14 Aug 2014 | Tony Leon | Original
Publication: BDlive
Africa was a ‘sideshow’ compared with the immensity of
destruction and the ritualised killing fields in the trenches of Belgium and
France, writes Tony Leon
THE recent centenary of the outbreak of the First World War
brought back to mind my Grandpa Jack (Jack Leon, 1892-1983). Of imperishable
memory to his grandchildren and others, he would enliven our early childhood
with his tales of some wonder and much hardship from his experiences as a foot
soldier in the Great War, the so-called "war to end all wars", which
profoundly it did not.
My grandfather was one of about 150,000 white soldiers and
more than 80,000 black compatriots who served in the Union Defence Force in the
wide-ranging theatres of combat across Southern Africa and beyond, when they
answered the call of Empire to push back, or push out, Kaiser Wilhelm’s
colonial empire in Africa. Jack endured considerable hardship in today’s
Tanzania — which back then rejoiced in the name German East Africa — and was
captured by the Germans shortly before hostilities ended. He recounted his
"days of thirst" when, in the absence of any water provided by his
captors, he and his comrades sucked stones and dew off the grass in a desperate
attempt to keep hydrated. But he was lucky to have returned alive, as opposed
to those South Africans who went to France, where, in the epic battle of
Delville Wood in 1916, nearly two-thirds of South Africa’s combatants were
killed or severely injured.
Africa was more incidental than central to the war aims of
either the winning "Entente Powers" side (the UK, France, Russia,
Italy, Serbia and the US) or the losing "Central Powers" (the German
Empire, the Hapsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria). But, as the
world soon enough discovered, there was no end of consequences from this global
conflict, some of which — from Syria to Palestine to Ukraine — enflame the
world today.
Africa was a "sideshow" compared with the
immensity of destruction and the ritualised killing fields in the trenches of
Belgium and France. It lacked the set-piece battles that history and blood has
emorialised and globalised on such bucolic and, until the war, unknown European
towns and villages such as Ypres and Passchendaele.
But, as Byron Farwell, in his work, The Great War in Africa,
notes, the "butcher’s bill" in Africa was immense, and the theatre of
war stretched over thousands of kilometres of inhospitable terrain, and most of
the skirmishes were fought by "tattered hungry men in dust and mud".
Africa also provided both the first and the last shots of
the Great War, proving yet again that the continent marches to its own rhythm.
According to Hew Strachan’s account of the First World War, regimental
sergeant-major Ahaji Grushi of the West African Frontier Force entered the
history books for firing the first shot in the war, which had been declared by
England nine days before. At the end of this global conflagration, about
16-million soldiers and civilians had perished out of a global population of
less than 2-billion people. But even after the armistice had been signed by
Germany on November 11 1918, the war continued in Africa for two more weeks;
only on November 25 in Abercorn (now Mbala) in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) did
Col Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck of the Imperial German Army finally surrender.
He earned a footnote in history as the last German commander to do so.
One of the consequences of the war for the then fledgling
Union of South Africa was its effect on solidifying the white sense of
nationhood here, just as the epic battles, immense loss of life and chains of
brotherhood among survivors (or "mateship", as the Australians call
it) helped to forge a specific sense of national identity in far-flung dominions
of the British realm, from Canada to Australia and New Zealand.
On the other side of the white fence in the Union of South
Africa, fighting on the "wrong side", as Boers and bittereinders
viewed the decision of Jan Smuts and Louis Botha to enter the lists on the side
of the UK, would further light the fires of nationalist resentment. They would
smoulder on until the election in 1924 of a Hertzog coalition government and
then, with far greater consequence, in 1948, when the politics of resentment
would burn into political victory, after the next world war, and the triumph of
the National Party.
Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa went to France last month
to correct a historic injustice; the reinternment of the remains of South
African Native Labour Corps member Myengwa Beleza, who, unlike some of his
slain white counterparts in the slaughter of Delville Wood, had been denied a
final resting place in a military cemetery. This "correction"
inspired a lively correspondence in some local newspapers, with military
historians indicating that many soldiers, and not just due to the strictures of
South African segregation being carried over to France, had also been buried in
civilian cemeteries or in unmarked graves.
But without descending down the road recently paved by the
South African Democratic Teachers Union and its new history project designed to
"manufacture patriotism", the global consequences of the First World
War, particularly the terms on which it ended, would also be informed by some
localised and almost forgotten events.
Perhaps the greatest "what if?" question from the
Great War is both the simplest and most complex: what if it had never happened?
RJW Evans, Regius professor of history emeritus at Oxford University, provided
his distinguished answer: "This calamitous conflict, more than any other
series of events, has shaped the world ever since; without it, we can doubt
that communism would have taken hold in Russia, fascism in Italy, and Nazism in
Germany, or that global empires would have disintegrated so rapidly and so
chaotically."
If, a century later, there is no historical consensus of
either its causes or even its necessity, there was no uncertainty about who was
blamed for it at its end. The victorious powers at the Paris Conference in 1919
and in the treaty signed in nearby Versailles were unanimous — Germany and its
leaders were responsible. And Southern Africa provided a crucial piece of
evidence for both this assertion and the carving up of the world order that
followed.
To German aggression was added the charge of
"barbarity", and the mistreatment of the Belgian civilian population
was "exhibit A" on the charge sheet. But from the shadows of
forgotten history in 1919, the earlier German genocide of the Herero and Nama
people in their colony of South West Africa was added to the bill of
indictment.
In David Olusoga and Caspar Erichsen’s riveting book, The
Kaiser’s Holocaust, they note: "At Versailles, if only momentarily, the
lives of black Africans were regarded as comparable to those of white Europeans.
Indeed, the history of German brutality in South West Africa was ‘proof to the
civilised world’ that it was ‘duty bound to shackle the monster of German
militarism’."Smuts and Botha marshalled the abundant evidence of such cruelties to make a winning bid for the territory to be mandated to South Africa as a "sacred trust" on the basis that "they had established a white civilisation in a savage continent and had become a great cultural agency all over South Africa".
Sixty years after my grandfather joined up, I, alongside
most white matriculants, was conscripted into the South African Defence Force,
which in 1975 had as its core military objective securing the borders of South
West Africa. It proved to be as futile and unattainable a goal as many of the
military objectives of the "war to end all wars".
• Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela
(Jonathan Ball) Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA
No comments:
Post a Comment