A Single Swallow Read Online Free PDF

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    In the east, in Natal, the voortrekkers fought battles against the Zulus, but victory brought only British annexation of the Natal region. The British in turn fought the Zulus, and began to import labour from India. Squeezed between native populations and the British, many Boers continued to press north. Eventually two Boer republics were formed: the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
    After the great trek this same route, which the train followed, became the road between the Cape and the diamond mines at Kimberley. Everything you thought you might need to make your fortune had to be lugged this way, and perhaps this was the way youwalked back, after Cecil Rhodes had bought up your claim and defeat had emptied your pockets. Diamonds were discovered in 1869; Britain swiftly annexed the territory. In 1877 it also took over the Transvaal: a rebellion there led to the first Anglo-Boer War, which began in 1880 and ended swiftly with a Boer victory. The Transvaal became the South African Republic, or ZAR, led by President Paul Kruger. Six years later, gold was discovered in the Witwatersrand, a region of the ZAR. Now it flooded with prospectors and workers, black and white, and the population rocketed. In 1899 the British demanded that 60,000 non-Boer whites on the Witwatersrand be given voting rights. Kruger refused, countering that the British should withdraw their troops from his borders. The second Boer War began.
    It was hot. The main street of Matjiesfontein is still wide enough for an ox cart with sixteen beasts in pairs to do a U-turn, Dad had informed me. I peered at it, dutifully. There were small, fast-flying hirundines near the station but I could not be sure of their species. The wind sighed gratefully in tall poplar trees. We wound up through passes and tunnels, along high, dry river beds, the train picking its way through the Drakenstein Mountains. Every now and then we passed massive stone blockhouses beside the track, built by the British during the second Boer War
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Pretoria, the last Boer-controlled town, fell in 1900, but the Boers continued to fight for two more years. The blockhouses are enormous, with peculiar out-thrusts on the top corners, throwbacks to medieval castles, permitting defenders to fire down at attackers hard up against the foot of the walls. You would not fancy it. The Boers were notoriously good shots.
    The British countered guerrilla warfare with a scorched-earth policy. To deny the Boers ‘on Kommando’ any support or provisions, their families, women and children were assembled in concentration camps. Disease, particularly cholera and tuberculosis, killed tens of thousands – estimates run to as many as 30,000. As I would find out, in many quarters this is neither forgotten nor forgiven.
    The only other whites on our tourist-class Shosholoza Meyl train were thin, sun-bitten husbands and wider wives. They looked at an over-friendly tourist the way Londoners sometimes look at theirvisitors: with a blankness kneaded out of vague familiarity and vaguer irritation.
    I slept in the long afternoon and woke towards evening, aware that we had been working our way up through tunnels. The pitch of the wheels had changed, there was a longer, running rhythm from the tracks. It was chilly, suddenly. I jumped up and gasped. I had read about it and seen pictures of it: the Great Karoo. The blue-pink colour of dusk, with red and blonde sand-streaks breaking it like waves, the Karoo was an undulation of short hard vegetation; under a bare sky its rolling contours looked as vast and cold as the sea. We had topped the escarpment and now ran freely on.
    A flight of swallows mocked the speed of the train. Where would they sleep? Telephone wires? Surely they would not go down into the scrub, among the snakes. Were they on their way too? The sun purpled the Karoo and darkened its sandbanks; now the sea became a heather moor. A road appeared, made visible by the lights of a vehicle. For