The lion skin and Wolhuter’s knife are today on display at the Skukuza Rest Camp in the Kruger.
3 hours ago
Photo obtained from Trips SA.
Today, exactly 55 years ago, Harry Charles (Christoffel) Wolhuter died in White River.
Wolhuter was born at Beaufort West in Cape Colony on February 14, 1877. After living for some time in Johannesburg he later managed a farm and trading store for his father at Legogote in the eastern Transvaal where he associated with the local Native Commissioner, Abel Erasmus, and learned to know the Lowveld and its native inhabitants. He became a fluent speaker of the Swazi language.
He had built up a small herd of cattle of his own but they were wiped out in the rinderpest epidemic of 1896—97 and he was forced to go and manage a farm near Nelspruit. A virulent form of malaria also decimated many of the area’s white population and Wolhuter had his first experience of this plague — as a sufferer himself and then attempting to help other victims.
Such was the ignorance of its cause that the local people were not aware of the role of the mosquito and even thought that the construction of the Netherlands Railway from Lourenco Marques to Pretoria had something to do with the pestilence.
He had his first taste of warfare when he was commandeered to fight in the Magato war in the Zoutpansberg, northern Transvaal. On his return from a hunting trip in 1899 he learned that the Anglo-Boer War had begun and having friends on both sides he and others decided to trek into Portuguese East Africa.
The war had been in progress for many months when Wolhuter met the two Willis brothers ‘Pump’ and ‘Clinkers’ at Nkomati. They had emerged from the bush where they had been elephant hunting to learn of the war for the first time.
They had heard of a volunteer corps being raised at Nomahasha, near the north-eastern border of Swaziland, by a Lieutenant von Steinaecker.
The three of them decided to join and Wolhuter enlisted in SH at Komatipoort on November 12 1900, although he claimed that none of the three signed any papers. His first assignment in SH was to oversee a gang of natives making a road from the Komatipoort bridge to Mateveskom.
When the road was completed Wolhuter was stationed at Sabi Bridge, a distant outpost and the end of the Selati railway where he helped build the blockhouse. The garrison there consisted mainly of a contingent of native police. Further on from Sabi (later known as ‘Skukuza’) Steinaecker’s men had constructed a fort near the kraal of | Chief Mpisane which was strongly garrisoned and under the command of Captain Farmer Francis.
https://lowvelder.co.za/466637/day-lege ... uter-died/
