Foreword

A VISITOR TO modern South Africa could be forgiven for knowing nothing about Louis Botha. Prominent statues of him may still stand in front of the Union Buildings up on the Highveld in Pretoria and the National Assembly at the other end of the country in Cape Town, but today they are mostly ignored. They have about them more than a whiff of ‘Ozymandias’, Shelley’s lament to the passing power of a leader who once styled himself King of Kings and yet whose broken stone likeness lies askew in the desert, the forlorn, double-edged invocation still legible on the pedestal: ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

And what works did Botha achieve? The turbulent history of South Africa’s fight against racial inequality can rightly make uncomfortable the lauding of senior white figures from the ancien regime, but in Botha perhaps an exception can be made.

From humble, rural Afrikaner beginnings that seeded in him a connection with the land of South Africa as pure as any, he rose to prominence fighting the British during the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. Famous for out-thinking their better supplied, funded and equipped enemy, it was guerrilla commanders such as Botha who helped establish the myth of the resourceful, dogged – indeed, noble – Afrikaner commando outwitting the flat-footed British soldiers on the remote South African platteland.

Then, in an act of remarkable statesmanlike transformation, just twelve years later he raised an army to fight alongside the British when the First World War broke out in 1914. He would die a committed Anglophile.

It was an evolution that would win him huge respect in Europe, where he was invited to take part in the Paris peace negotiations following the Armistice, and the eternal respect and friendship of Britain’s great wartime leader, Winston Churchill. Yet it was an act that would tarnish him forever with the traitor’s mark of Cain in the eyes of many anti-British Afrikaners back home in South Africa, the so-called ‘bitter-enders’ unwilling to come to terms with Britain’s eventual victory in the Boer War.

It is this ‘betrayal’ that has led in part to his story being largely forgotten today. The narrative of the struggle against apartheid tends to put all whites in the same single, homogenous, racist block, yet the reality of history is that single blocks rarely exist. There are fault lines, margins, places were subtlety and nuance agglomerate, and this is perhaps why a richly complex South African figure like Botha is passed over today.

Adam Cruise goes a long way to putting that right with his excellent new book, Louis Botha’s War. It is in part a work of military history, an account of the 1914/15 campaign by South African forces led by Botha that dislodged German troops from the arid, thirsty wastes of what was known in the colonial era as German South-West Africa, but is today called Namibia. But it also gives new life to our understanding of a key and complex international figure from the start of the twentieth century.

That some of Botha’s views can today be regarded as reactionary, even racist, should not be forgotten. It was under his premiership that the Natives Land Act of 1913 was passed, a law that stopped black South Africans from owning land in all but very limited areas. It was a keystone to ensuring white minority rule in the country long before apartheid was legally codified in the 1950s and 1960s.

But to pillory one man for an attitude that seeped through entire social cohorts would be wrong. It is much more important to understand what a difference he made in the context of the time in which he lived, and this is where Cruise’s book really comes alive.

South Africa as a united nation was just four years old when Botha, now serving as prime minister, took the momentous decision to invade South-West Africa on behalf of Britain. Many outsiders doubted whether such a new entity could even field an effective army. Many of the soldiers were Afrikaners who had fought against Britain in the Boer War and who did not possess quite the same magnanimous mindset of forgiveness as Botha. Cruise relates how the invasion brought anti-British republicanism to the fore, leading to a rebellion at home that had to be put down by Botha’s loyalists before the war could be successfully prosecuted against Germany across the border.

This led to the first – and last – time South Africa was invaded by a foreign power, when a German detachment managed to cross the frontier, egged on by a minority of Afrikaners with such strong hatred of Britain they would later embrace Nazism. But, as Cruise argues convincingly, this was more a case of an incursion in search of water and supplies, rather than a serious attempt to seize territory.

Botha was not the sort of prime minister to run a war from his office, forward deploying into German-held territory to such an extent that his bodyguards gave up trying to rein him in. At one point, he came within a whisker of being captured, insisting on taking operational command to an extent that would be inconceivable in our modern age of pampered world leaders.

Through careful culling of all the best sources on the campaign, Cruise tells of the many ‘firsts’ associated with the 1914/15 South-West Africa campaign: the first time South Africa deployed armoured cars, the first time aeroplanes were used to bomb enemy positions, the first time motorbike outriders replaced horsemen, the first German target to be successfully taken by the Allies in the Great War (a consular building on the Caprivi Strip).

This is a story of derring-do, of troops trekking for days on a diet of biltong and biscuit, of Botha’s indomitable wife rushing north to nurse her husband back to strength during the campaign, of forces who dared to traverse the Kalahari desert in full battle order.

But mostly, this is the story of a man who, rather like Nelson Mandela later in the century, was willing to adapt, compromise and change, all in the name of peoples putting their differences behind them. Botha’s name may no longer be revered around the globe, but after reading this book with its account of his tactical brilliance and political courage in the deserts of Namibia, one could be inspired to think how lucky South Africa has been to sire the greatest of leaders.

TIM BUTCHER

AUGUST 2014