Forgotten Truths of the Boer War

And what they mean for us today.

“… a thing abhorrent to Christians and to lovers of liberty.”

GK Chesterton on the Anglo-Boer War

The true story of the Second Anglo-Boer War sheds a great deal of light on the current tumults of both South Africa and the Anglosphere.

I would even say you cannot truly understand the latest South African election without knowing the long shadow the War still casts over the country.

The tension between particularism and cosmopolitanism, between land and finance, the power of bureaucracy and middle management over and against their superiors, and the African resources curse, are all most starkly seen in the horror and tragedy of this war.

I will not be giving a summary of the entire context and history of the War, but instead drawing some contemporary attention to the often-forgotten aspects of the conflict.

In order to do this, I will lean on Thomas Pakenham’s magisterial work, aptly titled The Boer War, which seems a balanced account as far as I can tell as a layman.

The first thing that struck me in his account is the subtitle he gives to Part I: ‘Milner’s War’. It is his thesis that Milner, along with the randlords who owned Johannesburg’s goldmines, drove the conflict and deliberately thwarted any meaningful negotiations between Kruger and the British.

I had not realised that Milner was German-born. Despite this, when he was deployed as High Commisioner to the Cape Colony, he was given an heroic send-off by the leading lights of both the Tory and Liberal Parties.

And in all his efforts in South Africa, Milner would be backed by a cabal of Rand millionaires, Alfred Beit, an Anglo-Jewish-German, and Julius Wernher, also a German-born member of the English Establishment. Both men had been given their start by a man named Jules Porgès, a Parisian jeweller, born Yehuda Porges in Vienna.

As GK Chesterton, the English writer vehemently opposed to the War, would write later, “We began to guess that the people the Boers called Outlanders were often people whom the British would call Outsiders.”

Obviously Cecil Rhodes was lurking in these circles too.

Milner was never motivated by any kind of balanced view of the Afrikaner tension with the British. He seems to have had no sympathy with these Dutch-French-Germanic people who had decisively turned their backs on Europe, formed a nation and a language, and had yet fallen foul to European conflict during the Napoleonic Wars, in which the Cape, a colony founded by the Dutch, had moved between Dutch and English possession.

Despite English possession, English settlers had never arrived en masse to South Africa, a hard land. The Afrikaner people remained the white majority.

Milner was a true believer in English ‘race patriotism’. The Afrikaners must not be allowed to resist this world supremacy, a burgeoning world state (sound familiar?). The irony is obvious. Milner and his backers were hardly of old English stock.

With the development of gold mining in Kruger’s Transvaal Republic, the British ‘Uitlanders’ who had flocked to the gold rush, became more and more dissatisifed over their lack of political rights and gold taxation.

Kruger offered a ‘Great Deal’ in early 1899, concessions to the mining houses and the enfranchisement of Uitlanders after five years’ residence.

Ultimately, this would have been accepted, but Milner and his backers never truly wanted anything less than the British flag flying over Johannesburg, which they would get by the time the War ended. Even the Prime Minister, Salisbury, had remarked on the eve of the War that they are ‘doing work for the capitalists.’ The Uitlanders were not popular in England at all.

And Pakenham points out that the likes of Smuts had misread that Milner accurately represented the views of an immovable British government, when, in fact, it was most likely a summit between Salisbury and Kruger themselves would have easily seen successful negotiations and even a new friendship between Boer and Brit.

To my surprise, I discovered that on the other side of the table, the likes of General de la Rey had opposed Kruger’s eventual push for war. He did not believe the Boers should begin the War by invading Natal, stating that as long as they had their own independence, and ‘land enough to go on burying British soldiers’ should they be invaded, they should wait for the unjust cause of England to bring itself to a fall. This was an opposition he shared with President Steyn of the Orange Free State, the Transvaal Commander-in-Chief, Piet Joubert, and the young Louis Botha.

When Kruger accused him of cowardice, De la Rey looked him in the eyes and rebutted, “You will see me in the field fighting for our independence long after you and your party who make war with your mouths have fled the country.”

These words would prove prescient. A lion of a man.

The tragic irony is that given what resulted in the negotiations between Kruger and Milner, and Kruger’s subsequent ultimatum, the aggressive strategy proposed by the hawkish Smuts in the shape of a lightning invasion, but never undertaken, was likely the only way the Boers could have won the War.

I will pass over the story of the War itself and how it was waged, and focus on its conclusion, barring its most notorious facet, the concentration camps.

British officers admitted that the novel strategy of driving families off their land was ‘beastly’. Even Kitchener, the mastermind behind ‘scorched earth’ and the camps, had urged Milner and the Cabinet to offer the Boers more generous terms to end the War after they had turned to a mobile, guerilla strategy.

Kitchener derided the recalcitrant stance as a policy of ‘extermination’, ‘absurd and wrong’, and ‘vindictive’.

Nonetheless, he saw the camps as a logical way therefore to end a belated war, albeit a logic that was brutal and morally repugnant, the herding of women and children into malnourished, unhygienic camps where tens of thousands would die appalling deaths.

After all, Kitchener and his predecessor, Lord Roberts, had shown similar callousness towards their own soldiers, when they allowed typhus to ravage their wounded soldiers in field hospitals that were poorly organised and supplied, thus exhibiting their own brutal lack of care for their own men.

This same brutality extended to the British, and Australian, treatment of Boer prisoners, and, as Pakenham reports, vice versa. Kitchener would order the execution of two Australians for such offences, further demonstrating the complexity of Kitchener’s character, considering his ability to compartmentalize what was happening behind the barbed wire of the camps.

(This complexity extends to the War itself. It is not widely remembered by the general public that thousands of Boers fought for the British and many British opposed the entire thing too.)

Meanwhile, Milner was organising the return of the mines to productivity in occupied Johannesburg, increasing taxation on native workers, while driving down wages by increasing labour supply via Mozambique.

The British generals finally got to meet their Boer counterparts. They had begun to realise that Milner had deliberately stifled negotiations prior to the War just as he was stifling peace negotiations.

Lieutenant General Ian Hamilton would later attend a birthday party for Smuts, where he sat between Botha and De la Rey, recounting in a letter to Winston Churchill that he considered them “the best men in South Africa”.

What he would go on to say in that same letter is both shocking and revelatory. He stated his belief that the British had made a grave mistake “by annihilating the Boers for the Jewburghers [the Randlords].”

Churchill, believe it or not, agreed, stating that the Boers, and not the Uitlanders, must be “the rock” on the new British position.

At the signing of the eventual Peace, Kitchener would state to the Boer delegates, “We are good friends now.”

Milner was disappointed, at this attitude and the tone of the terms of the Peace, which would ultimately lead to self-government for a united South Africa, governed by the Afrikaners.

But, the Union would still fight for the British in both World Wars, and the mining houses would remain dominant for over a century, shaping the economic and social fabric of the country, and not for the good.

What is clear, therefore, from all of the above, is that the War was clearly fought for the likes of Milner, Beit, and Wernher, and not for the interests of England; it was fought for the interests for a cabal, the moneyed interests directing the Empire. (Think here of the Opium Wars as another example.)

What does this mean today?

First, South Africa remains a site of empire today just as it did 125 years ago. When our Constitution is described ‘as the most progressive in the world’, and lauded as an example for the US by American Supreme Court judges, what is being revealed is the experimental nature of the country today, an experiment in rainbow religion and deracination.

Milner and his friends also had a religion of sorts, a world state built on a kind of anglo-capitalism, where resources by right belong to an efficient world-state. This was not synonymous with the white man’s burden described by Kipling, as evidenced by the diverse ethnic origins of the cabal and its antagonism towards the official governing apparatus. This would be seen again when Churchill ran a virtual shadow government during the 1930s.

Second, we see that true power does not rest in elected leaders. Milner, a diplomat, not even born in England, along with moneyed backers, managed to ignite a war that most did not want.

Ask yourself, who was in charge during the covid event? Does it really seem like Boris Johnson and Cyril Ramaphosa were truly making decisions? No, the administrative or deep state is indeed real. We are ruled by a sordid, multi-national class of journalists, bankers, and bureaucrats. Sometimes they also parade as ‘scientists’.

Finally, in the Anglo-Boer conflict we see the conflict, of time immemorial, between finance and land, between particularism and cosmopolitanism, between ‘world cities’ and dorp and volk, between Babel and tribe.

The manner in which World War II has been made into a master mythology for us ensures we perforce view the latter as forever teetering on the edge of ‘fascism’ and ‘authoritarianism’. Indeed, part of the reason for the breakdown of patriarchal families, is the ideology sown within the western university complex, the belief that traditional fatherhood is a kind of mental illness of ‘the authoritarian personality’, and a forerunner to an always impending second holocaust.

This is why Trump (regardless of his actual policies) is associated with apartheid South Africa (sometimes by way of the heretic Elon Musk) is associated with Hitler. And before Trump, Nixon was also painted in that same light, with his appeal to ‘the silent majority’ and ‘law and order’.

Any hint of any leader or polity (at least within the European world and its diaspora) showing commitment to a particular people in time and space is seen as a betrayal of the liberal, post-Nuremberg religion, in which ‘openness’ must constantly be dissolving traditional identity, borders, faith, and now even gender.

But no attempt to build Babel is ever finally successful.

In this regard, let me conclude again with Chesterton:

“But I emphatically was a Pro-Boer, and I emphatically was not a pacifist. My point was that the Boers were right in fighting; not that anybody must be wrong in fighting. I thought that their farmers were perfectly entitled to take to horse and rifle in defence of their farms, and their little farming commonwealth, when it was invaded by a more cosmopolitan empire at the command of very cosmopolitan financiers.”