While today the waters of the Kowie River vary between a sky blue, with streaks of brown reflecting the mud banks, or green where the water is deep, there was a time when a stretch of its main tributary, the Blaauwkrantz, was red with blood. This was the river some locals term the Kowie Ditch, which flows through Grahamstown, and the blood was that of some of the thousand Xhosa warriors killed in the battle that took place in the vicinity in 1819. Many of the wounded crawled away from the fighting, trying to stop the bleeding from bullet holes with tufts of grass, and hid in the waters of the Kowie tributary. The site is now known by the Xhosa as Egazini, ‘the place of blood’. It is widely acknowledged by historians that this event was a turning point in South African history. It was also decisive in the history of the Kowie River.

In 2005, on 22 April, dressed in black, I flew from Johannesburg to attend a re-enactment of this battle. This took place on the site where the Xhosa assembled below the pine-covered hill known to them as intaba izono (the mountain of danger) and to whites as Makana's Kop. It was a colourful and noisy scene: some people were dressed in red coats to represent the British colonial army, while others in loincloths with cowhide shields, spears, and fake leopard skins, took the part of Xhosa warriors. A four-pounder cannon, muskets, kudu horns and drums provided the props of war. Starting with a procession of drum majorettes from a local school to the viewing site overlooking the town, the occasion had a festive atmosphere. To the schoolchildren, who seemed to constitute the majority of the watching crowd, it was an occasion of fun and hilarity rather than one of mourning. My black clothing was somewhat inappropriate. Scant attention was paid to the speeches of the dignitaries such as Prince Jongolo from the AmaNdlambe Traditional Council. There was little sense of the tragic significance of the event being commemorated: ‘tragic’ in terms of the scale of the Xhosa casualties, ‘significant’ in the sense of its historical consequences.