Sheep magazine archive 1: issues 3-9

22
Britain’s response to what is more correctly
referred to as India’s First War of Independence
was truly savage. A captain at the time,
Wolseley recalls having sworn an oath “of
having blood for blood, not drop for drop, but
barrels and barrels of the filth which flows in
these niggers’ veins for every drop” of British
blood that had been spilled by the rebellious
sepoys [Indian soldiers].
While most accounts suggest about 100,000
Indians were killed following the rebellion – in
many cases, forced to lick blood from the floor
before being hung, bayoneted in the stomach
or tied over cannon and blasted to smithereens
– historian Amaresh Misra has calculated that
almost 10 million were in fact wiped out over
the next decade. As one British official recorded
after the event: “On account of the undisputed
display of British power, necessary during those
terrible and wretched days, millions of wretches
seemed to have died.”
On the other side of the parade is a hero, at
last. Field Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum
was one of the truly great men of the British
Empire – so much so that his image was
famously used for recruitment purposes during
the First World War: “Your country needs you!”
But it wasn’t just Britain’s youth that he ushered
into an early grave. During the Second Boer
War, in response to the guerrilla tactics of the
Afrikaners, he vastly expanded the use of a new
tactic: the concentration camp.
Tens of thousands were interred in filthy, undersupplied
and exposed camps. Emily Hobhouse,
a campaigner who made it her mission to
expose conditions, wrote that “the whole talk [in
the camps] was of death – who died yesterday,
who lay dying today and who would be dead
tomorrow”. The reward for her efforts was an
attack piece in the Daily Mail, written by that
great author of Empire, Edgar Wallace (Sanders
of the River, King Kong and scores more). It was
headlined, simply, “Woman – The Enemy”.
By the end of the war, 28,000 Boers, mostly
women and children, had perished in the
camps. The black victims of the policy
went uncounted. Years later, when the
British Ambassador to Germany expressed
concerns about Nazi use of concentration
camps, Hermann Goering reached for his
encyclopaedia: “First used by the British in South
Africa,” he announced. It’s hard to imagine a
more inappropriate figure for us to place on a
pedestal – yet there he stands.
Down Whitehall, giving a wide berth to General
Haig, the bloody-minded butcher of the Somme,
we arrive at Parliament Square, where statues
dot the green like giant chess pieces. To the
north, there’s Lord Palmerston, declarer of the
First Opium War and poster boy for “gunboat
diplomacy”, whose time at the Foreign Office
was described by the Liberal politician John
Bright as “one long crime”; next, Jan Smuts,
a South African statesman whose advocacy of
racial segregation laid the ground for apartheid;
and finally, Sir Winston Churchill himself.
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 8