In the battle of the farm of Naroegas, fought near Kenhardt in the northern Cape on 23 May 1901, a Boer commando suffered a severe defeat at the hands of a force of ‘brown’ people of the Northern Border Scouts. The story of this battle has been buried almost since its occurrence. The text of the present chapter was written to accompany an account by Jesse Strauss, a recovery of the story of the battle based solely on oral testimony from brown people, including his own ancestors, which originally formed part of his manuscript titled Kinders van die Gariep (Children of the Gariep) on the history of brown people in the northern Cape up to the turn of the 20th century.

In the course of my research in the northern Cape, I met Jesse Strauss, read his manuscript, and was excited by the originality of some sections of it, including that on Naroegas. I undertook to try to discover what could be found in the archives on this forgotten battle of the South African War (1899–1902). The following commentary is based largely on the written sources. It places the battle in the context of the war in the north-west Cape, and reflects on the silences and distortions in the written accounts of this war, as well as the ‘hiddenness’ of the oral records of the battle. It argues that the significance of the ‘history’ of the battle lies as much in what it reveals about social relations in the area as in adding to our military knowledge.

The battle of Naroegas: context, historiography, sources and Significance