commemoration of SS Mendi, Cape Town
10 November 2007
Thank you programme director
My esteemed colleague, Minister Mosioua Lekota Minister of Defence
Premier of the Western Cape province, Mr Ebrahim Rasool
MEC for Sport and Cultural Affairs, Mr W Jacobs
Cabinet Ministers present
Provincial MECs present
Executive Deputy Mayor, Councillor Grant Haskin
Councillors of the City of Cape Town present
National and Provincial Parliamentarians present
Members of the Diplomatic Corps
Invited guests
Ladies and gentlemen
The story of SS Mendi is one of immense human courage and bravery. We mark
the sinking of this ship because of the 616 South Africans, 607 of them African
men of the 802nd South African Native Labour Corps en route to Le Havre in
France, where they were to serve as menials, doing the dirty work which South
African white soldiers would not perform!
We mark this terrible accident to recall the courage of those on board the
SS Mendi. When their ship was rammed by another, the SS Darro, bravely stood to
attention, performed a dance and went down with their ship in an amasing
display of dignity. We commemorate this tragedy firstly for the terrible loss
of human life. Six hundred and sixteen South African fathers, brothers,
husbands, sons perished in the icy water of the English Channel because of an
act of neglect! The SS Darro had appeared as if from nowhere, out of the fog,
with no warning lights, no fog horn sounding and after hitting the SS Mendi,
she steamed on, not even pausing to deploy lifeboats to try to rescue those
struggling in the chilly waters.
We say this was a terrible tragedy. But it was a tragedy compounded by the
deplorable betrayal that went with it. The sinking of the SS Mendi was one of
the numerous tragedies that unfolded during the First World War. To appreciate
the extent of the disaster that descended on virtually every country in Europe
and those beyond, we must recall that this was the first war in which a number
of new, extremely dangerous weapons, the products of an industrial age, were
tested.
By the time the war started, Europe was already a blood-drenched continent,
having witnessed one war after another throughout the 19th century. But nothing
that had preceded August 1914 could have prepared Europeans for the scale of
the slaughter that ensued. When the war ended on 11 November 1918, 5,6 million
soldiers from among the Entente powers, Britain, France and Russia joined by
the United States in 19178 had perished. From among the Central powers,
Germany, Austria, Turkey, four million soldiers had died.
The numbers of wounded also came as a terrible shock, 12,8 million among the
Entente powers and 8,4 million for the Central powers. This was probably the
first major war in which civilians, non-combatants had been targeted, the
central powers lost 5,1 million civilians, while the Entente lost 3,6
million.
So this was a human tragedy on a massive scale, hitherto unknown to all of
humanity. It is proper to recall that this was probably the first war in which
industrial powers had faced each other with the sort of modern weapons that
could only be manufactured with the aid of machines.
They included a pernicious new weapon, poison gas, that either killed or so
damaged human lungs that in many instances, fellow soldiers preferred to shoot
they comrades injured by gas, rather than see let them lives with lungs that
would be coughed out in bloody, pussy blobs over the rest of their lives.
The second dimension of this tragedy was that the war was so unnecessary!
While the war leaders of both sides of the conflict made the most extravagant
claims about their war aims, every one of them knew that at the centre of their
quarrel was the scramble for territory, in Africa, in Asia, in the Caribbean,
and in Europe. What is more, the imperial powers did not hesitate to draft and
impress the colonial peoples themselves to wage this war whose sole purpose was
to rob them of their sovereignty. Britain and France the two leading imperial
powers at the time, drafted soldiers from their African and Asian colonies into
service at the front.
Among them were the men of the South African Native Labour Corps, who would
literally be employed as cannon fodder because neither the British nor the
South African government thought it proper to train them in the use of modern
weapons. Their task at the front was to relieve the white soldiers of the
burden of digging trenches, latrines and carrying the wounded off the
field.
South Africa sent some 21 000 soldiers to fight in the war; we lost 9 463
men and 12 029 were wounded. Thus the men of the Native Labour Corps
constituted almost a tenth of the losses South Africa sustained during that
conflict. The third dimension of the tragedy and perhaps the most damning of
them, the depths of treachery the various imperial powers were prepared to
plumb in pursuance of their expansionist aims.
When the war broke out in 1914, a delegation from the African National
Congress, led by Reverend WB Rubusana was in London to petition the British
parliament and the crown regarding the notorious 1913 Natives Land Act. When
they heard the news that war had been declared, they hurried home to mobilise
African support for the war effort. The African National Congress (ANC)
leadership even decided to suspend agitation against the Natives Land Act, so
as to give the Union government a free hand to pursue the war unencumbered by
their protests. African opinion makers, political leaders and clergymen
criss-crossed the country mobilising support and encouraging Africans and other
blacks to volunteer for service. They did all this in the hope that a
demonstration of loyalty will be repaid when the war ended.
In virtually every colony, from Vietnam in the east, to the islands of the
Caribbean in the west, the colonial people were given to understand that loyal
service would not go unrewarded. It was consequently no accident that every one
of the embers of the South African Native Labour Corps who perished in the
English Channel that fateful morning was a volunteer. Among them were notables
Henry Bokleni and Richard Ndamase, both traditional leaders from Mpondoland.
The best known was the Reverend Isaac Wauchope Dyobha, chaplain of the Native
Labour Corps, who led the men in prayer and hymn â singing as their ship went
down.
It is said Dyobha calmed the men of the Labour Corps with the words:
"Be quiet and calm, my countrymen. What is happening now is what you came to
do you are going to die, but that is what you came to do. Brothers, we are
drilling the death drill. I, a Xhosa, say you are all my brothers. Swazis,
Pondos, Basotho and all the others, so let us die like warriors. We are the
sons of Africa. Raise your war-cries, brothers, for though they made us leave
our assegais in the kraal, our voices are left with our bodies."
But it was at the end of the war that the extent of the betrayal perpetrated
against all the colonial peoples became apparent. When the victorious Entente
Powers met at Versailles, they acted out the real purpose of the war. Germany
lost all her colonies in Africa, and these were parcelled out among the
British, the French and the Belgians. For its contribution, South Africa was
awarded Namibia, to govern as a trust territory. We all know what happened
after 1918.
Austria's empire in Europe was dismembered and new national states, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, and Poland emerged from its ruins. The Ottoman Empire of the
Turks was also dismembered. The cynical manner in which this was done has
bequeathed to the world the ongoing conflict that has plagued the west Asia
since!
The various deputations representing the colonial peoples, who came to
Versailles with high hopes of relief each returned home empty-handed. All
except for one, the deputation of Afrikaner Nationalists, led by Barry Herzog
from South Africa, who was able to return home with firm promises of greater
autonomy? Those pledges were honoured with the Statute of Westminster in
1931.
Irony in this is that while black South Africans, Africans, coloureds and
Indians all loyally responded to the call to arms to defend, the king and his
Empire, Afrikaner nationalist officers in the then Union Defence Force had
staged a mutiny and led an anti-British Rebellion in the hope of restoring the
Boer Republics that had been destroyed in 1902!
There is a very instructive lesson there!
Yet, today we are here not to recall the tragedy of inter-imperialist wars;
we are here not to recall the terrible betrayal of the colonial peoples by
their imperial masters. As a nation we have memorialised courage by naming one
of warships of democratic South Africa's Navy, the SAS Mendi! The Order of the
Mendi, is also among our national orders for bravery. The chaplain of the South
African Native Labour Corps is remembered by the naming of yet another vessel
of our navy, the SAS Dyobha.
We are here to honour and pay tribute to the courage, the bravery and the
extra-ordinary discipline of the men of the 802nd South African Native Labour
Corps. We dip our banners in their memory. But even as we pay homage to these
616 courageous South Africans, we should take with us the lesson of the utter
wastefulness of war and dedicate ourselves to its elimination as one of the
ways of solving the problems of humankind.
Issued by: Department of Arts and Culture
10 November 2007
