The Bechuanaland Pioneers and Gunners (review)

Given the rather unusual circumstances connecting this author to the work under review, a brief biographical diversion might be excused. In 1993 I chose to write a doctoral thesis on the Bechuanaland Protectorate during the Second World War because I believed that it would be interesting and, just as importantly, under-researched and attracting little attention in the world of African scholarship. No competition, in short, and a green light to an uncontested thesis. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when, shortly after arriving in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, to spend a year in the archives and interviewing Batswana ex-servicemen, I was nonchalantly informed that there was a female American air force officer in the archives at that very moment writing exactly the same thesis. “Of all the archives in all the world …”, &c.

Given this background, it was a memory lane experience reading Deborah Ann Schmitt’s new book on the subject of Botswana’s participation in the Second World War, for we had clearly looked at all the same files in London and Gaborone, read the same books and articles, and even interviewed some of the same British Army African Pioneer Corps ex-servicemen, usually sitting perched on small wooden chairs outside their houses or huts, tape recorders and interpreters at the ready. Although the two books do pretty much the same thing, there is no doubt that the remarkable story of Botswana’s participation in the war can sustain multiple accounts (the main differences between the two books is that Schmitt’s spends a great deal of time looking at the background to Botswana’s war participation, and that mine examines the home front in depth as well as the war front).

The war participation of this African territory, huge and sandy yet sparsely populated and administered by a tiny British administration, presents a remarkable story. An imperial backwater, in which powerful African chiefs exercised real authority over their people and were able significantly to shape British policy, it sent over 20 percent of its adult male population to support the British Army in the Middle East and Southern Europe. Recruited from bush and cattle posts, they received initial training within the territory, before being transported to Durban and the waiting troopships which conveyed them to Suez. From there they were shunted to a massive British Army holding camp in the Egyptian desert, before being deployed to their various workplaces in Egypt, Italy, Libya, Palestine, Syria, and Tunisia.

One of the book’s features is its wide consideration of the Protectorate’s prewar history. An overview of British military policy and imperial defence from the nineteenth century is sketched, before a chapter-length consideration of Britain’s interaction with Boers and Bantus in Southern Africa. This leads to a consideration of Batswana military experience in the precolonial period and their involvement in the Anglo-Boer War and the First World War. The first hundred pages thus provide background information (some of it surplus to requirements to those familiar with Southern African history) for the main feature, covered in the remaining 150 pages—the focus on the military experience of Batswana men recruited into the British Army, from recruitment to demobilization. Once in theatre they served in the Royal Pioneer Corps, along with tens of thousands of other imperial soldiers from African, Indian Ocean, and Mediterranean colonies, providing the essential support that kept fighting formations such as the Eighth Army in the field. The book focuses on the experiences of these men whilst at war, the welfare problems that accompanied their service, and issues of racial politics, making good use of archival and oral sources. Schmitt provides on the whole a balanced and restrained account, and the appearance of her book has ensured that Botswana is second to none when it comes to the historiography of the Second World War and its ramifications for sub-Saharan African societies.