Matthew Krouse
The profile of Boer women encouraged by historians was one of quiet endurance, of hard times in British concentration camps at the turn of the century.
This is in sharp contrast to the picture of the Boer woman as a bearer of arms, in khaki fatigues, fighting a guerrilla war – but that is the picture which emerged this week at a history conference organised by the library of Unisa.
The conference has thrown new light on the role of women during the Anglo- Boer War.
At a session titled Gentlemen and Boers: Afrikaner Nationalism, Gender and Colonial Warfare in the South African War, the University of Cape Town’s Dr Kay Bradford highlighted the role of women as armed soldiers in the fighting forces.
Sources of the time provide a quaint picture of the fighting Boervrou, portraying her as an outsider enduring a double threat. Fighting women of the Anglo-Boer War didn’t only resist the British, it would seem. They also concealed their female identities from their own men.
A fascinating example is the case of Helena Herbst Wagner. Johannesburg’s turn-of-the-century daily, the Standard and Diggers News, which later became The Rand Daily Mail, carried her story on May 15 1900.
In it, she appeared in the bar of the North-Western hotel, “a well-cropped slim little Boertjie, bandoliered up to the eyes, and the mauser slung on the slender back”.
Hot debate about her true gender gripped the men in the bar, after which she was forced into a full confession: “One had to do these things in the laager [garrison]. If they offered me tobacco, I had to smoke; if they gave me snuff, I had to sneeze.”
Wagner’s long ordeal began when her husband, a constable in the small town of Zeerust, left to fight in the war. Alone, aged 25, she eked out a meagre existence, until her house was reduced to its “beam ends”.
What followed was a miserable winter in which she lost her only child to malnutrition. “Lonely and hungry”, she wrote to her husband that she had determined to join him on the front.
“He wrote back saying he would shoot me if I ventured anywhere near the fighting front, or in the men’s laagers. But what was I to do? I clipped my hair and cut down my husband’s clothes.”
As a soldier, Wagner claimed to have shared the same tent as her comrades, and fought in the cavalry at Spioenkop and Pontdrift. It was only when she heard her brother had been wounded that she applied for leave and journeyed to Johannesburg.
She spent three months in the fighting force, after which she intended to return to Zeerust, to take up a position in the local telegraph office.
Further evidence of women soldiers is found in the writings of the historian, CM Bakkes, who relates witness accounts of the battle of Pietershooghte on February 27 1900.
He describes wounded women and children in the trenches. Added to this are the letters of an unnamed British soldier to his wife, describing how he saw 16 armed, dead women on the front.
The Anglo-Boer War was to continue for only three years, but its legacy was to live on for decades after that. In rethinking the Afrikaner women’s role in history, such investigations question the assumption that they emerged from the war bearing a victim’s brand.