were kept and some rough crops raised. On such a farm every member of a large household had to take his share in looking after the cattle and sheep, breaking in the horses, shooting game for the family pot, and supervising the Kaffirs. Here Louis Botha learned to understand and sympathize with the Kaffirs of South Africa and to speak familiarly the two chief native languages, Sesuto and Zulu. Here he acquired that unerring eye for country which served him in such good stead in later years; and here was developed his deep and affectionate appreciation of his own people in the rough and tumble of a large family ruled patriarchally by a notable father and mother who were leaders in their own neighbourhood.
Botha was eighteen years old when he started on his first independent adventure. With a bundle of food and clothes put up by his mother to strap on to his horse, he set forth at the beginning of winter in charge of the family’s sheep and cattle to find better pasture in the warm low-lying lands on the borders of Zululand. It was a long month’s trek across the Drakensberg, a trek not without its perils, and he undertook it every winter for four years. Zululand in those days, owing to the exile of the paramount chief, Cetywayo, and to Sir Garnet Wolseley’s division of the country among several petty chieftains, was in a state of unrest and turmoil, and on one occasion at least all Botha’s presence of mind was needed to avert a serious peril. One of these chieftains, hot from the murder of a missionary, suddenly appeared in Botha’s camp with his impi and truculently demanded some of his flock. Young Botha, who had only one cartridge left, quietly lighted his pipe and then, after reproving them for their unceremonious approach, offered them one sheep on condition that they cleared off at once, which they did in a much chastened mood. During these sojourns on the Zululand border he made the acquaintance of Lukas Meyer, then landrost of Utrecht, and in 1884 was one of the first to respond to Meyer’s call for volunteers to restore Cetywayo’s son, Dinizulu, to his father’s possessions, on promise of a large tract of land in Zululand as a reward for the volunteers. After a short campaign conducted by Meyer with 800 Boers and some 16,000 of Dinizulu’s Zulu adherents, Dinizulu’s chief adversary, Usibepu, was routed and Dinizulu restored to his father’s position. In accordance with the agreement, a large and rich tract of Zululand on the borders of Natal and the Transvaal was assigned to the volunteers, who formed the ‘New Republic’ with Meyer as president. Botha, who had already acquired the confidence of his companions by his presence of mind and resourcefulness, was chosen as one of the commissioners to delimit the farms. He himself obtained Waterval, a farm in the neighbourhood of the new capital, Vryheid, and thither in 1886 he brought his bride, Annie Emmet, eldest daughter of John Cheere Emmet, a descendant of the Irish patriot, Robert Emmet; she was a sister of one of his comrades in the Zulu expedition. Three sons and two daughters were born of the marriage. Botha’s father died in 1885 and his mother in 1887, and he never afterwards lived in the Free State, but settled down to a very happy married life at Waterval, busying himself with his own farm-work and with local affairs. He was made field-cornet of his district and also kept the local post-office in his house. But the New Republic was short-lived. It had difficulties with both its neighbours, the Transvaal and Natal; had been cut off by the British from an approach to the sea at St. Lucia Bay, where Botha had originally laid out the township; and finally in 1888 cast in its lot with the Transvaal.
P. J. Joubert, the commandant-general, came down to Vryheid to take over the new province, and made Botha’s acquaintance. Five years later, during the great contest for the presidency, Botha and his friend Meyer enthusiastically supported Joubert against Kruger. Otherwise the even tenor of Botha’s happy farm life was undisturbed till in 1895, when the government of Swaziland had been handed over to the Transvaal, he was appointed a native commissioner. Here he distinguished himself by his energetic fight against the scandalous liquor traffic with the natives; but he resigned the appointment after six months and returned to his more congenial duties as field-cornet and native commissioner at Vryheid. At the end of that year, when (Sir) Leander Starr Jameson [q.v.] invaded the Transvaal, he was called upon to mobilize the burgher force of his frontier district; and, though strongly opposed to Kruger’s illiberal Uitlander policy, the main cause of the projected rising in Johannesburg, he is stated to have strongly urged the shooting of Jameson; it is also on record that in later years, when this advice was reported to him, Jameson remarked, ‘Yes, Botha was always right’.
In 1897 Botha entered political life as member for his district in the first volksraad, appearing at the head of the poll
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