One of South Africa’s worst military disasters is to be taught in British schools to highlight the role of African soldiers in World War I, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) announced on Monday.
A total of 616 South Africans, virtually all of them African members of the South African Native Labour Contingent, died when the steamship Mendi sank in the Channel on the way to France on February 21 1917.
Their involvement in the war thousands of miles from home is the subject of a new 20-minute film — Let us die like brothers — that will be distributed on CD-Rom to more than 5 000 British high schools in the coming weeks.
The film, which will be released in South Africa next February to coincide with the 90th anniversary of the tragedy, was officially launched at the South African High Commission in London on Monday.
South African High Commissioner Lindiwe Mabuza said: ”The story of the 21 000 or more black South Africans as well as many other nationalities from the Commonwealth, people of colour, who enlisted on behalf of Britain has itself not been adequately told.
”The sinking of the Mendi and the role played by what was called the South African Native Labour Contingent is virtually absent from history books …
”The material … will go a long way to securing their place in history and not just in the history books, but in the minds and hearts of young students for whom the story will now come alive.”
The film, told through a fictional narrator called Samuel, was commissioned by the CWGC and produced at no cost by the History Channel to coincide with Black History Month, which is held in Britain every October.
CWGC’s educational consultant Caroline Coxon, who researched and wrote the film, said the idea was to get away from a focus on white British or white Commonwealth soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front in northern France.
”It’s just not realised that in the First World War how many troops from the Caribbean, Africa and the Indian sub-continent did fight,” she told AFP.
The title Let us die like brothers comes from the reported call of the South African chaplain as the ship went down.
The names of those who died are on a war memorial in Hollybrook cemetery in Southampton, on England’s south coast, as well as in Soweto and Delville Wood, where nearly 800 South Africans were killed during The Somme offensive in 1916.
The CWGC is a non-profit organisation that cares for the memorials and graves of the 1,7-million Commonwealth troops who died in the two world wars. — Sapa