STEENKAMP GUN STORIES
by Willem Steenkamp

One of the longest love-affairs in recorded South African history has been between my branch of the family and its firearms. Since we also tend to talk a lot and forget very little, quite a few family legends and stories - some of them nearly 200 years old and others of comparatively recent vintage - seem to revolve around guns of one kind or another.

Some feature guns that are still in the family possession. Others are about guns that have vanished somewhere along the way. Between one and the other they are peopled by a large cast of major and minor characters - ranging from buffalo, trek-oxen, horses and lions to cattle-thieves, drunkards, soldiers of various nationalities and (in one case) a fighter aircraft.

With one exception, not one of these stories has ever been told outside the immediate circle of family and friends. So a few years ago I thought I would try putting them together and see if other people would enjoy them as much as we have. I wrote a series of articles for a local outdoors magazine, but for one reason and another it was never published, and so here they are, seeing the light of day for the first time.

1. JAN SLAAI AND THE CATTLE-RUSTLERS

Several of the best gun stories in my family involve weapons are about guns that, alas, are no longer known to exist (I say "known to exist" because hope springeth eternal, no matter how long deferred).

The most intriguing gun story features my great-great-great-grand-uncle, Jan Harmse Steenkamp (1761-1841), who was universally known as "Jan Slaai" for reasons now obscured by the mists of time. It is at once so dramatic, horrible, comic and bizarre that one would hesitate to use it as a plot for a work of fiction, and it has a varied cast of characters that include Jan Slaai himself; a band of Bushman stock-thieves; a wily field-cornet; Lord Charles Somerset; and Jan Slaai's favourite trek-ox, Biesterveld. Not to mention, of course, Jan Slaai's vanished "sanna".

At the time (around 1810, as near as I can calculate) Jan Slaai was living in the Koue Bokkeveld at the time. For those who do not know it, the Koue Bokkeveld lies along the outer north-western corner of the Great Karoo before it drops down to the dusty plains of Kneg-se-Vlakte which guard the southern marches of Namaqualand proper. It is a land of great plains and long, mysterious mountains with strange overhanging crests called "hangneste", and around the beginning of the 19th Century it was real frontier country.

It may hurt Transvaalers to hear this, but in the North-West Cape the Great Trekkers are regarded as little more than johnny-come-latelies; by the time the first of them set out, the North-West Cape and its surrounding areas had already been thoroughly explored by generations of protean white and coloured pioneers, whose descendants mostly live there to this day.

It was a hard and often perilous way of life in the old days. The Koue Bokkevelders hunted, raised cattle and horses, battled lions and other predators (and sometimes got eaten), clashed - not always successfully - with roving bands of Bushmen, and for the rest minded their own business and buried their own dead.

But the Koue Bokkevelders were content with the hardships and dangers of frontier life because they were a long, long way away from any interference by the bureaucrats at Cape Town - first those belonging to the Dutch East India Company and later their British successors who settled in for good at the Cape in 1806 after their successful dress rehearsal of 1795-1802.

No portrait survives of Jan Slaai (1761-1841), but as a youth in the 1890s my Grandfather Steenkamp had detailed conversations with people who had actually known him, and has left behind a good pen-portrait.

According to my grandfather, Jan Slaai and his immediate descendants were "honest, upright, simple people, determined, truth-loving and fearless. If they had a wrong opinion you would not be able to talk them out of it, and when they were right the same thing applied. But you could always depend on them."

In any case, times were hard in the Bokkeveld around 1810. Although the British had come to stay this time, their grip on the outer frontiers of the Cape was still feeble; a more immediate problem was that the local livestock owners – white, coloured and Khoi - were locked in a sporadic but merciless little war with the Bushmen.

The basis of the struggle seems to have been what today would be called a cultural clash. The concept of land and livestock ownership was foreign to the Bushmen; the idea that someone would actually claim to own certain types of game (namely cattle and sheep) just did not make any sense to them.

Needless to say, the livestock-owners of all races did not share this view, and since the Bushmen were inclined to fend off attempts at repossession with a few poisoned arrows, the result was an intermittent but frequently deadly little chain of clashes that went on for many years: The Bushmen raided the farmers as they pleased, and in return the farmers and their coloured and Khoi allies hunted them down whenever they could, secure in the knowledge that the nearest court of justice was at Cape Town, 450 kilometres and a month's travel by ox-wagon away.

By modern standards the whole business was totally reprehensible, of course, but that was how it was in those days; frontiersmen, regardless of race or creed, played for keeps. At the same time it should be added that it was not a state of total war, and in fact Bushmen saved the lives of at least three members of my family during the 19th Century.

In any case, Jan Slaai suffered more than his fair share of Bushman raids because he lived at Soutpan, one of the remotest of the Koue Bokkeveld farms. He bore his losses reasonably philosophically, though, till the day a band of marauders carried off a large flock of his sheep and several of his cattle, among them his beloved Biesterveld, a handsome red beast with swept-back horns. According to their usual practice they hamstrung the cattle to keep them docile while they slaughtered and ate the sheep. This done, they killed and ate the cattle as well.

Jan Slaai was deeply angry about this latest loss, but being a law-abiding citizen, his first reaction was to lay a complaint. This involved riding a full day to visit the nearest thing to a government official in the Koue Bokkeveld; to wit, his cousin Daniel Louw, the local field-cornet.

Daniel Louw, who was known by the nickname "Daail", was no trained lawman, simply a farmer who had been deputised by the government to uphold the majesty of the law, such as it was, in the Koue Bokkeveld. This lack of formal learning did not mean that he did not know how to keep his wits about him, however, as subsequent events were to prove.

The story goes that after the usual greetings, followed by coffee and rusks, Jan Slaai poured out his heart to Daail Louw. When he had finished, he asked: "Neef Daail, what must I do now?"

Daail Louw's reply was forthright, if not quite sound in law: "Well, shoot the creatures, otherwise they'll shoot you, too!"

That was good enough for Jan Slaai. He saddled up and rode back to Soutpan to wait for the next visitation. It was not long in coming, and when the news reached Jan Slaai he loaded his sanna with "lopers" (this was a murderously efficient close-in load, consisting of a number of balls sewed up in a leather cylinder, which had the general effect of grape-shot) and rode off into the veld after the rustlers.

It was a courageous thing to do, given the fact that Jan Slaai was in his late 40s at the time and on his own, and the Bushmen were masters of fieldcraft; but he was a brave man and no slouch at fieldcraft himself, and he was filled with the implacable fury that any farmer feels towards a stock-thief.

Jan Slaai soon picked up the Bushmen's spoor. Hour after hour he followed it, a grim if slightly corpulent Nemesis, his sanna balanced on his saddle-bow. Eventually the day began to fade into dusk. Jan Slaai kept tracking for as long as there was light, keeping a sharp eye open for the sight of the Bushmen's camp-fire, because he knew that they would not trek through the hours of darkness.

Sure enough, night had scarcely fallen when he saw the first twinkle of fire ahead of him. Jan Slaai tethered his horse and went forward on foot, his sanna with its load of lopers as light as a feather in his practised hand. He did not stop till he was so close that he could smell the meat - his meat! - roasting on the coals.

Jan Slaai did not act precipitately. Bushmen were not people to be trifled with, and he did not know how many there were, or even precisely where they were. So he crept as close to the fire as was reasonably safe, made himself more or less comfortable and settled down to wait for dawn.

The night-hours passed slowly, as they do for a man who is lying hungry and cold and rather frightened in the veld. But eventually the sky lightened to the point where he could see some of the Bushmen moving in the vicinity of the fire. Carefully he crept even closer and settled down to wait some more. Time passed, and eventually a substantial group was clustered around the fire's welcome warmth.

This was the moment Jan Slaai had been waiting for: Silently he thumbed back the sanna's hammer, checked his flint and pan, aimed at the dead centre of the little circle of heads and squeezed the trigger. The sanna boomed; when the smoke cleared, seven Bushmen lay dead and the others had vanished, no doubt believing that they were being attacked by a whole commando.

Jan Slaai did not chase after the survivors; that was a very dangerous game, and in any case he had succeeded in doing what he had intended to do, which was to recover his remaining livestock. So he loaded another bag of lopers into his sanna, cut one ear from each corpse to show to Daail Louw, and then headed back to Soutpan.

And that was that ... for some considerable time, anyway. But by some evil mischance (at least from Jan Slaai's point of view) news of his deed eventually found its way to Cape Town. To his dismay he was arrested - presumably by his quondam adviser Daail Louw - and taken to Cape Town by ox-wagon to be tried for murder.

From my grandfather's telling of the trial, it appears that at first Jan Slaai was not particularly worried about the outcome as he stood in the dock, a sturdy figure in his leather breeches and short jacket, his sheathed Herrnhutter knife still hanging from his belt.

After all, he probably reflected, he had done what anyone else would have done in the circumstances, and in any case he had merely followed the advice of Daail Louw, who was not only his own cousin but the field-cornet as well.

Then, with dawning horror and rage, he realised that one Crown witness after another was testifying against him, prominent among them being none other than Daail Louw, who calmly denied that he had ever encouraged Jan Slaai to kill any Bushmen.

At length Jan Slaai's temper erupted. "Mijnheer," he shouted at the judge, "why are you calling all these people as witnesses? I shot the Bushmen, the field-cornet is lying like hell, and if you don't believe me - here are their ears!" And he reached into his pocket and flourished the seven dried Bushman ears at the judge.

Needless to say, the defence case immediately sank without trace. Jan Slaai was sentenced to four years, loaded on to a ferry-boat and shipped out to the penal settlement on Robben Island in Table Bay.

Jan Slaai spent many long, sad months on Robben Island. The conditions of his imprisonment do not seem to have been very onerous; he certainly had enough time to spend hours watching the seagulls, his untutored but observant hunter’s eye carefully noting how they flew and used their tails for balancing and steering.

But this was a mere diversion. His bushvelder's heart yearned for the open spaces of the Koue Bokkeveld. Legend has it that in the afternoons he would sit staring out over the choppy water separating him from the mainland, eating his heart out for his home-veld and Soutpan; he would see thunder flashing in the north-west and know that soon thousands of springbok would be trekking in from the Karoo to lamb in the new green grass, and he would reach for the powder-horn at his belt ... only to realise that it was not there, because he was a convict.

In the meantime, however, Jan Slaai had become a cause celebre, with friends, relatives and other interested parties bombarding the Governor of the Cape, Lord Charles Somerset, with appeals and petitions for his early release.

Nowadays South Africans tend to regard Somerset as the epitome of British arrogance and high-handedness, but in fact he was an astute politician, and perhaps he saw in Jan Slaai's case an opportunity for conciliating the Cape's rancorous ex-Dutchmen, who still had difficulty reconciling themselves with their new-found status as British subjects.

Be that as it may, on a day about a year after Jan Slaai's conviction several officials arrived at Robben Island on the prison ferry and told him that the rest of his sentence had been commuted; he was to board the ferry-boat immediately so that he could be taken to Cape Town and formally released.

Jan Slaai's reaction to this good news was downright disconcerting: He pulled his hat down over his eyes and growled: "I refuse to get into the boat."

Flabbergasted, the officials asked him why. Jan Slaai replied: "Damn it, if the judge thought I deserved four years because of Daail Louw's falseness, then I'll stay here and sit out the other three years as well."

The officials would have none of this pig-headed ingratitude. They handcuffed Jan Slaai and dragged him kicking and cursing to the boat. When it arrived at Cape Town he was frog-marched ashore and told to find his own way home.

By this time, no doubt, sanity had returned to Jan Slaai, and he wasted no time in setting off on foot for Soutpan, hundreds of kilometres away. The story has it that it took him just 10 days to reach his destination, from which one assumes that he managed to borrow a horse or horses along the way. Whatever the case, on the morning of the 10th day a lean and travel-stained Jan Slaai came trotting on to the werf at Soutpan, greeted his astonished wife and children, and then demanded: "Give me some chewing tobacco."

What happened when Jan Slaai confronted the smooth-tongued Daail Louw is not known, but I would guess that their relationship never recovered its earlier warmth.

This is not the end of the story. Jan Slaai’s period in durance vile had set him thinking about matters scientific, and after pondering the matter for some time he decided to build himself a flying machine. Given the fact that he lived in an age in which the common man had not yet even accepted that the world was round, this was an act of intellectual courage not far short of Dr Christiaan Barnard's decision, some 150 years later, to perform an allegedly impossible heart transplant.

It is to be doubted whether Jan Slaai realised what a quantum leap he was taking. No doubt he had consulted his Bible and concluded that if a witless bird could fly, so could Man, whose divinely deputised dominion over the fowl of the air was, after all, clearly spelt out in the Book of Genesis. It is certain that as a practical frontiersman he understood how handy flight would be for farming and hunting purposes.

Jan Slaai did not put his theories into practice immediately; possibly he was still working out the details. But in due course he moved from Soutpan to another farm called Ouplaas, about nine miles from present-day Nieuwoudtville, and it was there that he set about realising his dream.

It was not long before Jan Slaai’s flying machine was a reality, no doubt because he buoilt it with the scanty materials he had to hand. By today's standards it was certainly low-tech, to say the least. The wings were made from canvas and split bamboo, and the tail was the farm's "jaagbesem", the long broom used to sweep up grains of wheat after they had been trampled out of their husks on the threshing-floor.

The story tells us that on the morning of his first flight he drank a cup of coffee with his brothers and gave them a detailed itinerary of his intended journey. He would fly from Ouplaas to the high koppie at Groot Gorem, he said. There he would rest a while before continuing onwards to the Hantam mountains, after which he would fly to the Roggeveld on the other side of Calvinia, where he would spend the night with some relatives before returning the next day (what his wife was doing while all this was going on, no-one knows; probably wringing her hands at his folly and contemplating a life of widowhood.

Having filed his flight plan, so to speak, Jan Slaai lodged a chew of tobacco in his cheek and prepared for his epoch-making flight. He attached the canvas-and-bamboo wings to his shoulders and tied the jaagbesem between his legs with a length of eland-hide. Then he climbed on to the gable of his house, bade everyone a final farewell (it is a fair bet that every last person on the farm was standing a-gape below him) and without further ado launched himself into the air ...

I wish I could say that Jan Slaai then flapped away towards Groot Gorem, pursued by cries of superstitious awe from his family and retainers. What actually happened, however, was that he dropped like a stone into his own yard and landed with such force that it was three months before he was able to walk properly again.

And so ends the story of Jan Slaai - hunter, relentless pursuer of stock thieves, and aviation pioneer. The only loose end which remains is this: What happened to the gun whose single lethal volley of slugs set all these events in motion?

The story does not tell us. Perhaps it was confiscated - one presumes that in those days the authorities were no more sanguine about people shooting one another than they are at present. On the other hand, perhaps not. It is just possible that in fact Jan Slaai's gun is grinning complacently at me from a corner of my study as I write this. But that is a story for another day.

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2. FLORIS AND THE KLIPRUG LION

 I have always wondered whether the flintlock "sanna" that resulted in my great-great-great-grand-uncle Jan Slaai becoming a South African aviation pioneer is not perhaps the same one used in another famous episode of the family history, namely my great-great-grand-uncle Floris Steenkamp in his encounter with the Kliprug lion.

 Unlike Jan Slaai's gun, there is no doubt about the whereabouts or provenance of Floris's firearm. It lives behind my study door, secure in the knowledge that it is the most treasured item among my various bits of tribal memorabilia.

By a collector's standards it is not, perhaps, anything remarkable. It is pretty much a standard old "bobbejaanboud" of the early 19th Century; there is no famous gunmaker's name on its 36 inches of approximately .625-calibre smoothbore barrel, its ramrod is obviously not the original one, and it shows signs of having been repaired several times, none too expertly. 

But that is hardly the point. It is, beyond a shadow of doubt, the gun Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Floris used to shoot what was reputed to be the last lion in the Calvinia district, sometime (according to my calculations) in the first third of the 19th Century. 

Weapons that allegedly brought down the last something-or-other – and the story of how they did so - are not unique in South Africa. But there is no doubt in this case, seeing that inherited not only the gun but the story from my grandfather, who as a youth in the 1880s heard it from people who were living at the time it happened.  

It is quite possible, in fact, that his source was his grandfather, Floris's brother Casper Jan Hendrik Lucas Steenkamp, a tenacious old fellow who clung on till the age of 92 and did not die till 1896, when my grandfather was in his late teens. 

The exact date of Floris's famous exploit has been lost. However, Floris was born in 1807 on the farm Kliprug in the Koue Bokkeveld - three years after his brother Casper, my great-great-grandfather - and was a grown man when he dealt with the lion, so it is fair to assume that it could not have been before the middle 1830s. 

We do not know very much about Floris the man. If he is anything like many modern Steenkamps, he was fond of eating fat meat, did not like being messed around and set great store by personal loyalty. He was certainly a seasoned hunter and horse-lover, and, like many Steenkamps since and presumably before, a man of volcanic temper. 

In any case, the story goes that Floris was sitting in his voorkamer entertaining two visitors when a farm-hand came bursting in with the news that a large lion had killed one of Floris's favourite riding-horses, and was now in the process of devouring it. 

Floris's first reaction to the news has been lost. Most probably he flew into a rage and aired a few curses. But there is no doubt about what he did next. He snatched up his sanna and hastened to the scene of the crime with his visitors close behind him.  

And sure enough, there was the lion in flagrante delicto on the slope of Kliprug Mountain, chewing on the remains of Floris's beloved steed.  

What happened then varies slightly in the details but not in the main content. Firstly, Floris blew his top all over again and cursed the lion. At same time, one assumes, he did what any experienced hunter would have done, namely checked his sanna’s pan to make sure it was primed, then hauled back the hammer in case the lion took offence. 

Which the lion did; according to the story he roared, twitched his tail a couple of times and then charged, red in tooth and claw. 

Now Floris showed his true metal. Being charged by a lion is a perilous business at the best of times. It was doubly so in the days when you had exactly one shot and no guarantee that your flintlock's somewhat involved ignition process would actually proceed as intended. 

Floris did not lose his nerve, however. In his experience a lion usually charged right up to its victim, then paused a moment to wind itself up for the final death-dealing leap on to its target. That was the moment critique, as it were, but you had to be quick about it, or you would have your guts galloped out in double-quick time. 

So Floris waited. No time now to make sure that the touch-hole was unobstructed, the pan still full of powder and the flint possessed of a good edge and set at the right angle; he dared not take his eyes off the tawny body that was hurtling towards him. 

Then the moment arrived. For a split-second the lion paused to gather himself. As he did so Floris laid the ivory foresight-bead on the lion's "kuiltjie", the little hollow at the base of the throat, just above the junction of the clavicles, and squeezed the trigger. 

The sanna responded nobly. There was a solid as the flint hit the frizzen and scraped a shower of sparks down into the pan. With a gorgon's hiss the powder in the pan ignited, sending out a flash of flame and smoke just forward of Floris's face.  

But Floris was a veteran and did not spoil his aim by jerking his face away; the foresight's bead, nestled in the tiny V of the rearsight, stayed steady on the lion's kuiltjie. A millisecond later the flame flashed through the touch-hole and ignited the main charge, and with a hollow boom the sanna spat out a cloud of smoke and a home-cast ball weighing several hundreds of grains. 

It is theoretically possible that Floris actually fired a leather bag of "loper" slugs at the lion instead of a bullet, but the story is quite definite on this point, and on what happened next. The ball hit the lion just as he launched himself, and crumpled him to such good effect that he hit the ground on his back, so close that his "kwas", the brush on the end of his tail, slapped against Floris's left velskoen. 

Floris, understandably pleased at a) having killed the lion and b) having done so without suffering bodily harm, turned to his visitors and called on them to bear witness to his feat. To his fury, both of them were some distance off and travelling fast, having beaten the retreat as soon as the lion charged. 

So angry was he, in fact, that he reloaded and sent a couple of balls after them. The story does not tell if he hit them or not. Personally I think he only shot at them to register his disgust. Had he brought either of them down the fact would have been recorded, since nothing is ever forgotten by my family (remind me to tell you sometime about Governor Sir George Yonge's fancy woman). However, I would say it is likely that the shots marked the end of the friendship. 

The Kliprug lion's skin has not survived, but Great-Great-Uncle Floris's gun, as I have said, is still very much with us. In due course it passed into my direct line, presumably by coming into the possession of Great-Great-Grandfather Casper when Floris died in 1861.  

I assume Great-Great-Grandfather Casper used it till he went on to more improved technology, and that thereafter Floris's sanna went through successive stages of retirement as it became more and more outdated.  

It fired its last shots around 1918, when my father, then 14 and already a dead-and-gone gun enthusiast, often passed the time by loading it with small charges of black powder behind newspaper wads which he set off by pushing a red-hot needle through the touch-hole, flints being virtually unobtainable at that time. 

After that it became a wall-hanger and somehow survived mainly unscathed. In 1949 my grandfather had it restored after a fashion and presented it to me on my ninth birthday, complete with a dramatic account (not for nothing was he the North-West Cape's most famous preacher of his time) of Floris's finest hour. 

Since then it has not been out of my possession except for three years while I was working in Johannesburg in the late 1960s, when my father put it away with his own particular treasures, such as a walking-stick made of a rhino's wedding-tackle and a rare specimen of early South African published filth entitled "De Lof Der Stront", containing 300 humorous verses in High Dutch devoted to the subject of ordure. 

As I look at Floris's sanna now, I find myself speculating once more about the chances of its having also been Jan Slaai's weapon. Technologically speaking it is anything but impossible. Floris's weapon is of a kind whose use spanned the lifetimes of both men, although towards the end many flintlock sannas were converted to "dopslaners" (percussion weapons). So it is quite possible that Jan Slaai's gun ended up in Floris's possession by inheritance, gift or purchase, considering they were not only closely related but generationally linked.

 If my calculations are correct, Jan Slaai's one-man expedition against the Bushmen took place around 1810, when Floris was three years old. Jan Slaai lived on for another three decades and only died in 1841, when Floris was 34. It is possible that Floris had just inherited or been given the gun after Jan Slaai's death when he had his adventure with the Kliprug lion.

3. THE ANTI-AIRCRAFT MANNLICHER

No matter how many guns a man might own in his lifetime, there are always a couple for which he has a special affection. In my father's case it was a lovely full-stocked Mannlicher-Schoenauer in 9.3 x 62mm calibre that he bought in Cape Town around 1935 and became his companion on some strange and perilous adventures in the ensuing decades.

My old man was already a seasoned hunter when he bought the Mannlicher for something like 30 pounds, but as far as I am aware it was his first true "plesiergeweer" - previous to that he hunted mainly with a .303 Short Magazine Lee-Enfield, which (like so many other hunters of his era) he did not like because the military 174-grain solids in common use left something to be desired as hunting ammunition.

It is possible that he was influenced in this dislike by my grandfather, who loathed military Lee-Enfields because he had once missed a perfect running shot when, in the heat of the moment, he had mistaken one of the foresight ears for the foresight itself.

In any case, the Mannlicher was a different story. My father fell in love with it at first sight, and his devotion never wavered; he owned many firearms during his long lifetime, but basically he was a one-rifle man, and the Mannlicher was that rifle.

He delighted in its balance and the way it came up (although he was uncharacteristically short for a latter-day Steenkamp and the stock was actually a trifle too long for him), the British-style gold foresight bead and wide-V express sights and the satiny-smooth movement of the spoon bolt.

Strictly a no-frills hunter, he did not worry about such things as a telescopic sight (which he considered unsporting in any case) or the finer points of ballistics. Most of the time he used the standard 285-grain DWM and Kynoch cartridges, although he also swore by RWS rounds loaded with the famed 258-grain Brennecke Torpedo Ideal Geschuss bullets.

Since the Mannlicher was regulated for 285-grainers - it has not changed its zero in my lifetime, which says something for the quality of the wood used in factory rifles in those days - there must have been some differences in bullet drop and so forth, but my old man did not worry his head about such things, and to my certain knowledge usually killed what he was shooting at.

Granted, this is a contradiction in terms, but my old man never set much store by logic or cold fact, and by some miracle usually came out on top. No doubt this was also why he took some very good photographs, although he had no technical bent and struggled with every camera he owned except the bellows-type Kodak he bought in the United States in 1927. He used that old Kodak till 116-size film marched into history, then battled with its various successors till, to his delight, the first point-and-push cameras came on the market.

As far as he was concerned the Mannlicher was the ideal all-round weapon, and he proved it to his own satisfaction. You could shoot everything with it, he told me. It demolished heavy and dangerous game in a very satisfactory manner, while on light game the bullet went right through without wrecking the meat.

He had ample opportunity to test his theories. He obtained the Mannlicher in time for 30 years of sport such as today's generation can only dream of. Hunting was cheap, Africa was wide open, and my old man and the Mannlicher travelled far and wide. He hunted everything with it except birds - for which he relied on a nice Williamson double and later one of the early post-war FN semi-autos - and it repaid his sublime faith in its capabilities. The only other man who could prise it out of his jealous grasp was my grandfather, who was as keen a hunter he was.

The two of them ranged over Southern and Central Africa, singly or together. They hunted in South West Africa and often in Angola (where, according to my father, a bottle of whisky for the local "chef da posto" was usually all that was needed to secure unlimited hunting opportunities). At other times they visited Bechuanaland, Rhodesia, Mozambique and Tanganyika.

I might add that they were extremely ethical hunters. They killed only what they wanted and never, ever, shot anything simply for the sake of shooting it, and they prided themselves on one-shot kills. They personified the best type of hunter, who is in love not only with the bushveld in all its moods and forms but with the very animals they killed on occasion. It is a mystical thing, this strange kind of love, and no-one but a true-hearted hunter can really understand it. That is why they never complained if a day of hunting put nothing in the bag: the shooting was only part of the greater communing with the land and its denizens.

Needless to say they found themselves in tight spots at various times, such as one episode in the late 1930s in which my old man came close to shutting down the direct line of male descent for good and all 

Ever a man of impulse, he had managed to get himself into an extremely ropey situation, featuring a very angry buffalo bull and himself up to the thighs in an Angolan swamp. How he managed this I do not know, but in essence the situation was that the buffalo was cranking himself up to charge and my old man found that he was out of ammo for the Mannlicher.

At this stage, my old man always said, he had more or less resigned himself to a messy end, because there was no question of taking evasive action in the thigh-deep water and he knew his tracker would have fled, the sensible thing to do in such a situation.

Then something tapped him on the shoulder. He looked around and saw it was his tracker's hand, holding a charger of five cartridges. My old man wasted no time in ramming them into the magazine and dropped the buffalo at point-blank range.

That night, as I recall, the tracker received both a hefty tip and a strong dop of whisky; I cannot recall his name, which I regret because my father always spoke about this humble but courageous tribesman with gratitude and admiration, and I would have liked to publish his name as my own tribute to him.

A fine pair of tusks on my study wall date from yet another Angolan hunt, in July of 1937, when my father dropped their owner with one shot from (you guessed it) his trusty Mannlicher. The local inhabitants were on the scene in a flash and two of them had already nearly hacked part of the trunk off when my old man stopped them so that he could have his picture taken sitting on the elephant. The photo hangs between the tusks in my study now, the gash on the trunk clearly visible.

Various other pieces of the elephant came back along with the tusks, namely his tail, both femurs, one foot and large pieces of hide which my old man screwed down on a variety of chests and table-tops. The foot is next to my desk as this is written, having been rescued from a cellar, thoroughly aired on my back stoep and turned into my wastepaper basket; the femurs are on the family farm, where the locals like to come and look at them; and one of the chests stands in my hall, a source of irritation to my wife Andrea because it has bunched up on one side due to the damp Cape weather. The tail, alas, vanished sometime in the 1960s.

My old man's opportunity to hunt distinctly more exotic game came on the outbreak of World War II. Being a pugnacious little man, he immediately tried to join first the artillery and then the armour, only to be turned by both because he was a highly qualified surgeon. So with bad grace he headed northwards to Abyssinia as a member of the 10th Field Ambulance, South African Medical Corps. Hidden in his kit, needless, to say, was the Mannlicher; my old man's reasoning being that apart from Italians and such, East Africa was big-game country and he had to be ready for any hunting opportunity that might arise.

As it transpired he did not get much of a chance to hunt conventional big game, but he did have a shot at a most unusual trophy. This was an Italian CR-42 fighter which strafed his convoy soon after the 1st South African Brigade's arrival in the theatre of operations. My old man's companions very sensibly took cover, but he whipped out the Mannlicher and gave the fighter five rounds' worth, after which it  crashed.

Reasonably chuffed but not surprised that the Mannlicher had once again brought home the bacon - although his enthusiasm was slightly dampened when he found that the CR-42 had shot a number of holes in his staff car's radiator, right next to him - my old man went off to brigade headquarters to claim his fighter 

Precisely what his intention was, I cannot say; knowing my old man, he probably wanted to paint an Air Force-style emblem on his car's door to mark a confirmed "kill". To his indignation, however, Brigade rejected his claim on the grounds that someone else had been firing at the CR-42 with a Bren LMG at the same time.

My father protested more or less politely. His line of reasoning was that he knew from personal experience that the .303 military bullet did not have much stopping-power; the 9.3mm was another story altogether, however. A fighter aircraft could be regarded more or less as soft-skinned dangerous game, about like a lion, and five rounds of softnose was more than adequate for any such creature. And, he added, he was an experienced wildfowler and had known just how much to lead the aircraft.

This logical explanation fell on stony ground. Whether the staff officer concerned was an anti-hunting man, simply too busy or immune to glib explanations from wily field soldiers, I do not know; suffice it to say that my old man was sent packing, leaving him with a lifelong grudge against the South African Army.

From Abyssinia my old man went on to the Western Desert, from which he and the Mannlicher returned after El Alamein, having survived various perilous situations and calamities. One of the latter involved three K98 Mausers he looted after one battle, only to have them destroyed by an enemy shell during another. This left him with a permanent grudge against the German as well as the South African Army, but it is not really germane (so to speak) to this tale.

In 1944 my old man's personal campaign against Hitler suffered a serious setback when the Army would not let him go on the Italian campaign because he was suffering from severe amoebic dysentery and a suspected heart murmur which was actually something else.

He consoled himself by taking the Mannlicher to the Kalahari to hunt lions, from which he returned in due course with the skin and skull of a fine lioness he dropped with one shot in mid-charge, and a couple of bars of soap made from the lioness's fat (being primarily a meat-hunter, he had a rather Calvinistic view about not wasting what he shot).

One of my earliest memories is handling the lioness's skull, which he showed me as soon as he arrived. That's the way to thrill a four-year-old! The skull now lives in my study, a source of wonderment to visitors and a thorn in the eye of anti-hunters.

The echoes of that trip were a long time a-dying; I did not hear the final untold story till 1971, but that is a tale to be told later, in its right place.

I saw the Mannlicher in action for the first time in 1949, when my father took me on a three-week trip to Bechuanaland. Four years later we went again, and I took my first game with it, a giraffe. I was big for my age, but definitely not man enough for the Mannlicher yet, and the result was a flinch that it took me years to shake off.

On reflection my old man should have been more sensible than to allow me to fire it, but I suppose he simply could not wait for me to fall in love with the Mannlicher - which I did, of course, kick or no kick. That night I was also introduced to giraffe marrow. I scooped it up with a teaspoon while listening to my father swop tall tales with two government hunters named Paddy MacMahon and Shorty Rinkie, and the flavour of both the marrow and their stories lingers on the taste-buds of my memory to this day.

That 1953 trip was pretty seminal. Apart from marking my graduation from dassie-hunting and introducing me to the old-style Africa, a horrendous ammunition problem also got me interested in ballistics. Just before leaving Cape Town my old man - who was always interested in new things even though he was a technical illiterate - augmented his ammunition supplies with about 250 rounds from the then almost unknown Norma factory. The Norma ammo turned out to be bad (because of incorrect annealing of the cartridge-case brass, I suppose) and expanded so ferociously in the chamber that ejection was a major struggle.

My old man was apoplectic about this, promptly unearthed the store of his beloved RWS cartridges with the TIG bullets that he had brought along, and as soon as we returned to Cape Town told me to take the whole lot back to Rawbone's gunshop and complain to Mr Mo Klein, the owner. A horrified Mr Klein, who had known my father for years, promptly swopped the Norma ammo for 286-grain solid and soft-nose Kynoch cartridges, 20 of which still reside in my safe, together with the last of the RWS/TIG rounds, which are now rather dicky in the primer.

The Mannlicher's voice was heard less and less from the 1960s onwards as I got stuck into a demanding career and my old man retired from serious hunting, but it never fell entirely silent, and in due course it became mine when my father died. In the meantime my two sons have also succumbed to its charms, so I reckon its future is assured. None of us are inveterate hunters like my father and grandfather (nor are the opportunities as plentiful as formerly), but the gene is there; it merely sleeps.

4.  SPOILS OF WAR

My father’s reasons for volunteering such alacrity to go on active service when World War II broke out were honourable ones. He had an instinctive aversion to overbearing officialdom, as represented by the Nazis; he had seen Hitler's encroachments in Europe at first hand, and been revolted by them; and my grandfather, whom he admired above all other men, felt so strongly about the matter that he had destroyed his political career by voting vote for South Africa's participation in the war.

On the other hand, my old man also saw the practical possibilities; mainly that there would surely be the chance of some good hunting in East Africa (which is why he took his 9.3 x 62 Mannlicher-Schoenauer with him), and also an opportunity for a bit of judicious looting.

My old man had very distinct ideas on the subject of the spoils of war. When I first got involved in the Army in 1959, he said to me: "My boy, the best job in the Army is intelligence officer, because he's the one who gets first crack at the loot."

He was right. Almost 20 years later, as an infantry battalion's intelligence officer, I found myself the custodian (heh, heh!) of a 10-tonner full of an assortment of weapons ranging from 12,7mm Soviet ack-ack guns, two Schpagins and a couple of nice AK-47s to ex-Portuguese G3s, a lovely little wooden-stocked early Belgian FAL and an American M1 Carbine with several hundred rounds of tracer ammo. Alas, the bastard Army made me hand them all in.

In any case, I should like to make it clear that my old man was not a looter so much as - hem - a collector. Namely, he was not interested in the things your common or garden looter prefers, such as gold, jewellery, drugs or dirty photos. What he was after was weapons and their accessories, and he did fairly well for himself, although at times the military got in his way, as it was to do in my case as well.

The best of his deals was certainly a very fine Westley Richards .425 Magnum on which he laid hands during the Abyssinian Campaign in 1941, and which formerly belonged to Duke Amadeo of Aosta, last Italian Viceroy of Abyssinia.

Now, I am perfectly aware that there are probably as many weapons attributed to the Duke in South Africa as there used to be alleged pieces of the True Cross scattered around Europe, but in this case the evidence is hard to discount.

My old man met up with the Duke's Westley Richards shortly after the Battle of Dessie in April 1941, when he was a captain in the 10th Field Ambulance, South African Medical Corps, a component of Brigadier Dan Pienaar's renowned 1st South African Brigade.

This was the battle at which, he always said afterwards, he should have been decorated for gallantry because he addressed a British medical brigadier in terms of fornication in front of witnesses when the brigadier started making a nuisance of himself while my old man was busy patching up the wounded at a forward dressing station.

The battle ended with the South Africans in full possession of Dessie and the Italians retreating precipitately, leaving behind large stocks of weapons, munitions, food, wine and other essential military supplies.

My father, a gourmand to his dying day, always remembered the aftermath of the battle with great fondness. Instead of bully beef and army tea, he and his colleagues ploughed through delicious Italian cheese, meatballs and spaghetti, and drank so much Italian champagne that at times they actually longed for a bottle of good old South African beer.

However, the best (from my old man's point of view anyway) was yet to come. One of the things the Italians had left behind was a house containing 44 crates of the Duke's belongings - a valuable find, since the Duke was a rich man and used to the best of everything. Dan Pienaar, a rigidly honest man, decided to preserve the contents of the house so that they could be returned to the Duke after the war.

To this end Pienaar placed the Duke's possessions under the protection of his favourite regiment, the 1st Battalion, Transvaal Scottish. Alas, the "Boere Jocks" were not as meticulous in their guardianship as they might have been, and within 24 hours all sorts of interesting things began to be seen around Dessie.

My father encountered another officer strutting about in a pair of fine riding boots such as had never been issued in the bare-bones South African Army. Asked where he got it, the wearer admitted proudly that till a couple of days earlier they had belonged to no less a person than the Duke himself.

A little later he found yet another of his colleagues preparing to mail a collection of silk stockings and underwear home to his wife. The officer concerned said they had belonged to the Duchess of Aosta, but now they were going to his wife, who would love him with renewed fervour because in wartime South Africa such items were like hen's teeth.

My old man had his doubts about the true late owner of the stockings and undies, and so have I, since to our knowledge the Duchess was never in the Abyssinian war-zone. The inescapable conclusion is that the items had belonged to a bit of "skelm" some Italian staff officer had brought along to ameliorate the rigours of war.

But this sort of thing excited only mild interest in my old man, who was after other booty. By this time he had acquired a monstrous old Bernadelli revolver with a folding trigger and a mint-condition .380 Beretta (which he wore alternately right through till after El Alamein), and various shells and hand-grenades which, with uncharacteristic caution, he had had defused before packing them away in his kit.

He had also just missed laying hands on one of those cute little 6.5mm carbines issued to the Fascist Youth, which he had thought would be a good present for me - I was only about a year old at the time, but quite healthy and obviously destined to reach gun-owning age.

But the Big One was still to come. It was heralded by the arrival at his tent of a company sergeant-major in the Transvaal Scottish, who said he had heard that my old man was interested in guns. My old man admitted that this was so. In that case, the sergeant-major said, would he be interested in acquiring a nice rifle he (the Boere Jock) had just liberated from the Duke's possessions

"Captain," he explained, "you know what the bloody Army is like - sooner or later they're going to have it off me. Don't you want to buy it? 

My old man, who was a keen haggler, opined that he might be if the price were right. So they threw it back and forth till the sergeant-major lost patience and said: "Okay, I'll sell it to you for 400 lire." It was truly a piffling price - about the equivalent of four South African pounds - and my old man hauled out his cash there and then. A little later the sergeant-major unloaded a long gun-case at his tent and went off with my old man's four quid in his hand.

Considering the provenance and the selling-price, this was undoubtedly one of South Africa's gun bargains of the century. The rifle was a standard Westley Richards with 26-inch barrel and protruding five-shot magazine, and a strange dovetail arrangement to the left of the receiver-bridge on which a Z-shaped Zeiss telescopic sight was mounted on a single post.

All this was packed in a canvas-covered case bearing the ducal crest branded on a wooden plaque, and containing a cleaning-rod and a considerable amount of proprietary solid and LT Capped ammunition.

My old man immediately started laying plans to take it home with him, regulations or no regulations; as it turned out, a solution was immediately at hand, in the form of a notoriously inefficient portable fracture table issued to the SAMC for reducing compound fractures.

The fracture tables were so useless that one by one they had been marked off as "lost by enemy action" and their carrying-boxes converted to other uses. Such as, for example, concealing the Westley Richards, whose case fitted in very neatly and was safe from detection because standing orders barred all but SAMC personnel from opening any medical equipment.

And so in due course my father and the Westley Richards arrived home on leave, and, like the good law-abiding citizen he was not, he went along to the Caledon Square police station in Cape Town to inquire about obtaining a licence.

I assume he did not go directly to one of the local magistrates, who were in charge of issuing licences in those days, because in terms of wartime regulations most civilian-owned weapons had been pulled in by the police - usually never to be seen again.

Whatever the case, he ended up being interviewed by a police officer who, not realising what a tiger he had by the tail, gave him a little lecture about the illegal importation of firearms, a citizen's duty, the impossibility of making the Westley Richards kosher and so on.

My father responded with a little lecture of his own which became increasingly intemperate as he got into his stride.

As he told the story, it consisted mainly of remarks about battle-shy malingerers (that is to say, people like the policeman) who stayed safe at home and confiscated honest citizens' rifles (this was a reference to a Lee-Enfield of his that had been pulled in) from true patriots (that is to say, people like my old man) who were risking their lives on the battlefield in order to save the country from Fascism, even the loafers living in it (this was the policeman again), instead of safeguarding said patriots' innocent wives (namely my mother, who had handed in the Lee-Enfield, not realising that as a soldier’s wife she did not have to).

He concluded with a promise that he would complain directly to General Smuts. This was no empty threat, since General Smuts was a family friend, but it was not really necessary because by now the cop - like most people who argued with my old man - was in full retreat.

The upshot of it was that before long my parent was headed northwards again, leaving behind a rifle that was as legal as the Reserve Bank.

And so, eventually, the Westley Richards entered my life. I fired it often but never hunted with it - at first because my father would never risk it in the veld (except once, when he loaned it to his old hunting-friend Jack Stodel, the film impresario) - and later because the cartridge-cases began splitting from sheer old age.

Incidentally, there are two very peculiar cartridges among the remaining Westley Richards ammunition. Their have needle-sharp points and seem to have been turned rather than swaged or drawn. Their origin is a complete mystery; they are definitely not hunting bullets and they certainly do not feature in any Westley Richards catalogue that I have ever seen.

All I know about them derives from a vague remark my old man once made about their being "armour-piercing". He did not elaborate, and I suspect he had them made up by some friendly armourer just in case he ever encountered an enemy tank. It is just as well he did not, since the best possible scenario would have been a ruined barrel. Either way, these might be the very first "monolithic" solids ever made by a South African.

The history of the rifle itself is somewhat obscure. In 1970 I wrote to Westley Richards to ask them about it. They replied that they could confirm it had been built in 1912, but that all other records pertaining to it had been destroyed during the Blitz.

So - did the Duke buy it from Westley Richards, or did he acquire it later from the original buyer? I suppose I could write to the Aosta family, but they might want it back, and my father would haunt me forever if I let it out of my hands.

My father came out of World War II with yet another weapon he acquired in Abyssinia, a 12-bore hammer double that was a real piece of Birm-ingham trade-gun rubbish but was treasured by him because it helped to cement one of the greatest friendships of his life.

Around the time of the Battle of Dessie the much-loved Brigadier Dan Pienaar began to lose weight and complain of stomach pains, and my old man was sent to examine him for a possible stomach cancer.

My old man looked him over and decided that Pienaar's symptoms were psychosomatic rather than physical. On reporting this, his commanding officer – a Natalian like most of the other 10^th Field Ambulance men, and therefore bilingual, but in English and Zulu – told him: "Well, for God's sake, Willem, go and talk to him - you're the only one here who speaks Afrikaans properly."

So they spent hours walking in the veld, sometimes just talking and at other times birdshooting with the old shotgun. It was just what Pienaar needed. Secure in the knowledge that my old man would respect the need for secrecy, Pienaar could afford to pour out his worries.

The main one was that 1st SA Brigade would suffer heavy casualties during what was obviously to be the climactic battle of the campaign, an assault on the heavily fortified mountain of Amba Alagi.

"What am I going to tell their people back in the Union?" he asked again and again. My father listened, and soothed - and worried, because he, too, was plagued by self-doubt. Just say he had made a wrong diagnosis and was allowing Pienaar's cancer to develop to the point where it was inoperable?

But in due course the magic of the veld and my father's sympathetic ear did their work. Pienaar's pains vanished and he began putting on weight, and on May 15 that year he won a great victory at Amba Alagi at the cost of minimal casualties.

My old man's final essay at ad hoc weapons procurement ended in failure, though not of his own doing.

In those early years of the war the South African Army was not particularly well-equipped, and by the time 10th Field Ambulance deployed in the Western Desert in late 1941 it had acquired several useful items from the Italians, including a mobile operating theatre built on the back of a 10-ton Lancia lorry.

This was put to good use by the medics. It was also put to strictly unauthorised use by my father, who had somehow acquired three brand-new K98 Mausers through the courtesy (albeit involuntary) of the Afrikakorps and stashed them behind the driver's seat of the Lancia, preparatory to getting them to Cairo and sneaking them back to South Africa.

Alas, in November 1941 most of the 10th Field Ambulance went into the bag at Sidi Rezegh. My old man escaped with a German armoured car in hot pursuit, and one of the bitterest moments of the battle, he later told me, was seeing the Lancia going up in flames, Mausers and all, after being hit by a German tank shell.

He always felt very savage towards the Afrikakorps about this, and dismissed with contempt my contention that logically speaking the Germans had been fully entitled to burn up the Mausers, seeing that the rifles had been looted from them in the first place. Logic aside, of course, I quite agreed with him; but for Rommel's dog-in-the-manger soldiers I would have inherited three mint-condition K98s (granted, I do not need them, but that is hardly the point).

Perhaps the best World War II gun story involving my old man has to do with a rifle he did not loot. His lonely walks in the veld with Dan Pienaar had left him with an enormous respect and affection for our famous little fighting man, and he never ceased to mourn Dan's untimely death in an air crash at Lake Kisumu in 1943. Many years after the war he told Dan's son, Barry, that one of his greatest desires was to own a rifle that had once belonged to his hero.

Barry did not have one, but, being as kindly as his father, he could not bring himself to disappoint my old man. So he gave him one of his own rifles and pretended it had been Dan's - a lovely old long-barrelled 7 x 57mm sporter, built on a military Mauser action.

The origins of this rifle I do not know. As far as I can determine, it was proofed in Austria just after World War I, but it has no maker's name on it. The metal-to-wood fit is not particularly good, from which I deduce that the gunsmith was primarily a metalwork man, for it is a fine shooter that will hold within a minute of angle, and is a sure-enough buckslayer whenever I have taken it into the veld.

In any case, my old man went to his grave believing he owned a rifle that had belonged to his greatest hero – I was the only person to whom Barry confided the secret - and "Dan's rifle" it remains to this day, facts or no facts.

I have it still, precisely as it was then except that it now has a Weaver V4.5 telescopic sight on it. It fits me as if it had been made for me. It is a natural pointer, and its long barrel (my friend Manie Malan calls it "jou sweepstok-Mauser") makes for steady off-hand aiming.

Stamvader Jan Harmensz

Webwerf ontwerp en onderhou deur Anna anna3mc@yahoo.com