‘Freedom’ – but not as you know it

Life can be unpredictable, but there are still a few near-certainties… the sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning, England will always lose to Germany in a penalty shoot-out, and John Elsegood will continue to humiliate himself by posting utter nonsense on Facebook.

This was the latest offering from the prize buffoon:

Ignorant fanatics like Elsegood love to pretend that the ‘real name’ for the First Boer War was ‘the Freedom War’ – though presumably he is not in the least bit bothered that this (ahem) ‘freedom’ did not extend to blacks, Indians, Coloureds, Jews, Catholics or English-speakers.

With Kruger’s clique winning their (ahem) ‘freedom’ war and back in power, no one would suffer more than the Africans who—it is often forgotten—made up the vast majority of the ZAR’s population. A distraught Henry Rider Haggard stated that they deserved ‘some protection and consideration, some voice in the settlement of their fate’:

‘They outnumbered the Boers by 25 to one, taking their numbers at a million and those of the Boers at 40,000, a fair estimate, I believe … as the lash and the bullet have been the lot of the wretched Transvaal K****r in the past, so they will be his lot in the future … after leading those hundreds of thousands of men and women to believe that they were once and for ever the subjects of Her Majesty, safe from all violence, cruelty, and oppression, we have handed them over without a word of warning to the tender mercies of one, where natives are concerned, of the cruellest white races in the world.’^[i]

Of course, and despite him being a first-hand and well-placed witness of events, Elsegood et al will simply dismiss Haggard as a ‘Jingo’ (ie. anyone who doesn’t just parrot National Party propaganda). So, let’s instead see how much that ‘freedom’ was indeed valued by the black residents of the Transvaal – surely not even Elsegood would be insane enough to dismiss them as ‘Jingos’ (though you never know).

It fell to the missionary John Moffat to try to explain to the African chiefs in the Transvaal that they would no longer enjoy British protection or equality before the law. Moffat described how, ‘for the most part there was the silence of despair. One gentle old man, Mokhatle, a man of great influence, used the language of resignation, ‘When I was a child, the Matabele came, they swept over us like the wind and we bowed before them like the long white grass on the plains. They left us and we stood upright again. The Boers came and we bowed ourselves under them in like manner. The British came and we rose upright, our hearts lived within us and we said: Now we are the children of the Great Lady. And now that is past and we must lie flat again under the wind—who knows what are the ways of God?’’^[ii]

Of course, what Elsegood really wants to be ‘remembered’ is not history at all – but self-pitying, Apartheid-era myth.

NOTES:

[i] Creswicke, South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. I, p.103

[ii] Mason, The Birth of a Dilemma: The Conquest and Settlement of Rhodesia, p.110