S.Africa marks centenary of Anglo-Boer War
By Darren Schuettler
JOHANNESBURG, Oct 8 (Reuters) - In a remote corner of South Africa's Kalahari Desert a century ago, a young Boer gunner took careful aim and fired the first shot in a bloody war fought for volk, empire and gold.
The Anglo-Boer War was Britain's last great imperial crusade, pitting a vast colonial empire against two tiny Afrikaner republics, which would emerge from defeat with a nationalist fervour that formed the roots of apartheid.
The 1899-1902 conflict cost more than 70,000 lives, gave the world its first mass media war and a bloody preview of trench warfare that scarred Europe more than a decade later.
It also marked the first widespread use of concentration camps where thousands of white Afrikaners and blacks fell to disease and starvation in a ruthless effort to depopulate the countryside and staunch the lifeblood of Boer guerrillas.
Long known as a ''white man's war,'' the role and suffering of blacks is only now getting the attention it deserves after being suppressed for decades.
''Looking back after a hundred years, it was a war that involved all people in South Africa and now we can take a really objective view of what happened,'' Leo Barnard, a professor of history at the University of the Free State, told Reuters.
BRITONS EXPECTED TROOPS HOME BY CHRISTMAS
The Anglo-Boer War had its beginnings in the Great Trek of the 1830s when Dutch-speaking settlers, bristling at British rule of the Cape, travelled a thousands miles north to establish two independent republics, the Transvaal and Orange Free State.
When the rich Witwatersrand gold fields were discovered in 1886, thousands of so-called ''uitlanders'' (foreigners), mostly British immigrants, flocked to the Transvaal in search of wealth.
Tensions rose between the Boers and uitlanders when the latter demanded equal rights, including the vote. The British High Commissioner, Lord Alfred Milner, used the uitlanders' plight to force a final showdown with the Boers who a few years earlier had fended off British attempts to annex the republics.
Talks to avert a war failed mainly due to British intransigence and the Boer republics issued an ultimatum on October 9, demanding international arbitration and the withdrawal of British army reinforcements.
Two days later the republics were officially at war with the world's biggest empire. The first shot was fired on October 12 by Jacob van Deventer's Boer artillery unit against a British army train in the remote Kalahari town of Kraaipan.
London newspapers predicted an easy victory by Christmas, but Britain's 19th century army was woefully unprepared to fight a 20th century war of trenches, mobility and smokeless Mauser rifles used with deadly effect by concealed Boer commandoes.
''The war...gave the British, in Kipling's famous phrase 'no end of a lesson'. It proved to be the longest, the costliest, the bloodiest and most humiliating war for Britain between 1815 and 1914,'' Thomas Pakenham wrote in The Boer War.
It would take more than 450,000 empire troops, including units from Canada, New Zealand and Australia, nearly three years to defeat a smaller, but more mobile Boer force of 87,000.
When the Boers were finally subdued in May, 1902, about 22,000 empire soldiers and 7,000 Boer fighters had died.
Between 18,000 and 28,000 Boers and up to 20,000 blacks died of disease and starvation after they were herded into miserable camps under Lord Kitchener's scorched earth policy to depopulate the countryside and deny food supplies to Boer guerrillas.
A hundred years later, Afrikaners have not forgotten the camps and some continue to demand an apology from Britain.
FIRST MASS MEDIA WAR
It was the world's first mass media war with Winston Churchill and Rudyard Kipling among the 58 war correspondents who glorified the sieges of Mafeking and Ladysmith, made heroes or goats of British commanders, and sometimes affected the course of the war itself.
Perhaps the most famous story of the war was the seven-month siege of Mafeking, a relative sideshow in purely military terms, but its propaganda value was immense in the early dark days of the war when British troops had suffered several reverses.
Robert Baden-Powell, the stiff-upper-lipped garrison commander who later founded the Boy Scouts, became one of Britain's greatest war heroes. However, recent historians have criticised Baden-Powell for prolonging the siege and denying rations to thousands of blacks in the garrison who starved.
The biggest myth of the conflict was that it was a ''gentleman's war'' or ''white man's war'' with blacks playing a minor role if at all.
In fact, at least 70,000 black men worked as labourers and drivers for the British army, while 30,000 were armed as scouts and guards. Up to 10,000 unarmed blacks served with the Boers.
Thousands died in concentration camps and many graves have only now been uncovered in the run up to this year's centenary.
''This war tended to be represented in a narrow and chauvinistic way that totally disregarded the impact it had on other citizens, especially back people,'' said South Africa's Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture Bridget Mabandla.
When the war ended, many blacks expected to benefit from more liberal British rule. But the Treaty of Vereeniging paid black farmers lower compensation than the Boers for lost property, and when black miners faced lower wages and worse labour conditions when they returned to the gold mines.
Historians often say the Boers lost the war, but won the peace. Desperate to get the gold mines running again and reconcile the white communities, Milner sacrificed black expectations of a non-racial franchise to appease the Boers.
When the republics merged with Britain's South African colonies in 1910, blacks saw their rights erode even further as the country set a course for apartheid a half century later and its descent into pariah status.
The country's first all-race elections in 1994 and the war's centenary has allowed a more sober view of the war which had become a part of apartheid propaganda.
''The Great Trek and the Anglo-Boer War were pillars of Afrikaner history for many years. It took the Afrikaner 50 or 60 years to get rid of those myths, but there are still some people in that mould,'' said Barnard.
22:10 10-07-99
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