Die galghout

Emile Badenhorst, curator of the Somerset East Museum, was responsible for bringing the Slagtersnek Rebellion beam back to the Eastern Cape in 2005. The beam was used as a gallows on 09 March 1816 to hang five Boer leaders after the Slagtersnek Rebellion in 1815. Emile discovered the beam in the storage rooms of the South African Museum (now Iziko Museum) in Cape Town. It took 5 years of phoning and organising to bring it to Somerset East. The beam was offered to the museum in the 1980s but the former curator turned it down because it was too sensitive. The beam still bears the bolt holes which secured it to a wooden structure and turned it into a gallows. The leather riempie rope snapped in mid execution and another had to be found to complete the hanging. Normally prisoners would be set free if the rope snapped but not in this case and the men’s wives and children who were forced to attend the hanging had to watch them being hanged again. The rebellion was one of the reasons for the Great Trek. After the hangings the beam was returned to its original purpose which was as a ceiling support in a farm’s pigsty. It was eventually removed and became an icon of Afrikaner nationalism. In 1949, it was transported to the opening of the completed Voortrekker Monument outside Pretoria, after being paraded through Middelburg, Colesburg, Bloemfortein, Winburg, Ventersburg and Parys en route. It ended up at the Cape Town Historical Museum in 1989. http://debuys.blogspot.com/2011/08/slagtersnek-rebellion.html The Slachter's Nek Rebellion of 1815 was the first Boer rebellion against British rule and gained a place in Boer and Afrikaner demonology. Over the New Year weekend of 1895/96 Leander Starr Jameson led a force of 600 men in the so-called Jameson Raid seeking to overthrow the Boer Republic of Transvaal, under President Paul Kruger. But the raid was a fiasco which the Boers quickly suppressed. Residents of the Transvaal who had conspired with Jameson were convicted of High Treason and condemned to death by hanging. The Boers prepared to use in their execution the very beams used by the British to hang the Slachter's Nek rebels.