By JASPER COOK
In late 1918, a man named Bongli mounted his horse at his home in the Kat River Valley in the Eastern Cape, rode into Fort Beaufort (now kwaMaqoma), and returned with saddlebags full of medicine for local people suffering from Spanish Flu. As a result, he became a hero, remembered by my mother and others for ‘saving the people of the valley’.
I heard about Bongli in the late 1980s while on a road trip with my then elderly mother, who longed to see her birthplace. I was free for a week, and up for a road trip. These were usually round trips from Johannesburg to her sister in Richmond in the Karoo, on to her brother at Breakfast Vlei near Alice in the Eastern Cape, northward through the Transkei to Pietermaritzburg to see my sister, and then back to Johannesburg.
This time, we changed our route to accommodate her wish to go via Fort Beaufort in the Kat River Valley. We drove out of Fort Beaufort on the Seymour Road and took a gravel road lined with gum trees, passing the farm Lorraine, and reaching the smaller adjoining farm Amherst, where she had been born.
Of course, much had changed in the 60-odd years since she had left the valley. She had returned once, in the 1970s, but did not go to Amherst, and did not know whether the house still stood. After some time, she led us to a modest four-roomed dwelling, painted bright blue – not much bigger than the ‘RDP houses’ of today. Set about with plantation trees, we had almost missed the place, but she oriented herself from the river. We drove on slowly from there, retracing her childhood footsteps, until she spotted it. We parked and approached a group of four tall and graceful Xhosa women.
At first, it was an awkward encounter. The women were very reserved, even suspicious. This was still deep in the apartheid days. Strange whites could mean trouble! They replied to my mother’s greeting in Afrikaans. My mother revealed she had been born in this house. ‘Hierdie huis?’ they echoed, disbelievingly, clearly accustomed to whites living in larger houses. Further questions were fielded politely, until my mother asked: ‘Waar is Bongli?’
Their hands flew to their mouths in utter surprise, exclaiming: ‘Die Miesies ken vir Bongli!’ It was a surprise to me too: she had never mentioned him before. She explained that Bongli was regarded as a hero, whom she had heard of as a child and never forgotten.
There was an exchange of appreciative memories, after which the women told us: ‘Bongli is lankal dood’. They could not say exactly when. I never thought to ask his surname or clan name.
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The Spanish Flu of 1918 was devastating. Whereas Covid-19 deaths in South Africa from 2020 to date amount to 103 000, some 300 000 people died in the first six weeks of the flu pandemic alone. This comprised 6 per cent of the population, or one out of every six people. It was also vastly more than the 11 000 South African soldiers who had died during the entire First World War.
Everyone knew someone who had died. The only consolation, if there was one, was that people died quietly in their beds, instead of being blown to pieces by shrieking shards of metal in a war that was, in the words of Sebastian Faulks (in ‘Birdsong’), a ‘huge crime against nature’.
Spanish Flu had spread suddenly by way of returning troop ships. Bongli must, on previous trips to town, have seen sports fields and built spaces filling up with beds. Church halls, school halls, the town hall, every large room was filled with people wheezing and struggling. Newly erected laundries and washing lines hung with white bedsheets had spring up everywhere.
Nurses in Lawrence, Massachusetts in the US care for victims of the flu epidemic, 1918. Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
As a child, Bongli must have experienced other upheavals, including the Anglo-Boer War, but his most unforgettable childhood memory must have been the rinderpest of 1896. That epizootic came in the middle of a decade-long drought, paradoxically making water central to death as well as life: the disease spread mainly via water sources. It killed 90% of all cattle, taking most buffalo and eland with it, and destroyed much of the fabric of African society, thereby driving people into the migrant labour system. Bongli would have lost many uncles and cousins to wage labour in the mines and cities.
To his everlasting credit, Bongli did not hang around. Back then, there were few motor vehicles, and no public transport other than the post coach. A narrow gauge rail from Fort Beaufort to Seymour was built later, in 1926. Bongli’s options were to ride or walk. In a hurry, he chose to ride.
Since hearing his story many years ago, some questions arise: If things had not worked out, would Bongli have been reviled by his family and community for ignoring traditional medicine? Resorting to Western medicine as he did was surely not yet common. How did he come by the medicine? Bongli was a farm worker, and could not have paid for the consignment himself. The meds must have been handed out by the government, free of charge.
Lastly, Bongli’s mission tells us something about the nature of society at that time. If he had tried to do this in the apartheid era, it would probably not have succeeded. But in 1918, a doctor saw fit to give him a large consignment of medicine. Legislative apartheid was not yet a thing.
The women my mother and I spoke with on Amherst Farm were still dressed in the Victorian style — long dresses, elaborate headgear. Decades ago, I met a filmmaker who was about to make a film about Victorian blacks in South Africa. It centred on a black American who had bought and ran a hotel in the southern Natal town of Ixopo, some time around Union. What excited the film maker was the visual richness promised by this era: at that time, he found the best-dressed South Africans were black.
There was nothing to beat the Victorian finery worn by blacks, especially in the Eastern Cape. In today’s terms, that’s over-dressed, but tribal dress was already restricted to rural areas only. Streets in dorps like Alice and Peddie were commonly filled with finely attired blacks, riding in equally fine carriages. When kids scampered to the front gate to peer in wonder at a finely dressed passer-by, it was as likely a Matshikiza as a Mackenzie.
My mom thought that Lovedale was the class driver, if you like, of both dress and opinion style. Bongli’s style, though he might not have worn a topper like Enoch Sontonga, might have been middle-class sartorial.
The filmmaker’s researchers had found scores of photo albums kept by black families to prove it. I clearly remember his passion for revealing, in film, the travesty of the removal of the black middle classes and its subsequent whitewash. Forgive the pun. There was a film crew person in the Yeoville days who would know. She showed me some photos of the black American hotelier as well as the film’s target period in and around Ixopo, Kelso Junction and Port Shepstone. Truly amazing.
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About 20 years later, in the town of Alice, to the south of Kat River, an old farmer named Knott ecstatically met a childhood friend from school who was by then a professor. His friend was Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu, who later became famous for his knowledge of Xhosa clan lineages, and the father of Noni Jabavu, author of Drawn in Colour and Ochre People. When they looked around for a place to have tea, it dawned on them that – even a decade before the Nationalists rose to power — this was no longer possible. By contrast, Bongli’s was a more graceful and respectful time.
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I enjoy the memory of Bongli’s ride, because the plan was his alone: as far as we know, he was not sent by anyone else. My mother, who had turned four at the start of the pandemic, remembers first hearing Bongli’s story in isiXhosa. Like most farm children, by the time she went to school she was trilingual: ‘English at home, Afrikaans in town, Xhosa around the farm’, as she put it. She also heard Bongli’s story repeated in both English and Afrikaans before leaving the valley, and he was famous throughout the area by the time her father returned to the Karoo.
My maternal grandfather was born in Middelburg in the Cape Colony. (Fascinatingly, the Xhosa names of two current South African provinces still include the word ‘koloni’.) He found the misty Kat River Valley hard on his lungs. Longing for the dry Karoo, he returned, taking up another managerial job, this time on a Church of England property named Manifolds (later renamed Sterkstroom) in Hanover district.
Bongli’s ride from the Kat River Valley to Fort Beaufort was 15 kilometres each way. We can reasonably suppose that he started at dawn, because that’s how people do things on farms, and he would have walked his horse for more than two and a half hours. In town, he would have had to wait for some time before explaining his mission. Farm telephones were still rare at the time, so there was no phoning ahead. The Spanish Flu pandemic kept medical care staff frantically busy: the only busier people were undertakers. So he would have needed to wait some hours for a busy dispensary to prepare the medicines.
Apothecaries of the time did not deal in pre-packed medicines: almost everything was either a powder, tincture, ointment, suspension or mixture. We can reasonably assume that he started his return journey to Kat River Valley after lunch, arriving at the valley in mid- or late-afternoon. The treatments surely gave the recipient patients their first comfortable night’s rest in weeks.
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‘Amagama aphelile’ (renamed ‘Amaqawe’) is the title of a song composed by Ntemi Piliso. Google translates this as ‘the words are gone’, but Amagama can mean either names or words, and we will choose the former. When the African Jazz Pioneers recorded this number, Ntemi explained that it paid homage to past heroes, so many of them that we had run out of names. He stressed his homage was not only to people lost in the anti-apartheid struggle, but all those who had died while striving for freedom during our colonial history. It’s in that same spirit, also inspired by Chats Devroop’s Unsung, that I honour and remember Bongli.
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World War One memorials are often headlined with ‘Lest we forget’. I hope Bongli’s story is still kept alive by people in Kat River Valley. My grandfather was a voorman, managing two farms for one George White in the valley. The main farm was Lorraine, and the lesser farm was Amherst, the latter becoming the name of the nearby rail siding when rail arrived. When the Ciskei homeland took over the area, its Chief Minister grabbed Lorraine, the farm widely regarded as the jewel of the valley, for himself. I take that as a compliment to the farming acumen of Mr White and his voorman. Other than that, it serves to remind that not everyone in Kat River Valley was a hero. As David Marais once captioned a political cartoon, published on the fifth of November, caricaturing Hendrik Verwoerd: ‘Forget Guy Fawkes: honour our own political hooligans!’
Bongli, as we all do, aged and fell into obscurity, but how many people can claim to have saved a life, let alone many lives? Ndiyamhlonipha, uBongli. Respect, Bongli. I wish I had known about you in time to bid you Hamba Kahle when your time came. RIP.
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FEATURED IMAGE: The historic Victoria Bridge over the Kat River, Fort Beaufort. Picture: Wikipedia