Perhaps the closest modern counterpart is the so-called ‘Wonga Coup’ of 2004 to replace the President of Equatorial Guinea with an exiled opposition leader in return for preferential oil rights to corporations affiliated with those involved in the coup.

 

Ever since that death-or-glory ride by the Jameson Raiders, the fate of several of those men of the Mashonaland Mounted and the Bechuanaland Border Police units has been lost in the fog of history. This article investigates where those bold policemen killed in clashes with the Boer burghers were buried.

 

By the mid-1890s it was obvious that the area immediately south of Johannesburg contained the world’s richest and greatest gold reefs ever. To the chagrin of Cecil John Rhodes, it also became clear that the extensive gold reefs he and other investors had hoped to find north of the Limpopo River did not exist. 

 

To Rhodes and other like-minded Randlords, it was intolerable that an ignorant and supposedly corrupt Boer government should rule the country where all this immense underground wealth existed. Plans were laid to seize, if not the whole of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republie (ZAR) then at least the area comprising the Witwatersrand goldfields.

 

With the covert backing of the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, Rhodes and leaders of the Johannesburg Reform Committee, set in motion plans for an armed uprising of the Uitlanders in Johannesburg against Boer “corruption and misrule”. This would provide Dr Leander Starr Jameson, then Administrator of Mashonaland and Matabeleland with the pretext to invade the Transvaal, ostensibly to rescue the Uitlanders from the tyranny of Kruger and his government. 

 

In October 1895, the High Commissioner in the Cape Colony proclaimed a strip of land within the Bechuanaland Protectorate along the border with the Transvaal as British South Africa Company (hereinafter Company) territory. 

 

A contingent of 14 officers and 356 other ranks of the Mashonaland Mounted Police (MMP) were stationed at the village of Pitsane, ostensibly to protect the railway against marauding African Chiefs. But the real purpose of granting the Company administrative control of this strip of land was to provide a springboard for the Raid on Johannesburg, since Matabeleland would have been too distant. 

 

A smaller unit of the Bechuanaland Border Police (BBP) was stationed at Mafeking, and when these two groups gathered at Malmani (now Ottoshoop), Jameson’s combined force totaled 511 mounted men, plus about 150 unarmed ‘Native’ drivers and leaders, etc.  The column was considerably strengthened by the addition of one 12½ pounder and two 7 pounder cannons as well as eight maxim machine guns. Ammunition and baggage were transported on eight Scotch carts and three Cape carts. The two accompanying wagons sent ahead with fodder for the horses and mules would later become very useful for transporting the wounded.  

 

Since there were no roads directly linking Mafeking with Johannesburg, a string of five galvanized iron sheds had been set up at roughly 50-kilometre intervals along the wagon spoor or track between the border and Krugersdorp. Seemingly established for a proposed mail coach service to Mafeking. They were stocked with bully beef, biscuits and fodder for 600 men and their mounts, without arousing the suspicion of the Boers.

 

By 29 December 1895, the impatient Jameson was no longer willing to await the long-awaited cry for help from the Johannesburg Reform Committee and he ordered the Raiders to depart for the Rand the following evening. 

 

Both the Pitsane and Mafikeng Police contingents severed the nearby telegraph lines before departing at sunset on Sunday 30 December 1895. One version, probably apocryphal, is that some intoxicated troopers cut a wire fence instead of the telegraph line. More likely, when the two units met in Malmani the following morning, the alarmed telegraphist realizing that this was an armed invasion, hurriedly wired Pretoria, before this line too was cut.

Ignoring repeated instructions from the British High Commissioner, the Reform Committee, and the Boers, to desist from invading the Transvaal, the single-minded Jameson and his senior officers, defiantly pushed ahead.

 

Today, one can trace the route of the Raiders across the North West Province by drawing a line on a map from Ottoshoop to Boons and from there to the western approaches to Krugersdorp. Many years ago, I heard some older people referring to the road from Boons to Krugersdorp as ‘the Jameson Road.’ The little village of Boons was then merely known as ‘Mrs Boon’s Store’ and here the Raiders briefly halted. 

 

With the intentions and the route of the Raiders becoming clear, the Boer commandos dug in on a ridge of the Witwatersrand, overlooking the present-day Krugersdorp Game Reserve, just about where Robert Broom Drive intersects with Rustenburg Road. On this escarpment, dominating the shallow valley below, traversed by the marshy Tweelopiespruit and ensconced behind large boulders, the substantial Battery House and tailing heaps of the Queen’s Mine, the ZAR burghers confidently awaited the arrival of the Raiders on New Year’s Day, 1896. 

 

The literature of the Jameson Raid is vague on the losses suffered in this, the first real clash between the Raiders and the Boers. Marshall Hole merely states, the Raiders had ‘some losses.’ Ian Colvin maintains, ‘… they were driven back with the loss of a few men.’ Other authors claim between thirty and sixty of the Raiders were killed, wounded, or captured. 

 

Rev Colin Rae, quoting from the Pretoria Press of 4 January 1896, gives the Raider losses as two killed and five wounded in their abortive attack. He mentions the names of the wounded and twenty-one captured officers and other ranks, but unfortunately omits the names of the two men killed. 

 

The historic Burgershoop Cemetery in Krugersdorp contains the headstones of three Raiders, namely Captain W J Barry (BBP) and Troopers PS Wiid and D Frazer, both MMP. Barry and Wiid were mortally wounded in subsequent clashes with the Boers, and they died on 31 and 7 January 1896, respectively, after being nursed in a temporary hospital in Krugersdorp. They therefore cannot be the two troopers killed in action, referred to by Rae. Perhaps, Trooper Frazer was one of the two killed, but who was the other one and where was he buried? Because of this discrepancy some authorities believe that there might be a fourth Raider grave in this cemetery. However, notwithstanding crisscrossing it, I have not been able to locate the tombstone of any fourth Raider.