History of South Africa podcast

By: Desmond Latham
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  • Summary

  • A series that seeks to tell the story of the South Africa in some depth. Presented by experienced broadcaster/podcaster Des Latham and updated weekly, the episodes will take a listener through the various epochs that have made up the story of South Africa.
    Desmond Latham
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Social Sciences Travel Writing & Commentary World
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Episodes
  • Episode 221 - Free State Judges, the Transvaal Civil War and the Architecture of Deliberation

    Episode 221 - Free State Judges, the Transvaal Civil War and the Architecture of Deliberation
    May 4 2025
    This is episode 221, 1863, the midst of the Transvaal Civil War.

    As you heard in episode 220, this was the making of a new president and one who’d take the Trekker Republics into the 20th Century, albeit in the midst of the Anglo-Boer War.

    There had been a rapid and real effect — as the farmers took up arms against each other, the Transvaal’s economy collapsed. This weakened the government’s ability to back up its stated authority.

    By now the tiny independent States of Lydenburg and Utrecht had joined the Transvaal accepting the authority of the Transvaal. They had been outliers since the trekkers first arrived in those regions, fifteen years earlier.

    To recap - In 1859, Transvaal President, Marthinus Wessel Pretorius, was invited to stand for President in the Orange Free State, many burghers there now wanted to unify with the Transvaal. They were mainly worried about how to deal with King Moshoeshoe of the Basotho.

    The Transvaal constitution that he had just enacted made it illegal to hold office abroad, still Pretorius won the Transvaal election, then Volksraad attempted to side-step the constitutional problems by granting Pretorius half-a-year of leave. They hoped some kind of solution would be found — Pretorius left for Bloemfontein and appointed Johannes Hermanus Grobler to be acting president in his absence.
    Up stepped Stephanus Schoeman from the Marico region who unsuccessfully attempted to use force to supplant Johannes Grobler as acting president. Schoeman believed that the presidency should have been granted to him as the new Transvaal constitution stipulated that in the case of the president's dismissal or death, the presidency should be granted to the oldest member of the Executive Council. Schoeman was three years older than Grobler.
    Forward fast to 1863, Kruger had defeated Schoeman at a skirmish outside Potchefstroom. He had also managed to convince some of the supporters of rebel in the Heidelberg district to switch sides, and had ridden back to Pretoria with a local farmer of high standing, Jan Marais.

    There a council of war determined that rebels like Schoeman were taking advantage of a disagreement between the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The two fledgling Boer Republics could not agree on where the boundary lay between them.

    Transvaal President Van Rensburg duly assigned Kruger the duty of riding to the Free State to settle the question of the border - and he left almost immediately, taking a group of burghers with him as security. Further West, the Marico district was a hotbed of rebel activity and the commandant there, Jan Viljoen, heard about Kruger’s mission and organised a commando.
    On the way to Potch, a spy warned Kruger about what awaited. He changed course, and set off with a small detachment to confront Viljoen while Kruger’s 2 IC, Veld kornet Sarel Eloff dashed forward to seize a nearby kopje - the all important high ground. Viljoen is so happened, was also on his way to the very same kopje.
    One of the aspects of this conflict which is interesting is how Kruger used his spies or messengers as he called them. They were feeding him information daily, information about what Schoeman and Viljoen were up to. The capacity to recon an enemy was one of the defining strengths of the Boer military system, and would be sharpened constantly over the coming century and a half.
    Folks, there are remarkable resonances in this apparently distant little civil war. When the Union of South Africa was achieved, Bloemfontein was nominated as the seat of the Supreme Court of the union. Cape Town and Pretoria shared power, parliament in Cape Town, Pretoria the seat of government. The Free State is slap bang in the middle — so they got the Supreme Court.
    These historical instances reflect a legal and political philosophy that, in the aftermath of internal conflict, prioritising national healing through amnesty can be more beneficial than widespread punitive actions.
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    17 mins
  • Episode 220 - The Transvaal Civil War of 1862-1864 and Paul Kruger’s Dopping Doppers

    Episode 220 - The Transvaal Civil War of 1862-1864 and Paul Kruger’s Dopping Doppers
    Apr 27 2025
    All manner of things are going on — thanks to those folks out there who’ve been sending me notes and support, much appreciated.

    Episode 220 deals with the start of the Transvaal Civil War, and quite a bit about Paul Kruger’s early life.

    The American civil war was raging in 1862, and there’s nothing like a war to trigger innovation — if you excuse the pun. Richard Jordan Gatling patented his terrifying Gatling gun featuring multiple rotating barrels driven by a hand crank, allowing operators to unleash a relentless hailstorm of bullets—up to several hundred rounds per minute.

    Its distinctive mechanical whirr echoed across battlefields, marking a chilling shift toward modern, industrialized warfare. While undoubtedly efficient, the Gatling gun also embodied a grim reality: the age when technology would reshape combat forever had arrived.

    Just in time to cause more chaos in the already bloody American Civil War.

    What is less known these days is that there was another Civil War involving descendants of Europeans, and this was going on in South Africa. The AmaZulu had just wrapped up their own recent Civil War as you’ve heard. All manner of brutal and uncivil conduct marked this period in South African history, as neighbour turned against neighbour and the bonds of society frayed.

    The Boer Republics had been riven by conflict since the days of the Voortrekkers, but in 1862 perhaps inspired in part by the American civil War, the Boer Republics went from squabbling to skirmishing. There’s no proof that the carnage of the United States directly influenced South Africa, but there is proof that the Boers knew about it.

    Later, during the apartheid period of National Party Rule, this Transvaal Civil War was deposited in historical file 13, almost expunged, because it contradicted the prevailing political ideology where it was all the whites against all the blacks. Anything that detracted from this nationalist agenda was taboo.

    The modern architects of African nationalism, too, often reshape the past to suit their narratives, discarding inconvenient histories into their own version of "file 13."Compared to the carnage in America, where an estimated 750 000 people died, the South African version was far less bloody. A few dozen dead and wounded. A handful of skirmishes was the real effect, which took place in what is now Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the North West Province - but at the same time as the American Civil War which ran from 1861 to 1865. The Transvaal Civil War started in 1862 and ended in 1864.
    While less gory, it was emblematic of the frontier streak embedded in the first generation descendants of the Voortrekkers.
    According to the constitution of the Republic, the Hervormde Church was the state church. Its members alone were entitled to exercise any influence in public affairs. Whoever was not a member of the Hervormde Church was not a fully-qualified burgher.

    Paul Kruger belonged to the Christelljk-Gereformeerde Kerk founded recently, in 1859, by Dr. Postma, at Rustenburg. This church became known in South Africa as the Dopper, or partly Canting Church. The derivation of the word Dopper is not completely clear, but it was believed to have come from the word dop, a damper or extinguisher for putting out
    Candles.
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    22 mins
  • Episode 219 - The Snarled Chronicle of John Orr, Wodehouse Blues and Mercantile Matters

    Episode 219 - The Snarled Chronicle of John Orr, Wodehouse Blues and Mercantile Matters
    Apr 20 2025
    This is episode 219 — a new Governor has sailed into Table Bay.

    Sir Philip Edmond Wodehouse, born in 1811, eldest child of Edmond Wodehouse who married his first cousin Lucy, daughter of Philip Wodehouse, uncle Philip to Sir Philip Edmond.

    How very Victorian. Queen Victoria herself, who married her first cousin Prince Albert—did allow and even encourage cousin marriage, particularly among royalty and the upper classes to consolidate power, property, and lineage.

    But it also increased the risk of birth defects by 2 percent, and if both parents carry a recessive gene mutation, their child has a 25 percent chance of expressing the disorder.

    Scientists have a well-worn phrase for this — its called inbreeding.

    Wodehouse junior entered the Ceylon Civil Service in 1828, and was installed as superintendent of British Honduras between 1851 to 1854. From there he sailed to British Guiana where he served as Governor between 1854 to 1861 — before heading to the Cape in 1862.

    It’s illuminating to touch on Sir Philip Wodehouse’s disastrous time in British Guiana. Two years after he took office in the South American country, the Angel Gabriel riots broke out.

    His implacable opponent was John Sayers Orr, whose nom de guerre was the Angel Gabriel, was half Scottish, half African. Edinburgh’s Caledonian Newspaper of the time reported that his mother Mary Ann Orr was a respectable coloured woman and married to a respectable Scot — John Orr senior.

    Young John Sayer Orr was rabidly anti-papal, hated the Pope and had an anti-Catholic obsession. He took to the Guianese streets with bullhorn in hand, whereupon the distant Glasgow Herald noted he spoke “rampant anti-papist froth and lies..”
    Between 1850 and 1851 he popped up in Boston, then New York, Bath in Maine, and Manchester in New Hampshire. In 1854 he was hustled off by police in Boston. Apart from the usual racial insults levelled at him, the Boston police report says he had more impudence than brains ..

    “…who with a three cornered hat and a cockade on his head, and old brass horn .. took advantage of the political excitement .. travelled around the city …tooting his horn … collecting crowds in the streets, delivering what he called his political lectures and passing around the hat for contributions…”

    Sounds like a modern political influencer, the bullhorn, the disinformation, the extreme rhetoric, not to mention his hat which is literally crowd sourcing.

    He was arrested at least 20 times for what was called his international harangues tour — where he’d shout confusing messages like

    “Scorn be those who rob us of our rights — purgatory for popery and the Pope — Freedom to man be he black or white — Rule Britannia…!!”
    Bizarrely, the resonances to today’s crazy politics continued, Orr was associated with the fantastically named Know Nothing Party in America. Wait to hear about this bunch, you’ll recognise bits of modern USA.

    Members of the movement were required to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about its specifics by outsiders, and that providing the group with its colloquial name.

    Before you wonder aloud what relevance all this has, let me quickly point out that the so-called Know Nothing Party had 43 representatives in Congress at the height of its power in the late 1850s.
    In 1855 this strange 19th Century character pitched up in British Guiana, and Sir Philip Wodehouse had his work cut out. Soon Orr was up to his old tricks, walking about with his bull horn, carrying a flag and a British imperial badge, followed by a group of …. Well .. followers. They were not repeating they Knew Nothing, but attacking the British establishment.
    We'll also hear about the Angel Gabriel riots. By 1862 Wodehouse who survived a public stoning in Guiana, had arrived in the Cape as Governor. Here he was to face the implacable enemies - the Westerners and the Easterners. Two parts of the Cape that did not get along.
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    19 mins

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Profile Image for Rosie J

Gripping History expertly narrated

Excellent history lesson from beginning to end, wry commentary on a subject that I as a Brit knew very little about. Its a really worthwhile listen, great stuff !

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