JENDA: A JOURNAL OF CULTURE AND AFRICAN WOMEN STUDIES ISSN: 1530-5686 Issue 8 (2006)

Meta Schettler

Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South African War, 1899-1902, edited by Greg Cuthbertson, Albert Grundlingh, and Mary-Lynn Suttie is a wide-ranging anthology that explores many understudied aspects of South Africa’s Anglo-Boer War one century later. As the editors state in their introduction their volume “cannot claim to have made a paradigmatic shift away from the discourses of social history or to have reconceptualized the war in dramatic new ways” (xvii). However, the inclusion of multiple new stories, some marginalized and some functioning as counternarratives, the uncovering of multiple layers previously obscured or omitted from earlier studies of the war does signify an important expansion of current understandings and interpretations of this conflict in South African early modern history.

Four chapters out of fifteen make significant new contributions to gender analysis and women’s roles in the war and its aftermath. Shula Marks’ “British Nursing and the South African War” and Elizabeth Van Heyningen’s “Women and Disease: The Clash of Medical Cultures in the Concentration Camps of the South African War” both investigate aspects of medical history and the shifting lives of women impacted by the exigencies of war. In particular “Women and Disease” eloquently reveals the cultural conflicts between British doctors and Boer women in Britain’s concentration camps that aggravated relations and medical assistance within the camps. Boer women attempted to affirm traditions of healing based on their experience of rural life that ran counter to Britain’s imperial agenda in the war and the standard Victorian middle-class and urban values of British doctors serving in the camps. Parallel to this conflict between genders, Shula Marks documents the increasing acceptance of women as nurses working at the battlefront of the war. Imperial women’s enthusiasm for participation in the war sprung from various motives such as patriotism and/or embracing the opportunity to escape the constrictions of Victorian life. Marks also explores the inherent contradictions between the goals of an imperial war of destruction and the mission of nursing to “heal all regardless of race, color, or creed” (175).

Two more chapters cover new ground in gender analysis, “Gentlemen and Boers: Afrikaner Nationalism, Gender, and Colonial Warfare in the South African War” by Helen Bradford and “The National Women’s Monument” by Albert Grundlingh, both giving new detail and examination of Afrikaner women’s experience of the war. Bradford analyzes gender relations among Afrikaners in the context of the war as well as gender formations in Britain’s imperialist discourse while Grundlingh documents the process by which the monument honoring Boer women and children who died in British concentration camps was gained in the years following the war. He both critically analyzes Afrikaner patriarchy within the context of Afrikaner nationalism in the aftermath of the war and the later manipulation of rhetoric about the monument, which narrowed the discourse from a broad universal homage to womanhood to a sole focus on Afrikaner sacrifice and Afrikaner nationalism.

One more chapter by Fransjohan Pretorius, “Afrikaner Nationalism and the Burgher on Commando,” continues analysis of Afrikaner nationalism and its growth during the war. In a still-emerging and protean post-apartheid multicultural era, issues of Afrikaner nationalism can at times seem simultaneously out-dated and yet still integral to understanding how we view the entire landscape of the last century. However, as the founding ideology of apartheid itself, Afrikaner nationalism remains a kind of specter representing the abuses of apartheid. Writing a Wider War at times seems to attempt rehabilitation of Afrikaner nationalism when placed in the larger global context of British imperialism. Or perhaps it might be fairer to say that these writers uncover the particularities of Afrikaner experience under British exploitation at the time of the war. However, the dichotomy between Afrikaners as victims in the early twentieth century in South Africa and Afrikaners as oppressors in mid-century might be a hard one to overlook for some readers. Additionally, the current status of Afrikaners in the “new” South Africa is not linked to any historical analysis here leaving us to wonder how contemporary Afrikaners interpret and understand the war today. I believe that the contours and scope of a fully inclusive South African democracy clearly cannot omit Afrikaner experience but at the same time cannot necessarily afford to include well-worn paths of separatist or narrow nationalisms.

Still the editors self-consciously assert the centrality of Afrikaners to understanding the war when they write in their introduction, “As much as we have tried in this collection to recover African participation in the war—indeed, tried to make it a South African war—it nevertheless remains a preeminently Afrikaner struggle against British imperialism” (xii). Three chapters in whole address African experience during the war, and other chapters in part analyze African experience or at least African exclusion in the historical record. In Bernard Mbenga’s “The Role of the Bakgatla of the Pilanesberg in the South African War,” he analyzes the British use of Bakgatla men as soldiers in the Pilanesberg region, and he stresses the fact that they were “both shaping agents and victims in the conflict” (85). Mbenga asserts that the Bakgatla made substantial material gains in the course of the war by their raids on Boer property, which increased the political authority of their paramount chief Linchwe in the aftermath of the war. Mbenga also looks at the ways in which the conflict substantially transformed Boer-Bakgatla relations in the Pilanesberg region for decades to come.

John Lambert’s “Loyalty Its Own Reward” and Manelisi Genge’s “The Role of the EmaSwati in the South African War” cover two more regions where the British utilized African men for the purpose of reconnaissance and incursions on Boer property. In both Swaziland and Natal, the British were reluctant to acknowledge, let alone commend, African participation in the war once the conflict was ended. As Genge writes, “The exclusion of the emaSwati and black South Africans from the Treaty of Vereeniging, signed by the British and the Boers in May 1902, has long obscured the diversity of combatants” (136). All three chapters in Writing a Wider War that affirm African agency in the conflict extend and complement the much earlier war diary of Sol Plaatje, one of the founding members of the African National Congress, who recorded his experience of the Mafeking siege when working as a translator there. It is certain that more research awaits an Africanist perspective to interpret and preserve African experience from the colonial era to the present.

In terms of identity and cultural analysis, the editors have also included Richard Mendelsohn’s “The Jewish War: Anglo-Jewry and the South African War.” Mendelsohn records and reinterprets Jewish experience and Jewish representations within British propaganda about the war. The play of cultures in South African history has always required a multi-faceted representation even when the object of study is known by the famous tag, “the white man’s war.” The diversity of perspectives in Writing a Wider War is quite admirable, unveiling the multiplicity of culture, gender and class amongst the various peoples affected by the conflict. The lasting impact of the legacy of cultural conflict, armed conflict and gender conflict is not a dormant issue in South Africa today. It remains an urgent and pressing daily issue for South African peoples still emerging and recovering from the apartheid era. South Africa remains a society deeply ridden with violence, inequality and cultural conflict. As South Africa moves forward and remakes itself, South Africans will decide for themselves what further histories need to be reworked and rewritten to preserve and understand the impact of colonial and modern wars and the place that the Anglo-Boer War will have in South Africa’s collective memory.

Writing a Wider War begins this process of uncovering and affirming the multicultural history of South Africa and to demarginalize women’s experience and women’s agency in the historical record. New studies and new mythologies will ultimately continue to reshape and rework a common identity for South Africa and seek to overcome the extremities of difference that have too often been at the center of South Africa’s esprit de corps.

Citation Format:

Meta Schettler. “Review: Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South African War, 1899-1902” JENDA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: Issue 8, 2006.