Boer History1903 in South Africa: Sargant’s Teachers, the War’s Print, and Cd. 1789
July 1903: 475 Overseas Teachers of 1306
Peace between Britain and the two Boer republics — the South African Republic and the Orange Free State — was signed at Vereeniging on the 31st of May 1902. Britain already held the Cape Colony and Natal. The two republics were gone. In their place stood the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony, under Milner as high commissioner. The camps into which Boer families had been brought since 1900 were broken from June 1902. What hung on 1903 was no longer whether Louis Botha, De Wet, and De la Rey would make a peace. It was whether the education machine built in those camps would still hold the children once the tents were down, and whether the overseas teachers on the roll would yet be counted in hundreds against a staff of more than a thousand. [6]
The man on whose shoulders that machine rested was E. B. Sargant, director of education for the new colonies. Milner had invited him in 1900 while Sargant was travelling in Canada and New Brunswick to look at colonial school systems. He stepped ashore at Capetown from Quebec on the 6th of November 1900. He doubted whether his capacities for so large an administration were adequate. By the end of January 1901 he was back in Capetown, discouraged, and in doubt whether camp schools could be dared at all. The prisoners’ school at Green Point then surprised him with the eagerness of the young burghers. On Saturday the 2nd of February 1901 he reached Norvalspont with Mills, where Captain Du Plat Taylor was eager for a school. He stayed fourteen days as head and taught the higher classes. Of the proverbial dirt of the Boer he found no trace; the children, especially those grown on farms, were submissive and well-mannered, and most of them neatly dressed. That was the man whose July count this year recorded. [6]
Before the signing of peace there were 200 teachers from England and Scotland in service. During March 1902 another 50 English teachers arrived, and during April a further 50. In June 1902 another 40 teachers from Canada and 20 from New Zealand landed, and in August a further 40 from Australia. The Education Gazette for the Transvaal and Orange River Colony of the 1st of July 1902 gave the names of 1046 teachers in Transvaal, Free State, and Natal camps. Against the end of May 1902 the teaching staff in the two colonies had risen to about 1000, from 54 in 8 Transvaal camps and 47 in the Free State at the end of May 1901. School-going children had grown from 1293 in Transvaal and 1370 in Free State camps on the 30th of April 1901 to 17213 in Transvaal and 12066 in Free State camps on the 31st of May 1902. That was the roll as the camps broke. [6]
In July 1903 there were in service no fewer than 475 overseas teachers from a total of 1306 taken into employ. More overseas staff had come with the lapse of time after the Australian 40 of August 1902. The Gazette’s 1046 names of the 1st of July 1902 had thus grown, in twelve months, by 260 on the total roll, and the overseas share had become more than a third of the whole. 475 from oversea against 831 others: that was the count this July made of the machine Sargant had built from Green Point and Norvalspont. The remaining posts were the established teachers who had not been eliminated, the younger sent toward the normal schools, and those who had followed the children from the tents to the farms and the small towns. The figures mattered because they measured, a full year after Vereeniging, how much of the imported staff still stood once the camps were ash. [6]
He had tried courses for teachers in service and regular conferences, so that opinions on important matters might be aired and uniformity of method and organisation reached. About 100 teachers, mostly from Bloemfontein, attended a holiday course there, a reunion of teachers, at which he himself was present and welcomed them as forerunners of peace. For the inspectors in the Transvaal district he arranged, from the 13th of August 1901 to the 18th of March 1902, no fewer than 6 conferences at Pretoria; he also called separate conferences for the Free State inspectors, and 2 general congresses for both Transvaal and Free State inspectors on the 18th and 19th of December 1901 at Bloemfontein and on the 2nd to the 4th of April 1902 at Johannesburg. In July 1902 he arranged a much more extensive teachers’ congress at Johannesburg, attended by some 750 teachers. That congress, and the Gazette of the 1st of July, stood as the last great camp muster of the staff. The July count of this year was the muster after the tents were down. [6]
One of his principal aims was to secure the services of men winning over the young generation of Dutch Afrikaner to English ways of thought and speech, and English ideas of truthfulness and loyalty. Milner struck on that view as approaching the task not merely as an educational expert but with remarkable grasp of the social and political conditions, and called the camps an unequalled opportunity of teaching children and bringing them under influences which would promote future harmony in races. In the Commons, Humphreys-Owen asked whether the secretary of state knew of the notice that teaching in the camps must be through English, though the children scarcely knew a word of it, and pointed to Wales, where after generations of failure with a foreign medium the mother tongue had at last been used with success; he asked whether Sargant should not be approached to issue instructions that Dutch be used thereafter for Dutch-speaking children. Chamberlain answered that he knew Sargant’s instructions, that the analogy between the Transvaal and Wales was not correct, that many Boer children understood as little Dutch as English and spoke only the Taal, and that many parents preferred instruction in English as the language which would most conduce to the material benefit of their children. On the 6th of December Sargant was able to report about 2000 applications for 100 vacancies, and asked leave to select another hundred, since about 300 teachers would be needed in the next six months. That recruitment, begun in England and Scotland, is what filled the overseas 475 of this July. [6]
English Medium, Pay, and the Circulars Still in Force
English was by far the principal subject in all the camps, and to it by far the most attention and time were devoted. At the inspectors’ conference of the 18th of March 1902 it was minuted that all the inspectors classified the children primarily in respect of their knowledge of English; the director approved, and wished an examination of proficiency in English in the first place, and in other subjects in the second, during the ensuing term. At the fifth inspectors’ conference in the Transvaal, in February, he strongly emphasised oral work, the teacher and the blackboard rather than the book, and plenty of pictures to make the children talk English. Religion might be given through Dutch as medium — a promise with which he had pacified those who showed unmistakable displeasure at the policy — and he noted a genuine eagerness to acquire English even on the part of those Boers who lived on outlying farms. South African history was to be left untaught: geographical readers were better than historical because they avoided political questions. Arithmetic, writing, reading, English, Bible reading, singing, and physical drill were the subjects that filled the timetable. That standing order — English first, Dutch for the catechism, no South African history — was what the farm and town schools of 1903 inherited when the tents came down. [6]
Pay told the same story of imported and established staff. At the beginning teachers received only 4 to 6 pounds with rations and lodging, or 9 pounds without, a month; heads 10 to 15 pounds — in a few cases only 7 pounds 10 shillings — with rations and lodging, or 15 without. A qualified teacher from the camp or the town was commonly named head at a slight wage to do the fiddling pioneer work; when that was done he was reduced to assistant to make room for qualified teachers from England or elsewhere, who then suddenly received 25 to 30 pounds plus rations a month. J. E. Davies of the Johannesburg camp school had 25 pounds; Hannion of Nylstroom 200 pounds a year; Humbly was appointed head of Howick from the 15th of November 1901 at 20 pounds a month; two Canadian teachers, Mullin and Dr Bridges, as heads of the Pretoria Normal School and the High School for Boys, were to have 700 pounds a year. Three things hurt the quality from the start: the rapid growth of numbers, so that demand far exceeded supply; the rule that the medium must be English; and the fact that the majority of teachers were not professionally trained and commonly lacked academic training. Knowledge of English, spoken and written, was taken as the measure of a teacher’s competence. Those scales and that measure still sat over the staff that this year’s July counted at 1306. [6]
To quiet friction between the imported and the established teachers, Sargant addressed both in person by circular. The established camp teachers were asked to receive the newcomers heartily, put them at ease, and instruct them in the chief requirements of teaching in the camps; they were to take them to the tents of those among their countrymen from whom they could learn all that was dignified and religious in the lives of the Afrikander farmers; they were to learn so much of the speech of the people as would unlock the hearts of those with whom they had thrown in their lot; and they were to avoid petty jealousies and continue to teach side by side with a single eye to the advancement in knowledge of the children entrusted to their joint care. Experienced and competent teachers would not lose their posts; the incompetent and the younger would necessarily be eliminated, and the younger would then have the chance of better training at the normal schools. [6]
To the newcomers he asked cooperation with the Dutch teachers on the only ground where the two races could work together on a common and friendly footing — the school — since the teaching had been made non-political in character. They were to learn something of the Taal, that expressive language of the Dutch Africander population. They would find in the children charm of manner and docility, perseverance and eagerness to learn. They were to teach all ordinary subjects through English, because the Dutch recognised that the material advancement of the children in these colonies was bound up with an adequate knowledge of the English tongue. Where they found apparent stupidity and a depth of ignorance to which they were unaccustomed, they were to remember that the difficulties of comprehension in a foreign tongue are very great. Those circulars, written to the tents, were the standing instructions of the staff that still taught when this year opened — the 475 from oversea and the 831 others, no longer in marquees but in the farm schools and the small towns. [6]
Farm Schools and Town Schools after the Camps
The attempt to English the Boer children in the concentration camps could in the end bear no fruit: for that the time was too short and the people after the experience of the camps too embittered to swallow the pro-British propaganda as sweet cake. With the breaking-up of the camps from June 1902 the British ideals in that regard went up in mist. At first the authorities still cherished the thought of keeping the camp schools in flourishing motion by housing children in camp lodging-houses while parents rebuilt the farms, but the thought found no favour with the parents; those who were best able to judge thought that the mothers would never consent to this. The numbers of children in camp schools fell from 29279 in May to 14438 in August and finally to 1816 in December 1902, when the last camp schools were closed. This year therefore opened on farm and town, not on tent and marquee. What hung on that opening was whether the school would follow the Boer to the rebuilt homestead, or whether the imported staff would gather in the small towns and leave the farms behind. [6]
Sargant advised his camp teachers to go to the farm schools, but the great majority preferred to give education at town schools, and the Anglicising dreams of Sargant and Milner therefore necessarily came to nothing. The British concentration-camp schools completely missed the purpose for which they had been instituted, namely to English the Boer child. In so far they worked for good that many children were kept constructively busy, while they would otherwise have remained relatively idle. An elementary knowledge of basic subjects such as writing, reading, arithmetic, and even of other subjects such as geography and hygiene was brought to the children. An influence of lasting significance these schools did not exercise and could not exercise, because they had at longest functioned only a year. What 1903 held was that aftermath: the farm school following the rebuilt homestead, the town school taking the majority of the camp teachers, and the overseas 475 still on the larger roll of 1306, no longer counted against 29279 camp children but against whatever children the farms and the small towns would send. [6]
The school had to follow the Boer to the farm, and the camp teacher who wished to remain in service had also to turn his steps thither or teach in the small towns. That sentence, written of the breaking of the camps, was the sentence under which this year actually ran. The tents of Irene, where Sargant himself met the first group from Capetown and housed them, and from which Mr Munro took 6 Scottish ladies to Belfast while 6 English ladies remained, were no longer a school. The first group landed at Capetown on the 5th of January 1902, fetched by W. A. Russell and Dr W. A. Macfadyen; 10 destined for the Free State remained at Bloemfontein; 12 under Miss Firks, head of the Bloemfontein Normal School, left for the Transvaal. The second group of 28 stepped ashore toward mid-January; 12 remained at Bloemfontein, 16 left for Irene. The third and fourth groups, 25 each, set foot ashore on the 4th and the 10th of February by the Briton and the Avondale Castle. Those ships and those names were now the memory of a staff that this July still numbered 475 from oversea, teaching no longer in the tents to which Sargant had taken them but in the towns they had preferred and on the farms a minority had accepted. [6]
Benches were never uniform even in the camps: at the sixth Transvaal inspectors’ conference on the same 18th of March 1902 Mr Bangley said that one of the carpenters at Potchefstroom camp had made a model school desk to seat 7 or 8 children, the seat and desk all being made in one; Mr White objected to a desk and seat made in one, and the other inspectors were of the same opinion. On the farms the children came daily carrying little, and school benches were wholly unobtainable. The Dutch private schoollet at Norvalspont had died within less than two months for want of support, though Sargant did not at first support the commandant’s proposal that it be drastically suppressed, and later claimed that he had not directly influenced parents to send their children to the government school. What the farms of this year received was therefore not a uniform desk for 7 or 8, nor a surviving Dutch schoollet beside the government tent, but the teacher who had chosen the town or the farm, the English medium, and the children whose mothers had refused to leave them in camp lodging-houses while the homesteads were raised from ash. [6]
The War’s Print: Kestell, MacDonald, Penning, and the Rest
This year was also a year of print. At Amsterdam and Pretoria J. D. Kestell issued Met de Boeren-Commando’s. Mijne Ervaringen als Veldprediker; at London the same year he issued Through Shot and Flame. The Adventures and Experiences of J. D. Kestell, Chaplain to President Steyn and General Christiaan de Wet. Kestell had ridden with Steyn and De Wet through the last years of the war. The chaplain thus put into Dutch and into English, in the first full year after Vereeniging, what he had seen with the commandos. The two books mattered because they were not a London official history but a field preacher’s account, issued while the people were still rebuilding the farms and while Sargant’s overseas staff was still being counted on the July roll. [6]
At London Ramsay MacDonald issued What I saw in South Africa, September and October 1902, the visit of the two months after the peace, now a London book of 1903. MacDonald had come out after Vereeniging to see the country for himself; the book was the printed form of that visit. At Rotterdam L. Penning issued De Oorlog in Zuid-Afrika. At Amsterdam O. T. de Villiers issued Met De Wet en Steyn in het Veld. The field, the chaplain, the visitor of September and October, and De Wet and Steyn in the veld: those were the titles this year set on the table beside the farm school. [6]
At Boston Col. J. T. F. Blake issued A West Pointer with the Boers. At Edinburgh J. Brebner issued Memoirs. At London Capt. F. S. Brereton issued One of the Fighting Scouts. At London Capt. S. E. St. Leger issued War Sketches in Colour. At Amsterdam Johanna van Helsdingen issued Vrouwenleed. Persoonlijke Ondervindingen in den Boerenoorlog — women’s sorrow, personal experiences in the Boer war. The West Point colonel, the Edinburgh memoirs, the fighting scouts, the coloured sketches, and the women’s sorrow: those were the other London, Boston, Edinburgh, and Amsterdam titles of the year, issued while the last camp schools of December were already closed and while Sargant’s overseas 475 were being counted on the July roll. [6]
Earlier war books still stood on the same shelves. De Wet’s De Strijd tusschen Boer en Brit of Amsterdam 1902 and Three Years War (October 1899 — June 1902) of Westminster 1902 had named the three years. Emily Hobhouse’s The Brunt of the War and where it Fell of London 1902, her Onthullingen uit de Vrouwenkampen in Zuid-Afrika of Rotterdam 1901, and her report of a visit to the camps of women and children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies, still named the camps from which the people had now gone home. B. J. Viljoen’s Mijne Herinneringen uit den Anglo-Boeren-Oorlog of Amsterdam 1902 and Wilhelmina Riem Vis’s Tien Maanden in een Vrouwenkamp of Rotterdam 1902 still named the ten months in a women’s camp. This year’s print did not reopen the tents; it set beside them the chaplain, the September visitor, the women’s sorrow, and the West Pointer. [6]
George W. Stow’s The Native Races of South Africa also issued in 1903, a printed account of the peoples of the country that later writers still cited for the five Khoikhoi tribes of the peninsula at the landing. Maurice’s official History of the War in South Africa, volumes I to IV, was issuing at London across 1901–1906. The Director of Education’s report, covering November 1900 to February, was the paper from which the July count of 475 overseas of 1306 was drawn. Transvaal blue books of 1902–1903 stood in the published archival list. The print of this year was therefore not only the chaplain and the visitor: it was also the official history still coming out, the director’s roll, the blue books of the two new colonies, and Stow’s ethnography on the same shelf. [4] [6]
Cd. 1789, the Blue Books, and the Papers Still Issuing
Cd. 1789 of 1903 was the Report of His Majesty’s Commission appointed to inquire into the Military Preparation and other matters connected with the War in South Africa. A command paper was a numbered parliamentary print: Cd. meant a paper presented by command of the Crown. This one sat at the end of a long shelf of command papers that named the camps, the burnt buildings, and the negotiations. Cd. 524 of 1901 was the return of buildings burnt in each month from June 1900 to January 1901, including farm buildings, cottages, and hovels. Cd. 528 of March 1901 printed papers relating to negotiations between Commandant-General Louis Botha and Lord Kitchener. Cd. 546 of April 1901 printed Botha’s letter to Kitchener dated the 13th of February 1901. Cd. 582 of June 1901 was correspondence so far as it affected the destruction of property. Cd. 608 gave concentration-camp statistics for June; Cd. 694, Cd. 789, and Cd. 793 further returns of numbers in the camps of refuge for July, August, and September 1901. Cd. 819 of November 1901 and Cd. 853 of December were reports on the working of the refugee camps in the Transvaal, Orange River Colony, Cape Colony, and Natal. Cd. 893 of 1902 was the Ladies Committee’s report on the camps in Natal, the Orange River Colony, and the Transvaal. Cd. 902, Cd. 934, Cd. 936, Cd. 939, Cd. 942, and Cd. 1161 were further papers and statistics of the refugee camps through 1902. Cd. 1329 of November 1902 was correspondence relating to the appeal of the Boer generals to the civilized world. This year’s commission paper did not retabulate the tents; it inquired into the military preparation and other matters connected with the war whose camps those earlier papers had counted. What hung on Cd. 1789 was the imperial account of how the war had been prepared, issued in the first full year of the peace. [6]
Cd. 800 of 1901 had printed The Laws and Customs of War by Land, signed at the Hague on the 29th of July 1899. Cd. 906 of February 1902 had been correspondence with the Netherlands’ Government regarding the war. Cd. 979 of 1902 had returned farm buildings in Cape Colony and Natal destroyed by the Boers. Cd. 933 of February 1902 had been the letter from Assistant-Commandant-General Tobias Smuts to Commandant-General L. P. Botha. Those papers, with Cd. 1789, were the printed imperial account on which this year could still be read: the Hague rules, the Netherlands correspondence, the burnt farms of the Cape and Natal, Smuts to Botha, the ladies’ report, the generals’ appeal of November, and now the commission on military preparation. [6]
In South Africa the papers still issuing through this year included De Kerkbode (later Die Kerkbode) for 1902–1903, Land en Volk for 1902–1903, The Natal Witness for 1901–1903, and De Volksstem (later Die Volkstem) from 1902 through 1904. The Cape Times and the Cape Argus had run through 1900–1902; the South African News through 1900–1902. Abroad the Times had run through 1900–1902, the Algemeen Handelsblad through 1900–1902, the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant through 1901–1902, the Review of Reviews through 1899–1902, and War against War in South Africa through 1899–1902. What still came out on the Cape and Natal tables in this calendar was therefore the church paper, Land en Volk, the Natal Witness, and Volksstem; the London and Rotterdam war-against-war sheets had closed their runs with the peace. [6]
The Education Gazette for the Transvaal and Orange River Colony, Pretoria, the 1st of July 1902, remained the named official periodical of the school machine, with the Report of the Acting Director of Education of the 12th of July 1901 and the Director’s report from November 1900. The Transvaal Government Gazette Extraordinary of June 1902 had named the peace month. Cape Hansard had run through 1901–1902; British parliamentary debates, fourth series, volumes LXXXVII to CVII, through 1900–1902. This year’s commission paper, Cd. 1789, was the new command paper on that shelf. The Gazette of the 1st of July and the director’s roll were the school papers from which the 475 of this July were read. The inquiry into military preparation, the blue books of the two new colonies, and the church and Volksstem sheets still on the table: those were the printed record on which 1903 closed. [6]