The lives and times of the strangest clan in African history
Words: Cameron Luke Peters
“Born on fire, it was as if his whole being had already irrevocably accepted that he could only live by burning himself out.” - Laurens van der Post
If there is any one character from the past who has truly haunted my life, it’s Roy Campbell (1901-57). Have you heard of him? Did you read his poems in second-year English? He it was who wrote the enduring lines:
Attend my fable if your ears be clean,
In fair Banana Land we lay our scene -
South Africa, renowned both far and wide
For politics and little else beside…
(From ‘The Wayzgoose’ (1926))
Our country has produced many exemplary writers over the last century-and-change, but it’s hard to imagine very many others receiving fan-letters from T.S. Eliot. Or having their first book of epic verse (The Flaming Terrapin, published when Campbell was 23) reviewed like this in a prominent London magazine:
“Full circle! We have spun back … back to an exuberant relish of the sheer sonority and clangour of words, words enjoyed for their own gust, and flung down to fit each other with an easy rapture of phrase.”
This is still dead-on. Campbell’s lyrics slap. Here’s how he describes sailing past Adamastor, the mythic monstrous double of Table Mountain, in 1926:
Faint on the glare uptowers the dauntless form,
Into whose shade abysmal as we draw,
Down on our decks, from far above the storm,
Grin the stark ridges of his broken jaw.
Across his back, unheeded, we have broken
Whole forests: heedless of the blood we’ve spilled,
In thunder still his prophecies are spoken,
In silence, by the centuries, fulfilled.
(From ‘Rounding the Cape’)
And I have a special affection for ‘The Sleeper’, which Campbell wrote to his wife and equal, Mary, in 1930, which always reminds me of the friend I fell in love with when I was 21:
She lies so still, her only motion
The waves of hair that round her sweep
Revolving to their hushed explosion
Of fragrance on the shores of sleep.
Is it my spirit or her flesh
That takes this breathless, silver swoon?
Sleep has no darkness to enmesh
That lonely rival of the moon […]
Later in life he turned to translation work and managed to produce some of the most nuanced and spiritually accurate renditions of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Federico Garcia Lorca on the books. In a more obsessive article, I might dive into my theory that Campbell is, indeed, the missing link in the Western Canon between John Keats and Ernest Hemingway.
Like his fellow colonials Olive Schreiner and Katherine Mansfield, he was flabbergastingly renowned and influential in the dead centre of the English literary world during his lifetime, but the century since has seen him marginalised and footnoted. Peter Alexander’s page-turner biography of him (1982) is a fiesta of name-dropping, with extended cameos from the likes of Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Laurie Lee, Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas.
And just like so many of the greatest imaginations of his generation, he repressed his bisexuality, lived far beyond his means, drifted from country to country to avoid his creditors, put his family through hell several times, wrote extended poems to take revenge on a woman his partner had an affair with, abandoned his early socialist ideals to sympathise with fascism, said many extremely anti-semitic things and otherwise survived dozens of personal failures. Can you cancel an artist who’s already half-forgotten? We shall see. What fascinates me is that he grew up on Musgrave Road, just around the corner from my childhood home in Morningside, Durban.
If ever there were proof that truth is stranger than poetry, the Campbells would be it. They are the old Durban family to end all Old Durban Families. And naturally, like so many other emigres, they were swindled into coming. The patriarch was William Campbell, Roy’s grandfather. He was a 29-year-old Scottish railway engineer who - along with his wife, three kids and 122 other marks - was convinced in early 1850 to give up his life savings and set off from the Glasgow docks aboard a brig named the Conquering Hero. Three months later, their boat parked by the Bluff and the Campbells clattered onto the Back Beach to discover that their long-awaited Eden was a mangrove swamp and their banker was bankrupt.
Actually, their banker was an Irish con-man named Joseph Charles Byrne. So successful had he been over the years at seducing settlers into trusting his visions of the warm south that he’d ‘died’ at least twice, before being resurrected as a new gambit each time. One of the first Campbell poems in South Africa is William’s own rueful piece of doggerel recalling the dream he’d been sold on:
‘One day, said old Byrne, ‘when I’d journeyed out there,
I was taking a jaunt and enjoying the air:
My stick, as I wandered, got stuck in a sluit
And I found it next morning all covered with a fruit [...]’
In his memoirs, Roy compares these small beginnings to the French fable ‘Donogoo-Tonka’, in which a village of dupes is lured to Brazil by the promise of El Dorado. A few years later, the villains behind the scheme travel up the Amazon, curious to find any sign of survivors. Instead, to their shock, they find the would-be conquistadors have taken the gap to build El Dorado all by themselves in the middle of the jungle.
Of course, in the real world, the Campbells were helped by the fact that William’s wife, Margaret, like a true Presbyterian, hadn’t taken any chances and had sewn 120 gold sovereigns into the lining of her clothes just in case. But with this windfall, they did basically build the foundations of the Durban we know (aided by the sweat of dozens of disenfranchised Zulu labourers). They started by building Muckleneuk, one of the first profitable sugar estates on the site of the present-day Mount Edgecombe Country Club. Then William engineered and built the first breakwater in the Port Natal harbour, which still forms the base of the North Pier to this day. Additionally, in the process he designed and ran the first railway line in South Africa along the Point, which started by using oxen and wooden carts to pull stones along its tracks from one end of the bay to the other. More than anything, the couple focused on having six more kids and building a dynasty.
These included William the Second, who would become a chief magistrate of the colony of Natal, standing guard over the border with the Zulu Kingdom; Archie, who would work for Cecil Rhodes and join the ‘pioneers’ who crushed the Matabele people and brought Zimbabwe under white rule; Agnes, who aspired to be a missionary and wrote mystical letters like Santa Teresa but died at just 17; and Jessie, who dutifully took on Agnes’s mantle and became a kind of dotty Florence Nightingale to the prisoners and vagrants of Durban - smuggling alcohol into hospitals, bursting into army hymns at public gatherings and refusing to wear eye-glasses for years because she was waiting for express permission from God. She eventually got it.
In fact, the clan had so many cards that neither Roy’s memoirs nor any of his biographies cover them all. Were the others just ordinary souties? I somehow doubt it. Likewise, I am bound by the limits of the record to focus on the two overachievers of the brood: Marshall and Samuel George. These boys were such larger-than-life figures that Roy introduces them with this anecdote:
“[O]n my way out [of Durban] in a convoy during [World War II], I spoke to one of the porters, who came aboard the troopship, in Zulu, and when, unable to conceal his surprise, he asked me: ‘How did you, an English soldier, learn my language?’ and I said: ‘Am I not the nephew of Machu and the son of Sam-Joj?’ - he replied: ‘Like Hell you are - the nephew of Machu would be a colonel; so would the son of Sam-Joj - not a sergeant, like you.’”
If you haven’t heard of any of the people I’ve mentioned so far, you have definitely read Sir Marshall’s name or been affected by his life. He is the man who KwaMashu (literally ‘Place of Marshall’) was named for and he imported the first rickshaws to the Golden Mile beachfront from Japan in the 1890’s. Both gestures started as private projects meant to uplift the housing standards and employment opportunities of the Zulu people displaced by decades of British land-grabs. He was the self-appointed king of the South African Sugar Barons, one of the first senators in the first white South African parliament in 1910 and a close confidante of the first Union Prime Minister, Louis Botha. Like his nephew, he also spouted his share of enduring lines regarding the fate of his nation:
“It seems monstrous to me that a Native, say, who has received a University education, settles in this Colony, the land of his fathers, and conducts himself properly, should have no say in the government or the welfare of his own people. [...] No country can prosper when the largest section of its people has no say in the government of the country.”
In many ways, he and his nephew (despite his love for General Franco) were two of the star figures in the lineage of white liberal guilt that peppers South African history, all the way from Thomas Pringle to semigrant Capetonians like myself. These sentiments didn’t stop Marshall’s wing of the family from living a colonial fantasy.
In 1911, like Rhodes before him, Sir Marshall commissioned Sir Herbert Baker to design and build a lush Cape Dutch Revival mansion (perhaps the only one still standing in KZN) which he named Muckleneuk, in honour of the family homestead. His daughter Margaret the Second - or ‘Killie’ as she was universally known - then spent the next fifty-plus years filling its halls with one of the biggest collections of Africana in the world. Starting with suitcases of books she brought home from browsing London’s antiquarian shops, she died amidst a pile of “32,000 volumes [...] and old photographs, manuscripts, paintings, maps, early Settlers’ records, old Cape and British furniture and an extensive collection of Bantu beadwork, pottery and relics.” Truly a woman after my own heart. This was donated to the Durban City Council, who gave it to UKZN. You can still visit it on Stephen Dlamini Road, though you do need an appointment.
My favourite Campbell though is ‘cousin Ethelbert’, presumably Killie’s brother. Here was a man who managed to convince every newspaper and radio station in the city sometime in the early 1920’s that he had spotted an iceberg floating down from the equator past Umdloti. Thousands of Durbanites believed the headlines and crowded the beaches in excitement. Needless to say, they were quickly disabused of that notion. Both by their eyes and by a local scientist. Likewise, here was a man who bought the entire stock of the Durban Zoo during the First World War when the city was cutting its budget and had the animals trained up to Mount Edgecombe in a private locomotive. Roy takes pains to recount in horrific detail how one of the camels is said to have literally lost its head when it peeked out of its carriage to study an oncoming tunnel.
Not to be outdone by his brother’s stature, Roy’s father Sam founded DUT and the Durban branch of UKZN. Such an impression did he make on his offspring that after his early death in 1926 his daughter Ethel wrote and illustrated a faux-medieval manuscript detailing his life and accomplishments in rhyming couplets:
You can still buy a copy at Ike’s Books on Florida Road if you’re interested. But nor was this reverence confined to his family. Roy himself takes endless pride in quoting how the first Zulu-language newspaper in the country, Ilanga Lase Natal, reported Sam-Joj’s recovery from a car accident in 1916:
“The Doctor is the most popular gentleman in Natal. His kind nature is so well known that a misfortune to him is a misfortune to the whole country. Much as his professional ability is esteemed, yet he could be of still greater use to the Union of South Africa as the Administrator of the Province of Natal.”
Part of this admiration, of course, comes from the fact that he was an extremely skilled man in an educationally-deprived country. He had earned his medical degree in Edinburgh and worked for a year at the Pasteur Institute in Paris when Louis himself still had his office just down the hall. Back in Durban, he seemed to take the Hippocratic Oath more seriously than anyone else alive. For decades he treated all people, regardless of their race or ability to pay him, and he is said to have swum across the Umhlanga river during a storm to reach a Zulu child in a critical state. When Samuel Clemens (AKA Mark Twain) visited Durban on a lecture tour in 1896, Sam Campbell offered to host him and they subsequently kept in touch for a decade. When he died, the authorities couldn’t stop tens of thousands of black South Africans from streaming into the city to pay their respects to his funeral cortege.
Of course, with regards to education, you might be more familiar with Roy’s brother George Campbell, who was content to live up to their father as both a medical man, a founder of technicons and the Chairman of the former University of Natal’s academic council. Today, however, the most admired Campbell beyond eThekwini is Ethel, surprisingly enough - and if you knew her already, you’re probably Australian. She was ‘The Angel of Durban’: a South African Lady Liberty.
As you might expect, given the environment I’ve described, she was a tomboy and spent her late teens hanging round a set of bright young things on the Berea who dubbed themselves ‘The Hooligans’. She then had the luck to fall in love with one of them just before he signed up to go to the Western front at the outbreak of World War I. He died within months, followed by four of her best friends. While she grieved, she drove her father around his circuit of house-calls and imagined what she could do as a woman to serve the war-effort.
A few weeks later, the men aboard a coal ship pulling into the docks were taken by the sight of “a petite, slim young figure in a white middy blouse and sailor collar signalling with two flags from the Breakwater to assure them of a warm welcome at the West Street [Servicemen’s] Hut.” She would then wave them off a few days later by chucking oranges up to their decks and signalling “All is well, and cheerio.”
Two years later, the imperial supply route through the Mediterranean was blocked and the whole British Empire had to detour through Durban. Ethel took the opportunity to become a star. She endeavoured to supply fruits, sweets and cigarettes to the tens of thousands of Australasian troops who briefly rested in the Bay and enlisted the national railways, the mayor, the newspapers and thousands of patrons all around the country to support her cause. But because she wasn’t of sufficient rank for the Navy to give her the harbour’s classified timetable, she lived on the breakwater, waiting in all weathers to welcome all the ships at sea.
More than she knew, her heroics had endeared her to an entire continent of young men. In 1923, when she visited Australia with her parents to see a long-lost aunt, word ran ahead and she was welcomed at every harbour like a returning saint. In Sydney, “a hundred pairs of hands shot out at her, and she stopped to reach out to some of them. A dozen hands clutched excitedly at hers, and held it fast till she was leaning far over the gangway, laughing, and trying to speak to 500 friends at once.”
Even in World War II, two decades later, some of the Australian servicemen who passed Durban made a point to make a pilgrimage up to Hilton, where Ethel was tending to her ageing mother. When she died in 1954, the country observed a day of national mourning.
I have a close friend, who I’ve known for more than half my life, who refers to Durban every time I see him as a mediocre place full of mediocre people that we were lucky to get away from. A part of me agrees. But still I always wince - for a number of reasons. Firstly, I enjoy disagreeing with him. Secondly, I think it’s subtly self-aggrandising to say that everyone you knew growing up was mediocre - besides yourself of course. And thirdly, I have always found the mediocrity of English cities (and other foreign climes) far more galling and embarrassing given the history and expectations we’ve been taught as South Africans.
The Campbells were a lot of things, but they were certainly not mediocre. Like Roy himself, they come over today as being too European for Africa and too African for Europeans; full to the brim of vital, unbelievable love and energy for the world around them. But still invaders, of a kind. Many of them were ‘good whites’, and they embody for me the sadness and isolation of the ex-pat - South Africans who once wore kilts and played the bagpipes in Umhlanga Rocks and now sing ‘Shosholoza’ at Twickenham. Roy would eventually put down the family motto like this: “Better a broken head than a broken spirit every time!”
P.S. I tried to reach out in preparation for this article but couldn’t contact any living Campbells. If one of you is reading this, please reach out! Would love to learn more lore.
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