Épisodes

  • Episode 201 - Labour, Lovedale and Roads are all the Rage in 1854

    Episode 201 - Labour, Lovedale and Roads are all the Rage in 1854
    Dec 15 2024
    This is episode 201. The sounds you’re hearing are those of roadworks, because South Africa is upgrading.

    Quickly.

    The arrival of governor sir George Grey in 1854 heralded a new epoch. Previous governors had been Peninsular war Veterans, they’d fought against Napoleon. This one was the first who was the child of a veteran of the war against Napoleon, and a person who was schooled in liberal humanism.

    He was also a Victorian, steeped in the consciousness of evolution, principled and simultaneously, flaunting truth. A fibber who was in a delirium of post-renaissance spirituality, combining dialect and salvation.

    You heard about George Grey’s time in New Zealand last episode, and here he was, the new Cape Governor. So without further ado, let’s dive into episode 201.

    He was free from prejudice against black and coloured people, and all indigenes as such, firmly believing from his own insight into the Polynesians cultures, the Maori, that there was nothing to distinguish them in aptitude and intelligence from anyone else in mankind. The same applied to Aborigines and black South Africans he believed.

    At the same time, Grey wanted indigenous people to wean themselves from what he called barbarism and heathenism. By suppressing tribal laws and customs, and incorporating indigenes into the economic system through labour and industry.

    During his short stint in Australia, he had set the Aborigines to work building roads, and those who worked hardest, earned the most. At the same time, he ruthlessly suppressed any sort of push back from the Aborigines, then the Maoris, and now he brought this brand of colonialism to South Africa.

    Dangling the carrot of labour, then applying the stick of punishment. The Cape colony was his laboratory in the Victorian age of discovery. An intellectual exercise. There was quite a bit in it for him of course. An ideologue and highly learned, he had written the New Zealand articles of Representative Government, an act that led to him being knighted.

    Sir George.

    Utopia beckons those who are imbued with internal fire — it’s only now and then that history provides a crack into which people with this sort of vision can plunge. A man or woman appears at a particular point in time, restructuring entire territories and societies by dint of their character, and their timing, their epoch.

    During this time, a powerful figure with a vision for change could restructure an entire land before his minders back in England could do anything about it. Correspondence with the antipodes, New Zealand and Australia, took nearly a year for an exchange of letters to take place. Six months one way, six months return. In the meantime, an industrious social engineer could get very busy indeed.

    South Africa was closer to the centres of power, the new steam driven ships could do the return journey in four months, but that was more than a financial quarter in modern jargon. A person with initiative could launch quite a few initiatives before the folks back in London put a stop to their initiating.
    The biggest problem at this moment for Grey was not the amaXhosa or AmaZulu or Basotho, nor the Khoe, or the Boers.

    IT was the British colonial office. They were in the throes of recession not expansion. Retrenchment and withdrawal.
    Grey pondered the solution. Five thousand white European immigrants should be brought in he wrote, the occupy British Kaffraria. There was a certain problem, and that was the amaNqika Xhosa lived there at a pretty squashed density of 83 people per square mile. To give you an idea of how squashed this was, the Cape colony population density of 1854 was 1.15 per square mile at the same time.

    The second conundrum was accessing cash to construct all these new schools and public buildings. Grey sent a letter to the Colonial office outlining his needs — this new plan would require 45 000 pounds a year.
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    25 min
  • Episode 200 - Sir George Grey’s Racial Amalgamation Thesis, its Maori Roots and Opiate Dependency

    Episode 200 - Sir George Grey’s Racial Amalgamation Thesis, its Maori Roots and Opiate Dependency
    Dec 8 2024
    This is episode 200 - we have reached the double century milestone on our winding journey through the past.
    When I began the series in 2021 after some years of planning, I had no idea what would happen. Diving into the shark tank that is history podcasting took a great deal of forethought. One person’s history is another persons’ propaganda after all, social engineers rewrite the past to suit their own agenda’s and this series has been based on our people’s stories first.
    Endeavouring to let the folks of the south talk for themselves, which of course, can threaten folks’ world view about their origins, or their personal narrative. It is rife with risk.

    So it’s with some relief to report that the response has been overwhelmingly positive. This series is now the third most shared podcast in South Africa — a stunning revelation given that I am doing this solo. There is no marketing team, no financier, no patron, just me and you the listener.

    Thanks to Francois at iono.fm for the growth in advertising, nothing for mahala I guess. Speaking of filthy lucre, I have a PayPal account for donations which can be found on desmondlatham.blog. The funds go towards the series audio hosting fees. The third video episode is about to land on YouTube, so things are happening.

    With that craven bit of begging, let us continue for we are going to spend this episode meeting Cape Governor, Sir George Grey. He is probably the most influential Englishman in both New Zealand and South Africa’s history, playing a key role in the annexation of Maori land, he spent time as a Governor of Australia. Very much an administrator of his time, he believed in educating the masses, and put his money where his mouth was, founding Grey’s College in Bloemfontein in 1855, then Grey’s High School in Gbeberha a year later.

    In between, all manner of shenanigans were recorded. But wait. As we hear about Sir George, I’ll introduce his amaxhosa alter ego, Manhlakaza, aka Wilhelm Goliath, who was the first amaXhosa Anglican in South Africa.
    Manhlakaza’s relationship with the Archdeacon of Grahamstown, Nathanial James Merriman, was going to change the whole course of South Africa’s history. Don’t take my word for it, this is the view of many who know much more than me about these things, particularly the fantastic historian Jeff Peires.

    Here were two people, opposites. Grey and Goliath.

    Their tale is tantamount to the gears of history turning like a great, soot-streaked clockwork, steam-punk cogs groaning under the weight of human ambition and magical ether, while the past, a fog of coal-smoke and brass, hisses and sputters, propelling the unwieldy engine unsteadily into the unknown.

    The allegorical story this episode contains metaphors and illustrations of an era.
    Grey believed white and black people were essentially the same, it was only culture and backward rituals that separated the races. Grey wrote regularly about how aborigines and later amaXhosa

    “…are as apt and intelligent as any other race of men I am acquainted with…”
    “They are subject to the same affections, appetites and passions as other men…”

    Simply put, he thought that the Aborigines, the Maoris, the First People’s of Canada, the Khoekhoe, the Nguni and Tswana speaking south Africans, all wanted to become Englishmen but couldn’t because they were trapped by the barbarous customs and rituals enforced by their older generation.
    At the same time, the colonial in him believed that no Aborigine, or Maori or African culture, was worth the grand heights of English culture. Still, that didn’t stop him personally conducting a major contribution study of the Maori language and folklore. That study is regarded one of the most important research into early Maori ways — a contradiction considering that he didn’t hold the Maori ways in high regard.
    What a strange character.
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    21 min
  • Episode 199 - Cognitive Dissonance, Desiccated Hags, a Trail of Tears and Ssehura Baartman

    Episode 199 - Cognitive Dissonance, Desiccated Hags, a Trail of Tears and Ssehura Baartman
    Dec 1 2024
    Episode 199, cognitive dissonance, desiccated hags, a Trail of Tears and Ssehura Baartman — Almost two hundred episodes exploring a land rich with some of the earliest examples of human habitation.
    We need to assess what has happened — standing back a bit to view the scene from where we’ve arrived - 1853 in the main with a smattering of 1854. The amaXhosa had lost a great deal of land to the English Settlers, the Coloureds, Khoe and Boers, as well as the amaMfengu refugees who were allies of the colonists. The coloureds and Khoekhoe had then lost some of their land to the colonists post 8th Frontier War. Each epoch saw a tussle over the territory.
    AmaXhosa chiefs realised by the mid-Nineteenth century that they were fighting for survival. A semblance of joint understanding was starting to spread out from southern AFrica into the interior, but not in the sense of any co-ordinated response to a colonial threat. The vast majority of African chiefdoms facing expanding settler frontiers were still responding locally, their response fragmented because the vast majority of African chiefs still regarded each other as more dangerous enemies - so their joint response to this growing threat was haphazard.
    AS the first people’s faced annhilation, what distinguished the amaXhosa in a kind of historical contradiction, is that they did not diminish the numbers after each pushback — their numbers actually increased. This is not what happened to the Khoe and San who were pushed off their land by the new arrivals, the Nguni, then the next arrivals, the Europeans. The First people’s of south Africa almost disappeared from the landscape as they were defeated.

    Not so the amaXhosa.
    Last episode I spoke of the historical Doppler Effect, and how folks approach the past, and this episode it’s Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance theory. A simple example of this is that when people smoke, and they know smoking causes cancer, they are in a state of cognitive dissonance. The behaviour is smoking, and knowing it causes cancer is the cognitive dissonance bit when they continue to puff away.

    When Individuals form a group try to avoid disharmony by seeking consistency in beliefs. This is a central tenant to being human.

    However, it was this basic principle that was going to lead to the coming Cattle Killing extravaganza. Mlanjeni’s prophecy continued — despite the fact that he had failed in his mission, he had not failed in his message.
    It is not a surprise therefore to hear that the next complex prophet in our tale of magic and mystery hailed from southern Transkei, and lived alongside the Gxara River which is just north of the Great Kei River Mouth.

    This is a place I know well, having regularly hiked from the Kei mouth Ferry along the beach to a nearby place called Qholora near the Ngogwane River in the mid-1980s. The riverine bush here is thick, mysterious, ancient and haunting. It seeps into your consciousness like the fingers of God, prodding your imagination, assailing your senses with sight and sound — and smell.
    The reason for spending time on the flora is because the next character to emerge in this saga who is going to alter South African history was a young Xhosa girl, Nongqawuse. It is these sights and sounds, this landscape that etched into her mind because it was from inside this landscape from bushes growing near her village, two strangers would appear in a bush and tell her that salvation for the Xhosa lay in killing all their cattle.
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    23 min
  • Episode 198 - 1853: The Crimean War, Historical Doppler Effects and Quitrent in Keiskamma Hoek

    Episode 198 - 1853: The Crimean War, Historical Doppler Effects and Quitrent in Keiskamma Hoek
    Nov 24 2024
    This is episode 198 — and good news!

    Apple has listed this podcast as one of South Africas five shows they liked in 2024 — and we are also the third most shared podcast in South Africa on all Apple Podcasts.

    Unvelievable, ongelooflijk, Ngiyamangala, Ke Makatsoa!

    I am delighted — and indebted to you the listener who has shared this show with friends and family. Thank you everyone!

    With that unadulterated self adulation out of the way, back to 1853.

    As you know, this series constantly shuffles between world events of the time, and incidents and events in southern Africa.

    In China the Taiping Rebellion rolled on— a civil war between the Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the Hakka-led Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The war had started in 1850 and would only end in 1864.

    It’s believed between 20 and 30 million Chinese died in this war, about the same number who died in World War One. By comparison, the 8th Frontier War which had just ended in the eastern Cape was trifling - unless of course you were one of the 16 000 amaXhosa or 1400 of the British soldiers and settlers who died.

    The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was dreamed up by a prophet just like the 8th Frontier War. In the southern African case, Mlanjeni had fused Christian and amaXhosa cosmology into a generated a cult-like following. In China it was Hong Xiuquan, an ethnic Hakka man who had proclaimed himself to be the brother of Jesus Christ and who led the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

    Also in 1853, the first passenger railway in India began running between Bombay or Mumbai as it’s now known, and Thana was inaugurated in 1853. In the same year, Manchester was granted city status in the UK, and the first public aquarium opened in London.

    Yellow Fever killed 8 000 Americans in New Orleans, that’s one reason why we get Yellow Fever shots — because yes folks — it kills you as quickly as a vaccine hesitant with spasmodic dysphonia.
    The Swiss watch company Tissot was founded in 1853 and soon the biggest market for Tisso watches, in those days was … Russia. Ironic, considering Russia and a host of countries had gone to war in the Crimea. A Time to die. The first potato chips, or chips as we call it, were prepared and sold by George Crum in New York.
    Christian Doppler the Austrian mathematician a physicist died in 1853, famous for his discovery that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer.

    It’s called the doppler Effect.

    Some could argue that there is a doppler effect in historical views, just as the perceived pitch of a wave changes with movement, historical events are viewed differently depending on the distance in time from the event. To stretch this metaphor further, perception is influenced by position, shaped by cultural, geographical and ideological positions. The closer you are to the event, the more intense it is. Thus, the Historical Doppler Effect.
    The Crimean War kicked off in October 1853.
    Word of these events, of course, were rippling across the planet, sometimes taking months to reach the furtherest corners. The Boers in South Africa for example were acutely aware of the Crimean war, and that their enemy the English were involved.
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    21 min
  • Episode 197 - The Show Trial of Andries Botha and the Forgotten Significance of the 8th Frontier War

    Episode 197 - The Show Trial of Andries Botha and the Forgotten Significance of the 8th Frontier War
    Nov 17 2024
    This is episode 197. Which is a prime number and therefore symbolic too because this episode we’re dealing with a unique event in Southern African history.

    The 8th Frontier war, which began on Christmas Day 1850, was going to end eventually although as with all conflicts that stretch into years, most of those involved despaired believing perhaps the guns would never fall silent.

    A British government under Russell had come a cropper partly because of the way in which this war dragged on, it led to Sir Harry Smith losing his job as Cape Governor, and Sir George Cathcart had arrived to escort the conflagration to its spluttering expiration.

    Lord Earl Grey had lost his job as Colonial Secretary, only a few weeks after he’d fired Harry Smith. Among the amaXhosa, things were actually not much better. The overall situation was different from the previous war, because there was no longer any attempt at a central command, or even unity of action.

    Chief Sandile of the amaNqgika had told his warriors to avoid gathering in large numbers, preferring quick and dirty small raids to anything large scale. Committing acts of mischief of all kinds as the British referred to it. For both the settlers and Xhosa people who were trying to get on with their lives, the unstable frontier was a torturous concoction of blood, sweat and tears.

    It was actually the Khoekhoe rebels under leaders like Willem Uithaalder who were determined to hold out whatever happened. This position was reinforced when the British conducted a show trial of a man who has been treated very badly by History, by the name of Andries Botha.

    A Khoe veteran — former of the Cape Mounted Rifles.

    He faced two treason trials, the first ended in 1851, but the settlers were baying for his blood as a former Cape Mounted Rifles commander who was accused of switching sides to fight with the amaXhosa. As you’ll hear, he hadn’t.

    In May 1852 he was re-arrested and marched into a court where Judge Sir John Wylde presided in what became known as South Africa’s first show trial — foreshadowing others such as the Rivonia Treason Trials where Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life on Robben Island. It as an unprecedented event this 1852 show trial, the first of its kind in the Supreme Court of the Cape Colony. Previously the trials had been dominated by the almost ritualised sentencing of rebellious slaves, but this one was the first politically charged trial taking aim at an indigenous person, a man of Southern Africa, not a rebellious slave from Madagascar or West Africa.

    Botha was defended by two of the Cape’s top lawyers, Frank Watermeyer and Johannes Brand. In what amounted to an unsightly rush, he was sentenced to death in spite of a strong defence, however the outrage that followed led to the death sentence commuted to life in prison.

    The amaXhosa were exhausted and in Febuary 1853, Sir George Cathcart, like his predecessors, had tired of greedy colonists making quite a bit of cash out of this war. They hiked up their prices for all goods, horses, oxen, feed, leather goods, food.

    After protracted negotiations, Sandile and Maqoma surrendered, along with their chiefs. They were pardoned by Cathcart, who had promised they would not be arrested like Siyolo, in exchange for an unconditional surrender.
    And so dear listener, the end of the eighth frontier war was inconclusive. At first glance, it appeared the British had prevailed, the amaXhosa had been vanquished. It had cost close to three million pounds, 16 000 Xhosa had died, 1400 British and colonials.

    It had given the world something called the Birkenhead Drill, women and children first. It had also revealed to planet earth, a modern war where a guerrilla-style army with experience in the bush had forced the conventional army into unconventional tactics.
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    22 min
  • Episode 196 - An Irishman-penned Cape Qualified Franchise Constitution and Boots Cathcart on the Ground

    Episode 196 - An Irishman-penned Cape Qualified Franchise Constitution and Boots Cathcart on the Ground
    Nov 10 2024
    This is episode 196 and we’re covering the movement towards sef-government and the first Cape Constitution which included what’s known as a qualified Franchise.

    A trend had been sweeping British colonies by the mid-nineteenth century where the coming commonwealth was intent on running its own affairs on a country-by-country basis.

    The first self-governing colony of the British Empire you could say was Massachussett’s in 1630 showing how long the Americans had been tugging at the British leash before they began their war of independence. But to be strictly accurate it was really the Province of Canada in 1841, and all colonies of British North America became self governing between 1848 and 1855 — except Vancouver Island. Australia was a bit more complex, there were six settler colonies which each achieved self-governing status over quite a long period, between 1852 and 1901.

    Well Seven if you include New Zealand, sorry Kiwis, the English system kind of lumped Australasia together.

    There had been a tension growing between the mother-country with it’s erratic political system, and the colonies. The plethora of politics that blew back and forth on the headlands of the British voter was head spinning - but by 1850 the British bureaucracy began to gain prominance and in the halls of power, it was whispered that public jobs were going to be based on merit rather than patronage.

    As this liberalisation of the system back home began to shake the dusty and cobweb strewn hallways of ancient Britain, the philosophy drifted outwards, like an informed mist, towards the distant colonies.

    The problem for the colonists was the liberals wanted black people to have rights, the conservatives vacillated. Settlers almost to a man preferred indigenous people of the colonised territories to avail themselves as labour without recourse to the same rights as themselves.
    You’ll remember last episode we met new Cape Attorney General William Porter, an Irish democrat who wanted to extend the rights afforded white colonists to all who lived in the Cape.

    He arrived in Cape Town in 1839 and was acutely aware of the changing winds back home when it came to bureaucracy.

    Confounding a quick solution to the debate about who should be allowed to vote was the fact that officials in the Cape couldn’t get along. Chief Justice Wylde wanted to have a seat on the proposed lower house of a new Cape Legislature, even though he was a technocrat.

    Porter himself hankered after a seat in the House of Assembly proposed as Attorney General that officials should be allowed to stand for election without being held responsible to Parliament for their official acts.
    Everyone agreed however that the concept of a franchise system was important, and the franchise must be low enough so that everyone had a shot of being allowed to vote. Disallowing coloureds the vote had been the major reason at least two Colonial Secretaries had delayed self-government in South Africa. This was known as the Cape Qualified Franchise. What we must keep in mind is that the ideology of utilitarianism mixed with evangelicalism was characteristic of the new order. However, it was tempered by fear. There were two factions debating this in 1850 through to 1853. One faction sought a narrowly based electorate to be achieved by high property qualification, and the other a widely based electorate to be achieved by a low property qualification.
    Speaking of the war, it was about to come to an end. Burned itself out so to speak.

    When Lieutenant Colonel Cathcart had arrived in the Eastern Cape, his initial strategy of ending the war was to do what other British commanders had done, start building fortified posts.
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    23 min
  • Episode 195 - Mpande’s Mswati beef, a bit about Reserves and Bantustans and a Lashing of Self Government

    Episode 195 - Mpande’s Mswati beef, a bit about Reserves and Bantustans and a Lashing of Self Government
    Nov 3 2024
    A quick note to the SA Podcaster’s Guild, thank you for the History podcast of the year silver award — I shared the honour with the 30 Years of Democracy Podcast, part of the TimesLive stable.

    It’s heart warming to receive some sort of recognition, and thanks mainly to you the listener.

    With that it’s back to episode 195 and we’re swinging back to the east, to Zululand, where Chief Mpande kaSenzangakhona of the AmaZulu has not been idle for the last two years.

    When we last heard about Mpande, after a few years of relative quiet once he took over from Dinging as king of the AmaZulu, he began to plot against the Swazi in late 1840s. As he planned and plotted, in the British outpost called Natal, this territory that abounded Durban, two men had arrived who were to alter South African history.

    Theophilus Shepstone and Hans Schreuder. More about them in a moment.

    Mpande thought of Eswatini, Swaziland, as a source of treasure, booty, and a future place of refuge for his people just in case the Boers or the British should advance further into Zululand. The good relations between the Boers and the Swazi, at least running up to the mid-19th Century, meant that Mpande was forced to hold off most of his plans to invade King Mswati’s land. It was also along a corridor coveted by not only the AmaZulu and the Swazi, but also by the boers.

    So his first aim was north west, towards smaller kingdoms where the booty was thinner on the ground, not exactly a plethora of cows, rather a smattering but better than nix. The amaHlubi bore the brunt of Mpande’s expansionist aims when he attacked Langalibalele kaMthimkulu who had told his people that from now on, it was he and not Mpande who would control the function of rainmaking. Mpande disagreed.

    The disputes going on Swazi territory gave the AmaZulu king an opportunity to interfere. If you remember a previous podcast, I’d explained that after Mswati was declared the new young king of the amaSwazi, the senior regent Malambule tried to cling onto power — and was backed in his clinging by Mpande.
    Enter stage left, a missionary who was on a mission. Enter stage right, a second missionary on another mission.

    Cast member number one, stage left, Theophilus Shepstone, or Somtseu as the Zulu called him.

    The other, stage right, was lesser known Norwegian Missionary Society’s Hans Schreuder. The latter was well over six feet tall, a powerful man, with a powerful temper. He may have been a bible-wielding man of God, but that didn’t stop the Viking blood pumping him up when he was crossed.

    Schreuder would establish 7 mission stations across Zululand and was going to be extremely useful as Mpande’s diplomat.

    Shepstone’s role in our story is a complex combination of missionary, Zulu-phile, Anglophone civiliser in chief — a vast figure in our tale. He would suffer many a baleful settler glare, the colonists believed his pro-Zulu politics were dangerous to their almost infinite demand for labour and land.
    As the Cape colonials moved towards self-government, Natal became a problem child.
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    26 min
  • Episode 194 - The Battle of Berea leads to an Anglo-Basotho Mutual Admiration Society

    Episode 194 - The Battle of Berea leads to an Anglo-Basotho Mutual Admiration Society
    Oct 27 2024
    This is episode 194 and we’re marching towards Thaba Bosiu with Lieutenant General George Cathcart.

    Or sitting on horseback among King Moshoeshoe’s Basotho warriors, armed with a musket. Take your pick. We’re going to hear about the Battle of Berea, and the outcome would underline the Basotho mastery of their land, leading to Lesotho’s independence.

    But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, first things first.

    AS you heard last episode, soldiers from various regiments in the British army and the Cape Mounted Rifles totalling 2500 troops were invading Moshoeshoes’ kingdom.

    The British were trying to secure the northern parts of the Cape Colony and believed that by crushing Moshoeshoe, the TransOrangia would be rid of raiding and chaos. The fact that a whole range of people were raiding and causing chaos seemed to have escaped the attention of Cathcart and his commanders.

    As you know, there was a long list of these renegades. But because Moshoeshoe was the most organised African leader in the territory, it stood to reason that it must be his people causing the trouble. The Basotho’s main opponent weren’t the Boers under Pretorius or the Rolong under Maroka or the Griqua, no they weren’t the Bastaards under Pieter Davids and Carolus Batjoe, or even the Kora Bandits under Gert Taaibosch.
    No, the Basotho regarded Sekonyela’s Batlokwa as their main opposition in the area.
    And it was Sekonyela’s complaints to the British about Moshoeshoe that set off this recent marching business. Sure, there’s no debate about whether or not Moshoeshoe and his allies had been carting off Boer stock, raiding when they could, this was true.

    What was really going on was that Cathcart wanted to end the ongoing 8th Frontier War and thought that by hammering Moshoeshoe, a possible future conflict could be avoided and he could concentrate on the amaXhosa further south.
    Cathcart moved off during daylight, and it was going to take his force hours to reach their first objectives. That was more than enough time for Moshoeshoe to recover from what was a heinous break from English military tradition — no war was declared after all. The Basotho king moved fast and within an hour, his 3000 warriors were on their horses, muskets loaded.

    The King had also not been idle in recent years, his people had been studying and practicing how to fight a mobile army moving inside his mountain kingdom, particularly the tactics used by the British.
    Instead, the British commander looked around him and counted the cost. Thirty-eight British soldiers died, the most in any engagement thus far in South Africa. He had 5000 Basotho cattle, hardly a small number, and yet something to boast about.
    The Basotho king in turn had lost around 50 men, dozens more injured and written a letter that Cathcart could wave about - peace in our time!
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    21 min