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South Africa and Africa in the World before War

Before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, Europe’s major imperial powers had given little serious thought to the position of their African colonial possessions in the possible event of a major war in Europe. Whatever scenarios were being thought up in London, Paris or Berlin were little more than sketchy. In that vague way, South Africa came into the picture, but only in a regional sense. There, in the case of southern Africa, British nervousness over Germany had been fuelled by German support of the Boer republican cause in the late 1890s and by the growth of the German navy and its expansion into the South Atlantic and Indian oceans. Other than that, in British thinking, South Africa was bracketed with the other imperial Dominions of Australia, New Zealand and Canada – in the event of war, it would serve as a source of manpower and supplies for a European defence of the mother country.

While German power and imperial ambitions in sub-Saharan Africa remained soft, Britain remained tolerant through the early 1900s, although its government kept a wary eye on developments. At one point, it dabbled with contingency planning for a conquest and annexation of German East Africa. This would have neatly completed Cecil John Rhodes’s dream of a continuous line of British rule from the Cape to Cairo, and would also have stretched the reach of South African interests into the eastern portion of the continent. Indeed, even before the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, forward-looking commercial agriculture was already sniffing at the prospective gains to be made were fertile German East African lands ever to be opened to white settlers from the south. If Britain knocked down the door, it could open the way for independent South African interests to walk in.

Yet, that discreet British plan was never formally approved by London. In fact, in 1911, the sluggish War Office was still trying to find out the strength of German forces in East Africa. Meanwhile, in 1907 the British administration in Nyasaland (modern Malawi) had devised rough defence plans to deal with a possible invasion from neighbouring German and Portuguese colonial territories. Again, these too were left to gather dust.

Acting – or thinking – almost in tandem, Germany also had half an eye open. Two decades earlier – in 1891, to be exact – Kaiser Wilhelm II had concluded that were his country ever to end up at war with Britain, German South West Africa should be sacrificed in order to concentrate energies on the defence of German East Africa. For that territory mattered more, and it was not just for its coffee, sisal and freshwater fishing.

Prevailing in East Africa would undermine British naval dominance of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Moreover, it would also thwart Britain’s imperial ambition of complete supremacy in Africa, from south to north. Years later, close to the eve of World War One, Germany also had something else up its sleeve, should the opportunity have presented itself. This was a desire to expand its South West Africa colony northwards, at the expense of a rickety Portuguese empire, by seizing a poorly defended southern Angola. The eventual outbreak of the world war put paid to that idling ambition.

Initially, even the start of war in Europe did relatively little to end lethargy over Africa. Britain’s Secretary of State for War, for one, had little time, energy, or inclination to conceive of the continent as a serious theatre of operations. Lord Kitchener was convinced that there would be no point in the Allies devoting efforts to any invasion of Germany’s colonial territories, for at least two reasons. Firstly, the German possessions were militarily too feeble to threaten the imperial status quo. Secondly, as the decisive battlefront would be in Europe, it was there that the war would have to be won. Once the Allies had secured victory, the Germans would have to surrender their colonies in the peace negotiations.

So much for complacencies over its interior hinterland. But what of the fate of the recently created Union of South Africa? Granted, in 1910, the year of its formation, the Union was not considered by Britain’s War Office to be the safest part of the Empire – that honour went to Australia. If anything, it was quite to the contrary, for London’s newest self-governing, white-ruled Dominion lay in the far south of what, by 1914, was one of its ‘most geographically sensitive regions’.1

Yet, beyond occasional talk, there were few serious signs of South African defensive preparation before 1914. The country’s military establishment, the Union Defence Forces (UDF), was only formed in 1912, with its first prime minister making much of it in July of that year. For General Louis Botha, it was acquiring ‘a real Army’, by which he meant a force ‘able to defend South Africa against any odds, wherever they came from’.2

It was as well that those odds were likely to remain limited, for the fledgling UDF comprised a miniscule permanent force of between two and three thousand mounted riflemen, a larger body of 23 000 citizen volunteers and a patchy tail of part-time conscripts, rifle association reservists and commandos. If confronted by a strong external enemy, it was not much for the defence of a large country of around five million people, ringed by hopelessly vulnerable land borders and exposed coasts. (In our own time, it is hard not to resist an old reminder from the late great Welsh historian, Gwyn Williams. Drawing on Karl Marx, Williams once pointed out that if history does repeat itself, it need not be as a tragedy, but also as a farce. Thus, it might even be suggested that similarly precarious circumstances are being born again, a century later. As the Johannesburg daily The Times cautioned its readers in July 2014, the country’s peeling armed defences were becoming so ‘ragtag’, that the role of ‘our soldiers’ would be confined to that of stationary ‘border guards’.3)

Equally, in a sense, the defence of the country’s borders could also have been left to chance. For South Africa had the crucial insulation of enormous distance from any possible European storm centre. Internationally, therefore, the Union was not exactly banging on the table in alarm at what it might have to face. For instance, a year after Union, the country’s representatives travelled to London to attend the coronation of King George V and to participate in the Imperial Conference. Although issues of external defence and security were on their minds, these did not appear to weigh all that heavily. During his attendance at the 1911 Imperial Conference, Louis Botha’s concerns were mainly over any possible threats to trade. Should a major crisis develop, Botha warned, what would have to be protected most was the sea route around the Cape. Without maritime defences of its own, his country would count on the Royal Navy should it ever find itself facing a ‘German threat to the ports of Lourenço Marques [now Maputo] and Beira in Portuguese Mozambique that were vital to South African trade’.4

During the parliamentary defence debate the following year, Botha and his ruling Unionist allies ‘had predicted a time when South Africa would assume responsibility for her own defence’, but would also be prepared to offer the ‘old country’ the support of a South African expeditionary force.

The notion of South Africa dispensing with its British imperial garrison to look after its own defence was one thing, and palatable to anyone who wished to see the country standing on its own feet, but contemplative talk of assisting Britain with an overseas contingent was another thing altogether, and wholly unpalatable to a large sector of Afrikaners. Having lost their two republican states in a harsh war, they were inclined to cast a cold eye back over the torment of those years, and to the imperialist midwife of their colonial misfortune. Any outward move of Botha’s kind was never going to be smooth sailing. For what it put in mind was not new national defence, but the old position of bowing to empire. Inevitably, for those Afrikaner nationalists who continued to sulk in the shadow of the recent Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), the idea of providing support to Britain and its Empire was, naturally, ‘anathema’.5

In any event, the UDF was still battling to weld into a coherent whole several armed formations with highly disparate English and Afrikaner organisations and traditions. To those difficulties could be added the uncertainties caused by a section of its Afrikaner leadership, which vehemently opposed South African involvement in any of Britain’s potential future wars. Accordingly, the Union had little opportunity or obvious capacity to embark on the preparation of expeditionary forces to be donated to London in the event of a war crisis. Instead, circumstances dictated that the focus of the UDF would be inward, confined to securing the defence of the country, to routine patrolling of the border with German South West Africa, and to forming an essential paramilitary capability to assist in repressing any rural African rebellion or urban industrial unrest.

In the years before the arrival of world war, South Africa had its share of such risings and restiveness. Novelist John Buchan, the official historian of the Union’s later war effort on the Western Front, emphasised quite rightly in 1919 that ‘at the outbreak of war’, confronting ‘foes within and without her gates’, the Union’s step into hostilities represented an undertaking that was ‘the most intricate’ of ‘all the nations of the British Commonwealth’.6 Or, in other words, it was a nuisance that South Africa was not New Zealand.

That was obvious enough, up to a point. The point, though, did not apply solely to the Union of South Africa. Granted, it was distinctively different from other, more homogeneous, more consensual, more rounded Dominion states. However many champagne corks may have popped in celebration of unification in 1910, South Africa’s dominant white minority did not share a common political ethos. Not even for its English and Afrikaner people was it a united country, nor did it contain a credibly identifiable South African nation. Those who hailed the resolution of what was referred to then as the race question – or Anglo-Afrikaner divisions – and trumpeted the achievement of a South African nationhood based on white conciliation were in the grip of a grandiose self-delusion.

Perhaps all that could be said with certainty is that South Africa consisted of the diverse people who lived in it, coexisting together or apart, consentingly or grudgingly. With all its complications, in the international tensions of 1914 the country had become a cause of considerable anxiety for the British government. Given lingering Afrikaner bitterness over the 1899-1902 war, to what extent might that weaken any national campaigning effort? Worse still, might there be serious support for Germany?

Yet, at the same time, it is worth remembering that the Union’s troubled domestic situation in the run-up to hostilities was not wholly unlike that of some other imperial territories. These included places that counted more for London than did South Africa when it came to securing the resources it required for waging a mass war simultaneously across numerous fronts. There was also no shortage of awareness in Britain of these other potential stumbling blocks. For instance, could Indians, notably those who backed the idea of home rule, be relied upon to turn out for the Empire in war? Similarly, there was Ireland. There, too, it was possible that support for the cause of Irish home rule could seriously dilute support for a British war effort.

Then there were uncertainties over the loyalty of minorities in some other dominions, or about discontented majorities in distant imperial lands, such as French Canadians and West Indians. Nagging worries in Westminster over Empire loyalty in wartime were certainly not all down to South Africa, when one ticklish Protestant political question was, how would ‘Québécois and Irish Catholic minorities in Canada and Australia respectively, respond to the call to arms?’7

There was also another parallel between the situation in South Africa and that of some other places in the Empire in the years before the onset of war. At a very general level, it was the common experience of various kinds of tension and violent disturbance. In contemplating the dawn of the new century at the end of the 1890s, it was not for nothing that Ireland’s nationalist Fenian movement, epitomised by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, had pinned its hopes on a continuation of ‘international unrest in South Africa’. For those excitable republicans, there could be no better spot from which to watch ‘the stars being blown about the sky’.8 In showing the rest of the Empire that the way ahead was going to be troublesome, South Africa was being as good – or, perhaps, as bad – as Ireland.

As it happened, in 1902 the Boers failed to deliver that hoped-for republican apocalypse. Still, in other respects, South Africa continued to rumble. For one thing, even the collapse of Boer republican independence was seemingly not quite the end of it, even if it then turned out as ham-fisted adventurism, fuelled possibly by too much brandy and biltong. In 1904, one Willem Hendrik Durandt trotted about with a knot of uniformed and mounted armed followers, in a horsey revival of republican fantasising. Although bemused, a Pretoria court found Durandt and his ineffectual band guilty of a seditious conspiracy against the Transvaal colony.

Two years later, there was a further flicker of white rural rebellion. Another fed-up party of Boer malcontents, mustered behind a couple of jumped-up commondants, galloped out to raid a colonial government armoury, in an optimistic mission to reclaim their lost Eden. It was a cause to which they tried – unsuccessfully – to recruit the handy muscle of the independent-­minded Boer general, Salomon Gerhardus ‘Manie’ Maritz. In that personal aspiration, at least for the near future, they were on the right track.

These mild episodes of self-deception and eccentric hankerings were hardly the cause of notable panic. The cause of that, and its accompanying brutality and bloodshed, came from elsewhere, also around this time. The high-handed imposition by the Natal colonial authorities of a poll tax – levied on all Zulu men who were not paying a hut tax – ran into fierce resistance, resulting in the Bhambatha Rising of 1906, the last armed African peasant rebellion against the burdens of colonial rule before the advent of Union. Thirty whites were killed. One turn of the screw too many by Natal in Zululand, it provoked a passionate, religiously inspired rebellion in defiance of a tax that menaced the wellbeing of the ‘rural homestead’ and threatened the fabric of ‘African communal life’.9

Local colonial forces were ferocious in their crushing of the uprising, leaving almost 4 000 Zulu dead. That toll, in peacetime, would amount to close to half of South Africa’s deaths in the coming world war (calculated at about 9 500 by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission). The horrific scale of punitive violence prompted Winston Churchill, no faint-heart, to turn on Natal, denouncing ‘this wretched Colony’ as ‘the hooligan of the British Empire’.10 It also confirmed African political leadership throughout the country in their belief that open rebellion was of no avail in the struggle for better rights, the only realistic option left being ‘the pen against the sword’.11

If some conditions of life in the country were tense and confrontational, they reflected a strain present in other societies as the world stumbled along its deadly path towards the European summer of 1914. In striking fashion, this mood culminated immediately before the declaration of hostilities, when there was a broader global phase in 1913-1914 of bristling urban class antagonism towards the ruling order. South Africa, like Britain, and like the other Dominions, was a country in which the trade unions representing its mining and railway workers were on the march on the very eve of the war. Australia was jolted by a rash of industrial disputes. The ports of New Zealand were hit by a wave of strikes by militant dockworkers. In Britain itself, major industrial towns were torn by left-wing labour militancy.

It was a rocky story, in which South Africa featured at times in fairly idiosyncratic ways. In July 1913, the Quinlan Opera Company of London was touring South Africa, making the most of the centenary of Richard Wagner’s birth. One of its matinee performances in Johannesburg’s main business district coincided with a state of ‘turmoil’ as a strike by white miners turned violent. For the company’s worried director, Thomas Quinlan, trying to present opera ‘under such trying’ conditions was a ‘shock’, what with Madama Butterfly having to be ‘played with the accompaniment of incessant firing’.12

The calling of a general strike early in 1914 by radical white miners and railway workers so outraged the industrial and farming barons of the Rand Club that they dusted off their Imperial Light Horse expertise acquired during the Anglo-Boer War. With a tough solution to what was termed the Labour Problem squarely in their sights, the business worthies of the Witwatersrand established a mounted Volunteer Force to assist the state in saving the mining industry from the flames of revolutionary Marxism.

White labour unrest growled on into July, with the authorities and their supporting press growing increasingly jittery about the dangers of worker militancy spreading out to infect African miners on the goldfields. Following talk of a national emergency and the imposition of martial law in Johannesburg, the Union Defence Forces were deployed as an iron shield to secure the mines and to guard their nervous owners. General Jan Smuts, the Union’s inspirational uniformed messiah and its deputy prime minister, minister of mines and the interior, as well as defence, was quick to see the value of soldiers in an economic class war. Over 10 000 strikebreaking troops were unleashed in Johannesburg to crack whatever had to be cracked. Never short of steel when it came to compelling his extra-parliamentary adversaries to stay in their place, it is always tempting to reverse the normal order of habits associated with the chilly Smuts. Better to see him not so much as the dreamy philosopher-king of visionary progress who slipped into bouts of state military violence against crowds of civilian firebrands, but more as the other way round.

Running alongside, or preceding the waves of white labour discontent that preoccupied Smuts, were the reverberations of other smaller crises or acts of disaffection. Such restiveness included spurting strikes by some African and Indian miners, anti-pass law protests by African women in the Orange Free State, the launching of Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha resistance campaign against discrimination, and angry political reaction to the deprivations of the 1913 Natives’ Land Act, marshalled by the recently-formed South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the forerunner of the African National Congress.

Of course, if we look back a hundred years from where we are now, it is easy to see how remote South Africa was from the most obviously deep and accelerating crises of 1914 – remote from the galloping arms race after 1911, remote from expanding conscription, remote from degenerating diplomacy, and remote from the launching of ambitious and suspiciously strategic railway improvement programmes. Nonetheless, in a sense, in its atmosphere it shared something of the febrile mood of the age, that of a ‘heightened tension of a more general sort’.13

Instead of the Union growing into a state of calm and balanced consolidation, it was being buffeted by various crises of authority, racked by squabbles, local food shortages, outbreaks of street fighting, and transport disruption. Confronted by turbulent resistance from striking miners and railway workers, the government identified the villains who needed to be rooted out, as they were considered to be harmful to the health of the country. (As can be seen in the responses of some of South Africa’s ruling politicians to its recent mine labour unrest, detecting the hand of influential alien elements behind it all is nothing new.)

Back then, Jan Smuts resorted to purging the Union of troublemaking strike leaders who were foreign-born. With the ‘maintenance of law and order’ fixed as ‘the great question before the country’, what had to be silenced 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.