An Imperfect Occupation by John Boje

Author:John Boje [Boje, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Military, Africa, South, Europe, Great Britain
ISBN: 9780252097652
Google: 9HK9CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2015-10-15T02:54:56+00:00

6 White Man's War

THE TITLE OF THIS CHAPTER serves as a reminder of the long cherished but now totally discredited myth that the South African War was an “Anglo-Boer” war in which, as in all ethnocentric narratives, black people were no more than a shadowy background presence. They were indeed integrally involved, whether responding creatively to new situations, serving either the Boers or the British, or entirely overwhelmed by circumstances not of their making.

This chapter, which seeks to deal with their involvement, labors under the profound difficulty of an almost total absence of firsthand written evidence and the passage of more than a century, which would severely limit the value of any oral tradition that might still be traced. The Free State government made no provision for black education, and the 1904 census revealed that only 8 percent of blacks in the Free State could read and write, as opposed to 73 percent of whites.1 Apart from widespread illiteracy, the subordinate status of blacks militated against their being represented in the archival record. Only one letter from a black man in Winburg has been found that has any bearing on the issue of black-white relationships and only one brief statement from a black man who enlisted in British service. There were black concentration camps in the district, but the records relating to the individual camps have been lost or destroyed, and very little direct evidence on the Winburg camps can be found in the surviving documents. The Winburg district was notorious as the scene of operations of Bergh's Scouts, a black military unit in British service under Boer officers, but all we know of its activities comes from hostile white witnesses.

This chapter deals with Boer-black relations; blacks in Boer service; black resistance to Boer hegemony fostered by Ethiopianism and manifested in the activities of armed gangs; service with the British troops, particularly Bergh's Scouts; the black concentration camps; and recurrent claims of blacks murdering and mutilating whites contextualized in the colonial mythology of black savagery and recontextualized in terms of a general descent into murderous brutality.

Boer-Black Relations

The Boers’ attitude toward blacks before and during the South African War has been described as highly racist. Although this is certainly true, it is too unnuanced. The racist attitudes that prevailed among the Boers, and that were typical, in varying degree, of other white nations, developed over time into a unique brand of South African racism that earned the opprobrium of the world community. But to conflate the two is to overlook the crucial difference that, while the harshness of the former could be mitigated by experiences of co-humanity, the latter was premised on social segregation, designed to remove all points of meaningful personal contact. Discussing the “otherness” of the past, John Tosh describes anachronism as particularly blameworthy, and the worst kind of anachronism, Lucien Febvre said, is psychological anachronism. To avoid these pitfalls, the historian needs to consider changes not only in material conditions but also in mentalité.2

What characterized many Boer-black interactions

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