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Interview with Professor Bill Nasson
COB: Hello, my name is Conor O’Brien. I’m the managing editor for History journals at Routledge
and I’m speaking to Professor Bill Nasson of the University of Stellenbosch, who we have just
heard earlier this morning deliver the plenary lecture at the Anglo-American Conference of
Historians. I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to revisit the paper you published in
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History back in volume 23 on ‘War opinion in South Africa,
1914’. I suppose what I was really struck by in that paper is the way you highlighted the
importance of local factors (social, cultural, economic factors) in how South Africa responded to
the war. But at the same time how that tied into a much wider colonial experience. I was
personally very much struck by the Irish analogues.
BN: Yes, well I think there are very striking Irish parallels and similarities.
COB: And you spoke today about whether South Africa was an ‘African oddity’ in the white
colonial experience.
BN: I think that is the thing about South Africa, that in a way it faces two ways. There is a side to it
where it is very deeply African and that always makes me think of Anthony Trollope. Trollope wrote
this travel book about South Africa in the 1870s – it basically was about Kimberley and the mines and
how industrialisation was going to change the country. But he ends the book by saying that that the
thing is ‘South Africa is run by white men, but it will never be a country of white men. It will always
be a country of black men.’ It’s not like Australia, it’s not like Canada, it’s not like New Zealand. There
are these underlying currents. So the white men may feel that they have a strong connection with
empire, but local people will have a different kind of connection which might be confrontational, or
disaffected, or alienated. Or feel that they are part of it depending on where they come from
structurally. That if you are a Westernised, educated black person you might feel some connection
to the national cause and to the wider empire in 1914. Do you want to know how I came to write
that paper?
COB: That would be interesting, yes.
BN: It was an odd way, because I was a student in Cambridge and I worked for Jay Winter, the great
doyen of First World War historians, for two years. And in the course of that work there was a very
interesting discussion about the simple idea of war enthusiasm in 1914, that everywhere around the
world everyone rushed off to war unthinkingly and in a burst of patriotic fervour. He was very
interested in getting people to think a little more deeply about that and to unpick some of the
complexities of responses. So that’s how I ended up doing this article and it was a paper I did for a
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conference on the Somme as I recall and then it became the article for JICH. But it was a paper which
came about by accident because prior to that I had never really worked on the First World War, I had
worked on the Anglo-Boer war and it was working with Jay Winter that I got interested in the First
World War. So the paper comes out of that sense really of looking at Australia and looking at
dominions more generally in the way in which people reacted to the events of 1914.
COB: And this morning you suggested that there were very strong parallels between the South
African experience and the rest of the British African experience.
BN: Yes, because South Africa is almost a little template or laboratory where so much, and I talked
about some of those responses in the article which is almost twenty years ago now. Millenarianism,
utopianism and the idea of latching unto the war as not quite a cargo cult but something from
Europe which is rather fuzzy and diffuse but may signify something very profound and important. So
a lot of that is going on in South Africa, which makes South Africa a lot like East Africa or West Africa
because those things are going on there as well. But then there’s another big part of South Africa
which is very much more like, let’s say, New Zealand or Australia, with its collegiate schools, its
societies and that kind of white civic culture that you have around cities. And thinking of the Irish
with very deep divisions between the republicans and unionists, in South Africa there’s an extent to
which Afrikaners are looking to Ireland in that period. And the Irish are looking to South Africa. If you
think of the Easter Rising and the wearing of those felt hats, those commando hats, there are really
strong and interesting intersections which are going on.
COB: I was particularly struck by the idea that if you join up and ‘prove’ your loyalty to the Empire,
perhaps as a black South African, somehow you will earn respect – and that’s very similar to the
Irish volunteer approach.
BN: Oh yes, that’s very strong. There was a kind of approach to that historiographically, decades ago,
where many historians would have said that this was a form of false consciousness, but, look, many
of the leaders of those groups, they were not stupid men. There was a genuine, misplaced perhaps,
but there was a genuine feeling that as coloured South Africans in the Cape would have said in 1914,
‘We are more you than the Maoris of Auckland, or more you than the Aboriginals of Queensland.
We’re just on the cusp actually, so if we sacrifice, if we volunteer, if we serve, we should get some
kind of dividend.’ And that’s very, very strong. And of course there wasn’t a dividend. But that kind
of old imperial connection continued into the Second World War, because a lot of the people who
enlisted in the First, then re-enlisted in the Second. Part of it comes out of that lingering imperial
consciousness, that somehow although the empire never delivered on the rights or liberties which
were always being talked about rhetorically, the empire still represented something better than
local white settler rule. And so you were constantly looking upward. So in the Second World War
you’d have African servicemen and coloured servicemen, who would look up to figures like
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Montgomery and British generals because they represented something other than white South
Africa.
It’s rather like South Africa, Cape Town, in which I grew up the 1960s – when the Royal Navy used to
visit in the sixties because the Royal Navy was imposing the oil blockade for Rhodesia, the UDI, then
you would have black school children basically playing truant from school to visit these British ships
during the course of the week because they were opened to the public. Because you could step onto
British space and you could be in an unsegregated environment. I did that myself.
COB: That’s very interesting.
BN: So habitually we would troop down to the docks just to be ‘in Britain’ in a sense. That’s
something which should be explored a bit more or could be explored a bit more. That sense that
anything was better than what you had. And the other thing is the considerable numbers of coloured
men in 1914 who leave South Africa to serve in British Imperial forces in East Africa, or find ways of
getting into Britain where they can join up directly as South Africans but then in a sense almost
become surrogate Britons. And then the South Africans, Smuts in particular, are incensed by this.
Smuts has this extraordinary correspondence about what he calls ‘men of doubtful descent’ who are
leaving the country to join British Empire forces; and he writes to Louis Botha the prime minister,
and he uses this phrase repeatedly, ‘men of doubtful descent’. He’s very worried because they might
get ideas above their station, think that they were Europeans – and he suggests that army doctors
be delegated to investigate their origins. I don’t know what this doctor was going to measure! But
Botha writes back that there is a war on and he thinks doctors have more important things to do
than check people’s racial ancestry. But it’s very telling – it’s a very important issue about identity
and citizenship and belonging.
COB: So when something like the war seems to have touched on so many important issues for
South Africa, has there really been much engagement in the historiography?
BN: Relatively little. It’s a complicated story that. The war that looms large in South Africa is of
course the Anglo-Boer war, which is over-arching and still, I think, has a very deep deposit in the
consciousness of white Afrikaners. And the story of the World Wars is that, in a way, if you think of
the First World War taking place in the context of an imperial South Africa – it’s all very much, under
Smuts and Botha, part of a loyalist country. Then the Second World War in a way inflates the empire
in South Africa but then in ‘48 you have the Nationalist victory. And one of the things the nationalists
do in ‘48 is really to bury the Second World War because many of them were pro-German and some
of the country’s subsequent prime ministers were in fact interned for pro-German activity during the
war. So the Second World War gets buried politically and takes with it the First World War. So both
wars feature relatively mildly in public consciousness.
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COB: And there’s been no post-apartheid…?
BN: The post-apartheid thing is interesting. I mean the political agenda of the post-apartheid thing is
really about the liberation struggle and the restoration of the idea or the narrative of black heroism
and valour. So I would say in the long-run, if you were to say to me as an ageing South African what
was the most important contribution of Afrikaner nationalism? It was the creation of South Africa as
a republic. And in a way South Africa is still a republic but it’s much more deferential in a way, with
black majority rule there’s a much closer sense of a return to a Commonwealth. So I think that’s a
great irony.
COB: So do you think maybe there will be an increase in commemorations over the next few
years?
BN: It’s possible, with the Mendi, the sinking of the Mendi – this troop ship which sinks in the English
Channel in 1917 with the loss of almost 700 lives, members of the South African Native Labour
Contingent. That sinking became a symbol of martyrdom and involved the creation of a lot of
mythologies around it, so I suspect that they may well become some sort of leitmotif for the South
African First World War. But we need to wait for that. I suspect that 1916, Delville Wood and the
South African battle on the Somme has always loomed large in English and Anglo-Afrikaner
consciousness but that may well be less prominent now I suspect and may well be replaced by the
Mendi. In post-apartheid South Africa you can already get a Mendi medal for bravery, various Mendi
orders; so I think for a new nationalist agenda the Mendi may very well come to serve as a very
important symbolic episode. But as I was saying earlier on there’s not very much at all.
It will be very interesting to see how it plays out, because South Africa was not as deeply involved as
any of the other dominions at the time but nonetheless the war was very important – not least for
the idea of a Greater South Africa. Smuts saw the war as a moment to expand South Africa into East
Africa and West Africa: they go German South-West and they didn’t get the East. And in a way, postapartheid South Africa has completed the project of the First World War but through capital,
because South African capital is now deeply dominating the African continent. South African
commerce and trade, South African Airways just dominate the rest of the continent. So the First
World War project has come to an end now, but it’s taken a long time and it’s not a project for white
settler rule – it’s a project for African nationalism. That’s what I would argue actually: that we have
now finished the First World War. It’s taken a while!