A War's Hidden Victims

The

sleepy farming town of Brandfort, 50 km from Bloemfontein in South Africa's Free State province, is best known as the place where Winnie Mandela, the activist wife of Nelson Mandela, spent eight years under house arrest during the apartheid era. But now the town has a new significance. It is the site of a monument that formally recognizes what apartheid history long ignored--that almost half the civilian victims of the Boer War were black.

During the 1899-1902 war between British colonial forces and rebel Afrikaners, Brandfort became one of many infamous concentration camps that held the families of Afrikaner rebels, driven from their lands by the British advances and a scorched-earth policy. Many Afrikaners remain bitter over the fact that 28,000 of their people--mostly women and children --died in the camps, mainly from disease. Often overlooked, however, were the deaths of up to 20,000 blacks, either servants of the incarcerated Afrikaner families or people held in separate all-black camps.

One such camp for blacks was at Brandfort. Some 60 graves were recently discovered on the site, although up to 4,000 blacks were interned there and many more deaths went unrecorded. Earlier this month, however, all the victims of the Boer War found peace in equality. Accompanied by South Africa's President, Thabo Mbeki, Britain's Duke of Kent toured well-tended British, Boer and black cemeteries in Bloemfontein and Brandfort and launched the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the war with the message that never again would the rights of South Africa's blacks be disregarded as they were during the Anglo-Boer conflict.

The irony is that, outnumbered almost five to one, the Boers lost the war but eventually won political freedom in the peace that followed. Blacks who were involved in the war on both sides achieved nothing but colonial overlordship and 30 years of apartheid. There should be no recrimination, however, in the memory of the war, said President Mbeki at the Boer War remembrance ceremony. "There should be only a process of reconciliation. Through our actions we have, in this country at least, silenced the guns of war forever."

It was also a war that captivated Victorian England with newspaper coverage that reached a mass audience thanks to the rise in literacy of the industrial revolution. The press celebrated triumphs and mourned tragedies of the battles and sieges of the campaign, thrusting people, places and names into history. A Morning Post reporter named Winston Churchill became world famous after being captured by the Boers and escaping to tell his story. Among the Boer War memorabilia surfacing for the centenary is a poster offering 25 pounds sterling for the recapture of Churchill, dead or alive. The relief of the siege of Mafeking not only made a hero out of the British commander, Colonel R.S. Baden-Powell--who went on to found the Boy Scouts--but created a new word for the English dictionary: maffick--to celebrate extravagantly and publicly.

A lesser-known fact about Baden-Powell is that during the seven-month siege of Mafeking out of desperation he brazenly departed from precedent by recruiting and arming 300 Africans to guard part of the town's perimeter. The African guard, locally christened the Black Watch, prompted a Boer commander, General Cronje, to send a message to Baden-Powell accusing him of "an enormous act of wickedness" and demanding that he "disarm your blacks and thereby act the part of a white man in a white man's war." A memorial to the Mafeking siege today carries a small plaque recording the services of the Black Watch.

A British parliamentary report in 1902 said there were up to 30,000 armed blacks in British service in South Africa--which is considerably more than the 20,000 or so Boers--known as bitter enders--who hung on to fight the last skirmishes of the war. From the outset, however, both Boers and British employed blacks in noncombatant roles. In the British army they were mostly drivers, scouts and camp laborers. On the Boer side they included up to 10,000 agterryers--literally "after-riders"--who guarded the horses, cooked in the camps and delivered supplies, weapons and ammunition.

It has taken a hundred years and a dramatic reversal of power from white to black, but, combatants or civilians, the black people who were involved in the Boer war are at last getting their place in history. "We're not trying to re-write anything, we're trying to redress the spectrum of history and heritage in those areas where they have been ignored," says Professor Musa Xulu, deputy director of the Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. "This war affected everybody in South Africa and it should be remembered that way." Lest anyone should forget, the South African Government will this month officially rename the war from its customary title to the nationally inclusive Anglo-Boer South African War.