NEWS from one hundred years ago: SOUTH AFRICA AND NEW ZEALAND

The Hawkes Bay Tribune, a conservative newspaper backing the Reform Party, editorialises today about what it says were the causes and consquences of the South African War at the end of the 19th century. ‘We were all, and still should be, just as proud of the men who came so promptly forward then as we were, and still are, of those who volunteered and were drawn for service in the Empire’s cause in the Great War.’ The South African War ‘vitally affected the prestige and the destiny of the British race.’ The British Empire, by attacking the republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State, was able to keep Germany out of southern Africa and led to the creation of the Union of South Africa. ‘It is quite impossible to estimate the present-day value to the Empire,’ and to New Zealand ‘as an integral part of the Empire,’ of the work of the young men from New Zealand who volunteered to join the British invasion army. The First World War ‘would have been one very appreciably more difficult to win’ without ‘a South African Union loyal to the British Crown.’ The editorial praises the ‘beneficence’ of the British Empire and says nothing about the racial hierarchy in South Africa.
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Hawkes Bay Tribune, 30 September