The South African War (1899–1902), also called the Boer War and Anglo-Boer War, began as a conventional conflict. It escalated into a savage irregular war fought between the two Boer republics and a British imperial force that adopted a scorched-earth policy and used concentration camps to break the will of Afrikaner patriots and Boer guerrillas. This book delves into the agonizing choices faced by Winburg district residents during the British occupation. Afrikaner men fought or evaded combat or collaborated; Afrikaner women fled over the veld or submitted to life in the camps; and black Africans weighed the life or death consequences of taking sides. The book’s sensitive analysis showcases the motives, actions, and reactions of Boers and Africans alike as initial British accommodation gave way to ruthlessness. Challenging notions of Boer unity and homogeneity, the book illustrates the precarious tightrope of resistance, neutrality, and collaboration walked by people on all sides. It also reveals how the repercussions of the War’s transformative effect on Afrikaner identity plays out in today’s South Africa. The book provides a dramatic account of the often overlooked aspects of one of the first “modern” wars.
In Belgium, France and the Netherlands, state-induced punishments were inflicted on collaborators with the German occupation. In this article, Boer collaboration with the British is explored by recounting the careers of three high-profile officers of the Winburg commando, Commandants Harry Theunissen, Fanie Vilonel and Gerrie van der Merwe.There were hundreds of ordinary men and women in the district who also collaborated, but after the war there was no Boer state to bring them to book and the Dutch Reformed Church, as the only coherent social structure to survive the war was, unsurprisingly, more inclined to reconciliation than to retribution. Within post-war Afrikaner society there were furthermore social and political pressures for not settling accounts with those who had been disloyal. Consequently, collaborators were speedily re-integrated into society and the mythology of a united and heroic struggle against British imperialism could be sustained. Today the individualistic and pragmatic way in which Boers responded to occupation helps us to see the past and therefore also the present and the future in a different light.
A number of sources documenting the varied sexual relations between British soldiers and Boer women are assessed in terms of the traditional historical methodology of empirical evidence and logical inference. On this basis, the facticity of most of these sources is accepted, while two are discounted by virtue of provenance and internal evidence. Next two further sources that are not amenable to this methodology are interpreted using the postmodern deconstructive rejection of history as an epistemology and Alun Munslow's speculative expressionist history. However, these anti-empirical strategies are ideologically determined and therefore ethically questionable and the resultant relativity vitiates the historian's craft. On this basis, the historical status of these sources is rejected. KEYWORDS IntroductionThe recent publication of an Afrikaans novel about a young woman who was viciously raped and left for dead by two British officers 1 has excited much attention and pertinently raises the issue of sexual relations between British soldiers and Boer women. In this article the range of such relations from
At the end of the nineteenth century, the actions of belligerents were constrained by the Hague Convention of 1899 and the Geneva Convention of 1864. The Hague Convention differentiated between combatants and non-combatants, but both the British implementation of a scorched earth policy and the Boer execution of blacks violated this convention. The Geneva Convention centred on medical immunity, which presupposes medical neutrality. The British opposed the voluntarism fundamental to the Red Cross movement and all British medical personnel in the field were subservient to the military establishment. Imperial patriotism, the shortcomings of the army and the insistent claims of military necessity subverted best medical practice, producing dilemmas that doctors had to negotiate. On the Boer side too, there was the moral complexity of doctors who were not only medical professionals but also social agents with personal commitments. This article considers the dilemmas that confronted doctors involved in the South African War in the Free State and concludes that trends in dealing with ethical challenges in this war became normative in subsequent conflicts.
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