1. Same old, same old…

An Indian colleague writes:

I’ve noticed that the same accusations about Churchill repeated frequently. Many writers seem to recycle them on trust. Take for example a new anti-Churchill article which I think needs a thorough debunking. In fairness to the author, it is not all bad; she concedes for instance that Churchill wanted to use tear gas in Iraq, not poison gas. But there are some things that stand out as seriously misinformed.

For example, the article claims inter alia that (1) Churchill admired Hitler in the 1930s. (2) Churchill’s decisions derived from romantic intuition, not intellectual consistency. (3) Churchill’s convictions about the “Aryan race” were why Churchill was unpopular in the 1930s. Are these exaggerated, or just wrong?

The answers…

We can’t respond to every ahistorical attack on Churchill; we would simply end up repeating ourselves. But we can certainly supply links to published material. Feel free to quote from these articles.

(1) The notion that Churchill “admired” Hitler in the 1930s stems from inadequate understanding. Churchill approved of Germany’s revival after the Great War. As a politician was careful not to condemn a whole people; but on Hitler he was right from the beginning. For the first of three articles on this, click here.

(2) Decisions guided by “romantic intuition”? Churchill was certainly guided by a deep understanding of history. In Marlborough, his greatest biography, one can see all the great war speeches developing. See Andrew Roberts, “Marlborough.”

(3) “The Aryan stock is bound to triumph” (remarked by young Winston when he was 26) is a favorite bogeyman among his critics. He certainly said those words, but he was not predicting a triumph by the British. He was referring instead to the likely outcome of a Russia-China dispute, now 120 years ago.

2. “Defending” Boer War prison camps

Our correspondent continues:

Many allegations seem to derive from Johann Hari’s review of Churchill’s Empire, now over a decade old, in The New York Times. Hari claims that Churchill defended the British prison camps set up in the Boer War as causing the “minimum of suffering…. At least 115,000 people were swept into them and 14,000 died, but he wrote only of his ‘irritation that kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men.’ Later, he boasted of his experiences. ‘That was before war degenerated,’ he said. ‘It was great fun galloping about.’”

Churchill’s “minimal suffering” remark apparently stems from his letter to The Times (London) on 25 June 1901. At almost the same time, Emily Hobhouse returned from a fact-finding trip to South Africa. Meeting the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, she told of appalling conditions in the ‘concentration camps.’ At that point, it seems to have become a big scandal in Britain.

I’ve found nothing in the Churchill Archives flagging Boer War concentration camps. The government at first denied Hobhouse’s claims. It wasn’t until later that the appalling conditions were confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt.

Camps: what Churchill said

To quote Professor Warren Kimball, “‘Concentration Camps’ as a term for anything but the Nazis’ work is ‘politically’ incorrect and should stay that way.” In any case, having read Churchill’s letter to The Times, I cannot imagine what the critics are talking about. Readers may judge his letter for themselves. (Excerpt below, click here for the full text.)

Churchill does not defend inhumane conditions in the British camps. In fact he condemns them. The “civilized combatant,” he writes, “is obliged, at peril of being classed a savage, to avoid unnecessary cruelty to his enemy.”

His letter mainly criticizes Campbell-Bannerman and Lord Crewe for blaming the government, while excusing the military, for cruelty in the camps. Nevertheless, Churchill allows for the possibility that both may be at fault. The government indeed appointed the Fawcett Commission, which found Emily Hobhouse’s description of the camps accurate.

The phrase about natives firing on white men is not from this letter. It is from a 1900 letter to Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. Churchill was commenting on Boer troops being hardened by facing non-whites in the war. After all, he also said, “we have done without the whole of the magnificent Indian army for the sake of a White man’s War…’” This suggests quite a different attitude than the one Hari implies.

Emily Hobhouse

Churchill’s 1901 letter does not mention Emily Hobhouse. He did, however, write favorably of her more than half a century later, when he knew the full story:

Then, area by area, every man, woman, and child was swept into concentration camps. Such methods could only be justified by the fact that most of the commandos fought in plain clothes, and could only be subdued by wholesale imprisonment, together with the families who gave them succour. Nothing, not even the incapacity of the military authorities when charged with the novel and distasteful task of herding large bodies of civilians into captivity, could justify the conditions in the camps themselves. At length an Englishwoman, Miss Emily Hobhouse, exposed and proclaimed the terrible facts. [Italics added.] Campbell-Bannerman, soon to be Prime Minister, but at this time in Opposition, denounced the camps as “methods of barbarism.”

The truth

Churchill was always horrified at inhumane treatment of civilians or prisoners, from Kitchener’s in the Sudan to Britain’s in South Africa to the Germans’ in the 1940s. On the Holocaust he was as censorious as anyone who ever lived:

There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved.

During the Boer War, Churchill certainly was sympathetic to the Boers, as he was to most brave enemies. including the Indian Pashtuns and the Sudanese Dervishes while “galloping about.” He also knew that in dealing with South Africa, Britain was walking on eggshells. Every British action had to be based on the art of the possible, not on fantasy. t is, I fear, fantasy that drives such warped historical visions as this one.

Excerpts: Churchill to The Times, 25 June 1901

Sir, In his rejoinder to Lord Hugh Cecil, Lord Crewe deals chiefly with two questions. First, if the war in South Africa is being prosecuted by “methods of barbarism,” are the generals responsible or only the Government?… If the methods are of the general’s own choosing, the balance of responsibility, if any exist, rests with him…. Unless there has been unnecessary cruelty, whatever the suffering, there can be no barbarity. If there has been unnecessary cruelty, all who are in any way responsible for it are infected with the taint of inhumanity.

[Second,] is the policy of concentrating the civil inhabitants barbarous? As Lord Hugh Cecil pointed out, the privations of the women and children in the refugee camps are nothing in comparison to those endured by the civil inhabitants of a fortified town during a siege. Nevertheless, as the death-rate shows, they have undoubtedly been severe….

The supreme question is—Was there any alternative action by which this suffering might have been diminished without impeding the military operations? Lord Crewe is silent. He does not tell us…whether they would have faced the alternative to the concentration camps. Would they have refused to accept any responsibility for the Boer women and children left in the devastated districts?… Would they, having trampled the crops—the enemy’s commissariat—or destroyed the houses—often his magazines—have left the women sitting hungry amid the ruins? The mind revolts from such ideas; and so we come to concentration camps, honestly believing that upon the whole they involve the minimum of suffering to the unfortunate people for whom we have made ourselves responsible.

I am, Sir, Yours faithfully
WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

Click here for the full text.

Continued from Part 1…

Youthful discretions

Churchill was born into a world in which virtually all Britons, from the Sovereign to a Covent Garden grocer, believed in their moral superiority. They preached it to their children. All learned that the red portions of the map showed where Britannic civilization had tamed savagery and cured pandemics. Churchill’s assertions, especially as a young man, were often in line with this. And yet he consistently displayed this odd streak of magnanimity and libertarian impulse.

It was Churchill, the aristocratic Victorian, who argued that Dervish enemy in Sudan had a “claim beyond the grave…no less good than that which any of our countrymen could make.” In South Africa, he asserted that Boer racism was intolerable, that the Indian minority deserved the same rights as all British citizens. (This was something Gandhi never forgot, though Churchill did—which Gandhi praised years later, when they were opponents over the India Bill.)

Fair play and magnanimity

After the Great War ended, this same Churchill urged that shiploads of food be sent to a starving Germany as the wartime blockade ended. Other leaders preferred to “squeeze Germany till the pips squeaked.” They did, and the long-term results were not good.

The Jallianwala Bagh or Armritsar massacre of Indians in 1919 found Churchill in full cry against the perpetrators. It was Churchill who in 1920 secured India’s support in the future Hitler war, and assured independent India’s military legacy. Arthur Herman in Gandhi & Churchill writes:

For every disgruntled or discouraged subaltern who joined Japan’s puppet Indian National Army, a dozen KCIOs and VCOs served with distinction on every front in the British war effort…. And the minister of war who created the KCIOs in 1920 had been Winston Churchill…. Churchill never grasped the full magnitude of what he had done, but Gandhi nearly did. Many times over the years he had spoken of brave Indian soldiers who would defend their country and then return home to carry the future burden of freedom.

In the 1920s, it was Churchill who argued that the coal miners should be compensated after the 1926 General Strike. In the 1940s it was Churchill, not FDR, certainly not Stalin, who declared carpet bombing German cities morally reprehensible. Ten years later, he denied South Africa’s demand for Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland without the consent of their inhabitants.

A singular record

No statesmen of stature exhibited such magnanimity for so long: Not the leaders of the Tory or Labour parties; not the chieftains of wars. Many who heard Churchill’s proposals shook their heads. Some thought him a mental case, a traitor to his class, or a good man gone soft. “I have asserted many times and without being contradicted,” writes historian Larry Arnn, “that Winston Churchill never said or implied that the rights of any person were conditioned upon the color of his or her skin.”

There are countless examples of Churchill’s magnanimity bucking what Andrew Roberts called “The Respectable Tendency.”  He recognized and cited the rights of minorities and the oppressed long before the World Wars. He understood that the claim to liberty was not Britain’s alone, and that understanding welled up in his finest hour. Yet similar views had governed his political thought virtually from the start.

Verdict of historians

I often quote what William Manchester wrote. Churchill, he declared,

…always had second and third thoughts, and they usually improved as he went along. It was part of his pattern of response to any political issue that while his early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity. Given time, he could devise imaginative solutions.

Martin Gilbert wrote about the thousands of documents he examined in writing the Official Biography:

I never felt that he was going to spring an unpleasant surprise on me. I might find that he was adopting views with which I disagreed. But I always knew that there would be nothing to cause me to think: “How shocking, how appalling.”

Yet today some writers profess shock at Churchill’s stray, emotional, unworthy remark. Time and again, the full context of what he said produces an entirely opposite impression.

On the matter of Eugenics (Part 1), to equate Churchill’s record with “the extremities practiced to a tee by the Nazis is”—forgive me—pretty extreme.

Dear Superintendent Smith: I write in opposition to the petition to rename Winston Churchill High School. A hard copy of this is in the mail, but this digital version offers links which may be of interest.

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has a digital reference to all of Winston Churchill’s 20 million published words—books, articles, speeches, private papers—and 60 million words about him in biographies, documents and memoirs. They prove that he is not guilty of the charges in the petition reported by Caitlyn Peetz in Bethesda Magazine. I would be glad to participate with your committee or students by email or Zoom if they wish to examine this question further.

The petition on India

The petition argues that Churchill “stole grain from India to feed soldiers in World War II.” Nothing of the kind occurred. Indian grain did feed soldiers (most of them Indian), but it did not come from famine areas. In 1943, Churchill ordered the new Viceroy, General Wavell: “Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages, [preventing] the hoarding of grain for a better market.” He also urged Wavell to ease the strife between Hindus and Muslims: “No form of democratic Government can flourish in India while so many millions are by their birth excluded from those fundamental rights of equality between man and man, upon which all healthy human societies must stand.” (Italics mine.)

In the midst of a world war, Churchill scoured every grain source from Iraq to Australia, which helped bring an end to the 1943-44 famine. Arthur Herman, Pulitzer nominee for Gandhi and Churchill, wrote: “Absent Churchill, the Bengal Famine would have been worse.” Attached is a chapter from my book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, which explains Churchill’s actions in detail. I would be glad to send you a copy of the book for the school library.

“Beastly”

The petition mentions a popular Churchill “quote”—which has only one source, and no other occurrences. Supposedly Churchill said Indians and their religion were “beastly.” This is actually hearsay, from the diaries of Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India. Amery was a good and decent man, but excitable and fiery. His own diaries are not lacking in racist language. In one sentence he used more racial pejoratives than Churchill used in his life. They include the most repulsive term for black people. There is not one instance in our records of Churchill using that word.

Whatever he said, Churchill was referring not to the Indian peoples but to Delhi nationalists, with whom Amery was negotiating. Why did Churchill use the term “beastly,” if indeed he did? The Indian historian Dr. Tirthankar Roy explains. In 1942:

…everything he said about Indians and the Empire was related to the Indian nationalist movement. Negotiating with Indian nationalists during the war could be pointless and dangerous because the moderate nationalists were demoralized by dissensions and the radical nationalists wanted the Axis powers to win on the Eastern Front. No prime minister would be willing to fight a war and negotiate with the nationalists at the same time.

On Africa

The petition claims Churchill ordered Kenyans into camps “where they were subject to severe torture, malnutrition, beatings.” Churchill gave no such order. The Kenya Mau-Mau uprising had more native opponents than supporters. Both it and the local government indulged in atrocities, though the Mau-Mau’s were worse. There are only two instances where Churchill mentioned the Kenya uprising in Cabinet. In one he expressed concern over loss of life. In the second he warned against “mass executions.” Jomo Kenyatta, father of modern Kenya, said: “Mau-Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.”

The petition says Churchill “defended the use of concentration camps in South Africa.” There is no evidence, unless this refers to POW camps in the Boer War. (Churchill himself was incarcerated in one.) From age 25 (when he argued for black rights with his Boer captor in Pretoria), to age 80 (when he denied South Africa’s perennial demand to annex native-run protectorates), Churchill constantly supported native rights in South Africa. Perhaps this is why Nelson Mandela, before addressing a Joint Session in 1994, asked me for a copy of Churchill’s last speech to Congress.

For the rights of all

Dr. Smith, I have spent forty years studying Churchill and defending his good name. He had 90 years to make political and strategic mistakes, and they were sometimes big ones. But assaults on his character and sense of justice are unjustified.

In his time, Churchill expressed support for the rights of peoples of all colors, despite the prevailing prejudices. His defenders sometimes offer the excuse that he was “just a man of his time.” “Everybody,” they say, “was racist then.” Given the truth, this is a disservice. Again and again, Churchill’s views proved far in advance of his time.  As a result, the establishment of his day often regarded him as a dangerous radical.

Your high school deserves to keep his name. I note that one of the alternatives proposed is the name of Frederick Douglass. His statue, along with Churchill’s, is on our Hillsdale campus. A few days ago, a statue of Douglass in Rochester, New York, was ripped from its pedestal and hurled into a gully. In the onward march of ignorance, it appears no hero is safe.

Respectfully, Richard Langworth

This article is dedicated to the memory of Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), below with François Pienaar after the Springboks won the 1995 Rugby World Cup. (See videos at end of article.) Not only did he support and integrate the national sport; he combined Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and Die Stem van Suid-Afrika as a joint national anthem. His Churchillian magnanimity was a model for his time. And even more for ours.

“Almal sal regkom” 

Continued from Part 1.

In 1994 President Nelson Mandela’s representatives asked me for the text of Churchill’s third speech to Congress. He was to address a Joint Session soon after ending Apartheid (racial segregation). I assumed he wanted the 1952 text because it was delivered (for once) in peacetime. There were no Churchill quotes in Mr. Mandela’s speech. But there was a certain echo—of which more anon.

The article prompting this essay argued that Churchill’s support of South African union helped deprive Africans of their rights. The truth is more complicated. Churchill had his faults, and some stemmed from his stubborn optimism. “Almal sal regkom,” he often remarked in Afrikaans: “All will come right.” Much has since come right in South Africa, and Churchill made his contribution.

Apartheid did not begin when Britain united Natal, Cape Colony, the Transvaal and Orange Free State in 1910. It developed gradually, not taking legal form until 1949. Blacks were not everywhere disenfranchised. As Britain approved the Transvaal constitution in July 1906, Churchill and Colonial Secretary Lord Elgin strove to expand liberties against stubborn resistance.

“No cause for present apprehension”

Elgin and Churchill intended to lay the question of native rights before the cabinet. They faced several challenges. First, “nothing could be done for Africans involving the spending of British taxpayers’ money.” Second, there was the feeling: why rush? There was “no serious friction” between blacks and whites. “Each race goes its own way and lives its own life.” There was nothing like the racial animus in America, Britons told each other.

Elgin, with no experience of African Society didn’t share Churchill’s views on the rights of subjects of all colors. Natives could vote in Cape Colony, Elgin conceded. But that would end “when the whites begin to realise that political power is passing out of their hands.” Elgin thought Native councils should be established “to give them freedom to express their views.” How would those views matter? Elgin never addressed the question. “It is therefore all the more remarkable and impressive,” wrote Ronald Hyam, “that so much time was devoted to it.”

The protectorate issue

In April 1908 Lord Crewe replaced Lord Elgin as Colonial Secretary. Simultaneously, Churchill became President of the Board of Trade. This did not prevent Churchill from continuing to strive for native interests.

Churchill declared that a future South African state must concede “our right to be consulted effectively upon the native policy. I would not do anything for them without a sufficient return for the benefit of the native….” Nor should Britain jump to hand over the protectorates. What were these?

Within South Africa’s multiple components were three British protectorates. Basutoland (today’s Lesotho) and Bechuanaland (now Botswana) were established after the First Boer War (1880-81). Swaziland (renamed Eswatini in 2018) became a protectorate after the Second Boer War (1899-1902). All three, governed by native chiefs, proved a major bone of contention. For almost a century, South Africa would demand their annexation. Britain, including Churchill, found one excuse after another not to agree. Finally, in the heyday of Apartheid, Britain granted all three independence.

“Majestic, beneficent, far-reaching…”

The natives’ best security, Churchill told Crewe, was “our power to delay” handing over the protectorates. A few years would surely make a difference:

…the Government of United South Africa will take a broader and calmer view of native questions…. [And] the real security the natives are gaining in education, civilisation and influence so rapidly that they will be far more capable—apart from force altogether—of maintaining their rights, and making their own bargain…. [W]e should assert our intention to hand over the Protectorates…the more South Africa will swallow the better for House of Commons—and should then play steadily for time with all the cards in our hand. [Let us try] to get as much as we can for the natives…. The horse will draw the cart, if both are tied together. But do not let them get separated. Confront Parliament with a complete scheme, majestic, beneficent, far-reaching. Prove to them that you have done your best for the natives.

The drift toward Apartheid

On 31 May 1910 the Union of South Africa, united Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Apartheid was not a word in use then. In the mainly British Cape and Natal, qualified males retained the vote regardless of race. Of course, “qualified” then required minimum income or property ownership. White women received the vote in 1930. By then, as Elgin had predicted, the black franchise in the Cape and Natal had dwindled. Successive governments of the white supremacist National Party (often known as “Nationalists”) chipped away at it, and few blacks or Cape Coloureds were still voting in the 1930s.

Two world wars kept Churchill far from South African affairs. There is no comment in his ‘tween-wars writings on the drift toward segregated societies. South Africa reasserted its claim to the protectorates. Natives should be consulted and their “full acquiescence sought,” answered Edwin Smith in 1938. “Would anyone seriously maintain that the people of this country should keep the one pledge and not the other? A promise given to Africans is just as sacred as a promise given to Afrikaners.”

Botha and Smuts

Churchill’s two best Afrikaner friends were former Boer enemies. Louis Botha (1869-1919), was the country’s first prime minister. Botha succeeded in making South Africa a self-governing Dominion. Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts (1870-1950) became one of Churchill’s closest confidants.

Smuts was no egalitarian, but in his day he was considered moderate. He believed in the government by whites and “the inherent stability and good faith” of blacks. He resisted “breaking down their local tribal customs,” and opposed “the artificial half-baked white ideas we are foisting upon them.”

Malan and the Apartheid campaign

In 1946 the Fagan Commission on native laws recommended easing restrictions on natives in urban areas. It was self-serving, since it contemplated improving the supply of labor. Still, it was not Apartheid. It would have helped ease the poverty in which blacks were forced to live outside white urban areas. Smuts’s support for this reform outraged the National Party, led by Daniel François Malan, an ardent racialist. Malan fought the May 1948 election on color lines, and for the first time we heard the word Apartheid.

Smuts’s United Party ran in part on racial reconciliation—and lost. It was as surprising as Churchill’s defeat in 1945, and Smuts never got over it. He derided the Nationalists for calling his chosen successor Jan Hofmeyr a “kaffir boetie” and “gogga.” In grief and despair, he died two years later.

Smuts and Churchill

Churchill saw himself in Smuts’s defeat. “A great world statesman [was] cast aside by the country he led through so many perils and for whose independence he fought with such valour in bygone days, and for whose revival he worked with so much perseverance over long years, raising South Africa to a level of repute and influence in the world never known before.”

Malan’s drive for Apartheid depressed Smuts. The Population Registration Act of 1950 formalized identity cards specifying one’s race. The Group Areas Act ended mixed races living side by side, allotting each race its separate areas. The 1951 Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act demolished poor black neighborhoods within white enclaves. White employers had to pay for housing of any black workers allowed to reside in white cities. Laws proscribed mixed marriages. The 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act reserved to whites such public facilities as beaches, buses, hospitals, schools and universities. “Whites only” signs appeared, even on park benches. Apartheid seemed at least as severe as American Jim Crow laws, which Britons once proudly claimed “don’t exist here.”

Smuts saw his country “moving into a dark period of totalitarian politics.” In 1950, Malan’s government disenfranchised Cape Coloured (mixed-race) citizens. Government bureaus ran non-white affairs. Malan, Smuts told Churchill, could not “control his republican extremists. [Their propaganda] will influence racial feeling here as no other issue can.”

Bantustans

Before he left office, Malan made another claim to the protectorates. Churchill was Prime Minister when it arrived in 1954, His response stood foursquare for justice:

There can be no question of Her Majesty’s Government agreeing at the present time to the transfer of Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland to the Union of South Africa. We are pledged, since the South Africa Act of 1909, not to transfer these Territories until their inhabitants have been consulted [and] wished it. [South Africa should] not needlessly press an issue on which we could not fall in with their views without failing in our trust.

Within fourteen years, Britain would grant all three protectorates independence. Today, Botswana is one of the most prosperous and democratic countries in Africa.

In 1958 Malan’s successor Hendrik Verwoerd set up twenty “bantustans” or black homelands, nominally independent, but recognized by no other government. Churchill had thought South Africa’s repudiating the Crown inconceivable. He was wrong.  In 1961 Verwoerd proclaimed a republic, leaving a British Commonwealth increasingly critical of Apartheid.

“The oneness of the human race”

Back to Nelson Mandela’s speech to Congress. He did not quote Churchill. I preferred to think his request for Churchill’s speech meant that he shared the Churchillian spirit. There was an echo when he spoke of “the uneasy road to victory” for human rights…

Principal among these was, on the one hand, the willingness of the erstwhile minority rulers to concede political power without first resorting to such resistance as would reduce our country to a wasteland. On the other was the ability of the oppressed majority to forgive and accept a shared destiny with those who had enslaved them. That both black and white in our country can today say we are to one another brother and sister…constitutes a celebration of the oneness of the human race.

A half century before, Churchill told the House of Commons:

…when the ancient Athenians, on one occasion, overpowered a tribe in the Peloponnesus which had wrought them great injury by base, treacherous means, and when they had the hostile army herded on a beach naked for slaughter, they forgave them and set them free, and they said: “This was not because they were men; it was done because of the nature of Man.”

Ever since he asked for Churchill’s speech, I have regarded Nelson Mandela as a Churchillian. I am sure he would not approve of Churchill’s every act toward South Africa over the years. But I have no doubt that he shared two famous Churchill qualities: “In Victory, Magnanimity. In Peace, Goodwill.”

Reflections

Did everything come right in South Africa? An ex-pat friend says: “Not everything. The heady days of Mandela are long gone.” Corruption, crime and poverty still exist. “The best thing is that post-Apartheid it is not a racialistic country.” It is predominantly a two-party parliamentary system with open elections. The white population retains its economic power, but there are many black entrepreneurs, intellectuals and professionals. They are contributing much to the country.”

Was Churchill everywhere right on South Africa? No, but his efforts deserve consideration. Was his attitude paternalistic? “Of course, and you can quote Abraham Lincoln, and most of America’s founders, in precisely the same sense,” writes Hillsdale College’s President Larry Arnn:

The remarkable thing is that Lincoln, for the slaves, and Churchill, for the Empire, believed that people of all colors should enjoy the same rights, and that it was the mission of their country to protect those rights…. I do not think Churchill was typical of the age on this question, if the age was racist.

Another thing to remember is that Lincoln and Churchill were political men. Also they were democratic men. They needed, and thought it was right that they needed, the votes of a majority. If they lived in an age of prejudice (and every age is that) then of course they would be careful how they offended those prejudices.

Videos

South Africa’s dual national anthems, Rugby World Cup, 1995: Click here.

Springboks’ Captain François Pienaar looks back: Click here.

Part 1: 1902-1909

In “Apartheid: Made in Britain,” Richard Dowden argued that Britain not South Africa cost black South Africans their rights. His account is factual as far as it goes, but there is more to say about Churchill’s effort to achieve justice in South Africa.

By the end of the Second Boer War, Britons were as weary as Americans are today over Afghanistan. Both British political parties fought the 1906 election promising peace in South Africa. From 1906 Churchill, now Under-Secretary for the Colonies, represented colonial affairs in the House of Commons. (His chief, the 9th Earl of Elgin, sat in the Lords.) Churchill declared their hope to build upon “reconciliation and not upon the rivalry of races.” It was tall order.

Churchill and the Africans

Churchill’s views about the rights of British subjects of all colors marked him as a dangerous radical. In 1899, imprisoned in Pretoria, he argued with a Boer jailer who mocked Britain’s racial policies:

Well, is it right that a dirty Kaffir should walk on the pavement—without a pass too? That’s what they do in your British Colonies. Brother! Equal! Ugh! Free! Not a bit. We know how to treat Kaffirs…. Ah, that’s you English all over. No, no, old chappie. We educate ’em with a stick…. Insist on their proper treatment will you! Ah, that’s what we’re going to see about now.

“Probing at random,” wrote Churchill “I had touched a very sensitive nerve.” Boer aversion to British rule was “the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man…. The dominant race is to be deprived of their superiority; nor is a tigress robbed of her cubs more furious than is the Boer at this prospect.” He would learn later the depth of that ferocity.

South Africa: spinning top of diversity

In 1907, Churchill made a tour of British East Africa. From the East Africa Protectorate (later Kenya) Churchill wrote the King: “There can be no question of our handing over this beautiful Protectorate upon which we have spent so much, with its 4 or 5 millions of Your Majesty’s native subjects, to the control of the first few thousand white men who happen to arrive in the country.”

Though Churchill respected Boer agronomy and fighting prowess, South Africa posed a knotty problem for any peacemaker. Natives outnumbered Boers and British by five to one. Cape Colony contained significant numbers of “Cape Coloureds” and Jews.  There were also Indians, on whose behalf Mohandas Gandhi was prominent. Years later, Gandhi remembered: “I have got a good recollection of Mr. Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill.”

Churchill favored a generous settlement with the Boers. A war-weary public agreed. South Africa was quite different from other British African territory. So many peoples who cordially deplored each other suggests the enormity of Churchill’s task. Yet he was confident of the right tactic. Make the Boers “one of the foundations of our position in South Africa.” Then “we shall be building upon the rock.”

“Equal rights irrespective of colour”

Pro-native, Churchill was on the “radical wing” of the Liberal Party, but even that wing had its prejudices. He favored “party government…upon racial lines. It is so at the Cape.” In the British Cape Colony, qualified blacks voted.

Nothing more united the whites, Churchill declared, than politicizing natives. In the war it was “a nameless crime on either side to set the black man on his fellow foe.” Yet Churchill recognized Britain’s responsibility:

We will endeavour…to advance the principle of equal rights of civilized men irrespective of colour. We will not—at least I will pledge myself—hesitate to speak out when necessary if any plain case of cruelty of exploitation of the native for the sordid profit of the white man can be proved.

Pleasing Gandhi, he promised “a proper status for our Indian fellow subjects.” He demanded “good, well-watered land” for natives to “dwell secluded and at peace.” Examples of the latter were three British protectorates administered by native chiefs, Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland. Britain resisted periodic attempts by South Africa to annex these territories. In the 1960s they became the independent nations of Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini.

“Terminological inexactitude”

Churchill had also to address the problem of Chinese coolies, indentured workers in the Rand goldmines. The Liberals campaigned in 1906 against what they called “Chinese slavery.” Churchill abjured the term, since they were paid wages, not bought or sold, and free to return home. He famously quipped this could not be called slavery “without some risk of terminological inexactitude.”

Churchill’s contentions on behalf of the Chinese brought him into conflict with leading conservatives like Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain. But the South Africa High Commissioner, Lord Selborne, understood Churchill’s position. The Boers were simply bemused. Boer leader Jan Smuts remarked: “Winston’s pity for the Chinese-flogging [Transvaal Governor] Milner is no less Olympian than that for the benighted radical who thought the Chinese indentures partook of the nature of slavery.”

Ultimately, white and native labor gradually replaced the coolies, and a vexatious problem vanished. The greater challenge was: who would run the Boer colonies in the future?

The Transvaal constitution

Throughout 1906, Churchill pressed for Responsible Government in the Transvaal and Orange Free State. He also denounced Natal courts’ treatment of blacks. Elgin and Churchill hoped Boer territories would allow native governing councils, as in the British protectorates. But both agreed that “harsh laws are sometimes better than no laws at all.” Without Boer collaboration there would be “more injustice and tyranny on the natives.” Elgin believed that forced equality would “prejudice the just expectations of natives.” The right time was when “the two races stand more on an equal footing.”

Churchill insisted that “our responsibility to the native races remains a real one.” The Union of South Africa, he hoped, would finally place “treatment of native races upon a broad and secure platform….”

The Transvaal elected its first parliament in February 1907. Churchill thought a Boer majority  “quite impossible.” He was wrong. The Boer Het Volk Party won a majority of five, and Churchill’s only consolation was that his friend Louis Botha became prime minister. In December, the Orangia Unie (Orange Union) took twenty-nine of thirty-eight seats in the Orange Free State. Black voting was thus proscribed. Yet no one believed this was worth reopening the Boer War.

Pros and cons

Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman congratulated Churchill over the Transvaal constitution: “The finest and noblest work of the British power in recent times.” Randolph Churchill, writing his father’s biography, praised his “urgency and assiduity…the cogency of his arguments, his mastery of the task.”

But Campbell-Bannerman was writing in 1907, Randolph Churchill in 1967. That was then but this is now. In 2014, Christopher Beckvold wrote: “The British Government was partly responsible for Apartheid and…Churchill was just as responsible as a member of the Government. [But] historians do not want to slander a great man.”

Not exactly. Richard Dowden’s “Apartheid: Made in Britain” appeared twenty years before Mr. Beckvold’s thesis.

Let us add up the score. From his first encounter with South Africa in 1899, Churchill stood up for native rights. That was an uncommon thing among Victorian Englishmen. After the Boer War, he publicly and privately emphasized fair play for black Africans. In Parliament he promoted “good, well-watered land” for native cultures. Without Boer cooperation, nothing could be done. Churchill hoped, vainly, that the Boer colonies might merge into a more liberal union. As late as 1954, as we shall see, he denied South Africa the British protectorates. One of them is now among Africa’s most prosperous countries.

“The Art of the Possible”

It is quite true, as Mr. Dowden wrote, that Churchill’s policies in 1906-07 abetted Boer power. That power waxed with the Union of South Africa in 1910 and the election of Louis Botha as its first prime minister. Under later National (aka “Nationalist”) Party governments, the black vote in the Cape and Natal gradually withered. So did Churchill’s hopes for more moderate evolution. But as Bismarck said, “Politics is the art of the possible.”

Mr. Dowden ended his 1994 article with “half a cheer” for Churchill’s chief, Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Elgin. In 1906, he wrote, Elgin hoped “that Afrikaners would, ‘in some time to come’ see the good sense of granting ‘reasonable representation to the natives.’ I suppose you could say his wish has come true—at last.”

In 1907, Elgin wrote Churchill: “I am not satisfied that a compromise is impossible.” Churchill favored just such an arrangement. “I would not,” he replied, “do anything for them without a sufficient return for the benefit of the native.”

Perhaps we might offer half a cheer for Winston Churchill, too.

Concluded in Part 2: From 1910 to the Age of Mandela.