WWI and the People of South Africa

BILL NASSON

WWI

AND THE PEOPLE OF SOUTH AFRICA

Tafelberg

To Lucy and Lola, not the dogs of war

Dwindle, dwindle, Big big war, How I wonder more and more,

As about the world you hop, when you ever mean to stop.’

– Author’s adaptation of the satirical Anglo-Boer War verse by Saki (Hector Munro), The Westminster Alice (London, 1902).

‘I want the wisdom ignorant of wars and the soft key that opens all the locks.

I want the touch of fur, the slant of sun deep in a golden, slotted, changing eye.’

– verse extract, Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Futurology’, in Liz Gray (ed.), You have breath for no more than 99 words. What would they be? (London, 2011).

Preface

Today, as we reach the centenary of the catastrophic world war that was once called the war to end all wars, we now have a greater appreciation of it as a huge global conflict, indeed, as a turning point in modern history. The industrial bloodbath brought about by the nations of the European imperial world consumed not only Europe itself. For, while the peace that came eventually depended on the outcome of the conflict in Europe and on its Western Front, regions very far away were sucked into a titanic struggle, and were affected in deep and complicated ways.

In what was then the Union of South Africa, readers of the souvenir booklet of Cape Town’s official peace celebrations of August 1919 were reminded of how fortunate they had been, as their ‘security was never disturbed by an enemy ship. No Zeppelins or aeroplanes have bombed our streets. Not a single citizen has had cause to fear for his personal safety.’ Nevertheless, as The Peace Celebrations – Cape Town 1919 concluded, even ‘here in this bright and sunny land of ours’, in which ‘we have been spared the horrors of the scourge’, South Africa’s people had been drawn into ‘a hundred activities called into being by the War’ and had ‘all learned much’.

This book is an attempt to provide a perspective on that distinctive wartime experience, for this was especially a country in which people did not respond to the crisis of 1914-1918 in simple terms, nor in tidy ways. While a relatively small number of men volunteered to fight beyond the country’s borders, they left behind a place in which life consisted of a messy, at times painful, combination of conflicting loyalties, doubts, hostilities, hatreds, strains and uncertainties. I hope that a sense of that atmosphere might convey to the reader some appreciation of the complexities and varying challenges of the war for the people of South Africa, in what was truly a global war of many peoples.

In explaining what kind of book this is – a short, illustrated account of how the inhabitants of South Africa responded to the war, and lived as a population at war – I should at the same time say what this book is not. It is not about how South Africa’s war has come to be commemorated or remembered nationally. Nor, although it is shaped by the realities of why and where South Africa fought, is this a general military history, concerned with the particulars of campaigns, battles and the individual experiences of fighting in Africa and overseas. That said, many of the illustrations that follow are intended to document something of that sharp end – what the great American poet Walt Whitman called, in 1863 (in the middle of his country’s Civil War agony), the ‘red life-blood oozing’. In its own way, photography captures vividly the essential character of this war, through images that are a peculiar assortment of the strange and the familiar, the repellent and the fascinating.

In the course of producing any book, one always incurs numerous debts. In this instance, I have a fair share, to say nothing of a lot more besides. Among the many to whom I owe an assortment of war reparations over the years, I should like to thank especially Albert Grundlingh, Mark Connelly, Alan Kramer, John Horne, Robert Gerwarth, Jay Winter, Ian van der Waag, Jeffrey Grey, Natie Greeff, Mac Bisset and Jacques de Vries. I would also like to record my gratitude to other treasured friends and acquaintances who have taken a kind and encouraging personal interest in the progress (or otherwise) of my World War One scribblings, particularly Vivian Bickford-Smith, David Johnson, Jenny Hobbs, Helen Binckes, Lydia du Plessis, Tanya Wilson, Gareth Smit, Hugh Corder, Lauren van Vuuren, Alex Matthews, Keren Ben-Zeev, Wilhelm Snyman, Claire Keeton, Tim Couzens and Roger Goodwin. My warm thanks, too, to the many stimulating students of my War and Society courses, previously at the University of Cape Town and, more recently, at the University of Stellenbosch, for helping me to maintain a long campaign – to what end is for them to judge.

Once again, I cannot praise too highly my perfectionist, perceptive and generous publishing editor, Annie Olivier, for the extraordinary amount that she has contributed to the production of this book. I am also grateful to others at my publisher, Tafelberg, for expert assistance and constant encouragement, not least Surita Joubert, whose promoting of books is almost surpassed by her promoting of fine wine.

I am also most grateful to the Military Museum of the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town for permission to have rare items from its collections photographed and displayed in these pages.

Some of the material used here appeared in a different form in Springboks on the Somme (Penguin Books, 2007). Here, too, acknowledgement is due.

Finally, how do I thank Ann and Leah, who continue to live cheerfully with this sort of human activity?

Naturally, none of the above bears any responsibility for the opinions and arguments of this volume, nor for its errors or shortcomings. This applies most of all to the pair of constant companions to whom this work is dedicated. Stubbornly non-literate, at most they might bring themselves to give it a bored sniff.

BILL NASSON,

Professor of History at the University of Stellenbosch

1

South Africa and Africa in the World before War

Before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, Europe’s major imperial powers had given little serious thought to the position of their African colonial possessions in the possible event of a major war in Europe. Whatever scenarios were being thought up in London, Paris or Berlin were little more than sketchy. In that vague way, South Africa came into the picture, but only in a regional sense. There, in the case of southern Africa, British nervousness over Germany had been fuelled by German support of the Boer republican cause in the late 1890s and by the growth of the German navy and its expansion into the South Atlantic and Indian oceans. Other than that, in British thinking, South Africa was bracketed with the other imperial Dominions of Australia, New Zealand and Canada – in the event of war, it would serve as a source of manpower and supplies for a European defence of the mother country.

While German power and imperial ambitions in sub-Saharan Africa remained soft, Britain remained tolerant through the early 1900s, although its government kept a wary eye on developments. At one point, it dabbled with contingency planning for a conquest and annexation of German East Africa. This would have neatly completed Cecil John Rhodes’s dream of a continuous line of British rule from the Cape to Cairo, and would also have stretched the reach of South African interests into the eastern portion of the continent. Indeed, even before the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, forward-looking commercial agriculture was already sniffing at the prospective gains to be made were fertile German East African lands ever to be opened to white settlers from the south. If Britain knocked down the door, it could open the way for independent South African interests to walk in.

Yet, that discreet British plan was never formally approved by London. In fact, in 1911, the sluggish War Office was still trying to find out the strength of German forces in East Africa. Meanwhile, in 1907 the British administration in Nyasaland (modern Malawi) had devised rough defence plans to deal with a possible invasion from neighbouring German and Portuguese colonial territories. Again, these too were left to gather dust.

Acting – or thinking – almost in tandem, Germany also had half an eye open. Two decades earlier – in 1891, to be exact – Kaiser Wilhelm II had concluded that were his country ever to end up at war with Britain, German South West Africa should be sacrificed in order to concentrate energies on the defence of German East Africa. For that territory mattered more, and it was not just for its coffee, sisal and freshwater fishing.

Prevailing in East Africa would undermine British naval dominance of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Moreover, it would also thwart Britain’s imperial ambition of complete supremacy in Africa, from south to north. Years later, close to the eve of World War One, Germany also had something else up its sleeve, should the opportunity have presented itself. This was a desire to expand its South West Africa colony northwards, at the expense of a rickety Portuguese empire, by seizing a poorly defended southern Angola. The eventual outbreak of the world war put paid to that idling ambition.

Initially, even the start of war in Europe did relatively little to end lethargy over Africa. Britain’s Secretary of State for War, for one, had little time, energy, or inclination to conceive of the continent as a serious theatre of operations. Lord Kitchener was convinced that there would be no point in the Allies devoting efforts to any invasion of Germany’s colonial territories, for at least two reasons. Firstly, the German possessions were militarily too feeble to threaten the imperial status quo. Secondly, as the decisive battlefront would be in Europe, it was there that the war would have to be won. Once the Allies had secured victory, the Germans would have to surrender their colonies in the peace negotiations.

So much for complacencies over its interior hinterland. But what of the fate of the recently created Union of South Africa? Granted, in 1910, the year of its formation, the Union was not considered by Britain’s War Office to be the safest part of the Empire – that honour went to Australia. If anything, it was quite to the contrary, for London’s newest self-governing, white-ruled Dominion lay in the far south of what, by 1914, was one of its ‘most geographically sensitive regions’.¹

Yet, beyond occasional talk, there were few serious signs of South African defensive preparation before 1914. The country’s military establishment, the Union Defence Forces (UDF), was only formed in 1912, with its first prime minister making much of it in July of that year. For General Louis Botha, it was acquiring ‘a real Army’, by which he meant a force ‘able to defend South Africa against any odds, wherever they came from’.²

It was as well that those odds were likely to remain limited, for the fledgling UDF comprised a miniscule permanent force of between two and three thousand mounted riflemen, a larger body of 23 000 citizen volunteers and a patchy tail of part-time conscripts, rifle association reservists and commandos. If confronted by a strong external enemy, it was not much for the defence of a large country of around five million people, ringed by hopelessly vulnerable land borders and exposed coasts. (In our own time, it is hard not to resist an old reminder from the late great Welsh historian, Gwyn Williams. Drawing on Karl Marx, Williams once pointed out that if history does repeat itself, it need not be as a tragedy, but also as a farce. Thus, it might even be suggested that similarly precarious circumstances are being born again, a century later. As the Johannesburg daily The Times cautioned its readers in July 2014, the country’s peeling armed defences were becoming so ‘ragtag’, that the role of ‘our soldiers’ would be confined to that of stationary ‘border guards’.³)

Equally, in a sense, the defence of the country’s borders could also have been left to chance. For South Africa had the crucial insulation of enormous distance from any possible European storm centre. Internationally, therefore, the Union was not exactly banging on the table in alarm at what it might have to face. For instance, a year after Union, the country’s representatives travelled to London to attend the coronation of King George V and to participate in the Imperial Conference. Although issues of external defence and security were on their minds, these did not appear to weigh all that heavily. During his attendance at the 1911 Imperial Conference, Louis Botha’s concerns were mainly over any possible threats to trade. Should a major crisis develop, Botha warned, what would have to be protected most was the sea route around the Cape. Without maritime defences of its own, his country would count on the Royal Navy should it ever find itself facing a ‘German threat to the ports of Lourenço Marques [now Maputo] and Beira in Portuguese Mozambique that were vital to South African trade’.⁴

During the parliamentary defence debate the following year, Botha and his ruling Unionist allies ‘had predicted a time when South Africa would assume responsibility for her own defence’, but would also be prepared to offer the ‘old country’ the support of a South African expeditionary force.

The notion of South Africa dispensing with its British imperial garrison to look after its own defence was one thing, and palatable to anyone who wished to see the country standing on its own feet, but contemplative talk of assisting Britain with an overseas contingent was another thing altogether, and wholly unpalatable to a large sector of Afrikaners. Having lost their two republican states in a harsh war, they were inclined to cast a cold eye back over the torment of those years, and to the imperialist midwife of their colonial misfortune. Any outward move of Botha’s kind was never going to be smooth sailing. For what it put in mind was not new national defence, but the old position of bowing to empire. Inevitably, for those Afrikaner nationalists who continued to sulk in the shadow of the recent Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), the idea of providing support to Britain and its Empire was, naturally, ‘anathema’.⁵

In any event, the UDF was still battling to weld into a coherent whole several armed formations with highly disparate English and Afrikaner organisations and traditions. To those difficulties could be added the uncertainties caused by a section of its Afrikaner leadership, which vehemently opposed South African involvement in any of Britain’s potential future wars. Accordingly, the Union had little opportunity or obvious capacity to embark on the preparation of expeditionary forces to be donated to London in the event of a war crisis. Instead, circumstances dictated that the focus of the UDF would be inward, confined to securing the defence of the country, to routine patrolling of the border with German South West Africa, and to forming an essential paramilitary capability to assist in repressing any rural African rebellion or urban industrial unrest.

In the years before the arrival of world war, South Africa had its share of such risings and restiveness. Novelist John Buchan, the official historian of the Union’s later war effort on the Western Front, emphasised quite rightly in 1919 that ‘at the outbreak of war’, confronting ‘foes within and without her gates’, the Union’s step into hostilities represented an undertaking that was ‘the most intricate’ of ‘all the nations of the British Commonwealth’.⁶ Or, in other words, it was a nuisance that South Africa was not New Zealand.

That was obvious enough, up to a point. The point, though, did not apply solely to the Union of South Africa. Granted, it was distinctively different from other, more homogeneous, more consensual, more rounded Dominion states. However many champagne corks may have popped in celebration of unification in 1910, South Africa’s dominant white minority did not share a common political ethos. Not even for its English and Afrikaner people was it a united country, nor did it contain a credibly identifiable South African nation. Those who hailed the resolution of what was referred to then as the race question – or Anglo-Afrikaner divisions – and trumpeted the achievement of a South African nationhood based on white conciliation were in the grip of a grandiose self-delusion.

Perhaps all that could be said with certainty is that South Africa consisted of the diverse people who lived in it, coexisting together or apart, consentingly or grudgingly. With all its complications, in the international tensions of 1914 the country had become a cause of considerable anxiety for the British government. Given lingering Afrikaner bitterness over the 1899-1902 war, to what extent might that weaken any national campaigning effort? Worse still, might there be serious support for Germany?

Yet, at the same time, it is worth remembering that the Union’s troubled domestic situation in the run-up to hostilities was not wholly unlike that of some other imperial territories. These included places that counted more for London than did South Africa when it came to securing the resources it required for waging a mass war simultaneously across numerous fronts. There was also no shortage of awareness in Britain of these other potential stumbling blocks. For instance, could Indians, notably those who backed the idea of home rule, be relied upon to turn out for the Empire in war? Similarly, there was Ireland. There, too, it was possible that support for the cause of Irish home rule could seriously dilute support for a British war effort.

Then there were uncertainties over