Gold – that was the reason the mighty British Empire waged war on the tiny Transvaal Republic. The whole balance of power in the region had changed, Britain was in danger of losing her paramountcy in southern Africa to these undeserving Boers, and Britain needed gold to maintain her position as the leading banker in an industrially expanding world. Further, she intended to extend her colonial power from Cape Town to Cairo, and this tinpot Boer republic stood in her way. The only solution was to make it part of the empire. First Britain tried economic strangulation, encirclement to cut the Boers off from the sea so that they would be forced to rejoin the Cape Colony. When that failed Britain promoted a rebellion by the foreigners on the gold reefs, demanding the vote. When that was crushed Britain mobilised her imperial army on the excuse that British subjects were being treated ‘like helots’.
It was a vicious, scorched-earth war the British waged: Boer farms were put to the torch, their crops and homesteads sent up in smoke, their livestock shot or driven off, their women and children herded off to concentration camps where twenty-eight thousand of them died of malnutrition and disease. For three years the war raged, 1899 to 1902. Only devastating attrition drove the Boers to discuss peace. The British offered the Boers financial aid and self-government in a few years in a union with the Cape and Natal colonies; but the most significant concession concerned the status of black people: the question of whether blacks would be given the vote in the new South Africa would be decided only after self-government had been granted.
The bitter-enders wanted to fight on: not to do so meant that almost a century of suffering had been in vain – Slagter’s Nek, the Kaffir Wars, the Great Trek, the battles of Vegkop, Blood River, this terrible war, their whole hard-won independence … But the British pressure was now overwhelming, the countryside was exsanguinated, their very livelihoods destroyed, their women and children dying. Was it not better to lose the war but win the peace? They would get their self-government, albeit in a union with Cape and Natal colonies – and the dreaded question of the voting rights of natives would be decided by them, not by the British. And would not the Boers come to dominate the union government – would they not then have beaten the British at their own bloody game?
The debate was angry, but finally the bitter-enders threw in their hand so as not to split the volk further. And the commandos rode back to what was left of their farms, to try to rebuild their devastated lives.
Ernest and Sarie Mahoney died before the Boer War, but their son William, and his son Hector, both fought on the side of the British.
‘What was it all for … ?’ William Mahoney demanded in his journal shortly before his death.‘The British thought it was going to be a “tea-time” war – instead it taught them “an imperial lesson”, in the words of Rudyard Kipling.’
Writers from around the world were there: not only Rudyard Kipling, the immortal poet of Empire, but also Winston Churchill, Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, Banjo Patterson, who became Australia’s poet laureate; and John Buchan. The American and European press fiercely condemned the British as monsters who laid waste, starved women and children; the Boers they described as heroes. The greatest were General de Wet, General Smuts, General de la Rey, General Louis Botha, all of them fighting courageous running battles.
It was the longest, costliest, bloodiest, most humiliating war she fought in almost a hundred years. Over 450,000 British troops took almost three years to defeat a mere 87,000 combatant Boers who were reduced finally to a few thousand commandos. 22,000 British soldiers lost their lives, over 400,000 horses were killed, 15,000 innocent natives, over 27,000 Boer women and children died in the concentration camps. And most survivors were left destitute. The hideous scars will last a very long time: a nation of embittered paupers has been created.
And after the British soldiers sailed home, Sir Alfred Milner, supreme ruler of all the South African colonies, determined to crush the Boer spirit, culture and language, to turn the two old republics into real British colonies. He Anglicised the civil service and decreed that all education be in English. Boer children who used their mother tongue had to wear the label around their necks: ‘I am a Donkey: I spoke Dutch today.’
… and the Boer bitterness grew: not only had he been conquered for his gold, not only had he been brutally vandalised, not only had he lost loved ones in the dreadful concentration camps, but now his very culture was being humiliated. He now belonged to a volk of poor-whites: impoverished by the British scorched-earth policy, many were driven to the towns. There, poorly educated, unable to speak the language of his oppressor, regarded as a country bumpkin, he had to sell his labour in competition with the ubiquitous black man. And so, to his old fear of the black man as a warrior, as the Black Peril, was now added the fear of being swamped by him economically.
But Britain’s greatest injustice was to the black people. In order to woo the Boers into surrender, the peace treaty had agreed that the thorny question of the black man’s vote would be shelved until after responsible government – knowing that there was no likelihood of the Boers granting the franchise to the ‘kaffirs’. And, predictably, they did not. In short, the British purchased peace at the expense of the black man, and opened the door to legalised racial prejudice.
I have no doubt that this dereliction of British duty will plague South Africa for years to come … I hear that the natives are deeply hurt that they have been treated so badly. An organization has been formed, called the ‘African National Congress’, to work for their political rights and a fairer distribution of land …
And so the Boers lost the war but won the peace. When the first elections were held and the new Union of South Africa came into being in 1910, the Boer War hero, General Louis Botha, was the first prime minister, and he was a segregationist. His successor was General Jan Smuts, also a Boer War hero, also a segregationist, but Britain was rewarded for her duplicity by having a South African government who believed its best interests lay in being a member of the Empire. But vast numbers of Afrikaners believed they were being sacrificed in favour of English-speakers, and the Black Peril remained. The National Party was formed to pursue Afrikaner interests vigorously. Then along came World War I, and rebellion.
William Mahoney’s grandson George did not join Harker-Mahoney – he had the gift of the gab rather than the commercial instinct, and he became a lawyer and, in due course, a member of parliament. He kept up the tradition of the family journals, even when he was fighting in World War I. His journal continues:
Many Afrikaners hated to fight on the side of the hated British against the Germans who had been their allies in the Boer War a scant twelve years ago. A group of army generals tried to mount a coup d’état to recover the independence of their old republics. The battles were fast and furious, Afrikaner fighting Afrikaner. They lasted three months before General Smuts crushed the rebellion. And the scars of the Boer War were split wide open.
In 1918 a secret society called the Broederbond was formed to promote the domination by Afrikaners in all walks of life. When World War II came, and South Africa again went into battle on the side of the hated British against the Germans, Afrikaner nationalists who called themselves the Ossewa Brandwag hatched a plot with Hitler to assassinate General Smuts, mount a coup d’état and harness South Africa’s goldfields to the Third Reich. The plot was foiled but many Afrikaners had to be interned in concentration camps, including three future prime ministers.
And then the war ended in 1945, and the same old troubles resumed that had plagued the land since the Kaffir Wars and the Great Trek: the ‘native problem’, the ‘Black Peril’. The poor-white Afrikaner was still struggling, the English-speakers still dominated the land economically. And then came the fateful elections in 1948 …
General Smuts, the hero of the Boer War, was an old man, worn out by fifty years of bloody fighting for and against his Afrikaner volk. And although he was a segregationist, he was a paternalistic one who believed the problem had to be solved ‘by future generations.’ His weary policies were no emotional