It’s hard to take Armed Forces Day seriously, what with Cyril “Indefinite Stage 6” Ramaphosa making speeches about freedom while Russian and Chinese sailors bob around in a soup of e-coli practicing the best ways to end democracy, and an endless traffic jam of cadre-owned trucks waits to deliver coal to nearby Richards Bay because the ANC has conveniently broken the rail network.
It’s even harder when one reads Gen Rudzani Maphwanya reveal that this day was invented a decade ago “for the purpose of bringing the SANDF to the people”, as if nobody remembers what happened when the SANDF was brought to the people during the Covid-19 lockdown. Then again, severe beatings can cause memory loss, so perhaps he’s guessing right.
However, there is one ritual playing out among the whizzes and bangs that is worth reflecting on: the annual laying of a wreath at the memorial to the 616 South Africans who drowned or died of exposure after the sinking of the SS Mendi on the morning of February 21 1917.
The facts of that tragedy are roughly as follows. The Mendi, a converted mail boat, was not large, and with its single funnel and modest, almost delicate superstructure it looked more like a millionaire’s pleasure barge than a troop ship. Still, it had been large enough to carry more than 800 black South Africans of the SA Native Labour Corps from Cape Town to Plymouth, from where they were headed to France to serve in racially segregated noncombat roles behind the World War 1’s western front.
German U-boats hunted in those waters, and no doubt most captains wanted to move as quickly and as quietly as possible. Perhaps that was why a certain captain Henry Stump, master of the SS Daro, was pushing his vessel at top speed through the dark and the fog that morning, moving dangerously fast and without sounding the obligatory fog whistle at one-minute intervals.
Almost three times bigger and heavier than the Mendi, the Daro hit the troop ship like an 11,000-ton chisel, punching a vast hole in the Mendi’s forward hold and sending the stricken ship lurching over at a steep angle, rendering at least half of its lifeboats unusable. Stump knew that he had hit a ship with catastrophic violence. And yet, instead of stopping and lowering his own lifeboats, he raced on.
Very few of the South Africans aboard had ever seen the sea before they boarded the Mendi in Cape Town. Very few could swim. According to the popular and probably apocryphal telling of it, the Rev Isaac Wauchope Dyobha calmed the men with his famous “death drill” exhortation. According to others, some men refused orders to jump off the sinking ship: perhaps they were afraid of the water; perhaps they had simply decided to meet death on their own terms.
Either way, what does seem to be true is that many of the men on the Mendi did not surrender to panic or chaos, and that they went to their deaths with something that looked to their comrades like courage and dignity. Today, they will be remembered as war heroes. Their monument is a military one, covered in wreaths laid by admirals and saluted by commanders-in-chief.
Which is a pity, and not just because today’s events are stained with the blood of Ukrainian civilians. It’s a pity because the wreck of the Mendi is a monument to one thing only: the terrible waste that happens when brave, dignified people are betrayed by the fear or callous incompetence of infinitely inferior men.
Today Ramaphosa pretends to be an inheritor of the storied stoicism of the dead of the Mendi. He tries to remember the dignified people he’s met and approximate their expressions. He hears himself referred to over and over as “commander-in-chief” and tries to simulate an air of command, perhaps from a film he’s once seen. He looks across to Russians for inspiration — after all, it must take a certain kind of strength to launch missiles at Syrian hospitals and Ukrainian apartment blocks — and puffs out his chest a little further, as a thousand generators keep his shrinking enclave illuminated for another day.
Yes, Ramaphosa, his murderous guests and the ANC cronies licking the gravy off the carpet under their table all want us to believe they are like the fabled dead of the Mendi. But we know who they are. They are all Capt Henry Stump of the SS Daro; disgraced men who snuff out the potential or the lives of brave young people not because they are evil but because they are frightened and stupid and small; because they are in a rush to get to safety and to get paid, and believe their own lives are more valuable than everyone else’s. And if you think this isn’t a perfect metaphor, consider what happened to Stump: having killed more than 600 people he lost his licence — for a year.
Today, let us remember the dead of the Mendi, and all the others like them, not by listening to the pious fictions of politicians and warmongers but by thinking of all South Africans who are still holding on, refusing to surrender to panic, still hoping to get through this on their terms; still maintaining some kind of dignity despite the reckless cruelty of men who collide with us and then sail on into the darkness.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.