Afrikaner Women and Their Concerns After 1900

For Afrikaners the period after 1899 had been politically traumatic. Cradock was part of the Midlands, a zone that the British Army tried and failed to keep clear of commandos from 1900 on. Already in July, 1901, a rebel had been sentenced to death in the market square with all adult males required to be present.^[39] In October, two (perhaps four) more rebels were sentenced in the square.^[40] Next morning, these rebels were executed within earshot of the town. These issues were revived in 1907 when a memorial was erected in the local cemetery to those Afrikaners who had died 'in this district' during the war, including Cape rebels and men from the OFS and Transvaal.^[41] In its attempt to keep a potentially rebellious district in order, the army had resorted to less drastic methods as well. In mid-1901, some 40 men and 41 women, most of them from Cradock and its district and described as 'undesirables', were sent to Port Alfred to live at their own expense until the war was over. The 'undesirables' were certainly unrepentant, had themselves photographed while in Port Alfred, men and women separately, and some of them returned to Cradock to play a vigorous role in the new institutions and debates of the future.^[42]

The significance of the Anglo-Boer War for Afrikaner politics has usually been written about in terms of the subsequent loyalties of men and their relations with their leaders in that war.^[43] We have long known, however, that at particular moments, Afrikaner women have had a major role in politics, as when they rejected their menfolk's acceptance of the British annexation of Natal in 1843.^[44] Both John X. Merriman and Olive Schreiner believed that women had played a major role in the 'first war of independence' in 1881.^[45] In the Anglo-Boer War itself many women in the Transvaal and Orange Free State were active—at least one served with a commando—but most took on the considerable responsibility of running farms in the absence of the men. There is little evidence that they were ever a force for surrender or accommodation, and much that they were a force for militancy.^[46] British soldiers and policy-makers frequently commented on the behaviour of the women, and evoked the image of a 'Boer woman in [a] refugee camp who slaps her protruding belly and shouts "When all our men are gone, these little Khakis will fight you." '^[47]

Afrikaner women in the republics were continuing a tradition of selfstandigheid —self-reliance—characteristic of women on the expanding frontiers of the nineteenth century.^[48] They were soon joined politically by their sisters in Cape Colony. Farm burning had begun at least as early as March, 1900, and with the coming of Boer prisoners of war to Cape Town in large numbers, 'Dames Comites' ('Ladies' Committees') were set up throughout Cape Colony to make collections of cash and clothing on their behalf.^[49] In October 1900 there was a meeting of women at Somerset East, only fifty miles from Cradock, and a much larger one—2000 - at Paarl in November.^[50] At the latter meeting they heard a message of denunciation of farm burnings by Marie Koopmans de Wet, a grande dame from Cape Town who seems to have presided over a salon and been active in cultural affairs, particularly in promoting use of the Dutch and Afrikaans languages, and in politics.^[51] These Cape women were identifying with Afrikaners elsewhere and a sense of having escaped farm burning probably increased their resentment and militancy. The shooting of rebels and the forced hearing of

sentences inevitably involved friends and relatives; perhaps many women attended the grisly proceedings in the Cradock market square with a grim determination to avenge.

At this stage, it is possible to make a brief comment on the probable class character of the women participating in these public activities as a result of the war. The Afrikaner community at the turn of the century was nowhere near as economically differentiated as it subsequently became: if one had subtracted rural occupations, the church, and the law from the total Afrikaans-speaking community, little would have remained. Within the group of rural origin, there was a distinction between the comfortably off and the struggling, and it was the former who must have had the leisure and the resources to travel to meetings, and the social and intellectual self-confidence to protest against government policies. From biographical literature we can identify a 'more than comfortable' leader like Mrs de Wet, but we have no material on the rank and file at large gatherings like that at Paarl in November, 1900. It seems highly unlikely, however, that many of them could have been described as 'poor white'.