The Boer War

by Martin Bossenbroek

  At two o’clock that afternoon the document was presented to the delegates. The outcome was almost an anticlimax. The proposal was adopted by an overwhelming majority of 54 to six—three Transvalers and three Free Staters. Burger delivered a last solemn word. Dominee J.D. Kestell led the closing prayer. Then Kitchener’s representatives were called in. A deathly silence fell as Botha announced that the meeting had adopted the British government’s peace proposal.

  Hurried preparations were made for the official signing. Burger, Reitz, Botha, De la Rey and the two members of the Executive Council, L.J. Meyer and J.C. Krogh, signed on behalf of the Transvaal. De Wet, Hertzog and the two members of the government, W.J.C. Brebner and C.H. Olivier, signed for the Orange Free State. Just before 11 that evening their train pulled in at Pretoria. Kitchener and Milner were waiting for them in Melrose House. The formalities were over in five minutes. Burger signed first, Milner last. The Boer War had officially come to an end. The silence was unearthly. Kitchener was the first to speak. ‘We are good friends now.’141

  Epilogue

  Winners and losers

  Bloemfontein, 6 July 2012

  Today is the closing date. If no objections have come in, the decision will be final. In future, Paul Kruger Avenue in Bloemfontein will be known as OR Tambo Street. The street signs will be replaced. ‘Oom Paul’ will disappear to make way for ‘OR’. The Boer leader who started the war against the British has been superseded by the ANC leader who fought against the apartheid regime.1

  This is nothing unusual. Streets, cities and countries are renamed after a change of regime. In South Africa the process has actually been relatively slow: 18 years have passed since the ANC came to power. But now it is being implemented more vigorously, and not just in Bloemfontein but throughout the country; in Durban and Cape Town by the score.2

  The whole procedure has stirred unrest, notably in Pretoria, the country’s administrative capital, where the name of the city itself is at issue. A resolution to rename it Tshwane has touched a raw nerve in the Afrikaner community. Pretoria has been the bastion of Afrikanerdom since it was founded in 1855 by Marthinus Pretorius, who named it after his father. Even today, its inhabitants are predominantly Afrikaners and 75 per cent are white.3

  The change touches a nerve because the new name is as emotionally charged as the one it replaces. Tshwane was a legendary chief of the Ndebele, hence an ancestor of Mzilikazi and Lobengula. He is said to have ruled the area where Pretoria is now situated in the eighteenth century, long before the Voortrekkers arrived. The evidence consists of information transmitted orally from one generation to the next. In 2006 a six-metre bronze sculpture of Chief Tshwane was erected in the square outside the City Hall, opposite the existing statues of Pretorius and his father.

  The symbolism is unmistakable. A city’s name, the sculptures in its streets: this is about defining public space. It is a political test of strength, with the historical dimension of competing invented traditions. Pretoria and Tshwane stand for disparate narratives of South Africa’s history, and different answers to questions like ‘Which tribe was here first, the Ndebele or the Voortrekkers?’ or ‘Who developed this country, the whites or the blacks?’ The answers to these questions have far-reaching implications. Ultimately they shape the paramount social debate in South Africa today: ‘Who does this country belong to?’4

  The ANC centenary, celebrated on 8 January 2012, appears to have heightened its leaders’ awareness of the importance of historical claims. The church in Bloemfontein where the ANC was founded was spruced up in time for the celebrations. Claims to the past are not going to stop there. The government recently identified an additional 28 heritage projects which, in President Zuma’s words, will help ‘to correct the legacies of a colonial and apartheid past’.5

  So it would seem that the ANC has finally gained the upper hand. Things looked very different a century ago. In terms of legal status, the African and coloured populations were in fact the real losers of the Boer War.

  The Peace of Vereeniging, which ended the war on 31 May 1902, dealt a blow to African leaders like Sol Plaatje. All their sacrifices had been in vain. Their support of the British was rewarded with betrayal. Article 8 of the peace treaty may have seemed innocuous, but it extinguished all hope. ‘The question of granting the Franchise to Natives will not be decided until after the introduction of Self-Government.’ In other words, it wasn’t going to happen at all. The Boers would never have accepted it. The British yielded to the demands of their vanquished adversaries. The whites had settled their differences on a piece of paper and excluded the rest of the population.

  They excluded coloureds and Africans and the immigrants from British India represented by Mohandas Gandhi, whose loyalty during the war, whose ambulance corps on Spion Kop and other battlefields, counted for nothing. Gandhi was faced with the same truth as Plaatje and every other leader of every non-white community.

  This applied not only in the two former Boer republics but in the Cape Colony and Natal as well. Article 8 was just the beginning. In the following years, the Boers and the British throughout South Africa shared a common view of the destiny of their African and coloured compatriots. Their only future was as a labour force for the mines and the agricultural sector, and for that they had no need of the vote or any other civil right. What they needed was passes, by the handful, to prevent them from coming and going as they pleased.

  Only one more attempt was made to put up a show of organised resistance against white rule. In Natal in 1906, a local chief, Bambatha, rebelled against the introduction of a new tax. The British colonial administration responded with an iron fist and the Bambatha uprising was brutally suppressed. Thousands of Africans were killed and thousands more imprisoned or flogged.

  Gandhi reacted by making one last attempt. Again, he offered the colonial regime the services of the Indian community, initially in the form of a combat unit, subsequently as an ambulance corps. Their second offer was accepted, but that too failed to achieve its ulterior objective. The colour bar couldn’t be crossed by his people, either. Disillusioned, he abandoned his struggle for acceptance by the whites and turned to a new strategy, satyagraha, nonviolent resistance.

  Black leaders like Sol Plaatje also reached a breaking point. They too had spent years fruitlessly pinning their hopes on those among the British who supported their cause. The ultimate instrument of oppression was the Natives Land Act of 1913, which denied Africans and coloureds the right to own land except in a few designated areas, which amounted to seven per cent of the land surface. Other black leaders around the country had responded to the growing discontent by establishing the (South) African (Native) National Congress.6

  On a very different, less existential level, the Netherlands was also one of the losers of the Boer War. The Peace of Vereeniging allowed the use of Dutch in schools and law courts, but apart from that the old motherland’s role had played out. The strategic bastions of Dutchness that President Kruger had painstakingly constructed in the Transvaal had disintegrated during the war. The Netherlands-South African Railway Company, the proud flagship, had been nationalised and its staff deported by the British.

  Willem Leyds personified the demise—and originally the creation—of the ‘Dutch connection’. For him the Peace of Vereeniging was a threefold defeat. The Boers had lost. The Netherlands’ input in South Africa was at an end. And on a personal level the peace came as a shock. Up to the end he had clung to the belief that things would come right. All of a sudden he had to face up to reality, not just the country’s, but his own as well. In a single stroke he was unemployed and stateless. He was 43 years old, young enough to make a fresh start, but did he actually want to?

  A few days later he knew the answer. The Boer cause had become too great a part of his life. He couldn’t shake off the 18 years he had spent living in and working for the Transvaal. In early June 1902 he wrote to his brother, saying, ‘I won’t give up hope.’ He firmly believed that ‘the Boer
element in South Africa will triumph in the end’. Leyds dedicated the rest of his life to that aspiration. Not that he wasn’t in demand. He could have held a chair at the university in Leiden, he could have been consul-general in Teheran, but he chose The Hague—once more as a Dutch national and still for the cause célèbre which had come his way on the brink of his career as a lawyer. After returning to the Netherlands he devoted himself to writing historical works with pregnant titles like ‘The Containment of the Boer Republics’.

  Leyds was rarely to return to South Africa. In 1904 he escorted the recently deceased former President Kruger to his last resting place. After that, he seldom accepted invitations, preferring the solitude of his study. He felt that public life in South Africa had become ‘completely politicised’ and refused to become embroiled in the feud between the Afrikaners. He spent his time writing and rewriting the history he had been instrumental in shaping. For him too, Paul Kruger was the hero and Britain the source of all evil.

  But history didn’t stand still. It almost brought an ironic end to Leyds’s life. In early May 1940, amid fears of a German invasion, the 81-year-old Leyds decided to flee from the Netherlands. The only place left that he could go to was England. What could be more incongruous than for him to seek refuge in the country he had been castigating for years? But fate intervened. He took ill while preparing for the journey and died in hospital in The Hague on 14 May 1940.7

  Great Britain may have emerged as the winner of the Boer War, but its losses were staggering. Over 22,000 soldiers killed, more than half by disease, 400,000 horses and mules slaughtered, £217 million squandered. Not to mention the incalculable damage to the country’s prestige. Its reputation as a military power was tarnished, its moral authority in shreds, its diplomatic status undermined, and the nation’s self-confidence shaken as a result. Against this background it wasn’t surprising that London had had enough of the war, and that in May 1902 it was prepared to make more concessions to the Boers than a year earlier.

  To Winston Churchill the Peace of Vereeniging didn’t come as a surprise. Through well-connected acquaintances like Ian Hamilton he was kept informed about everything—including his friend’s growing sympathy with the Boer generals. They ranked higher in Hamilton’s estimation than the ‘Cape loyalists’ or the Uitlanders. Churchill agreed. He, too, was in favour of assisting the Boers to recover as quickly as possible. They were ‘the rock’ on which the British would build in South Africa.8

  Once peace was restored, Milner busied himself with the aim of totally anglicising the two old and the two new colonies. But he met with resistance from the Afrikaners as well as the English-speaking community. Forgive, forget and join hands with the Boers. This was the groundswell of opinion among the British, in London as in Cape Town and Durban. Besides the promised £3 million in reparations, ten times more was provided in loans to rebuild the ravaged country.

  In 1905 the process of reconciliation was given an extra boost. In Cape Town Milner was replaced by the more amenable Lord Selborne. In London the Liberals superseded the Conservatives, and Churchill, whose politics had become more progressive, was appointed secretary for the colonies in the new Cabinet. In this capacity he made a substantial contribution to South Africa’s transition to self-government. Finally, on 31 May 1910 the four colonies were united to form the Union of South Africa, as a dominion of the British Empire.

  The First World War was the litmus test for the new state. The South African government suppressed an uprising by former Boer commandos and opted to give Great Britain its active support. Thousands of troops were deployed against the German colonies in Africa and subsequently in Europe as well. For many it meant rubbing shoulders again with their old enemies from the Boer War, but this time they were on the same side. One of their comrades-in-arms was Winston Churchill. In the meantime he had risen to the heights of political office and also taken a hard fall. Hoping to restore his reputation, he returned to the trenches near Arras in 1916, now as lieutenant-colonel of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. In early 1917 the 1st Battalion came to relieve them. Among them was a South African major, a man called Reitz.9

  Many Boers were in shock after the Peace of Vereeniging. Their losses were horrific. 34,000 people had died, 6000 in battle, 28,000 in the camps, mostly children; millions of cows, sheep and horses had been lost, thousands of farmhouses ruined, all their property and possessions had gone up in smoke, their land lay barren. And these were only the visible scars.10

  Deneys Reitz bore witness to their bewilderment. The proceedings at Vereeniging in May 1902 cut him to the quick. The 60 Boer fighters assembled there were ‘the pick of our nation—all brave fighters and tough as nails’. Now they lay in their tents, ‘weeping like children at the grave of their freedom’. His father was devastated. He had signed the ultimatum that unleashed the war, and now the peace treaty that ended it. Unable to endure any more, he went to the Netherlands to join his wife and youngest children. Deneys stood by him, but chose his own exile. He settled in Madagascar, where he eked out a living by conveying goods.11

  Yet, the Reitz family had been fortunate to survive it all. Most Boer families were in mourning, for a vanished past, for the loss of those who had died or for those who had made the ‘wrong’ choice and disappeared from their lives for ever. The lost war gouged a rift between bittereinders and hensoppers in Afrikaner society which remained long after peace was restored. Divided, they were unable to grieve as a nation and come to terms with their loss. This was the real tragedy and its effects were felt for decades.

  On the face of it, however, the Boers seemed to have recovered from their defeat in no time at all. Deneys Reitz was a good example. In December 1903 he was back in Pretoria, penniless and half dead with malaria. Jan Smuts and his wife took him into their home and nursed him back to health. He went on to study, became a lawyer, and witnessed the country’s economic revival and the political success of Louis Botha’s South African Party, which espoused a policy of appeasement with Great Britain. In 1910 Botha became the first prime minister of the Union of South Africa. Four years later Barry Hertzog formed the anti-British National Party in opposition to the government.

  The First World War also confronted Reitz with difficult decisions. His old commando comrade Manie Maritz, the Leliefontein avenger, the hurler of bombs at O’Okiep, led a rebellion, backed by thousands of bittereinders, including Christiaan de Wet. But Reitz sided with Botha and, in particular, Smuts, under whose leadership he helped to suppress the rebellion and conquer the territories of German South West Africa and German East Africa. He subsequently enlisted on the European front. Thanks to Smuts, who had become a member of the Imperial War Cabinet, he was assigned to the Royal Scots Fusiliers, and served in the trenches of Arras, following in Churchill’s footsteps.

  In later years Reitz remained loyal to Smuts, now in the realm of politics. Smuts succeeded Louis Botha as prime minister of the country until he was superseded by Hertzog in 1924. The 1930s saw a remarkable intermezzo in Afrikaner politics. The South African Party, led by Smuts, and Hertzog’s National Party reconciled their differences and formed the United Party, a move that met with disapproval from nationalist extremists.

  The Second World War brought an end to the alliance. Anti-British sentiment, which had been dormant, flared up again. Hertzog chose the path of neutrality but was outvoted by Smuts, who took the country to the war on Britain’s side. Like Smuts, Reitz supported Great Britain unconditionally. His last public office was that of high commissioner in London. His official residence was South Africa House, not far from the Cabinet War Rooms, where Churchill, now prime minister, was supervising the British war effort.12

  The Voortrekker Monument, on the outskirts of Pretoria, is an ambiguous piece of architecture. It falters between two ideas, strange as that description may be for a monolithic 40-square-metre building surrounded by a circle of 64 granite oxwagons. But it’s precisely this paradox that intrigues. What does it mean? That t
he Boers have established themselves so firmly in this country that they’ll be here forever? Or the opposite? That they could break up their laager any moment and move on to a new Promised Land?

  The architect, Gerard Moerdijk, had the former idea in mind. He wanted his building to stand for the next thousand years as a testimony to the historic importance of the Great Trek. In 1949 the monument was inaugurated by the new prime minister, D.F. Malan, the ‘purified’ nationalist who had won the election from Smuts a year earlier. The National Party was back in power. Racial segregation became more firmly entrenched as an official policy. Twelve years later, on 31 May 1961, the Afrikaners cut themselves off from the outside world when South Africa severed its ties with Great Britain and became a republic. Fifty-nine years, to the day, after the Peace of Vereeniging, the bittereinders had prevailed. The Boers were now boss in the whole of South Africa.

  But not for a thousand years. Thirty years later, under the pressure of internal resistance and protest from abroad, the apartheid regime was forced to back down. President F.W. de Klerk took the first step in 1990. The African National Congress was unbanned and Nelson Mandela was released from prison. In the first non-racial general election, in 1994, the ANC won 63 per cent of the vote. Mandela was elected president. The land of apartheid became the Rainbow Nation. In 2009 the ANC still gained a two-thirds majority.

  The Voortrekker Monument still stands today. Moreover, it has recently become the first Afrikaner monument to be declared a national heritage site under the new dispensation. Announcing this on 16 March 2012, the arts and culture minister, Paul Mashatile, described the nomination as a step towards reconciliation and an acknowledgement of the monument’s ‘deep historical significance to the Afrikaner community’. But it meant different things to different people, he added. ‘Part of our history is painful. It is a history of exclusion, suppression, domination of one by another and a history of division. However, we cannot wish away this history.’