Journeying into the past to understand the future

A wreath floats in the English Channel to commemorate the centenary of the sinking of the troopship SS Mendi. Picture: Kevin Ritchie

A wreath floats in the English Channel to commemorate the centenary of the sinking of the troopship SS Mendi. Picture: Kevin Ritchie

Published Mar 2, 2017

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It’s cold in the English Channel. It’s just after 8 in the morning and a watery sun is peeking through an otherwise bleak grey sky. The outgoing British High Commissioner to South Africa, Dame Judith McGregor demurs: “it’s not cold,” she says.

Don’t believe her. It’s freezing, you can choose an alliterative adjective to preface it too, it’s that cold – if you’re a South African.

The wind’s blowing and the deck’s starting to roll as the frigate picks up speed on its date to remember destiny.

A century ago and a couple of hours before, South Africa’s greatest maritime disaster played out several nautical miles ahead, of where we still have to travel.

It would have been pitch dark at the time, the water might even have been colder.

In 90 minutes, 616 South Africans – 607 of them black – would have died.

They wouldn’t have stood a chance. Even had it been light, the thick fog would have rendered visibility zero.

The troops were on their way to France to serve as labourers in the South African Native Labour Corps. All in all, 25 000 would sign up to serve the Empire, putting aside their own political aspirations to fight a greater evil.

Just before 5am, their troopship, the SS Mendi, would be rammed by a ship more than twice its size, the Darro. Its master would then go astern, allowing the sea to pour into through the catastrophic rent that had almost cleaved the Mendi’s bow, drowning 140 men immediately.

The rest had 25 minutes as the Mendi canted over to starboard, the sea cascading in over the tops of her bulkheads. Her stern went up and she cleaved downwards to her watery grave on the ocean bottom less than 40m below.

Those that survived the initial collision went about their rescue drills with military precision, almost insouciant in the face of death even as one lifeboat overturned.

There were incredible tales of heroism, chief among them the legendary call by Isaac Wauchope Dyobha, a preacher and interpreter, who called out to the men of different tribes and clans, urging them to face their fate as Africans, as warriors.

It was an incredible moment for men who if they didn’t drown when they were sucked down by the Mendi’s death plunge, would die from hypothermia in the 3°C water.

Whites helped blacks, blacks helped whites – there were only two recorded acts of appalling cruelty; one a fat white sergeant nicknamed, typically, Mafutha who reportedly kicked soldiers in the face as they tried to clamber onto his raft. He was later arrested, but history doesn’t know what became of hims fate.

The other was the captain of the Darro, Henry Stump. He never launched his boats, as was the rule of the sea, to pick up survivors even after he’d been told several times that his actions had led to hundreds of troops being dumped in the water, a short distance from his ship. All he did was allow the survivors from two of the Mendi’s lifeboats and a liferaft to come on board.

Was he a coward? A racist? We don’t know. All that we do know is that the Board of Trade inquiry suspended his licence for a year and then promptly sealed the record of their deliberations for the next 50 years. Other members of the tribunal were less sanguine. They called for Stump to be banned from the sea for life.

Not for nothing, is the Mendi referred to as the black Titanic. Would there have been a different outcome had the troops been white? We don’t know, we can only speculate a century later.

We do know that Prime Minister Louis Botha and his government were so affected by the tragedy that parliament rose as one in silence at the news, before passing an uncontested motion of sympathy.

It was an empty gesture; the men who survived the icy immersion but were ruined were sent home and told to tell their chiefs "thank you". The others who were demobbed at the end of their year’s attestation went home with neither pension nor recognition. Their white officers and NCOs received campaign medals, but the successive governments of Jan Smuts and Barry Hertzog did their damnedest to successfully frustrate any effort to have the medals issued.

Nobody knew anything about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in those days. Some of the frontline soldiers were said to suffer from "shell shock", an awful euphemism for being gassed, bombarded and shot at until you lost the last vestige of your sanity. No one said anything about being almost drowned in freezing water.

Paulina Buyeye-Mohale’s great uncle was like that. He came home, months after the sinking, went straight up to Limpopo and died. The family don’t know when or how. It took them years to find his grave.

For others, there’s been the ongoing denial of their right to observe African customs and rituals, to ensure their ancestors are buried at home, their graves are properly tended. For the descendants of the Mendi, all they know is that their ancestors are forever at the bottom of an ocean at the other end of the world.

This week, 10 of them finally got the opportunity to say goodbye. A week in the UK to reflect at the various cemeteries, to pay homage at Hollybrook Cemetery, where the men of the Mendi who have no grave, share a wall with the man who was perhaps Britain’s most famous soldier of World War I, Field Marshal Kitchener of Khartoum. He was a man, ironically, whose scorched earth policy and concentration camps laid the seeds for generational race hatred between Boer and Brit back in South Africa, but who himself has no grave, after being lost at sea eight months before.

There are 2 000 names on the walls, a third of them from the Mendi.

For Captain Frans Roux, the outgoing commander of the Amatola, there’s no doubt about the importance of the day or who the focus should be: “it’s all about the descendants today,” he says on the flight deck as night still shrouds the harbour

It’s the highlight of the Amatola’s entire four-month deployment up the west coast of Africa, scaring off pirates, and the diplomatic tour of Europe and exercises with the Royal Navy and then the Germans next week, he says. There is nothing bigger.

Before the ship departs, it’s left to Commander Cebo Gwala – who will take over command from Roux in May, when the Amatola returns to Simon's Town – to provide some light humour with the safety briefing; the ship won’t sink, but if it does, there’s nothing to worry about. If there’s a fire, everyone’s to congregate in the helicopter hangar, if there’s a man overboard, no one must jump in to help… Whatever the crisis, the crew’s got you covered, no one’s drowning or dying today…

There’s laughter, but it’s nervous laughter because many are looking at the sea, thinking back 100 years and thinking what if?

I know I am.

Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe throws the first wreath into the sea; the descendants follow. The wreaths mimic their ancestors; some hit the water and disappear without trace, others break on impact. Some hit the water face down and aren’t seen past the wake, others bob majestically on and beyond, as if heading for the open Atlantic – and home to South Africa.

The atmosphere is sombre, understandably so.

Picture: Kevin Ritchie

For many of the descendants the week in Britain has been an emotional rollercoaster. Grown men have wept openly and unashamedly at the memorial services, at the burden not just of discovery and reflection but also of being their families’ designated representatives.

Captain Lulamile Ngesi, the Navy’s chaplain, seems to sum it up in his sermon: “Their unfulfilled dreams and hopes are ours now.”

Once the wreaths have been thrown atop the rolling waves, it’s time for the national anthems. The guard of honour presents arms, all the officers in uniform come to attention and salute.

Some of the civilians place their hands on their chests.

Except there’s no music.

Everyone stands mute, swaying with the motion of the sea beneath and just before this can become another Ard Matthews or Ras Dumisani moment, the group where the descendants are cloistered on the port side, starts singing.

In an instant, with the exception of the guard of honour, the entire company is singing Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. The music comes back on cue but the singing continues to the end.

As everyone departs for lunch in the wardroom down the corridor beyond the hangar, I ask Buyeye-Mohale how she feels. She’s had a tough life. Her father served in World War II and probably came back with undiagnosed PTSD, just like the rest of his neighbours, all policemen in Masoleni, Dube, Soweto.

Buyeye-Mohale was arrested, tortured, put on trial for her life and then released to fend for herself when her trial collapsed.

She’s the third generation in her family trying for that elusive better life.

“I felt cold. I thought of him swimming in the icy water. I thought of his comrades.” She shivers.

“But it’s okay now. I feel at peace. Finally.”

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