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Hester Johanna Maria Uys

(Interviews with Errol Lincoln Uys,1970)Johanna, or Joey as she was later called, was born in July 1892. Her mother was killed in a train crash in 1896, and Joey and her sister went to live with an uncle and aunt in Bethulie, Orange Free State, Magiel and Lettie Roux. When the Second Anglo-Boer War broke out in October 1899, Magiel joined the Bethulie Commando.

In September 1900, as British troops rolled over the veld, Magiel and thirty commandos attempted to flee the Orange Free State for the Transvaal. Joey and her cousins, the child Magiel and Johann, were in the convoy when it was attacked and captured by the British “Tommies” near Springfontein in the Free State.

We trekked with fourteen wagons, seventy women and children, escorted by thirty Boer commandos. Three days after leaving Bethulie, the Tommies found us.

“O, God, ons is nou gevang!” – (“O, God, now we’re caught!”)

It was daylight. I hid under a wagon. Magiel and Johann lay on the wagon floor. They couldn’t understand what was happening. There was confusion. People screaming. Shouts. “Rooinek vark!” – (“Redneck pig!”)

Women were shooting and killing Tommies. Tant (aunt) Lettie was a crack-shot. She kept firing till she’d no more bullets.

Several Boers were killed. Then we ran out of ammunition. We surrendered with a white flag on a stick.

I still see the red faces of the Tommies. They wore khaki, brass buttons, and leggings. Their heavy boots thudded as they walked.

They gathered our men together and took their guns and horses.

Before they were led away, our commandant warned us to obey the Tommies or be shot.

My uncle said goodbye. We were all crying.

Magiel looked at me. “Never desert her,” he said to my aunt. “If you’ve one crust of bread, break it in half and give it to her.”

As Joey recounted the attack on the wagons to me, she sang a line of an old Boer War song: “Zij geniet die blouwe bergen op die skepe na Ceylon.” — “They enjoy the blue mountains on the ships to Ceylon.”

Magiel went as POW to Sri Lanka where five thousand Boer guerillas were interned during the war. The British shipped four times that number to other camps in India, St. Helena and Bermuda.

At the wagons, the Tommies searched the women and went through their belongings.

The soldiers weren’t cruel. They hadn’t tasted real war yet.

While they searched our stuff, my aunt sat on a trommeltjie filled with bottles of Lennon’s home remedies. The Tommy’s never looked inside the medicine chest.

Tant Lettie had hidden gold sovereigns under the bottles.

After they took our men away, they made us get back into the wagons. We trekked across the veld to a station. We stayed there all night, some lying down, others sitting up in the wagons. In the morning, they pushed us into boxcars.

I couldn’t see anything. There were vents on top and one of these slammed onto my aunt’s head. When the train moved off, the boxcar shook so much we fell against each other.

My mother’s reference to a boxcar is unusual. Most women and children were herded into fetid cattle trucks to be shunted across the Free State under a boiling sun or through frigid nights.

We realized we were going to Bloemfontein.

“You’ll get food, everything you need in the camp,” the Tommies said.

At Bloemfontein, we were placed in carts. We were taken three miles outside town and dumped down on the veld.

They put up bell-tents for us, one next to the other. Hundreds of round tents, far as the eye could see. We met one of Tant (aunt) Lettie’s sisters and stayed together for a while.

A woman in the tent next to us went into labor. Her baby was born that night. The child contracted some disease and died soon after.

We slept on the bare ground. No bedding, no pillows, only some blankets from the wagon. It rained heavily. In the beginning, we didn’t know we had to loosen the tent ropes and let the water run off. We got sopping wet. Tant Lettie and I went outside in the rain. We released the ropes and knocked in the pegs again. It was a quagmire. Exhausted, we lay down in the mud to sleep.

We lit a paraffin lamp in the tent at night. At nine o’clock, all lights had to be out. Women were kicked and beaten if they disobeyed the orders of the Tommies. We obeyed.

We were issued ration cards and stood in line for food. We got meat, sugar, mealie meal, condensed milk. The meat was chilled. Even after cooking, it had chunks of ice in it. We used a paraffin tin outside the tent for a stove, same as a ‘kaffir-koggel ,’ with holes in the sides and irons to hold pots. We collected firewood on a kopje next to the camp. Water was brought from a river by cart. Every morning we stood in line to fill our buckets. We were always short of water.
Tant Lettie, the two boys and Johanna were designated “Undesirables,” a term applied to Boers who don’t go voluntarily into captivity or had family members on commando. “Refugees” described displaced Boers who surrender, the “hands-uppers” and their dependants. The latter are rewarded with a few extra spoonfuls of sugar, condensed milk and the luxury of the occasional potato. In either case, rations are insufficient to stave off starvation and disease.

If we had grievances, we were taken in front of the camp commandant. Usually, we kept quiet. We didn’t want trouble with the Tommies.

During the day, the women visited each other. We walked around the camp. The sun burnt us black. Our shoes wore out. Our clothes were unironed and filthy. Afterwards we got blue soap to wash our things. The toilet was horrible. A big hole with plank seats and sacking around it, you climbed up on top of the planks. No newspaper, no rags.

The camp was lice-infested. I watched Tommies take their leggings off, unwinding them like strips of bandages. They used broken glass to scrape the lice from their legs. My aunt had to cut all my hair off.

There was a church but I don’t remember going to it or to a school begun in the camp. Tant Lettie read to us from the Bible.

Theft was rife. There were fights between women.

Prostitutes carried on with Tommies and Boers in the camp. Most of the men were elderly. One old man called De Wet was a bastard. He wanted to interfere with my aunt. She chased him out of the tent. Tommies also interfered with the women.

I remember a short man with a gray beard. I hated him.

My aunt became friendly with one of the Tommies. She stole someone else’s skirt and walked with him.

Thousands of newcomers arrived at Bloemfontein camp. Thousands became sick. The marquee hospital tents were always full. The doctors worked day and night.

We found pieces of blue stone vitriol in the sugar. Lots of people were poisoned.

People died like rats. Carts came down the rows of tents to pick up the dead. There were funerals every day.

In the eighteen months Johanna and her family were in Bloemfontein concentration camp, the population soared to six thousand three hundred and twenty two. Of this number, one thousand six hundred and ninety-five perished from want and sickness.

British propagandists alleged that Boer mothers were killing their children through their own stupidity and carelessness. When seven-year-old Lizzie van Zyl died of hunger at Bloemfontein, a report said her mother starved her.

Emily Hobhouse, an English activist, spent six months in South Africa from January to June 1901 visiting Bloemfontein and six other camps. She saw Lizzie van Zyl die on an airless April day.

“I used to see her in her bare tent lying on a tiny mattress which had been given her, trying to get air from the raised flap, gasping her life out in the heated tent. Her mother tended her. I got some friends in town to make a little muslin cap to keep the flies from her bare head. I was arranging to get a cart made to draw her into the air in the cooler hours but before wood could be procured, the cold nights came on and she died. I found nothing to show neglect on the mother’s part.”

Emily returned to England to campaign against “a gigantic and grievous blunder caused not by uncaring women but crass male ignorance, helplessness and muddling.” Her militancy brought the scorn of the British people who called her a rebel, a liar, an enemy of the nation, hysterical and worse.

No one hated Emily more than Lord Kitchener, whose troops burnt down 30,000 farm houses, torched a score of towns and interned 116,572 Boers, a quarter of the population.

“It is for their protection against the Kaffirs,” said the British War Secretary, oblivious to the fact that Africans were being armed and encouraged by the English to attack a mutual enemy. Also ignoring the fact that 115,000 “black Boers” were sent to their own concentration camps, loyal servants who saw twelve thousand of their number die.

Miss Hobhouse was banned from visiting the most terrible of all camps that had been established just outside Bethulie, a place name meaning “Chosen by God.” My mother considered it a blessing of the Almighty that they weren’t interned at Bethulie where twelve hundred died in one six-month period from pneumonia and measles and from hunger.

The concentration camps claimed the lives of 27,972 Boers. Of these, 22,074 were children like Lizzie van Zyl.

We guarded the gold sovereigns day and night. After lights out, we slept next to the box where Tant Lettie had hidden the coins.

Women could apply to the camp commandant for a pass to go into Bloemfontein. Tant Lettie went to buy extra food. This was all that kept us alive.

I think of the thousands who died in the camps. I thank God that we survived.

In summer 1902, as Kitchener’s cordon strangled Boer resistance, Tant Lettie got notice that she and the children were going to another camp.

My mother was too young at the time to know why they were moved, whether Tant Lettie’s Tommy friend pulled strings or what other reason was behind the transfer. They went from Bloemfontein to a camp at Kubusie River near Stutterheim in the Eastern Cape, nestled in the green hills of the Amatola Range, a world away from the horrors of the dumping ground at Bloemfontein.

This time, Johanna recalled making the two-hundred-and-fifty mile journey in a cattle truck. According to one report, some of the refugees were supplied with tents, which they ingeniously erected on the beds of railroad cars. Others were covered with tarpaulins like so much baggage.

“The former arrived more contented and less sullen. All were provided with hot water and cocoa en route.”

We were vaccinated on arrival at Kubusie. Our arms swelled up. Magiel and Johann became sick but after a while we were all OK.

We lived in a one-roomed house. A big room with a plank table, plank chairs and three plank beds with straw mattresses.

Our days at Kubusie were happier. Farmers in the district helped the Boers. The camp was small, nothing like Bloemfontein. I don’t recall anyone dying at Kubusie.

A Miss O’Brien taught school in the camp. I learnt English from her. After school, she invited me to her room. My dress was in rags. Miss O’Brien cut up her own clothes to make dresses for me. She taught me how to knit and gave me a ball of wool for a pair of socks.

Who was Miss O’Brien? Was she English or Irish as her name might suggest? Was she one of Emily Hobhouse’s angels of mercy? It matters not, just that she was there, sitting with a child pretty as a flower, teaching her to knit a pair of socks.

Today, the site of Kubusie Concentration Camp has been turned into a car park and the surface area graveled and curbed.

“The socks were yellow,” Johanna said a lifetime later. She never forgot Miss O’Brien’s kindness.

 

Joey…in the late 1920’s