From the Editor

I have just returned from a battlefield tour – the second of our Life & Style weekend adventures – and I come away from the experience with mixed emotions.

I met some wonderful people on this trip and everyone really seemed to have enjoyed the weekend in the hills, but there was some sadness in my return to these places.

As a schoolboy one of my best friends was a little fellow who collected snakes and scorpions and told wild tales about the Zulu War, a passion that he had inherited from his father. This was David Rattray, who would ultimately become one of the foremost authorities on that epoch. We remained close through the wonder years but then duty called and in 1976 our lives changed forever. National service in the South African Defence Force affected everyone in some way.

When I left the army, I wanted to change the world so I enrolled at Wits to study Politics, History and Zulu with a course in Biblical Studies thrown in for good measure. It didn’t take much to make me realise that this was a combination of subjects that was taking me nowhere fast in those days of fear and suspicion.

Television was in its infancy in South Africa and so I modified my plans and changed direction, eventually graduating with an honours degree in Dramatic Art majoring in Film and Television production. And so, I became a media professional.

My friend, David had continued to study creepy crawlies, graduating with a degree in entomology and he went back into the bush to become a game ranger.

We kept in touch and remained close as the years passed.

Eventually, through strange sets of circumstance, we both ended up telling stories to people from all over the world on these evocative battlefields in Natal. 

Those were happy times, mostly, and as our little boys grew up together in the paradise that was the Fugitives’ Drift Game Reserve, we could never have known what fate had in store for us. Our sons are now all fine young men and I am proud of what they have achieved, yet I miss those little souls with their bare feet and tousled hair when I remember fishing trips down to the Buffalo River and the laughter and joy of those carefree days.

But everything changes.

David was murdered in his home at the Fugitives’ Drift on January 26, 2007 in what I believe was a politically motivated attack based on land claims in the area. But this is speculation on my part and we may never know what truly motivated the tragedy.

I hadn’t been back to the battlefields since we left the Fugitive’s Drift nearly ten years ago, until I was persuaded to take the first group of our readers out to these places earlier this year. I was back at Rorke’s Drift again last weekend with our second tour and the memories came flooding back. They were all still there in the shadows…Privates Robert Jones and William Jones, John Williams and Joseph Williams, Thomas Cole and Alfred Henry Hook…those long-gone heroes of the battle that took place there over a hundred and thirty years ago, those who, as the poet said, shall grow not old as we that are left grow old…and now David is with them.

It’s an evocative place to contemplate the future of our beloved country.

We had a wonderful weekend in the hills of Zululand, made even more special by the enthusiasm of everyone in our group. Despite some inclement weather, we managed to explore these places and return, hopefully enriched by the experience.  We are planning another tour to the battlefields early next year and I hope that you will consider joining us. We’ll keep you posted.

Welcome to another edition of Life & Style coming to you hot off the press from our nuclear cottage in Ballito.