Why They Fought: Black Cape Colonists and Imperial Wars, 1899-1918

Abstract

This essay starts with intriguing question sometimes still posed by historians:1 Why did black South Africans retain their optimistic faith in British imperial project, despite its palpably wounding betrayal of their tenuous and interests? And, in particular speculation, Why did that attachment hold despite bruising political consequences of Anglo-Boer peace at end of South African War of 1899-1902, and their subsequent exclusion from political community forged by creation of Union in 1910? Granted, not everyone hung on, but vigorous, Western-educated minority of pan-ethnic ama-respectables, big Coloureds, and coterie of Indian merchants continued to believe in dressing for dinner, especially in Cape. For earlier years of twentieth century, some obvious part of answer lies in lingering perception of Britain as an uplifting Whitehall which might yet recall its proper duties towards those languishing under settler rule. Or, in complementary image, in vision of imperial Britain as mythical monarchy, sort of bigwig paramount chief to which adolescent urban middle classes and traditionalist rural leadership felt linked by an imaginative ideology of monarchical responsibility for, and protection of, subject races. Peasant landlessness in Transkeian Territories and immiseration of farm laborers in Namaqualand was amply compensated for by fortifying gaze of Queen Victoria from various classroom and living-room walls, a great White Queen across water who made no distinction of race among her subjects, who might be appealed to in case of need.2 It was almost as if, at mercy of oppressive local forces beyond their control, members of black elite derived some security of aspiration from sense of trustee belonging or connection with British power. These dispositions, and formative role in their construction of nineteenth-century impact of British missionary liberalism, slave emancipation, softening of discipline for Khoi under Ordinance 50, and nonracial Cape franchise, have recently been handily restated by Christopher Saunders in concise survey of South African African views of Britain and Empire from late nineteenth-century until early 1920s.3 For polite culture of educated urban professionals and small trading groups, as well as rural chieftaincies associated with Christianity and allied colonial interests, it all boiled down, in way, to facing contradictions and having to deal with disquieting ambiguity of British South Africa. Above all, perhaps, it was tilting balance between suspicion and trust. For direct British power in region was simultaneous paradox of liberal constitutionalism of rights and moderating protectionism against Boer trespass or bull-necked local white colonial rule, and complicity in avaricious colonial aggression and conquest. Within context of modernizing ideals and an ambience of political moderation, one response of African pro-Empire loyalism was an infiltrationist kind of mortgaged anticolonialism. In early 1900s, best of civilized men-schoolmasters, lawyers, clergymen, journalists, traders, and progressive peasants-puckered up to best of sympathetic liberal imperial establishment. Its drawing rooms included British prime minister, David Lloyd George, Lord Buxton, Union governor-general, and Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society, or at least until its secretary, John Harris, fell in with Union Prime Minister Louis Botha's segregationist land policies.4 This was calculating or strategic kind of deferential loyalism, ever-watchful for right vocabulary to exert moral claims. It was exemplified by Sol Plaatje's beguiling plea to Lloyd George in 1919, in which he tugged at latter's Welshness by invoking plight of the land of his fathers.5 The purpose of such activity was, of course, to try to recall imperial men of enlightened vision to their paternalist duties, in hope that their ethical muscle might yet stay hand of an increasingly rapacious settler rule. …