The Boer War

by Martin Bossenbroek

  Besides those in the service of the Boers or the British, a growing number of non-whites were drawn into the war as members of chiefdoms or nations allied to one of the two parties to the conflict—more accurately, the British. In the early days, notably during the siege of Mafeking, the Boers occasionally enlisted the help of their allies, the Rapulana Barolong, but that was the sum of it. The British, however, began to rely more heavily on armed support from Africans and coloureds. Initially they recruited only from the territories bordering on the Transvaal and Orange Free State—Bechuanaland, Griqualand, Basutoland and Zululand—but gradually they cast their net further, to the Boer republics themselves, recruiting notably among the Kgatla and the Pedi in the north-west and east of the Transvaal.

  Though hostility between the Boers and the black population escalated in the course of the war, the two also had something in common. On Kitchener’s orders, African and coloured families who were not active in the British war effort were systematically removed from the operational arena. Like Boer women and children, they were confined to (segregated) internment camps. As it happens, the same number of Africans and coloureds—115,000—were incarcerated in the same inhumane conditions and with the same appalling mortality rate. And again, most fatalities occurred among children. Although the official death toll was 14,000, Warwick says the real number must have exceeded 20,000.4

  The exhibition in the Sol Plaatje Room is based on Warwick’s findings. This is not the only room in which the museum has moved with the times, at least to some extent. A small outbuilding houses an education centre where information about the Boer War is woven into the national history of the new, multiracial South Africa. Schoolchildren learn the story behind the Afrikaner ‘Sarie Marais’, but they also learn about the tragic fate suffered by black as well as white children in the internment camps. And that in three languages: Afrikaans, English and isiZulu (after English, South Africa’s second lingua franca).

  It is an ‘inclusive’ retrospective of the Boer War, in contrast to the Afrikaner narrative in the rest of the museum and its grounds. The combination takes getting used to, but apparently these things really can coexist in the new South Africa. It is an extraordinary combination, which gives the memorial site in Monument Road the feel of an archaeological dig. Except that here the successive layers of soil, instead of being on top of one another, occur randomly throughout the site.

  Boer War commemoration as an archaeological dig would probably explain the insistent involvement of ANC dignitaries in the centenary events in 1999–2002. The new discovery they held up for inspection was the suffering of the population as a whole. The idea of the Boer War as a collective experience tied in nicely with the prevailing ideal of South Africa as a rainbow nation. Nelson Mandela’s presidency aimed at national reconciliation. Thabo Mbeki, his successor from June 1999, followed this through during the commemoration of the Boer War.

  At the official launch of the commemoration in Brandfort, near Bloemfontein, on 9 October 1999, in the presence of the Duke of Kent, Mbeki honoured all those whom ‘the tides of history’ had swept into ‘a bitter, costly and protracted war . . . Afrikaners, British, Africans, Coloureds, Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders’. Such a war must never be allowed to happen again, Mbeki urged. While paying tribute to the heroism of all who had been involved at the time, he appealed to his audience to dream of new heroes and heroines, ‘who will be the architects of a non-racial, a peaceful and prosperous South Africa’.

  Mbeki’s vice-president, the current president Jacob Zuma, also styled himself as a messenger of reconciliation. A day later he spoke in Mafikeng—the original, now restored name of Mafeking—about Sol Plaatje and his diary, which for once looked at the war from a ‘unique black perspective’. But he also spoke about ‘our historical responsibility to reconcile and heal those old wounds’. Zuma called for blacks and whites to combine their different versions of the story to form ‘a comprehensive narrative’. Because ‘distressing as our past may be, it is a shared past that excludes no South African’. To express this inclusive view, Zuma too coined a new name: the Anglo-Boer South African War.5

  To judge by the event at the museum today, the new name didn’t catch on. It is Saturday 24 September 2011, Heritage Day in South Africa. To mark the occasion, the museum has organised a special morning dedicated to the 110th anniversary of the Anglo-Boer War—in Afrikaans, the Anglo-Boereoorlog—the name by which the war has always been known.

  The museum is less consistent as far as its own name is concerned. It uses its original name, the War Museum of the Boer Republics, interchangeably with its official name, the Anglo-Boer War Museum. This no longer surprises anyone, any more than the ‘archaeological’ aspects of the programme do. A lecture on the (Anglo-) Boer War as ‘the first media war’ was sandwiched between educational films about the Women’s Monument and the museum itself. Then came an anthology of war memoirs. The morning ended with the unveiling of an installation by the Johannesburg artist Willem Boshoff.

  It is difficult to relate Boshoff’s work to any of those other ‘layers of soil’. It represents the suffering of the Boers, but not theirs alone. It is clearly not meant to be inclusive or reconciliatory. Quite the contrary, it is an expression of anger and grief, a scathing indictment in the name of the thousands of children—black, white and coloured—who suffered and died in the British internment camps. Boshoff holds Queen Victoria formally responsible for it and observes that neither she nor her four successors have ever apologised for what he considers a war crime. The title of the installation, 32,000 Darling Little Nuisances, refers to the estimated number of children who died in the camps; ‘darling little nuisances’ is a phrase Queen Victoria once used herself. The work juxtaposes life-sized portraits of the five monarchs with the names of the 1432 children who were interned in Bethulie, one of the most notorious camps of all.

  After the ceremony, 60-year-old Boshoff is happy to talk about his work. With his powerful physique and long beard he looks like a real Afrikaner, which he is, one with a hippie streak. Bethulie was situated near his grandfather’s farm. Two of the children who died there had the same name as his. Like the rest of his family, he has been scarred by the war. At the same time, he denounces extremist right-wing movements, such as the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, which exploit the history of the camps for propaganda purposes. A committed pacifist, Boshoff was a conscientious objector to military conscription under the apartheid regime. He lives, as he says, by humanitarian principles and the dictates of his conscience.

  Boshoff sees a correspondence between the Boer War and the rise of reactionary conservatism among Afrikaners in the twentieth century, the nation’s overreaction, he believes, to anxieties about being reduced to a marginal existence, perhaps being destroyed. The collective trauma of the war generated movements like the National Party, which aimed to protect Afrikaner culture and uncompromisingly appropriate power, only to seek the ultimate illusion of security in the ‘disastrous system of apartheid’.6

  This kind of rationale is nothing new. The hypothesis has been proposed by academics and others. The presumed causal relationship between the war and the apartheid system is one of the five main themes in the historiographical discourse on the Boer War.

  The first of these themes is the war as an atypical climax to British imperialism. The Scramble for Africa (1880–1914) went hand in hand with the violent oppression of the indigenous populations of almost the entire continent by the armies of the European powers. The Boer War was the only major conflict between white adversaries. Its scale can be deduced from the financial cost to Great Britain. In October 1899 the British government believed £10 million would see it through; by May 1902 it had cost £217 million. To put this in perspective, that was 12 per cent of Britain’s gross national product in 1900. This massive expenditure prompted a flurry of research to establish why London had decided to start the war. The answers range from economic and political to psychological and geostrategic m
otives—with the balance ultimately coming down on the side of the politicians in Whitehall rather than the bankers in the City.7

  The second theme examines the political and military links, whether direct or indirect, between the Boer War and the First World War. Widespread sympathy for the Boers on the European continent prompted Great Britain to review its strategic position in relation to emerging economic and military superpowers such as the United States and Germany. Its traditional policy of ‘splendid isolation’ was no longer effective, so Britain sought alliances instead. This led to a construct of diplomatic dominoes which, in the summer of 1914, threatened to collapse. As for the military aspect, the first stage of conventional warfare in the Boer War revealed the senseless slaughter that results from massive frontal attacks against an entrenched adversary.8

  In another respect too, the Boer War was a precursor of what military conflicts would be like in the future. Never before had the media played such an important role in war. Never before had they been represented in such numbers. An estimated 200 correspondents were sent to the war zone, mostly from Great Britain, but also from other parts of the British Empire and the United States. Steamships, steam trains and, most importantly, an extensive telegraph network made it possible to travel and disseminate news with little delay. Besides journalists and other eyewitnesses, there were also artists, photographers and film-makers who played a part in shaping opinions and attitudes around the world. Given the mass of available material, European and American public opinion became the pawn in a full-blown propaganda war between the two sides, which sometimes reached the same frenzied pitch as the war on the battlefield.9

  The fourth theme—the catastrophic impact of the second phase of the war on the civilian populations of the two Boer republics—has already been discussed in the preceding pages. Around 230,000 whites and non-whites were incarcerated; 46,000 are known to have died. In addition, the British troops left a trail of systematic destruction as they swept through the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Hence the guerrilla phase of the Boer War foreshadowed the devastation caused by all-out warfare as in the Second World War.10

  The fifth and final theme is the one Willem Boshoff touched on: the possibility of a causal relationship between the Boer War and the surge of white nationalism, culminating in the apartheid ideology. Much has been written on this subject, but the last word has not been said. The same applies to its corollary: the development of an anti-apartheid movement. After all, the emergence of black nationalism cannot be examined without taking account of the Boer War. The hopes that black leaders had pinned on a British victory were shattered during the peace talks. The aftermath of war brought even greater disillusionment. To their bitter frustration, the non-white population, with a nod from the British administration, ended up with probably even fewer constitutional rights than they had possessed before. The ANC, like the National Party, didn’t come out of nowhere.11

  This last factor is by far the most relevant today and therefore attracts most social and academic interest. All the more reason to return to this in the Epilogue.

  But first, as President Zuma has urged, the whole story must be told. This sounds more self-evident than it is. Few, if any, books offer a complete account. A number expressly aim to do so and some almost succeed. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches. Some writers tell the story from the perspective of the British protagonists, in both Great Britain and South Africa, others from that of the Boer leaders. The most successful accounts present the two points of view alternately as well as that of the non-white population.12

  But what these works have in common, no matter how informative or revealing some of them are, is that they omit one important frame of reference. The story of the Boer War has never been told from the Dutch point of view. What is missing is a vital link in the chain of cause and effect. The Dutch played a crucial part in the prelude to the war and throughout the actual conflict, not just in practical terms because of the input of Dutch actors in key positions but—no less importantly—because of the psychological aspect of the ties between the Dutch and the Boers. It is true that the Netherlands’ infatuation with the Boers may not have impelled the Dutch to take a strong political stand, but emotionally the venerable motherland was a rock and anchor for the Boer cause in Europe. This was felt not only in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State but also in Great Britain. It resounds in the words of the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, who remarked on the eve of the war that in South Africa ‘we, not the Dutch, are Boss’.13

  The part played by the Netherlands, particularly in the period leading up to the hostilities, is one aspect of the Boer War that has largely been overlooked, even in recent Dutch publications. It received attention in older works such as P.J. van Winter’s history of the Netherlands-South African Railway Company, and rightly so given the strategic importance of the railway network built and run by the company. But since the Second World War, nothing more has been said about it. Subsequent histories concerning the ties between the Netherlands and South Africa have focused mainly on their bonds of kinship, language and religion.14

  This book is the first to tell the story of the Boer War from the Dutch point of view as well. But of course it goes further than that. To tell the full story, it weaves this new angle into the bigger picture. As a result, the narrative perspective shifts back and forth throughout the book, from Boer to Briton and, where relevant, to the Dutch.

  It highlights three individuals whose accounts of the period encapsulate the three main narratives of the time, and who themselves have personified those narratives up to the present day. The Boer War made them larger than life and they make the war more real through their journals, correspondence and reports, and later through their memoirs and reflections. They are the Dutch lawyer Willem Leyds, the British war correspondent Winston Churchill, and the Boer commando Deneys Reitz, three young men at the start of their careers, each fighting a just cause and each convinced that right was on his side. There are pictures of them close together at the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein. In real life their thinking and experiences were miles apart. Their story begins in June 1884 in the Amstel Hotel in Amsterdam.

  PART I

  For a good cause

  June 1884—October 1899

  An extraordinary meeting

  Amsterdam, June 1884

  It was an offer he could easily have refused. A PhD cum laude, barely 25 years old, the protégé of distinguished academics at Amsterdam’s celebrated faculty of law, Willem Leyds could take his pick: the judiciary in the East Indies, a chair at Groningen University, or a position with the Nederlandsche Bank. He could choose any career he wanted.

  Then why would he accept such a bizarre proposal? State attorney in the Transvaal? That was the last thing he could have imagined. A country populated by zealous Calvinist cattle farmers, a state not much older than himself, it had little to offer a liberal-minded lawyer. Not to mention the inhospitable cultural climate of the South African highveld. Leyds was not only an academic, but also a gifted artist. He played the cello in a string quartet, read Homer and socialised with the intelligentsia. And now the Transvaal, ‘that intellectual desert’, in the words of his fiancée Louise Roeff.

  Any doubts he may have had were confirmed when he met the man who had made the proposal. Paul Kruger had impressed him with his physical stature, his dark eyes and sonorous voice, his self-assured directness. But the sound came from another world, an echo from the past. The president of the Transvaal was an Afrikaner through and through, a man of the Word, the gun and the wide open savannas. He was also patently unconcerned with his appearance. Leyds, on the other hand, was a handsome young man, groomed to the tips of his stylish moustache. The lumbering grubbiness of the Boer leader, going on 60, filled the luxurious suite of the Amstel Hotel where they had arranged to meet.

  For Leyds the contrast was too sharp, the distance too great and the decision too radical. A few hours later he graciously declined t
he honour. But Kruger wasn’t a man to take no for an answer. He persuaded him to reconsider the offer. That was on Thursday 12 June 1884, the day after Leyds’s graduation. Two days later, the president of the Transvaal would be leaving Amsterdam. Well, why not? Leyds decided to have another word with his mentor Nicolaas Pierson.1

  Leyds’s reservations were understandable. The Netherlands wasn’t sure how to deal with the Boers. They had won admiration for their successful resistance to British colonial rule, but they had only become heroes recently, in December 1880. Who could tell whether the glory would last?

  They had been ignored and forgotten for decades. After the British formally gained control over the Cape Colony in 1806, the white colonists there gradually faded into oblivion. That was the case in the Netherlands too, where most of their forefathers had been born. In the 1850s, when the Boers cast off the shackles of British rule and established the independent republics of the Transvaal (officially the South African Republic) and the Orange Free State, the Dutch responded with an indifferent nod. The ties of kinship had gradually weakened, or been swept under the carpet.

  The few reports about the Boers that slipped through were generally unflattering. They were said to be lazy, stupid, sanctimonious and, worst of all, they mistreated ‘the poor Kaffirs’. Well, it is true that the Boers practised an Old Testament kind of racism, slavery and all, with no sense of shame. On the contrary, they deliberately frustrated the efforts of missionaries who tried to convert the black population to Christianity. So it was mainly the missionary societies that were critical of the Boers and turned public opinion against them, first in Britain and later in the rest of Europe as well. The most incriminating evidence was revealed to the Netherlands by the clergyman Pierre Huet in 1869. Huet had been a missionary for 12 years and had written at length about the plundering, murder and other atrocities committed by the Boers.