Maverick Africans. Hermann Giliomee

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СКАЧАТЬ nationalism. The first was the uprising in 1880 –1 of the Transvaal Afrikaners against the British occupation of their country, leading to a crushing British defeat at Majuba and their withdrawal from the Highveld. Olive Schreiner wrote in the early 1890s that the war was largely a ‘woman’s war’. Women urged their menfolk to actively resist the British authorities. ‘Even in the [Cape] Colony at the distance of many hundreds of miles Afrikaner women implored sons and husbands to go to the aid of their northern kindred, while a martial ardour often far exceeding that of the males seemed to fill them.’71

      In 1890 Schreiner painted her famous picture of the ‘Boer woman’. She noted that the ‘Women’s Movement’, as she called feminism, always desired nothing more and nothing less than to stand beside the man as his full co-labourer, and hence as his equal. The Boer woman on the farm had already attained this. Referring to Roman-Dutch law, she stated: ‘The fiction of common possession of all material goods … is not a fiction but a reality among the Boers, and justly so, seeing that the female as often as the male contributes to the original household stock.’72 On the farm all the domestic arrangements were her domain – slaughtering, cooking, making clothes, educating the children, and instructing them in the Christian faith and Boer traditions.

      Schreiner concluded that the Boer woman ‘retained the full possession of one full half of the labour of her race’. She had no intention of becoming the ‘drone of society’ like upper-class women in Europe, leading a parasitic life in which she is ‘fed, clothed and sustained by the labours of others for the mere performance of her animal sex function’, while employing others to raise her children. There was no mental chasm between the Boer woman and her male comrade, Schreiner concluded. She enjoyed a position of ‘intellectual equality with her male companions, a condition which seems to constitute the highest ideal in the human sexual world’.73

      Thus the woman not only brought to the common household an equal share of material goods, but – and Schreiner thought this infinitely more important – ‘she [also] brought to the common life an equal culture.’74 In her view there were few societies in which ‘the duties and enjoyments of life are so equally divided between the sexes’ as in Boer society. The Boer woman even stood side by side with the man, facing death in fighting enemies. She remarked that it was the Boer woman ‘who still today [the 1890s] has a determining influence on peace or war’.

      Ten years after she wrote these words Boer women, to use her phrase, did indeed play a major role in the bittereinder phase of the South African War. The Republican forces had suffered some disastrous defeats in the first year of the war, and by June 1900 the Transvaal burghers were ready to surrender. Rejecting this option, President M.T. Steyn of the Republic of the Orange Free State propagated the idea of a war to the bitter end. So did many of the Boer women in the two republics.

      The great suffering and privation that women were prepared to endure baffled the men, both Boer and British. They hid in mountains, forests or reed-infested rivers, or wandered across the land in so-called vrouwen laagers, all to avoid capture and being sent to the concentration camps. Most insisted that their husbands and sons had to continue fighting, even to the death. Soldiers setting their houses on fire did not cow them. Some candidly declared that they preferred their houses to burn down than to see their husbands surrender. A British officer noted after two months of farm burning that, without exception, the women said that they would not give in.75

      As early as March 1900 the historian G.M. Theal, who had written extensively about South African history, warned that Eurocentric gender stereotypes did not apply in South Africa: ‘The women are the fiercest advocates of war to the bitter end. For independence the Boer women will send husbands and son after son to fight to the last.’76 General Kitchener, commander-in-chief of the British forces, wrote just after assuming his post in November 1900: ‘There is no doubt the women are keeping up the war and are far more bitter than the men.’77

      Women scorned men who had given up the fight. After the British had overrun the Orange Free State in mid-1900, a Boer woman noted: ‘[We] think the men should be on commando instead of meekly giving up their arms to, and getting passes from, the English.’78 In one camp the British authorities considered separating hendsoppers (Boers who had surrendered) and women. A British officer wrote: ‘The feelings between the families of men still on commando and those who have surrendered appear to be very bitter … and the men of the latter class have to put up with a great deal of abuse … from the women who call them slaves of the British and “handsoppers”.’ In another camp a hendsopper wrote of being ‘unmercifully persecuted by the anti-British sex’.79

      J.R. MacDonald, a British visitor, concluded: ‘It was the vrouw who kept the war going on so long. It was in her heart that patriotism flamed into an all-consuming heat. She it is who returns, forgiving nothing and forgetting nothing.’80 For many women and children, the camp was a searing experience that stayed with them for the rest of their lives. When an English woman exhorted Boer children at Maria Fischer’s camp to develop a spirit of forgiveness and love for one’s enemy, Fischer grimly commented: ‘To my mind it is not only impossible but also undesirable.’81

      Defeat in war also made women cling tenaciously to their culture. Indignation about British war methods prompted a Bloemfontein woman to wonder aloud whether she should continue letting her children speak the English language. Reflecting on what separated her from the English, another Free State woman came up with an answer: republicanism, history, the taal (language) and ‘hatred of the [British] race’.82

      In the early stages of the war the British high commissioner, Alfred Milner, remarked that the Boers loved their property more than they hated the British and would never fight for a political system; but the bittereinder stage of the war changed the course of South African history. At stake were the character of the Boer people, their republican commitment, and their willingness to pay the highest price for their freedom. It was the valour of the bittereinders and, above all, the grim determination of the Afrikaner women to persevere until the bitter end that won the Boers universal respect as freedom fighters. Smuts and General Kitchener observed that this stand had made a vital difference. It meant, as Smuts pointed out, that ‘every child to be born in South Africa was to have a proud self-respect and a more erect carriage before the nations of the world’.83

      The Women’s Monument erected outside Bloemfontein is virtually unique in paying tribute to the sacrifice of women in war, particularly the deaths in the concentration camps. It seems particularly inappropriate to consider the monument as a symbol of female subservience. It was rather the manifestation of a deep sense of indebtedness on the part of the Boer leaders, who erected it after consultation with women like R.I. (Tibbie) Steyn, the wife of former President Steyn.84

      The women’s resistance during the bittereinder phase is such an extraordinary event that the search for an adequate explanation will continue.85 Here one can only note that it cannot be understood without giving full weight to the extraordinary position Afrikaner women enjoyed in the household as a result of Roman-Dutch law, their partnership with their husbands in running the farms, and the development of what Jan Smuts called ‘the Boers [as] an intensely domestic people’.86 The violation of their domestic space and the wilful destruction of the farms made it impossible for women to conceive of defeat and subordination to British rule.

      Women’s political activism did not subside after the peace treaty had been signed. When Union was formed in 1910 the nationalist leader J.B.M. (Barry) Hertzog noticed the large number of Afrikaner women in his audiences. He concluded: ‘They stood firm in maintaining language, life, morals and traditions.’ They ‘feel more than the men’, he remarked.87

      After the Rebellion of 1914–15, Afrikaner women marched in protest against the jail sentence passed on General C.R. de Wet and other leaders of the rebellion and the stiff fines that were imposed on many of their followers. Prominent Afrikaner women had initiated the protest, including Hendrina Joubert, wife of Commandant-General Piet Joubert, and F.G. (Nettie) Eloff, a grandchild of President СКАЧАТЬ