Correspondent L McLeod wants debates about the past to end (“Stop rehashing the past,” The Herald, March 2).
McLeod is right to reprimand Jonathan Jansen and Abigail George for their constant complaints about the apartheid era.
Yet McLeod brings up the same old Boer propaganda about the actions of the “evil British army” during the Boer War.
McLeod writes: “The farms were burnt, animals killed and women raped by the British soldiers.”
Anyone would think that all the wrong in that war was Britain’s doing.
Rapes of Boer women and girls did unfortunately take place, but they were not sanctioned, let alone ordered, by the army, and they were isolated incidents.
More importantly, the burning of farms and killing of animals was something that the Boer invaders of Natal did routinely.
They eagerly stripped the farms of the “English” and made the inhabitants, black and white, walk to the British lines with nothing more than they could carry.
They drove off most of the livestock, burned the buildings and left carcasses in the ruins.
Then, when they were driven back into their republics, they used the same tactics on anyone who did not immediately give them what they demanded.
Farms were burned, property looted and vast numbers of people were rendered homeless.
The much maligned camps were a vital necessity, because of those who had lost their homes.
The diseases that plagued the camps also killed many more people outside the camps than in them.
Lord Kitchener ordered farm burning in response to the use by commandos of farms close to places they attacked as bases for those attacks.
This certainly added to the numbers of inmates in the camps, but it was a necessary means of curbing the guerrilla attacks.
McLeod boasts: “But we did not teach our children to hate the British or to remember what happened during the period 1898 to 1902.”
On several counts this is utterly untrue.
Afrikaner children were taught to hate the British and the “Engelse” in this country, and there have been constant jeremiads and hagiographies of the sufferings of the people in the camps.
McLeod does not even have the dates right: the war started in 1899.
The war was not of Britain’s making: it was planned for almost two decades by Paul Kruger.
It began with an ultimatum that falsely accused Britain of massing troops on the border, and when that ultimatum expired, the Cape and Natal were invaded — Kruger wanted his forces to capture Durban, East London and Port Elizabeth.
We have to examine the past impartially, expose the wrongs of both apartheid and the Boer War, but then work together to build a strong nation for the future.
Scratching old sores will not do this.
- Mike Oettle, Newton Park
