It is a crisp Sunday in the year 2025. The trees on Talana Hill gleam with spring’s flush, and Dundee is going about its weekend at a pace that makes Pietermaritzburg feel like London at Christmas.
Pam McFadden points to a tree at the foot of the hill. “People say that’s where they see Colonel Gunning,” she says.
The day being warm and bright, stories of seeing Lt-Col Henry Gunning, felled by a bullet shot from a Boer Mauser as he led the final British charge up the hill on October 20 1899, seem unlikely.
Then again, McFadden, former curator of what may be the finest museum of anything in the country and now chair of its board, has little time for scepticism.
She’s talking about the ghost walk she and people from the museum do every year on the anniversary of the battle, the first of the South African War. Two Boer commandos on the hills and British troops hurrying to protect the town that straddled the vital railway to the coalfields.
“We tell the story, we lay the wreaths, we do the memorial side of things,” she says. “Then we go up the hill. We know where Lt Taylor and Capt Pechell are. We know where Col Gunning was killed. I always say to people: ‘Please don’t wave at Col Gunning under the tree there, for he will not wave back.’”
People tell her later they saw this British soldier or heard those horses.
“The Utrecht commando came back,” she says, pointing to the hill that overlooks the town and its Sunday streets. “You can smell the horses … It’s the Boers fetching their dead and wounded off the battlefield to take them home to Utrecht.”
Siya Africa, the museum’s curator, walks past at that moment. “The horses,” she says, “I’ve smelt them.”
The anniversary fell on a Monday this year. The ghosts don’t care. “People ask us: ‘Why can’t we do the ghost walk on a Saturday?’” says McFadden. “You can’t. The ghosts aren’t there if it’s not the 20th.”
The museum sprawls across rolling ground at the foot of the hill. The stone wall where Gen William Penn Symons took a bullet in the gut is part of the structure. Some of the British dead lie in the graveyard, looking east, Talana on the edge of their eternal gaze.
In the museum are the trappings and detritus dug up from an old battlefield. Spent shell casings, the corroded remains of a rifle, mess kits, discarded equipment …
There are diaries and letters and photographs, flags and bayonets.
Dundee is situated in what was once one of the bloodiest places in the country. It is surrounded by battlefields: Elandslaagte, Isandlwana, Rorke’s Drift, Ladysmith and Colenso just down the road. Majuba is over the hill. Blood River, Ulundi, Weenen are close by.
There are probably millions of items in this museum. They’re just things. But start with the story or the person behind it; that makes the difference
— Pam McFadden
Yet to call this merely a museum of the battle is an injustice because the events of October 20 1899, as graphic and bloody and stupidly heroic as they were, are almost a sideshow.
It started out small: two rooms in an old school to commemorate the centenary of the Anglo-Zulu War in 1979. In 1981, the town council passed a resolution to expand it because Dundee was about to turn 100.
“There was a lot of wandering around and looking at places and old buildings and deciding where we should put it,” she says. “And we were in the cemetery cleaning out the weeds one afternoon … and there was this lightbulb moment to buy the land.”
They had to buy the farm from a Mr Dekker, whose family had been given it after the Battle of Blood River. “We had to find the money ourselves,” says McFadden. “We became extremely good at industrial blackmail.”
They approached every big business in town. Consol Glass, which had a factory there named after the hill. Corobrik. And, of course, the mines. “They have ploughed millions into it,” she says.
McFadden, a history teacher, became curator in 1983. In the decades since, she has gathered — often by sheer force of personality — a collection of things that together seem disparate yet tell the story of the South African experiment.
Much of it is a repository of the life of the town. The contents and bottles of the chemist. A collection of glassware. Tons of documents in a fireproof vault — the entire records and survey maps of 92 coal mines. Every receipt in the local Freemason’s Lodge accounts ledger. And the life’s work of half a dozen local historians.
There are paintings and maps. Dresses. Equipment from now-lost coal mines. There’s a steam locomotive under a eucalyptus tree, a donation from a mine where it was once used to haul wagons of black diamonds.
“There are probably millions of items in this museum,” she says. “They’re just things. But start with the story or the person behind it; that makes the difference.
It is those stories that McFadden is trying desperately to preserve and pass on to a new generation because a piece of cloth is just a piece of cloth until you know the story.
“We have a particular bolt of material that we got from an elderly lady in Glencoe, about ’83, ’84. ‘This is beautiful,’ I said. ‘Why are you giving it to the museum?’ She said: ‘My dear, it would have been my wedding dress, but he never came home from the war.’ Those sorts of stories hit you in your stomach.”
Just getting some of the exhibits to the museum created their own mythology. Take the locomotive, more than 100t of unwilling rusty steel. Before they could even move it, they had to wait for an old bridge to be demolished, and that took four years.
Getting the locomotive from the mine was the easy part — it was hauled dead along the SAR’s tracks to a point as close to the museum as possible.
There is competition for the ownership of history and what is acceptable and what is not acceptable
— Pam McFadden
“We had to have the equivalent of a roadworthy certificate,” says McFadden. “The brakes had to work.”
Then they had to build a spur of railway line to get the locomotive into the grounds, built by a team of track workers sent from Empangeni. It took all weekend to inch the unwilling relic into its final resting place.
“It was great fun,” says McFadden. “I ran meals-on-wheels for a whole weekend for 60 men. At 3.20am, they derailed it, and we had to bring all the guys back from Empangeni to get it back on the track.”
After a weekend of bitter, expletive-rich work, the engine was finally on the grounds when one of the mine managers came to McFadden and pointed at the locomotive. “He said: ‘Pam, are you sure you’ve got it facing the right way? Don’t you want us to turn it around?’”
Telling the story of the locomotive is an easy one. Telling the truth about South Africa’s contested past, less so. “There is competition for the ownership of history and what is acceptable and what is not acceptable,” says McFadden.
The gathering of stories is always imperfect (just ask any reporter or police officer or air crash investigator). But McFadden has trained tour guides for years. “I tell them there’s always three sides to every story. There’s your side, their side, and then there’s the one that people are going to go away with.”
She gets frustrated at the thought of five generations of historians quoting the wrong information. She insists her guides go back to the original accounts, as flawed as even they may be.
Preserving those stories has become a quest of its own. The museum is training people how to do oral history. “We are sending young people out into the community,” she says. “Just in case there are any stories left. Because after this it’s too late.”
She tells the story of Mr Mbatha, one of Dundee’s old men. “He owned the first bus service in town. It was a little red wooden bus, but he was so short he looked through the steering wheel … we’ve got one photograph.”
After much persuasion, Mbatha agreed to take her around the town and show her where the first black-owned businesses were.
“Nobody told me that this man was 90% blind,” she says. “So he came out all dressed in his suit, and for three hours we drove around the town. He kept saying things like ‘No, no, go back up’, and I realised he was trying to see shadows or shapes.
“He showed me where the first bicycle shop started. And next to that there used to be a pile of sawdust and all the little wooden toys that were broken were thrown on the sawdust heap, and he would go and pick them up.”
McFadden pauses for a moment, looks up at the hill where Gunning took a bullet through the heart.
“That history doesn’t mean anything to anybody except local people,” she says. “But if we don’t record it, it’s gone forever.”
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