World War One and the People of South Africa. Bill Nasson
– 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