Let’s all share the burden of memory

“DON’T forget to remember.” It’s a catchy phrase, it’s poignant. It’s an evolution on “Lest we forget”.

You’ve probably seen it with all the coverage of the centenary of the tragic loss of life when the SS Mendi sank in the English Channel in 1917.

The sad truth is that most times we couldn’t be bothered to even remember to remember – that’s if we’d ever learnt anything to remember. Why should we? For the simple fact that once upon a time someone did something incredible – or suffered unbelievable hardships or died – so that we have the todays that we often squander and the tomorrows that we take for granted.

For this generation, the greatest gift wasn’t the men on the Mendi, or the troops in Delville Wood or the warriors of the Cape Corps and their heroism at Square Hill in Palestine.

No, it was the gift of the Rainbow Nation, something that is derided today as “Rainbowism” by people who are able to squander an opportunity for peace and harmony because none of them got bludgeoned to death, drowned in open cesspits or were machine-gunned in stadiums like the Tutsis in Rwanda – just when our rainbow emblazoned the horizon.

If we can’t get people to take the tales of the Struggle seriously; the brave kids of 1976 in Soweto, the parents marching to burn their passes at Sharpeville in 1960, or even the women marching to the Union Buildings in 1956, how on earth are we ever going to get people to relearn the courage, patriotism and esprit de corps of 1916, 1917 and 1918?

When we do get them to remember, just for a moment, isn’t it ironic that we all know about the Mendi, but not the fact that the largest number of South African Native Labour Corps graves is in Maitland Cemetery in Cape Town?

It’s run by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), which looks after the graves of South Africans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians and West Indians – who were all once part of the British Empire – wherever they might be; in the UK, France, or even South Africa.

As CWGC director Colin Kerr explained it: “Every individual helped shape the modern world we live in. We must respect them.”

Each one of them is equal in death.

At the Hollybrook Cemetery in Southampton, the CWGC erected a series of panels to honour all those who had no known grave because they drowned at sea. Six hundred men of the Mendi are memorialised there.

Next to them is the name of perhaps one of Britain’s most famous soldiers and indeed leaders of World War I, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of the Vaal and Khartoum.

He’s also the man who introduced concentration camps (which the Nazis perfected 30 years later), burnt the veld and laid the seeds for Boer and Brit to hate each other for generations.

He’s remembered side by side with black South African soldiers who volunteered to fight in a war that wasn’t theirs, for an empire that wouldn’t let them bear arms, wouldn’t give them medals – but would ensure they never had the vote.

A century later, the context seems perverse, horrifically unfair – and yet the juxtaposition somehow frames the miracle of 1994 and explains the infernos that continuously threaten to consume us today.

That’s why none of us dare forget to remember.