African resistance and rebellion: The other side of World War I
/On Sept. 15, 1914, barely six weeks after war broke out in Europe and was quickly exported to the eastern and western shores of Africa, something unexpected happened as it reached the southern tip of the continent. While troops from the South African dominion of the British Empire prepared to invade neighboring German South West Africa (now Namibia), Christiaan Frederick Beyers, the highest-ranking member and commandant of South Africa’s army, resigned.
“It is said that the war is being waged against the ‘barbarism’ of the Germans,” Beyers reportedly wrote to explain his decision. “We have forgiven but not forgotten all the barbarities committed in our own country during the South African War.” He was referring to the Second Anglo-Boer War, a brutal annexation campaign that the British launched and won against Afrikaners 12 years earlier.
His resignation marked the beginning of the Maritz rebellion, named after the general who allied with the Germans to boost its chances of success. Over the next five months, Beyers and a number of other military officers gathered 12,000 Afrikaner troops, proclaimed an independent South African republic and battled an army of 32,000 men — among them 20,000 Afrikaners loyal to the British crown — in hopes of toppling the acting South African government.
