PLETTENBERG BAY NEWS - The dream of Wilja Reitz to keep the Reitz name flying high with her cooking, baking and eccentric wearable art in keeping with the Reitz legacy will her Ouland nursery venue in Plettenberg Bay on 8 March.
This is when Advocate Trevor Emslie SC, a specialist in tax law, will unfold the pages of Deneys Reitz's Adrift in the Open Veld at the next Van Plettenberg Historical Society gathering.
Emslie has for the past 25 years published books broadly classified as Africana, which includes the works by Herman Charles Bosman, C Louis Leipoldt, Olive Schreiner, Iris Vaughan, Sarah Raal, Willie Steyn, Victor Pohl, John Buchan and Deneys Reitz.
Boer War
He will talk about the storytelling of the young Deneys Reitz, son of the former President of the Orange Free State, FW Reitz.
When the young Deneys, aged only 17, took up his rifle and joined the Boer forces to fight the British for his country in 1899, he started a life journey that grabbed the imagination of successive generations in South Africa.
Reitz wrote about his experiences – along with many other spellbinding stories in his trilogy Adrift on the Open Veld. It includes his three books, Commando, Trekking On and Outspan.
The Reitz family of Plettenberg Bay are direct descendants and this talk will, most appropriately, be held at Ouland Royale – Wilya Reitz's magical baroque-style barn venue.
Commando
Reitz writes that he had no hatred of the British people, but "as a South African, one had to fight for one's country".
He could ride and shoot with the best of them, so he was quickly assigned to a Boer Commando unit - one of the highly mobile light cavalry units that were driving the British crazy.
Today the word "commando" conjures a picture of daring special forces raids, but originally it was the Boer word for a mobile column of fighting men.
Trevor Emslie, the publisher of the trilogy Adrift in the Open Veld by Deneys Reitz.
Reitz was present at nearly every one of the major battles of the war. His own narrative brings us a vivid, unforgettable picture of mobile guerrilla warfare, especially later in the war as General JC Smuts and men like Reitz fought on, braving heat, cold, rain, tiring horses, and lack of food, clothing and boots.
His descriptions of war and adventure have come to be regarded as among the best in the English language.
After the war
After the fighting was over in 1902, Reitz chose to live in Madagascar rather than remain in South Africa under British rule.
His exile did not last. His old commander, JC Smuts, talked him into returning to his homeland to help build the new dominion and he became Smuts' right-hand man.
To this task, he brought the courage and leadership he had learned as a commando, eventually becoming a Member of Parliament, Cabinet Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, and South African High Commissioner to London.
During this time, he also studied law and founded "Deneys Reitz", which was to become a major South African law firm.
When World War 1 swept across the globe, he fought bravely alongside the British against the Germans, first in Africa and then on the Western front, rising to command a battalion.
Storyteller par excellence
The brilliance of Reitz's storytelling is its simplicity, directness and understatement. Commando is written with a sophisticated detachment remarkable in a 21-year-old.
His love of horses, his loyalty to his father, his brothers and comrades, his addiction to a life of adventure, his passion to preserve the wild game of South Africa and his devotion to his sons with whom he shared the lore of the bushveld and fishing in False Bay are all unravelled in this fascinating story of adventure and struggle.
JC Smuts summed it up best in his preface: "Wars pass, but the human soul endures; the interest is not so much in the war as in the human experience behind it. This book tells the simple straightforward story of what the Boer War meant to one participant in it".
Tickets for the event can be purchased via Quicket or at Barney’s Kiosk on Market Square, Plettenberg Bay.
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