The World Cup balm of racial harmony in South Africa hasn't necessarily reached Bloemfontein in Free State province. Whereas in Johannesburg nearly every metered taxi driver is black, here nearly all of them are white. I asked one of them why. “A lot of my clients don't trust black drivers,” he said simply.
I was surprised to find that Bloemfontein, unlike Johannesburg, is running an open top bus tour for World Cup visitors. But I shifted uncomfortably in my seat when we found ourselves literally looking down on a black township and our tour guide waved to “friendly people with big smiles.” Apartheid felt a lot more recent than 16 years ago.
Bloemfontein gave birth to JRR Tolkien and Zola Budd, to the African National Congress in 1912 and the National Party in 1914, and to Tokkelos the liger — crossbred from a male lion and female tiger — at the local zoo in 1975. I remember hearing Budd interviewed on BBC radio, saying that she grew up unaware of Nelson Mandela's existence. Surely he was mentioned in the press, the interviewer wondered. Not in Bloemfontein, Budd replied. Celebrations for the ANC's centenary in January 2012 won't have an obvious focal point. The township where a meeting formed what was then the South African Native National Congress has since been demolished. Four gigantic and sacrilegious water towers, painted with a bank logo and colourful murals, now stand on the historic spot.
But there's another narrative from the past running in the Afrikaner capital. A soaring sandstone obelisk pays homage to the suffering of women and children in the Anglo-Boer war. Surrounding it are the whispering walls, whose echo effect pays tribute to the inmates of concentration camps who were not allowed to raise their voices.
The Boer War was one of those conflicts, like so many, that was meant to take eight days but dragged on for three years at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. One statue depicts a Boer riding off to battle on a well-fed horse with a sling full of bullets. Another shows a Boer exhausted, his bullets spent, his horse nearly crippled.
It's a struggle remembered for virtually inventing guerrilla warfare, as the heavily outnumbered Boers kept on the move, hitting the British in surprise attacks before vanishing into the bush. Earlier this month the American political scientist Peter W. Singer invoked these farmer commandos when discussing the current war in Afghanistan.
“My worry is that Afghanistan becomes America's Boer War,” Singer said. “Great Britain got engaged in a grinding war where by the end of it, its definition of success was just to get out.” Britain's Lord Kitchener responded with a scorched earth policy that was ruthlessly effective but unthinkable in a Universal Declaration of Human Rights and YouTube world. The British burned down farms, cutting off the Boers' food and information supply, and rounded up women and children into some of the world's first concentration camps, where more than 26,000 died from malnourishment and diseases including pneumonia and dysentery.
As a Briton, I wondered if this is how it feels to be German in a museum about the second world war. There are a series of plaques set in the ground, each with the name of a concentration camp, the number who perished there and a quotation from the Bible in Afrikaans. The nearby Anglo-Boer War Museum has photographs of the camp occupants, from emaciated children with flesh hanging off ribcages to proud middle-class men wearing moustaches and Sunday best, striving to keep their makeshift tent respectable.
The captured Boers, including boys, were shipped off to far corners of the empire in prisoner-of-war camps on St. Helena and Bermuda and in Sri Lanka, India and Portugal. They whiled away the days boxing, playing cricket and football, putting on plays and carving exquisite tokens to their faraway loved ones. Brooches and watch chains made from horsehair, bone, horn, wood, stone, mother of pearl and coins are on display.
I was in town for the World Cup match between England and Germany and war metaphors were thick in the air, with at least one fan dressed as a Spitfire pilot. I wondered if Afrikaners are cheering for Germany, or the Netherlands, in this tournament because of their ancestry, but couldn't find much evidence for it. The museum was keen to find an angle on the World Cup, with an exhibition on what role the competing nations played in the 1899 - 1902 war.
Many foreigners living in South Africa at the time felt they had to show loyalty to the Afrikaner government, it noted. The first to raise a commando were the Germans, despite the Kaiser's official policy of neutrality. “The rank and file of the commando were made up of navvies, shopkeepers, professional men, adventurers, teachers and students.” The German volunteers suffered losses at the Battle of Elandslaagte, with nine dead and about double that number wounded. Among them were Konzett (two lance wounds), Fabel (left jaw shot away), Scheffler (left lower arm shattered), Engel (bullet through both cheeks), Schmidt (leg injuries), Exner (shoulder and hip injuries), Goltz (left knee shattered), Shutte-Brockhoff (shrapnel in chest), Eisman (bullet wound in left side), Thiels (bullet wound in left arm), Heuer (shrapnel wounds) and Krugel (multiple shrapnel wounds in chest).
Lessons for Obama, Petraeus
Russia was also technically neutral, but Tsar Nicholas II wrote to his sister: “I am wholly preoccupied with the war between England and the Transvaal. Every day I read the news in the British newspapers from the first to the last line — I cannot conceal my joy at Boer success.” There may well be lessons in this war for Obama and Petraeus in Afghanistan. But these analogies are never perfect and no one has a monopoly on them. In the museum's visitor book a Paraguayan, presumably also here for the football, has written: “This is a great exhibition that Afrikaners should be very proud of. Your history is so similar to that of Paraguay!” — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010
