British Boer rights activist left a message for all time
Emily Hobhouse warned freedom fighters not to limit others’ liberty
DEPENDING on where and when you went to school, Emily Hobhouse may be anything from an apartheid-era submarine to someone you think is the little old tannie smiling at you from a box of rusks.
If Cape Town jour nalist Elsabe Brits has anything to do with it, though, you won’t forget what she meant for this country – and what her message means today.
Hobhouse was a well-to-do British welfare activist who came to South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War and blew the whistle on the effects of military supremo Horatio Kitchener’s scorched earth policy.
More than a century later, after the Holocaust, ethnic cleansings and wars big and small the length and breadth of the globe, it’s difficult to remember that the Boers were South Africa’s first freedom fighters in a war that became a war crime.
Brits’s book, Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor, leaves you in no doubt.
This was a war that was over before it began conventionally, and then it dragged on as an insurgency for two years. Kitchener ordered a scorched earth policy, burning 30 000 farms to the ground, slaughtering livestock where they stood, looting and burning farmhouses, and herding their occupants into concentration camps, where they died in droves from disease.
The statistics tell their own story: 250 000 people interned in 50 white and 64 black concentration camps across the Transvaal, Free State and Northern Cape; 55 000 would die, 80 percent of them children. By contrast, 7 800 British soldiers died in battle, with a further 13 000 perishing from disease. Four thousand Boers died, and a further 5 000 off the battlefield.
Far from breaking the Boer resolve, the policy spawned an implacable hatred that festered for decades.
The war reparations were risible. Although the British parliament voted for millions of pounds to be used to rebuild farms after the depredations, little was paid over; another truth inconveniently revealed by Hobhouse.
All this Brits had learnt as a schoolgirl almost 30 years ago, but what piqued her interest was a little book she picked up in Prince Albert. It told not just of Hobhouse’s whistle-blowing, but her bid to raise funds to create a ploughing scheme to help farmers till their barren fields and feed their shattered, starving families.
The book sparked a threeyear journey that would take her to Britain and even to Canada – across the old Boer War battlefields and the sites of the concentration camps, culminating in 11 months of writing after work each day and every weekend, to get the story told.
Her primary sources were Hobhouse’s personal papers and her draft autobiography, reliving how she had fought off the unprecedented misogyny of the leaders of one of the greatest empires the world had seen – run by a woman.
She would discover how Hobhouse’s activism was not limited to Boer women and children, but extended to all South Africans, how her pacificism took her to Belgium and Germany in the midst of World War I, in the face of parliamentary calls for her to be tried for treason and executed.
Undeterred, she returned to Leipzig after armistice, feeding 12 000 German children for two-and-a-half years – a staggering 5.5 million meals.
Hobhouse was hated by successive British administrations. When she died in 1926, her death went unrecorded and she was cremated.
In South Africa, though, it was a different story. Hob- house’s remains were transported to Bloemfontein, where she was accorded a state funeral – the only non-South African to have received such an honour. Her ashes were interred in the monument she had helped design.
“She worked with Anton Van Wouw, the sculptor, to get the tableau of the Boer woman holding the dead child on her lap right. It was something Emily had witnessed herself and she made Van Wouw redo the child until it appeared dead – as she had witnessed it,” says Brits.
But it was the speech she made at the opening of the Vroue Monument in 1913 that sealed the importance of Hobhouse’s legacy for Brits.
“Be merciful towards the weak, the down-trodden, the stranger. Do not open your gates to those worst foes of freedom – tyranny and selfishness. Are not these the withholding from others in your control, the very liberties and rights which you have valued and won for yourselves? So will the monument speak to you.
“Many nations have foundered on this rock. We in England are ourselves still but dunces in this great world lesson; our leaders still struggling with the unlearnt lesson that liberty is the equal right and heritage of every child of man, without distinction of race, colour or sex. A community that lacks the courage to found its citizenship on this broad base becomes a city divided against itself, a city that cannot stand.”
“It’s so profound,” muses Brits, “Emily could have been saying it today. She was a liberal humanitarian, she hated nationalism, she hated imperialism.”
Perhaps the most important message for Brits is that irrespective of the righteousness of the fight for freedom – be it for gay rights or against racism – the greater crime is to deny others the same freedoms once the battle has been won. This has been seen all too often, as Hobhouse warned. The Boer freedom fighters morphed into the architects of apartheid.
“Emily was a freedom fighter, a heroine, a human rights hero and humanist hero, a fabulous woman for whom no labels actually fit – that’s why I had to write this book, to bring her story to life to a broader market and to inspire young girls.”