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.
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.
Very nice, Jussi! And the question of the forgetting is an interesting one.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero | December 13, 2009 at 04:08 PM
Noel's handy map tells us that we have a South African reader. Welcome!
Bernard, the question of why the participation of the Finnish volunteers in the South African War was eventually so completely forgotten is difficult to answer. I can just as well mention some of the data points here, because I can't really explain it any better even if I wrote a detailed analysis.
During the inter-war era, the memory of the war was invoked in Finland on many occasions. As I mentioned, Kent gij dat volk was translated in Finnish and included in elementary school songbooks. The festivities of 1924 were followed by a Scandinavian shooting contest named "Memory of Magersfontein" in Helsinki in the summer of 1925. I have an encyclopedia from 1938 which contains a page-length article on the Finnish volunteers in South Africa, as a prologue to the history of the Finnish independence struggle. It was definitely considered as an important historical event.
Sometimes, the memory of the Boer War was even used in Finnish political rhetoric. Perhaps the most famous example is Juho Kusti Paasikivi, who was the chairman of the conservative National Coalition party in the 1930s, and became the President of the Republic after the war. At the height of the extreme right-wing reaction and the activities of the Lapua movement, Paasikivi sought to actively distance the right-wing conservatives from the extremist elements and established himself as the right-wing champion of parliamentary democracy. On June 21st 1936, he traveled to the town of Lapua in Ostrobothnia, to the very cradle of the right-wing extremism, and he held a speech titled "Freedom", defending parliamentary democracy and civil liberties, urging the locals to abandon the extreme right-wing radicalism.
As a historical example to be followed, he invoked the memory of South Africa, and made a reference to a speech where Jan Smuts had also defended parliamentary form of government:
"As I was thinking my presentation, I re-read one speech, held two years ago by a freedom fighter who, even though he lives and operates far away from our country, is a Western man by his opinions and character - the leading general and statesman of the Boer nation in South Africa, his name is Jan Smuts. As we all know, those Boer farmers, who served their God and fought for their freedom far away in the southern lands, share the same mentality with the people of Ostrobothnia..."
The Union of South Africa, a model that was invoked by the inter-war Finnish champions of democracy. It's one of those sublime historical ironies, involving two nations on separate hemispheres.
As for why it was forgotten, I honestly don't know. My best guess is that with the two wars against the USSR in 1939-1940 and 1941-1944, the Finnish involvement in this distant colonial conflict simply lost its actuality and relevance. I don't think there were any deliberate "memory politics" involved, even though it's not impossible that the apartheid may have also had something to do with it. The young people who lived in the inter-war era sang the Finnish translation of Kent gij dat volk in schools. In contrast, my generation was singing the Finnish translation of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, which also became hymn number 501 in the choral book of the Finnish Lutheran Church.
I still remember memorizing it as a child. I'm not a member of the Church anymore, but it's still a good song.
And, as I said, there are several other reasons why the South African War should be remembered, still today. The times that we're living have many, many similarities to the Age of Imperialism, in good and in bad.
Cheers,
J. J.
Posted by: Jussi Jalonen | December 15, 2009 at 02:34 PM
A question: was there any feeling (then or later) in Finland that the Boers were in the wrong? I know English-speaking historians have become a lot less sympathetic to the Boers than they used to be because of the race issue. Of course, it's not like the British declared the war to be a war of black liberation anyway...
But in any case, was there any sort of backlash in Finland against the Boers for this? (Kind of like how there's been a micro-backlash against American volunteers for the Abe Lincoln brigade in Spain.)
Posted by: Tzintzuntzan | December 17, 2009 at 12:24 PM
Tzin, the Finnish press did express also some criticism towards the Boers. The one newspaper which stood out was the venerable conservative-fennoman Uusi Suometar (approx. "New Finlandia", Suometar translates as the feminine embodiment of Finland), at the time the leading national newspaper with the widest circulation.
Already during the autumn of 1899, Uusi Suometar adopted a critical tone towards president Krüger's confrontational policy, and criticized the government of Transvaal for a lack of realism. As far as I know, they were also the only newspaper which criticized the Boer actions towards the native African peoples in any way. The newspaper also expressed understanding for the British interests, attempted to portray the war in a "fair and balanced" fashion, and expressed a hope that Britain would be willing to grant tolerable peace terms to the Boer republics.
This position was essentially a reflection of those same arguments which the newspaper had advanced in the question of the Finnish autonomy and relations with Russia. As conservatives, they advocated Finnish acquiescence and compliance towards the Russian imperial interests, in order to avoid excessive imperial reaction; and at the same time, they were also reluctant to criticize Britain, because they considered the British goodwill and sympathy important in the international campaign for the Finnish autonomy.
(For details on the internation campaign on behalf of Finland, you may check the address Pro Finlandia. Signed by Florence Nightingale, Émile Zola and Anatole France. The year 1899 was an important year for many small nations, and Finland was a small cause célèbre for European intellectuals for a short while.)
Uusi Suometar was the largest newspaper, but it was probably an exception in its moderate approach to the conflict. Other Finnish newspapers were more openly pro-Boer. The constitutional Päivälehti ("Daily Newspaper", direct predecessor of today's Helsingin Sanomat, "Helsinki News") was very pro-Boer, although they also remembered to mention how Britain should be considered as the "supporter and guardian of Finland in Europe". Not surprisingly, the newspaper was also the favourite target of the Russian censorship. The socialist Työmies ("Worker"), which was censored by the Russian and Finnish authorities, was overtly pro-Boer, and regarded the conflict as an imperialist war initiated by the British capitalists.
Swedish-language Finnish newspapers were in the class of their own, because they were the only ones which mentioned the race factor openly. Nya Pressen, which advocated constitutional resistance towards Russia, condemned the British actions in South Africa precisely because of their nature as actions against another white nation. The newspaper made it specifically clear that they wholeheartedly approved colonial rule over "inferior" people, but the Boers were "representatives of the European culture". This was a clear reflection of the newspaper's own view of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland as the "bulwark of Scandinavian civilization" against the Russian influence.
The other Scandinavian newspapers were equally divided in their opinions. The conservative Svenska Dagbladet was pro-British, but the liberal and social democratic Swedish newspapers were pro-Boer. The Norwegian Aftonbladet and Verdens Gang were pro-Boer, but also tried to avoid excessive criticism of Britain. The Norwegian reasons for this moderation were a bit similar to the Finnish motives; they were reluctant to jeopardize British support for Norway at the time when the termination of the personal union with Sweden was becoming topical.
So, the Finnish newspapers were more or less part of the Scandinavian mainstream in their opinions and in their differences of opinion. The Russian opinion, however, was adamantly and absolutely pro-Boer and anti-British all across the political spectrum, from Tolstoy to Lenin.
As the war continued, even Uusi Suometar gradually adopted a more pro-Boer stance. The decisive thrust was given by the British actions at the end of the war, the scorched-earth tactics and the concentration camps, which aroused absolute horror even in Finland. The reason was simple. The British Empire was regarded as a liberal, responsible and humane great power, and if they could resort to such methods, what was going to prevent the other, more callous great powers from taking equally harsh actions on other small nations? Because of the censorship, the Finnish newspapers could not openly mention that the British actions had ignited their fear of Russia, but the message was clear from between the lines.
Once again, this is something which has importance still today. These days, the United States is in the same position, and enjoys more or less the same international standing which the British Empire had a century ago. And for the same reason, when the United States acts in breach of international justice, or when the American military forces commit atrocities, the response is exactly similar. The reason behind it "If the Americans can do this, what's going to prevent the others?"
Cheers,
J. J.
Posted by: Jussi Jalonen | December 17, 2009 at 02:00 PM
I linked to this over at my blog. As I said there, it's interesting that Finns volunteered at Paardeberg since volunteers from my hometown fought on the other side.
Posted by: Randy McDonald | December 17, 2009 at 03:39 PM
(Bows to Jussi in awe)Thank you! As always, the more I know, the more I know that I don't know anything.
And mentioning how 1899 was a year for small nations...makes me wish it had been more of one. As in, if the Balkan and northern Slavic nationalists had been able to co-ordinate this early, maybe a lot of crap wouldn't have gone down...unless they did co-ordinate and I just didn't know.
Posted by: Tzintzuntzan | December 17, 2009 at 04:17 PM