The Sword and the Pen

Six decades on the political frontier

Allister Sparks

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781868425600
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

Allister Sparks joined his first newspaper at age 17 and was pitched headlong into the vortex of South Africa's stormy politi. His autobiography, The Sword and the Pen: Six decades on the political frontier, is the story of how as a journalist he watched and chronicled and participated in his country's unfolding drama for over half a century, covering events from the premiership of DF Malan to the presidency of Jacob Zuma, and witnessing at close range the rise and fall of apartheid and the rise and crisis of the new South Africa.

In trenchant prose, Sparks has written a remarkable account of both a life lived to its fullest capacity as well as the surrounding narrative of South Africa from the birth of apartheid, the rise of political opposition, the dawn of democracy, right through to the crisis being experienced today.

'Anyone who tries to understand what is happening in South Africa today without first digesting Allister Sparks' lucid, sensitive and comprehensive exploration of the country's multi-faceted mind, does so at his own peril.' - André Brink, on The Mind of South Africa

'His special strength is a writing talent which combines precise reportage with shrewd analysis and unusual stamina …' - The Observer, on Tomorrow is Another Country

CHAPTER ONE

The Sword

MAYVILLE HOUSE at No 77 Prince Alfred Road, Queenstown, was a daunting place for a five-year-old to visit. Its south-facing front entrance was covered with creeping ivy that shaded the red brick walls, giving the impression of a damp and chilly reception. Press the bell and after a while you would hear a hesitant shuffling of feet and there would be the figure of Aunt Kate standing in the doorway, an eternally ancient and skeletal Miss Havisham dressed in a pink padded dressing gown with pink pom-pom slippers, staring at me through thick-lensed cataract spectacles that made her eyes look large and owlish.

My mother used to take me there periodically to pay duty calls, for Kate and her two sisters, Lillian and Millicent, were her aunts, three elderly spinsters who had lived together in Mayville House for most of their lives. They were the three youngest siblings of Henry Thomas Lloyd, who had arrived in South Africa at the age of six together with his father, Henry James Lloyd, a London worsted weaver. When displaced by the industrial revolution, he decided to join the legendary 1820 Settlers and seek a new life on the war-torn eastern Cape frontier with his wife Rebecca.

Six-year-old Henry Thomas Lloyd, one of eight siblings, grew up into a sturdy young frontiersman who fought in the frontier wars of 1835, 1856 and 1847. He was rewarded with a government grant that he used to build himself a large home-cum-inn called Travellers’ Rest, just across the Great Kei River near the mission settlement of St Marks. There he sired 21 children in his 82 years − seven by his first wife, Ann Ulyate, and 14 by his second, Maria Godfrey − of whom 18 survived. Maria was my mother’s grandmother, a strong Scots woman with blazing red hair that she bequeathed to several of her descendants, including one of my four sons. My mother, Bernice Constance Godfrey, who was named after her, cited her often in tones of deference. ‘Beware of women with red hair,’ she enjoined me. ‘They can be difficult.’ Welshmen, she declared, referring to Henry’s family tree, were all horse-thieves. She was a woman of emphatic views.

On Maria’s death, so the family story goes, Henry James informed his three youngest daughters that they should not marry but rather stay at home to care for him in his old age. Which, being dutiful Victorian maidens, they did.

And so it came about that my mother visited the ‘Aunties’ to give them some much-needed company. With me in tow. The gloomy entrance to Mayville House led through a passageway into a wide sitting room with ornate oak furniture and heavy maroon velvet curtains at the windows. Stern ancestral faces glared down from the walls and the place was cluttered with china ornaments and other Victorian bric-a-brac. This was not a happy playground for a small boy.

But the Aunties would cluck over me during those visits. How to entertain me, of course, was the problem during those few hours of serious adult conversation about the doings of distant and departed relatives about whom I knew nothing.

‘What about Walter’s old sword?’ Aunt Kate, the imaginative one, suggested.

‘Ah yes, I’ll get it out,’ responded Aunt Lillie, the eldest, as she took my hand and led me into another dingy room. There she opened a cupboard drawer and withdrew a long object wrapped in an old military blanket. Carefully, almost reverently, she carried it across the room, laid it on a bed and slowly unwrapped it.

There it lay. Not a shiny ceremonial sword, but an old battle sword rough-sharpened for use and sheathed in a battered metal scabbard, rusted and darkened with age. Hardly a toy, of course, but no matter. The impact on me was immense. I was allowed to unsheathe it. And hold it. I stared at it, at the heavy brass hilt and at the strange inscriptions on the blade partly obscured by old stains. Were those bloodstains? How many men had it decapitated? There can be no end to the mind-games of heroism and derring-do that a small boy can play with an old battle sword in his hands.

It became a ritual. On every visit to the Aunties, once every six months or so, the sword would come out and I would be allowed to wage my imaginary battles with it.

Aunt Millie, the last to go, collapsed and died when she was 97. When the will was read, I found she had left me the sword.

* * *

FOR YEARS IT lay untouched at the back of a cupboard of my own, its novelty as a small boy’s plaything long expired. It had no ornamental value, so it was simply stashed away along with life’s other useless collectables, its provenance and story undisclosed.

And so it might have remained but for my first visit to the United States where, during a year of study at Harvard, I came upon WJ Cash’s literary masterpiece, The Mind of the South, a vivid portrait of that colourful but cruelly bigoted region and its tempestuous history. It awakened in me an awareness not only of the importance of well-presented history in understanding the idiosyncrasies of different human societies but also, to my journalistic mind, the great stories buried in the past, waiting to be exhumed.

I had done well in history at high school, scoring decent grades, but how dull it had all been: a catalogue of dreary dates, drearily presented, as uninspired teachers and even more uninspired textbooks dragged us, year after year, through the same tedious sequence of dates, grievances, conflicts, wars, peace agreements and yet more grievances. The groaning wagons of the Great Trek, the repetitiveness of the battles, the treachery of the tribal chiefs, the heroism of the white settlers and the meddlesomeness of the missionaries and the Colonial Office in London who didn’t understand the true nature of the natives. It was biased and it was boring.

Now here was I consuming it greedily in a foreign land. My mind went back to those dreary schooldays and I realised what a travesty had been committed by the South African education system, what great drama had been smothered, what tragedies of human misconception in that century of frontier warfare between different cultures and value systems, what epic endurance and heroism in the task of hauling ox-wagons and whole families a thousand kilometres over the great Dragon Mountains to the plains of the highveld that stretch all the way up Africa, the agony of what was effectively a civil war between the Boers and those of British ancestry that killed thousands and scorched the earth and poisoned relations between the two white race groups. The thought struck me that if there had been a Hollywood in South Africa, the dramatising of our history would have far outshone the story of the opening up of the American West.

That is when I began a new phase in my life of returning to the history of my country, of trying to revive and write about the vividness of it, of rediscovering and bringing to life its great stories. And so ultimately also to pondering the roles of my own family members in all this. They had all been 1820 Settlers, on both my father’s and my mother’s side − all except one, that is, but more of him later − so they must have been players in the whole tableau, with untold stories of their own to be unearthed.

So my mind went back to the old sword. Who was Walter?

A little research revealed that he was one of Henry Thomas Lloyd’s 21 children, the eldest of his second marriage to Maria and thus the Aunties’ big brother. He had obviously bequeathed the sword to them on his death in 1921, but how it had come into Walter’s possession took longer to discover.

My first clue came from a distant cousin, Margaret Lloyd, who told me Walter had ridden in a military commando under the leadership of an officer named Von Linsingen, who was killed in a battle in the Transkei – and that the sword had belonged to Von Linsingen. This sent me to the provincial archives in Cape Town, where I found the death notice on one Ernst von Linsingen, aged 16. It was dated 14 November 1880 and was signed by his mother, Bertha, who had filled in the space to describe cause of death: ‘Fell on the field at Snodgrass.’ There was a ring of pride in that wording, together with what must have been the agonising grief of a bereaved mother. Clearly a military family, I thought, all straight-backed and stiff-upper-lipped. But the lad was still a schoolboy, obviously not the commander of a military unit. But I had the curious name of the battlefield, Snodgrass, so I went to see the country’s leading expert on the history of the Eastern Cape, Jeff Peires.

‘Ah yes, Snodgrass’s Café,’ Peires replied. ‘An interesting place. A trading store, once run by a man of that name. Thembu rebels used it as a kind of base during a rebellion in the nineteenth century, then guerrilla fighters used it again during the recent anti-apartheid struggle. It’s still there, you know …’

And so the story unfolded, beginning with the discovery of the Kimberley diamond fields in the 1870s. That watershed event led, together with the rush of rapacious immigration, to a flood of illicit guns into the country. Fearful that this would compound problems on the frontier, the Cape Colonial Parliament, recently granted representative government, enacted a Gun Law prohibiting black people from owning firearms.

By a twist of constitutional fate, the Basutoland Protectorate, homeland of the Basotho people – who had sought refuge in their mountain kingdom from the ravages of Zulu King Shaka’s wars of conquest – was at this time briefly incorporated into the Cape Colony. So the Gun Law applied to the Basotho as well. Furious at this outside interference in what they regarded as their sovereign right to defend themselves, as well as a slight to their national pride, the Basotho rebelled.

Tribal boundaries being porous, the Gun Law rebellion soon spilled over into the adjoining Transkei, where it was taken up by restless members of the isiXhosa-speaking Thembu tribe, the same tribe that a century later was to give us Nelson Mandela. The rebellious Thembus attacked several small Transkei towns, killing the white resident magistrate of Qumbu, Hamilton Hope, and his two lieutenants, besieging the magistrate of Maclear, Mr Thomson, locking the magistrate of Tsolo, Mr Welsh, in his own jail, putting the magistrate of Ngcobo to flight and briefly seizing control of the town. As panic rippled through the colony, Prime Minister Sir John Gordon Sprigg ordered a commando to be raised on the frontier to engage with the rebels and restore order.

The commando was duly mobilised under the command of Colonel Wilhelm Carl von Linsingen, a former Prussian officer who had settled in South Africa at a time when the Colonial Office was eager to encourage immigrants with military experience to strengthen white settlement on the frontier. Von Linsingen was serving as governor of the prison in East London at the time, but as a professional soldier he answered the call unquestioningly.

His 16-year-old son Ernst asked, and was granted, permission to ride with his dad as a cadet. My great-uncle Walter, living in Grahamstown and at some point its mayor, joined the unit. Together they rode out to Snodgrass’s café, a known trouble spot not far from Ngcobo.

Today the café is an old rectangular mud-daub building with a red corrugated-iron roof and a dilapidated front porch that is no longer a refreshment station but serves as a busy store for the local ...