World War One and the People of South Africa. Bill Nasson
of Villiersdorp in the western Cape, it was ‘the duty of Dutch Reformed boys to do their duty to the King and country’.37
The question of the war, duty and the need of the King and the country was also on the plate of the SANNC. On first hearing news of the outbreak of hostilities, its protest meeting in Bloemfontein against the 1913 Land Act immediately added the war to proceedings. It then promptly eclipsed everything else. Delegates resolved to ‘hang up native grievances against the South African Parliament till a better time’. Instead, ‘a patriotic demonstration’ would be organised and a deputation would be dispatched to reassure the government that they would ‘tender the authorities every assistance’.38
Overseas, Congress representatives, involved in a hopeless effort to try to persuade Britain to intervene constitutionally to check the Land Act, found themselves ‘longing to catch the first steamer back to South Africa’. Once there, according to the organisation’s secretary, Solomon (Sol) Plaatje, it was their wish ‘to join their countrymen and proceed to the front’.39 One who evidently saw himself at the front of any procession was Walter Rubusana of the Cape Congress. A character whose reach often exceeded his grasp, in October 1914 he offered to raise a force of 5 000 Africans under his personal command to participate in the Union invasion of German South West Africa.
Westernised nationalist protagonists like Rubusana were not the only Africans who swung behind support of the Union war effort. A rural tributary of chiefs and headmen also took a firm stand, propelled there by a mixture of motives. One possibility, which ought not to be ignored, was a straightforward sense of personal loyalty to the governing structures to which they were attached. Or, expressions of patriotic wartime tribute came from a desire to curry favour with magistrates and native commissioners in the Ciskei, the Transkei, the Transvaal and elsewhere. Thirdly, attentiveness in the various African reserves to national need came also as a shrewdly calculating bid to try to shore up the position of those who were feeling the erosion of their chiefly powers and customary standing.
Under the gaze of approving Department of Native Affairs officials, various countryside assemblies of ‘chiefs and people’ nodded through solemn addresses, calls and resolutions. Many were for the consideration of ‘His Majesty and General Botha’, the governor-general as ‘Supreme Chief of His Majesty’ (in Natal and Zululand an imaginative sort of Shaka stand-in), the ‘King and Union’ and ‘the Great Empire and this Land’.40 It is impossible not to miss a loaded, calculating sense of priority in these acts of theatrical deference; dipping into their modern colonial heritage as subjects of the Crown, these African crowds were confirming their allegiance in a distinctive order. It was, invariably, obeisance to the British Empire first, and to the Union second. With London still standing for what might have been a more liberal present, here the imperial sun was still high in the sky.
In other places, rural African reactions to the cry of war intersected with ordinary initiatives undertaken by whites. Such open-hearted gestures by impoverished communities were moving, all the more for the objects of their sympathy being utterly unknown or completely unrecognisable. Some headmen and village elders in the Ciskei and Transkei took up donations for European war refugees, sending tiny sums to the nearest Belgian refugee funds, located in Port Elizabeth and East London. There were also slight pickings in the vicinity of railway stations, post offices and trading stores for roaming collectors for the Governor General’s Fund and the Prince of Wales’ Fund.
Further kinds of close identification with the cause of war were associated with a wide sprinkling of patriotic local committees manned by various members of the ‘Non-European’ middle classes. These attracted professionals such as teachers, lawyers and doctors, as well as small businessmen and small landowners. In the Cape, where they retained their rights to the non-racial and qualified male franchise, that political investment in a sense of citizenship extended instinctively to a broader patriotic investment in the Union war effort. So, the commercial merchant elite of the Transvaal British Indian Association and the Cape British Indian Union made direct financial contributions to the government.
At the same time, Muslim loyalists in the Cape readied a ‘Malay Ambulance Corps’, although of a kind unlikely to win the approval of the Red Cross. While it undertook to supply its own transport and basic medical supplies such as bandages and stretchers, it also requested arms from the authorities to defend itself in the field. There, ‘upright Cape Malays’ would need weaponry to repel ‘barbaric Sultans with their merciless tribes’, and to protect the wounded from the ‘repulsive’ and ‘uncivilised Turks who respect not the home of the sick’.41
Less overheated teachers and tradesmen on a number of Coloured mission stations staged fundraising brass band concerts and choir performances, and even held poetry readings at which coin collections were held on Belgian Days. Here, too, even among those who had precious little to give, some gave. Once again, it also did not matter that the victims and the war that they endured were almost indescribably remote from the donors’ everyday existence. What really mattered, perhaps, was the impact of the opening image of the conflict – in Belgium in 1914, a pitiless war was being waged upon civilians and their homes. South Africa’s own very recent history had been scarred by a heavy onslaught upon civilian communities. In helping to mould sympathetic awareness and responses among these mission and other local Christian communities, the impact of knowledge of the wartime fate of women and children in the former Boer republics may be worth some consideration.
Some of the other reactions from poorer rural communities involved no charitable campaigning nor, come to that, any real comprehension of what the war may have been about. For skinny Baster pastoralists, farm herders and agricultural labourers in tough northern and northwestern stretches of the Cape interior, what had reached the air of Namaqualand and Gordonia was a British Empire war and, with it, another prospect of gainful employment. It was enough to make some, including 1899-1902 veterans of the Namaqualand Border Scouts, jump the gun by offering to serve, whether the UDF wanted them or not. As future scouts and drivers, there was some hope of repeating their previous stint of well-rewarded army service in British forces. It did not take much for men to come out, eager to ‘be counted’, and to ‘be in’.42
In many ways, the major expression of Coloured political organisation, the moderate Cape-based African Political (later People’s) Organisation, or APO, simply mirrored the loyalist tone of the SANNC, with which its leadership had fraternal links. Its branches, inhabited mainly by the educated Coloured elite, generated their own round of pro-war resolutions and petitions. Moreover, the events of the war soon saturated the APO, the organisation’s newspaper. Indeed, more or less its entire reportage and editorial stand became dominated by war news and by domestic concern over how patriotic volunteering might bring the reward of expanded citizenship rights. For a time, the war became its politics, and its politics became the war.
The APO even distributed its own volunteer attestation forms in August 1914 in issues of its paper, as campaigning leaders such as Abdullah Abdurahman, James Currey and A.H. Gool urged local organisers to mobilise men for active service in a Cape Corps. Having ‘sprinted off’ after able-bodied men, by mid-September beavering APO branches had mustered around 10 000 volunteers. Sweetening inducements included cake and chocolate spooned up by a Cape Corps Comforts Committee. ‘By offering to bear our share of the responsibilities’, remarked Abdurahman, ‘Coloured men’ would prove themselves to be ‘not less worthy than any other sons of the British Empire’.43 With that test having been passed, the case for the reward of improved status was, he hoped, incontestable.
In the light of that aspiration, there were good wartime lessons to be learned from positive conduct in other parts of the Empire. News of the large-scale enlistment of soldiers in India was applauded by the APO as exemplary for local communities, ‘no one will appreciate this more than the Indians themselves’.44 The conduct of ‘responsible’ Irishmen, even nationalists like Willie Redmond, to put aside the Home Rule fight and to support Britain was also grist to the mill. In its acceptance of the necessity of leaving ‘local grievances in abeyance’ in order ‘to rally to Country and Empire’, the APO was lining up with Ulster patriots and southern Irish constitutional moderates. Turning out in his trademark pinstriped suit, Abdurahman lectured audiences through August and September on the danger of any equivocation over the war issue,