The World's War

by David Olusoga

  Above all, the South Africans demanded that the black labourers be strictly segregated from other labour contingents and especially from white civilians in France and Belgium – and particularly that they have no contact with white women. This fear, that their black subjects might come into contact with French civilians who were not as fixed in their racial views as were almost all white South Africans, emerged in the various official discussions. In late 1916 John X. Merriman, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony before it was merged into the Union of South Africa, warned Jan Smuts, then leading South African forces against Lettow-Vorbeck’s Askari in East Africa, that ‘some of the wisest and most solid friends of the Union government… regard the introduction of our Natives to the social conditions of Europe with the greatest alarm’.45 To allay these concerns, Pritchard demanded that the authorities in France ensure, as far as possible, that the black men be prevented from having any significant encounters with ‘the social conditions of Europe’ and therefore be spared from the ‘dangers of contamination’.

  While Merriman and much of the Union government looked upon the deployment with ‘alarm’, the Department of Native Affairs had a somewhat different view, seeing it as a great social experiment in which new methods of segregation could be field-tested. In 1913, South Africa had passed the Natives Land Act, which restricted where black South Africans could live within their own country, and now the white elites were interested in new methods and systems that would prevent black people from having meaningful contact with whites while at the same time harvesting their labour and keeping them passive, divided and unthreatening. At the heart of the Department of Native Affairs’ experiment was the use of ‘closed compounds’ – special encampments, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded to prevent unauthorized access. These compounds were based on systems of segregation then being pioneered in the South African mining industry. They were now to be transplanted to France and fine-tuned under wartime conditions in the hope that the results could be re-exported and adapted, post-war, back in South Africa.46

  With these pre-conditions agreed, and the systems of segregation and control in place, recruitment got under way. The British had initially requested a contingent of 10,000 men, which was increased to 40,000 in January 1917 after the initial 10,000 figure had been surpassed. Ultimately, 25,000 men were recruited, of whom 21,000 actually left South Africa. Unaware of what their white countrymen had in store for them, there were men who willingly and enthusiastically volunteered. Stimela Jason Jingoes recalled in his memoirs:

  When the first World War broke out, I, as a member of the British Commonwealth, felt deeply involved. The picture that the newspapers drew of men doing battle in trenches in the mud and the cold of France, fascinated and horrified me. I followed closely the progress of the war… and felt growing in me the conviction that I should go and help in some way.47

  As with thousands of men from societies across the world in which warrior cultures were strong, Jingoes viewed the First World War through the prism of tradition and tribal culture. Looking back into his own family’s past, he asked himself: ‘I’m a pure coward! What am I waiting here for? My father fought against the Boers; his older brother was also there and, more to the point, so was his younger brother. Why am I putting these things off then! I must have been born a coward.’48 However, inspired by newspaper accounts and war propaganda, and following the internal battle with his conscience, Jingoes eventually talked himself into volunteering: ‘Why should I hesitate? I must go and die for my country and my King!’

  Many of Jingoes’ compatriots were less enthusiastic. Recruitment in South Africa was slow, and from the authorities’ point of view disappointing. It was hampered by a deep inter-generational mistrust of the white authorities by most black communities. Millions of black South Africans did not share Stimela Jason Jingoes’ perception of themselves as citizens of ‘the British Commonwealth’ and felt little patriotic sentiment for a nation in which they had few rights. The Natives Land Act was deeply resented, and it convinced men who might otherwise have considered volunteering that while they were serving abroad the government would take away their land. In an effort to boost recruitment numbers, men were given false and unofficial promises of land and exemption from the Poll Tax and the Pass Laws – none of which were honoured.49 There were recruitment rallies across the country, in which it was suggested that service was an opportunity for black men to demonstrate their loyalty to the king. When these calls failed, the government began to heavily pressurize young men into enlisting, through the offices of the chiefs. As with men from elsewhere on the African continent, service was forced upon some South Africans. There was even discussion of creating a prison labour corps, as the British had done in India.50 Some African leaders, ignorant of the plans of their government, hoped that the venture would be an opportunity for black South Africans to receive an education and to see the world, in what one of them called ‘a university of experience’.

  The first units of the South African Native Labour Corps arrived in France on 19 February 1917, just two days before the disaster of the Mendi. In March 1917, Colonel Pritchard issued all white officers commanding black South Africans with the document Appendix to Notes for Officers of Labour Companies (South African Native Labour). It stated that the compounds housing the South Africans ‘should be surrounded by an unclimbable fence or wall, in which all openings are guarded’. The fences around them were to be six feet high – oddly, two feet lower than the fences erected around the camps of the diminutive Chinese labourers. The fences were to be topped with barbed wire ‘to prevent the natives climbing over’. It was left to the discretion of officers overseeing camps in areas with large civilian populations as to whether corrugated iron screens should be erected to conceal the Africans from the local people (and vice versa). Once in the closed compounds, the South Africans were not to be allowed beyond the enclosing fence unless they were accompanied by a European officer. And when outside the camps they were prohibited from ‘entering or being served with wine, beer, or spirits in any estaminet or place where liquor is sold, and prohibited also from entering shops or business premises unless under European escort’. Under ‘General Remarks, Section 7’, the notes demanded that:

  Care should be taken to prevent unauthorized persons from entering the Camp or conversing with Natives and especially to prevent all familiarity between Europeans and Natives, as this is subversive to discipline and calculated to impair their efficiency as working units.

  It went on:

  Under the conditions under which they are living in France, they (the Natives) are not to be trusted with white women, and any Native found wandering about without a pass and not under the escort of a white N.C.O. should be returned to his unit under guard, or failing this, handed over to the Military Police.51

  Lieutenant Colonel Godfrey Godley, who was the second-in-­command of the Labour Corps, considered the security arrangements so severe that he thought the camps ‘identical in every respect’ to those housing German PoWs ‘except that as regards locality those occupied by the prisoners are in the majority of cases more favorably situated’.52 The conditions under which the Labour Corps lived and worked was ultimately not a form of military service but something closer to penal servitude, which even risked seriously undermining their value as war workers. Whenever they were required to move to a new area, there was a delay before they could be deployed while the closed compounds were constructed to receive them, almost as if they were a group of men contaminated with some communicable disease.

  A British charity, the Aboriginal Protection Society, which had been born out of the Abolition movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did its best to supply the black South Africans with some small comforts; but they did so while accepting that the compound system was necessary.53 The Germans, for their part, made the camps military targets. Aware that deaths of South Africans would further limit recruitment at home, air raids against them were launched. Stimela Jas
on Jingoes, who experienced a raid on the camp at Dieppe in 1917, reported that in addition to bombs the Germans had dropped leaflets, the text of which (purportedly by the Kaiser) read: ‘in this war I hate black people the most. I do not know what they want in this European war. Where I find them, I will smash them.’54 The violence came not just from the air, and not just from the Germans; in July 1917 four members of the South African Native Labour Corps were shot dead and eleven others wounded when British troops opened fire during the South Africans’ attempt to free a comrade who had been arrested.

  Even when at work in the docks or warehouses, other, more subtle methods were used by the South African authorities to devalue and diminish the black men they had transported to France. The offer of a free uniform had been one of the supposed attractions to lure men into service.55 But the uniforms issued to the Labour Corps were deliberately of the very lowest quality. A dull brown in colour and made from shoddy materials, they had been designed to distinguish the South Africans from other labour units and mark them out as men of low status and limited worth. There were no marks or regimental insignia, and rather than a peaked cap the men were given a floppy bush hat. There was nothing about their uniform that could induce in a man much of a sense of pride in his unit or make him believe that his service was valued. The white overseers, by contrast, were given standard South African Army uniforms; the inferior kit was issued exclusively to black men.

  If they had happened to have read ‘An Army of Labour, Workers from Distant Shores’ in The Times in December 1917, Botha, Merriman, Smuts and their colleagues would have been extremely satisfied by the account. The black South Africans were being put to good work and were commanded by a white officer who believed he ‘knew the native’ and was the very embodiment of South African racial attitudes in the early twentieth century. As the reporter explained, the camp commandant:

  …himself is an Afrikaner, a landowner and politician, who has strong views on many subjects and expresses them with energy. I ask him whether the South African native can be relied upon for steady labour. He repels the implied suggestion with warmth. ‘I come from a country where we know what work means,’ he tells me. ‘There is no slacking or shirking with us. The South African native has great physical strength, and he does not spare it when he is labouring. Send some of your trades union delegates here: it will open their eyes and do them good.’.56

  Although there were breakdowns in South Africa’s programme of racial containment – much to the frustration of the South African authorities – the men of the South African Native Labour Corps were largely prevented from taking part in the enormous mixing of peoples that took place on the Western Front. Lieutenant Colonel Godley had to accept that the South Africans under his command were being forced to live indefinitely under conditions ‘which are unique, as all other units in France, both white and black, are free to move about’. The freedoms available to other groups of soldiers and labourers – the right to enter shops, buy local goods, taste new foods, meet the children, learn smatterings of French and Flemish-Dutch, take part in celebrations – were denied the South Africans. They were the second-class citizens of a racial state that, after the First World War, was to perfect even more efficient systems of exploitation and separation, and expand these systems into new territory in Africa seized from the defeated Germans.

  If the Western Front was – looked at in one way – a great experiment in multi-ethnic, multiracial and multinational cohabitation, it was also a testbed of human segregation too.

  * Kitchener was drowned, along with many others, when the ship on which he was travelling on a diplomatic mission to Russia, HMS Hampshire, hit a mine off the Orkney Islands on 5 June 1916.

  Chapter 8

  ‘What are you doing over here?

  Siam, segregation and the Harlem Hellfighters

  BANGKOK, 22 JULY 1917. In the dark, early hours of the day units of the police, along with men from the army and navy of the Kingdom of Siam, fan out across the capital Bangkok. They make for pre-arranged rendezvous points and specific addresses. At the city’s docks, navy launches head out across the water and disappear into the gloom. Around the newly built railway line leading to the north, soldiers assemble and prepare for action. Each unit follows a detailed plan of operations, the product of eight weeks of preparation, during which time many of the key targets have been kept under constant observation, their movements monitored and recorded. The first mission of the day is undertaken not by soldiers or sailors but by diplomats, who arrive at two foreign legations and hand over documents that contain declarations of war by the Kingdom of Siam against the governments of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Then police and army units begin arresting German and Austrian nationals living in the country, while at the Ministry of Local Government Siam’s officials stand by telephones awaiting news of the operations.1 In the docks, the navy launches appear out of the darkness and slip silently alongside German-owned merchant ships. Siamese sailors use specially built boarding ladders to clamber onto the decks of the German ships, where they seize control of the vessels and arrest their crews. The crews of three German ships have time to damage their vessels, setting small fires – but those are quickly extinguished and the crews taken into custody. On the German-built railway at Koon Tan there are more arrests. Overwhelmed by the Siamese officials, none of the German administrators or engineers has the opportunity to sabotage the lines or the engines, or a vulnerable railway tunnel. The Straits Times of Singapore, published a few days later, refers to ‘a considerable body of troops’ sent north to protect the rail line.2 The magazine The Far East, published in Tokyo, will compliment the Siamese on the ‘business-like efficiency’ with which they have undertaken a task that other nations have bungled. Everything, it states, has been ‘accomplished without causing the least trouble or inconvenience to the general public, who simply woke up from their sleep and saw victory already attained’.3

  At 7am that same morning, as the round-up of enemy nationals takes place and the German ships are seized, just a few miles away Siam’s King Vajiravudh, known also as Rama VI, stands within the white walls of the royal palace wearing the ceremonial red ‘victory dress’. In anticipation of the special ceremonies about to take place on this auspicious day, the king carries the sword of King Naresuan, Siam’s fearsome sixteenth-century warrior king, and in the early-morning light he and his entourage enter Wat Phra Kaew, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. Candles are lit and offerings are made to the ancient and exquisite jade figurine, who sits serenely under his ornate pagoda within Wat Phra Kaew. After these offerings, the king proceeds to the royal plaza. There he approaches a tree, specially planted for the day’s events and intended to represent Germany – Siam’s new enemy. First, the tree is ceremoniously ‘disgraced’. This is achieved by dousing it in water, in which the king’s feet have recently been washed. With the tree now suitably admonished, King Rama then orders it to be felled, its demise symbolizing the impending fall of Germany.

  Siam in 1917 was not a colonial territory of any European power but rather an independent Asian kingdom. Its king – educated at Oxford and Sandhurst – was ambitious, forward-thinking and, when necessary, Machiavellian. He alone had the right to declare war, and he chose which side in the war Siam would take; he also drafted the declaration that was delivered to the German and Austrian governments. Having made the decision to join the Allied powers, Rama VI had used his enormous popularity to convince his people of the wisdom of abandoning neutrality. In newspaper articles the revered monarch had informed the Siamese that their nation had no choice but to turn against Germany, a nation the king assured his people was ‘the enemy of the world’ and a ‘ferocious giant’ that was inflicting ‘injuries and atrocities’ upon all civilized nations.4 The British and French gladly welcomed Siam, a country on which they had, in the past, foisted much-resented extra-territorial treaties. The Spectator in London approved of Britain’s new ally, warning that German involvement in the country meant tha
t ‘Siam would have become the most convenient of bases for intrigue in South-Eastern Asia, and for the dissemination of discontent and sedition in the British and French Colonies.’5

  King Rama’s denouncement of Germany was so emphatic, and his decision to enter the war so popular, that when the call went out for volunteers to serve in a Siamese Expeditionary Force the rush of applicants outnumbered the places available. The Expeditionary Force was intended to ‘make a bit of a show’ on the Western Front. With only limited resources, the king and his advisers calculated that the best way to maximize the diplomatic and political impact of their forces was to dispatch highly trained specialists rather than an army of peasant labourers as China had been forced to do. The small but select Siamese Expeditionary Force therefore consisted of 950 qualified pilots, engineers, ambulance drivers and other medical personnel, including surgeons. Led by a Siamese general, they were sent to France under great fanfare in 1918, arriving in June. They were the subject of constantly positive reports in the French press regarding their discipline and behaviour; two Siamese officers were even recommended for the Croix de Guerre. Nineteen of their number were killed in the war.