14
Reverberations
AFTER SIGNING THE Treaty of Khorab, Botha left the territory for good, having appointed Brigadier General Beves as interim military governor. As promised, the German soldiers and officers were interned in prisoner-of-war camps for the remainder of the war. Of the pilots, Lieutenant Alexander von Scheele was kept at a camp at Okahandja. After the war, he immigrated to Argentina before returning to Germany to join the Luftwaffe, where he attained the rank of major. He was eventually killed in an aeroplane crash in Spain shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. Lieutenant Paul Fiedler briefly returned to his native Austria, but moved back to South-West Africa where he managed a farm until 1926, when he again returned to Europe. Willy Trück lived a long life as a Namibian farmer and ultimately moved to Cape Town. He died in his home in Sea Point when he was well into his nineties, having lived through the history of aerial bombing, from his own humble beginnings to the launch of the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, also known as the Stealth Bomber.1
Prime Minister Botha arrived home to a rapturous welcome, greeted at the Union Buildings by an adoring crowd. The victory came at a time when the Allies desperately needed some good news. The horrors of trench warfare were starting to become apparent and the passenger liner RMS Lusitania had been sunk by German submarines only a month before, with a terrible loss of civilian life. Botha, commander of the first Allied victory in the field, became the hero the world sorely needed. His exploits were compared to a romantic medieval crusade, with horsemen fighting for their holy rights. Instead of tank and rocket, horse and nature dictated and directed proceedings. Even after modern technology – aeroplanes, armoured cars, anti-aircraft guns – was introduced, the campaign in South-West Africa remained a far cry from the mechanised hideousness of twentieth-century warfare.
For Botha, the campaign was more than the first victory in a global war. It was the first time South Africa had fought as a united country, with former foes fighting side by side. It must have pleased him that he had at least achieved some headway with his policy of reconciliation. It came at a huge cost though. While many of his close friends and comrades in arms continued the fight in German East Africa and in the trenches in France, Botha remained in South Africa where he despairingly tried to patch up his broken political relationship with the Afrikaner republicans, without success.
The insurrection of 1914 had developed into clear-cut party-political quarrels. Hertzog, who had remained so quiet throughout the rebellion, found his voice in the immediate aftermath and roundly condemned Botha for both causing the rebellion and initiating an unnecessary invasion of German South-West Africa. The nationalists at once martyred men like De la Rey, Beyers and Fourie, and lauded as heroes De Wet, Kemp and even the unpalatable Maritz.
On 20 October 1915, the general election for the second Union Parliament was held. To a man, the ex-rebels voted for Hertzog’s fledgling National Party. Deneys Reitz returned to his home in Heilbron in the Free State directly after the campaign to contest the seat. As a Botha man, he was beaten by a huge majority. The Free State was almost 100 per cent behind Hertzog. Overall, Botha remained in power that year, but the nationalists made great strides, becoming the country’s official opposition and forcing Botha into a coalition with the pro-British unionists. His popularity at home was clearly waning.
While Botha tried to quench the flames, the rest of the South African command went on to distinguish themselves and their country in the conflict abroad. After his stint in German South-West Africa, Brigadier General Henry Lukin’s star rose rapidly. Towards the end of 1915, he went with a brigade to Egypt to quell the Senussi uprising. The Senussi were a religious sect composed of tribesmen based in Libya and supported by the Ottoman Empire and the Germans to destabilise the British presence in Egypt. The Senussi crossed the frontier into Egypt with 5 000 rifles and Turkish artillery and machine guns, but were roundly defeated. Their leader, Jaafar Pasha, was captured in February 1916 by two regiments of South African infantry, some British detachments and a New Zealand regiment, all under Lukin’s command.
From Egypt, Lukin was sent to the Western Front, where he commanded the 1st South African Infantry Brigade in the trenches of France during the Battle of the Somme. The brigade became famous for valiantly holding the Allied front line at Delville Wood on 14 July 1916. Eighty per cent of Lukin’s force was killed, but the survivors bravely held the line in what was described as the bloodiest battle of the year. More soldiers were killed on the Somme than in any other previous campaign in the history of mankind. Lukin was promoted to major general after the battle. He was later appointed as a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, and awarded the Order of St Michael and St George, the Order of the Nile and the Distinguished Service Order for his service in the Great War.2
Lukin died in 1925 in Muizenberg, Cape Town. There is a statue of him in the Company’s Gardens, near the national museum. The likeness of the major general, in khaki and riding boots, demurely looking down as he leans on his cane, is a bit out of place today, given South Africa’s current social and political climate.
Lukin’s immediate superior at Delville Wood was Major General Percy Skinner, the British Army officer who had played an important role in the South-West Africa campaign. He too served with distinction and was awarded a knighthood.
In 1916, Smuts, Van Deventer, Brits, Collyer, Reitz, Berrangé and Enselin, together with many of Southern Force’s commandos, took charge of the East African Campaign, taking over from the British command who were faring badly against the indomitable von Lettow-Vorbeck in German East Africa. Unlike his colleagues in the South West, von Lettow-Vorbeck had gone to ground and was fighting a successful guerrilla campaign, making excellent use of the African askaris and running rings around the British and Indian expeditionary forces.
Although Smuts, who was given overall command, and his dream team were more successful, they could not replicate Botha’s feat of the previous year, primarily because their horses dropped dead in their thousands from the ravages of the Tsetse fly. ‘Ultimately,’ says Hew Strachan, ‘all horses in East Africa would succumb to the fly.’3 Without their mounts, the commandos were no longer mobile, the primary reason for their previous successes. Furthermore, the conditions in the tropics of Tanzania were entirely different to those in Botha’s desert environment.
Smuts was also faced with commanding a polyglot of British, Indian, South African, Rhodesian and African troops. His force consisted of ‘men of different nationalities, of different training, speaking different languages, with equipment of varying patterns, thrown together without any coordinated training to carry out an important operation in an unknown country’.4 Von Lettow-Vorbeck, who knew both the terrain and the locals intimately, was willing and able to make use of native soldiers, as he lacked the racial prejudices of Seitz and Botha. The askaris would gain the grudging respect of the South Africans fighting opposite them; there was no denying that they were as good as the Boers when it came to guerrilla tactics.
In March 1917, Smuts was called to London to serve in the Imperial War Cabinet. It was Van Deventer who persevered in the endless cat-and-mouse game with the askaris, eventually taking over from Smuts’s unsuccessful British replacement as commander of the campaign. Van Deventer was now a lieutenant general of the British Army, much to the chagrin of the other British officers, especially those who had fought against him in the Boer War and whom he constantly teased for failing to capture or kill him. Apart from his near-inaudible rasp, Van Deventer did not speak any English and had to make use of an interpreter, which further infuriated his British subordinates.
Although he successfully hounded von Lettow-Vorbeck out of German East Africa and into Portuguese and British territory, Van Deventer never did catch the German commander. Von Lettow-Vorbeck gave the Portuguese and Northern Rhodesian regiments a thorough run-around before surrendering in Northern Rhodesia after the Armistice was signed in 1918.
At the end of the war, Van Deventer was knighted and awarded the Order of the Bath and the Order of St Michael and St George. He then, surprisingly, became an aide-de-camp to King George V, even though he still required an interpreter. In 1920, Sir Jaap van Deventer retired from the military and was given the Dekoratie voor Trouwe Dienst (Decoration of Devoted Service), a retrospective South African military award for distinguished service in the Anglo-Boer War. In 1922, Smuts hauled him out of retirement to assist in quelling the Rand Rebellion. Van Deventer died in a car accident shortly thereafter, apparently as a result of heart failure while driving. He was just forty-eight years old.
Botha continued to trade blows with the nationalists once the Great War was over, but his health was failing. Plagued with fatigue, he was unwell for most of 1919 yet still personally represented South Africa at the Treaty of Versailles in June, where, as a lone voice, he unsuccessfully lobbied for leniency regarding the treatment of the defeated armies. On his return to South Africa, Botha contracted Spanish influenza and died suddenly of heart failure on 27 August 1919. He was exactly one month shy of his fifty-seventh birthday. He was laid to rest in Heroes’ Acre in Pretoria.
Smuts took over from his old friend and over the years won and relinquished his hold on government in a protracted seesaw of ideologies and disjointed coalitions. Each time, however, the National Party strengthened its support base. Smuts, who was far less conciliatory than his predecessor, was unable to prevent the steady outflow of Afrikaners from his party. In the 1924 general election, Hertzog’s nationalists defeated the South African Party and came to power in coalition with the Labour Party.
Maritz had returned to South Africa in 1923 and later set about organising hard-line republicans to support the rise of Nazi Germany and harass South African Jews. His was a small-scale operation, however, and proved more of an embarrassment to the coalition government than anything else throughout the 1930s. By the time of his death in a car accident in Pretoria in 1940, he was a confirmed and committed Nazi. His antics provided fertile ground for ultra-right-wing Afrikaner movements such as the pro-Nazi separatist and paramilitary Ossewa Brandwag (Oxwagon Sentinel), which operated during World War II.
In 1933, Smuts’s South African Party formed a coalition government with the National Party and the following year they merged to form the United Party. Reitz became a member of Parliament during this time and notes that the aftermath of the South-West Africa campaign was still raging across the political field, almost twenty years after the fact.5 Those dissatisfied with the merger broke off to form the Purified National Party. Led by the ultra-right-wing D.F. Malan, the new nationalists, taking a leaf from their forefathers, used opposition to South African participation in World War II to stir up anti-British feelings among Afrikaners.
The nationalists tapped into the old republican sentiment like never before, certainly more than Hertzog ever did. The age of the Boer generals had passed and the nationalists set about tightening their grip on South African politics. They effectively throttled the discombobulated opposition, who were at odds over how best to deal with the burgeoning political consciousness of black South Africans. Old and unprepared for the swell of Afrikaner nationalism, Smuts was defeated for good in the 1948 general election.
A few months after his eightieth birthday in 1950, Smuts suffered a heart attack and died. Malan and his cronies went about resurrecting the strong isolationist and separatist sentiments of the Afrikaners and began to implement the first of the infamous policies of apartheid, an ideology that would be enshrined during the 1960s under Hendrik Verwoerd. With Verwoerd at the helm, the rebels’ cherished republican dream was at last realised. On 31 May 1961, the fully independent Republic of South Africa replaced the Union of South Africa, and the break from the hated English was complete.
Verwoerd’s schemes, which were the ultimate manifestation of the republican ideology born in 1914, shaped South Africa as we know it. Tensions among its disparate people still exist and South Africans remain inextricably bound to their politics. In his 1915 election campaign, Reitz poignantly said of South African voters: ‘We are a race of politicians.’6 One hundred years later, we still are.
In part thanks to Botha’s invasion of German South-West Africa, the architects of apartheid got their claws into that territory as well. Despite the prime minister’s audacious claim to Churchill that he would kick the Germans out of South-West Africa, at the end of the campaign he allowed the defeated German colonists to stay. It was typical of his conciliatory nature. The Germans, in turn, welcomed the South Africans as their landlords. The racial and cultural ideologies of the two white races were similar, and the Germans were not too unhappy about being vanquished as long as their way of life changed little.
Almost immediately after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, the new South African overlords began implementing racial segregation over the border. In 1922, Smuts ruthlessly crushed an armed uprising by the Bondelswarts, the Nama tribe of Warmbad in the south of the territory, who had come to realise that their new masters were no different to their old ones. Smuts was chastised by the League of Nations for his brutality in quashing the insurrection. He had used the air force to hunt down the Bondelswarts and in the process air-bombed women and children, as well as their flocks of sheep and goats. It was an act that prompted the League to permanently reserve handing over South-West Africa to South Africa as a fifth province.
In the decades that followed, the League and eventually the United Nations doggedly refused the occasional request from South Africa for complete acquisition, but were unable, or unwilling, to prevent South Africa enforcing its racial policies in the ex-German territory. From 1948, apartheid laws were enacted in South West Africa as they were in South Africa.
In 1960, to gain the cherished dream of a republic, Prime Minister Verwoerd held a referendum for white South Africans. It was a tightly contested poll, as the winning margin in favour of a republic ended up being just 2 per cent. In order to secure the outcome in his favour, Verwoerd had made the unprecedented move of enfranchising white voters from South West Africa. It could therefore be argued that it was the German vote that ultimately gave South Africa total independence from Britain.
In the 1970s and 1980s, South West Africa experienced a rebellion not too dissimilar to the one in South Africa in 1914. This one, however, was a lot more vicious, protracted and deeply complex. The South West African branch of the Ovambo tribe, in particular, was proving to be a headache for the South African authorities. The Ovambo freedom fighters of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) were operating from bases immediately across the border in Angola, the government of which was assisting in arming and training them. The Angolans were keen to see off the South Africans because Pretoria was arming Angola’s rebel movement, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).
The conflict was a real rats’ nest of who was supporting whom, made even more complicated by the fact that it was a hot sideshow of the Cold War. On the one hand, the Angolan government and SWAPO were supported in the field by contingents of Cuban soldiers sent by Fidel Castro and financed by the Soviet Union. The South African forces, on the other hand, were using local San and Nama trackers and had the support of the territory’s German citizens as well as the Himba, who traditionally hated the Ovambo. In addition, the United States was secretly bolstering the South Africans both financially and militarily. It can be argued that American involvement with South Africa propped up the creaking edifice of apartheid for at least a decade longer. While the Reagan administration paid lip service to the global clamour to end racial segregation in South Africa, they underhandedly needed the whites-only South African government for their own regional interests.
In the 1980s, South Africa’s head of state P.W. Botha, who was neither related to nor nearly as statesmanlike as Louis Botha, intensified the war in South West Africa and Angola. At this stage, conscription was at its height, and all able-bodied white males, upon leaving school or university, had to serve a two-year term in the South African Defence Force, which often meant spending time on ‘the Border’ between northern South West Africa and southern Angola, fighting for an ideology that often was not their own. It was a particularly dirty war for both soldier and civilian. The scars of those still living along the border between Angola and present-day Namibia run very deep.
The conflict variously known as the South African Border War or the Angolan Bush War began to wind down in 1988 with the withdrawal of foreign forces from Angola. South Africa agreed to hand over control of South West Africa to the United Nations, which set about preparing the territory for independence. Democratic elections were held in November 1989 and on 21 March 1990 Namibia became the last African country to rid itself of colonial rule.
The Namibia of today feels no different from South Africa. The languages, infrastructure, culture and outlook are so South African that the place could be mistaken for another province of the republic. There is one standout difference, however. There are still many German-speaking Namibians, and lately German tourists. They disgorge from Lufthansa jets in Windhoek to visit the place that they still regard as within the German sphere of influence, much like Britons think of Jamaica or Kenya. It is somewhat strange, given that a century has passed since the Germans last governed here. And even when they did govern, it was for little more than three decades (1884 to 1915). This is the paradox of Louis Botha’s legacy – Germans and Afrikaners side by side as allies. It was Beyers and Maritz’s dream, but in the end it was Botha who realised it. South Africans and Germans both feel somehow connected to Namibia. It is as though they never left, and, in truth, many have not.
Louis Botha’s decision to invade German South-West Africa was less about placating Britain than about South Africa’s territorial aggrandisement. He wanted to absorb it, not administer it as a mandate. He had hoped that the German territory, along with other British-administered protectorates, would form part of a Greater South Africa. Had he not been so preoccupied with domestic strife, had he not died so prematurely, his dream may have eventually come to pass. Perhaps if Botha and not the impatient and unsentimental Smuts had faced the republican groundswell, it could have been tempered. In which case, maybe – just maybe – separatist white Afrikaner supremacy, and hence apartheid, would not have flourished as it did. Botha was the kind of man who would always eventually find the justness, or unjustness, in something. It is not unfeasible that he would have changed his stance on what was then called the ‘native question’. He was, after all, a man of the times and, as times changed, he certainly would have changed with them, as he had proved so often before.
As the first prime minister of a unified South Africa, Louis Botha was ostensibly the father of a nation, one that sadly rejected his legacy and continues to do so. He won the affection not only of those Afrikaner soldiers loyal to him, but of most English-speaking South African citizens and colleagues overseas as well. But it was not enough. While his exploits in German South-West Africa were regarded with an almost mythical reverence in Britain, at home his own brethren were determined to unseat him. It literally broke his great heart. Soon after his death he ceased to be a household name, as successive generations of Afrikaners were determined to forget the man they thought had betrayed them.
Winston Churchill and Botha had become close friends after the Anglo-Boer War. The two often joked about how the future prime minister of South Africa had personally captured the future undersecretary of state for the colonies during that war. Although not entirely true – Botha was nowhere near the armoured train that Churchill was travelling in when it was captured, although the captors certainly had been men under his command – Churchill nonetheless took the romantic view of the incident. He had grown quite fond of Botha and refused to accept any alternative version of events.
The two former foes saw a good deal of each other when Churchill was undersecretary between 1905 and 1908, a job that was dominated by South African affairs in the aftermath of the Boer War. In 1907, Churchill successfully lobbied Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal government to grant responsible rather than representative government to the two former Boer colonies, something that must have left Botha deeply indebted to his friend. Churchill’s act was possibly the primary reason Botha, as the newly elected prime minister of the independent Transvaal Colony, adopted such unwavering loyalty towards Britain, which he continued to exercise after the formation of the Union three years later.
After Botha’s death, it was Churchill who venerated him as the father of South Africa. He affectionately remembered the ‘grand rugged figure’, and described Botha as a ‘a wise and profound statesman, the farmer warrior, the crafty hunter of the wilderness, the deep, sure man of solitude’.7 Of Botha’s military prowess, Churchill wrote in Great Contemporaries, ‘The three most famous generals I have known in my life … all begin with a “B”. They are General Booth, General Botha and General Baden-Powell.’8 Of the three, Churchill would often say that Louis Botha was the greatest he ever knew.