Sara (Sarah/Susara) Johanna Adriana Nel

Sarie Marais's true story Graves of Aya Jana and Sara Maré, 6km east of Greytown off the D479 to Kranskop P GT Laid to rest side-by-side in a poignant setting deep in a wattle plantation on the farm Welgegund, are two South African women of diverse cultures, brought together by extraordinary circumstances. Among the early settlers in the district of uMvoti was the Maré family, who brought with them a young girl by the name of Aya Jana. Aya was of mixed race who had, as a small child, been orphaned when the Trekkers and Mzilikazi’s Matabele clashed at Mosega. She had then been taken in by a Trekker family. Little over a year later, the family had been camped along the banks of the Bloukrans River when they had been attacked by a Zulu force in what became known as the Bloukrans Massacre of 1838. Although seriously wounded, young Aya had escaped with her life by feigning death while being prodded with assegais. She had been nursed back to health, adopted by an uncle and aunt of one Susara Johanna Adriana Maré, and raised as one of their own. Sara, as she was better known, was herself born in 1840, and so grew up under the watchful eye of Aya, in effect her step-cousin. In 1857 seventeen-year-old Sara Maré and Louis Jacobus Nel of Welgegund farm were married at the unpretentious little Church of the Vow in Pietermaritzburg. Ten years later a son, who they named Paul, was born to them. Ten years thereafter, 37-year-old Sara Nel gave birth to her eleventh child, and in so doing, passed away. In 1891, while studying theology in Stellenbosch, Paul Nel turned 24. That year a rugby team was selected to represent the town to play against the first British team to tour southern Africa. Captain of the visitors was WE Maclagan, while leading the Stellenbosch XV was young Nel. With the outbreak of the South African War in October 1899, Paul Nel, who was then Dutch Reformed Church minister of the Jeppestown congregation in Johannesburg, joined the republican forces as a field chaplain, only to be captured weeks thereafter during the Battle of Elandslaagte. Nel was later released on parole and so returned to his parish. After the British occupation of Johannesburg and the opening of a concentration camp at Turffontein, Nel received permission to visit the camp and minister to the internees, some of whom were men too old or infirm for battle. Also granted permission to visit the camp from time to time was Ella de Wet, wife of Nicolaas Jacobus de Wet, then General Louis Botha’s military attaché. Here Nel would relate moving stories about his mother, Sara, who had died so young, while Ella de Wet would encourage the inmates to sing from The Cavendish Song Album as she accompanied them on piano. Amongst the songs in this book is Ellie Rhee - popularly known as Carry me back to Tennessee - which has its origins in the American Civil War. Inspired by their pastor’s reminiscences of his beautiful mother, the inmates gradually began adapting the song to their mother tongue. On 16 December 1912 Aya Jana attended the historic Festival of the Voortrekker Vow held in the Pietermaritzburg church in which Louis Nel and Sara Maré had married 55 years earlier, and amongst the dignitaries seated alongside her was the aged widow of Andries Pretorius, the man after whom the people of uMvoti had four years prior to the wedding proposed to name their town! Then, in 1915, Ella de Wet, her husband now a judge in the Transvaal Supreme Court, sat down with Ellaline Roos to record the music and Afrikaans lyrics that had evolved from Ellie Rhee during her choral sessions with the inmates of the Turffontein Concentration Camp. It must have been an Ella of a task, but between them the two ladies somehow battled through. After a huge amount of thought and constant and painstaking reference to Die Groot Afrikaans/Engels Woordeboek (The Big Afrikaans/English Dictionary), ‘Carry me back to Tennessee’ became ‘Bring me back to the old Transvaal’ - the ‘old’ being a reference to the Transvaal the republicans so cherished before British occupation – Ellie went from Sara to Sarie and Rhee from Maré to Marais. And there, in the home of Ella de Wet, the music script lay until Louis Botha, after a long illness, passed away in Pretoria in August 1919. He was succeeded as prime minister by General Jan Christian Smuts, and it was Smuts who now urged the wife of his predecessor’s former military attaché to publish her song. This she did the following year, and in no time at all Sarie Marais, with its lilting melody and doleful lyrics, was firmly established in the annals of boeremusiek (Afrikaans folk music). Radio broadcasts in Natal only commenced in December 1924, so it is highly unlikely that Aya Jana ever heard a rendition of Sarie Marais, and even had she; it is equally unlikely that she would have been aware that the lyrics of the song referred to her step-cousin, for she died in 1925 at the ripe old age of 93. Aya was laid to rest alongside Sara Maré in this hauntingly beautiful little cemetery on the Nel’s original farm, a few kilometres east of Greytown. If it wasn’t already, Welgegund was at long last ‘well endowed’.

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See also: Sarie Maré