MAFIKENG in the North West Province started its life as a one-ox town and – if it had been situated a couple of hundred miles away from where it is – it would still be a one-ox town.  Anyone driving past without any knowledge of the town’s schizophrenic history would think that here is just another dorp with donkeys snoozing on the sidewalks.  And boy, would they be wrong.  Mafikeng never really started out as an earth-shaking centre of world events.  The name means ‘the place among the rocks,’ which pretty much says it all.  It was settled from about 1852 by local BaRolong chiefs.  In about 1880 the Voortrekkers arrived with their creaking wagons and began to settle in a semi-arid area they dubbed Goshen, after the Biblical land that Joseph procured for the Israelites as a refuge from Egyptian slavery.   The Voortrekkers, I must add, were never hot on irony.  By 1882 the Boers had declared the place a Republic along with the adjacent state of Stellaland.  The name Goshen has gone, but Stellaland has survived for the region, and it is a lovely name, redolent of the huge night skies with their galaxies of stars. It wasn’t long before the British sent in a military force to abolish the Republic and re-incorporate it into British Bechuanaland.  English settlers arrived shortly afterwards and settled on a piece of land given to them by the BaRolong chief, which they misspelled as Mafeking.  They built some rather nice churches and houses, and settled down to doze through history.  But little did they know that the stage was now set for this tiny town’s blaze of glory. Mafikeng is what military wallahs call strategic, ie. It was the closest town within English territory to the Goldfields.  And ever since gold had been discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, the English directed greedy eyes towards the Transvaal Republic.  So when English prime minister Neville Chamberlain decided that a raid on Johannesburg by English forces would start an uprising by the disenfranchised English living on the goldfields, Mafikeng was chosen as the springboard for the English government’s imperial ambitions. By the way, when the farcical Jameson raid fizzled out, Chamberlain batted his eyelids and proclaimed complete ignorance of the illegal raid, and poor old Jameson was left to carry the can and do the jail sentence.  And the raid was farcical – Jameson was a clerk, albeit a rich and important one, and knew nothing about war.  He hung about, got impatient, started off too early, got lost, blundered about the bush for a while and then surrendered to the Boers, who had been watching him every step of the way. Anyway, after this inexcusable act of aggression, war with the Transvaal Republic was inevitable.  Lord Baden-Powell was sent to Mafikeng to build up army supplies for the forthcoming war – again, Mafikeng was chosen because it was the closest English-owned town to Johannesburg.  The Boers tumbled to this and decided to besiege the town to prevent Baden-Powell from going anywhere. For 217 days the Boers surrounded the town.  It was an extraordinary siege:  Baden-Powell dreamed up all sorts of deceptions to make the Boers think the British garrison was stronger than it actually was.  The two enemies exchanged cordial messages under flags of truce – on Baden-Powell’s birthday the Boer general Piet Cronje sent him a bottle of whiskey.  On Sundays the Brits would play cricket, watched wonderingly by the besiegers, who used to send sarcastic messages about the player’s prowess and – on one occasion - asked if they could join the game.  (Baden-Powell said no.) During this long confinement, Baden-Powell organised the young boys of the town into a Cadet Corp to keep them out of mischief and to help the soldiers.  This would become the founding of the international Boy Scouts Movement. The siege also proved to be the making of Sol Plaatjie, who had been working in Mafikeng as a court interpreter.  He wrote a diary of the siege – the first known black person to keep a diary.  This was the beginning of his journalist career, in which he went on later to found three newspapers, write a Setswana dictionary, translate Shakespeare into his native tongue, and in 1912 become a founding member of the ANC. When the siege of Mafikeng was eventually lifted, people back in Britain, who were keen to find something good about this embarrassing war, went into transports of delight.  So much so that the word ‘to maffick’ – to celebrate extravagantly – entered the English language. There are so many wonderful tales about this siege and other titbits of Mafikeng history that it is possible to spend several days exploring the town.  There is the Mafikeng Museum, the defensive fort Kanon Koppie, several monuments to commemorate those of all the different groups who died during the Siege, several places honouring the extraordinary Sol Plaatjie, a couple of game reserves and resorts, the famous Wondergat (a vast network of underwater caves), the Scout Centre of Excellence for Nature and Environment – an international scouting centre, the International School of South Africa, a couple of golf courses and a casino. A further curiosity of this fascinating town is that it was the capital of Bechuanaland for almost seventy years, even though it was not actually situated in that country.  In 1965 the oddity of having a capital city in another country became rather apparent, and Gaborone was made the capital of what became Botswana.