HISTORY: Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa,1880-1899, By Charles van Onselen, Struik, 304pp. £16.63
THE IRISH HAVE always tended to have had strong views on South Africa. A century ago they fervently rallied in support of the white Afrikaners in a not dissimilar manner to that in which a few years ago they rallied to the cause of the black African population. They have, however, generally ignored the only permanently settled Irish population on the African continent, a community that dates from the 1780s, before the First Fleet arrived in Australia. This is unfortunate, as the Irish in South Africa make an interesting case study, contrasting as they do with those “huddled masses” who were driven by the Famine and its consequences to the United States.
The Irish who came to Africa tended to be skilled or semi-skilled; they were often slightly older than emigrants to the US or Australia; they were predominantly male; the religious split was bigger even than in the United States; and, interestingly, they were pretty well devoid of sentimentality about Ireland. There are no songs about leprechauns dying on the veld or about crossing Table Bay to return to Ireland.
Up to now the academic orthodoxy has been that South Africa got the cream of Irish emigrants. The Irish soldiers of the queen of England; the missionaries of God; two colonial prime ministers (Messrs Upington and Hime); attorneys general, including William Porter, the author of the Cape’s famous “colour-blind” franchise; a dozen colonial governors; captains of retailing, such as John Orr; and the adventurous, albeit sometimes like n’er-do-well sons, such as that of Sir Edward Carson, sent to the African colonies to make good. Well, you will not think all this once you have read Prof van Onselen’s well-written and extraordinary Masked Raiders.
This book is a mixture of social commentary and ripping yarns about those Irish rogues and vagabonds who looked to banditry, safe-blowing, prison breaks, highway robbery, murder and illicit gold dealing, many in the “other Irish Brigade” in the old Transvaal Republic and colonial Mozambique in the years of the South African gold rush in the last quarter of the 19th-century.
What is so refreshing about this book, by South Africa’s most intellectual of modern historians, is that it is divorced from the panegyrics of post-revolutionary euphoria. And rightly so, for, as with so much of South African history, this saga of crime and violence, of mining camps, hard drinking and mountain hideaways, could have happened anywhere that circumstances permitted. The universality of the human condition, with its failings, knows no continental boundaries.
BUT THIS IS NOTjust a Boy's Ownpage-turner: it is also a serious study of social banditry, so easily thrown up by a gold rush and an ineffective government. It is a story of restlessness, degradation, seedy lodgings and, indeed, loyalty among thieves. But beyond the criminal heroes and anti-heroes there are fascinating studies.
One is the rather sad saga of Martha McKeone, of one Irish gangster family, who fled a convent in Basutholand (Lesotho) and became Chief Jonathan Molapo’s 11th wife, an action that hit at Victorian views on masculinity and race and that, ironically, disturbed a family that otherwise was clearly completely self-serving and amoral.
The second study is the most controversial in the book. Did Arthur Griffith, the later founder of Sinn Féin and editor of the United Irishman, get mixed up in illegal gold dealing? Is he the mysterious "Mr A. Griffiths" in the manuscript documents? Why, indeed, did Griffith come to South Africa in the first place? Was his 18-month sojourn editing the Middelburg Courantand working at the surface in a goldmine all a cover, a scheme to help rob the capitalist mines and ship gold amalgam in "Dr Kelly's" ship (which sank off the coast of Zululand), all to bankroll the advanced Irish nationalist cause? The problem is, as with so much of Irish-South African history, that the sources are sparse. As things stand it is speculation, but it certainly makes for lively debate.
Move over, Ned Kelly: there are rivals now in the southern hemisphere.
Prof Donal McCracken of the University of KwaZulu-Natal is director of the Ireland and Southern Africa Project and author of MacBride's Brigade and Forgotten Protest: Ireland and the Anglo-Boer War
