Songs of the Veld and other Poems, The New Age, London 1902, re-published by Cederberg, Cape Town 2008
BY MARTHINUS VAN BART
“War is always a dangerous thing and brings with it destruction and devastation. Therefore it should not be resorted to rashly but should only be used as a last resort. The basis of action of the armed forces must be justice and validity, and it’s reasons for going into action must clear, intelligible and be met with general approval. War waged out of greed and possesiveness only leads to the destruction of the country and to turmoil in the decades to follow. Brambles grow where such an army has been, the Chinese sages of old declared.
The war Great Britain and its Empire waged from 1899 to 1902 with the two small Boer Republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State, both rich in gold and diamonds, was unjust, invalid, unclear and unintelligable.
The true nature of this war can be gauged by the way it was initiated by the arch capitalist and mining magnate Cecil John Rhodes and his henchman dr. Leander Starr Jameson. They launched a coup d’etat on Kruger’s republic between Christmas 1895, and New Year’s Day, 1 January 1896, when they knew the pious Afrikaners celebrated their holy week with prayer and socializing.
Like thieves under cover of darkness Jameson and his hirelings from Rhodes’s British South-African Company stole into the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (The official name of the Transvaal Boer-republic) from Mashonaland whilst their armed cohorts waited in Johannesburg to attack Pretoria from the back. But they underestimated the alertness of the Boers, who stopped the raiders at Doornkop near Roodepoort and Krugersdorp on New Year’s Day.
War artist Richard Caton Woodville's painting depicting the scorched earth tacticts of the British in South Africa. This painting shows a real incident when the farmhouse of a Boer officer was burned to the ground. The beautiful white horses were first put in their stables before it was put to fire. The women and children were carried off to concentration camps to perish.
On 11 October 1899 the anticipated war finally broke out. Although condemned in 1897 in courts of justice in Pretoria and London, Jameson was elevated from skunk to administrator of the Cape Colony in 1904.
Britain’s gold war with the Boers was condemned worldwide by all civilized nations. Its sole supporters were the possessions worldwide, called the British Empire, and its partner in business and crime, America. And even from the midst of dubious America, who at exactly the same time was waging a cruel war of extermination in the Philippines, came a message of support for the Boers signed by hundreds of school children and delivered to Kruger in Pretoria a day before the Boer capital fell into the hands of the British army.
When Winston Churchill, after his lightning sojourn in South Africa to “earn” his upper-class medals in the war, went to America in December 1900 for political support, Mark Twain, American writer, journalist and philosopher, was asked to introduce him (Churchill) at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Twain, an anti-emperialist, gave a short and sharp introduction: “I think that England sinned when she got herself into a war in South Africa which she could have avoided, just as we have sinned in getting into a similar war in the Philippines. Mr. Churchill by his father is an Englishman: By his mother he is an American; no doubt a blend that makes the perfect man. England and America: Yes we are kin. And now that we are also kin in sin, there is nothing more to be desired. The harmony is complete, the blend is perfect – like Mr. Churchill himself, whom I now have the honour to present to you.”
Mark Twain introduced Winston Churchill to America's intellectuals as a sinner.
The esteemed philosopher and journalist Gilbert Keith Chesterton, said: “I was called a Pro-Boer, and, unlike some Pro-Boers, I was very proud of the title. It expressed exactly what I meant much better than its idealistic synonyms. Some intellectuals indignantly repudiated the term, and said they were not Pro-Boers, but only lovers of peace or pacifists. But I emphatically was a Pro-Boer, and I emphatically was not a pacifist. My point was that the Boers were right in fighting. I thought that these farmers were perfectly entitled to take to horse and rifle in defence of their farms, and their little farming commonwealth, when it was invaded by a more cosmopolitan empire at the command of very cosmopolitan financiers.”
He concluded: “The imperialist is the direct enemy of liberty. The staunch imperialist H.G. Wells defends the only sort of war I thoroughly despise, the bullying of small states for their oil or gold; and he despises the only sort of war that I really defend, a war of civilizations and religions, to determine the moral destiny of mankind.”
Herbert Spencer, British philosopher, said Britain, through its military despotism, was in the course of rebarbarization.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Pro=Boer opposing imperialism. He condemned Imperialist Britain for being an enemy of civilization, religion and liberty.
HERBERT SPENCER, British philosopher, wrote in Ethical World on 10 February 1900: “We are in the course of rebarbarization; and there is no prospect but that of military despotisms, which we are rapidly approaching.”
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, leader of the Liberal opposition in London: "When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa!"
And on the 14th of June 1901 sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, leader of the Liberal opposition in London, condemned the scorched earth warfare of the British army in South Africa by saying: “When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.”
The respected British political commentator sir A.M.S. Methuen, who was described as both pro-Boer and decidedly not pro-Boer, wrote in the preface to the original edition of Peace or War in South Africa, 1901: “It is the policy of the Government (expressed by Lord Hugh Cecil in a letter to The Times of June 24th, 1901) to throw the blame for the barbarous methods of this war on our generals in the field. Such an attitude is both unconstitutional and cowardly. The Ministry is responsible to Parliament and the public for the acts of its executive departments; and to shelter itself behind our brave and sorely-tried army is an unworthy trick.”
Sir A.M.S. Methuen wrote about the Boers: "Their history, written in tears and blood, will be an eternal inspiration to generous minds."
Writing about the Afrikaner character, Methuen concluded: “Their history, written in tears and blood, will be an eternal inspiration to generous minds. In an age when the ideal has little influence and little value, they have struggled – the few against the many, the poor against the rich, the weak against the strong – for the sake of freedom against overwhelming odds for over two years. They have seen their wives carried into captivity, their children dying, their homes burnt, their property confiscated; but they have not flinched. When peace and the ordered ease of English rule were offered them if only they would forswear their country, they refused the temptation and were strong to fight on.
“Are we not chivalrous enough to acknowledge that these men are heroes and worthy of our steel and our regard? Let us, in Burke’s noble phrase, confess that we do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people… when the day of our own Armageddon comes, we shall utter no better prayer than to face our destiny with a courage as dauntless and serene.”
To what extent were the British parliament and public informed about the impact of Kitchener’s ruthless methods to combat the Boer guerrilla resistance, winning through psychological warfare not military supremacy?
Regardless of the answer, the British parliament and public should have been well aware of what Kitchener was capable of: Shortly before the Anglo-Boer War, after the Battle of Omdurman, Sudan, September 2, 1898, Winston Churchill, then war correspondent, wrote: “Being now free from military discipline, I was able to write what I thought about Lord Kitchener without fear, favour or affection and certainly did so. I had been scandalised by his desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb and the barbarous manner in which he had carried off the Mahdi’s head in a kerosene can as a trophy.”
At home in South Africa six Cape Intellectuals, muted by Matial Law to cry out against the war crimes committed by the British army at an unpresedented scale across the whole country, used the only weapon at their disposal: journalism and poetry. Working in secret, this they masterly deployed to attack Britain world wide in intellectual circles for its immoral, greedy and posessive war to lay claim to a vast mineral wealth that was not hers for the taking. And thus poetry, part and parcel of the world of the written word, of literature, became a weapon of war, perfectly fitting the expression: “The pen is mightier than the sword”.
Going back in ancient history, we find that the ancient Greeks revered Apollo as their god of war, and he is thus depicted with a bow and arrow in his right hand. But curiously enough, in his left hand he holds a lyre, the stringed instrument the Greek poets played in accompanyment when reciting their verse, aptly called lyric poetry. And the Greeks are well known for their lyric poetry praising their gods as well as their heroes on the battle field.
Greek painting of Apollo, god of war, but also god of music, poetry and verse.
In line with this ancient tradition, we find that during the Anglo-Boer War many rhymes were made up and turned into songs which built up the morale of the men. This was done by both the British soldiers and the Boer guerillas in the field. Many a British soldier was heard to remark that the habit of the Boers to sing religious songs at night time, made them feel quite uncomfortable. Winston Churchill actually declared that their singing scared him.
On the Boer side FW Reitz was a master at the art of humorous rhyming mocking the British for their pomp, sermony and pride. These rhymes were turned into song, giving the Boers a much needed psychological boost to their morale when they more than often had to face overwhelming numbers of their enemy whilst their women and children suffered in the concentration camps and their burnt down farms offered no replenishment.
The poetry of the Cape intellectuals, as collected together in Songs of the Veld and Other Poems, however, is in a class of its own. It was written when the Anglo-Boer War was in full swing and the scorched earth onslaught of the British army at its severest. From 1900 onwards the British army had its hands fuller than before as the elusive and hardy Boers relentlessly kept on waging a highly effective guerilla war against it. And on top of it all these farmers, these Sons of the Veld, were dealing the professional British army with its proud tradition and military history of beaming successes over the centuries and all over the globe, the one humiliating blow after the next. As Kipling put it: “Teaching Britain no end of a lesson”.
SCORCHED EARTH TACTICS
A very frustrated army leadership, namely generals Bobs Roberts and Horatio Herbert Kitchener, then resorted to Scorched Earth tactics. If you cannot get to the men, get hold of their wives and children and hold them hostage in concentration camps with little to eat, burn their homesteads, destroy their flocks and crops and make life on earth a living hell for them, forcing the men to lay down their weapons (in actual fact, as the war progressed, it was the British army’s own armaments the Boers were using) and to surrender.
British forces in Pretoria, July 1900.
The whole country was literary fenced in when block houses were erected all over. And when the Boer commando’s invaded the Cape Colony, the headquarters of the British Army, martial law was declared and every single citizen reduced to a prisoner. Life even for loyalists became unbearable here under British military authority.
When all was in turmoil and the news of the numerous war crimes committed by the British Army suppressed so that the outside world could be kept in the dark till the final aim was won, six Cape intellectuals – C. Louis Leipoldt, Friedrich Carl Kolbe, Albert Cartwright, Betty Molteno, Alice Greene and Anna Purcell –
wrote poetry in English exposing these scorched earth atrocities to the outside world, condemning Britain for forsaking its own proud tradition of heroism in battle by refering to William Wallace (Braveheart), Robert the Bruce and other famous icons who opposed tyranny, holding the moral high ground.
These poems from the Cape were smuggled out of the country, presumebly by Leipoldt’s diplomatic connections, and printed in London by The New Age, a Literary Magazine circulated to all English speaking countries world wide.
Soon intelectuals from America, Britian, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere responded with outrage, many writing their own poetry likewise condemning Britain for its methods of barbarism in South Africa and challenging the so called Christianity of its crown.
Because of Martial Law in South Africa, writing poems such as these by subjects of the Cape Colony and Queen Victoria would have been regarded as acts of treason. If found out, the punishment would be incarceration and even the firing squad or the gallows.
Cartwright, editor of The South African News, was thrown into jail for accurately reporting in his Cape Town newspaper on the shelling of a Boer homestead occupied by Boer women and children, killing some and wounding the rest. An by reporting that Kitchener gave an order not to take Boer prisoners, but to summarily execute them. This was later denied by Kitchener, but in recent times this allegation has resurfaced in Australia where a military pressure group is arguing for a posthumous pardon of the executed Bushveld Carbineers who murdered, robbed and cattle rustled in Northern Transvaal during the war.
Three other newspaper editors, FS Malan, L.E. de Jong and J.A. Vosloo, who also carried these reports in their papers, were likewise incarcerated and their printing presses closed down. John Ntengo Jabavu, editor of two Xhosa newspapers in the Eastern Cape, who warned his readers not to join the British forces for a few bob a day and all you can rape and rob, was also prosecuted and his papers banned. Jabavu actually predicted future retaliation for this if the Afrikaners should ever regain control of the government. He was prophetical in this: Apartheid at its worst had much to do with settling old scores with the blacks for joing the enemy and participating in the plunder and the outrage of the Afrikaner womenfolk and children. Like the crimes of apartheid, these crimes against a community are never forgotten. Something Jacob Zuma and his co-leaders of the ANC must take heed of. The brutal murder of 3 368 white farmers since 1994 in South Africa will never be forgotten, and sooner or later there will be payback time.
KITCHENER
In a speech made at Johannesburg, June 18, 1902, Kitchener went beyond the customary complimentary remarks regarding one’s former enemies that the winner is wont to make. In fact, rather ironically, he expressed opinions that echo in the pro-Boer poetry in this anthology:
“And, gentlemen, what have we learnt about our enemies? We were told that the Boers would all run away. Well, they ran away very often, but they always came back again. We were told they would never hold together in any cohesive formation, and I fully believe that there is no one more self-confidant of his own individual opinion than the Boers. And yet, what have we seen? That they have subordinated themselves to their leaders and have worked with discipline through a long and protracted war. We have seen them courageous in attack and retreat. They have always shown such marked ability as to be a lesson to us all. There is another characteristic they have displayed which, if we are true descendents of our forefathers, we ought to be most capable of fully appreciating. I refer to that wonderful tenacity of purpose, that ‘don’t-know-when-you-are-beaten’ quality which they have so prominently displayed in this war. There may be individuals amongst them whose characteristicts and methods we do not like and do not approve of, but judged as a whole I maintain that they are a verile race and an asset of considerable importance to the British Empire, for whose honour and glory I hope before long they may be fighting side by side with us.”
SUMMARY:
In the context of the Anglo-Boer War the imperialist war is questioned and shown to have been ethically indefensible and unjustifiable. And where ethical questions are concerned, it is clearly still a small but valiant band who, against the general conformist mentality, forces a breach for the advancement of human civilization. The contribution of the female poets, writers and journalists in this regard must not be underestimated. They, in particular, proved that a socio-political powerless position cannot constrain the power of the conscience.
The publication of this controversial little anthology – so controversial that in a hundred years it has never been published in South Africa – is a tangible indication of the important role of the ethically motivated journalist and publisher to promote freedom and right by fighting with the pen, always mightier than the sword, against the oppressive, and thus dehumanising hegemony, of a rapacious, hedonistic dispensation.
Songs of the Veld is a striking example of what can be achieved when journalist and poet take up this weapon together. Under great pressure, despite imprisonment and the closing down of newspapers and publishing houses, these poets, journalists and publishers were prepared to stand or fall by their convictions.
Through the print-media the six intellectuals, three men and three women, opened windows on a terrifying reality that presented completely different socio-political and economical scenes than those offered by the imperialist politicians and their publications, cart-horses of unscrupulous capitalists and war-financiers. The power of the pen proved to be able to awaken the power of public awareness.
