APPENDIX VII

A note on the role of black South Africans

For many years, white races have drafted Africans for wars on southern African soil. As far back as 1854, the Boers deployed the Bakgatla in the Rustenburg district in their campaign against Baga-Mokopane. In 1865/6 they used Africans against the Basotho of Moshoeshoe and in 1879 they drafted two Baphalane regiments in support of their campaign against Sekhukhune in the northern Transvaal. During the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, the Boers employed Africans as labourers, while the British used them as spies and blockhouse sentries. In 1906, the British deployed the Natal Native Horse regiment against Chief Bambatha in what became known as the Bambatha Rebellion.¹

When the Great War broke out in 1914, the Union of South Africa’s own defence force was two years old, but still a part of the British Empire. It could, therefore, not remain neutral. In a show of loyalty to Britain, the South African Native National Congress, the predecessor of the African National Congress, passed a resolution of loyalty to the Empire at its annual conference in Bloemfontein. It is estimated that as many as 83 000 African and 2 000 Coloured men ended up serving in the war.²

The country’s internal politics at the time prescribed that only whites would be armed. Therefore, Africans and Coloureds would be recruited as unarmed railway labourers or transport workers. The Cape’s large Coloured community, however, wished to send men to fight, and so after the campaign in German South-West Africa the South African government offered to raise an infantry battalion of Coloured soldiers for overseas service. The British government agreed to class the men as Imperial troops, equating their service conditions with those of the black British West Indies Regiment.

On 25 October 1915, the Recruiting Committee called for volunteers throughout South Africa. Lieutenant-Colonel George A. Morris was appointed commander of the unit, with Major C.N. Hoy his second in command. Nineteen white warrant officers and senior ranks were recruited to fill key appointments. The battalion sailed from Cape Town on 9 February 1916 aboard HMS Armadale Castle, and once in East Africa, became part of Major-General J.M. Stewart’s 1st East Africa Division.

This Cape Corps saw action in East Africa, Egypt, Palestine and Northern Rhodesia, while the Africans served as civilian batmen (personal servants of commissioned officers) and labourers in the South African Labour Corps, assisting General Louis Botha in South-West Africa and General Jan Smuts in East Africa.

Due to the admirable work done by the South African Labour Corps in Africa, a South African Native Labour Contingent (SANLC) was recruited for service in Europe. Of the first convoy, two ships landed safely in France, but the third, the SS Mendi, was sunk off the Isle of Wight on 21 February 1917 after a collision with the SS Darro in thick fog. The Mendi sank within about 25 minutes of the collision, and 616 out of the 823 South Africans of the 5th Battalion SANLC on board lost their lives. While some of the men died on impact, most drowned in the icy waters of the English Channel. The disaster is regarded as one of South Africa’s worst war tragedies.³ Most of the dead are remembered at the Hollybrook Memorial, in Southampton, England, while the Mendi Memorial in Avalon Cemetery, Soweto, also commemorates the disaster.

Between 1916 and 1918, almost 21 000 black South African volunteers served with the SANLC in France, where they formed part of a labour force that consisted of French, British, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Egyptian and Canadian labourers, as well as German prisoners of war. During their stay in France they were housed in closed compounds, not unlike the camps used to hold the prisoners.

By the time the unit was disbanded in early 1918, the men of the SANLC had laid and repaired roads and railway lines, and unloaded supply ships and loaded trains in the French harbours of Le Havre, Rouen and Dieppe. Most of the 333 African men who died on active duty are buried at the British military cemetery at Arques-la-Bataille.⁴

Prime Minister Botha paid tribute to the African soldiers in France in an address to Parliament on 10 March 1917:

If we have ever lived in times when the Native people of South Africa have shown great and true loyalty, it is in times like the present … I have all my life dealt with the Natives, but at no other time have they displayed greater loyalty than they have done in the difficult, dark days through which we are now passing … These people [the Natives] said: ‘This war is raging and we want to help’, and in so doing they have shown their loyalty to their flag, their King, and country, and what they have done will resound to their everlasting credit.⁵

Following the armistice in 1918, the African troops of the SANLC were returned to South Africa and disbanded. Unfairly, and despite their sacrifices, none were awarded medals or ribbons, while those blacks from the High Commission Territories who had served in the same units were, as well as the blacks who had served in South-West Africa with the South African Artillery and the South African Mounted Rifles.⁶