Capture of Christiaan de Wet

On 1 December 1914 at Waterbury farm, near Vryburg in the northern Cape Province, government troops of the Union of South Africa surrounded a small band of rebels. Its leader, General Christiaan de Wet, surrendered without a fight together with about fifty companions. Some sources give the date as 30 November, and one even as 2 December. The date most commonly accepted is 1 December.

A legend of the Boer War

The sixty-year-old De Wet was one of the most famous Boers. During the Second Boer War, as commander of the forces of the Orange Free State, he had eluded British columns for years and become a master of guerrilla warfare. In 1914 he opposed going to war against Germany on Britain’s side. After the resignation of General Beyers and the death of General De la Rey he spoke at protest meetings, and at the end of October he placed himself at the head of an armed rising in the former Orange Free State. He gathered several thousand men.

The rebellion soon brought him personal tragedy. At the beginning of November his son Danie was killed in a skirmish with government troops. On 12 November the Prime Minister, Louis Botha, who was personally directing the operation, routed De Wet’s main forces at Mushroom Valley, south-east of Winburg. The rebels scattered, and the general escaped from the battlefield.

Flight to the west

A few days later De Wet had to admit that the rising in the Orange Free State had failed. With a handful of loyal men he set off westwards. He wanted to cross the Kalahari into German South West Africa and join Manie Maritz, who had gone over to the Germans as early as October. The fugitives crossed the Vaal river and rode through the sparsely populated borderland of former British Bechuanaland.

This time the old tactics failed. The government troops pursued him not only on horseback but also in motor cars. Colonel Coen Brits’s column used vehicles that carried the soldiers much faster than the rebels’ tired horses could go. According to accounts, an informer told Commandant Jorrie Jordaan where the exhausted fugitives were hiding. Jordaan surrounded Waterbury farm, about 20 kilometres from Morokweng, and De Wet surrendered.

“It was the motor cars that beat me”

Jordaan was an Afrikaner, like De Wet himself and most of the soldiers pursuing him. The general is said to have remarked with relief that, thank God, he had not been captured by an Englishman. He is also credited with saying that it was the motor cars that had beaten him. His pursuit is regarded as one of the first operations in which motorised units chased an enemy on horseback.

De Wet was taken to prison in Johannesburg. In 1915 a court found him guilty of high treason and sentenced him to six years in prison and a fine of £2,000. The fine was paid by his supporters from collections, and the general himself was released after about a year, when he undertook not to engage in politics. He died in 1922 on his farm. His capture was a heavy blow to the rebellion, although it did not mean its end. Beyers was still at large, and Jan Kemp and Maritz fought on along the border of the German colony.