History for sale

“It’s the culmination of a long process,” says Chico da Silva of Consolidated Auction Group, the asset specialists who in 2011 launched a historic memorabilia awareness project called Heritage Watch.

“We have accumulated a wide selection of collectable items from our history, covering a wide span of time. Of course there are lots of militaria, such as keepsakes made by prisoners of the great, three-year, South African War who were incarcerated as far afield as Bermuda and Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka.

“We’ve also been shown prayer books and other items dating back to the 1830s when conflict on the Eastern frontier spurred a large segment of settlers to move further East and North. But one of the most iconic possessions, in my humble opinion, that we have been entrusted so far, must be an assegai and knobkierie that its current owner claims was removed from the royal hut of Shaka Senzangakhona, not long after his brutal assassination in the area of Stanger in September 1828.”

The assegai and kierie bare certain signs of timeworn ageing, in particular the assegai, where the senewy thread around the shaft, holding the blade in place, has been rubbed down over the years.

Its current owner recalls that his father, Heubert van der Stadt Joubert, received it as payment.

“My father was a farmer in the Pongola region who, in 1978, flew to Wonderboom Airport in his Cessna to collect vaccines from Onderstepoort against an outbreak of anthrax,” he says. “That same day he was approached by an iNduna who needed help with his own cattle. My father, being fluent in Zulu, listened to the old man’s pleas and, without hesitating, drove deep into the hills of Nongoma to treat the iNduna’s livestock at his ancestral kraal. When my father was done the Zulu elder gave him the assegai and knobkierie and said: ‘I don’t have money to give you for what you did here today, but I can give you these.”