The Sinking of the SS Mendi
For more than 600 black South Africans, there were to be no fine deeds serving for the glory of the British King and for Africa, no quick death in the heat of battle, simply a miserable end in the icy English Channel, as Caroline Coxon explains.
There is a timeline on the internet which claims to show ‘every event of the First World War’. Setting aside scepticism at such audacity, it is little surprise that the sinking of the SS Mendi in 1917 does not feature. Why would it? It is one of those events that could easily be swamped by a hundred others. Yet this story has achieved an almost legendary status in South Africa.
When war was declared in 1914, the countries of the British Empire and its Dominions could not remain neutral. For the people of rural South Africa how distant and irrelevant hostilities in Europe might have seemed, yet many considered that the war was theirs.
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