THROUGH WATERBERG. 81 



observation, and yet when I traversed the country again 

 about two months subsequently, scarcely one of these 

 birds was to be seen. A large portion of the avifauna 

 is migratory in a local sense, and the Buzzards follow 

 their prey. 



We now approached localities which will always be 

 remembered in Boer history and recall the days of the 

 Boer and Kafir struggle for supremacy. Potgieter's 

 Rust is associated with a name attached to a tragedy 

 about to be related. The place had been an improving 

 hamlet, and had enjoyed a healthy reputation till the 

 year 1870, when fever in a most violent form broke out 

 among its inhabitants. By April of that year eighty- 

 one out of the ninety-three settlers had died or were 

 prostrated, and in May the locality was deserted. It is 

 now again inhabited, and may in time become a town- 

 ship. A spot, however, which is still called Makapan's 

 Poort, is the central point of one of those wild deeds 

 which so often give a lurid glare to the struggle be- 

 tween native races and white settlers. At Makapan's 

 Poort, in the year 1854, a particularly diabolical murder 

 was perpetrated by a clan of Kafirs under a chief named 

 Makapan upon a party of hunting Boers. The hunting 

 party consisted of thirteen men and ten women and 

 children, and were under the head of a Field-cornet, 

 Hermanus Potgieter. Potgieter had visited Makapan 

 to trade for ivory, although the volksraad had passed 

 laws prohibiting this manner of barter, with the view 

 of preventing the danger of disputes and quarrels arising 

 between the black and white people. Whatever the 

 provocation may have been in the demeanour of the 

 Boer, if provocation there was, as has been currently 

 reported at the time and since, it remains that these 

 unfortunate people were barbarously murdered, women 

 and children sharing the same fate, and Potgieter 

 himself flayed alive, his skin being afterwards pre- 

 pared for a kaross. 



Blood once being shed and the die cast, the Kafirs 

 commenced to pillage the surrounding neighbourhood. 

 Needless to say the fiercest passions for retribution 



G 



