Boer History1904 in South Africa: Sargant’s Report to February, Kritzinger, and Luckhoff
The Director’s Report: November 1900 to February 1904
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 1904 was no longer whether Louis Botha, De Wet, and De la Rey would make a peace, nor whether last July’s overseas teachers would yet be counted in hundreds against a roll of more than a thousand. It was whether the director’s own report, covering from November 1900 to this February, would close the account of the machine built in those camps, and whether the farm and the town would still hold the children once the tents were ash. [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. The invitation was to the acting directorate of education in the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony. 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. The report that closed this February still carried that doubt in his own words: he had never before regulated a large administrative machine, and he doubted whether his capacities for such work 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 report this February closed. [6]
His first circular to heads and assistants issued on the 19th of February 1901: the commandants’ cooperation was to be got; parents were not yet to be compelled; teachers were as far as possible to be recruited from the camp ranks. On the 17th of February 1901 he was able to tell Goold-Adams in a short report that the educational work in the camps was already in full swing and a source of great satisfaction to the camp inhabitants. The paper that closed this February was the long account of that first fortnight and of everything that followed it through the tents, the overseas ships, the Gazette, and the farms: the Report of the Director of Education (Transvaal and Orange River Colonies) for the period November 1900 to February 1904. From the month he stepped ashore at Capetown from Quebec to the second February after Vereeniging, the machine he had doubted he could regulate was now written up as one report. [6]
The same report was the paper from which the later counts were read. 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 — those figures from pages 12 and 13 of the director’s report of this year. 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. 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 another 40 from Canada and 20 from New Zealand, and in August a further 40 from Australia. With the lapse of time still more overseas staff came, so that in July 1903 there were in service no fewer than 475 overseas teachers from a total of 1306 taken into employ. That July count, cited from page 19 of the same report, was still the last full muster this February’s paper had to give. The figures mattered because they measured, from the director’s own hand, how much of the imported staff still stood a year after Vereeniging, once the camps were ash. [6]
The report also closed the account of the camp schools themselves. The numbers of children in those schools fell from 29279 in May to 14438 in August and finally to 1816 in December 1902, when the last camp schools were closed — pages 12 and 13 of the director’s report again, the same leaves that had given the rise to May 1902. Those who were best able to judge thought that the mothers would never consent to camp lodging-houses while the parents rebuilt the farms. The school had to follow the Boer to the farm; the camp teacher who wished to remain in service had to turn his steps thither or teach in the small towns. What this February’s paper therefore closed was not a still-standing tent-school of 29279, but the aftermath of that fall, written from November 1900 through the second February after the peace. [6]
Miss Firks, head of the Bloemfontein Normal School, who led 12 of the first Capetown group toward the Transvaal, was herself named from this year’s report. 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 left for the Transvaal; Sargant himself met them at Elandsfontein and took them to Irene, where they were housed in tents. Mr Munro took the 6 Scottish ladies — Mickie, McLeod, Kinnoch, Kerr, McKenzie, and Kirkwood — to Belfast, while 6 English ladies remained at Irene. The second group of 28 stepped ashore toward mid-January; the third and fourth, 25 each, on the 4th and the 10th of February by the Briton and the Avondale Castle. Those names, written into the report that closed this February, were the names of a staff that July 1903 had counted at 475 from oversea, no longer in the tents to which Sargant had taken them. [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 still inherited when this calendar opened, and what the report to February still had to defend. [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 the February report counted. [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. 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; and 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 still the standing instructions of the staff that taught when this year opened, and the report that closed in February still pointed back to them. [6]
He 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 1901 he arranged a conference for teachers at Bloemfontein, and in July 1902 a much more extensive teachers’ congress at Johannesburg, attended by some 750 teachers. That congress, and the Education Gazette for the Transvaal and Orange River Colony of the 1st of July 1902 with its 1046 names, stood as the last great camp muster of the staff; the July count of 1903, written into this year’s report, 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. 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 still named in this February’s report. [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. This calendar therefore still ran on farm and town, not on tent and marquee, and the director’s report to February had to write that fall as complete. What hung on that writing 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 this year still 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, and under which the report to February closed. The tents of Irene, where Sargant himself met the first group from Capetown and housed them, were no longer a school. The ships — the Arundel Castle and the Galeka of December 1901, from which 22 and then 28 were told off by Chamberlain’s telegram of the 13th; the Briton and the Avondale Castle of February 1902 — were now the memory of a staff teaching in the towns they had preferred and on the farms a minority had accepted. Benches were never uniform even in the camps: at the sixth Transvaal inspectors’ conference on the 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, and the other inspectors were of the same opinion. On the farms the children came daily carrying little pads which they placed upon some large stones to form their seats, and school benches were wholly unobtainable. [6]
The Dutch private schoollet at Norvalspont 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. In the Free State English camp schools were opened at 26 places with a teaching staff of 66, instruction in English except where parents specially asked for Dutch; teachers were recruited locally on the recommendation of district commissioners, or obtained by the Superintendent of Education from the Cape Colony, until Major P. Holland Pryor, assistant adjutant-general, strongly recommended that suitable teachers be imported direct from England — teachers suitable to English the Boer children with success. Under Lord Methuen the first of those Transvaal schools came into being only on the 15th of January at Zeerust; by British ordinance all children between 7 and 15 had to attend unless the parents could prove that the children received satisfactory teaching at home; with recognition of Dutch as a school subject, English was the medium. Until that date the Transvaal was still free of the attempt to English through the school system. What the farms and towns 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: Kritzinger, Luckhoff, Brink, and the Gedenkboeken
This year was also a year of print. At London Generaal P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald issued In the Shadow of Death. Kritzinger had been a Free State commandant in the field; the shadow named in that title was the shadow the camps and the field had thrown. The book of this year put it into English at London, as Kestell’s Through Shot and Flame had put the chaplain’s ride with Steyn and De Wet into English at London the year before. The two books mattered because they were not a London official history but a commandant’s and a companion’s account, issued while the people were still rebuilding the farms and while Sargant’s February report was still closing the school account of the same war. [6]
At Cape Town A. D. Luckhoff issued Women’s Endurance. The endurance named there was the endurance of the women, written at the Cape in the second full year after the tents came down, beside van Helsdingen’s Vrouwenleed of Amsterdam 1903 and Hobhouse’s earlier The Brunt of the War and where it Fell. Those two London and Cape Town books were this year’s named witness to the field and to the women. The title mattered because it named, from the Cape itself, what the camps had done to the women, in the same year the director’s report closed the school account of those camps. [6]
At Amsterdam and Capetown J. N. Brink issued Ceylon en de Bannelingen. The banishment named there was the banishment of the prisoners to Ceylon, written in the year the director’s report closed the school account of the same war; the camps for fighting men at Green Point, St. Helena, Ceylon, India, the Bermudas and elsewhere had been named among the prisoner schools the English had meant to bring under one plan. At Cape Town K. J. De Kok issued Empires of the Veld. At Amsterdam W. F. Andriessen issued Gedenkboek van den Oorlog in Zuid-Afrika; at Amsterdam and Capetown a Gedenkboek van den Oorlog in Zuid-Afrika issued in the same year. The memorial books of the war, the veld’s empires, and the banishment to Ceylon: those were the Dutch and Cape titles this year set on the table beside Kritzinger and Luckhoff. [6]
Last year’s print still stood on the same shelf. Kestell’s Met de Boeren-Commando’s. Mijne Ervaringen als Veldprediker at Amsterdam and Pretoria, and Through Shot and Flame at London; MacDonald’s What I saw in South Africa, September and October 1902 at London; Penning’s De Oorlog in Zuid-Afrika at Rotterdam; de Villiers’s Met De Wet en Steyn in het Veld at Amsterdam; Blake’s A West Pointer with the Boers at Boston; Brebner’s Memoirs at Edinburgh; Brereton’s One of the Fighting Scouts and St. Leger’s War Sketches in Colour at London; van Helsdingen’s Vrouwenleed at Amsterdam. This year did not replace those titles; it set Kritzinger, Luckhoff, Brink, De Kok, and the two Gedenkboeken beside them. [6]
Maurice’s official History of the War in South Africa, volumes I to IV, was still issuing at London across 1901–1906. Repatriation of the Boers and the natives in the Orange River Colony was itself a work of 1902 through this year: the aftermath of the war named that span, even where the book that would later tell it had not yet issued. What this calendar set in type, besides Kritzinger’s shadow and Luckhoff’s endurance, was therefore also the Gedenkboeken at Amsterdam and Capetown, Brink’s Ceylon, and De Kok’s veld, with the official war history still in motion at London. [6]
The Friend, Pretoria News, Volksstem, and Bethelsdorp as It Stood
The papers that still issued this year were not last year’s list entire. De Kerkbode, Land en Volk, and the Natal Witness had been named through 1902–1903. This year the Friend issued, and the Pretoria News, and De Volksstem still ran from 1902 through this calendar. The Friend at Bloemfontein was the Free State capital’s English paper; the Pretoria News sat at the capital of the new Transvaal colony; De Volksstem was the Dutch paper that had run through the peace and still issued in the second full year after it. What still came out on the tables of the new colonies was therefore Bloemfontein’s Friend, Pretoria’s News, and Volksstem; the church paper, Land en Volk, and the Natal Witness had been last year’s named runs. [6]
The Education Gazette for the Transvaal and Orange River Colony of 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 to this February. 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. Last year’s commission paper, Cd. 1789 — the Report of His Majesty’s Commission appointed to inquire into the Military Preparation and other matters connected with the War in South Africa — remained on that shelf; this year’s director’s report to February was the new school paper from which the 475 of last July were still read. A command paper was a numbered parliamentary print: Cd. meant a paper presented by command of the Crown. Cd. 1789 did not retabulate the tents; it inquired into the military preparation of the war whose camps those earlier papers had counted. [6]
The Transvaal blue books of 1902–1903 remained the last named colonial blue books on that list. Cd. 369 of 1900 had been the correspondence relating to the recent political situation in South Africa; Cd. 426 of 1900 the proclamations issued by Field-Marshal Lord Roberts. Those command papers were the older shelf; Cd. 1789 of last year had been the inquiry into military preparation; this year’s named official school paper was the director’s report to February. The Friend at Bloemfontein, the Pretoria News at the capital of the new colony, and De Volksstem still issuing: those were the papers this calendar could still name, with the Gazette of the 1st of July 1902 still the school paper and the director’s own report the year’s close of that account. [6]
Bethelsdorp as it stood this year was photographed by C. Skead. Bethelsdorp was the London Missionary Society station founded under van der Kemp on the eastern Cape. The photograph listed it now beside a corner of an old house in High Street, Grahamstown, photographed by Dr Drury; beside the old drostdy house at Graaff-Reinet, photographed by W. Roe; and beside the first house built in Grahamstown — those four leaves, all to face the same page, set this year’s Bethelsdorp among the older eastern stations as they still stood. The photograph did not reopen the station’s founding; it recorded the place in 1904, as the director’s report recorded the schools from November 1900 to this February, and as Luckhoff at Cape Town recorded the women’s endurance. What hung on Skead’s lens was a station still standing in the second full year after Vereeniging, named among the eastern places as they then were, not as they had been at the founding. [4]
De Vroedschap van Amsterdam of J. E. Elias, begun last year at Amsterdam, still issued through this calendar. Records of the Cape Colony, begun at London in 1897, still ran. Those two works, the Amsterdam vroedschap and the Cape records, were not this year’s war print; they were the older paper still in motion while Kritzinger, Luckhoff, Brink, and the Gedenkboeken issued, and while Skead’s lens stood at Bethelsdorp. The Cape records still being printed at London, and Amsterdam’s vroedschap still being compiled, ran beside the Friend, the Pretoria News, and Volksstem on the tables of 1904. [9]