The distant war that defined a new country
| Tomorrow, August 4, marks exactly 100 years since South Africa (then the Union of South Africa) entered World War 1 on the side of Britain. It fought battles throughout Africa and, devastatingly, in northern France
ONE hundred years after South Africa entered World War 1, an unlikely set of victors has emerged — from supermarket tycoon Whitey Basson to MTN and Spur.
Professor Bill Nasson of Stellenbosch University, an authority on South Africa’s role in the Great War, called these pioneering businesses the “Jannie Smutses of today”.
Union prime minister Louis Botha and his deputy, Smuts, had hoped to use the war to extend South African territory and commerce far beyond its borders, which in 1914 had not yet been fixed.
Their ambitions included the protectorates of Bechuanaland (Botswana), Basutoland (Lesotho), Swaziland, German West Africa (Namibia), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and even Mozambique, despite the colonial power, Portugal, being a longtime British ally.
Smuts particularly coveted the Mozambican port Beira and even had his eyes on East Africa, where he had briefly — and not very successfully — led a campaign against the army of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the only German general to retire undefeated from the field.
These hopes of expansion were dashed by big brother Britain — but where they failed, South African entrepreneurs have flourished.
Basson has taken Shoprite into countries Smuts and Botha could only dream of and others, such as Nigeria, about which they did not even dare speculate. MTN rules the continent’s cellphone waves and you can get a Spur burger in Lusaka and Lagos.
“They’re completing Jannie’s thing in a coarse commercial way,” said Nasson.
But before Smuts and Botha could make a claim on territory they had to get South Africa into the action. The new Union of South Africa, just four years old, did not have a choice about entering the war, tied as it was to the apron strings of Empire. Once Britain ventured into what then made it a world war, South Africa was obliged to follow and did so on the same day, August 4 1914.
It was another matter getting South Africans to the front line. Britain had asked South Africa to invade German West Africa with the aim of eliminating radio stations there, but this held the danger of splitting Botha and Smuts from some of their political allies, old Boer War comrades who regarded Germany as a friend and the war as an opportunity to regain the lost republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
Ironically, these old comrades helped provide a casus belli when they threw in their lot with the German army across the border.
Like many wars, South Africa’s in 1914 began with a border incident. At the small outpost of Nakop, 132km west of Upington and one of the loneliest places on earth, German troops encroached on South African soil. It was the only time in the war that German troops invaded British soil.
They fired a Maxim gun at the South Africans, killing Corporal
If you’re black, it’s the Mendi; if you’re Englishspeaking, it’s Delville Wood
P Coulter of the South African Mounted Rifles, who may have been this country’s first casualty of the war.
The incident gave Botha and Smuts the pretext for invasion. For the next four bloody years South African soldiers fought in what are now Namibia and Tanzania, as well as Egypt and, most heroically, on the Western Front where the terrible losses — 2 373 casualties out of a brigade of 3 153 — at the 1916 Battle of Delville Wood in northern France still hold a poignant place in our history.
Delville Wood is commemorated annually but the war has become increasingly distant for most South Africans. It was, after all, fought mainly by white men on white men’s terms.
Roy Andersen, however, believes it is important to remember World War 1.
“South Africans fought for our freedom then,” said Andersen, a former president of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and now, as a major-general, chief of the army reserve.
“It is also important for the soldiers of today as a motivation for the reserve force which is the backbone of our defence force,” said Andersen, who makes a pilgrimage to the Delville Wood memorial at Longueval each year.
But for Professor Fransjohan Pretorius, the renowned Boer War historian of the University of Pretoria, there are limits to remembering the war.
“The first is that it was not fought on our soil and, second, that Afrikaners focused on the rebellion and not on being part of ‘Britain’s war’,” he said.
The third is that black people had only a peripheral role in it.
If anything, the war led to increased frustration among black South Africans, especially coming so soon after the 1913 Land Act, which confined them to reserves, said Pretorius.
But the role of the black man in the war effort was critical, according to Anne Samson, an independent South African historian working in Britain.
Although not strictly soldiers — they were recruited by the Department of Native Affairs and served as unarmed labourers — what they did was “fundamental to what white and coloured men, who were armed, did”, said Samson.
“These men were the drivers, they were the carriers, they were the backbone. The soldiers wouldn’t have been able to move if it hadn’t been for them. They built the roads and the railway lines in East Africa where an old Africa hunter said that if it had not been for the black labourer to even cook for them, the South African soldier would not have been able to fend for himself in the bush.”
Samson said there was a need to bring recognition to this “invisible force”. She said the centenary commemoration was an opportunity for greater reconciliation, but— like Pretorius — acknowledged that the war could still be divisive: “If you’re black, it’s the Mendi; if you’re English-speaking, it’s Delville Wood; if you’re Afrikaansspeaking, it’s the rebellion and Jopie Fourie.”
The SS Mendi was a troopship accidentally sunk in 1917, with the loss of 616 South Africans (607 of them black troops) who drowned.
It will form a centrepiece of South Africa’s commemoration in three years’ time. Fourie was an officer in the Union Defence Force who joined the rebels and was captured and executed by firing squad.
For all the victory, defeat, tragedy and bitterness, the most enduring influence of the war is not military.
“Don’t get all worked up about the military stuff,” said Nasson. “Where were we in industrialisation? Nowhere in 1913. We even imported shoes from Britain. Industrialisation, manufacturing — those are the key things. Otherwise we’re like Ireland.”
As Samson declared: “The war defined South Africa as a country.”