Emily Hobhouse provided a powerful British voice against the inhumanity of total war against the civilian Boer population.
While it would be misleading to call this a war in which everyone took part, the extent to which male and female civilians were drawn into hostilities, and the depth of black participation, demolish one older historical myth – that of ‘a white man’s war’. The brutality of the war’s tactics, such as farm burnings, conditions in the camps and summary executions, overturns a second enduring myth – that the South African highveld saw the last of the European world’s ‘gentlemanly wars’, fought with honour and mutual respect. It is more appropriate to view the South African War as the most violent and hostile battle between the British Empire and a South African community over more than a century. For both sides the war was seldom a simple matter of a united national commitment to defeating a common enemy. British liberals like Emily Hobhouse and anti-war radicals such as Lloyd George denounced the inhumanity of their country’s use of concentration camps as barbarism. Idealising the republics as a pastoral Eden in Africa, inhabited by virtuous white Protestants, militant British pro-Boers opposed the war as an unjust act of aggression. Their views were echoed in South Africa by prominent Cape English sympathisers such as Olive Schreiner. Even in the British army there were soldiers who admired the Boers as worthy farmers and soldiers and disliked having to fight what they felt to be a war for the benefit of unscrupulous Johannesburg capitalists.
Republican leadership hoped constantly for a mass rebellion against British authority by Cape colonial Boers who, although British subjects, were expected to be largely disloyal to the Crown. But the idea of a big uprising by a rural fifth column turned out to be a pipe dream. Granted, some Cape Boers not only sent sons to serve in Orange Free State forces but also rebelled in support of invading commandos. In the course of the war about 12 000 men turned out as republican rebels, and the number of colonial collaborators might have been even greater if the thrust of republican invasion had been deeper. Yet their number remained too small to be of any decisive strategic consequence.
A writer who wielded her pen against the imperialist sword: Olive Schreiner.
That said, the imposition of martial law to suppress rebellion did little to draw the angry sting of local pro-war Boers. The use of black and coloured witnesses in rough and ready special courts that tried and convicted rebels for offences such as high treason, murder and robbery, caused outrage. So did the practice of publicly executing convicted men, with rebel prisoners forced to watch. One execution, that of Commandant Gideon Scheepers in January 1902, despite his status as an Orange Free State burgher and a prominent officer, even prompted some British parliamentarians to question the propriety of the courts’ martial procedures. Of the 30-odd Boers executed during Kitchener’s command, most were rebel Cape citizens, as were the great majority of the other 500 who were sentenced to death but had the penalty commuted to varying terms of imprisonment. Peace would bring further leniency. Under its terms, ordinary rebels in the Cape Colony lost only their right to vote for a brief period. Their rights as white citizens would eclipse misdemeanours like treason.
As for the war itself, too many Cape Boers were too realistic to fulfil republican expectations. For the most part, they found life as Crown subjects tolerable and remained reluctant to risk joining a republican war that they sensed could not be won. Tellingly, some colonial loyalists even enlisted in town guards and rural militia to defend their southern settlements against invading northern Boers.
Then there were the internal divisions of republican society. The source of deep animosity, their scars would remain long after the end of war. As the British onslaught cracked open Boer society, it opened up an increasingly raw gap between implacable bittereinders and compromising hensoppers about the acceptable terms of future survival. This affected not only the conduct of the war itself. The issue of capitulation to, and collaboration with, British imperialism clouded even the conclusion of peace. More accommodating generals like Louis Botha were willing to break bread with the enemy, negotiating a surrender of their cause. More intransigent leaders, especially from the devastated Orange Free State, remained contemptuous of what they considered to be weakness. To the end, for all Smuts’s realistic assessment that what republicans faced was a catastrophic sacrifice of Boer people in a cause that could no longer be won, they were still all for going to the wire, resisting until they were battered into unconditional surrender.
The South African War ended clearly enough, with the Boers brought into line in a Transvaal Colony and an Orange River Colony, and British imperial supremacy victorious over the whole of South Africa. But its experience of agony and sacrifice would go on to haunt Afrikaner society in the twentieth century, providing the ideological tools of war remembrance that would play a part in the future rebuilding of an Afrikaner nationalist identity and republican political culture.
Fanning the flames of anti-British sentiment. This propaganda cartoon depicts a pro-Boer alliance between Karoo writer Olive Schreiner and Dutch Reformed Church clergyman Dominee A.I. Steytler, after whom the Karoo town of Steytlerville was named.
For the black majority, which was in theory not supposed to be party to the war, its outcome was mixed. True enough, it had for the duration of the war put bread in many mouths and even filled the pockets of those peasants who profited from the sale of livestock and crops to the British. Equally, for a great many others, there were grievous losses for which there was little if any compensation from the imperial side. Those who had been permitted to take up weapons were rapidly disarmed to ensure that they would not cause future trouble. But many others, such as the Kgafela-Kgatla, simply refused to hand in their weapons. Rebellious tenants who had seized stock or occupied land on the farms of the former republics would also be in store for an unpleasant surprise. All along, they had relished Britain’s crushing of the Boers, believing that what they had seized would remain theirs. Instead, backed by the British South African Constabulary, returning Boers would be re-taking what they had lost.
In its reach into and across society, the South African War was the closest the country has ever come to experiencing the brutality of modern total war, in the sense that we might think of the lengthy industrial wars of the past century. The war’s expression was stark, and it was not of ideals or high achievement. Its images – of dead Boer children in concentration camps, of blackened farmhouses and gutted livestock, of public executions of colonial Boer rebels under martial law, of British trench corpses mowed down by commando marksmen, of skinny black refugees wandering the countryside, or of colonial mission stations razed by invading Boers – all bring to mind the merciless nature of what for a time resembled South Africa’s own war without end.
