Episode 81 - Black participation in the Boer War and Reitz breaks a leg

Deneys Reitz will experience a terrible wound to his leg and we will probe an issue that caused much gnashing of teeth - the role of Black South Africans in the war. A quick note for my American listeners, in South Africa people who are mixed race are known as coloured. I know the phrase is frowned on in the U.S., but here in Africa, it's accepted. I’ve tried to show how the myth that there were no black fighting men on both sides is just that - a myth - by using examples of how close black men and women were to the action throughout these podcasts over the last 18 months. Professor Bill Nasson published a book in the Anglo-Boer war series called Uyadela Wen’Osulapho - which is the cry of a fallen Zulu warrior, urging his comrades to carry on the fight. On the cover of his book is a black member of the British army in Mafikeng photographed alongside with lord Baden Powell. Inside the full photograph shows a group of black soldiers sitting with the famous general. All are stern faced, the soldiers holding their Lee-Metford Rifles and sporting large bandoliers around their shoulders. They were scouts and transport riders, armed to the teeth. When the war began in 1899, contemporary observers assumed that blacks would not be allowed to play any part in the coming hostilities but of course that was naive. A British commentator in the Fortnightly Review told readers that blacks in his words “would be impossible to control…” if they were armed. The risk of rebellion meant that the British in particular were petrified of stoking uprisings, considering what had happened to them in Zululand in 1879 where the Zulu had killed 1300 of their best troops at Isandhlwana. Jan Smuts too had written that this was to be a war between whites - saying that this was in the interests “of self-preservation” as he put it. Ironically, by the end of the war, Smuts was sending armed black men to fight in Namaqualand.