World War One and the People of South Africa. Bill Nasson
sentiments towards local government officials.54
At this level of murmuring, there was a fair amount going on, especially in rural districts that were far away from urban centres. There, incoming stories, fragments or wispy scraps of war news about the doings of the Germans – in Africa as well as in Europe – opened up an assortment of interested ears. Circulating through barely literate communities, and coated in rumours and wild imaginings, their mental grip could be decidedly eccentric. Thus, news of Britain’s setbacks in its war with Germany tickled the appetites of some Zulu peasant communities that had lost their lands in colonial conquest. Those most hungry for a British defeat even readied themselves for the arrival on the Natal coast of a triumphant German fleet. There were reports of celebratory bonfires, and even of beer being laid in for feasting. For once Britain fell, and South Africa fell with it, an ascendant German empire might bring with it a new colonial order with new prospects – perhaps those dispossessed might be able to reclaim what had once been rightfully theirs. In a flourish of wishful dreaming, something could yet happen to remedy the main grievance of local Africans, the throbbing injustice of ‘land shortage’.55 Europe’s faraway great war might come to heal the painful scars of Zulu loss and shortage due to English land-grabbing.
In a more diffuse and more scattered manner – in other parts of rural Natal, as well as in the Transvaal and in the Transkeian Territories, the war tiptoed into the consciousness of groups of rural Africans, tinting their outlook with an almost intangible, curiously hypnotic sort of yearning. Sightings of warships or of packed troopships offshore in the Indian Ocean, or of a troop train conveying men to some port, turned inquisitive onlookers glassy-eyed, interpreting these sightings as signs of a coming upheaval, looked to for its promise of better days to come. In the course of 1914 and 1915, daydreaming and fanciful speculation of this kind was also fed by the withdrawal of some Transkeian rural garrisons for duty in the German South West Africa campaign, and by the depleting of magistracy rifle armouries and military storage depots. Might not a thawing world be lying around the corner?
In a sense, ‘by breaking out when it did, the war promised a transcendant widening of horizons at precisely a grim moment when those horizons were closing’.56 For these restless, wandering utopian or millenarian visions were bred by the bad soil of bad times for stringy peasants, bony cattle and thin pastures and plots. In many respects, the effects of the world war made things worse for the precarious livelihoods of the most insecure rural African people, already pinched by cycles of heavy drought, land erosion and draining livestock losses.
While the impact of the war, obviously, varied from place to place, where its hammer blows hit, they hit hard. These included inflationary increases in the cost of basic goods, a slump in the wool market, the initial closure of the diamond mines – which stopped the earnings of migrant workers – the overnight calling in of debt by patriotic white traders who were joining up, and the loss of seasonal jobs in agricultural sectors which had previously been exporting to Germany.
The paradox of such circumstances was the simultaneous, yet disconcertingly double-edged force of wartime conditions which penetrated the life of shaky communities like these. In 1914, they came as yet a further flood tide, at precisely a moment when so much was crumbling. Yet, at the same time, there was a consciousness of the war as something distant yet moving, showing signs of getting nearer. It was a wide-eyed glimpse of it, at times as a lengthening German shadow, which brought the lure of promise. For disaffected factions of Transkeian peasants, to say nothing of disgruntled bands of African miners on the Rand, or of open-air fundamentalist Afrikaner religious sects, a quickening sense of German world power and of German opposition to ‘the English’ and ‘the King’ became, for a time, ‘a kind of metaphor of resistance’.57
Although unquestionably even more fallible than the patriotic promise that carried along the wartime aspirations of bodies such as the SANNC and the APO, a hallucinatory Germany played its little supernatural part in rousing some hard-pressed peasants and labourers to craft their own version of the war. Running through restless minds as a lightning flash, it conjured up a widening of cramped horizons as a wishful transcendence.
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