113 Vincent Kuitenbrouwer Many Dutch Cities Have a Transvaal

book Reviews 113

Vincent Kuitenbrouwer War of Words. Dutch Pro-Boer Propaganda and the South African War (1899-1902). (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2012. 24 cm, 404 pp., illus., ISBN 978 90 8964 4121, € 49,95. Free online at http://www.oapen.org/home).

Many Dutch cities have a Transvaal district, where the streets carry the names of Afrikaner leaders and battles of the two Boer Wars (1880-1, 1899-1902). The majority of these neighbourhoods were built during the first decades of the twentieth century. At the end of the twentieth century some of the streets were renamed and received names of black anti-apartheid activists. The best-known example in this regard is the Pretorius Square in Amsterdam, which was named after one of the leaders of the Great Trek, Andries Pretorus, and which was renamed Steve Biko Square in 1978. The renaming indicates that the Dutch engagement with South Africa had changed its bearing. After years of admiration for the Afrikaners as ‘cousins’ in South Africa, postcolonial Dutch society now sought to express its sympathy with the struggle against Apartheid. Dutch admiration for the Boers arose quite suddenly at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Transvaal succeeded to free itself of a British occupa- tion in 1880-1. Suddenly the Netherlands discovered its cultural and racial relatives (stamverwanten) in South Africa, who had largely been forgotten after the end of Dutch colonial rule over the Cape Colony in 1806. The Transvaal vic- tory over the British Empire seemed useful to compensate for Dutch feelings of national inferiority. Due to the recent discovery of racial and cultural kinship (stamverwantschap) the Netherlands could share at a distance in the achieve- ments of these somewhat uncouth, but courageous people, which represented

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/15700690-12341287 114 book Reviews the Netherlands on the world stage. For the Netherlands itself there was no role in this respect. The Dutch government was concerned that some kind of commitment could have been punished with British intervention in the Indonesian archipelago. After the end of the Second Boer War, Dutch sympathy for the Boers waned, but never died away completely. The Dutch anti- apartheid movement could to a certain degree be seen as a continuation. Although admiration had been transformed into condemnation, in a perverse way one still felt proud that ‘apartheid’ was internationally the most famous ‘Dutch’ word (as a matter of fact it is an Afrikaans word). Vincent Kuitenbrouwer’s book, which was originally submitted as a disser- tation at the University of Amsterdam, deals primarily with the Dutch engagement with South Africa at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Following the footsteps of the Dutch historians Gerrit Schutte, Martin Bossenbroek and Bart de Graaff, who published on Dutch atti- tudes towards the Afrikaners in the 1980s en 1990s, Kuitenbrouwer analyses the Dutch pro-Boer propaganda during the Second Boer War. On the basis of archi- val documents and contemporary publications he has written the most com- prehensive book on this topic available today. Kuitenbrouwer is principally interested in the role of individuals and organisations which were responsible for the propaganda. Particularly the so-called Hollanders in Transvaal appeared to be important actors in this regard. At the invitation of the Transvaal government, several thousands, in most cases highly educated Dutchmen had estab- lished themselves in the Transvaal, during the last decade of the nineteenth century. The majority were employed with the railways, in government admin- istration and in education. When the British occupied Transvaal in 1900 many of them fled or were expelled. Coordinated by the Dutch South African Society (NZAV) and the most famous of the South African Hollanders, Willem Leyds, the Transvaal representative in Brussels they covered the news of the war, and they facilitated the publication of eyewitness accounts of the conflict. Their news coverage was important at an international level, because the news from the battlefield was completely dominated by British news agencies, which owned the intercontinental telegraph cables and were able to field approxi- mately two hundred journalists to cover the war, among them celebrities such as Winston Churchill, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. Dutch news reporting and propaganda happened outside the official channels and without any help from the Dutch government. Kuitenbrouwer calls this a ‘guerilla style of propaganda’, analogous to the battle tactic of the Boers. If the Hollanders had not played a role as propagandists of the Boer cause, the news coverage of the Boer War would have been as one sided as that of the conflict in the Middle East is today.

Quærendo 44 (2014) 91-116