If it was up to journalist Elsabe Brits, South Africans would never forget what Emily Hobhouse meant for this country - and what her message still means today, writes Kevin Ritchie.
Depending on where and when you went to school Emily Hobhouse might be anything from an apartheid era submarine, to someone you might think is the little old tannie smiling on a rusk box.
If Cape Town based journalist Elsabe Brits has anything to do with it though, you’ll never forget what she meant for this country - and what her message still means today.
A quick potted history: Hobhouse was a well to do British welfare activist who came to South Africa during the Anglo Boer War and blew the whistle on the effects of military supremo Horatio Kitchener’s scorched earth policy.
More than a century later; after holocausts, ethnic cleansings and wars big and small the length and breadth of the globe, it's difficult to remember that the Boers were actually South Africa's first freedom fighters in a war that progressively became a war crime.
Brits’s book: Emily Hobhouse Beloved Traitor, leaves you in no doubt. This was a war that was over before it really began conventionally, but then dragged on as an insurgency for another two years, In reply, Kitchener ordered a scorched earth policy, burning 30 000 farms to the ground, slaughtering livestock where they stood, looting and burning farm houses and then herding the occupants into concentration camps where they died in their droves from disease.
The statistics tell their own story: 250 000 interned between 50 white and 64 black concentration camps across the Transvaal, Free State and Northern Cape. 55 000 would die, 80 percent of them children. In contrast 7 800 British soldiers died in battle, with a further 13 000 perishing from disease. 4 000 Boers died, with a further 5 000 off the battlefield.
But far from breaking the Boer resolve the policy spawned an implacable hate that festered for decades.
The post war reparations were risible. Even though the British parliament voted millions of pounds to be used to rebuild the depredations on the farms, very little was ever paid over; another truth inconveniently revealed by Hobhouse.
All this Brits had learnt as a schoolgirl almost 30 years ago, but what piqued her interest was a little book she picked up in Prince Albert. It told not just of Hobhouse's whistleblowing but her bid to raise funds to create a ploughing scheme to help farmers till their barren fields and and feed their shattered, starving families.
The book sparked a three year journey that would take her to Britain and even to Canada – across the old Boer War battlefields and the sites of the concentration camps, culminating in 11 months of writing after work each day and every weekend, to get the story told. Her primary sources were Hobhouse’s personal papers and her draft autobiography, reliving how she had fought off the unprecedented misogyny of the leaders of one of the greatest empires the world had ever seen – ironically run by a woman.
She would discover how Hobhouse’s activism was not limited to Boer women and children but extended to all South Africans, how her pacificism took her to Belgium and Germany in the midst of World War I, in the face of parliamentary calls for her to be tried for treason and executed afterwards. Undeterred she returned to Leipzig after the armistice feeding 12 000 German children for 2 and a half years – a staggering 5.5 million meals.
Hobhouse was hated by successive British administrations. When she eventually died in 1926, her death went unrecorded and her remains were cremated.
South Africa though was a different story. Her remains were transported to Bloemfontein where she was accorded a state funeral, to date the only non South African to receive such an honour, and interred in the very monument she had helped design.
“You know, she worked with Anton Van Wouw, the sculptor, to get the tableau of the Boer woman holding the dead child on her lap right, it was something that Emily had witnessed herself and she made Van Wouw redo the child until it actually appeared dead – as she had witnessed it,” recalls Brits.
But it was the speech she made at the opening of the Vroue Monument in 1913 that sealed the importance of Hobhouse’s legacy for Brits.
“Be merciful towards the weak, the down-trodden, the stranger. Do not open your gates to those worst foes of freedom – tyranny and selfishness. Are not these the withholding from others in your control, they very liberties and rights which you have valued and won for yourselves? So will the monument speak to you.
“Many nations have foundered on this rock. We in England are ourselves still but dunces in this great world lesson; our leaders still struggling with the unlearnt lesson that liberty is the equal right and heritage of every child of man, without distinction of race, colour or sex. A community that lacks the courage to found its citizenship on this broad base becomes a city divided against itself, a city that cannot stand.”
“It’s so profound,” muses Brits, “Emily could have been saying it today. She was a liberal humanitarian, she hated nationalism, she hated imperialism.”
Perhaps the greatest message for Brits though is that irrespective of the righteousness of the fight for freedom; be it gay rights or against racism, the even greater crime is to deny others those same freedoms once the battle has been won; something that has been seen all too often, as Hobhouse presciently warned, after the erstwhile Boer freedom fighters morphed into the architects of apartheid and the polecats of the world.
“Emily was a freedom fighter, a heroine, a human rights hero and humanist hero, a fabulous woman for whom no labels actually fit - that’s why I had to write this book, to bring her story to life to a broader market and to inspire young girls.”
The Star