Frontier Partisans

The Adventurers, Rangers and Scouts Who Fought the Battles of Empire

‘Armed And Justified’ — The Freebooter Republics Of South Africa

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Much of the history of the Frontier Partisans is writ in the blood (and liquor) of freebooters and filibusters. From rum-soaked pirate republics of the Spanish Main to fevered mid-19th century dreams of slaveholding empires in Mexico and Central America, bands of men drunk on glory, ambition, racialist ideology — and fiery booze — built pocket republics that rose and (usually) fell, often in farcical and sometimes bloody wreckage.

In a few cases a filibuster republic survived and thrived, to eventually be absorbed into a bigger political entity, such as the United States. Texas and California were both really filibuster republics — and they served as launching points for yet other freebooting expeditions.

Freebooter Republics were not just a phenomenon of the Americas. Take, for example, the case of Stellaland and Goshen, two short-lived republics of frontier South Africa in the early 1880s.

••••••

South Africa in the 1880s was in tumult. The Transvaal — annexed by Britain in 1877 — had just re-asserted its independence in 1881, defeating a British force at the Battle of Majuba Hill. The discovery of a massive geological horde of diamonds at Kimberly had brought fortune seekers and magnates into the northern regions of the Cape Colony. And native Griqua and Tswana chiefdoms on the southwestern borders of the Transvaal jockeyed for position vis-à-vis the European powers and traders — which led to a series of petty wars.

European — mostly Boer — mercenaries offered up their services, usually as mounted riflemen, to these Tswana chiefs engaged in what more closely resembled armed feuds than full-scale wars. In turn, they were rewarded with land and cattle, partly as payment and partly in the form of loot taken from the defeated party.

The Tswana, under pressure from Boer expansionism, had been relieved at the 1877 annexation of the Transvaal. But as Martin Meredith explains in Diamonds, Gold & War:

“…Once the British had withdrawn four years later, humiliated by Boer victories, Transvaal settlers — ‘freebooters’ — flocked across the western border agreed with Britain in 1881, in violation of the Pretoria convention, knowing that the British would not intervene.”

A Tswana chief named Moshoette was feuding with two chiefs considered “friendly” by the British: Mankurwane and Montshiwa. A Boer frontiersman with the imposing monicker of Nicolaas Claudius Gey van Pittius led some 400 Boer mercenaries in aid of Moshoette, helping him gain the upper hand over his rivals. In gratitude, Moshoette served up thousands of acres of his rivals’ lands to the Boers, who lusted after land and cattle the way some men lust after women, gold or power. In October 1882, Gey van Pittius declared an independent State of Goshen. Its capital was a fortified farm called Rooigrond (Red Ground) — “a lair not a capital,” as historian Arthur Keppel-Jones put it.

At much the same time, the Republic of Stellaland sprang into being next door, under the leadership of Boer farmer Gerrit Jacobus van Niekerk.

Keppel-Jones notes that:

The two bands of freebooters, as the British officials called them, were supplied with ammunition, secret official support, and secure bases by the Transvaal. The republic’s intention to annex the two states at the first convenient opportunity was hardly disguised.

••••

The two republics merged into the United States of Stellaland in 1883. The national motto was “Armed and Justified,” which, as mottos go, kinda rocks.

While they were run by Boers, the borderland (and borderline) states also drew adventurers of a variety of ethnic and cultural extractions. And they were a rough bunch. Think Deadwood-On-The-Veld (“Cocksucker!” is “Haansucker!” in Afrikaans. Thus spake Google translate anyway. You’re welcome.) The place was crawling with wandering hunters, traders, cattle rustlers and Illegal Diamond Buyers (IDBs as they were known) who had been run out of the diggings at Kimberley.

South African historian T.V. Bulpin recalls that:

“The little frontier town of Zeerust was a particular resort of these adventurers. It was always jammed with traders, hunters and tough characters. The so-called Zeerust Club, run by Henry Martin, was the focal point of much of the noise. Its bar and billiard saloon were great places for fights and were hangouts for such characters as J.W. Honey — always either shooting somebody or being shot himself; and James McGilvray, one of the leading lights of Goshen and a renowned cattle rustler.”

Transvaal President Paul Kruger provisionally annexed the new states in September 1884, which had been the idea all along for the Boer expansionists. It wasn’t a particularly popular move. Members of Kruger’s national assembly, the Volksraad, rebelled against the action, which they considered a needless provocation of Great Britain. They didn’t want to risk their recently-won independence over a couple of republics full of rogues.

And the British did, in fact, find the annexation unacceptable. In December 1884, they organized the 4,000-strong Bechuanaland Expeditionary Force to make that point abundantly clear. The republics bestrode the “Road to the North” — toward the lands across the Limpopo, where Cecil Rhodes was already casting his avaricious eye. Neither the South African Republic of Transvaal nor a pair of rogue republics were going to block British expansion to the north. And, of course, Rhodes would lead that expansion in perhaps the most brazen filibuster of all time, which would lead to the creation of Rhodesia.

That was still a few years in the future.

For now, the British kept the road clear. Under the threat of overwhelming force, the short-lived republics capitulated and were absorbed into the British Bechuanaland Protectorate.

•••••

The freebooter republics were not entirely forgotten though, especially by the most hardcore Boer nationalists. As recently as 2008, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) was agitating for the area to once again become an independent Boer Republic — presumably Armed and Justified. The outfit’s charismatic leader  Eugène Terre’Blanche claimed possession of contracts of 1882 vintage that conferred ownership of the area and he was willing to take the case to The Hague.

It was just a scheme and a dream. The Afrikaner Resistance Movement favors the iconography of National Socialism, and nobody is willing to offer them a homeland. And, anyway, the driving force of Eugène Terre’Blanche was snuffed out in 2010 when he was bludgeoned and hacked to death on his farm by a couple of his black employees. It was a nasty ending, and it probably wasn’t even politically motivated; it was a misunderstanding and dispute over wages that led the farmhands to take clubs and pangas to the old Boer as he lay napping on a cot.

Somehow, that seems like a fitting coda for wild, weird tale of the South African freebooter republics.

Afrikaner nationalist Eugene Terreblanche had dreams and schemes of reviving the old Stellaland and Goshen republics. He came to a bad and bloody end.
REUTERS/Juda Ngwenya

 

 

 

 

Comments

  1. Paul McNamee says

    “The little frontier town of Zeerust was a particular resort of these adventurers. It was always jammed with traders, hunters and tough characters. The so-called Zeerust Club, run by Henry Martin, was the focal point of much of the noise. Its bar and billiard saloon were great places for fights and were hangouts for such characters…”

    Historical fiction anthology prompt!

    Reply

    • felonious monk says

      Wouldn’t that be nice. I have a feeling it exists but isn’t translated from South African
      to English. Contemporary SA. “crime fiction” is kick ass! I recommend Deon Meyer and
      Mike Nicol. Giles Foden is also great on Africa. Then there is Steven Price’s “By Gaslight”
      only partially set in Africa, but a wonderful book!

      Reply

        • felonious monk says

          Looking at the man’s name that’s hardly surprising.
          I’d say we’re fellow travelers, he’s me china plate
          (mate). I grew up in libraries can’t help myself, blew
          a fortune over the weekend and still I want more when
          they’re already coming out of my ears and I probably
          have to move soon.

          Reply

          • felonious monk says

            That’s funny I was just thinking of shaking hands with Steve Earle.
            We are both better these days (that was a while ago) But what I
            wanted to say is this. With your next book order put in for Rohan Wilson
            _The Roving Party. Have a look at Only Killers And Thieves_Paul Howarth
            and check out the work of Nick Brodie esp. The Vandemonian Wars, go on
            you know you want to.
            We need to talk about this South African shtick of yours as well, is there
            a Dutchman hiding in you?

          • JimC says

            OK, Felonious. It’s on.
            1. Steve Earle = Mt. Rushmore of American Song
            2. The Minister of Finance is going to unleash the Kraken on both of us if you don’t cut it out.
            3. Here’s a roundabout answer on the Dutchman. Several years ago, my wife got a custom saddle for her Morgan horse. Two women came out to do a fitting. I spent the whole time sitting on my ass in the paddock talking with one of them who was a Boer from SA who grew up riding like a maniac in the bush. My lovely and wise wife said, “Don’t think I don’t know what THAT’s about: You think that accent is sexy.” Guilty.

          • JimC says

            Only Killers and Thieves and The Roving Party on hold at the library. Off to the Australian frontier I go. Comparisons to The Son and Blood Meridian, I see…

          • Breaker Morant says

            LOL-I think the next step from “China Plate” is “Stone China”. As in “He’s my Stone China. I don’t want to mention how many books I have coming right now-Winter is deadly.

            My problem is that my parents would not take me to the library so book buying was ingrained early in my psyche.

            (Whispering seductively in a come hither voice)Come to the dark side with me and join my “Gulag Archipelago” book club.

            A teaser

            >>>“Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses.

            Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations…. Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.”

            ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

  5. felonious monk says

    Not mucking around today old mate are you. I’ll never run out of praise and admiration for the
    hardcore troubadour (time I mentioned is contained in that volume) can never get enough of
    his music.
    I understand, get a certain frisson myself when a French girl says vegetable, if that woman
    was from my tribe she would have got a kick out of your last name.
    Comparisons to Blood Meridian and The Son are getting a bit old, its often close but no cigar, still
    history is contained in fiction, I usually buy it.
    Brodie’s last is hard to get thru, I didn’t finish it, which is rare for me, it makes a really important
    case regarding the frontier wars though, perhaps better unpacked in a different context.
    So back to Africa, I have spent many happy hours with the work of Thomas Pakenham never quite
    found its equal. The Boer War fascinates me as I consider it a harbinger of many things. (like I do
    the Philippines) Thing is the more you dig the more you start to see connections, that’s one reason
    I am here.

    Reply

    • JimC says

      Thing is the more you dig the more you start to see connections, that’s one reason
      I am here.

      Thanks for that. If there’s a “purpose” in my work, that’s it. Those connections make me feel “connected” and I hit that like a drug. Hard to explain, but you clearly get it. And I appreciate that a lot.

      Reply

  6. felonious monk says

    You are a gentleman and a scholar and there is very few of us left.
    I think it is great to get that out, it is like a mission statement, it
    lends focus to this thing of ours (unified field theory, yuk yuk).
    May need that, I see overlap between the two sites already, I like
    the wide range that gets covered, but that could be an issue if you
    have a lot of contributors. I prefer a one stop shop just need a good
    menu up top. In these perilous times, here at least is lots of good ahead.
    Hat tip to Raylan Givens (armed and justified y’all)

    Reply

  7. deuce says

    Great post! Robert E. Howard was a fan of the American filibusters. He didn’t hold much with organized/national imperialism, but had a soft spot for “folk” imperialism like this. You see that attitude on display in works of his like “Wolves Beyond the Border”.

    Reply

    • JimC says

      Folk Imperialism — I think you’ve coined a useful term. REH’s native Texas was, of course, a prime example of folk imperialism, as was the settlement of Kentucky and Tennessee. All of which REH was quite familiar with. He doubtless imbibed the Texan tendency to look with an avaricious eye at all of northern Mexico. The idea of annexing the top tier of Mexico flared up frequently pre-Civil War (as a Knights of the Golden Circle project for a vast slavery-based empire including Cuba), post-Civil War, and again during the Mexican Revolution.

      Reply

  8. John McCormack says

    I have just discovered your superb website and am delighted!

    So, I don’t mean to carp but South African spellings are a bit unusual.

    Terreblanche was an Afrikaner but not an Afrikaaner.

    Even though his language is properly spelled Afrikaans.

    Reply

  10. felonious monk says

    Don’t elaborate what ever you do (time’s in short supply).
    I can see how you ran across him, what with his time in New Mexico,
    connection to Teddy etc. I remember the name, fancy being a prisoner
    sent to St.Helena, can’t believe more hasn’t been done with what seems
    to me an extraordinary life. Photos I mentioned previously are from St. Louis.
    I have dug up some more fiction possibles (as per above) just the titles here:
    -Kruger’s Gold (seems it really has been found, by a diver no less).
    -The Last Horseman
    -The Monster’s Daughter.
    Viljoen’s book is available as a free download from Gutenberg, need help translating
    original sources give me a call.

    Reply

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