Story 3 of 7

Vegkop, 1836

A small wagon laager on the highveld holds out against Mzilikazi’s army.

On 16 October 1836, on a low hill in what is now the Free State, about forty men and boys inside a ring of wagons faced an army of several thousand warriors. The place is still called Vegkop, “fight hill.” It was the first major battle of the Great Trek.

Background

By 1836 Hendrik Potgieter’s Voortrekkers had crossed the Orange and Vaal rivers onto the highveld, the high grassland plateau of the interior. This country lay within reach of the Ndebele (Matabele) kingdom of Mzilikazi, a former Zulu commander who had built a powerful state by conquest and raiding. To Mzilikazi, armed strangers with large herds entering his sphere were a threat.

In August 1836 Ndebele regiments attacked trekker parties camped along the Vaal River, including the Liebenberg family, killing many, among them women and children. Potgieter, who had been away scouting the north, hurried back and gathered his people on a rise near the Rietspruit stream to prepare.

The laager

The trekkers drew about 50 wagons into a tight ring. They lashed the wagons together with chains and stuffed the gaps and the space beneath with thorn branches, so that attackers could not crawl through. In the center they built a smaller enclosure of wagons covered with planks and hides to shelter the women and children. This defensive ring is called a laager. For Americans, it is the original “circling the wagons.”

The defenders numbered perhaps 33 to 40 fighting men, with boys old enough to shoot. Sarel Cilliers, a lay preacher who would later play a key part at Blood River, was among them. Their weapons were muzzle-loading flintlock muskets, slow to reload, so every man had several guns and the women loaded and passed them as fast as they could. Some cast bullets during the fight.

The battle

The Ndebele army, under the commander Mkalipi, is estimated at 3,000 to 6,000 warriors armed with stabbing spears and cowhide shields. Before the attack, a small mounted party rode out to meet them; according to tradition, Potgieter tried to ask why they had come, but got no answer, and the horsemen fired and fell back to the laager.

The warriors then attacked from several sides. They tried to pull the wagons apart and to break through the thorn barriers, and threw spears over the wagons into the laager. The defenders fired at close range, using buckshot loads that cut through massed ranks. The assault lasted perhaps half an hour before the attackers fell back.

About 430 Ndebele were killed, by the trekkers’ count. Two of the defenders died, among them Potgieter’s brother Nicolaas, and around a dozen were wounded. More than a thousand spears were said to have been found inside the laager afterwards.

A costly victory

The laager held, but the Ndebele drove off nearly all the trekkers’ livestock: thousands of cattle and tens of thousands of sheep and goats. Without oxen, the families were stranded on the open veld. They were rescued when the Rolong people of Chief Moroka at Thaba Nchu, along with Wesleyan missionaries and other trekkers, sent oxen to pull their wagons to safety. .

What followed

In January 1837 Potgieter and Gerrit Maritz led a commando, a mounted citizen militia, with Griqua and Rolong allies against the Ndebele town of Mosega and recovered some cattle. In November 1837 Potgieter and Piet Uys attacked again, in a running fight lasting days. Under this pressure, and attacked at the same time by Zulu forces from the east, Mzilikazi moved his people north across the Limpopo, into what is now Zimbabwe, where the Ndebele kingdom was re-founded. The highveld lay open to the Voortrekkers.

Vegkop showed what the laager and the commando could do, tactics that would decide Blood River two years later. In October 2026, 190 years later, the battle was remembered on its 190th anniversary. A memorial stands at the site, south of Heilbron.