Episode 100 - “Send the Boers to Mexico” & Scheepers rides from Desolation Valley

It’s an amazing to think that back in 2017 I was thinking about this podcast and whether I should go ahead and cover a topic that was missing on both iTunes and general podcasting. Jumping in and starting in October 2017, the plan was to follow the war as it wound its way through the next three or so years. Now we're on episode 100! We’re now well into year two and this podcast series will wrap up at the same time as the Boer war - in May next year. I’ve tracked the incidents, events and issues through the war on a week by week basis so we’re now in August 1901 and as you heard last week, Breaker Morant and his murderous Bushveld Carbineers have been busy across the north of the Transvaal. In the Free State, hundreds of Boers are beginning to arrive close to the Cape Colony border where they’ll join up with General Jan Smuts who has been riding from the Transvaal and plans an invasion into the colony. The winter temperatures begin to ease in August. South Africa’s high veld as I’ve explained experiences quite bitter winters with below freezing conditions for most of June and July. However by mid to late August, winds begin to blow and the sun which has been angled low in the north starts rising earlier, setting later and warming everyone. Not a moment too soon. In the Concentration camps now dotted around the interior, the death rate has been creeping up. There are now officially 100 000 Boer civilians - mostly women and children, who are incarcerated in these camps, with another 60 000 black civilians at least. These numbers are now known to have been conservative. Lord Kitchener had published his infamous proclamation of August 7th with an ultimatum to all the Boers’ political and military leaders from commandants down to the heads of what he called ‘armed bands’. Anyone who hadn’t surrendered by 15th September would be exiled from South Africa for life. What’s more, those who had families in the Concentration Camps would be forced to pay for their maintenance which naturally meant their land and property would be seized. This would hit them where it hurt most, he thought. And of course, it would. But General Christiaan de Wet and other hardliners shrugged off Kitchener’s threat. There were other ideas beginning to float around at this time. Why shouldn’t the British rid themselves of the Boers altogether? This has an ominous sound to it, doesn’t it? Kitchener ran his idea of rounding up all the Boers, women, children, old, young, from the camps as well as the 20 000 men in prisoner of war camps overseas. Why not pack these people off to a new region - Fiji perhaps? Willem Leyds had heard some of these wild plans before, but in August 1901 he was shocked when one of these wild plans came from a man by the name of Hyram Maxim. He was a 61 year-old American who had become a naturalised British subject and one of the last people that Queen Victoria had bestowed a knighthood before she died as I mentioned in an earlier podcast. The honour was conferred on Maxim as an inventor. He claimed to have invented the lightbulb, but that was debatable, but he had invented a number of machines including the mousetrap, the merry-go-round and, terrifingly, the machine gun. At the beginning of the letter dated August 1901, Maxim professed to be well disposed towards the Boers. Maxim wrote to Kruger that because of the British numerical superiority, they were inevitably going to win the war. But, there was a way out of this morass believed Maxim. And the horrible truth is that he was completely correct in his basic analysis. The British, by pure dint of their numerical and financial superiority, were going to win the war because they still wanted to win it. So what to do, thought Maxim? Simple, he said. The Boers were going to leave South Africa en masse to establish a new colony in the north of Mexico.