World War One and the People of South Africa. Bill Nasson
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 the loyalty of minorities in some other dominions, or about discontented majorities in distant imperial lands, such as French Canadians and West Indians. Nagging worries in Westminster over Empire loyalty in wartime were certainly not all down to South Africa, when one ticklish Protestant political question was, how would ‘Québécois and Irish Catholic minorities in Canada and Australia respectively, respond to the call to arms?’7
There was also another parallel between the situation in South Africa and that of some other places in the Empire in the years before the onset of war. At a very general level, it was the common experience of various kinds of tension and violent disturbance. In contemplating the dawn of the new century at the end of the 1890s, it was not for nothing that Ireland’s nationalist Fenian movement, epitomised by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, had pinned its hopes on a continuation of ‘international unrest in South Africa’. For those excitable republicans, there could be no better spot from which to watch ‘the stars being blown about the sky’.8 In showing the rest of the Empire that the way ahead was going to be troublesome, South Africa was being as good – or, perhaps, as bad – as Ireland.
As it happened, in 1902 the Boers failed to deliver that hoped-for republican apocalypse. Still, in other respects, South Africa continued to rumble. For one thing, even the collapse of Boer republican independence was seemingly not quite the end of it, even if it then turned out as ham-fisted adventurism, fuelled possibly by too much brandy and biltong. In 1904, one Willem Hendrik Durandt trotted about with a knot of uniformed and mounted armed followers, in a horsey revival of republican fantasising. Although bemused, a Pretoria court found Durandt and his ineffectual band guilty of a seditious conspiracy against the Transvaal colony.
Two years later, there was a further flicker of white rural rebellion. Another fed-up party of Boer malcontents, mustered behind a couple of jumped-up commondants, galloped out to raid a colonial government armoury, in an optimistic mission to reclaim their lost Eden. It was a cause to which they tried – unsuccessfully – to recruit the handy muscle of the independent-minded Boer general, Salomon Gerhardus ‘Manie’ Maritz. In that personal aspiration, at least for the near future, they were on the right track.
These mild episodes of self-deception and eccentric hankerings were hardly the cause of notable panic. The cause of that, and its accompanying brutality and bloodshed, came from elsewhere, also around this time. The high-handed imposition by the Natal colonial authorities of a poll tax – levied on all Zulu men who were not paying a hut tax – ran into fierce resistance, resulting in the Bhambatha Rising of 1906, the last armed African peasant rebellion against the burdens of colonial rule before the advent of Union. Thirty whites were killed. One turn of the screw too many by Natal in Zululand, it provoked a passionate, religiously inspired rebellion in defiance of a tax that menaced the wellbeing of the ‘rural homestead’ and threatened the fabric of ‘African communal life’.9
Local colonial forces were ferocious in their crushing of the uprising, leaving almost 4 000 Zulu dead. That toll, in peacetime, would amount to close to half of South Africa’s deaths in the coming world war (calculated at about 9 500 by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission). The horrific scale of punitive violence prompted Winston Churchill, no faint-heart, to turn on Natal, denouncing ‘this wretched Colony’ as ‘the hooligan of the British Empire’.10 It also confirmed African political leadership throughout the country in their belief that open rebellion was of no avail in the struggle for better rights, the only realistic option left being ‘the pen against the sword’.11
If some conditions of life in the country were tense and confrontational, they reflected a strain present in other societies as the world stumbled along its deadly path towards the European summer of 1914. In striking fashion, this mood culminated immediately before the declaration of hostilities, when there was a broader global phase in 1913-1914 of bristling urban class antagonism towards the ruling order. South Africa, like Britain, and like the other Dominions, was a country in which the trade unions representing its mining and railway workers were on the march on the very eve of the war. Australia was jolted by a rash of industrial disputes. The ports of New Zealand were hit by a wave of strikes by militant dockworkers. In Britain itself, major industrial towns were torn by left-wing labour militancy.
It was a rocky story, in which South Africa featured at times in fairly idiosyncratic ways. In July 1913, the Quinlan Opera Company of London was touring South Africa, making the most of the centenary of Richard Wagner’s birth. One of its matinee performances in Johannesburg’s main business district coincided with a state of ‘turmoil’ as a strike by white miners turned violent. For the company’s worried director, Thomas Quinlan, trying to present opera ‘under such trying’ conditions was a ‘shock’, what with Madama Butterfly having to be ‘played with the accompaniment of incessant firing’.12
The calling of a general strike early in 1914 by radical white miners and railway workers so outraged the industrial and farming barons of the Rand Club that they dusted off their Imperial Light Horse expertise acquired during the Anglo-Boer War. With a tough solution to what was termed the Labour Problem squarely in their sights, the business worthies of the Witwatersrand established a mounted Volunteer Force to assist the state in saving the mining industry from the flames of revolutionary Marxism.
White labour unrest growled on into July, with the authorities and their supporting press growing increasingly jittery about the dangers of worker militancy spreading out to infect African miners on the goldfields. Following talk of a national emergency and the imposition of martial law in Johannesburg, the Union Defence Forces were deployed as an iron shield to secure the mines and to guard their nervous owners. General Jan Smuts, the Union’s inspirational uniformed messiah and its deputy prime minister, minister of mines and the interior, as well as defence, was quick to see the value of soldiers in an economic class war. Over 10 000 strikebreaking troops were unleashed in Johannesburg to crack whatever had to be cracked. Never short of steel when it came to compelling his extra-parliamentary adversaries to stay in their place, it is always tempting to reverse the normal order of habits associated with the chilly Smuts. Better to see him not so much as the dreamy philosopher-king of visionary progress who slipped into bouts of state military violence against crowds of civilian firebrands, but more as the other way round.
Running alongside, or preceding the waves of white labour discontent that preoccupied Smuts, were the reverberations of other smaller crises or acts of disaffection. Such restiveness included spurting strikes by some African and Indian miners, anti-pass law protests by African women in the Orange Free State, the launching of Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha resistance campaign against discrimination, and angry political reaction to the deprivations of the 1913 Natives’ Land Act, marshalled by the recently-formed South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the forerunner of the African National Congress.
Of course, if we look back a hundred years from where we are now, it is easy to see how remote South Africa was from the most obviously deep and accelerating crises of 1914 – remote from the galloping arms race after 1911, remote from expanding conscription, remote from degenerating diplomacy, and remote from the launching of ambitious and suspiciously strategic railway improvement programmes. Nonetheless, in a sense, in its atmosphere it shared something of the febrile mood of the age, that of a ‘heightened tension of a more general sort’.13
Instead of the Union growing into a state of calm and balanced consolidation, it was being buffeted by various crises of authority, racked by squabbles, local food shortages, outbreaks of street fighting, and transport disruption. Confronted by turbulent resistance from striking miners and railway workers, the government identified the villains who needed to be rooted out, as they were considered to be harmful to the health of the country. (As can be seen in the responses of some of South Africa’s ruling politicians to its recent mine labour unrest, detecting the hand of influential alien elements behind it all is nothing new.)
Back then, Jan Smuts resorted to purging the Union of troublemaking strike leaders who were foreign-born. With the ‘maintenance