‘Avenge the Lusitania’: The Anti-German Riots in South Africa in 1915

Abstract

The anti-German riots which erupted simultaneously in many countries in response to the torpedoing of the Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915 reflected shifts in the status of minorities in multi-ethnic societies at a time of escalating nationalist emotions. This article shows that the situation of the Germans in South Africa differed in important respects from the dilemma in which Germans found themselves in other parts of the world during the First World War. The dominion of the Union of South Africa was embroiled in a struggle between Afrikaners and English-speaking settlers for the definition of white South Africanism. Since most German immigrants had previously tended to amalgamate with the Afrikaner section of the colonial society and had not laid claims to a hyphenated identity, many Afrikaners perceived the attacks on German residents as an assault by urban English-speakers on the Afrikaner community, and Afrikaner public opinion requested that Germans should be treated in a fair manner. The intra-white dispute about a shared South African identity prevented, therefore, the state from sustaining the kind of assimilationist or even discriminatory pressure which German residents had to face in countries such as the USA or Brazil during and after the Great War.