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Archiver > CARIBBEAN > 1999-09 > 0936347382


From: "Edward Crawford" <>
Subject: Re: [CARIBBEAN] Re: A Jamaican holder of the Victoria Cross, 1899
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 1999 09:29:42 +0100


I am very doubtful of these stories of West Indian participation as armed
units in the Boer War. The “Times History of the War in South Africa”, a 6
volume work and the nearest thing to an official history, makes it
absolutely clear that the Boers shot out of hand any black or mixed race
(Coloured in South African parlance) person whom they caught with arms in
their hands. They also shot out of hand any such suspected of giving
information etc. So confident and arrogant were they that they used to ride
up to the African kraals, take food from them and sleep there posting the
Africans as sentries. A close reading shows that what brought the war to an
end was that in 1902, 30 odd Vryheid burghers doing this got their throats
cut one night. In a sense the Africans had decided to enter the war. The
Boers promptly packed it in. This fact is not emphasised by British military
histories of the time.

The only occasion when Blacks fought the Boers under British command was
when a commando invaded Zululand. The Zululand Police, under British
officers, were armed and fought them. The point is made in the book that it
was impossible for the officers to surrender as all their men would have
been shot at once. The Boers withdrew.

That was the reason that Indian regiments (which had a very high military
reputation in Britain) were not used though Indians participated as
stretcher bearers – including Mahatma Gandhi. Had such regiments been used
the British would have had to take reprisals which would have made the war
much less gentlemanly – very savage in fact as it would have escalated. In
fact the two or three executions for war crimes that did occur after the
war, of men who had each murdered up to 30 “British Protected Persons” as it
was quaintly put, caused great ill-feeling and were regarded in Afrikaner
mythology as martyrs to British imperialism.

The Germans too seem to have had an objection to fighting blacks. My father
told me that a French officer had told him that in his unit there that was a
black man (I would imagine an antillais) and that near the end of the war
the French were advancing to take the surrender of a group of Germans who
had raised a white flag. When they saw that one of the future captors was
black, one seized a gun and shot him dead. As my father said “He did not
tell me what happened to the Germans”. The anecdote was simply quoted as an
example of odd German behaviour.

There is a list of Victoria Cross holders with the details of their awards
so that should be possible to check. White West Indians who joined British
regiments could certainly have fought there. And West Indian Regiments could
have been used elsewhere at the time of the war.

Edward Crawford

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