Donal Lowry. History Today. Volume 49, Issue 5, May 1999.
When in October 1899 the British Empire went to war against the Boers or Afrikaners of the Transvaal (South African Republic) and the Orange Free State, it was widely believed that the conflict would be brief. It became, however, the largest war waged by Britain since the Napoleonic Wars, even including the Crimea, involving the strongest forces sent from English shores since Henry V’s army departed for Agincourt. It was the first of the modern media wars, waged for the hearts and minds of both metropolitan and global opinion, in which military officers and civilian politicians on all sides had to pay acute attention to the coverage provided by the press. Fought at a time when the telegraph and syndicated news agencies had begun to globalise information, it became the most publicised war waged outside Europe between the American Civil War and the First World War. Indeed, in the minds of contemporaries, the South African War shared certain similarities with the American conflict, not least the widespread perception that it involved universal issues and principles which extended far beyond the borders of southern Africa.
Imperialists in Britain and its colonies of settlement believed the very essence of British strength to be at stake. Thousands of volunteers from Canada, Australia and New Zealand flocked to the imperial colours in South Africa. Britain, however, was made to appear both militarily and physically degenerate by the three years and almost half-a-million men it took to defeat the Boers, whose forces never numbered more than 88,000. During the guerrilla phase of the war, between June 1900 and the Boer surrender in May 1902, the tactics of farm burning and concentration camps employed by the British added further charges of brutality and moral corruption before the bar of world opinion. The significance of the Transvaal goldfields and the political prominence of leading magnates, often caricatured as a bloated Cecil Rhodes, gave the war a whiff of the sordid, which opponents of the conflict were all too ready to exploit (even if the actual influence of capitalists in the outbreak of hostilities was and remains controversial). Meanwhile, the unexpected protraction of the struggle intensified calls for a complete reorganisation of British educational and industrial life and gave rise to that peculiar Edwardian imperialist soul-searching encapsulated under the catchphrase National Efficiency. The war polarised political opinion in Britain, where David Lloyd George, Emily Hobhouse and James Ramsay MacDonald were among its leading opponents. The war even affected the young Clement Attlee, then a schoolboy at Haileybury, who, along with the entire middle school, was beaten by his pro-Boer headmaster for taking part in a celebration of the relief of Ladysmith that he had banned. In Ireland, the war greatly deepened the alienation of unionists, whose imperialism was invigorated by the war from nationalists who were enthusiastically pro-Boer. In Canada, too, the conflict widened the gulf between French Canadian nationalists and their English-speaking countrymen and set the pattern of their future relationship. It intensified the imperialism of Australia where it appeared to herald the arrival of The Coming Man, that healthy Independent Australian Briton who represented an almost evolutionary improvement on his metropolitan ancestors, ensuring that the new federation was born with a conservative emblem of imperial sacrifice. Nevertheless, it also provided, in the form of ‘Breaker’ Morant, executed for shooting prisoners, yet another Australian anti-hero. In India, the unwillingness of the British to employ Indian troops in a ‘Sahib’s War’, together with imperial failure to ensure Indian rights, further alienated moderate nationalists, while Indian advocates of physical force, like their Irish counterparts, came to admire Boer armed resistance. More generally, at the dawn of the twentieth century the war drew on a widespread, almost millenarian sense of angst about the future, manifested in such events as the Dreyfus Affair, the Fashoda Crisis, the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Chinese Boxer Uprising in 1900.
In Europe and America, where there was enormous interest in the war, and in the United Kingdom itself, there emerged vociferous movements loosely regarded as pro-Boer. These varied greatly in outlook, however, from those who favoured an immediate end to the war and conciliation with the Boers, to those, often represented by the Irish nationalists and continental movements generally, which looked forward to a British defeat. There were also pacifist movements opposed to the war and concerned chiefly with humanitarian aid. Like the mainstream pro-Boer movements, however, these also tended to idealise and sentimentalise the Boers as pastoralist victims of a militarist empire. The conflict attracted the unprecedented attention of contemporary thinkers and politicians of international stature. The Hungarian Marxist thinker George Lukacs quarrelled with his pro-British father on the issue. Karl Kautsky, the major populariser of Marxist theory after the death of Engels and chief theorist of the German Social Democratic Party, believed that the war was a struggle to conquer new fields for the military, bureaucracy and high finance, rather than markets. The Irish syndicalist James Connolly, destined to be executed by the British in Dublin in 1916, believed that the war had ‘pricked the bubble of England’s fighting reputation’, and marked the ‘beginning of the end’ of the ‘monstrous tyranny’ of the British Empire. For J. A. Hobson, leading critic of the war in particular and imperialism in general, who inspired Lenin, the war represented ‘The play of forces world-wide in their scope and revolutionary in their operation’.
The German revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxembourg was one of the few to recognise that the non-European population would be the ultimate losers in the conflict, while Henry Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation, came to regard the war as a dispute ‘between two burglars’. More typical, however, was Michael Davitt, ex-Fenian, founder of the Irish Land League, and firebrand opponent of imperialism. He resigned his parliamentary seat in protest against the war, attempted to mobilise intervention by European powers, and wrote an apologia for the Boers which indicted the British for arming African ‘savages’ against two tiny Christian states. Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, had been a journalist in South Africa before the war, and became a skilled manipulator of ‘Boer fever’ against British rule in Ireland, where the war revitalised separatism at a crucial moment.
Most opponents of the British war effort tended to idealise the Boers as much as they demonised the capitalists. Hobson, John Burns, the Labour MP, and Edward Carpenter, radical, spiritualist and champion of homosexual love, were among those who caricatured the Rand magnates as ‘cosmopolitan-Jewish’ manipulators, profiteers and conspirators. The Labour leader James Keir Hardie absolved the Boers of any blame for the war, in spite of their treatment of Africans, since they were a virtuous, republican and ‘pastoralist people’ with ‘all the fine qualities which pertain to that way of life’, while Carpenter acknowledged that the Boers had their faults, but the British, in contrast, were ‘cruel’. He likened Boer resistance to what the British would do if overrun by 100,000 Chinese, ‘smothering our civilization, and introducing their hated customs and ways.’ Joseph Conrad ridiculed Kipling’s assertion that this was a war for democracy as being ‘enough to make you die laughing,’ while to Mark Twain the war, like the recent Spanish-American War, made a mockery of ‘Christian civilisation.’ It was common for pro- and anti-war activists to regard these two wars as heralding a new age of Anglo-Saxon hegemony. Theodore Roosevelt, Governor of New York, veteran of the Cuban campaign and future president, sympathised with his Boer ‘kinsmen’ and favourably compared their guerrilla skills with America’s Cuban and Filipino opponents. He believed, however, that the downfall of the Boer oligarchy was as inevitable an outcome of Anglo-Saxon ‘manifest destiny’ as the defeat of the ‘medieval’ Spanish Empire in 1898, or the acquisition of Texas and New Mexico earlier in the century. His distant cousin and another future president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took a different attitude, however, by presiding over the Harvard University Committee for Boer Relief. The Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-Sen believed that the Boer commandos had ably demonstrated what determined opponents of European imperialism could achieve. Even advocates of imperial victory such as Arthur Conan Doyle tended to romanticise the Boers as comprising a unique blend of descendants of Dutch insurgents against imperial Spain and of French Huguenots, made more rugged by centuries of hard apprenticeship in the hostile environment of Africa. ‘Napoleon and all his veterans’, Conan Doyle wrote, ‘have never treated us so roughly as these hard-bitten farmers with their ancient theology and their inconveniently modern rifles’.
With even their own officers admiring the Boers’ reputed qualities, and in spite of Boer atrocities against Africans in the course of the war, it was virtually impossible for the British, especially in the years of farm burning and concentration camps, to provide effective propaganda to counter the pro-Boers in Europe and America. The extensive use of anti-war propaganda, together with the involvement of foreign volunteers in the Boer cause, places the South African War in a line of continuity of internationalist participation, from the American and French revolutionary wars of the previous century, through the South American revolutions of the early-nineteenth century, and the Greek war of independence, the Italian wars of reunification, the Paris Commune, to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, with Paris as ever ‘the Metropolis of Liberty’ playing its part as a conduit for idealistic volunteers. Their participation was symbolically significant in escalating anti-British and radical pro-Boer feeling in their various homelands, including Norway, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, the Low Countries, Russia and the United States. Moreover, the presence of foreign volunteers combined with a Boer diplomatic and propaganda offensive in Europe and America to encourage further Boer resistance, since in Kruger’s words’ the whole world’ appeared to be on their side in their ‘struggle for life and liberty’.
Several volunteer corps of foreigners living in the South African Republic were formed at the beginning of the war, of which the largest were the German and the Hollander Corps. These suffered major casualties on the Natal front, while the Scandinavian Corps was virtually annihilated at the Battle of Magersfontein. In all there were probably about 1,650 foreigners in the various volunteer corps, and another 1,000 in the ordinary Boer commandos, including Dutch, Germans, French, Americans, Russians, Italians, Irish, and Scandinavians. These contingents contained a number of prominent individuals who added a certain fascination to pro-Boer propaganda. Among the Germans were Count Harra von Zeppelin, killed at Elandslaagte; and Fritz Brall, a famous anarchist. The Italian Corps included in its ranks the dashing Captain Camillo Richiardi, who had fought in Ethiopia and on the side of Aguinaldo, the Filipino nationalist leader. His colleague, Lieutenant Count Pecci, was a nephew of Pope Leo XIII, who, in an Allocution of 1900 on the anniversary of his papacy, took an implicitly pro-Boer position. There was Cornelius Van Gogh of the Hollander Corps, who after his capture by the British, committed suicide, like his more famous painter and art dealer brothers Vincent and Theo before him; and the colourful Irish-American West Pointer, Colonel John Blake, who headed the First Irish Brigade. His second-in-command, Major John MacBride, later married Maud Gonne, W.B. Yeats’ unrequited love, and was executed after the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. The Irish-Australian Colonel Arthur Lynch, journalist and commander of the Second Irish Brigade, was also sentenced to death for high treason by the British soon after the war, but this was commuted to life imprisonment. He became a nationalist MP, and a colonel in the British Army, married a Hungarian aristocrat at Brompton Oratory and retired comfortably in London’s West End as a gentleman of letters.
The Russian Corps chiefly consisted of an ambulance and a unit of Scouts, many of them Cossacks, including Prince Bagration of Tiflis, giant hetman of the Cossacks and later a playboy opponent of the Bolsheviks, as was Count Alexis de Ganetzky. Very different from these was Alexander Guchkov, a liberal idealist grandson of a serf and son of a merchant. After service in the Transvaal, he went on to take part in the suppression of the Boxer Rising in China, before returning to Russia to found the Octobrist Party. He became Minister of War in the Provisional Government in March 1917, but fled abroad at the outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution. The most prominent of the Russians was Colonel Eugene Maximov, who in 1900 was appointed second-in-command of the International Legion to the Frenchman, General de Villebois-Mareuil. Officially, Maximov arrived in South Africa as a correspondent for several Russian newspapers. In fact he was a Russian police intelligence officer, which antagonised a number of volunteers. He was killed in the Russo-Japanese War. There was also the legend of ‘Maria Z’, a Russian woman doctor who reportedly served with the Russian Ambulance unit in male disguise while searching for her estranged husband and later wrote her memoirs; but the truth of this has never been established. Among the French volunteers was Prince Louis d’Orleans et Braganze, cousin of the French Pretender; and Rene de Charette, descendant of the famous Vendean guerrilla counter-revolutionary. Not surprisingly parallels between the Vendean and South African conflicts were frequently drawn. There was also Robert de Kersauson de Pennendreff, known in South Africa as ‘Robert the Frenchman’, who was a cousin of Villebois-Mareuil. In 1900, while attending college in Nantes, Robert decided to volunteer for the Boer forces, and played an important covert role in 1902 when he was sent by the Boer generals on a secret mission to Europe to meet with President Kruger. Most remarkable of all was the former colonial spahi, Mahomed Ben Nasser, surely the only Arab to gain citizenship of the Transvaal. After quarrelling with his French commander he transferred to an Austrian unit commanded by a Hungarian hussar, and ended the war as a Boer prisoner-of-war in Ceylon.
The leading figure of the foreign volunteers, however, was the twentieth Count de Villebois-Mareuil, a retired French Army colonel and novelist and a founder of Action Francaise, who had volunteered for the position of military adviser to the Transvaal. A highly decorated veteran of the Franco-Prussian War and colonial campaigns in Indochina and North Africa, he began to feel marginalised by his political superiors and disillusioned by the Dreyfus Affair which he believed had tarnished the honour of the Army. Other fin de siecle Third Republic scandals convinced Villebois-Mareuil that South Africa provided an opportunity to rise above the decadence of the age. On his arrival there he took a prominent part in a number of major battles, but he was scathing about the Boer leadership, with the exception of Louis Botha, whom he advised on the eve of the Battle of Colenso. His chief goal was to capture Cecil Rhodes, at bay in the fortress of Kimberley.’ ‘History will add a fresh flower to the glory of France’, he wrote in his diary, ‘To take Kimberley and see the face of the Napoleon of the Cape’. It was not to be. Villebois-Mareuil was killed in a reckless attack near Boshof in April 1900, and was buried by the British with full military honours. Shortly beforehand, he had been devastated by the early death of his wife, a cousin of the dramatist Edmond Rostand, who is said to have modelled Cyrano de Bergerac on her husband. His death was greeted with universal mourning in France, where he became a symbol of French honour and valour.
American opinion was also deeply divided by the war, with the government adopting a policy of benevolent neutrality in Britain’s favour, in gratitude for British support in America’s war with Spain, and greatly increased wartime custom. There was also a strong pro-Boer popular sentiment, based not least on the Irish-American community, newly united and invigorated by the war, which hampered close relations with Britain. Leading politicians from the ‘WASP Establishment’ feared that the war would produce an Irish-German electoral pact to destabilise the political system. Nevertheless the government provided Britain with intelligence reports on Irish-American activists and privately assured Britain of American goodwill. Some leading African-Americans, including Booker T. Washington, supported a campaign for US intervention, and a few even admired ‘the plucky and patriotic Boers’. Most, however, hoped that a British victory would deliver African rights.
The high point of the pro-Boer campaign was the dispatch by Queen Wilhelmina of the Dutch warship Gelderland to bring President Kruger to Europe. This was a response by the Dutch government to criticisms of timidity from pressure groups. On his arrival in France in November 1900 Kruger was presented with many addresses and commemorative medals. He was officially greeted by French President Loubet and was presented by the editor of the newspaper L’Intransigeant with a ceremonial sword intended for General Cronje. The Kruger visit further enhanced the Transvaal Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition as a place of pilgrimage for pro-Boers. Kruger was also received by Queen Wilhelmina at the Hague, where he was presented with addresses by both Houses of Parliament, and another sword of honour by German veterans of the Unification and Franco-Prussian \ Wars. At this time several Dutch and Belgian streets and hotels were renamed in honour of Kruger and his generals. A bust of General Christian de Wet was unveiled at Schierstein near Wiesbaden, and a statue of Kruger erected in Dresden. When General P. A. Cronje visited the Netherlands, he too was received by Queen Wilhelmina at the Hague and presented with addresses from the Dutch Parliament. By 1902, some 6,000 gifts presented to Kruger and his generals were housed at the Zuid-Afrikaansh Museum in Dordrecht. The figurative impact of the war in Europe was manifested on a more extensive scale and commemorated in monuments, plaques and statues. These include the various sites associated with presidents Kruger and Steyn, at Lake Geneva, Baden, Brussels, Deventer, Utrecht and the Hague. Monuments were also erected to foreign volunteers associated with the war, including a heroic statue at Nantes, and street names in Paris and Lyons, dedicated to Villebois-Mareuil. In 1922, almost a generation after the war, a statue of General Christiaan de Wet sculpted by J. Mendes da Costa was unveiled near Apeldoorn in the Netherlands. There is also the house at Clarens, near Lake Geneva, where the exiled Kruger spent his last days in 1904, and from where he issued his valedictory address to his defeated republic:
Born under the British flag, I do not wish to die under it. I have learned to accept the bitter thought of death in a foreign land as a lone exile, far from kith and kin whose faces I shall not likely see again, far from the soil of Africa, upon which I am not likely ever to set foot again, far from the country to which my whole life has been devoted.
The poignancy of a stateless, exiled president, attended by his heroic generals, dying in exile, was not lost on European nationalists and anglophobes. A generation later, British diplomats were chided by Hermann Goering for their creation of concentration camps, while the embattled Boer president was the subject of perhaps the most successful Nazi propaganda films, Ohm Kruger (1940).
The South African War’s immediate impact in Europe and America was dramatic but ultimately ineffective in bringing about foreign intervention, due to the unwillingness of governments to follow popular sentiment against national interest in a British victory, but the conflict’s long-term legacy in inter-imperial relations was profound. It directly involved several individuals who would occupy positions of global influence in the first half of the twentieth century, including Winston Churchill, who as a war correspondent was nearly killed in a train ambush, and Mahatma Gandhi who formed an Indian ambulance unit to serve alongside the British and who, despite discrimination against Indian immigrants, was profoundly inspired by Boer patriotism. So, too, was the young Jawaharlal Nehru, later first prime minister of India. The war also gave international stature to Robert Baden-Powell, defender of Mafeking and founder of the Boy Scouts, the most successful youth movement in history. Global fame also came to Jan Christiaan Smuts, Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Boer guerrilla general, statesman and philosopher-king, who would be acclaimed as a polymath of international organization. In 1946, showered with international honours, he presided over the General Assembly of the United Nations which he helped to found. Ironically as the prime minister of a minority-ruled state, it was he who was responsible for the insertion of the phrase ‘fundamental human rights’ into the Preamble to the United Nations Charter. The war was a formative experience for such leading imperialists as Leo Amery and Lionel Curtis of Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’. The British creation of a South African Dominion provided Curtis with an education in conciliating nationalists and republican guerrillas, which experience he and other members of the imperial government drew on twenty years later in dealing with Irish secession. In the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) the British administration looked closely to the South African precedent for their military and political policies. The leading British officers were veterans of the South African War, while the IRA modelled their guerrilla tactics largely on the strategies of the Boer flying columns. Similarly, for over a generation, both Indian nationalists and their British rulers looked to the South African War and its aftermath for inspiration or guidance in the Indian road to self-government.
In 1970, on an official visit to Pretoria, the Dutch deputy prime minister, Dr A. J. Bakker, returned the desk and chair used by Kruger on his voyage into exile. By then, however, the pro-Boer movement would find a strange successor in the international campaign against apartheid. The Afrikaners were no longer regarded by world opinion as underdogs but as racial overlords, and few could recall or even imagine an era when the whole world was moved by Boer ‘heroes of liberty’.