AUTOGRAPH LETTER

Autograph letter, 255 x 200 mm, on lined paper. The edges are frayed and there are two tape stains and foxing marks.

This handwritten copy of Josepf Johannes "Jopie" Fourie's letter to General Louis Botha is one of the early copies made to circulate among friends, family and supporters of the 1914 Rebellion. In a time of war, fratricide and suspicion, Afrikaners who supported Jopie Fourie kept his letters well hidden. The poet, Jan Celliers records that he kept his Jopie letters hidden in a flask buried in his garden. Later, typed versions of Jopie's letters were secretly circulated, but this handwritten copy, along with a few other copies, must be considered as historical source documents as the original version has still not seen the light of day.

Jopie Fourie addressed this letter to General Louis Botha in the mistaken belief that Botha, as Prime Minister, was responsible for ordering his execution by firing squad. The tragedy is that neither Botha nor the nation were aware that the then Minister of Defence, Gen. Jan Smuts, used his powers under Martial Law, without even consulting Botha, to rely on the legal technicality that since Jopie Fourie had not first resigned his commission as a citizen force officer in the Union Defence Force, he could be shot. He was arrested on 16 December 1914, and a few days later on the Sunday morning of 20 December he faced his killers without a blindfold singing a hymn for them.

At the time, Gen. Louis Botha was not even in Pretoria, but on his farm and the first time that he heard of Jopie's death was hours later in the evening of the 20th December. The main ring leaders of the rebellion, such as Generals De Wet and Kemp were fined and served short periods of their prison sentences. The majority of historians hold that General Koos de la Rey was accidentally shot on 15 September 1915.

This is how Jopie Fourie became the first and most important martyr of the Afrikaner cause and led to the downfall of Gen. Smuts in the 1948 election. The drama of the letters written by a condemned man hours before his death has inspired Afrikaners ever since, and whether or not Gen. Botha would have stayed the execution had he received Jopie's letter before the execution remains a moot point.

The sentence in this letter: "Ik ga op reisen en......Oom Louis en u zendt mij" would only have made sense to Gen. Louis Botha if he had read Jopie's letter to the Afrikaner nation, drafted a few minutes before, which describes Jopie's "reisen", or journey to his heavenly Father and eternity with his trusted leader and friend, Jesus.

Sometimes the names of the recipients of the copies of the Jopie letters had their names written at the top, but usually in the same hand. What looks like "De Wet" written in a different hand on both the right and left hand margins of this document cannot be explained.

This detailed research kindly provided by Arnaud Labuschagne of Gandolph's Books, Kensington, Johannesburg.