Voortrekkers en nuwelinge

Last weekend after staggering back from my regular trip to Abuja via Lagos I thought I'd take the family to see the Voortrekker Monument (also known as the Pop-up Toaster) which is around ten miles north of us here.

Dad doing local culture immersion training with Lily and Henry

A surprisingly large block of granite, on the top of a hill and surrounded by gardens, the Monument was built way back in the Thirties to celebrate the Great Trek of Dutch folk a century before. The "Trekkers" left the Cape Colony to avoid British domination, and headed North. Some, including ancestors of ours, kept on heading north at the slightest hint of domination, interference or even the odd dirty look - an irascibility and antisocialness that had them settling remote and uninhabited parts of Rhodesia. Some of these proto-Hodgsons apparently pre-dated the explorations of Selous and Livingstone - the discovery of Victoria Falls by the latter was quite some years after one of the Swart or Erasmus family arrived there in transit.

Henry and I found a seat next to some garlic plants and relaxed in the winter sunshine. A little way down the hill the sound of The Last Post wafted into the air - the annual South African Defence Force remembrance day service was taking place at the Wall of Remembrance which, like the US one in Washington, lists the names of the fallen. My war dead are mostly in Rhodesia I guess, and anyway I hate memorial services and funerals so we stayed up the hill, avoided all the old folk wearing black blazers and medals and contented ourselves with watching the parade of bearded Afrikaners, camera-toting tourists and the odd local low-budget families like ourselves who couldn't find anything else kid-friendly to do on a Sunday in Gauteng.

Lily inside the 64-wagon laager

Mindful of the fact that I was heading for Istanbul on Tuesday, I resolved to make the most of our Sunday outing and allowed my pale European kids to get more sun than they were accustomed to in Newbury. Lily explored the flower gardens inside the ring of concrete ox-wagon bas-reliefs symbolic of the laager that defended the Volk from Zulu attacks at Blood River and Marcela ascended to the parapets, no doubt thinking how her ancestors would have found such a structure useful in repelling the marauding Turks that threatened Bessarabia regularly.