Shaun de Waal looks at some of the many Anglo-Boer War books
The centenary of the start of the Anglo- Boer War (really the second Boer War – we won the first one, remember?) has seen a plethora of new books on the subject arrive on bookshop shelves. Alongside staples such as Thomas Pakenham’s great study (available in hardcover, paperback and illustrated editions), Rayne Kruger’s Goodbye Dolly Gray and books by Bill Nasson and Raymond Sibbald (the latter focusing on the war correspondents), there is the English translation of Fransjohan Pretorius’s vital Life on Commando, the letters of Emily Hobhouse, Jan Smuts’s war memoir and the surely very useful Concise Dictionary of the Boer War from Francolin.
Deneys Reitz’s recollections of the war – he was 21 when it ended – made a contemporary bestseller of his book Commando, first published in 1929, and now an acknowledged classic. Reitz went on to serve in World War I, in Smuts’s government, and travelled widely, eventually becoming deputy prime minister. He wrote two further volumes of memoirs, Trekking On and No Outspan, which have now been collected with Commando in one volume, as Adrift on the Open Veld (Stormberg). Its subtitle, The Anglo-Boer War and its Aftermath 1899-1943, perhaps stretches the sense of “aftermath”, and the later volumes are less interesting than Commando (still available on its own, from Jonathan Ball), but together they form a fascinating autobiography.
Tabitha Jackson’s The Boer War (4/Macmillan), based on her television series for Britain’s Channel Four, makes a good, accessible introduction to the subject. It is packed with vivid contemporary images and makes use of oral testimony by South Africans, both black and white, whose forebears were involved in the conflict. Jackson does not, by any means, ignore the contribution of black South Africans – something often hitherto neglected in studies of this “white man’s war” – and is all too aware of the frequent casual brutality visited upon them by both sides, but especially by the Boers. Some tales are quite sickening: this was no “gentleman’s war”, and the end was indeed bitter. Perhaps we should wait till 2002 and celebrate the war’s end rather than its start.
In Witnesses to War (Human &Rousseau), editor Karel Schoeman collects personal documents relating to the war in the collection of the South African Library. The letters, diaries, reports and images collated by Schoeman provide a fascinating view of the war from the perspective of a wide range of witnesses.
Elsab Brink’s 1899: The Long March Home (Kwela) uncovers a little-known episode of the early days of the war. John Sidney Marwick was the “Natal Native Agent” responsible for supplying workers to the Reef mines. When war broke out in 1899, he had 7 000 Zulu men in his care and no way to get them home. Most white men of the time, one suspects, would have left them to fate; Marwick, however, decided that, in the absence of other transport, they should return to Zululand by foot. Negotiating with the recently mobilised Boers en route, Marwick took these men through hostile territory back to Pietermaritzburg in a journey of 10 days, a feat of remarkable courage and compassion. Brink makes a lively tale of it.
Malvern van Wyk Smith’s Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War 1899- 1902 (Protea) examines the profusion of verse that sprang up around the war, from the jingoistic to the pacifist, the amateur to the professional; from that of the participant nations to that of the other peoples who watched its progress with keen interest. It is extraordinary, in this anti-poetic age, to realise how large a role verse played in expressing the often negative feelings aroused by the war, and to see how populist forms such as the music hall both absorbed and influenced the verse being produced at the time of the war. Van Wyk Smith’s book is valuable for both its exceptionally broad scope and its analytic detail.
For those interested in the minutiae of military manoeuvres, Ravan Press has published a series of slender volumes on Battles of the Anglo-Boer War. Each of the seven books focuses on an important battle, using contemporary images and brand new maps to outline what took place. The battles covered are those of Talana, Elandslaagte, Colenso, Spioenkop, Vaalkrans, the Thukela Heights, and the siege of Ladysmith.
A further Ravan volume, in a larger format, is A Guide to the Anglo-Boer War Sites of KwaZulu-Natal by Gilbert Torlage and Steve Watt. It covers the key battles in that region, providing maps to locate the battlefields and to indicate troop movements. Why only this area, though? The Free State and the old Transvaal must be feeling a bit neglected.