Canada’s Boer War

Canadian soldiers tried to kill my relatives. No, not in Afghanistan; in South Africa. And when I say relatives I should more correctly state “ancestors,” for the events happened in 1901 during the Anglo-Boer War, or, to be even more exact, during the first Boer War. Yes, there were two, in 1880–81, and the main war in 1899–1902. It is no exaggeration to say that the legacy of the Boer wars shaped the destiny of South Africa right to the present day.

Fred Stenson’s novel The Great Karoo is the story of a handful of Canadian cavalrymen in the Boer War. It is an important and timely novel, with many resonances for Canadians, not least of which is the current conflict in Afghanistan.

The Karoo of the title is an arid semidesert in the centre of South Africa, very different to the savannah and jungle that we usually associate with that part of the world. Stenson takes his characters all the way from the Pincher Creek area of Alberta (which ironically has a landscape similar to parts of South Africa) to the inhospitable Karoo, and some, but not all, of the soldiers go back to Canada.

The Great Karoo is an important book for its assessment of history and its graphic recreation of the past. And like all good historical fiction, it allows us to live the past. Stenson writes vividly and accurately of the landscape and of the details that made up a soldier’s life. This is very much a story of Canadians, despite its physical and historical setting. Among the soldiers on whom Stenson focuses there is a French Canadian as well as a Métis, a Nez Perce and the nephew of a Blood Indian chief.

Today, the Boer wars are practically forgotten in Canada. Belonging to a time when Canada was hardly a country itself and still very much a part of the British empire, they merit little more than a notation on war memorials, eclipsed by the brutality of the wars that came in the following decades.

But in my family there are still stories of the glorious victory against the “damned khakis” at the battle of Majuba Hill in 1881. Less glorious are the tales of the British concentration camps and scorched earth policies that killed thousands of Boer civilians, mostly women and children.

In South Africa, the hatred for the British, engendered by that war, extended right up until the Second World War, when many nationalistic Afrikaners were imprisoned (in what was still a British colony) because they chose to support Germany rather than Britain, on the grounds that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” For some ultra-nationalist Afrikaners (among them future leaders of the country during the apartheid era), the conflict between Germany and Britain was just a continuation of the Boer War.

The Great Karoo mostly avoids delving in the quagmire of historical rights and wrongs (although Stenson does not ignore them and is often critical of accepted views) and presents the war from the perspective of a handful of ordinary young men from southern Alberta who become members of the Canadian Mounted Rifles.

Stenson’s novel is a soldier’s tale and, as in most wars, brave and patriotic young men find not only camaraderie but disillusionment, a questioning of their cause and the inevitable death or disfigurement. When Stenson’s central character, Frank Adams, looks back from the vantage point of 1942 as another war rages and tries to write a memoir about his experiences in South Africa, he burns the pages he has written, unable to make full sense of his experiences.

A little historical background is necessary to explain why 7,400 Canadians shipped to South Africa and why 245 died there.

The Boers were descendants of Dutch settlers who had arrived in South Africa beginning in the 1650s. As a result of European wars involving France, Holland and Britain, the Cape Colony had become a British possession by the early part of the 19th century.

In the 1830s, rather than continue living under the British, about 12,000 Boers left the Cape Colony and moved into the interior, where they set up their own republics. British expansion northward eventually led to conflict with these Boer republics. The precipitating factor was the discovery of enormous resources of gold and diamonds in the republics. Thousands of workers flocked to the area to mine the minerals, but were denied any voting rights by the Boer citizens. At the same time, slavery had been abolished in Britain and its possessions, but was still active in the Boer republics. Citing these two issues of lack of franchise and subjugation of the black South Africans by the Afrikaners, Britain attempted to annex the republics in a war for “democracy.”

The war was a British colonial war, meant to be executed quickly and painlessly, as had been done numerous times already around the world, where superior arms and organization would quickly conquer the “uncivilized” locals. Britain had already subdued the Xhosa and Zulu people of South Africa in a series of other small wars. Unfortunately for Britain, it did not turn out that way, and the British army found itself embroiled in a losing battle against guerilla farmers. The colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada rallied to the imperial cause. A rough estimate of casualty figures, aside from the 245 Canadians, shows the scale of the war: Britain 20,000, Australia 500 and New Zealand 200. On the Boer side, 11,000 combatants were killed and 26,000 civilians died, mostly from disease. The number of black South Africans who died was not recorded. (As anyone who reads Stenson’s book will also discover, thousands and thousands of horses were also used in the war. Somewhere there is no doubt a statistic recording the numbers that were killed.)

As with most of history, there are contending versions of the truth of events. At the time of the war, European countries were establishing colonies in Africa, notably the Portuguese, Belgians, French and Germans. Britain wanted absolute control of the strategic Cape, which controlled the sea routes to the Far East. It especially wanted to block any expansionary ventures by the Germans in neighbouring South West Africa. And, of course, it wanted the gold and diamonds under the Boer farms.

The forgotten story in the Boer War is that of the black Africans, who saw their own country being divided and fought over by white men from afar. Stenson is well aware of that plight, and makes comparisons between the position of the blacks in Africa and the Native Indians in Canada. He is not unaware of the irony of Canadian farmers fighting South African farmers for the benefit of Britain.

At its time, the Boer War was as contentious as anything taking place today in Afghanistan or Iraq. It was by no means a popular war, in Britain or in Canada. The resonances between past and present are heightened if we look at old photographs of the bearded Boer farmers and note the similarities to the fighters in Afghanistan today. Gold and diamonds were the prizes then; black gold is certainly in the mix today.

An interesting footnote here is that one of the British generals was known as Lord Roberts of Kandahar, having “won his spurs” in Afghanistan. Whether anything has ever been won in that part of the world remains an open question.

The Great Karoo stands out among recent Canadian fiction not only for its ambitions and scope, but also for its evocation of a lost chapter in Canada’s history. Stenson’s vividly drawn epic will appeal to anybody interested in the history of Canada, as well as to those who appreciate a colourful and stirring read about men at war.