‘GOD HAS TAKEN POWER FROM WHITE MEN THROUGHOUT THE WORLD’

EARLY on the morning of 5 September 1906, at a small asbestos mine in the northern Cape, six African workers entered the tent of their white foreman and his family. They assaulted the sleepers with stones, knobkerries, the leg of a chair and an ox-yoke. The foreman, Dirk Mans, died of his injuries eighteen hours later, while his son, Jan, who had been sleeping in another tent, ran away. Dirk Mans's wife also had a narrow escape. She woke up when a blow narrowly missed the head of her three-year-old child, who was sleeping in her bed. Both could flee in the general mêlée. Another victim, the well digger, William Swanepoel, was bludgeoned to death so ferociously that his skull ‘was entirely knocked out of shape [and] separated in halves’. The perpetrators tried to kill more whites, but dispersed in the ensuing confusion. The six men were tracked down by the police after several days. The Griqualand West Supreme Court in Kimberley sentenced four of the culprits to death; they were hanged in March 1907.

The ringleader of the Hopefield gang, Hendrik Bekeer, told the policeman who had followed his tracks for several days, that ‘he was glad to be caught, although he knew that his life would be at an end’. He could hardly wait to tell the prison warder that the group had planned to kill all whites in South Africa. In court, the eloquent Bekeer explained:

I admit that I am guilty. I, Hendrik Bikier [sic], laid hands on these two souls. I have a craving in my heart which must be made known to everyone. I admit that I am a worker of God. I confess to the Court and all the white people that I am placed here by the Lord, and that I do his will. … The time when the whites had the upper hand is past. This is for Africa alone, but God has taken power from white men throughout the world.