The Valley of the Kings
Because I’m quite bossy I dictated my requirements for the celebration of our tenth wedding anniversary. Stephen duly complied. I wanted to go and explore my (unacknowledged and barely documented) family history at Rorke’s Drift, dip into some Isandlwana lore and then bask in luxury at a private game lodge for two days. This was a fact finding mission, one where I felt I was single handedly correcting history because it was only in Ian Knight’s 2010 book ‘Zulu Rising’ that the Stockil family get acknowledged as the missing link between the original owner of the farm, Jim Rorke and the Swedish missionary, Otto De Witte who owned Rorkes Drift at the time of the battle. We lived there for some three years before we could smell what the rock was cooking and got the hell out of dodge. We left a few months before the battle to settle in Winterton where we have been ever since. My family traded with King Cetshwayo and he in fact gave us our clan name - uMjangwan which means ‘young ...