Results 1 to 4 of 4
  1. #1
    Moderator KK20's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2008
    Location
    my heart at the sea and my soul in the mountains
    Posts
    14,326

    Default ANGLO BOER WAR: Magersfontein, December 11th

    Eighty-five years and one-day ago, on December 11th, 1924, the Republic of Finland celebrated a very special anniversary. The state and the military establishment hosted it at the Officers’ Casino Building in the Katajanokka neighborhood of Helsinki. The celebration commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Magersfontein, part of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.

    The conservative newspaper Uusi Suomi (New Finland) advertised the event on its front page, and the periodicals of the Finnish Civil Guard published articles on the conflict between the Boer republics and the British Empire. The celebration opened with the the Finnish Naval Orchestra’s performance of “Kent gij dat volk,” the South African anthem. Among the guests of honor were Lauri Malmberg, the minister of defense, and Per Zilliacus, the chief of staff of the Civil Guard. The Finnish Civil Guard also sent a wreath tied with blue-white ribbons to South Africa, where it was laid at the monument on the battlefield of Magersfontein.

    Why did independent Finland celebrate a battle fought in a British colonial conflict in South Africa? Simple: Finnish volunteers had fought in the battle as soldiers of the Scandinavian Corps of the Boer forces. The Scandinavian Corps was founded in Pretoria on September 23rd, 1899, supposedly as a testimony of loyalty felt by the Scandinavian immigrants towards the South African Republic. It included 118 men; 48 Swedes, 24 Danes, 19 Finns, 13 Norwegians and 14 other miscellaneous nationalities, mainly Germans and Dutch. In addition, three Swedish women served as nurses in a separate ambulance unit. The Scandinavians fought in the siege of Mafeking and the battles of Magersfontein and Paardeberg; of these, Magersfontein was the most significant.

    Magersfontein monument

    After the war, a special Scandinavian monument was constructed on the battlefield. The monument consisted of four cornerstones, representing the four Nordic countries, each decorated with the Scandinavian valkyrie and national symbols of each country. The verse is from Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s March of the Pori Regiment, these days the ofificial Finnish presidential march: “On valiant men the faces of their fathers smile.”

    The names of the fallen soldiers are engraved on the shield. Emil Mattsson died in Magersfontein; he’s buried in the field. The British captured Henrik Hägglöf, who died from his wounds at an infirmary near the Orange River. Johan Jakob Johansson — whose name is mistakenly written “Jakobsson” — died at the prison camp on St. Helena and is buried in grave number 18 at the Knollcombe cemetery. The name of Matts Laggnäs, another Finnish volunteer who died in captivity on St. Helena, is missing.

    My very first peer-reviewed academic article concerned this very topic, and it was published in the Finnish Journal of History a few years ago. Afterwards, I was delighted to note that an Afrikaner fluent in Finnish had read my article and discussed it in his own blog. Reading my own text translated in Afrikaans was an interesting experience. The term “Boer War” was translated as Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, the “Second War for Freedom.” The official term in the Afrikaner historiography for the wars against the British Empire in 1880-1881 and 1899-1901 were the First and Second War for Freedom, and the terms seem to still be in use. Non-Afrikaner South Africans do not seem to use the phrase, understandably enough.

    The history leaves us with three obvious questions. What significance does the Anglo-Boer War have today, eleven decades after the war broke out? What is the significance of the Finnish Republic’s 1924 commemoration of its citizens’ participation in that war? And what are we to make of the fact that an event considered highly significant in 1924 has been almost forgotten in 2009?

    The first one is the impact of migration on war, both civil and interstate. Those Finns who volunteered to fight in the Boer forces were, of course, immigrants, people who had come to the gold fields of Witwatersrand in search of wealth and a better life. Some had arrived directly from Finland, others came via United States. The uptick in immigration to the Transvaal had been one of the proximate causes of the war, and the British guest-workers and settlers — the so-called “uitlanders” — formed a fifth column through which the British Empire sought to strengthen its grip over the Boer republic.

    As a military strategy, the British attempt to control the Transvaal via migration failed utterly. After the outbreak of the war, most of the British immigrants were either deported or decided to leave on their own, rather than fight the Boer governments. Worse yet (from London’s perspective) but the non-British immigrants — Germans, Dutch, Italians, Irish, Russians, and obviously Scandinavians, including Finns — decided to stay and support the Boer war effort.

    On the other hand, as a pretext to subvert the South African republics and bring them under the ambit of the British Empire, the ploy succeeded brilliantly. Britain could claim that it went to war to “protect the rights of her citizens,” a classic measure used also by the United States (unsuccessfully) against Canada in 1812 and (rather more successfully) Mexico in 1848. The strategem is by no means dead today: as we all know, Russia has recently started to insist that it has the legal right to use military force to “protect her citizens also abroad,” a doctrine demonstrated in the South Ossetian war a year ago.

    This brings up another factor: the behavior of the great powers, which appears little different today from what it was back in 1899-1902. The Boer War triggered an international anti-war movement, not all that different from the movement that emerged after the American invasion of Iraq. Many labelled the invasion of Iraq an “oil war;” likewise, British actions in South Africa were considered by many to have been motivated by the region’s extensive deposits of gold. And as in Iraq, a quick invasion and occupation was followed by a long and bitter guerrilla war. The outcry over Abu Ghraib was a feint echo of the howls generated by the British concentration camps; and as noted, the British had their own Guantánamo in the island prisons of Ceylon and St. Helena, the latter of which housed Finnish prisoners for nineteen long months.

    The third factor is the position of the small nations. The Boer resistance against the British Empire set an example for national movements of the time. Both Sun Yat-Sen and Arthur Griffith paid special attention to the Boer struggle. This explains the Finnish fascination with the Boers. At the time of the war, the Grand-Duchy of Finland had become a target of Russian imperial reaction. The February Manifesto of 1899 began a Russian attempt to abrogate Finnish autonomous institutions and integrate it into the Russian Empire. The Boer resistance to Britain aroused sympathy in beleaguered Finland, and the participation of the Finnish volunteers in the battle on the Boer side became as a source of pride. Arvid Neovius, one of the organizers of the underground opposition to Russia, wrote an article where he spoke of the “intellectual guerrilla warfare” and argued for modelling Finnish passive resistance to Russia on Boer hit-and-run-tactics. The South African national anthem became a popular protest song that eventually found its way into Finnish schoolbooks. Finnish participation in another country’s war of national liberation was very much alive in 1924, only seven years after independence, and long before recognition of the sins of apartheid clouded the European view of the Afrikaner “liberation struggle.”

    Author Antero Manninen later described the view of the Boer War with the following words: “Over forty years ago, as the 19th century was drawing to a close, two small nations became targets of unjustified pressure and attack by their greater and more powerful neighbors. One of these was our own nation, whose special political status was singled out for elimination in the so-called February Manifesto; the other one were the Boers, living on the other side of the globe. This common experience between our nations was the reason why the people of Finland, like the entire civilized world, followed the Boers and their struggle for independence with special sympathy, and rejoiced for the successes they gained in the early stages of the war.”

    The situation was paradoxical, because Russian popular opinion in 1899-1902 was also very sympathetic towards the Boers. Consequently, the Russian press could write with official state endorsement articles espousing a pro-Boer and anti-British postion ... while at the same time, the Governor-General would censor similar articles in Finnish newspapers.

    The foreign volunteers who fought with the Boer forces — John MacBride perhaps as the most famous example — utilized their talents in later conflicts in their own homelands. The “flying columns” invented by Boer commandos became a standard tactic in the Irish Republican Army, and the terrorists of our own times have inherited these same practices. In Finland, the Boers were an example to both the Civil Guards, which formed the White forces in the Civil War of 1918, and their Red Guard opponents. Lennart Lindgren, the commander of the Oulu Red Guard in 1918, was a veteran of the Boer War, and even Väinö Linna’s Under the North Star — something of a modern national epic in Finland, recently made into a movie for the second time — includes a reference to Finnish Red guardsmen “reminiscing the stories about the Boers, which they had heard from their parents as small boys.”

    There is a further irony in the fact that most of the Finns who \left for South Africa were Swedish-speaking, from coastal Ostrobothnia. This was an era of a bitter language strife in Finland, when the rural Swedish population sought to present itself as a separate ethnicity of “Finland Swedes.” Nevertheless, the immigrants to South Africa identified closely with their former homeland, and set up a separate Finnish platoon rather than merging with the Swedish nationals who made up the majority of the Scandinavian Corps. Of the eighteen men who served in the Finnish platoon, only three spoke Finnish as their first language, but it appears that all of them regarded themselves as Finns. Matts Gustafsson, one of the volunteers who wrote poems, later noted, “Och wi voro finnar hwarendaste man,” which translates to, “And we were Finns, every single man.”

    Incidentally, language relations in Finland have recently become somewhat strained again.

    Immigration, great power politics, questions of natural resources, relations with Russia, and even minority relations are themes which are, of course, very relevant today. But the 25th Finnish anniversary of the Battle of Magersfontein was the first and the last of its kind. These days, no one in Finland remembers the importance that the South African war once had, and one would have to be either very well-versed in history or extremely nostalgic to remember the Finnish participation in the conflict. No one in Finland is going to light a candle today and recite the words “De God onzer voorvaden heeft ons heden een schitterende overwinning gegeven,” and few remember how the clash between a few amateur Finnish riflemen and elite Scottish soldiers gained national symbolic importance for a very brief moment. The significance of that forgetting is left as an exercise for another time, and a question for our readers.
    live out your imagination , not your history.

  2. #2
    User
    Join Date
    Jan 2017
    Location
    Finland, 60 degrees north
    Age
    59
    Posts
    1,834

    Default Re: ANGLO BOER WAR: Magersfontein, December 11th

    Thank you for an extremely interesting article, I learned a lot from my own history

  3. #3
    Moderator KK20's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2008
    Location
    my heart at the sea and my soul in the mountains
    Posts
    14,326

    Default Re: ANGLO BOER WAR: Magersfontein, December 11th

    It is a pity I don't how to post pictures ((
    live out your imagination , not your history.

  4. #4
    User
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Location
    Limpopo.
    Posts
    314

    Default Re: ANGLO BOER WAR: Magersfontein, December 11th

    I learned a lot as well. Thank you for posting!

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •