Race and hospitality: Allied troops of colour on the South African home front during the Second World War

Abstract

Though often marginalised in histories of the Second World War, South Africa, in addition to contributing manpower and economic support to the Allied war effort, was a transport hub and a site for military training. Millions of Allied servicemen and women spent time in South Africa, which became an important node in both imperial and Allied wartime networks. Examining the varied experiences of Allied personnel of colour in South Africa, with a focus on the Māori battalion, this essay, working towards a transnational social history of the conflict, highlights the ways in which wartime hospitality both reflected and subverted ideologies and practices of racial segregation.

Keywords:

• Second World War
• South Africa
• home front
• hospitality
• race
• Māori

Complicating the resilient story of Britain’s isolation as a besieged island nation, recent work on the Second World War has highlighted not only the crucial importance of troops and resources from the Empire-Commonwealth to the war effort but also the broader cultural and social impact of participating in a global war on both Britain and the wider empire.¹ One important consequence of the war was that it set millions into motion. Allied servicemen and women travelled not only to battlefields across the globe, but also to the numerous home fronts of the Empire-Commonwealth which served as training and staging grounds and transportation hubs.

South Africa was one such hub. After the closure of the Mediterranean to Allied shipping when Italy entered the war in 1940, for three years the Cape route was more important than it had been since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, bringing millions of visitors to South Africa’s port cities.² Close to 50,000 Allied ships passed through South African ports during the war.³ Many were ‘Winston’s Specials’ transporting British servicemen and women from Europe to the Middle East.⁴ Troops from all over the Empire-Commonwealth and from other Allied nations also passed through South African ports. South Africa became a site for military training, the recuperation of the injured and sick, the refitting of ships, and the launching ground for the Allied invasion of Madagascar.⁵

Yet, if South Africa appears at all in general histories of the Second World War, it is often as a footnote, perhaps a mention of Field-Marshal Jan Smuts or of General Klopper’s role in the disaster of Tobruk. Neither does the Second World War loom large in South African historiography, fitting neither Afrikaner nor African nationalist narratives comfortably.⁶ This article argues for South Africa’s importance to the Allied war effort and its role as a crucial hub in a wartime network that moved people, goods, and ideas around the Empire-Commonwealth and beyond. It also highlights the ways in which the wartime contingencies led to encounters across national and racial boundaries not only on the battle front but also on the home fronts of this global war.⁷ Focusing on the varied experiences of visiting Allied service personnel of colour, it shows the ways in which the provision of wartime hospitality both reflected and challenged ideologies and practices of racial segregation in 1940s South Africa.

While the formalisation of apartheid in 1948 was by no means certain and South Africa in the 1940s was, as Saul Dubow has persuasively argued, in a state of ‘fluidity and flux’, it was a segregated settler colonial society.⁸ Visiting Allied servicemen and women of colour, unfamiliar with the conventions of South African segregation or opposed to them, were seen by the South African government as threatening, both in terms of the disruption that their presence might cause and their potential to radicalise local people of colour.⁹ The South African government initially tried to prevent the landing of troops of colour and when this proved impractical, adopted a variety of strategies with varying degrees of success to control them. How visiting troops of colour were treated depended in part on how they were perceived in terms of the racial hierarchy of South Africa, which included South Africans of South Asian origin and the so-called ‘Coloured’ community, groups that held liminal positions between South Africans classified as white or ‘European’ and those classified as black or ‘native’ in the parlance of the time.¹⁰ This hierarchy was also reflected in the South African armed forces. Officially, only service personnel of ‘European descent’ were to be armed and servicemen of colour, who made up about a third of the South African armed forces, served largely in support roles. The exigencies of war, however, meant that in practice many servicemen of colour stationed in combat areas were armed, and a white manpower shortage in the all-volunteer armed forces meant that some of the largely Coloured Cape Corps units were armed and deployed as guards and escorts.¹¹

There was no conscription in South Africa because of division over the Union’s entry into the war, decided by an extremely close parliamentary vote. Many South Africans, especially those of British descent, supported the war effort and considered it to be their patriotic duty to host the men and women fighting for the Allied cause. Many others were opposed to South African participation in the war, however, ranging from pacifist critics of militarism to black and Indian anti-colonial activists who highlighted the hypocrisy of calls to fight for democracy abroad while it was denied to South Africans of colour at home.¹² The most active opponents to South African participation in the war were Afrikaner nationalists including radical groups such as the Ossewabrandwag (Ox-wagon Sentinel), whose paramilitary wing engaged in sabotage and violence against those in uniform. Such groups certainly did not welcome visiting Allied servicemen and women although much of their opposition was focused on South African service personnel.¹³

Tensions over hosting visiting troops, however, did not only arise from those opposed to the war. As was the case on other home fronts which hosted visiting troops, an influx of large numbers of mostly young, unattached men almost inevitably led to conflict.¹⁴ As well as allies to be welcomed, such men were also seen as potentially threatening outsiders, far from the social control of their own families and communities. Such concerns were heightened in regard to visiting servicemen of colour in segregated South Africa, given the prominent role of white women as hosts and the potential for romantic and sexual encounters in the social events held to entertain the troops.¹⁵ As well as bringing people together in common cause, this unprecedented wartime mobility brought into relief differences across the Empire-Commonwealth and beyond in conventions surrounding and understandings of race, class, and respectability.

Difficulties in Britain over the treatment of colonial and African-American troops are one well-known example of this kind of wartime conflict.¹⁶ Similar clashes took place in Australia and New Zealand.¹⁷ Alongside and often intertwined with these conflicts, there was also genuine welcome and conviviality, as reflected in the individual accounts discussed below. The provision of hospitality though often sincerely offered, signified not only generosity but was also a form of discipline, crucial to the war effort in terms of morale as well as the control of visiting troops. Military and civilian officials alike paid a great deal of attention to the provision of hospitality, often working with local voluntary groups. The co-ordination of such hospitality was one of the main functions of the South African Women’s Auxiliary Service (SAWAS) established in 1939 as a branch of the armed services.¹⁸ With close attention to the power relations at play in the provision of wartime hospitality, this article will trace the tensions over the hosting of Allied troops of colour in South Africa, focusing on the visits of the Māori Battalion to Cape Town. Their experiences point to the ways in which the extraordinary circumstances of war could lead to both increased imperial unity and anti-colonial subversion. Attention to these marginalised histories of the South African home front also highlight the ways in which wartime South Africa, far from a being marginal, proto-pariah state, was an important nexus in both imperial and Allied networks.

Hospitality in a time of war

The arrival of so many visiting Allied personnel created the opportunity for many kinds of hospitality, ranging from official events such as teas and concerts to more personal sociability in private homes or bars and clubs. This broad range of social interactions might be termed ‘conditional hospitality’ in Jacques Derrida’s formulation, offered ‘only on the condition that the other follow our rules’ [sic].¹⁹ This raises the question of the specific context for each case, the often unspoken rules and how they were followed or not, the power relationships at play, and their evolution over time. Within and beyond the framework of the official hospitality co-ordinated by organisations such as SAWAS, many individuals—especially from the large Anglo-South African communities in Durban and Cape Town, the port cities which played host to the largest number of servicemen—welcomed the visiting Allied forces. The act of providing sometimes lavish hospitality had a wide range of motivations. For some it was an exciting diversion, the chance to entertain an ever-changing cast of servicemen and women. For others, it was a way to contribute to the war effort, to demonstrate patriotism, whether South African, imperial or British, or some combination.²⁰

Whether hospitality was organised or spontaneous, whether it took place in public venues or private homes, as Ruth Craggs has argued, it should not be conflated simply with ‘generosity, benevolence, and tolerance’.²¹ The rituals of hospitality could disguise uneven relations of power and could operate in different ways, with varying degrees of intimacy and inclusion into the host society.²² Looking at wartime Britain, for example, David Reynolds has located a distinction between public social interactions with visiting troops of colour and those that took place in private.²³ Who was offered certain forms of hospitality speaks to the working of hierarchies of both race and class. West African troops landing in Cape Town were carefully controlled in their movements due to fears that they might radicalise the local population, while white British troops were allowed unrestricted shore leave.²⁴ As described below, Indian officers received different treatment than enlisted soldiers.

Much of the hospitality provided to visiting troops was staged in order to control and scrutinise their behaviour.²⁵ The official hospitality of SAWAS was explicitly intended to divert servicemen away from the seedier neighbourhoods of South African cities. One of the SAWAS founders, Lucy Bean, described what happened early in the war as the first ships began to stop in Cape Town:

the men wandered aimlessly around the streets or spent too much time in the bars, imbibing freely of cheap and potent South African brandy. Undesirable elements enticed some of the sailors into a district near the harbour that was notorious for illicit drinking, dagga-smoking and other social evils that went on in its squalid houses. Sailors went ‘adrift’.²⁶

After this, the British military authorities asked SAWAS to provide entertainment for the troops, featuring as one commanding officer succinctly put it, ‘Pretty girls and beer’.²⁷ These events were intended to be respectable, yet still attractive enough that they would tempt servicemen away from the red light districts of South Africa’s port cities.

Such efforts, however, were not always successful. Though the host possessed the power in many ways to set the terms of the social occasion, to determine who was included and excluded, the guest too possessed the power to disrupt social events or to change their form.²⁸ Although both local officials and Allied military authorities attempted to manage the interactions of the visiting troops with the local population, such large numbers often proved difficult to contain. Visiting troops, especially white troops given unrestricted shore leave, were often able to elude the control of both their own officers and the South African authorities, as illustrated memorably by the commandeering of a beer truck by Australian servicemen in Cape Town.²⁹ Visiting servicemen also visited brothels and shebeens, unlicensed drinking establishments often run by African women, and formed relationships and even marriages with local women of colour.³⁰ As this suggests, in terms of both morale and discipline the successful provision of hospitality that was respectable yet appealing was a crucial, if often overlooked or under-examined, aspect of the war effort.

Allied troops of colour in wartime South Africa

Within the overall challenges involved in hosting visiting service personnel, hosting Allied troops of colour in South Africa posed particular difficulties. Due to the perceived threat of racial-mixing and concerns that they might radicalise local communities of colour, the South African government sought to place stricter restrictions on troops of colour than on other Allied servicemen. In early June 1940, 4,000 Nigerian troops bound for East Africa were temporarily housed in an empty grain shed near Durban as it was not considered appropriate for them to be housed in the same facilities as white troops.³¹ After this the South African authorities attempted to prevent or limit the landing of troops of colour in South Africa but this soon proved impractical.³² By October 1940, a transit camp for ‘non-European’ servicemen near Durban had been built. Troops resident there did not receive shore leave and were confined to the camp except for controlled route marches, and their weapons were impounded during their stay.³³ In Cape Town, West African troops going East were allowed off the ship for a route march, but were not allowed ‘loose’ among the population.³⁴ Lucy Bean recounted that when 1,000 West African soldiers arrived in Cape Town, they were only allowed ashore for ‘organised entertainments’; half went to a picnic in Kalk Bay, the other half to the Woodstock swimming pool, then to lunch organised by the Cape Coloured women’s organisation, followed by a bus sightseeing tour.³⁵

This variation in the treatment of visiting Allied troops based on race reflected the systems of racial segregation and discrimination in South Africa, even in the years before formal apartheid. These policies had parallels in the South African military authorities’ largely unsuccessful attempts to limit the interactions between South African servicemen of colour and white women in Egypt and Italy and their refusal to admit to the Union Senegalese and Annamese prisoners of war captured from Vichy-held Madagascar.³⁶ As the war progressed, however, interactions across racial boundaries proved difficult to regulate both in the Union and in regard to South African troops abroad. There is some evidence that the arrival of large numbers of troops of colour placed strain on the infrastructure of segregation in Cape Town. In 1941, for example, the National Council of Women expressed concern about the limited number of canteens and restrooms available to Indian or West African troops who visited Cape Town.³⁷

The restrictions placed on servicemen of colour who came to South Africa are also hard to generalise as they varied based on the perceived racial group of the visitors and how that mapped onto the existing racial hierarchy in South Africa, as well as their national origin, rank, and number, and evolved over the course of the war. Consequently, a small group of Indian soldiers sent to guard Italian prisoners of war received a very different reception than the 4,000 Nigerian soldiers mentioned above. Despite India Office concerns about the treatment of these troops in Durban, a city with a large diasporic Indian community, officials were pleasantly surprised.³⁸ ‘Durban has been behaving very well indeed to the Indian contingent’, reported the Assistant Secretary J.A. Simpson, ‘[with] hotels, cinemas, [and] clubs … thrown open to them’.³⁹ However, other correspondence suggests that this assessment was overly optimistic and highlights the role that the soldiers’ rank played in their experience. The High Commission in South Africa reported the arrangements to the Dominions Office as follows:

Durban Club has welcomed the Indian Officers to whom hotels and cinemas have also been opened. Indian community are looking after the other ranks, and the Soldiers’ Clubs have been opened to them, blocks of seats have been reserved in the white cinema and special facilities given in public transport.⁴⁰

Though described in terms of welcome, these arrangements highlight the ways in which the authorities aimed to contain visiting soldiers of colour through the provision of separate facilities.

The importance of rank is also clear, with officers allowed access to cinemas, hotels, and the Durban Club, while the ‘other ranks’ were largely hosted by the local Indian community and restricted to special sections of the cinema and separate buses. That there were no ‘incidents’ was in large part because of the pressure placed on the South African authorities by the British government after an occasion earlier in the war when Indian officers were refused entry to a restaurant in Cape Town.⁴¹ This was certainly a limited and precarious form of welcome as reflected by the repeated refrain on the part of the South African government that the landing of Indian and other troops of colour in South Africa should be avoided whenever possible and the conditions of segregation and discrimination under which local people of colour lived. Temporary wartime visitors of colour could be treated differently to local people of colour without it posing as great a threat to the racialised order.

Even so, how this unfolded was often fraught. The memoir of Lucy Bean reveals the complexities of navigating between the wartime necessity to host all Allied troops and the racial politics of South Africa. Noting that during the war the colour bar was more informal than official, she described how she kept a roster of white women who were willing to entertain ‘non-European’ officers, usually from India, both in their homes and at the dances for officers held at the exclusive Kelvin Grove club. The need for a special roster captures the ambivalence of this hospitality, highlighting the reluctance of many SAWAS volunteers to dance with Allied officers of colour, but equally that some white women were willing to do so. It implicitly shows the pressure felt by SAWAS organisers to follow the conventions of hospitality, perhaps especially for officers, even if not on equal terms with white servicemen.

Bean also recalled her relief when no women refused to dance with ‘Indonesian’ servicemen when a concert turned spontaneously into a dance, and her alarm when she received an anonymous phone call complaining about this turn of events.⁴² This anecdote highlights the difficulty of controlling wartime interactions.⁴³ A concert, with people quietly seated might be considered appropriate for an inter-racial social occasion, but a dance with bodily contact was not, especially without preparations such as the roster mentioned above. The social difficulty of enforcing the usual practices of segregation in the specific context of hosting allies could overcome such conventions, although not always and not without tension.

The experiences of the Māori battalion in South Africa

The experiences of the 28th Battalion of the Second New Zealand Echelon, often called the Māori Battalion, illustrates the ambivalence of wartime hospitality in South Africa and its evolution over the course of the war. Their experiences speak to both the conflict and the conviviality such encounters often included and the potential for both imperial unity and anti-colonial solidarity. They also speak to the ways in which the Māori battalion was not easily categorised in terms of the racial hierarchy of South Africa, falling into the liminal space between black and white occupied by the Cape Coloured community, who were correspondingly enlisted to host them on their second visit to South Africa.⁴⁴

Though Māori served in all branches of the armed forces, the New Zealand government, responding to calls from Sir Apirana Ngata and other Māori MPs, formed an all-Māori combat battalion at the outset of the war. In contrast to the Māori Pioneer Battalion, which served largely in a support rather than combat capacity during the First World War, the 28th was a frontline infantry battalion.⁴⁵ The 28th visited South Africa twice during the war: in May 1940 en route to Britain for training and again in February 1941 on the way to fight in North Africa, Greece, and Italy.⁴⁶ Māori soldiers were initially apprehensive about the treatment they might receive in South Africa and were warned by one of their commanding officers, Major Bertrand, that they might encounter a ‘cool’ reception. They were told ‘that if they were turned out of shops or had any other indignity thrust upon them, they were not to make a fuss’.⁴⁷ Despite these concerns, most reported a warm welcome.

On their first visit to South Africa, a delayed landing and uncertainty over whether they would receive shore leave initially confirmed Māori servicemen’s fears of discrimination. The 28th Battalion’s ship, the RMS Aquitania and one other were unable to berth, though the other two ships in the convoy landed and the troops on board began shore leave. While this delay may have been because the seas were too heavy or the ships too large to dock, many of the Māori soldiers suspected that it was a deliberate exclusion. The ships moved to the naval base in nearby Simon’s Town the next day and here some form of discrimination is more evident; the pākehā (white) units were given shore leave, while the Māori Battalion was not. It is unclear whether the delay was imposed on the South African side or was an attempt by the New Zealand command to avoid difficulties with the South African authorities.⁴⁸ In the end, Brigadier James Hargest, a senior officer in the convoy, cabled the New Zealand government and received permission to transport the Māori Battalion to the city.⁴⁹

The fourth day after arriving in Cape Town, the Māori Battalion disembarked, after another warning ‘to be circumspect in their relations with the local native population’. They went on a bus tour, passing through countryside that reminded many of them of New Zealand, before marching to a drill hall where the mayoress of Cape Town hosted them for a light luncheon and they performed several Māori songs. The ladies hosting the luncheon found the singing ‘delightful’ and also commented on the ‘courteous manners’ and ‘splendid physique of the troops’.⁵⁰ Up until the luncheon, the Māori servicemen had been tightly controlled, but they were then given an hour of free time to see the city. According to the official history, ‘The troops strolled quietly around and were received in the shops with civil curiosity and in the hotels right royally. Not only were no incidents of any kind reported but all the troops were accounted for when the convoy sailed’. Major Clifton’s account also focused on the good behaviour of the troops, he noted that they all returned on the bus to Simon’s Town, ‘none missing, none drunk’.⁵¹ Given their responsibilities, it is unsurprising that officers would focus on the lack of conflict and problems in this excursion.

Drawing on the recollections of Māori veterans, Monty Soutar provides a quite different account. According to Soutar, 60 Māori soldiers ‘found the place so welcoming’ that they did not follow the order to return after an hour. Some returned later that night, others the next day and the military police had to be sent to find some men before they sailed.⁵² Soutar cites a 2002 oral history interview with Takamoana ‘Bill’ Delamere, describing an engagement party he attended. He recounted that they had been told by their commanding officers:

‘When you get to Capetown you are not a Māori, you are an Englishman. You’re not allowed to mix up with the Negroes.’ When we got there, there were these half-caste Negroes who met us, Oh, fine looking people. One of them said, ‘My daughter’s getting engaged and I’d like you to come’ … Twelve of us went to the party. We said to each other, ‘Make sure we stick together’. When we got there, we saw some black fullas, eh … but they were good… each one brought a plate. And the boys got stuck into the grog.⁵³

The request to avoid the company of South Africans of colour is in line with concerns about causing difficulty with the Union authorities given their fear that visiting troops of colour might radicalise local communities. That they were told they were ‘Englishman’ and should act accordingly in terms of social segregation also speaks to the perception of Māori as ‘superior’, close to European in the perceived racial hierarchy. That this order was disregarded speaks to the difficulties of controlling servicemen once they had been allowed shore leave, however limited. This incident might also be the reason why, in the second visit, a different approach was taken and the Coloured community was enlisted to provide formal hospitality for the Māori soldiers.

As Delamere’s account demonstrates, the accounts of ordinary soldiers from the New Zealand contingent complicate official narratives of the visit to South Africa. They recorded racial segregation and the discrimination faced by people of colour in South Africa. At the same time, they also emphasised the tremendous welcome all troops received, and individual acts of hospitality pepper their accounts. William James Stewart of the 18th Armoured Regiment travelled on the same ship as the Māori Battalion. Stewart wrote in his diary that he ‘became acutely aware of the colour bar when I saw members of the Māori Battalion being loaded onto buses for a sightseeing tour. They were not allowed to wander about, more or less independently, as we were’.⁵⁴ He also wrote about the plight of ‘natives’ in South Africa, describing their absence from bars and restaurants and how they ‘made way for Europeans on the street’.⁵⁵ Stewart recorded the warm reception that he received, however, and ‘the friendliness and charm’ of the people he met. Further, he wrote that he had later learned that the Māori Battalion was ‘well treated’. ⁵⁶ Though not Māori himself, Stewart was an astute observer of race relations in South Africa and elsewhere.

Rangitepuru Sydney ‘Sonny’ Sewell, a member of B Company of the Māori Battalion, similarly describes discrimination and racism in South Africa, alongside the welcome and hospitality he experienced. In an oral history recorded in 2001, Sewell described the delays and restrictions placed on the Māori soldiers when they finally came ashore.⁵⁷ He also spoke of the racial discrimination that he saw towards South Africans of colour: ‘quite frankly, I saw things that I would never like to see again. Like natives being beaten on the streets, pushed off the sidewalk. And various notices up, like “White People Only”’. Sewell’s assessment, however, was not entirely negative. When he and his friend went to a shop in Sea Point and tried to buy fruit, the shopkeeper refused their money as someone had paid their bill already. With a tone of some surprise in his voice, Sewell recalled, ‘I saw this chap, this white South African, [he] just waved and said, “My pleasure”. And he paid for our fruit. Yet, all these notices up around there’. Sewell muses that this may have been due to the distinction between Dutch and English white South Africans, but ultimately, his experience in South Africa both confirmed and confounded his expectations of racism.⁵⁸

From Britain, the 28th embarked for North Africa in January 1941, stopping again in South Africa in February. Accounts of this second visit are much more positive, in large part because there was no repeat of the previous delays and the soldiers enjoyed five days of shore leave in Cape Town. Before arriving, Brigadier Hargest had cabled the South African authorities to ask whether any restrictions would be placed on the Māori troops. He received the reply that they would be treated in ‘exactly the same manner as any other British soldiers’.⁵⁹ One Māori soldier described the second visit to South Africa in glowing terms: ‘We had a great time … the whole of the troops had leave every day and what a whoopee time we had. The Cape people sure gave us the freedom of the city for 4 days’.⁶⁰

On the last night of their visit, the Māori troops were hosted by the Cape Coloured community. Sewell recalled the dance:

We were treated like kings. The local population took us over, the Coloured population … They entertained the whole battalion at a function one night. Just hired the hall, put us all in there and brought in all their own people. It was just like a ball. And you know, the juice flowed, the wine and the beer flowed, all free.⁶¹

Three Māori soldiers enjoyed the dance so much that they did not report back to the ship in time and were left stranded in Cape Town. They were later picked up by the military police and rejoined the battalion months later in Egypt.⁶² One of them was Teri Tahana, whose nickname back home was ‘Cape Town Jack’ because of his exploits.⁶³

Though many of the historical accounts and a website devoted to the history of the Māori Battalion emphasise the delays and restrictions of the first visit, possibly because it fits preconceived notions about South Africa and the subsequent history of apartheid, they gloss over the much more open welcome provided in the second visit.⁶⁴ By contrast, accounts written or remembered by the Māori soldiers themselves, perhaps more influenced by the later visit, highlight the warm welcome they received and also tend to include more details about informal sociability aside from official events. These accounts also recount details about the personal relationships that they formed with South Africans, especially those from the Cape Coloured community.

Henry Ngata recalled a great atmosphere of conviviality. He describes being invited out to a night club by South African officers where the former captain of the Springbok rugby team recognised the Māori team captain they had played against in 1921 and embraced him, dispelling the initial awkwardness and tension of the occasion.⁶⁵ This story is remarkable, because the South African rugby tour of New Zealand in 1921 is largely remembered for South African criticism of the match the Springboks played against the Māori team in Napier.⁶⁶ This is widely assumed to be the reason for the New Zealand rugby union’s decision not to select Māori players for the tour to South Africa in 1928, a precedent followed in the tours in 1949 and 1960. This recounting of the embrace of the Springbok and Māori captains jars somewhat with this narrative and demonstrates the ways in which the war provided opportunities for sociability, however limited, across racial and national lines.⁶⁷

Sewell’s account of his relationships with white South Africans in North Africa also speaks to the ways in which the specific circumstances of war could lead to the creation of unlikely friendships. His interviewer asked a rather leading question assuming ‘animosity’ between South African soldiers and the Māori Battalion given the ‘problems that you had on your journey to England’ and the Battalion’s encounter with ‘apartheid’. Sewell replied that he had never experienced animosity from South African troops because:

they realised that there’s a war on … everything is forgotten on the football field. You would see South Africans and Māoris walking down the streets of Cairo arm in arm, you know … their arms round each other, around their shoulders, and singing.

He recalled learning South African songs, even in Afrikaans and gently mocking the difficulty his South African friends had in trying to pronounce Māori words. Sewell even described being offered a job in South Africa by Don Lacordaire, the chief physical instructor for the South African division, who he knew through playing rugby. Concerned about whether such wartime friendliness would extend after the war, however, Sewell never followed up on the job offer.⁶⁸

As well as detailing social interactions with white South Africans, Māori soldiers also recounted the welcome they received from the local Cape Coloured community in Cape Town. These accounts speak to the affinity between the Māori and Cape Coloured communities, which extended beyond the war as the continued phenomenon of Coloured support for the All Blacks reflects. One example of this was a woman Sewell had met at the dance held for the Māori Battalion. Sewell recalled that she asked about the racial situation in New Zealand as compared to South Africa: ‘“Don’t worry about that”, I said, “The same sort of business goes on there, but at least you are open about it here. It still goes on back there”’.⁶⁹ After Sewell left South Africa, he continued corresponding with her and put her in touch with his sister in New Zealand and they corresponded ‘well after the war years’. After they stopped hearing from her, Sewell and his sister were invested enough in the relationship that they asked a nephew who went on the 1970 All Blacks tour to South Africa to look her up, though nothing ever came of this.

Censorship reports also indicate that Māori soldiers remained in contact with Coloured people that they met in South Africa. In April 1942, for example, an unnamed Coloured teacher wrote to a Māori private fighting in North Africa. Her letter included her take on the question of whether Smuts, in her words ‘the old hypocrite’, would ever arm Black or Coloured South Africans. Her belief was that though Smuts had stated that he would arm them as a ‘last resort’ if the Japanese were to attack South Africa, she was doubtful as to whether South Africans of colour would come to the defence of the Union. She wrote:

the Non-European section of the population would stand by passively as those millions of Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies did, or probably if they were armed, they would probably fight against South Africa. If you follow my argument you will see why Britain has lost much territory in the East. People fight for rights and if they do not enjoy any rights, they do not fight.⁷⁰

In a similar way to Sewell’s correspondence, this letter indicates both the longer legacy of these often-fleeting wartime encounters and the ways in which they highlighted for their participants the varying situations of colonised people across the Empire-Commonwealth. Without more context, it is difficult to know for certain, but this excerpt suggests an attempt on the part of the letter writer to forge a kind of anti-colonial solidarity or at least to spread broader awareness about racial oppression in South Africa.

It also shows that the interactions of visiting troops with local communities of colour demonstrated to many the realities of racial segregation. Many were also aware that they were received differently from local communities of colour or indeed servicemen and women of colour from other parts of the Empire-Commonwealth. As Sewell put it, ‘the second time the word must have gone out … that we are not natives or anything’.⁷¹ Though the way the Māori battalion were perceived and the brevity of their visits make their experiences exceptional, it is precisely their liminal position, the uncertainty over how they would fit into the racial order, that makes visible both the working of South Africa racial ideology and its limits, especially in the exceptional circumstances of war.

Conclusion

These recollections of welcome and hospitality provide a more complex account of wartime South Africa. This should not obfuscate the limits placed on servicemen and women of colour when they landed in South Africa and the racial hierarchies at work in these limits. Within the rituals of hosting was a clear, although not always successful, attempt at social control. White servicemen enjoyed the most freedom, and Māori soldiers had more than the West African soldiers who were allowed off the ship only for a route march and a brief refreshment stop.

The openings for social encounters across national, class and racial boundaries provided by the war were real, though they were often fraught with concern about respectability and the relationships between visiting troops and local people, especially women. How these tensions were navigated, therefore, provides a way to demonstrate how ideologies of race, class, gender, and nation influenced and failed to influence the often-messy social reality of war. The Second World War is a particularly interesting moment for such a study. The physical presence of Allied troops from all over the world tested both the ideology and the logistics of racial segregation. At the same time the Allied rhetoric against the racial policies of Nazi Germany created an uncomfortable tension with the reality of racial discrimination in the Empire-Commonwealth and the United States. These wartime encounters in South Africa, far from being marginal to the history of the Second World War, reflect these larger tensions as well as highlighting the war’s global reach.

Additional information

Funding

The development and publication of this article was made possible by funding provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). This article has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust through an early career fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Jean P. Smith

Jean P. Smith works on the history of race and migration in twentieth-century Britain and the British Empire. She has held appointments at the University of Leeds and King’s College London. She was awarded a Leverhulme Trust early career fellowship for Empire in Motion: Conflict and Co-operation during the Second World War, a social and cultural history of the unprecedented mobility of troops and civilians in the British Empire-Commonwealth during the Second World War. Her work has appeared in Twentieth Century British History, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and Women’s History Review.

Notes

1 See for example, M.J. Crowley and S.T. Dawson, eds, Home Fronts: Britain and the Empire at War, 1939–1945 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017); J. Fennell, Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); A. Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2006); A. Jackson et al., eds, An Imperial World at War: Aspects of the British Empire’s War Experience, 1939–1945 (London: Routledge, 2017); A. Jackson, Ceylon at War, 1939–1945 (Solihull: Helion and Company, 2018); A. Jackson, Of Islands, Port, and Sea Lanes: Africa and the Indian Ocean in the Second World War (Solihull: Helion and Company, 2018); Y. Khan, The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (London: The Bodley Head, 2015).

2 Jonathan Hyslop has argued that South Africa’s ports were the Union’s most important contribution to the war effort. J. Hyslop, ‘The Lady in White: British Imperial Loyalism and Women’s Volunteerism in Second World War Durban’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 32:1 (2018), 40–1.

3 J. Lambert, ‘“Their Finest Hour?” English-speaking South Africans and World War II’, South African Historical Journal, 60 (2008), 80.

4 More than a million service personnel embarked from the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1943 via the Cape route. A. Munro, The Winston Specials: Troopships via the Cape, 1940–3 (Liskeard: Martime Books, 2006).

5 Ashley Jackson estimates that more than 6 million Allied troops passed through South Africa’s ports during the war. Jackson, The British Empire, 175–6, 245. According to South African statistics, a further 289,744 civilians visited the Union during the War. Republic of South Africa Department of Statistics, Report No. 19-01-01, Migration Statistics: Immigrants and Emigrants, 1966 to 1969 (Pretoria: The Government Printer, 1969), 1.

6 B. Nasson, South Africa at War: 1939–1945 (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2012), 20–3.

7 For the British case see W. Webster, Mixing It: Diversity in World War Two Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

8 S. Dubow, ‘Introduction: South Africa’s 1940s,’ in South Africa’s 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities, ed. by Saul Dubow and Alan Jeeves (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005), 2. See also S. Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).

9 The unfamiliarity of visiting white personnel with such conventions and their consequent willingness to disregard them was also viewed as a potential, if lesser, concern. This was illustrated by tensions over marriages between British servicemen and local women of colour during the war. J.P. Smith, ‘“Young blood” and “the blackout”: Love, Sex and Marriage on the South African Home Front,’ in Home Fronts: Britain and the Empire at War, 1939–45, ed. by Mark J. Crowley and Sandra Trudgen Dawson (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017), 105–8.

10 Here and throughout the essay ‘Cape Coloured’ or ‘Coloured’ refers to a distinctive community in South Africa of multi-ethnic and ‘Malay’ descent. See V. Bickford-Smith, ‘Providing Local Color?: “Cape Coloureds”, “Cockneys”, and Cape Town’s Identity from the Late Nineteenth Century to the 1970s,’ Journal of Urban History, 38:1 (2012), 138–139; Z. Erasmus ed., Coloured by History: Shaped by Place (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2002).

11 Nasson, 129–32; I. Gleeson, The Unknown Force: Black, Indian and Coloured Soldiers Through Two World Wars (Rivonia: Ashanti Publishing, 1994), x.

12 Nasson, 20–3.

13 C. Marx, Oxwagon Sentinel: Radical Afrikaner Nationalism and the History of the Ossewabrandwag, trans. by Sheila Gordon-Schröder (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2008), 353–62, 521–5.

14 N. Barr, Yanks and Limeys: Alliance Warfare in the Second World War (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015), 327–363; D. Reynolds, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945 (London: Harper Collins, 1995), xxviii; S. Rose, Which People’s War?: National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 73–92; M. Lake,’ The Desire for a Yank: Sexual Relations between Australian Women and American Servicemen,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2:4 (1992), 621–33; L. McCormick, ‘“One Yank and They’re off”: Interaction between U.S. Troops and Northern Irish Women, 1942–1945,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality, 15:2 (2006), 228–57; Y. Khan, ‘Sex in an Imperial War Zone: Transnational Encounters in Second World War India,’ History Workshop Journal, 73:1 (2012), 240–58; Khan, The Raj at War, 147, 149–51.

15 There was a long history of anxiety about the so-called ‘black peril,’ the alleged sexual threat posed to white women by black men in South Africa and echoes of this can be seen in wartime South Africa. W. Jackson, ‘The Private Lives of Empire: Emotion, Intimacy, and Colonial Rule,' Itinerario, 42:1 (2018), 3.

16 Rose, 239–84. See also G. Smith, When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War Two Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 1987).

17 Jackson, The British Empire, 491–2; P. Thompson and R. Macklin, The Battle of Brisbane: Australia and America at War (Canberra: BWM Books, 2000); N.M. Taylor, The Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War 1939–1945: The Home Front, Volume I (Wellington: V.R. Ward, Government Printer, 1986), 645–6.

18 Hyslop, 43, 46.

19 G. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 128–9. See also J. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 18–19, 63; J. Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice, Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,’ in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. by Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999), 69–71; J. Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 75–83.

20 Lambert, 61–3.

21 R. Craggs, ‘Towards a Political Geography of Hotels: Southern Rhodesia, 1958–1962,’ Political Geography, 31:4 (2012), 2. See also R. Craggs, ‘Hospitality in Geopolitics and the making of Commonwealth international relations,’ Geoforum, 52 (2014), 90–100; J. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), 16–17; M. Dikeç, ‘Pera peras poros: longings for spaces of hospitality,’ Theory, Culture and Society, 19:1 (2002), 229–31.

22 Craggs, ‘Towards a Political Geography,’ 4.

23 Reynolds, 309.

24 For more on the experience of British troops in South Africa see J.P. Smith, ‘“Transformation to Paradise”: Wartime Travel to Southern Africa, Race and the Discourse of Opportunity, 1939–1950,’ Twentieth Century British History, 26:1 (2015), 52–73.

25 For the role of hospitality in monitoring strangers see C. Lashley, ‘Towards a theoretical understanding,’ in In Search of Hospitality: Theoretical Perspectives and Debates, ed. by Conrad Lashley and Alison Morrison (Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, 2000), 11; J. Still, Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 18.

26 Dagga is the South African term for marijuana. L. Bean, Strangers in our Midst (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1970), 48–9.

27 Bean, 49.

28 Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 18; Dikeç, 237, 239.

29 J. Crwys-Williams, A Country at War 1939–1945: The Mood of a Nation (Rivonia: Ashanti Publishing, 1992), 48.

30 Smith, ‘Young blood,’ 93–110.

31 K. Fedorowich and B. Moore, The British Empire and its Italian Prisoners of War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 248–9.

32 The Australian government also attempted to prohibit the landing of African-American troops in Australia. In a compromise the American government agreed that African-American troops would largely be based in remote areas of Queensland and the Northern Territory. Jackson, The British Empire, 492.

33 Fedorowich and Moore, 248–9.

34 Bean, 80. On the experience of African troops in the war see D. Killingray and M. Plaut, Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War (Suffolk: James Currey, 2010). Some Nigerian soldiers later recalled the experience of racism in South Africa during the war, often connected to overall impressions of apartheid: P.B. Clarke, West Africans at War: Colonial Propaganda and its Cultural Aftermath (London: Ethnographica, 1986), 85.

35 L. Bean, ‘The Letters S.A.W.A.S. Signify Helpfulness: When a Convoy Calls at the Cape … A Welcome for All at Cape Town,’ The Women’s Auxiliary, May 1941, 37, BAJ355.34805 WOM, University of Cape Town Special Collections, Cape Town, South Africa (hereafter UCT).

36 Killingray and Plaut, 107, 110, 134; Fedorowich and Moore, 249.

37 ‘City Amenities for Troops Discussion by National Council of Women,’ Cape Times, 8 February 1941, 18. The Admiralty also had difficulties in providing separate mess facilities for white and coloured troops at Simon’s Town. Nasson, 117.

38 For more information on the Indian community in Durban during the war see Hyslop, 39–40.

39 J.A. Simpson to Col. D. MacLeod, 22 May 1941, ‘Military Discipline in South Africa’ WO 32/9362, The National Archives of the United Kingdom (hereafter TNA).

40 Telegram Acting United Kingdom High Commissioner in the Union of South Africa to Dominions Office, 20 May 1941, ‘Military Discipline in South Africa’ WO 32/9362, TNA.

41 Ibid. See also Fedorowich and Moore, 249.

42 This was an occasion hosting both indigenous and Dutch staff and cadets from the naval academy at Sourabaya in the Dutch East Indies who had escaped just before the Japanese occupation. Bean, 80–1.

43 This tension is also captured in Wendy Webster’s discussion of inter-racial encounters in Britain during the war, with many believing that they should be ‘friendly but brief with physical contact strictly confined to the dance floor’ although as this suggests, in the British context dancing was less taboo than in South Africa. Webster, 199.

44 There were wider perceptions of Māori as ‘superior’ to other indigenous people and theories that they were of Aryan descent. C. Macpherson, 'Reinventing the Nation: Building a Bicultural Future from a Monocultural Past in Aotearoa/New Zealand,’ in Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World, ed. By Paul Spickard (New York: Routledge, 2005), 224.

45 On the Māori experience of the First World War see W. Gardiner, Te Mura O Te Ahi: The Story of the Māori Battalion (Auckland: Reed Books, 1992), 12–18; R. Carkeek, Home Little Māori Home: A Memoir of the Māori Contingent, 1914–1916 (Wellington: Tōtika Publications, 2003).

46 Second New Zealand Echelon Chronology, 1st January 1940 to 30th June 1942, WO 201/534, TNA.

47 J.F. Cody, 28 (Māori) Battalion: Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War (Christchurch: John Douglas Publishers, 1956), 14; M. Soutar, Nga Tama Toa, The Price of Citizenship: C Company 28 (Māori) Battalion 1939–1945 (Auckland: David Bateman, 2008), 83.

48 Gardiner, 37–9.

49 Hargest, at the time, was in command of the 5th Infantry Brigade to which the Māori Battalion was attached while in transit.

50 Cody, 14–15. This mention of the ‘splendid physique’ of the troops likely reflected the long-running perception of the Māori as a ‘martial race’ and in this case, as exotic and distinct from local people of colour. F. Walker, ‘“Descendants of a Warrior Race”: The Māori Contigent, New Zealand Pioneer Battalion, and Martial Race Myth, 1914–19,’ War and Society, 31:1 (2012), 20.

51 Cody, 15.

52 Soutar, 83–4.

53 Takomoana Delamere, interview, 10 April 2002, quoted in Soutar, 83–4.

54 Diary 1, 49, Letters and Diary of William James Stewart, Accession No. 2007.922, Kippenburger Military Archive, Waiouru, New Zealand (hereafter KMA). Notations in his diary indicate that this was written in January 1941 about eight months after the visit.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid.

57 Oral History Sonny Sewell (28 Māori Battalion), Interviewer Matt Atfield, 11 May 2011, 2001.322, KMA.

58 Ibid.

59 Quoted in Gardiner, 44.

60 Ibid.

61 Oral History Sewell.

62 28 NZ (Māori) Battalion War Diary, 1 July–28 February 1941, DA 68/1/7-14, WAII1 1664, Archives New Zealand, Wellington. See also Gardiner, 44.

63 <http://www.28Maoribattalion.org.nz/soldier/teira-tahana> [accessed 20 November 2014].

64 <http://www.28Maoribattalion.org.nz/story-of-the-28th/call-to-arms> [accessed 7 April 2016].

65 Sir Henare Ngata, interview, 24 April 1995, quoted in Soutar, 102–3.

66 M. Mulholland, Beneath the Māori Moon: An Illustrated History of Māori Rugby (Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2009), 39.

67 Further illustrating this point, the Cape Times reported on a cricket match played between the Green Point side and visiting soldiers including Frank Solomon, a Samoan who had played for the All Blacks in the 1930s. ‘Visiting Soldiers Takes 7–24,’ Cape Times, 11 February 1941, 17.

68 Oral History Sewell.

69 Ibid.

70 South African Military Censorship Summary No. 4, 1 to 15 April 1942, Box 81/I/71/B, AI Gp 1, South African Defence Archives, Pretoria. My thanks to Jonathan Fennell for bringing this reference to my attention.

71 Oral History Sewell.