John Matshikiza
CROSSFIRE
The passion for revising our history in line with what we still tiresomely call our “new dispensation” is getting out of hand. It’s one thing to say that history must be rewritten to show what really happened in the course of our various national sagas. It’s quite another thing to try to improve on the past for the sake of national unity.
In his Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera tells the tale of a hapless Polish Communist Party functionary called Clementis who is airbrushed out of the official party photograph when he falls out of favour with his erstwhile comrades in the leadership. The only part of Clementis to survive in the history books is his hat, which he had generously lent to the party boss, a man called Gottwald, seconds before the photo was taken. As far as history is concerned, the hat belonged to Gottwald. Clementis was a non-person.
In South Africa’s case, we are in serious danger of going the other way. Historians and journalists are making serious efforts, not to airbrush huge swathes of humanity out of the official picture, as they did in the past, but rather to airbrush in hats and people that were never in the picture to begin with.
In her article in last week’s Mail & Guardian (“A hundred years of attitude”) Antjie Krog speaks of transforming “myths of exclusion” into a kind of national storytelling that is comprehensive. I agree wholeheartedly that the rare moments when our history was truly comprehensive should be searched out and celebrated. But the Boer War, or the Anglo-Boer War, or the South African War, as it is referred to by those anxious not to offend minority sensibilities on either side, was decidedly not a war in which the majority of the population had a stake. It was a white man’s war.
The wars that involved the natives had been long and bitter, but by 1899 they were basically over. There were still occasional embers smouldering among the ashes, some of which would flare up from time to time, like the Bambatha Rebellion in Natal in 1906. But generally speaking, the black population had been beaten into sullen submission, and could only look on at the bloodthirsty shenanigans of the white folks from the sidelines. They couldn’t even sit down comfortably and watch the fight, because they no longer owned any land to sit on. The land, like Clementis’s hat, was now an adornment of someone else’s reality.
The native onlookers referred to the contending sides as two distinct species: the “white men” and the “boers” (abelungu versus amabhunu). (There were no actual people [abantu] involved except as victims caught in the crossfire, or in bit parts as gun-bearers, porters and so forth, as we shall see later.)
The problem with establishing what the black population really thought is that so little was put down in writing – unlike the voluminous records, eyewitness accounts and outrageous yarns preserved by the real rivals in the war. An account, by a young woman called Katie Makanya, is one of the few. Her husband was a shopkeeper in Germiston Location, and, among other things, he repaired saddles and bridles for whoever cared to use his services.
Describing the mood among black people in Johannesburg as the war loomed ever closer, and as blacks were being advised to join the exodus started by the white population, she said: “My husband did not want to go until one day the Boers came into his store. And he had a saddle there he had mended for a white man and he was just waiting for the white man to come and fetch it. And the Boers took that saddle and also another one, and the harnesses . So the next day my husband went to the white man and said the Boers had taken the saddle. And the white man was not angry. He said, ‘I know how it is. They took my horses yesterday.’ And the Boers took all those things from my husband and did not pay him one penny .”
The Boers seemed to be behaving like township dwellers of today are supposed to behave – with scant regard for other people’s property. They were clearly setting a precedent.
But in the vocabulary of the black population, the Boers were also clearly distinguished from “the whites”. In those times the Boer would have been (in Yoko Ono’s phrase) “the nigger of the world”.
The quotation from Katie Makanya is taken from a newly published book, 1899: The Long March Home, by historian Elsab Brink. It is one of many volumes that we can look forward to over the next three years that attempt to place the black population, hitherto not even regarded as bystanders, within the context of the Anglo-Boer South African War.
The book describes a little-known incident, in which 5 000 black mine and domestic labourers are rescued by a Schindler-like figure from an uncertain fate in a deserted Johannesburg waiting to be overrun by Boer commandos or British redcoats. Their masters and mistresses had literally abandoned them, along with the rest of the city’s infrastructure, in the panic to get to the relative safety of Natal.
It is a mildly moving tale with a relatively happy ending. But it cannot do more than place these black souls in the subservient and dependent positions they occupied in the conflict. Since neither side asked them to join the fray as equals, there is nothing in this centenary for their descendants to celebrate.
And that is the problem with the present Boer War hoo-ha. It’s like calling on the Native Americans to celebrate the landing of the Mayflower or to join in the re- enactment of the Boston Tea Party. The war in question merely underlined the fact that the black population had already lost all meaning on the South African landscape.
Nobody can deny that the war happened. But it should be remembered for its meanness of spirit, and for the fact that its negative outcome for the Boers was turned into a triumphant imperial stratagem against the black population. Any attempt to turn it into a high point in our collective history is like calling a spade a sunflower.