Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Kevin Ritchie
collision went about their rescue drills with military precision, almost insouciant in the face of death even as one lifeboat overturned.
There were incredible tales of heroism, chief among them the legendary call by Isaac Wauchope Dyobha, a preacher and interpreter, who called out to the men of different tribes and clans, urging them to face their fate as Africans, as warriors.
It was an incredible moment for men who if they didn’t drown when they were sucked down by the Mendi’s death plunge, would perish from hypothermia in the icy water.
Whites helped blacks, blacks helped whites – there were only two recorded acts of appalling cruelty: One, a fat white sergeant nicknamed, typically, Mafutha, who reportedly kicked soldiers in the face as they tried to clamber on to his raft. He was later arrested, but history doesn’t know what became of him.
The other was the captain of the Darro, Henry Stump. He never launched his boats, as was the rule of the sea, to pick up survivors even after he’d been told several times that his actions had led to hundreds of troops being dumped in the water, a short distance from his ship. All he did was allow the survivors from two of the Mendi’s life boats and a life raft to come on board.
Was he a coward? A racist? We don’t know. All that we do know is that the Board of Trade enquiry suspended his licence for a year and then promptly sealed the record of their deliberations for the next 50 years.
Other members of the tribunal were less sanguine. They called for Stump to be banned from the sea for life.
Not for nothing, is the Mendi referred to as the black Titanic. Would there have been a different outcome had the troops been white? We don’t know, we can only speculate a century later.
We do know that Prime Minister Louis Botha and his government were so affected by the tragedy that Parliament rose as one in silence at the news, before passing an uncontested motion of sympathy.
It was an empty gesture. The men who survived the icy immersion but were ruined, were sent home and told to tell their chiefs “thank you”. The others who were demobbed at the end of their year’s attestation went home with neither pension, nor recognition.
Their white officers and NCOs received campaign medals, but the successive governments of Jan Smuts and Barry Hertzog did their damndest to successfully frustrate any effort to have the medals issued.
Nobody knew anything about post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in those days. Some of the frontline soldiers were said to suffer from “shell shock”, an awful euphemism for being gassed, bombarded and shot at until you lost the last vestige of your sanity. No one said anything about being almost drowned in freezing water.
Paulina Buyeye-Mohale’s great uncle was like that. He came home, months after the sinking, went straight up to Limpopo and died. The family don’t know when or how. It took them years to find his grave.
For others, there’s been the ongoing denial of their right to observe African customs and rituals, to ensure their ancestors are buried at home, their graves are properly tended. For the descendants of the Mendi, all they know is that their ancestors are