ZARPS and HARPS
The policing traditions of South Africa are dramatically different to most Commonwealth countries because of the par military duties of the former.
The Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek Politie ( South African Republic Police) or Zarps epitomised the history of the force, although to the cynics it would appear the Zarps were more honoured in death than in life, by English speaking critics.
Their heroic but ultimately doomed defence in the last set piece battle of the Anglo Boer War saw them eliminated as a fighting unit in the Battle of Bergendal. It was here that the battered Zarps won acclaim in trying to hold a rocky outcrop against the much maligned General Buller (the first CIC of British forces at the start of the war), who had,in fact, perceived a weakness in the Boer defence, at this point and pressed his attack home,successfully.
Buller’s force of 8000 were opposed by a total 1000 Boers with the ZARP contingent of 74 taking the brunt of the fire from their forward kopje with between four to five shells per minute raining down on them for some three hours.
Buller desctibed his Zarp foes as men of ‘great gallantry’ and they took the blows while giving plenty. John Stuart (Churchill’s successor at the Morning Post ) wrote, ….“the Boer dead lay where they had fallen.They were massive in their repose,those dead Vulcans….Peace unbroken, peace to their souls for they were brave men.” Thomas Pakenham, the best read author of the ABW was not unsympathetic to the Boers and he also wrote about the ‘’ that yesterday’s ‘bullies’ were now regarded as ‘heroes.’ But were the Boers the bullies of the past, as Pakenham mentioned?
Accusations like that are common place for most police forces around the world, past and present, particularly so in the period after the Jameson Raid that had left some Uitlanders disappointed that President Kruger’s government had not been overthrown.
It was the High Commissioner to the Cape, Sir Alfred Milner, who was determined to exacerbate tensions with the ZAR and Britain and the Edgar Affair with the ZARPS, as the whipping boys, made a good target. The ‘Harp of the Cape,’ (Milner) was determined to extract maximum political mileage from the incident of the shooting death of Thomas Edgar, by the police.
Indeed, on the 30th December 1898, the Colonial Secretary, Chamberlain, wrote to Milner thus:”The Edgar Affair may be very important and may give us the right of remonstrance and action which under the Convention we have not hitherto had. But at present we have no details and the case may assume a very different aspect after judicial inquiry.” Unfortunately for the two High Imp intriguers they were given no joy from the case.
What had happened on the night of 18th December is that Edgar had quarrelled with Foster , a fellow Englishman, and knocked him out, ultimately causing his death. Spectators called the police and when one of the police officers (Jones), who sought to arrest Edgar in his home, was attacked, (being struck twice with an iron shod stick), he then shot Edgar dead. Jones was later charged, tried and acquitted.
However, the smooth administration of the law didn’t stop Milner from trying to make capital from the affray. In writing to Lord Selborne (5/4/1899), he wanted a Blue book published so that the Edgar shooting and Jones trial was thoroughly “rubbed into the public mind.” A month earlier in another letter to Selborne (8/3/99), Milner was railing against injustices to British subjects, presumably the same ones he was trying to get become ZAR citizens by demanding a reduced qualifying period for the franchise. This ‘shocking story’ of the ‘lack of adequate protection’was so bad that “it had to be well noted up and kept in reserve against the day…when we shall be obliged to take the bull by the horns.”
So a Johannesburg street altercation between two English speaking imbibers was something that had to be given exposure to defame the ZAR administration and it’s police force. In fact it says much more about the venal nature of the British elite than about a micro domestic matter that could have happened in any other mining town. If it had happened across the Indian Ocean, at another famous raunchy gold mining town, at Kalgoorlie WA, it most certainly would not have been part of discussions by Westminster plotters.
When the incident took place, the acting High Commissioner, at the Cape, General Sir William Butler, (Milner was on leave, in London), rightly declared it as a drunken brawl and that the press and South Africa League were simply engaged in attempting to make political capital out of it.
Milner, on his return, was furious at Butler, resulting in the Butler tendering his resignation as CIC and returning to England. If it had been the other way around, (ie Milner being recalled), there would have been no war.Butler was correct when he said, “what South Africa needs is rest and not a surgical operation.” It got neither but instead a ratcheting up of tension and a butcher conducting operations!
As for Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary continued to harp on about the ‘murder of Edgar’ and his in dispatch of May 10, characterised the case thus: “But perhaps the most striking instance of arbitrary action by officials and the support of such action by the state, is the well known Edgar case. The effect of the verdict of the jury, warmly endorsed by the judge, is that four policeman, breaking into a man’s house at night without a warrant, on the mere statement of one person, which subsequently turned out to be true, that the man had committed a crime, are justified in killing him there and then, because according to their own account, he hits one of them with a stick.”
There is a historical irony in all this: the Zarps were to be the ‘whipping boys’ (as they would be later,in the war), by the two intriguers, something the British economist J.A. Hobson was not slow in attacking.
During the (European) summer and autumn of 1899 Hobson spent some months in South Africa and he spoke to the leading luminaries of the time. He was scathing at Chamberlain’s dissembling, describing it as completely ‘misrepresenting the evidence.’ (see his War in South Africa, p57, Howard Fertig. 1969, first printed 1900).Hobson makes a number of points, stating that when Chamberlain made that claim “ he had in his possession a full report of the trial.” This stated that English Uitlander witnesses said Forster was drunk, Edgar was not (both British); that acting on public information four police officers entered Edgar’s home where one of them (Jones) was instantly attacked with the said weapon. Jones, expecting more blows then fired his pistol, killing Edgar. Two surgeons testified on the injuries to Jones who nevertheless was still charged with murder, at first, later reduced, by the State prosecutor, to one of culpable homicide. The jury after a long deliberation found in favour of the accused by acquitting him, a decision approved of by the judge. Hobson has much more to say on the attitude of Zarps and English condescension toward them. He says, “My sober judgment, formed upon careful consideration of the kind of Englishman who was working up to these grievances, is that this insolence imputed to the Boer simply consisted in his assumption of equality and refusal of deference or recognition of superiority which the British have come to expect in other parts of South Africa. Britishers coming from the colonies had been accustomed to despise ‘the Dirty Boer’ and regard him as a social inferior; in the Transvaal they found him in power and refusing to accept the role of inferior; hence their indignation.” (Hobson, p.62).
That in a nutshell is what Chamberlain and Milner objected to- the lack of deference to British customs and desires but in fact, the London Convention (1884), which the British had agreed to, had given them no say in domestic ZAR policies.
As for the Zarps, Hobson in his cross examination, of many Uitlanders, did not elicit any accusations, from them, of an oppressive police force and nor indeed of any great contact with Boers.
Eventually,the Zarps, like their Boer Republic, (and also the Orange Free State) would be destroyed by an unnecessary war, rightly described by British historian, Godfrey Le May, as Milner’s War.
