Читать книгу World War One and the People of South Africa - Bill Nasson - Страница 9

Rising to War

Early in August 1914, London was advised by Pretoria that the Union would assume full responsibility for its own land defences, thereby releasing the country’s imperial garrison for service in France. The duties of that garrison had been interpreted flexibly, most recently including making up for a shortage of Johannesburg police when it assisted the government in dealing with the miners’ general strike of July 1913. Its British officers, sick of being stuck in South Africa on dull civil order chores, welcomed this national substitution of their imperial establishment. The safety of South African soil was now for the first time entirely in the hands of the emergent UDF.

With no sign of a Union expeditionary force in the offing, some white as well as a sprinkling of Coloured middle-class and other educated volunteers who were keen on what they considered to be proper action, opted to offer their bodies overseas. Joining the early rush for the army in 1914, some travelled to Britain. Making for the British Army, there they fell in along with South Africans who were either working or studying in Britain, were eager for service, and had no desire to return home to a place where support for the war was certain to be far from universal. These included university students at London, Oxford and Cambridge, dealers in the City, industrial chemists, and horticulturalists at Kew Gardens.

Other men headed for British colonial territories in Central and East Africa, to enlist in established imperial formations like the King’s African Rifles. While there was nothing that could be done about these individual departures in the early weeks of hostilities, it was still rather annoying for Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, who wanted to assert the identity of their new South Africa. It seemed ‘a pity’ that these volunteer recruits, so willing to serve overseas, were doing so as empire subjects or citizens, and ‘were not fighting as South Africans’.18 For Smuts, ruefulness turned to rage in due course, once he discovered that the migrant soldiers included non-European volunteers, or what he termed with disdain, ‘men of doubtful descent’.19

It would not do for Coloured men of the Union to end up as Christian soldiers on common terms with white British infantry. Who knew the impudent ideas with which they might return home? That apart, it took no imagination to know how it would have been received by nationalist critics, had they got wind of it. Casting about for what to do about so undesirable a development, Smuts proposed that medical doctors be assigned to check the racial ancestry of any would-be Empire fighters if their appearance on departure looked dubious. A more casual Botha, to his credit, thought that as there was a war on, doctors might find themselves with more urgent concerns.

As in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, South African inhabitants born in Britain had higher levels of war commitment than those born in overseas territories. Thus, ‘the strongly British identity’ of most of Natal’s white inhabitants put Durban, a ‘city of English gardens and statues of Queen Victoria’ where ‘a third of the white population had been born in Britain’,20 at the forefront of early popular enthusiasm. In 1899, with war with the Boer republics weighing on his mind, Britain’s High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner, had taken solace in the English faithfulness of Natal, which he considered to have been as loyal as Ulster. Fifteen years later, Milner would not have found himself let down by the Ulster of South Africa.

In this early flush of enthusiastic enlistment, numbers of ‘overseas-born’ men and working expatriates also returned to join the British Army, among them a Kimberley diamond prospector and mining engineer called Fred Roberts. As Lieutenant-Colonel F.J. Roberts, this Griqualand West-based miner would end up in Belgian Flanders, editing the celebrated satirical trench newspaper, The Wipers Times.

Meanwhile, back in the Union, Britain’s position that it embodied the Empire as a whole in committing the populations under its sovereign authority to war did not appear to be misplaced, whatever the doubts of its governing politicians as war approached. With relatively little urging from their rulers, English, Anglo-Afrikaner and a sprinkling of Afrikaner loyalist middle and lower middle classes embraced the conflict with considerable enthusiasm. Rallying behind calls for intervention in German Africa and for a fighting contribution to the war effort in Europe, pro-war patriots were carried by a tide of national conviction, Empire enthusiasm and some plain English colonial jingoism.

From late July and early August, rowdy city crowds swarmed around newspaper offices for news from Europe and reports of war developments; spectators at sports events and audiences at theatre and concert venues staged impromptu renditions of ‘Rule, Britannia!’; and even motor cars, buses and trams carried fluttering Union Jack flags. A widening ripple of pro-war meetings and rallies saw the carrying of loyal resolutions, sometimes exceptionally extravagant in their promise. For example, ‘The Call’, supported vociferously by students in Cape Town, took much of the world as its audience. It assured ‘all nations’ that it hardly required ‘General Botha’s emphatic declaration’ to know ‘that the South African nation, with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, will range herself without hesitation or reservation by the side of the gloriously united nations of Britain and Ireland.’21 Evidently, the colonial history of Ireland cannot have been studied much at Rondebosch Boys’ High School or at the South African College.

Aside from those on the streets of Cape Town and Durban, more youthful war enthusiasts in Johannesburg, Kimberley and Port Elizabeth were not far behind in the issuing of Calls, Declarations and Promises of a similarly strident sort. While not all of these necessarily crossed the line from pro-war spectator to volunteer participant in the ranks of the UDF, the forcefulness of war sentiment was unmistakable, as was the atmosphere of being carried along in the heat of the moment. More than anything, it was self-mobilisation. Early in September, such bursts of pro-war feeling could be seen in the actions of English-speaking students and hangers-on (at times, all swollen by hard drink) who pounced on any signs of anti-war sentiment. In Cape Town and in Durban, copies of Het Volk were shredded or burned in public. Its offence was an editorial suggesting that ‘England declared war on Germany for no other reason than self-interest’.22

On that basis, an impressive range of organisations and influential bodies of individuals started off well as the war got under way. Those who were gunning for war included English and loyalist Afri­kaner rifle associations, riding clubs, small-town business chambers of manufacturers and retailers, large mining and factory industrial combines, trade federations, progressive farmers’ associations, engineering works and sports groups. From these, individuals or deputations hastened forward to offer money, supplies and fit men for the war effort.

While these were free acts, there was also an occasional element of what might be termed conscientious bribery or patriotic inducement. Leading banks, such as the Standard Bank, assured clerks and other younger married male employees that if they volunteered for army service as ‘Botha’s Boys’, their spouses and children would be taken care of, and would be spared ‘any serious financial loss’.23 Several other larger businesses across the country promised to continue paying men their wages, or at least a portion of their earnings, if they volunteered for service in the UDF, thus offering to supplement their army pay. Like so many others in the early days and weeks of hostilities, they also shared the delusion that the war would be short.

In a few other instances, smaller companies and merchant dealers dangled the carrot of a prize or a fee to encourage office workers to volunteer. Shortly before he died at the end of the 1990s, one of the last surviving South African veterans of the expeditionary effort in France recalled that in September 1914, one Johannesburg brewery was offering to reward employees who agreed to enlist with a box of beer and a hearty lunch. ‘Under the circumstances’, he remembered wryly, ‘it really was quite cheap of them’.24

Elsewhere, continual local activity consisted of a mixture of patriotic cheering from the side and the rear to actually joining up for one or other kind of service. In an emotional identification with Germany’s victims, municipal orchestras in several larger cities took up the playing of coarse versions of the Belgian and the Russian national anthems, while Anglican cathedral choirs tried their throats at singing ‘La Marseillaise’. However subtly, and this time in reverse, these countries were once again speaking to more traumatic aspects of one another’s history. In the early 1900s, anti-British imperialist Russian, French and Belgian supporters of the Boer republican struggle had made a show of flying the symbols, and even of sounding the popular folk songs, of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In 1914, some of the Russian soldiers who marched off to war were singing not only music from Prince Igor but also, astonishingly, ‘Sarie Marais’.

The sound of choirs and the clash of cymbals were not the only appeals to patriotic conscience in the charged political atmosphere of the spring of 1914. Civic authorities in numerous Cape and Natal towns ran up the Tricolore and the flags of other European Allied countries, with mayors and their municipal officials hastening to offer hospitality and to extend speaking invitations to French and Belgian consuls. The only fly in the diplomatic ointment was the occasional British radical or socialist critic in Johannesburg and Cape Town who, with dripping irony, pointed out that the saintly diplomat from a stricken Belgium actually also represented a colonial power responsible ‘for heinous slavery’ and other atrocities in its ‘oppressive reign in the Congo’.25

The emphasis on the desperate need of continental Europe was often far more than accidental or simply a straightforward response to German invasion and the violation of Belgium’s neutrality. In places, it may well have been quite conscious or politically tactical. For wavering Afrikaner residents of rural towns in parts of the Cape that were largely loyalist, what was more effective? It was easier to get them behind a war to end the agony and the suffering of Belgium than one that was about backing a belligerent South Africa, which was part of the British Empire, or about defending that empire itself.

Thus, by October 1914, the councils of localities such as Worcester and Robertson were able to declare them ‘soundly patriotic’. By then, the busy mayors of an avowedly ‘Patriotic Riversdale’, a ‘Patriotic Porterville’ and a ‘Patriotic Villiersdorp’ were urging their citizens to do something to oppose German militarism, and were pledging to provide a range of loyal services to assist ‘the Union Government and that Great Empire of which the Union forms no inconsiderable part’.26

More widely, some of those who exemplified aspects of the volunteer war service they had in mind included artisan, mechanic and other tradesman bodies, such as the Society of Automobile Mechanics of South Africa, which swiftly supplied volunteer members for the mechanised transport and aviation sections of the UDF. Similarly, if the military needed the skills of welders and fitters, the Boilermakers’ Society of South Africa was ready with men of the right calibre. Working-men’s darts clubs and middle-class tennis clubs arranged raffles to raise war funds; wealthy riders from the polo and hunt clubs of northern Johannesburg and Cape Town’s southern suburbs staged fundraising gymkhanas and resolved to donate any spare horses to the Mounted Rifles of the UDF, and so on.

Furthermore, in the leafy grounds of well-heeled suburban white schools, enterprising patriotic teachers set up charity stalls and public donation posts for a variety of war collections and relief funds, including the prominent Governor General’s Fund, and gathered goods for weekend bazaars that sold war badges, emblazoned tin mugs and other rousing patriotic trinkets. Leading girls’ boarding schools, like Rustenburg School for Girls in Cape Town, St Andrew’s School for Girls in Johannesburg, and Grahamstown’s Diocesan School for Girls, were drawn into war crusading, with exhibitions of nourishing solidarity with brothers and other male relatives. Schools opened their gates after hours to ‘little bands of ladies’, mothers and older sisters who knuckled down alongside schoolgirls in domestic handicrafts to do their bit for a masculine world of war. That bit included knitting socks for UDF soldiers, baking for Belgian refugees, hemming groundsheets, stitching clothing for ‘those in France in dire want’ and ‘knitting warm garments for the Mother Country’.27 Although the war did not intrude into these female spheres in the powerful military way that it did in Europe, where British women, for instance, were called on to make gas masks for soldiers, here it also acquired a lively domestic presence.

Predictably, some of the most potent – and rhetorical – expressions of a pro-war spirit emanated from Edwardian South Africa’s nest of collegiate boys’ schools, those sylvan little Englands of the veld or the mossy suburbs. As volunteers left their dormitory beds under the approving gaze of common rooms to become soldiers, here, as in the elite schools of Britain and the other Dominions, the pull of the ‘Great War’ became an immediately ‘inescapable presence in the public schools’.28 It was there, perhaps as much as anywhere, that the idealistic ethos of volunteering, as a selfless merging of individual identity and culture with the first great cause of the newly born white nation, was at its most pervasive.

In practice, it meant rising to the war in a mannered English way, so that, say, the Dutch-Afrikaner boarders at Diocesan College, Rondebosch, or at Rondebosch Boys’ High School were as blue, red and white in their patriotic instincts as were their English counterparts. When it came to loyal duty to Union and Empire, the Maasdorps and the Cloetes of Cape Town and the Scots-Afrikaner Campbells or Andersons of Johannesburg or Bloemfontein were as one with any Attwell or Walker.

For a whiff of this middle-class schoolroom world and its misguided early complacency, one need not go much further than the South African College Magazine, a Cape Town grammar school equivalent of Australia’s Scotch College Melburnian or the New Zealand School Journal. Its September 1914 issue acclaimed the outbreak of hostilities of Europe as a good thing for a country that needed a kick up the pants to learn the desirable lesson of overcoming divisions and making progress on a mutual basis, ‘Europeans together, side by side’. Thankfully, ‘the blaze of war has put to shame the pale splutterings of individual and party interests’, while mobilisation was helping to knit together fresh threads of Union loyalty and a consciousness of national being. These ties were being warmed by ‘great gusts of fellow feeling’.29

In seeking out the desks and benches of the pre-Union, white, colonial ‘old’ schools such as SACS and Diocesan, or Hilton, Selborne and Grey, the war stirred elite aspirations of nation-building by reconciling the country’s English and Dutch pedigrees. The optimistic ideal, ultimately, was that the pro-war loyalism of level-­headed Afrikaners in blue blazers and straw boaters would come to be shared by their dark-grey-corduroy-wearing countrymen. Middle-class college schoolboys were undoubtedly among the keenest recruits who responded to Smuts’s initial call for the raising of two volunteer UDF divisions for defence. Indeed, virtually their only enlistment worries seemed to have been those of either having to vegetate in tedious home garrison duties, or of the war ending too quickly for them to have experienced it properly.

For those reared on the milk of school cadet training camps, it was a natural transition from corps drill to mature infantry service in what would become the Union’s emblematic Springbok or Spring­bokken volunteer contingents. There, they would realise the larger South African cause of the war in which they would be participating as individual soldiers. ‘Springboks’, urged one of the fiery English/Dutch war columns of the Diocesan College Magazine early in 1915, ‘remember, it is not for England that you are fighting, but for the British Empire … and in fighting for it, you are fighting for South Africa. Young South Africa is going to the battlefields, and will come back a nation.’30

From this quarter, the matter could not have been more straightforward. At the heart of the compulsion to join in the waging of war lay the indivisibility of the Union and the Empire. Through their youthful soldiering manhood, the best South African volunteers would find the virtue of final nationhood, and in that the best South African would also be the best Briton. The realisation of that harmonious wartime end would become a recurring refrain.

For these new soldiers, their expeditionary beginning of 1915 was, though, well before the sight of another end, that of the Somme in 1916 and Passchendaele in 1917. Those Western Front horrors would not deliver the visionary future of a national harmony, of a Union fully at ease in the British imperial world. Instead, what would come would be more sobering. For what they would leave in the schools that were the nurseries of infantrymen would be the enduring and poignant markers of cherished lives lost, the memorial halls and chapels, plaques and remembrance rolls, that reflect the heart-rending agony and sadness of headmasters, house­masters and others who were left behind.

Initially strong volunteer impulses from close-knit patriotic circles were not confined to the country’s grander English schools. Among British Empire migrants who formed self-consciously national diaspora communities in urban and industrial areas, there was also banding together. Asserting pride in an empire identity that was one part their host country and one part their country of birth, ‘Transvaal New Zealanders’, ‘Rand Australians’, ‘Cape Irish’ and ‘Bloemfontein Scottish’ were among the first groups to press themselves forward as volunteer fighting groups. Falling in alongside were a number of other fraternities with packaged local identities, including the Natal ‘Sons of England at Harrismith’ volunteers, the Port Alfred ‘St George’s Warriors’ and Kimberley’s ‘Warrior Owens’ (Welshmen).

The Natal branch of northern England’s Lancashire and Yorkshire Association pulled out a squad of ex-colonial militia ruffians, ‘The Rosebuds’. All thorns rather than fragrance, these misguided roughnecks seemed to view the war as an opportunity to repeat their sterling performance against rebel Zulu peasants in the early 1900s. For such martially minded men, veterans of the later nineteenth-century colonial land wars or blooded in the guerrilla phase of the Anglo-Boer War and in the subsequent suppression of the Bhambatha Rising, the view of a European conflict as decent duelling for colonial militiamen clearly carried some attraction.

More green recruits came from the hundreds of mostly immigrant British mineworkers who mobilised themselves in packs of infantry volunteers, seeking to enlist as ‘labour legions’, sticking together as fraternities of workmates who knew one another socially and were bound together by neighbourly familiarity and friendship. In a way, this made several of the main Reef towns of the Witwatersrand resemble Britain’s famous – and ill-fated – ‘Pals’ battalions’, in which neighbourhood and peer groups of industrial workers, clerks, shop workers and others in shared labouring occupations joined up together.

As a social and cultural basis upon which to volunteer, the act of accepting service as part of a knot of Natal English or Kimberley Welsh may well have represented the desire for ordinary civilian social exclusivity to be carried over into military service. Thus, far from dissolving the divisions within pro-war white society, the war may simply have sustained them. As a letter-writer to the Rand Daily Mail observed at the end of August 1914, army life for professional or clerical men would be ‘rendered truly amenable’ if its ‘various duties and many tasks were to be performed in proximity to others of similarly good class’.31 Viewed comparatively, as in the case of some British Pals’ battalions in 1914 and 1915, volunteering in kindred groups was ‘actually less about who you served with, but much more obviously about who you didn’t serve with’.32 Gentlemanly accountants, lawyers and other ‘university men’ had no wish to be lumped in with common, coarse or rough Afrikaners, men ‘of the railways type’, or ‘from roads and various diggings’ who were coming forward to serve only because they were unemployed.33

Many of those gentlemanly individuals, whose support for the Union’s war was rooted in individual choice and in the conviction that it was a just cause, were Christian in a Bible-reading and churchgoing sense. As the flock of militant Anglican priests, they were assured regularly of the righteousness of their volunteering mission. The message from English-language church pulpits was not merely a stirring condemnation of Prussian militarism and an endorsement of the Union’s war policy; in its grammar of Christian patriotism, it was that the war was a spiritual opportunity for South Africa to partake in a higher calling.

Naturally, the war was consecrated in holy terms, presented as a crusade for the preservation of the British Empire’s Protestant principles of freedom, honour and purity. The Union would be making ‘a mighty contribution’ to their survival, trumpeted a Transvaal Anglican bishop in September 1914. For, in taking up a selfless fight, the country would be ensuring ‘that the cause of right may prevail’.34

Pro-war Anglicanism had some equally tireless church company. A number of Roman Catholic clergymen spread the word that the war was a sacred opportunity for Catholics in South Africa to bear witness to how French they were, and to open their hearts to the cry of Germany’s suffering victims. In urging war service, Methodist and Presbyterian churchmen assured followers that it would stiffen their Christian humanity in a great battle for a new and better world civilisation. When it came to dealing with talk of neutrality or of pacifism, Anglican rhetoric was, again, particularly blunt. ‘Peace’, bellowed one Anglican rector, was ‘dishonourable’, when there was ‘decency’ to be fought for.35 Other churchmen denounced anti-war feeling as sinful, almost tantamount to paganism and atheism.

Meanwhile, although the UDF was not exactly throwing its doors open to loyal Africans, missionaries linked arms with magistrates, Department of Native Affairs commissioners, Cape judges and parliamentary senators to address various urban and rural meetings, as well as church meetings. Earnest administrators and politicians did their best to explain the inexplicable significance of the Triple Entente (the pre-1914 alliance formed by Britain, France and Russia) for the future of civilisation and progress in South Africa. On occasion, they also explained that a tyrannical and immoral Germany was after the fair and prosperous colonies of a Christian Britain, with the intention of enslaving their native people. All the while, attending clergy enlightened African mission congregations and village field audiences on who the German enemy was, and on how Germans had become the sordid, barbaric and ‘bloodthirsty’ enemies of God, ‘the brutish sword of Ungodliness’.36

What pro-war patriots expected to hear from the mainstream Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK) churches in 1914 was not exactly what they thought that they would get, or at least not automatically in the opening stage of the conflict. In August and into September, prominent Dutch Reformed clerics were notably cautious, rendering unto Caesar that which was his. At pains not to tread on the corns of the government, predikanten (preachers) largely skirted anything too controversial when it came to the issue of support for the war. Although that mood would change before very long, a number of ministers even came out openly in support of the Union’s war policy. Law-abiding dominees of starchy, ordentlike (respectable) congregations in larger cities like Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town called the war tragic and distressing, but nevertheless advised men to respond to the national duty of loyal service. Again, in smaller loyalist towns in rural districts, much the same tune was sung. Thus, for Dominee Christiaan Malherbe of Villiersdorp in the western Cape, it was ‘the duty of Dutch Reformed boys to do their duty to the King and country’.37

The question of the war, duty and the need of the King and the country was also on the plate of the SANNC. On first hearing news of the outbreak of hostilities, its protest meeting in Bloemfontein against the 1913 Land Act immediately added the war to proceedings. It then promptly eclipsed everything else. Delegates resolved to ‘hang up native grievances against the South African Parliament till a better time’. Instead, ‘a patriotic demonstration’ would be organised and a deputation would be dispatched to reassure the government that they would ‘tender the authorities every assist­ance’.38

Overseas, Congress representatives, involved in a hopeless effort to try to persuade Britain to intervene constitutionally to check the Land Act, found themselves ‘longing to catch the first steamer back to South Africa’. Once there, according to the organisation’s secretary, Solomon (Sol) Plaatje, it was their wish ‘to join their countrymen and proceed to the front’.39 One who evidently saw himself at the front of any procession was Walter Rubusana of the Cape Congress. A character whose reach often exceeded his grasp, in October 1914 he offered to raise a force of 5 000 Africans under his personal command to participate in the Union invasion of German South West Africa.

Westernised nationalist protagonists like Rubusana were not the only Africans who swung behind support of the Union war effort. A rural tributary of chiefs and headmen also took a firm stand, propelled there by a mixture of motives. One possibility, which ought not to be ignored, was a straightforward sense of personal loyalty to the governing structures to which they were attached. Or, expressions of patriotic wartime tribute came from a desire to curry favour with magistrates and native commissioners in the Ciskei, the Transkei, the Transvaal and elsewhere. Thirdly, attentiveness in the various African reserves to national need came also as a shrewdly calculating bid to try to shore up the position of those who were feeling the erosion of their chiefly powers and customary standing.

Under the gaze of approving Department of Native Affairs officials, various countryside assemblies of ‘chiefs and people’ nodded through solemn addresses, calls and resolutions. Many were for the consideration of ‘His Majesty and General Botha’, the governor-­general as ‘Supreme Chief of His Majesty’ (in Natal and Zululand an imaginative sort of Shaka stand-in), the ‘King and Union’ and ‘the Great Empire and this Land’.40 It is impossible not to miss a loaded, calculating sense of priority in these acts of theatrical deference; dipping into their modern colonial heritage as subjects of the Crown, these African crowds were confirming their allegiance in a distinctive order. It was, invariably, obeisance to the British Empire first, and to the Union second. With London still standing for what might have been a more liberal present, here the imperial sun was still high in the sky.

In other places, rural African reactions to the cry of war intersected with ordinary initiatives undertaken by whites. Such open-­hearted gestures by impoverished communities were moving, all the more for the objects of their sympathy being utterly unknown or completely unrecognisable. Some headmen and village elders in the Ciskei and Transkei took up donations for European war refugees, sending tiny sums to the nearest Belgian refugee funds, located in Port Elizabeth and East London. There were also slight pickings in the vicinity of railway stations, post offices and trading stores for roaming collectors for the Governor General’s Fund and the Prince of Wales’ Fund.

Further kinds of close identification with the cause of war were associated with a wide sprinkling of patriotic local committees manned by various members of the ‘Non-European’ middle classes. These attracted professionals such as teachers, lawyers and doctors, as well as small businessmen and small landowners. In the Cape, where they retained their rights to the non-racial and qualified male franchise, that political investment in a sense of citizenship extended instinctively to a broader patriotic investment in the Union war effort. So, the commercial merchant elite of the Transvaal British Indian Association and the Cape British Indian Union made direct financial contributions to the government.

At the same time, Muslim loyalists in the Cape readied a ‘Malay Ambulance Corps’, although of a kind unlikely to win the approval of the Red Cross. While it undertook to supply its own transport and basic medical supplies such as bandages and stretchers, it also requested arms from the authorities to defend itself in the field. There, ‘upright Cape Malays’ would need weaponry to repel ‘barbaric Sultans with their merciless tribes’, and to protect the wounded from the ‘repulsive’ and ‘uncivilised Turks who respect not the home of the sick’.41

Less overheated teachers and tradesmen on a number of Coloured mission stations staged fundraising brass band concerts and choir performances, and even held poetry readings at which coin collections were held on Belgian Days. Here, too, even among those who had precious little to give, some gave. Once again, it also did not matter that the victims and the war that they endured were almost indescribably remote from the donors’ everyday existence. What really mattered, perhaps, was the impact of the opening image of the conflict – in Belgium in 1914, a pitiless war was being waged upon civilians and their homes. South Africa’s own very recent history had been scarred by a heavy onslaught upon civilian communities. In helping to mould sympathetic awareness and responses among these mission and other local Christian communities, the impact of knowledge of the wartime fate of women and children in the former Boer republics may be worth some consideration.

Some of the other reactions from poorer rural communities involved no charitable campaigning nor, come to that, any real comprehension of what the war may have been about. For skinny Baster pastoralists, farm herders and agricultural labourers in tough northern and northwestern stretches of the Cape interior, what had reached the air of Namaqualand and Gordonia was a British Empire war and, with it, another prospect of gainful employment. It was enough to make some, including 1899-1902 veterans of the Nama­qualand Border Scouts, jump the gun by offering to serve, whether the UDF wanted them or not. As future scouts and drivers, there was some hope of repeating their previous stint of well-rewarded army service in British forces. It did not take much for men to come out, eager to ‘be counted’, and to ‘be in’.42

In many ways, the major expression of Coloured political organisation, the moderate Cape-based African Political (later People’s) Organisation, or APO, simply mirrored the loyalist tone of the SANNC, with which its leadership had fraternal links. Its branches, inhabited mainly by the educated Coloured elite, generated their own round of pro-war resolutions and petitions. Moreover, the events of the war soon saturated the APO, the organisation’s newspaper. Indeed, more or less its entire reportage and editorial stand became dominated by war news and by domestic concern over how patriotic volunteering might bring the reward of expanded citizenship rights. For a time, the war became its politics, and its politics became the war.

The APO even distributed its own volunteer attestation forms in August 1914 in issues of its paper, as campaigning leaders such as Abdullah Abdurahman, James Currey and A.H. Gool urged local organisers to mobilise men for active service in a Cape Corps. Having ‘sprinted off’ after able-bodied men, by mid-September beavering APO branches had mustered around 10 000 volunteers. Sweetening inducements included cake and chocolate spooned up by a Cape Corps Comforts Committee. ‘By offering to bear our share of the responsibilities’, remarked Abdurahman, ‘Coloured men’ would prove themselves to be ‘not less worthy than any other sons of the British Empire’.43 With that test having been passed, the case for the reward of improved status was, he hoped, incontestable.

In the light of that aspiration, there were good wartime lessons to be learned from positive conduct in other parts of the Empire. News of the large-scale enlistment of soldiers in India was applauded by the APO as exemplary for local communities, ‘no one will appreciate this more than the Indians themselves’.44 The conduct of ‘responsible’ Irishmen, even nationalists like Willie Redmond, to put aside the Home Rule fight and to support Britain was also grist to the mill. In its acceptance of the necessity of leaving ‘local grievances in abeyance’ in order ‘to rally to Country and Empire’, the APO was lining up with Ulster patriots and southern Irish constitutional moderates. Turning out in his trademark pinstriped suit, Abdurahman lectured audiences through August and September on the danger of any equivocation over the war issue, for ‘if the British Empire fell, they would all go with it’.45 Lord Milner, 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 were interned for appealing to fellow Afrikaners to prepare food stocks and to put in extra bedding to house invading German soldiers, who would be in need of friendly shelter. Elsewhere, a trickle of other poorer Afrikaner railways, forestry, roads and postal workers were hauled up for directing ‘disloyal’, ‘seditious’ or ‘treasonous’ 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.