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

World War One and the People of South Africa - Bill Nasson


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were ‘the ravings’ of those who appealed ‘to the poorer Dutch and to the Natives’.14 The collaring and deportation of those radical trade unionists who were doing the raving was aided by a brusque ‘legal order which was in many ways shaped by practices which derived from martial law’.15 To understand the authoritarianism and the ready resort to violence with which the government responded to threatening challenges to its authority in the years immediately after 1918, it is necessary to take into account not only the impact of the war, but also the experience of what directly preceded it. As a state of mind, a state of war was not easily left behind.

      By the time that Britain’s entry into war in the first week of August turned a European war into an imperialist world war, most of these fluctuating domestic pressures had either been bottled up, or had had more or less spent themselves. Others were swallowed up by the local move to war, as the mood that it brought gathered pace from September 1914. It left, on the sidelines, brooding correspondents to the Cape Times, the Rand Daily Mail, the Natal Witness and other papers, as well as a number of uneasy parliamentarians.

      They felt themselves to be in growing peril, scared by the strikes of 1913 and 1914, and startled by pockets of African intransigence in some rural areas. It left some people stalked by their own nightmares of class phobia and racial anxiety. As one letter-writer asked, late in August 1914, how could ‘this new country’ expect ‘to survive’ the ‘perilous indiscipline of Labour’, if it dropped its guard at home to become involved in a dangerous and distracting war overseas.16

      The potential consequences for life as it was known were catastrophic, should the UDF ever have to supply expeditionary contingents for service beyond the Union’s borders. ‘What would be the position’, thundered Piet Grobler, the vigilant MP for Rustenburg, ‘if all the able-bodied men went to war and a native rising took place?’17 As in Europe at the beginning of war, it was illusions that reigned here, too. But they were illusions of a different kind. South Africa did not hold millions of men to send off to war, nor would the interruptions of its imminent involvement in a global war yank out the foundations of its established order. And those who would be rising up would be Afrikaners, not Africans. That would become a festering local boil. But the business of lancing it would be mercifully short.

      2

      Rising to War

      Early in August 1914, London was advised by Pretoria that the Union would assume full responsibility for its own land defences, thereby releasing the country’s imperial garrison for service in France. The duties of that garrison had been interpreted flexibly, most recently including making up for a shortage of Johannesburg police when it assisted the government in dealing with the miners’ general strike of July 1913. Its British officers, sick of being stuck in South Africa on dull civil order chores, welcomed this national substitution of their imperial establishment. The safety of South African soil was now for the first time entirely in the hands of the emergent UDF.

      With no sign of a Union expeditionary force in the offing, some white as well as a sprinkling of Coloured middle-class and other educated volunteers who were keen on what they considered to be proper action, opted to offer their bodies overseas. Joining the early rush for the army in 1914, some travelled to Britain. Making for the British Army, there they fell in along with South Africans who were either working or studying in Britain, were eager for service, and had no desire to return home to a place where support for the war was certain to be far from universal. These included university students at London, Oxford and Cambridge, dealers in the City, industrial chemists, and horticulturalists at Kew Gardens.

      Other men headed for British colonial territories in Central and East Africa, to enlist in established imperial formations like the King’s African Rifles. While there was nothing that could be done about these individual departures in the early weeks of hostilities, it was still rather annoying for Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, who wanted to assert the identity of their new South Africa. It seemed ‘a pity’ that these volunteer recruits, so willing to serve overseas, were doing so as empire subjects or citizens, and ‘were not fighting as South Africans’.18 For Smuts, ruefulness turned to rage in due course, once he discovered that the migrant soldiers included non-European volunteers, or what he termed with disdain, ‘men of doubtful descent’.19

      It would not do for Coloured men of the Union to end up as Christian soldiers on common terms with white British infantry. Who knew the impudent ideas with which they might return home? That apart, it took no imagination to know how it would have been received by nationalist critics, had they got wind of it. Casting about for what to do about so undesirable a development, Smuts proposed that medical doctors be assigned to check the racial ancestry of any would-be Empire fighters if their appearance on departure looked dubious. A more casual Botha, to his credit, thought that as there was a war on, doctors might find themselves with more urgent concerns.

      As in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, South African inhabitants born in Britain had higher levels of war commitment than those born in overseas territories. Thus, ‘the strongly British identity’ of most of Natal’s white inhabitants put Durban, a ‘city of English gardens and statues of Queen Victoria’ where ‘a third of the white population had been born in Britain’,20 at the forefront of early popular enthusiasm. In 1899, with war with the Boer republics weighing on his mind, Britain’s High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner, had taken solace in the English faithfulness of Natal, which he considered to have been as loyal as Ulster. Fifteen years later, Milner would not have found himself let down by the Ulster of South Africa.

      In this early flush of enthusiastic enlistment, numbers of ‘overseas-born’ men and working expatriates also returned to join the British Army, among them a Kimberley diamond prospector and mining engineer called Fred Roberts. As Lieutenant-Colonel F.J. Roberts, this Griqualand West-based miner would end up in Belgian Flanders, editing the celebrated satirical trench newspaper, The Wipers Times.

      Meanwhile, back in the Union, Britain’s position that it embodied the Empire as a whole in committing the populations under its sovereign authority to war did not appear to be misplaced, whatever the doubts of its governing politicians as war approached. With relatively little urging from their rulers, English, Anglo-Afrikaner and a sprinkling of Afrikaner loyalist middle and lower middle classes embraced the conflict with considerable enthusiasm. Rallying behind calls for intervention in German Africa and for a fighting contribution to the war effort in Europe, pro-war patriots were carried by a tide of national conviction, Empire enthusiasm and some plain English colonial jingoism.

      From late July and early August, rowdy city crowds swarmed around newspaper offices for news from Europe and reports of war developments; spectators at sports events and audiences at theatre and concert venues staged impromptu renditions of ‘Rule, Britannia!’; and even motor cars, buses and trams carried fluttering Union Jack flags. A widening ripple of pro-war meetings and rallies saw the carrying of loyal resolutions, sometimes exceptionally extravagant in their promise. For example, ‘The Call’, supported vociferously by students in Cape Town, took much of the world as its audience. It assured ‘all nations’ that it hardly required ‘General Botha’s emphatic declaration’ to know ‘that the South African nation, with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, will range herself without hesitation or reservation by the side of the gloriously united nations of Britain and Ireland.’21 Evidently, the colonial history of Ireland cannot have been studied much at Rondebosch Boys’ High School or at the South African College.

      Aside from those on the streets of Cape Town and Durban, more youthful war enthusiasts in Johannesburg, Kimberley and Port Elizabeth were not far behind in the issuing of Calls, Declarations and Promises of a similarly strident sort. While not all of these necessarily crossed the line from pro-war spectator to volunteer participant in the ranks of the UDF, the forcefulness of war sentiment was unmistakable, as was the atmosphere of being carried along in the heat of the moment. More than anything, it was self-mobilisation. Early in September, such bursts of pro-war feeling could be seen in the actions of English-speaking students and hangers-on (at times, all swollen by hard drink) who pounced on any signs of anti-war sentiment.


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