of a clumsy and grotesque policy, which it had formulated a few years before, of hemming in the voortrekkers, who had settled north of the Orange River, with a barrier of native states set up for the purpose on the east and west; and which now threatened to involve it in a quarrel which naturally arose between Moshesh, the Basuto chief, and the emigrants whom he had been appointed to restrain.
That war had gone on for two years without result, and the total cost of the Basuto question had been four millions sterling when Gordon was summoned to the scene.
They found, however, that between Spytfontein and the river, the Magersfontein group of kopjes would afford excellent positions to Methuen from which Spytfontein could be attacked. During Methuen's halt at Modder River Delarey and Cronje received considerable reinforcements. From Natal, from the Basuto border, and from Kimberley, commandos were summoned to Spytfontein.
We moved onward to Thaba Nchu, Brabant keeping well away towards the Basuto border with his flying column. At Thaba Nchu it looked day by day as if we were in for something hot and hard, the Boers having, as usual, taken up a position of vast natural strength. But Hamilton was the only one to get to close quarters with the veldt warriors, when executing a flanking movement.
Perhaps it was for this reason that Thomas Bull never really came to understand or enter into the heart of a Zulu, or a Basuto, or a Swahili, or indeed of any dark-skinned man, woman, or child. To him they were but brands to be snatched from the burning, desperate and disagreeable sinners who must be saved, and he set to work to save them with fearful vigour.
The Roodebergen, which now separated us from the English, is a vast chain of mountains, extending from the Caledon River on the Basuto frontier to Slabbertsnek, then stretching away to Witzeshoek, where it again touches Basutoland. The passes over this wild mountain range are Commandonek, Witnek, Slabbertsnek, Retiefsnek, Naauwpoort and Witzeshoek.
I did not know that South Africa's plains would yet be drenched with the blood of Boer and Briton until the very rivers ran crimson. At the early age of seventeen I left the parental roof to earn for myself an independent living. I went to the district of Rouxville, where I occupied a farm situated on the Basutoland border. Several of the Basuto chiefs I got to know well.
And in less than an hour after my return to the wagon an induna arrived from the town accompanied by a couple of natives leading a pair of superb Basuto ponies a stallion and a mare, both unbroken as a present from the king.
Although I do not quote these two documents, I cannot help saying that Gordon, in the whole course of his life, never wrote anything more convincing than the advice he gave the Cape Government, which, owing to local jealousies and the invincible bulwark of vested interests, was never carried into effect, although the Basuto question was subsequently composed on Gordon's lines by the Imperial Government, and there has been peace there during all the other South African troubles.
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