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La guerra en Sudáfrica
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), el creador de Sherlock Holmes, escribió al filo del novecientos dos obras, a medio camino entre la historia y el periodismo, sobre la Segunda Guerra Bóer (1899-1902), que enfrentó a los afrikáners y al imperio británico, y que tuvo una amplia repercusión en la Europa de su tiempo. La primera de ellas fue The Great Boer War, publicada en 1900, antes de que concluyera el conflicto y por ello acrecentada en sucesivas ediciones; la segunda, esta de La guerra en Sudáfrica (1902). Su objetivo según nos informa el autor en sus memorias no es escribir la historia de la guerra, cosa que ya hizo en el libro anterior, «sino tocar ciertos puntos acerca de los cuales se ha tratado de desviar la opinión en el continente y en los Estados Unidos», y lo hará «no a la manera del abogado que prepara un informe, sino con la recta intención de pintar la cosa tal cual es, aun en aquello en que me atrevo a diferir, ya del modo de obrar del gobierno inglés, ya del de los generales en el campo». El resultado, una minuciosa y bien trabada defensa de la postura y actuación británicas, una pionera obra maestra de la propaganda política, tuvo un éxito inmediato en Inglaterra y fue pronto traducida a las principales lenguas (sería el primer libro suyo traducido al español). No reeditada nunca, esa temprana traducción de 1902 se ofrece ahora conveniente revisada y nos permite descubrir que el gran narrador que fue siempre Conan Doyle no deja de serlo cuando pone su arte en la defensa de unos ideales por los que en unos casos imperialismo, colonialismo ha pasado inmisericordemente el tiempo, pero que en otros, la mayoría, siguen siendo tan actuales hoy como entonces.
- GenresHistorySouth AfricaWar
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 17, 1902
24 people are currently reading
157 people want to read
About the author
Arthur Conan Doyle
15.8k books24.3k followersSir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a Scottish writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.
Doyle was a prolific writer. In addition to the Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle's early short stories, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of the brigantine Mary Celeste, found drifting at sea with no crew member aboard.
Doyle was a prolific writer. In addition to the Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle's early short stories, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of the brigantine Mary Celeste, found drifting at sea with no crew member aboard.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
September 1, 2021
The war that was fought in South Africa between British and Boer forces between 1899 and 1902 saw plenty of cruel and unjust behaviour on both sides. And it is sad to contemplate how such a gifted author as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could lower himself to the role of propagandist, with his 1901 tract The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct.
Conan Doyle may have had his own reasons, aside from British patriotism, for writing as he did. The author of the Sherlock Holmes tales had been a physician by training before turning to writing, and he put his medical training to good use on behalf of the British Army, serving at a field hospital in Bloemfontein in 1900, during the South African War. He would have seen plenty of horribly wounded young Britons, bearing the scars of fighting carried on by Boer commandos who used guerrilla tactics and sabotage to compensate for their inferior numbers. It would be understandable if Conan Doyle felt compassion for the suffering of these young men, and wanted to vindicate their cause.
But there may have been other motivations as well for Conan Doyle to write as he did. By 1900, the British Government was already facing mounting criticism of the manner in which British forces were waging the war – criticism from British opposition politicians and newspapers, from mainland Europe, and even from the Americas. Conan Doyle had already written another South Africa-related work, The Great Boer War (1900), and he seems to have felt that that book should have silenced all criticism of British policy in South Africa. When it did not, he wrote The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct as a way to keep setting forth his arguments.
Not being terribly familiar with South Africa’s earlier history, I did learn a great deal from Conan Doyle’s The War in South Africa regarding the events that led up to the war of 1899-1902. I learned, for example, about the Slachter’s Neck rebellion of 1815, when Afrikaner farmers rose up against British efforts to prevent Boer mistreatment of enslaved indigenous African workers; the British quelled the rebellion, executing a number of ringleaders. For Afrikaners of the 19th century, the event seems to have had a great deal of nationalistic significance.
I also learned about the process by which Boer voortrekkers (pioneers) traveled north to escape British hegemony and established two Boer republics – the South African Republic or Transvaal, and the Orange Free State. The mid-19th century treaties establishing these two states spoke of their being under British “suzerainty” – a term so vague that it all but guaranteed future conflict between nationalistic Boers and empire-minded Britons.
One of the key issues that seems to have led up to the South African War was the question of voting rights, and citizenship rights generally, for non-Boers (or at least white non-Boers) living in the two Boer republics. The Boers seem to have wanted an ethnically unified Boer state; the British opposed that idea. And what Conan Doyle says of the policies of the Orange Free State at that time is clearly applicable, for him, to the Transvaal as well:
It is evident that if the Free State rushed headlong to utter destruction it was not for want of wise voices which tried to guide her to some safer path. But there seems to have been a complete hallucination as to the comparative strength of the two opponents, and as to the probable future of South Africa. Under no possible future could the Free State be better off than it was already, a perfectly free and independent republic; and yet the country was carried away by race-prejudice spread broadcast from a subsidised press and an unchristian pulpit. (pp. 29-30)
Conan Doyle occasionally – as in the above passage and the earlier reference to Slachter’s Neck – refers to Boer racism, discrimination, and violence against South Africa’s black majority. When he states that “The Imperial Government has always taken an honourable and philanthropic view of the rights of the native and the claim which he has to the protection of the law. We hold, and rightly, that British justice, if not blind, should at least be colour-blind”, and when he refers to the Boers as citizens of a society built upon white-supremacist ideals, he engages a potential strong point in his argument – one that could conceivably carry weight in world opinion.
But having once or twice asserted that “The British Government in South Africa has always played the unpopular part of the friend and protector of the native servants” (p. 5), he largely drops the issue of the rights and the treatment of South Africa’s black majority. It is clear enough that the conflict in which Conan Doyle is truly interested is the conflict between the British and the Boers.
And the war came. Irregular modes of warfare by Boer commandos led to steadily harsher British efforts at repression – up to and including the establishment of concentration camps for the incarceration of Boer civilians, including women and children whose husbands and fathers were presumably out on commando.
It is sad to see a writer of Conan Doyle’s stature trying to justify the concentration camps. He describes them as “camps of refuge for the women and children, where, out of reach, as we hoped, of all harm, they could await the return of peace” (p. 52). He assures us that “The sites seem to have been well chosen, and the arrangements in most cases all that could be wished”; but then he starts making excuses for the rapid deterioration of conditions at the camps, writing that “They were formed…at an unfortunate moment” (p. 52), and going on about cut railways, and the difficulties of feeding a large army, and so on and so forth. And he had reason for needing to do so: as many as 150,000 Boer civilians were held in the concentration camps, and up to 25,000 of them died there.
With similarly elaborate verbal gymnastics, Conan Doyle tries to refute charges that the British forces in South Africa have engaged in illegal killings or excessive violence. He states that “From the first the position of the Boers was entirely irregular as regards the recognised rules of warfare” (p. 74). He goes on at some length about the Boers not being in uniform – a point of detail under which many Continental soldiers from the American Revolution and many Confederate soldiers from the American Civil War could have been deprived of the Hague Convention protections that he cites. He then adds that “As the war dragged on…it took a more savage character upon the part of our enemy, and it says much for the discipline of the British troops that they have held their hands and refused to punish a whole nation for the cruelty and treachery of a few” (p. 75).
Again, Conan Doyle is presenting a highly selective history. As in other military conflicts where a large conventional army is facing a smaller force that conducts an insurgency via irregular means of combat, the pressure on soldiers who find themselves fighting an invisible enemy – one that strikes without warning and then disappears into a population of possibly sympathetic civilians – can lead, all too easily, to extra-legal army violence against civilians. The film Breaker Morant (1980), about three Australian soldiers who faced war-crimes charges in 1902 for executing captured Boers, conveys well the process through which such violence can take place. And any objective history of the South African War would have to establish that there were a great many hideous atrocities carried out, throughout that war, by adherents of both sides.
In short, Conan Doyle’s The War in South Africa is a painful read. What a sad thing it is to see the extraordinarily gifted author of the Sherlock Holmes tales descending to this sort of special pleading. Holmes himself, from his home at 221-B Baker Street, would have swiftly anatomized and mercilessly dispatched the logical fallacies and flaws in Conan Doyle’s reasoning. But The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct reminds us that there can be times when even great authors refuse to permit themselves to look upon their times with clear eyes and try to see the truth.
Conan Doyle may have had his own reasons, aside from British patriotism, for writing as he did. The author of the Sherlock Holmes tales had been a physician by training before turning to writing, and he put his medical training to good use on behalf of the British Army, serving at a field hospital in Bloemfontein in 1900, during the South African War. He would have seen plenty of horribly wounded young Britons, bearing the scars of fighting carried on by Boer commandos who used guerrilla tactics and sabotage to compensate for their inferior numbers. It would be understandable if Conan Doyle felt compassion for the suffering of these young men, and wanted to vindicate their cause.
But there may have been other motivations as well for Conan Doyle to write as he did. By 1900, the British Government was already facing mounting criticism of the manner in which British forces were waging the war – criticism from British opposition politicians and newspapers, from mainland Europe, and even from the Americas. Conan Doyle had already written another South Africa-related work, The Great Boer War (1900), and he seems to have felt that that book should have silenced all criticism of British policy in South Africa. When it did not, he wrote The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct as a way to keep setting forth his arguments.
Not being terribly familiar with South Africa’s earlier history, I did learn a great deal from Conan Doyle’s The War in South Africa regarding the events that led up to the war of 1899-1902. I learned, for example, about the Slachter’s Neck rebellion of 1815, when Afrikaner farmers rose up against British efforts to prevent Boer mistreatment of enslaved indigenous African workers; the British quelled the rebellion, executing a number of ringleaders. For Afrikaners of the 19th century, the event seems to have had a great deal of nationalistic significance.
I also learned about the process by which Boer voortrekkers (pioneers) traveled north to escape British hegemony and established two Boer republics – the South African Republic or Transvaal, and the Orange Free State. The mid-19th century treaties establishing these two states spoke of their being under British “suzerainty” – a term so vague that it all but guaranteed future conflict between nationalistic Boers and empire-minded Britons.
One of the key issues that seems to have led up to the South African War was the question of voting rights, and citizenship rights generally, for non-Boers (or at least white non-Boers) living in the two Boer republics. The Boers seem to have wanted an ethnically unified Boer state; the British opposed that idea. And what Conan Doyle says of the policies of the Orange Free State at that time is clearly applicable, for him, to the Transvaal as well:
It is evident that if the Free State rushed headlong to utter destruction it was not for want of wise voices which tried to guide her to some safer path. But there seems to have been a complete hallucination as to the comparative strength of the two opponents, and as to the probable future of South Africa. Under no possible future could the Free State be better off than it was already, a perfectly free and independent republic; and yet the country was carried away by race-prejudice spread broadcast from a subsidised press and an unchristian pulpit. (pp. 29-30)
Conan Doyle occasionally – as in the above passage and the earlier reference to Slachter’s Neck – refers to Boer racism, discrimination, and violence against South Africa’s black majority. When he states that “The Imperial Government has always taken an honourable and philanthropic view of the rights of the native and the claim which he has to the protection of the law. We hold, and rightly, that British justice, if not blind, should at least be colour-blind”, and when he refers to the Boers as citizens of a society built upon white-supremacist ideals, he engages a potential strong point in his argument – one that could conceivably carry weight in world opinion.
But having once or twice asserted that “The British Government in South Africa has always played the unpopular part of the friend and protector of the native servants” (p. 5), he largely drops the issue of the rights and the treatment of South Africa’s black majority. It is clear enough that the conflict in which Conan Doyle is truly interested is the conflict between the British and the Boers.
And the war came. Irregular modes of warfare by Boer commandos led to steadily harsher British efforts at repression – up to and including the establishment of concentration camps for the incarceration of Boer civilians, including women and children whose husbands and fathers were presumably out on commando.
It is sad to see a writer of Conan Doyle’s stature trying to justify the concentration camps. He describes them as “camps of refuge for the women and children, where, out of reach, as we hoped, of all harm, they could await the return of peace” (p. 52). He assures us that “The sites seem to have been well chosen, and the arrangements in most cases all that could be wished”; but then he starts making excuses for the rapid deterioration of conditions at the camps, writing that “They were formed…at an unfortunate moment” (p. 52), and going on about cut railways, and the difficulties of feeding a large army, and so on and so forth. And he had reason for needing to do so: as many as 150,000 Boer civilians were held in the concentration camps, and up to 25,000 of them died there.
With similarly elaborate verbal gymnastics, Conan Doyle tries to refute charges that the British forces in South Africa have engaged in illegal killings or excessive violence. He states that “From the first the position of the Boers was entirely irregular as regards the recognised rules of warfare” (p. 74). He goes on at some length about the Boers not being in uniform – a point of detail under which many Continental soldiers from the American Revolution and many Confederate soldiers from the American Civil War could have been deprived of the Hague Convention protections that he cites. He then adds that “As the war dragged on…it took a more savage character upon the part of our enemy, and it says much for the discipline of the British troops that they have held their hands and refused to punish a whole nation for the cruelty and treachery of a few” (p. 75).
Again, Conan Doyle is presenting a highly selective history. As in other military conflicts where a large conventional army is facing a smaller force that conducts an insurgency via irregular means of combat, the pressure on soldiers who find themselves fighting an invisible enemy – one that strikes without warning and then disappears into a population of possibly sympathetic civilians – can lead, all too easily, to extra-legal army violence against civilians. The film Breaker Morant (1980), about three Australian soldiers who faced war-crimes charges in 1902 for executing captured Boers, conveys well the process through which such violence can take place. And any objective history of the South African War would have to establish that there were a great many hideous atrocities carried out, throughout that war, by adherents of both sides.
In short, Conan Doyle’s The War in South Africa is a painful read. What a sad thing it is to see the extraordinarily gifted author of the Sherlock Holmes tales descending to this sort of special pleading. Holmes himself, from his home at 221-B Baker Street, would have swiftly anatomized and mercilessly dispatched the logical fallacies and flaws in Conan Doyle’s reasoning. But The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct reminds us that there can be times when even great authors refuse to permit themselves to look upon their times with clear eyes and try to see the truth.
November 6, 2019
DNF @ 20%.
I just couldn't anymore.
History is written by the victors. But can you at least write the truth?????
Seems, the answer is NO.
This was meant as propaganda.
And it is propaganda of the worst kind.
I just couldn't anymore.
History is written by the victors. But can you at least write the truth?????
Seems, the answer is NO.
This was meant as propaganda.
And it is propaganda of the worst kind.
June 9, 2021
Escrito por el célebre autor de las aventuras de Sherlock Holmes, que siempre prefirió ser recordado por este tipo de obras históricas y de divulgación que por sus relatos de detectives. Sus primeros capítulos tienen valor histórico de divulgación sobre la segunda Guerra Bóer. Sin embargo, como ya se adelanta en el prefacio, la obra pretendió ser un escrito propagandístico británico para tumbar la propaganda antiimperialista generada en Europa a raíz de esta guerra contra el pueblo afrikaner. Esta motivación se hace patente hacia la mitad del libro, limitando considerablemente el interés de la obra, que se limita a una hagiografía sobre las actuaciones del ejército británico sobre el terreno. En cualquier caso, continua siendo de interés como ejemplo de propaganda de guerra redactada allá cuando está todavía estaba sucediendo. Por supuesto, dado el autor, está perfectamente escrita.
June 27, 2016
Author Arthur Conan Doyle recounts the events leading up to the two-year war in South Africa at the beginning of the 20th century between the Boer republics of South Africa and the British colonial empire. Doyle presents the Boers, comprised largely of Dutch and German immigrants, as the antagonist, accusing them of forcing Great Britain into war. Once the war is under way, European press begin attacking British troops, accusing them of atrocities, rudeness, disrespect and other foul acts toward Boer women and children as well as prisoners. Doyle spends at least three chapters defending the honor and humanity of British soldiers, while simultaneously presenting accounts of Boer atrocities toward British prisoners of war as well as South African native tribesmen.
The author's commitment to defending the honor of his fellow countrymen is noble, but he devotes so little space to discussing the history of the relationship between the Boers and the natives as to question whether or not Great Britain held any concern for the possibility of racial genocide occurring right under their noses. Doyle seems to take pride in mentioning that the British granted the Boers the right of self-government and questions why the Boers would be so eager to wage a war of independence under those circumstances.
The author's commitment to defending the honor of his fellow countrymen is noble, but he devotes so little space to discussing the history of the relationship between the Boers and the natives as to question whether or not Great Britain held any concern for the possibility of racial genocide occurring right under their noses. Doyle seems to take pride in mentioning that the British granted the Boers the right of self-government and questions why the Boers would be so eager to wage a war of independence under those circumstances.
December 23, 2011
This is really a propaganda piece for the British War effort in South Africa, written as the war was taking place. Not of much interest today to anyone but a student of British bellicosity.
October 20, 2024
If you have read this book or are thinking about reading this book i beg of you to do one thing, go to the boer war wikipedia page and read its content. For every one soldier the british killed they killed 7 civilians. The british sent 100,000 people to concentration camps leading to the death of 26,370 woman and children due to starvation. If you agree with the views of this book then i truly pray for you. The hypocrisy of the british is not surprising but it is very frightening.
August 2, 2021
Listening
Due to eye issues and damage from shingles Alexa reads to me.
A novella with lots of details on why the War happened. Not my kind of reading give it a try. Enjoy the adventure of reading 📚2021
Due to eye issues and damage from shingles Alexa reads to me.
A novella with lots of details on why the War happened. Not my kind of reading give it a try. Enjoy the adventure of reading 📚2021
May 29, 2016
El tono del libro es propagandístico, así que no sirve para conocer la realidad de la Segunda Guerra Bóer, pero sí que es interesante para descubrir la faceta más patriotera de Arthur Conan Doyle, y así acercarse un poco más a la figura del padre de Sherlock Holmes.
June 17, 2014
Enjoyable read but with a decidedely pro-British slant. Would have liked to have heard more from the other side.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews