World War One and the People of South Africa. Bill Nasson
the main director of strategy in the British War Cabinet, could scarcely have put it better.
In the longer run, the APO’s identification with the war effort put several distinct concerns on its agenda. One, for its northern Cape rural branches, was anxiety over the plight of hundreds of skilled ‘Cape Boy’ muleteers and other transport workers who had migrated to German South West Africa to serve in German colonial forces during their genocidal war of 1904-1907 against the Herero and the Nama. Although most of these colonial army auxiliaries were discharged after the Germans ended their campaign of extermination, a number remained in German territory, where they either toiled in harsh conditions or sank into destitution. A scandalised APO had been trying for some time to get the Cape authorities to pay attention to their circumstances. The arrival of war breathed greater intensity into its pleas, and it turned now to national petitioning for a South African invasion of the colony to bring about better conditions for its migrant Coloured workers. Hostility to a German colonial presence in the region was strong, and APO figures took every opportunity to air it.
At the same time, there were distinctive civic worries over the economic and social burdens that the war was imposing on people at home. By September, alarm over the disruption of the Union’s overseas trade saw the APO pointing to its adverse consequences for rural employment in export agriculture, and calling for relief from the pressure on living standards caused by shortages. In cities, spokesmen criticised deteriorating conditions for Coloured hawkers and small traders, hit by diminishing supplies of their customary goods. Fingers were also pointed at merchant houses and at larger dealers, accused of hoarding and profiteering at the expense of small Coloured traders.
Basic commodities like sugar, tea and potatoes were being kept in short supply deliberately to push up prices, declared one critic, blaming ‘the monsters of profit’.46 There was nothing particularly left-wing or socialist in this kind of rhetorical language. While undoubtedly on the mark, it was more a case of racial resentment being rooted in accusations of unfairness and greed, of an immoral exploitation of wartime conditions by white owners. Meanwhile, taking up the plight of poorer households, Abdurahman’s executive also clamoured for the imposition of stringent food price controls and for the introduction of special wartime welfare allowances. With an eye on the mobilisation and departure of Cape Corps volunteers to fighting fronts, leadership also requested that provision be made for soldiers’ separation allowances (financial grants for wives and dependants) to ‘avoid distress to Coloured citizens’.47
Aside from such nagging social concerns over what the war was bringing, its more prominent appeal in these circles rested in the aspects of civic virtue and high-minded crusading that it presented. For figures like Abdurahman and John Dube of the SANNC, attachment to a national war effort appeared as a natural opportunity, one that could reasonably be expected to yield potential benefits. After all, they and their modest followings could show themselves to be among the truest sons of a Union riddled with a variety of contemptible European dissidents and subversives.
Now, a high horse of moral black patriotism could be seen to tower over the past rebel treachery of Boer ‘slave states’, territories in which the recent conduct of rebellious white inhabitants revealed them to be ‘totally unworthy of the generous way in which the Imperial Government treated them in 1902’.48 This was not the only contrast in this disdainful gaze. Its rock-steady patriotism could also be set against the deplorable spectacle of parliamentary dissension over going to war, and the sectarian hostilities of militant and faithless white labour on the Witwatersrand.
With civilised society put under threat by wartime disturbances, the Union’s rulers needed to be told things, even to learn history lessons – mostly ironic lessons from the recent past, and to be taught those by more articulate black subjects in a self-righteous mood. So it was that nationalist-minded Afrikaners were denounced for their sympathies with German South West Africa and for showing respect for the Kaiser. Who could be certain of the true loyalties of Afrikaners, who may have been outwardly ‘peaceful in their daily business’ but had Germanic surnames? The menace of latent ‘mad’, ‘bestial’ or ‘Prussianistic’ tendencies could surely not be ignored.49
Even if there was no realistic basis for a softening dawn in segregationist South Africa, the hopes of Abdurahman, Dube and others like them were not necessarily those of stupid men. After the despondency at the exclusionary terms of Union, for moderate black political leaders the onset of war seemed to bring a useful moment to advance claims to improved rights. In the case of the APO, European hostilities erupted at exactly the time that its lukewarm protest programme was being challenged by a more assertive strain in Coloured politics. Once Britain declared war, ‘its leaders fell upon it, as a possible solution to their foundering strategies’.50 Thus, despite the initial reluctance of the government to accede to the mobilising of a Cape Corps infantry formation, the APO elite kept up the volunteering banner. If Coloured men were citizens, even of a partial kind, the greatest civic affirmation of that would be their free enlistment and recognition as worthy soldiers.
In its shaping of that picture, the war acted as a moral arena across which to stage a show of selfless altruism. It did not mean becoming reconciled to political injustice, for as the APO studiously reminded its readers in August 1914, whatever ‘British liberty means in the abstract, few of us can honestly say that we love it much in practice’.51 What it did mean was turning the other cheek, in a tactical demonstration of what faith and dependability there was to be depended upon.
The war as a moment of demonstrable honour also seeped through the politics of the progressive African elite. Educated observers pricked up their ears to solicitous propaganda messages from London that a British victory would ensure that increased rights, liberties and welfare would in future have a larger influence in Empire development. From this, all subject peoples here should surely stand to benefit, as much as those who were chafing under the yoke of oppression in continental Europe. Accordingly, for Robert Mantsayi of the newspaper Izwi la Kiti, was South Africa not without its version of the oppressed Bulgarians? Or, for John Dube in Natal, did the plight of the Zulu not resemble that of the South Slavs?
In their reflections upon the discriminatory state of the Union, several African papers, including Ilanga lase Natal, Tsalo ea Batho and Izwi la Kiti, ploughed ahead with the message that patriotic service and sacrifice might earn loyal subjects the reward of improved status, even a recognition of the common humanity of all who made up the national life of the Union. For Izwi la Kiti, the path to that was the showing of common patriotism, of a shoulder-to-shoulder sort. As it observed in August 1914, all that was needed was latitude, sufficient to permit Africans to take up their share of the country’s war effort, in which they could form ‘part of the Defence Forces of the Empire and Union, whose interests are theirs in common with the white people’.52 Such urgings were massaged along, if up to a point, by the declarations of governing politicians such as the Minister of Native Affairs, F.S. Malan. In the same month, he praised the SANNC stand on the war as ‘very wise’, and ventured that it was ‘likely to impress Parliament to consider their cause sympathetically’.53
In all of this, it also needs to be borne in mind that when the war knocked on the door, those who opened it in favourable anticipation did so in many different ways. Relatively few offered their bodies as uniformed participants, or their minds to be mobilised for pro-war activities at home. In a country in which it was easy to remain a spectator of the war, many remained just that, either curious or avid watchers, with a reader’s eye on mostly very distant hostilities. For the most passive, the war was present in its absence. Others supported the war, but were opposed to any introduction of conscription, either on principle or from trepidation over the political upheaval that it would have caused – being pro-war and being pro-conscription by no means amounted to the same thing.
Then there was, arguably, the most novel of all responses to the conflict. That was a fuzzy war of the mind, fixed not upon the doings of the Union and the Empire, but upon Germany, or its faintly romantic promise as a harbinger of change. Along the southwestern coast, a peppering of Afrikaner and Coloured fishermen reacted to the outbreak of war by renaming their small boats Bismarck, Berlin and Kaiser. Perhaps they were hoping for a friendly encounter with the German navy in the South Atlantic. A few months later, in Ladybrand in the Orange Free State, several white railway workers