Majuba Hill

Majuba Hill: The colonies of Canada, New Zealand and Australia answered the motherland call, and all three helped turn embarrassing defeats of the first conflict into great triumphs in the second. , according to Times Colonist. Public memory for Majubas warriors was brief. For a few years, Feb. 27 was celebrated as Majuba Day, but by 1917 the overwhelming lists of war dead and wounded had relegated Majuba to a minor scuffle on a remote hilltop in Africa and no longer worthy of memory. Nov. 11 became the new day to bow our heads in reverence and recognition for young lives too soon lost. On one brief day each year, we fall silent as a lone bugle sings its mournful requiem and the pipes play their sad laments and we mourn war dead from 1914 to the present. Earlier conflicts have been removed from memory. The First Boer War ended shortly after the Afrikaaners sent a British army fleeing in retreat from a place called Majuba Hill on Feb. 27, 1881. Nineteen years later, almost to the day, the Boers were themselves evicted from the same remote hilltop by the men of the Royal Canadian Regiment fighting in the Second Boer War. The Canadians were in South Africa in response to a plea from England for help in closing down two new republics Transvaal and the Orange Free State proclaimed by mainly Dutch settlers. Some historians claim Canadas victory at Majuba in 1900 was the first step toward its recognition as a nation of stature, a recognition strongly endorsed 17 years later on Vimy Ridge in the First World War. At Vimy, Canadian soldiers more than proved their mettle in the field; the men who fought there and the women who nursed there have been, and still are, well-remembered on anniversary dates. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.