The Siege of Mafeking
“A game of bluff from start to finish,” said Robert Baden-Powell, British commander during the Second Boer War. Nicholas King describes the seven-months’ siege, that took place in present day South Africa.
At the end of the nineteenth century Mafeking had little to distinguish it from any other trading settlement and village in South Africa. Situated on the railway line from Bulawayo to the Cape, and almost on the Transvaal border, it consisted of a station and the usual straggling collection of low mud-built houses and stores, roofed over with corrugated iron.
Half a mile to the southwest, on either bank of the Molopo River, lay the round huts of the Kaffir stad. The veld is almost unbroken here, save for the deep channel of the river and some slight undulations. The name “Mafeking,” meaning in the language of the natives “Place of Stones,” gives an indication of the hard rocky surface of the ground, that yielded nothing but thin grass and stunted shrubs.
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