“Gold mined at Tati was identified with the dynasty of the Queen of Sheba and the ancient rulers of biblical Ophir. David’s book records how this notion, mentioned in Milton’s Paradise Lost, was discarded as being romantic fiction. But romance there is here a-plenty.” —John Gordon Davis, best-selling author of Hold My Hand I’m Dying. The concession to mine gold at Tati was granted to a British baronet, Sir John Swinburne, by Lobengula, last king of the Matabele. Although called by colonial imperialists as a “savage king” and a “native despot”, Lobengula was “exceedingly well-made (in height about 6 ft. 10 inches), corpulent, with a commanding presence and, when in a good temper, having a kind heart and a full appreciation of humor”. The gold at Tati, which was discovered by the geologist Carl Mauch, was actually on the site of prehistoric diggings that had been mined there 400 years previously by the Makalanga people. Tati lay on the missionary road to the north, used by Livingstone and Moffat, and it was part of Cecil Rhodes’s dream of a continuous tract of British imperialism from Cape to Cairo. The annexation of Bechuanaland was a direct result of the conflicts between the tribes within the area and the threats from President Kruger and from Germany which had recently colonized Angra Pequena. Gold from the early diggings here found its way to Great Zimbabwe and the famous golden rhinoceros from Mapungubwe was probably fashioned from gold mined at Tati. This forgotten corner of the subcontinent encapsulates a chapter of our history involving five countries, powerful men, much subterfuge, a botched invasion, a rebellion, land annexation, prospectors, hunters, traders and adventurers. It is a story begging to be told.

The Baronet and the Savage King: The Intriguing Story of the Tati Concession

History

Hilton-Barber, David

Africa

30 Degrees South Publishers

Private Robert Hart, just 18, in the green-and-black kilt of the Argyllshire Highlanders, gazed in awe at the wild skyline of fantastic mountains in the Cape spring of 1795. This was at the end of a four—month voyage of conﬁnement, scurvy, and general misery in a troopship. Hart did not guess that this would become his home and he himself the ﬁrst of all English-speaking South Africans. Had he kept a diary, it could have been taken as a text book to the history of the Colony — from the arrival of the British troops at the ﬁrst taking of the Cape, through the uprising in Graaif-Reinet, the arrival of the 1820 Settlers and the ensuing turbulent frontier wars — until his death in 1865. He served as adjutant of the Cape Regiment, he chose the site where Grahamstown now stands, he took Thomas Pringle on a memorable journey through the lichen-hung forests of the frontier, he managed the Somerset farm on the slopes of the Boschberg to supply produce to the British troops engaged in the hostilities and when this became Somerset East, he developed his own farm, the ﬁrst ﬁne wool grower in the Eastern Province. He was a close friend of Piet Retief and lived to see Port Elizabeth become, with Grahamstown, the trading base of the Free State and Transvaal Voortrekkers. Hart was a sincerely religious man who always had the welfare of the Presbyterian Church in mind. He was host to visiting missionaries who toured the country on horseback and would ask them to hold services in his house or garden which his Hottentot labourers and domestic servants could attend.

Robert Hart: The first English-speaking settler in South Africa

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Imprint

This book is a story of success, of the triumph of man over a wilderness; of the triumph of science over disease; of the conversion of a Valley of Death into a paradise. It tells of the shaping of one of the cornerstones of South Africa from a stone which the earlier builders not only rejected, but found an almost insurmountable obstacle. It tells of men and women of all races, principally Boer, Briton and Hollander, toiling against great odds, some for sheer love of adventure, some for wealth or personal advantage, some with a true desire for the common weal; of some who came and shortly went their ways elsewhere; of many who closed their lives here in a twilight of apparently hopeless failure; of some few who lived through the later stages of travail and of hardship to see at last, ‘The stubborn thistle bursting into glossy purples, richer than the most voluptuous garden roses’. Each and all of these men and women of the past did their bit, great or small, consciously or unconsciously, with objects of self or of the common good, towards the shaping of the Stone, but the Great Architect could and did combine those individual efforts to the shaping of the things to come; none could foresee how great would be the eventual victory over the inimical forces of Nature, how great would be the use to which future generations would put the generous gifts of Nature in this Region of ours[: the Lowveld].—H.S. Webb, first president of the Lowveld Regional Development Association, in his preface to The South-Eastern Transvaal Lowveld published in 1954.

Footprints: On the Trail of Those Who Made History in the Lowveld

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