De Anglo-Boerenoorlog in een veranderend perspectief. Een comparatieve benadering

Abstract

In South Africa. as is the case almost everywhere else in the world, the remembrance of wars also offers many points ofcontact for national or group-bounded identification. The "Anglo-Boer War is no different. Through its main historic actors - British imperialists versus Afrikaner nationalists - this war got the reputation of a "white man's war". Once again black actors, whether active or passive participants, disappeared from the field of vision. The propagated new national consensus in South Africa cannot bear the memory of that sharp conflict. According to the contemporary uniformity of thought there is no longer talk of victors and vanquished. Black auxiliary troops - on both sides of 1he front - must now get 1he deserved attention. Prompted by last year's centenary, tho old "Anglo-Boer War" is being noiselessly re-baptized into a new "South African War", or even more neutral: the "1899- 1902 war". As though within the new national community there is no longer room for a separate commemoration of the dead,. but only for a collective remembrance uniting the victims in a posthumous act of reconciliation. The collective commemoration of all the victims, irrespective of the racial or ethnic dividing line of old. must therefore, according to the new national ideology, serve the new national unity. This contribution wishes to show some points of similarities between the politics of memory in present-day South Afr ica and in other European societies. especially the German case.