ABSTRACT
In social reach and human cost, the South African War was the biggest and most modern of the numerous pre-colonial and colonial wars which raged across the southern African subcontinent. Generating a wealth of literature, this early twentieth-century colonial war’s literary epitaph remains unrivalled locally, its cultural deposit perhaps making it the modest South African equivalent of an American Civil War, a British Great War or even a Spanish Civil War. In 1938, the massive centenary celebration of the Great Trek and the Boer-Zulu Battle of Blood River provided a focus for South African War commemorative bonding. As war tourism, South Africa’s Anglo-Boer War may end up providing a ‘heritage’ experience of tripping along an African version of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. That would be a long way from the struggle of Afrikaner generals to resolve the fate of a white nation, but it would be another turn in the cultural negotiation of South African War commemoration.
