10/07/2026
We're proud to be the one who wrote that article on Wikipedia. 🇿🇦🙌🏼😇
KRAAIPAN, 12 OCTOBER 1899: THE FIRST SHOT — AND THE BATSWANA STORY BRITAIN NEVER PUT ON THE MONUMENT
At 22:45 on the night of 11 October 1899, Field-Cornet Coetzee fired the first shot of the Second Anglo-Boer War into the darkness at a railway siding called Kraaipan, roughly 60 kilometres southwest of Mafeking. What followed set in motion 217 days that would put Batswana people directly in the path of a war they were told, twice, was "not their fight."
WHAT HAPPENED AT KRAAIPAN
President Paul Kruger of the South African Republic, allied with the Orange Free State, had declared war on Britain the previous day. That night, roughly 800 men of the Potchefstroom and Lichtenburg commandos, under General Koos de la Rey — one of General Piet Cronjé's field commanders — moved to cut the rail and telegraph line running between Vryburg and Mafeking.
Their target found them first, unluckily: the British armoured train "Mosquito," a mobile fort of an engine and two armoured trucks carrying Captain R.H. Nesbitt, roughly twenty men, two 7-pounder cannons, and a Maxim gun, ran straight into a gap the Boers had torn out of the track and derailed. For five hours through the night, the stranded train's crew fired back with cannon and Maxim gun into the darkness, achieving almost nothing, according to eyewitness accounts recorded in Johannes Meintjies's biography of de la Rey. At first light, Boer artillery under Captain van der Merwe arrived and began shelling the wrecked train directly. Nesbitt, wounded, surrendered with his roughly twenty surviving men by morning. Nine British soldiers were wounded; the Boers suffered no casualties. Among the captured supplies, the Boers found British Mark IV "dumdum" ammunition on board.
The skirmish made de la Rey's reputation and cost Britain the very artillery and supplies that had been racing toward Mafeking — a shortfall the besieged town would feel for the next seven months.
WHY KRAAIPAN WASN'T THE END OF THE STORY — IT WAS THE OPENING LINE
Cutting the line at Kraaipan on 12 October triggered the Siege of Mafeking the very next day, 13 October 1899 — 217 days that would become one of the most mythologised episodes of the entire war in Britain, credited with turning Colonel Robert Baden-Powell into a national hero and giving the English language the word "maffick," meaning to celebrate uncontrollably.
What British popular memory has consistently left out of that story is who actually made up the bulk of the town's defence and its casualties — and it is a documented, uncomfortable, and genuinely remarkable Batswana story.
THE BAROLONG WERE TOLD THIS WASN'T THEIR WAR. THEY REFUSED TO ACCEPT THAT.
Mafeking sat inside Barolong territory, ruled by the Barolong boo Ratshidi under Chief Wessels Montshiwa, who had succeeded his father in 1896. Both the British and the Boers publicly agreed this would be strictly a "white man's war." Sol Plaatje — then a 23-year-old Tswana court interpreter in Mafeking, later a founding figure of the ANC and translator of Shakespeare into Setswana — recorded in his now-famous Mafeking diary how Chief Montshiwa and his councillor Joshua Molema rejected that framing outright before the siege even began, arguing directly to colonial officials that if war came and the Barolong were expected to simply hide while white men fought and died on their land, that arrangement made no sense at all.
They were right to distrust the promise. Once the siege tightened and Baden-Powell's British garrison ran short of manpower, he armed roughly 300 Africans — nicknamed the "Black Watch" — to help hold the six-mile defensive perimeter, alongside a further force of about 500 armed Barolong and Bakgatla who fought throughout the siege, conducted cattle raids behind Boer lines, ran messages through gaps in the Boer encirclement, and helped repel a major Boer assault led by Sarel Eloff in May 1900 — cutting off his escape route after his raiding party stormed into the Barolong stadt.
General Piet Cronjé was furious when he learned of it, writing to Baden-Powell in protest: "It is understood that you have armed Bastards, Fingoes and Barolong against us... reconsider the matter, even if it costs you the loss of Mafeking... disarm your blacks and thereby act the part of a white man in a white man's war." Some senior Boer officers, including Jan Smuts, later publicly denied this had ever happened. Historians who have gone back through the archival record — including Bill Nasson — have found the evidence points firmly the other way.
THE NUMBER THAT NEVER MADE IT ONTO THE OBELISK
When Lord Roberts unveiled the Mafeking memorial obelisk in 1904, it listed the British names of those who died defending the town. According to the Mahikeng municipality's own published local history, an estimated 400 Barolong were killed in action during the siege — more than double the fewer than 200 British soldiers and town guard members who died. That figure has never carried anywhere near the same historical weight in how this siege gets remembered internationally, despite representing the majority of the dead.
Local history record puts it plainly: efforts to correct this historical anomaly and properly credit the contribution of the town's Black defenders have only gained real traction in recent decades — including at the Barolong boo Ratshidi kgotla itself, which today holds its own monuments to the Barolong who died in action and to the chief who led them through it.
THE THROUGH-LINE
Kraaipan cut the line. Mafeking absorbed the siege that followed. And the defence of that town — despite being framed from the outset as something Barolong people were meant to sit out — was, by the numbers, disproportionately carried and paid for by the very Tswana community the war was never supposed to concern.
📚 Sources: Wikipedia — Battle of Kraaipan, Siege of Mafeking, Mafikeng; Johannes Meintjies, De la Rey: Lion of the West; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Great Boer War; Nongqai Blog (Hennie Heymans) — "Kraaipan"; Battle Tours ZA — Kraaipan; Mahikeng Local Municipality official history page; South African Heritage Publishers — "Siege of Mafeking"; Martin Plaut — "African troops in the Boer War: the forgotten story" and "Rare photographs of Black troops in the Anglo-Boer War"; Sol T. Plaatje, The Boer War Diary of Sol T. Plaatje; Encyclopaedia Africana — "Montshiwa"; Grokipedia — "Mafikeng"; World History Encyclopedia — "Siege of Mafeking"; Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand — Molema and Plaatje Family Papers, Barolong Tribe photograph series
— History Nine hundred kilometres of railway line changed hands in this war. Four hundred Barolong names never made it onto the monument that came out of it.
