Siege of Mafeking

When the Second Boer War began in October 1899, Boer commandos surrounded the small railway town of Mafeking on the northern edge of the Cape Colony. Its commander, Robert Baden-Powell, held out with a mix of volunteers, police and townspeople, using bluff as much as firepower: dummy forts, fake minefields and improvised signals made the defences look stronger than they were. The Boers soon settled into a blockade, and a final assault in May 1900 was beaten off. A relief column reached the town on 17 May after 217 days. Baden-Powell came home a national hero, a fame he later drew on to launch the Boy Scout movement.

The heroic version of Mafeking has been heavily revised. Thomas Pakenham's history of the war argued that Baden-Powell kept the garrison fed partly at the expense of the town's African population, many of whom were pushed out to run the Boer lines or go hungry, a charge Pakenham himself later softened and Baden-Powell's defenders dispute. The siege diary of Sol Plaatje, a Tswana court interpreter in the town who later became a founding leader of the South African Native National Congress, was rediscovered and published in the 1970s and gives a rare African view of the siege. The town was later renamed Mafikeng and then Mahikeng, closer to the Setswana form of its name.