Editing South African Republic (section)

===War with Mapela and Makapaan, 1854===
[[Hendrik Potgieter]] was elected at the assembly of 1849 as commandant general for life and it became necessary, to avoid strife, to appoint three commandants general all possessing equal powers.<ref name=krugerp/>{{rp|41}} Commandant General [[Andries Pretorius]] became commandant general of the [[Potchefstroom]] and [[Rustenburg]] districts. On 16 December 1852, Andries died and his son, [[Piet Pretorius]], was appointed as commandant general of the [[Lydenburg]] and [[Zoutpansberg]] districts in his stead.

There were some disputes over cattle which Mapela was raising on behalf of Potgieter and earlier Commandant Scholtz had confiscated a large number of rifles and amounts of ammunition, rifle repair equipment and materials of war from the home of an English missionary, the Reverend Livingstone. Livingstone admitted to storing weaponry for the Secheli, a breach of the Sand River Convention, which prohibited providing arms or ammunition to the natives.<ref name=krugerp/>{{rp|40}}

In 1853, Herman Potgieter was called to Mapela to aid in a cull of the elephant population.<ref name=krugerp/>{{rp|42}} Upon arrival, Maphela guided the Potgieter party, which included Herman, his son, his groom and a few other burghers to the purported location where the elephants were herding. Rather instead, Mapela led the unsuspecting Boers into an ambush where hundreds of native warriors attacked the Potgieter party, killing Andries, then proceeding to drag Herman up a hill, where he was skinned alive. They stopped once they had torn the entrails from his body.<ref name=krugerp/>{{rp|43}} At the same time of these events, the Ndebele chief Magobane (known to the Boers as Makapaan) attacked and killed an entire convoy of women and children traveling to Pretoria. The two chiefs had concluded an agreement to murder all the Europeans in their respective districts<ref name=krugerp/>{{rp|44}} and to keep the cattle that they were raising for the Europeans.

General Piet Potgieter set out with 100 men from Zoutpansberg and Commandant General Pretorius left Pretoria with 200 men. After the commandos met up, they first attacked Magobane and the natives were driven back to their caves in the mountains where they lived before. The Boers held them at siege in their caves and eventually hundreds of women and children came out.

Orphan children of the native tribes were booked in strictly controlled by legal process, at appointed Boer families to look after them until they came of age.<ref name=krugerp/>{{rp|47}} The administration was similar to the system of indentured workers, which was simply another form of slavery, with the exception that children so registered had to be released at age 16. The commando would return all such children to the nearest landdrost district, for registration and allocation to a Boer family.

As there were slavers and other criminals dealing in children, any burgher found in possession of an unregistered minor child was guilty of a criminal offence. These children were also often called "oorlams" in reference to being overly used to the Dutch culture, and in reference to a hand-raised orphan sheep, or "hanslam". These children, even after their 16th birthday, and being free to come and go as they please, rarely re-connected with their own culture and own language and except for surviving and being cared for in terms of food and shelter, were basically forcefully divorced from their native tribe forever.

Among the casualties of this war was Commandant General Potgieter.<ref name=krugerp/>{{rp|46}} The natives were armed with rifles and were good shots. The general was killed by a native sniper on the ridge of a trench and his body recovered by then commandant Paul Kruger whilst under heavy fire from the natives. What remained of the joint commando, now under command of General Pretorius focussed their attention on Mapela. By the time the commando had reached Mapela, the natives had fled. A few wagons, bloody clothes, chests and other goods were discovered at a kop near Mapela's town. Mapela and his soldiers escaped and with their rifles and ammunition intact and Mapela was only captured much later, in 1858.