Insulting Britain
The following letter was sent by Professor Stephen Bush to the Daily Telegraph in response to the letter from Professor Saul Dubow of Cambridge University.
In response to Professor Robert Tombs’ article in the Daily Telegraph (August 7) about War Memorials to those 5775 soldiers of the British Army killed in the 1899-1902 Boer War (along with 22,829 wounded), Professor Saul Dubow ( August 11) is surely wrong to claim that in the aftermath of the war ”Britain reneged on its promises and allowed the Union of South Africa to be constituted in 1910 as a white supremacist state” – the new standard phrase used by “dokists”ref1 and “wokists”ref2 to insult us.
The facts on the ground in South Africa at the time were that while by June 1900 the Boer army had been completely defeated in the field and the major Boer towns occupied by the British Army, the Boer commanders led by Smuts and Botha among others, refused to surrender and launched a guerrilla war against the British across a huge area, supplied by the very farms from which the Boer commandos came.
What do you do to bring matters to a conclusion? Only by cutting off food and arms supplies, as numerous wars across the globe since have shown.
While not formally surrendering, the Boer leaders indicated in March 1902 that they would accept a treaty uniting under the Crown the two British South African colonies with the two former Boer republics , provided the latter would be granted self- government before a union came into effect.
They accepted that the Cape Colony’s common electoral roll would be part of the new South African constitution. The Liberal government passed the South Africa Act in 1909 entrenching this and other colour-blind democratic provisions in the new constitution. At the time even those who had opposed the war thought that this was the best outcome which could be achieved.
Extreme Afrikaner nationalists did not accept this settlement and as a result the political history of South Africa up to 1960 was dominated by Afrikaner Nationalist struggles to get rid of the entrenched clauses, culminating in the establishment of a Republic in 1961. From thereon they really did install a white supremacist state based on Apartheid of the races until its last president persuaded the bulk of his followers to give it up and replace it with a black majority rule-based constitution in 1994. Britain’s influence on South Africa’s internal affairs ceased 84 years before.
Endnote
1 Dictionary definition “Dokist, dokism – despiser, denigrator of their own kind.
2 This website’s definition “Woke, wokist, wokism – adj, noun, noun. Basically racist term used by race activist to mock, criticise all things White.