One Man in South Africa

Day 5 – on the trail of the Boer War. Some twenty years after the end of the Zulu war we were fighting the Boer along roughly the same battle lines. After my trip to Rorke's Drift I had planned to drive down to Ladysmith to have a look in the siege museum and emplacements there. As I mentioned in my previous post a chance view of a pamphlet at my hotel in Glencoe made me backtrack to Dundee. I had driven past the Talana Museum site, noticable from the road because of the steam train, but was not aware that this was also the site of the battle of Talana hill significant as the first battle of the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902. What better place to start!

Day 4 and I awoke early which was just as well as this was to be the start of another great adventure. Looking at a map whilst planning options for the trip to Durban I noticed that Zululand was the next province up. This put me in mind of the famous battle at Rorke's Drift popularised by “Not a lot of people know that” Michael Cain and I wondered how true to life the film was. The whole area on the map bordering Natal and Zululand is designated 'Battlefield Sites' and I realized how much fighting had gone on in the area against the Zulu and then the Boer shortly after. Much is mentioned of the First and Second World Wars but we in Britain have ancestors in many a forgotten field throughout the world.