There was substantial support among Irish Nationalists for the struggle for independence from the British Empire by the Boers in South Africa, with many opting to head to South Africa to fight against the British forces, writes Liam Nolan.

 

I can still see him clearly in my mind’s eye. H e was white-haired, elderly, stocky, smallish, with a back as straight and stiff as a ramrod. He had bulled his boots to a high polish, the toecaps smooth and shiny as patent leather.

He wore his uniform cap dead straight on his head, no slant of the peak, no admiration-seeking tilt to one side or the other.
The knot of his black tie he had positioned with mathematical accuracy in the dead centre of the collar of his white shirt; his uniform jacket was pressed and immaculate and he had ironed knife-edge creases on his trouser legs all the way down to the laces of his boots.

He had twisted the ends of his waxed moustache into needlepoints, and, playing his snare drum with impeccable metronomic rhythm, he marched like an automaton, staring unwaveringly ahead, looking to neither left nor right. You couldn’t help but keep step to his beat. Which was what I did when the band formed up outside the railway station and began their short walk to the bandstand in the Promenade. There they would perform a recital for the public. I marched along beside him.
“See that man playing the small drum?” a father at the front of the spectators shouted to his son, “he was in the Boer War.”

I hadn’t a clue about the Boer War, knew nothing about it, where it had taken place, or when, or any stuff like that. But for the man to make that shout to his boy indicated that the Boer War must have been very famous, important, historic even, something that deserved to be pointed out. I was a boy myself.
The “shawlies” were crowding the streets all along the waterfront selling apples and over-ripe blackening bananas, and toffees and boiled sweets, and little plastic windmills on thin white sticks.
Three-card tricksters, and fellows with pellet guns (“Tree shots for a tanner!”) shouldered each other for space on the footpath. The sun was shining, and this August day was Regatta Day. Tonight there’d be fireworks on the Prom, and a dance in the Atlantic Ballroom with Vesty doing his inimitable swooping tango. And the pubs all over town would be packed with men whose heads in the morning would feel as if they were being pounded by jackhammers.

But the Boer War — what the hell was that?

It was a hugely complicated, bloody and prolonged conflict, and the best that I can do to honour my memory of the small man with the waxed moustache is try to unravel the essence of it.

Between 1899 and 1902 the British Army fought a bitter Colonial war against the Boers in South Africa. The term Boer was derived from the Afrikaans word for farmer. Afrikaans itself became the Boers’ own language, having evolved from Dutch. The wealthier settlers, who spoke High Dutch, looked down upon it. They called it derisively a “kitchen language”.
“Boers” was used to describe the people in southern Africa who traced their ancestry to Dutch, German and French Huguenot settlers who arrived in the Cape of Good Hope from 1652. Many of these farmers settled in the fertile lands around Cape Town, and they brought in slaves to work on their farms, slaves from other Dutch territories. (An Irishman named Hooper would lead a slave revolt in 1808.
The first recorded visit of an Irishman to that part of the world was as long ago as 1781.)
For nearly 150 years the Dutch East India Company administered the colony. But in 1806 the British officially took control of the Cape during the Napoleonic Wars. They did so to prevent the colony being occupied by their French enemies.

And then came the South African War.

During it, advanced nationalists in Ireland rallied to the support of the Boers in the Boers’ struggle against the British Empire. They were outraged that the British government did not respect Boer independence. Some went to South Africa to fight against the British forces.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own