I must apologise for peppering you with messages. However, the issue of the South African Historical Journal which contained the Hyslop article, has a second piece which is of interest.

John Boje and Fransjohan Pretorius, ‘Of gold and iron: collaborators in the Winburg District’, South African Historical Journal, vol. 63, no 2, (June 2011), pp. 277-294.

The reason why is the article is relevant to the camps is that the able-bodied men in the camps were usually labelled as collaborators – hendsoppers. How they should be understood today is a difficult question. There are several dimensions to the problem.

1. The question of ‘guilt’. As a historian one should be able to deal dispassionately with the subject of collaboration but it is extremely difficult to do so, especially when one’s own family is involved. It is hard not to see collaboration as ‘bad’ and fighting for the Boers as ‘good’, especially if a man fought on against all odds, as a bittereinder. The best historians, like Albert Grundlingh, who wrote the pioneering book on the subject (admittedly as a young man, in a very difficult time) do not escape this trap entirely.
2. Were the able-bodied men in the camps all collaborators? Was it so wrong to take the oath of neutrality and join one’s family in the camps, rather than go to a prisoner-of-war camp overseas where one could be of no help to them?

The situation was a little different for the men who form the case studies of the article by Boje and Pretorius, only one of whom was in a camp and all of whom actively worked with the British. Possibly 600 men of the Winburg district were collaborating, as against the 1,616 who fought with the Winburg commando (the people overlap.) Their article describes the backgrounds and war careers of three Boer officers and then looks at their lives after the war. All of them were fairly prominent men in the Winburg district and they fought courageously in the early months of the war.

Harry Theunissen returned from Cape Town to Winburg and co-operated with the British, on a school committee. This was low-scale collaboration and he remained in good standing in the community after the war. Indeed, the town of Theunissen was named after him.

Fanie Vilonel is much better known, having recruited men for the Orange River Colony Volunteers (including many from Winburg camp). He did rather well out of the war but this did not prevent him from becoming mayor of Senekal after the war.

Less familiar is Gerrie van der Merwe, who was in Bloemfontein camp, having returned from Green Point – fairly typical of the camp men. He was an early member of the peace committee but he was received back into his church congregation, despite some objections. Astonishingly, so was Olaf Bergh, who had a much blacker record for the corps that he recruited, Bergh’s Scouts, had a bad reputation.

It seems clear from the Boje-Pretorius article that these men were motivated at least partly by a patriotism that was differently defined from that of the bittereinders. They quote a letter Vilonel wrote to President Steyn:

‘If you wish to proceed with the needless continuance of a devastating war, which can only result in the total decline and destruction of your own people, making ex-burghers of both Republics into hewers of wood and drawers of water, you will be the cause that I and other ex-officers and burghers take up arms against you in civil war, to thus accelerate the end.’

The article includes an interesting discussion on the Afrikaner dislike of confrontation and the way in which a veil has been drawn over the question of collaboration, avoided in traditional writing about the war. They conclude:

‘Both historiography and creative writing have had to grapple with the ambiguities and complexities of the past and are richer for it. Now, as we reflect dispassionately and empathetically on the agonising existential choices that confronted our forebears, we can begin to perceive that the acknowledgement that they were not a race of Titans, but all too fallible human beings has important implications for identity construction and coexistence in a democratic, pluralistic South Africa.’

There is a second item which deals with the same subject. This is a book by Albert Blake, Boereverraaier. Teregstellings tydens die Anglo-Boereoorlog (Cape Town, Tafelberg, 2010).

Again, what Blake brings out is the complexity of the backgrounds and motives of the men who were executed for treason, with varying degrees of justification. As Boje notes, men rarely set out to collaborate; they ‘slid’ from neutrality to co-operation, to taking up arms against their fellow countrymen.

One of the most interesting aspects of Blake’s book is the discussion on the impact of the executions on both the young men in the firing squads and on the families in the years after the war. The effects of the war lingered on in complex ways, often in silence.

Elizabeth van Heyningen
14 November 2011