The Boer War taught the Afrikaner to stand on his own and sometimes do unspeakable things for the survival of the Volk. A hundred years later it is time for a more inclusive story, says Antjie Krog
It is early October 1899. At a farmhouse people are laughing, dancing, having a party. On a kopje nearby, from nowhere, suddenly, the lonely figure of a horseman appears. Motionless he sits, as if he and his horse are carved in stone. Then he disappears. No movement. No sound. The next day war is declared between England and the two Boer republics.
This is how the war entered my consciousness (the terms Anglo-Boer War or even Boer War were never used in my family – for us it was simply The War. If she was forced to call it something, my mother would talk about the Second Liberation War). Via the first paragraph of a youth book titled Ruiter in die Nag (Rider in the Night), written by Mikro, the image of the lonely rider in vigil over injustice done to my people became part of my earliest memory as an Afrikaner. It was only after reading this book as an 11-year-old that I realised the extent to which the Anglo-Boer South African War was already a presence in my childhood. As point of reference, as explanation, as continuity, as backdrop. Seldom the suffering itself, only the statistics, often the betrayal, always the bravery and never, never the stories beyond the Afrikaner.
During my first school year there was a boy called Hennie Nagel. My father would tell one of my uncles: “She’s sitting next to one of the Nagels.” At which the uncle would nod knowingly: “Kopskote [head shots] – they were the best marksmen . used them to silence the gunners.” To which my father would add: “After the battle of Sannaspos, Oom Chris van Niekerk specifically measured the distance – from a thousand yards with an open visor the Nagels shot every single gunner, one after the other, right between the eyes.”
Since I can remember my mother collected Free State war stories and diaries. Some she told us, some she published. One I particularly remember is a graphic description of the first moments of the first battle. The Kroonstad burghers all went to Natal and came back with the most vivid mixtures of finely tuned ears for storytelling and a healthy disregard for Vaderland honour.
One was so bloated with fear, they said, one could hardly breathe without farting. “Six feet to my right lay a man looking like a freshly washed potato. He stacked his bullets in front of him, tested his Mauser’s muzzle, took out his watch, put it next to the bullets, followed by a neatly folded handkerchief and a packet of peppermints. He took out all the small stones under his body, put his Mauser in place and started scanning the landscape with his binoculars. On my left someone was stuffing himself with chewing tobacco as if berserk.
“While spewing tobacco juices he asked me if I knew how to distinguish a cannon shooting away from you from one shooting towards you. How should I know? He knows, he was in the war of 1880. It’s simple: when the noise goes zoeiing, zoeiing, zoeiing, catchla, it is firing away from you; if the noise goes catchla, zoeiing, zoeiing, zoeiing, then it is firing towards you.
“I cleaned my sweaty hands on my trousers and put my Mauser bullets next to me. Will I remember that? The first English bullets kicked up dust around us. I shot back, blindly. Then this side, then that. Before the dust could lift, I saw a rinkhals coming towards me – behind him short fire tongues burning after a cannonhit in the grass. I hit desperately with my hat in front of me until it swerved sharply.
“My ears were deaf, my hands were shaking so much I could hardly get the bullets into the magazine. I glanced quickly to the man who knows about cannons. He was lying turned towards me. >From a small hole in his head a stream of blood. His eyes were staring past me, his mouth hanging open like a finch nest from his tobacco-stained teeth. The man on my right had disappeared; only the packet of peppermints remained. Something to my left again caught my attention. Two big, green bluebottles on the tobacco mouth, to be followed soon by a swarm.
“. It has become very quiet around me. Someone touched my arm. I turned around. ‘You arsehole, pretend you’re dead so that I can pick you up.’ I raised my arm in protest. He hissed: ‘Quiet you stupid fool, I’m here under the white flag to pick up the dead. If you’re alive, you have to go that side as a prisoner of war.’ I fell forward. He threw me on to a cart. I was with those who died. Body after body were piled on to the cart. The stench of death, urine, sweat, blood. The wagon creaked away. I was vomiting. I recognised some of the faces squashed between bodies. I was convinced I was dead.”
Did all of this happen to one man? Was it true? I never asked, because in a sense it didn’t matter – one sensed that all these tales were playing themselves out in front of a vast backdrop, never officially and comprehensively documented. More importantly, because nation building and reconciliation prevented any officially accepted version of all sides of the war, the issues were left largely to the devices of the storytellers within the different communities.
One of the stories recorded by AHM Scholtz in his book Vatmaar deals with the dilemma of coloured people who had to choose sides between the two white groups fighting.
“Why white people have to kill one another, I could never understand, Auntie Vuurmaak said. The English said that they were giving their lives for an old woman whom they called Queen, and even if they play-fight, the Boere shot down the queen’s people like game.
“. Then this man came to hire five boys to work for Queen. He took us to an Englishman who said that he was Lance- Corporal Lewis. They would pay us a sixpence per day, a tin of bully beef and biscuits . In those days there was no other work, only war work . We soon found out what we were supposed to do. At the first farmhouse there was only an ouma, a pregnant woman and two small girls. None of them cried or begged for mercy. Then the ouma remembered that the Bible was still in the kitchen. She went back into the flames. She came out of the house with the book high above her head. The young woman ran to take the book from her. Then the ouma turned into a big flame, her dress burnt – her kappie [sun bonnet] was the last thing to burn and we just looked at that old face. Not a tear came out of her eyes or a sound from her lips. Then she fell to the ground – a black bundle of burnt meat.”
In a peculiar way the war separated the bloodlines of Afrikaner families into heroes and traitors. There was for instance the Nels. On the other side of the Swartbergpas lived a Nel, so the story goes – his name is not important, but his genes apparently are. His sister was the mother of the voortrekker Louis Trichardt. His daughters were the mothers or grandmothers of president Marthinus Steyn, Generals Louis Botha and Koos de la Rey. (The story less known is that the freed slave Liesbet van die Kaap was the foremother of two presidents and two generals: Paul Kruger and Steyn, Botha and De la Rey.)
A strong feature of the war was the division within families – the most famous case is that of General Christian de Wet and his brother Piet de Wet. But there were also the Wessels – Brand Wessels was known for his bravery, while Andries Wessels received a personal sjambok hiding and his relative Morgendaal was shot by General de Wet – they turned up at his commando in a spider to plead with him to end the war. There were the Bothaville Bothas of the smear pamphlet against De Wet and the exceptional General Louis Botha; there were the Steyns as war icons, while their family member John Fraser became the representative in Bloemfontein for the British Sympathisers.
What is notable about most Afrikaner Anglo-Boer War information is that the sacrifice and the bravery formed part of an official history written by Afrikaners, while the betrayal, the failures, the exceptions, the real gruesome testimony often formed part only of the oral history, or of other neglected sources of information. General de Wet compiled a comprehensive report based on first-hand testimonies for a court case to take Britain to the World Court for gross violations of the Hague Rules of War. After the war he was, however, ordered by president Steyn, in the name of reconciliation, to drop the case and destroy the evidence.
So what happened to the stories of the war? Because of a less-than-honourable victory, the English had to bury theirs in official files in England. The Afrikaners turned theirs into a myth of exclusion. In the absence of a comprehensive version of the war, the stories had no choice but to actually choke forth orally from generation to generation.
Colonel Thring of Kroonstad, an Irishman who fought on the Boers’ side, told the following. After a battle a wounded British officer asked him where the Boers were. On having them pointed out to him, he said, “No, no, I mean the Boers.” Thring replied, “Well, here they are,” pointing to the same men. The officer again said, “No, no, you don’t understand me – I mean the wild savage Boers, the people they say that look like the orang- utang.”
Running parallel with the stories of betrayal are the stories of horses. People stole horses. Deneys Reitz found his little Basotho pony tied to the wagon of General Piet Joubert. “I knew that among the Boers, ownership of a horse is almost sacrosanct.” He simply stole it back. There are also other tales: “I could not find my horse, but was told by the veldkornet that no horse could get away. I gave the whistle which I give when I have his fodder. There’s a commotion. A man swore and pulled the reins, but the horse climbed into the air. It stormed towards me. No longer with four white hoofs and a blaze, but definitely my horse. When I touched his nose, there was shoepolish on my hand.”
But then horses also got horse-sickness. The Boere remedy was: a bottle of human urine down the left nostril. But two burghers refused to degenerate to that. They stayed with their ill horses. Desperate. Nothing helped. That afternoon, one of them loaded his gun. “I cannot endure it any longer, I’m shooting her.” The other took a bottle and unbuttoned his fly. “Are you going to do it?” He filled the bottle. Slowly he poured the lukewarm urine down the horse’s nostril. He made sure that it was the left nostril. A quarter of an hour later, the other burgher did the same.
The story goes: “An hour later my horse’s fever broke. I again filled the bottle. We did so every hour. We drank water to fulfil our duties. By dusk my horse was really better, but the other horse not. ‘Please man,’ my friend asked respectfully, ‘give me a bit of yours. It must be a weak kind of thing which I’m churning out.’ ‘Get me some coffee, I am dry as a bone.’ He came back with bugu brandy. The shock of the alcohol produced miracles. An hour later we started walking the horses slowly step by step. What we didn’t realise was that the others watched our efforts with keen clinical interest through binoculars from the campsite. My homeopatic potential became a legend and right through the war I’ve been regularly bothered for a contribution.”
This notion of betrayal by the world and by one’s own blood (or urine) forms a crucial substance of the Afrikaner consciousness. Betrayal by one’s own is unforgivable, no matter the circumstances. The way to deal with it is: obliteration. The war diary of Reitz may be regarded as a minor world classic, but the fact that he was a Smuts man later and supported the British in the World War II made him reasonably dispensable.
Another example is “why we lost Natal and therefore the war”. It was a crucial moment after the battle at Nicholson’s Nek. Ten thousand British soldiers were in full retreat. Reitz describes in his book how, standing close to De Wet, he heard him mutter: “Los jou ruiters [leave your horsemen].” Everybody was waiting for General Piet Joubert to pursue the disorderly retreat of the English and drive them out of Ladysmith. Reitz says that Joubert explained afterwards: if God holds out a finger, don’t take the whole hand. In my family the story was told differently. Joubert told his staff: leave them, one never shoots a Christian in the back.
The war was the ultimate measurement, lodestone, guideline, for the Afrikaner. It taught us a few things:
l The world can and will turn against you.
l You are on your own for your own survival.
l Most importantly: you often have to do something regarded by the outside world as ghastly and impossible (such as fighting a mighty empire, shooting Christians in the back or compiling and enforcing racist laws) to safeguard your survival.
None of these ever formed part of any official narrative, but all of these informed the Afrikaner consciousness.
A free flow of a variety of stories told then, as happened now with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), could have changed these perceptions formed in isolation. Because in essence oral stories make space for the exceptional, the unusual, and link it to the core values in all societies. Orality cultivates tolerance if a safe space is created for the stories of all sides to be told.
One may wonder what would have happened if, after the war, the family of Lord Herbert Kitchener came to testify in public about their brother? How their father ran the household like a military camp. How the father thought blankets to be unhealthy – the whole family slept between rolls of newsprint hanging from a contraption he designed. What would the effect be of hearing that the strict father once disciplined his 10-year-old son by pinning him to the ground with croquet hoops where he was left to lie all day, spread-eagled, in the hot sun? Would this knowledge about the man who systematically killed thousands of black people, women and children have made a difference?
The human interaction between Brit and Boer never formed part of my collective memory. For some reason the interaction between Black and Boer did form part of my private memory – though very discreetly.
My grandmother often told how her mother would go down from the caves where they were hiding, and how the old black man staying on the farm would sit for hours with a knife at the spruit to spear a fish for her. She would whisper to me: if it wasn’t for him, we would have died.
Reitz records how, at the battle of Spioenkop, an old black man came scrambling up the hill – whimpering while peering over the ledges trying to find the body of “his master. I told him to be careful . but he soon had a bullet through his brain”.
The 20th century opened and closed in a specific way for the Afrikaner: it started traumatic but honourable with the Anglo-Boer War. It ends traumatic and dishonourable with the last decades of apartheid.
The war at the turn of the century is said to have forged the operating principle of the Afrikaner: the commando mentality. Like a commando, Afrikaners form a closely knit but very mobile unit – ears pitched, reconnaisance done and lightfooted, the Afrikaner is ready, at any moment, to change direction, policy or principle. The only ethos is survival; if to be done by dishonourable means – so be it.
The telling of stories after traumatic conflict is essential, because, in contrast to court records or history books, it creates space for the unique, the unusual gesture, the humane. But in order for these stories not to be exploited by political agendas, the stories have to be accompanied by an official balanced account of the past – as we have in the TRC report.
Although the report may be hotly contested, it is at least broad enough to prevent the apartheid past from being turned into myths of exclusion on racist male political tongues.
Because the Anglo-Boer South African War lacked an inclusive narrative, it became an exclusive myth. The centenary is about finding that comprehensive story.