THE BOER LAWYERS – I WONDER WHAT THEY WERE THINKING
Let me explain up-front, otherwise this article may be a bit confusing: In this article “Boers” does not mean Afrikaners or the police during the apartheid years. In this article “Boers” refers to the Dutch speaking Afrikaners who inhabited what was then the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in 1899.
In 1899 South Africa looked very different from the current South Africa. Kwa-Zulu Natal was then a British colony. As were today’s Eastern Cape, Western Cape and Northern Cape provinces – at the time they formed one massive British colony called the Cape Colony. Today’s Free State province was then an independent Boer republic (called the Orange Free State) with its own parliament, law and government. Today’s North West, Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces together constituted a second independent Boer Republic, known as the Zuid-Afrikaanse Republiek (ZAR).
The Afrikaners who inhabited the two Boer republics were mostly subsistence farmers who lived on remote farms. Living on remote farms meant that the Boer families had to be self sufficient. This had at least three consequences: Most male Boers were excellent horsemen, were excellent marksmen and had excellent bushcraft skills.
Tensions had been running high between the ZAR and the UK for quite some time, particularly over the very rich gold reefs that had been discovered in the ZAR. On 11 October 1899 matters came to a head and war broke out between the two Boer republics and the UK. In fact, the war was actually between the two Boer republics and the British Empire since the Australian colonies, New Zealand and Canada joined the UK in its fight with the two Boer republics. South Africa’s black people were not supposed to be directly involved in the war. But as we will see later, the war affected many of them. In some cases, disastrously so.
The war was a real David and Goliath affair – the two Boer republics did not have professional full-time soldiers (apart from some artillery units). Instead, every male citizen between the ages of 16 and 60 had to fight when called upon to do so. At the start of the war the two Boer republics could muster a total of 55,000 of these private citizen troops. In contrast, at the height of the war 500,000 UK and imperial forces were fighting the Boers in South Africa.
On paper it should have been an easy walkover for the British and imperial forces. The reality turned out to be very different though. Far from the war being over by the Christmas of 1899 as many Britons had expected, the war would carry on for another three years, only ending in 1902. The Boers taught the British, in Rudyard Kipling’s words, “no end of a lesson”.
That lesson came at a terrible cost though. Some 22,000 British and imperial soldiers lost their lives in the war. Financially, the war cost the British taxpayer approximately GBP3211million at the time, which today would be the equivalent of many billions of pound sterling.
The cost for the Boers was much higher though. The Boers lost the relatively low number of 6,000 Boer soldiers killed. However, some 26,000 Boer women and children died in British concentration camps. That is a staggering number if one remembers that the total number of male Boers between the ages of 16 and 60 was 55,000 at the time. It was a humanitarian catastrophe.
The economic and social cost to the Boers was equally high. During the latter part of the war the British applied a “scorched earth” policy. This meant that all Boer farmhouses, their content and all other farm buildings were burnt to the ground. All Boer livestock was killed. All Boer women and children who were not living in towns (some 116,000 in total) were interned in concentration camps (of which 26,000 died in those camps). When the war eventually ended most of the Boers returned to farms that could no longer function – the capital cost of rebuilding the farm infrastructure and re-acquiring livestock was simply too high. The affected Boers could theoretically claim some monetary compensation from the British government but the compensation could only be claimed in person in London. It could just as well have been claimable only on Mars.
Even though it was not their war, some black South Africans also suffered terribly in the war. The British did not only intern Boer women and children, they also interned some 110,000 black South Africans in concentration camps in the two Boer republics. An estimated 20,000 of those interned black South Africans died in those concentration camps. Another terrible humanitarian disaster. Politically, black South Africans in the two Boer republics were definitely the biggest losers. The peace terms that the Boers and the British eventually settled on included a condition that both Boers and Britons in the former two Boer republics would have the right to vote. Black South Africans in those two territories would not have the right to vote.
Given that (rather extensive) background, we return to the question asked at the top of this article: What were the Boer lawyers thinking? For the interesting fact is that a significant number of senior Boer statesmen and military commanders were lawyers who had studied in the UK. Those Boer lawyers had stayed in the UK, had studied in the UK and had graduated in the UK before they returned to South Africa. They knew the UK, and the Britons, first hand. I really wonder what they thought about having to fight against soldiers who came from the country that had been their host before?
Take Boer general Jannie Smuts (later the prime minister of South Africa) as an example. Before the war he had studied law at the University of Oxford in the UK, where he achieved outstanding academic results. During the war he rose to the rank of Boer general and caused the British some real headaches. His Boer forces even invaded the Cape Colony, eventually turning back only some 80 kilometres outside Cape Town. When the war ended, Jannie Smuts was still in the veld, fighting against an enemy that outnumbered the Boer forces that were still in the veld by at least ten to one. What did he think of having to fight such a devastating, in fact inhuman, war against his former hosts?
Or president MT Steyn, the president of the Orange Free State. As a child Steyn attended primary school at a farm school in the Free State. Where, rather strangely, the teacher was a Briton and the language of tuition accordingly was English. It was said that Steyn was more comfortable speaking formal English than speaking formal Dutch. Steyn went on to study law in the UK, where he was admitted as a barrister before returning to the Orange Free State. At the time that the war broke out, Steyn was the Orange Free State’s president. He was married to a Briton of Scottish descent. And yet, like Smuts, he saw out the entire war, fighting in the veld until the very end. What did he think of having to fight such a horrible war against soldiers from his former host country? Incidentally, despite being of Scottish descent Steyn’s wife, “Libbie”, fully supported the Boer cause.
There are many more examples. Such as Francis William Reitz, who had studied law in Scotland and loved all things Scottish. He went on to become president of the Orange Free State and fought in the veld until the very end of the war. Or his son, Deneys Reitz, who had travelled to the UK when he was 12 years old. Deneys was 17 years old when the war started. He fought in the war from the very beginning until the very end. He would eventually found the law firm Deneys Reitz Inc., which was one of South Africa’s premier law firms (it was renamed Norton Rose Fullbright when it amalgamated into that multi-national group in 2011). Or Danie Theron, who was an attorney practising in Krugersdorp when the war started. He went on to become the most legendary Boer scout until he was killed fighting on his own against a British unit that included artillery. (If you happen to drive from Johannesburg to Potchefstroom look out for his monument opposite the Anglo Gold Ashanti mine, roughly midway between the two cities. That is where he was killed. His troops later fetched his body and buried him on the Theron family farm next to his deceased fiancé).
Looking back, the Anglo-Boer War was a horrible, cruel, destructive and ultimately unnecessary war. It was a war in which innocent non-combatants, white and black alike, suffered the most. There can be no denying of these facts.
As a lawyer though, I still wonder what those Boer lawyers thought. They had lived and studied in the UK. They must have gotten to know their British fellow students. They probably developed friendships with some of their British class and residency mates. How did they feel when they had to fight soldiers from their former host country in their own country? Alas, we will probably never know. But I am quite certain that there must have been at least a hint of mixed emotions.
PS. It is a fascinating fact of history that Winston Churchill, Mahatma Ghandi and Louis Botha were each involved in the Anglo-Boer War battle of Spionkop that took plac in January 1900 (Ghandi as a non-combatant stretcher bearer). How different the world’s history would have been if a stray bullet had found its way to any one of them. Mercifully, none did. Even in a war as terrible as the Anglo-Boer War had been, there are reasons to be grateful.