On the eve of the Second Boer War in 1899, Colonel Robert Baden-Powell was sent to raise mounted regiments on the frontier between the British Cape Colony and the Boer republics. He chose Mafeking as his supply base: it sat near the border, on the railway between Bulawayo and Kimberley, and held good stocks of food. It was also isolated and exposed. Ordered to keep a mobile cavalry force, Baden-Powell instead chose to tie down half his men defending the town. The Boers, under General Piet Cronje, cut the railway and telegraph and surrounded Mafeking from 13 October. The siege had begun, and it would last 217 days.

What followed became the stuff of imperial folklore. The defenders dug a six-mile ring of trenches. They built a howitzer in the railway workshops and pressed an antique cannon from 1770 into service, the barrel happening to bear the initials B.P. Short of coins and banknotes, Baden-Powell printed his own siege money on woodcut presses, currency that today sells for far more than it was ever worth. Lord Edward Cecil, son of the British prime minister, organised local boys aged twelve to fifteen into a cadet corps that carried messages and freed men for the firing line, an arrangement Baden-Powell would later cite as a seed of Scouting. Lady Sarah Wilson, aunt of Winston Churchill, smuggled out dispatches and is remembered as one of the first women war correspondents.

The legend has a shadow, and it lived in the stadt, the adjacent African township where the Barolong people made up most of Mafeking's population; roughly four in five residents of the town were Black. When food ran short from early 1900, the rationing was not shared equally. Black residents received less than white ones, and Baden-Powell eased the garrison's shortage in part by withholding rations from the Barolong town next door, leaving its people to face hunger and worse. Among those who lived through it was Sol Plaatje, a brilliant twenty-three-year-old court interpreter whose siege diary, published decades later, gives us the rarest thing from this war: an African account of it. His Mafeking is not the gallant adventure of the English memoirs. It is a place where the people who suffered most were the people the legend forgot.

On 12 May, in the siege's final spasm, a Boer force under Field Cornet Sarel Eloff slipped through the defences before dawn, set fire to the stadt, and seized a police post, only to be cut off and beaten back by nightfall. Days later a relief column fought its way in. Mafeking had held. For no decisive military gain, the townspeople and garrison had suffered 212 killed and more than 600 wounded. Baden-Powell emerged the youngest major-general in the army and a household name, though sober military critics judged he had risked too much and tied down more of his own side than the enemy's. In 1908 he published Scouting for Boys, and his fame carried it: the Boy Scout movement spread across the world. The town, renamed Mahikeng, still stands, and so does the obelisk raised in 1904 to those who fell in its defence.