Natal Rebellion Medal 1906

[Tony Farrell]

Instituted by the government of Natal province in 1907, this medal was issued to local volunteer units & constabularies for service against the Zulu rebellion. This was the result of the Zulus' refusal to pay taxes and the subsequent murder of 2 Natal policemen provoked reaction.

The local authorities responded accordingly (after all, one simply cannot have Johnny Zulu getting all bolshy, what?) and the unrest was quelled before the situation deteriorated. Eligibility was 20-49 days service and those who served more than 50 received the clasp 1906. One notable recipient of this medal was a Sergeant Major Mahatma K Ghandi - at that time a medical orderly who subsequently led India to independence from the British Raj.

[Tony Farrell]

These medals were minted by the Gold & Silversmiths of London, not by the Crown, so are really a private issue, albeit an officially recogniosed one. And the rather pretty reverse:

[Chris Boonzaier]

Here is a bar to Lt W. Owen.

Not really a "Nice" guy, his record in the boer war was not the stuff great careers were made of, he was in the cape mounted rifles detachment that served in the 1906 affair.

In WW1 he was one of the very first, maybe THE first suth African casaulty. After the battle at Sandfontein in 1914 in GSWA the Germans took the encircled South Africans POW including the wounded, other than 4 seriously wounded who they sent back to the South African lines. Among them was W. Owen.

He had been wounded during the first shots of the battle, loosing his sight permanently. After spending therest of the day laying out in the desert under fire, he was captured and sent back.

Later in life he became an alcoholic and wife beater.

Of course, the reaction to the Zulu rebellion was not nealry as over the top as when the South African air force bombed a tribe in the northern cape because they refused to pay their dog taxes...strange but true

[Tony Farrell]

Not nealry as over the top as when the South African Air Force bombed a tribe in the Northern Cape because they refused to pay their dog taxes...strange but true.

Blimey, don't give the government ideas for Council Tax recoupment, for gawd's sake!

[Chris Boonzaier]

"The colonial subjects of South West Africa were not given the same right to decide their national destiny. They had innocently believed that South Africa would restore the freedom and territory taken from them by the Germans. Their new rulers were only concerned to provide white settlers with land and labour. The Bondelswart section of the Nama revolted in May against the threatened deportation of their leader Abram Morris, a hero in the liberation war of 1906 against German colonial rule. Police and troops, aided by aeroplanes from Pretoria, bombed and machine-gunned them into submission. The indomitable Morris and more than sixty of his men died fighting. His world had taken on the cramped lineaments of slavery' under the rule of white men who knew no rights other than their own, wrote Freislich, the sympathetic narrator of this Nama epic. Morris could regain freedom only if he destroyed that world by his death. An immediate cause of the rising was an increase in the dog tax from a flat rate of 7s. 6d. an animal to £4 10s. for four on a sliding scale. "