Picking the bones of wars long ago

23 July 2014 - 02:00 By Ceridwen Dovey
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TO FIGHT OR NOT TO FIGHT: Dovey's great-grandfather, Izak Horak, did not bear arms in either the Boer War or World War 1. The latter conflict started 100 years ago this week
TO FIGHT OR NOT TO FIGHT: Dovey's great-grandfather, Izak Horak, did not bear arms in either the Boer War or World War 1. The latter conflict started 100 years ago this week

My family history is completely silent on the subject of World War 1 - no memoirs or anecdotes have been passed down, not a shred of a letter written from the front, not even one good story about hardship out in the colonies has survived.

I hadn't thought much about it. I just assumed the gap in time was too vast for any remnants of family lore to have survived.

However, when I started digging around - with my mum and dad enthusiastically helping by making calls to elderly relatives in South Africa - a different picture began to emerge. I discovered the real reason for this silence: not a single one of my South African male ancestors signed up to fight for Britain in World War 1. That was their choice - there was no conscription in South Africa then.

To understand why they chose to stay at home instead of volunteering to fight, I had to go back a little further in time, to a different war - the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902, fought between the Boers and the British over control of territories in what is now South Africa.

I expected to hear stories of terrible suffering - the Boer War was, by official accounts, a savage conflict, and some of the methods used by the British would have constituted crimes against humanity by today's standards. But, as my mother and her much older brother, my father and his brother-in-law, slowly collected crumbs from their memories for me to try to follow back into time, like a trail into very dark woods, I heard something different.

My family's stories are touching in their simplicity - of regular people finding ways to connect, to coexist, even when they were on opposite sides.

When the Boer War was declared in 1899 my great-grandparents on my mum's side, Izak and Maria Horak, were newlyweds, living in the small town of Winburg, in the Orange Free State Republic.

They were both from Afrikaner families who believed that the two independent Boer Republics - the Transvaal and the Orange Free State - had a right to exist free of British interference. But their nationalism was tempered by the fact that they were part of the relatively small, educated class of urban Boers, very different from rural Boers, who were mostly illiterate, tough, and zealously religious.

Maria was 10 years younger than her husband but it seems she was his intellectual equal. During their long courtship, they wrote love letters to each other in Latin and English. Her father had been a teacher and she had attended a good school and possibly studied to be a teacher before her marriage. Izak came from a long line of magistrates, the first of who mentered recorded history as a Dutch East India Company employee, made magistrate of a Cape settlement in the mid-1700s.

As a magistrate, Izak would have been exempt from going on "commando", the armed patrols that citizens of the Boer republics were expected to join to defend their farms against the British or the local black communities.

After some initial victories for the Boers, the British regrouped and managed to occupy Bloemfontein and all the towns in its surrounds, including Winburg.

When the British took the small town, the British officers asked Izak to stay on in his role as magistrate. He did so on the condition that he would not be made to reveal any secrets that might compromise the Boer military operation.

The rest of the Boer War family stories we have about Izak and Maria are amusing, light-hearted tales about them as a young, newly married couple playing bridge with the occupying British officers in Winburg.

It's all quite civilised, and certainly not what I would have imagined having my hometown occupied by hostile forces would be like.

It's possible their experience was unremarkable - just another story of basic civility on both sides in the first phase of the Boer War, when it was closer to a 19th-century military engagement, led by supposedly genteel British officers and "proud but fair" Boers, and which has sometimes been called the "last gentlemen's war". The combatants agreed on certain codes of conduct: for example, allowing the other side to remove their wounded and letting their own medics treat the enemy's wounded

But, as things dragged on and the Boer commandos began to use guerrilla tactics, such as blowing up railway tracks and making stealthy raids, the British forces began to respond more brutally. Boer women and children were forced into disease-ridden concentration camps, and Boer farms were set ablaze. War had entered the 20th century and its methods of terror foreshadowed those of the Great War.

I can't help but think of the magistrate in JM Coetzee's allegorical novel Waiting for the Barbarians, a searing critique of colonial power relations. In the book, the magistrate's moral certainties are undermined when the "empire" he serves declares a state of emergency because of rumours of an invasion by the "barbarians".

Gradually the magistrate's ignorance and idealism are replaced by horror. In the final scene, the magistrate, now a broken man, watches the first snow of winter fall on his frontier town, awaiting the next attack, which might, or might not, come.

  • Dovey is a South African author living in Australia. This essay will be broadcast on the BBC World Service on Saturday July 26 at 9.06am and at 7.06pm. It is one of a collection of essays by writers from around the world, all under the age of 35.
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