SOUTH AFRICA: On Dingaan’s Day

Dingaan the Vulture was one of Darkest Africa’s crudest black despots.* In 1838 a column of 600 Boers in white covered wagons was trekking northward from the Cape colony into Natal; the bearded Voortrekkers (pioneers), who wanted to get away from the hated British and find new homes in the Zulu domain, asked Dingaan to give them land. The Vulture agreed, if the Voortrekkers would first recover some cattle stolen from him by a hostile tribe. The Boers did so, then went to seal the bargain at a great feast in Dingaan’s kraal.

The guests left their weapons outside the kraal with their women & children. At the height of the festivity, after a tumultuous war dance, Dingaan’s Zulus fell upon the Dutchmen, dragged them to the hill of execution, beat them to death with knobkerries, then surged on the Boer wagons to massacre the women & children.

Dingaan’s treachery was soon punished. Later that year, on Dec. 16, 1838, on the banks of Natal’s Blood River, another Voortrekker column, headed by Boer Leader Andries Pretorius, bloodily defeated Dingaan’s plume-decked, assagai-hurling horde. Of 12,000 Zulus, more than 3,000 perished. The Boers resolved ever after to celebrate Dec. 16 as a day of thanksgiving.

Black Fear. Last week, on the 111th anniversary of the Blood River battle, the thanksgiving day turned into a raucous demonstration of Boer chauvinism. Prime Minister Daniel Malan’s nationalist government formally dedicated a new monument to the Voortrekkers, a massive, brooding granite tabernacle on the boulder-strewn veld near Pretoria. South Africa’s 8,000,000 black people were excluded from all celebrations. For days before the actual dedication ceremonies, while bonfires blazed in the hilltops around Pretoria, frantic rumors had swept the wretched native settlements that the white men were bent on a bloody sequel to the battle of Blood River, that they would go forth on Dingaan’s day to slay black men, women & children. The government broadcast special messages to allay their fears.

On the great day there was no violence, but plenty of noise. Trains, buses, autos and old-style ox wagons poured 250,000 South Africans onto the scene. A city of 5,000 tents had been built to shelter part of the crowd. Many were dressed in Voortrekker garb—the men in cowhide or corduroys, with feathered slouch hats, powder horns, and bushy beards which they had carefully grown during the past year; the women in flowing dresses and tight kappies (sunbonnets).

More than 700 people fainted in the broiling sun, but swarms of sightseers climbed the monument’s steps to gaze reverently at the bas-reliefs of Voortrekker heroes and other figures of South African history. At noon, a shaft of sunlight fell through an opening in the monument’s dome upon the words “Ons Vir Jou Suid Afrika” (We for You South Africa), engraved on an altar 130 feet below. The crowd watched in solemn silence while organs played; at that moment, throughout the land, bells pealed from every town and village belfry.

White Light. Then the speeches started. Their main theme: only the Afrikaner (i.e., descendants of the Boers) might rightfully carry “the white light of Christendom” into “the black heart of Africa.”

All but lost in the strident Afrikaans outburst was the calmer voice of former Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts, who pleaded: “Let this monument of our genesis be … a symbol not only of the past but of our reconciliation . . .” Judge Newton Thompson bluntly spoke for South Africans of British descent: “If you want our country to flourish and be happy, then you must take us with you, not as your subordinates . . . but as your equals at your side.”

*It ran in the family. Dingaan’s brother and predecessor, the frightful Chief Tchaka, slaughtered an estimated 1,000,000 fellow blacks in genocidal wars. He liquidated women as useless, mourned his mother’s death by killing 7,000 followers, was himself murdered by Dingaan.