The Real History of Redvers Buller (found at the junction on Hele road)

 

Redvers Buller was a controversial military figure. Buller has been publicly hailed as a hero for over a century with a statue on the junction at Hele Road erected during his lifetime, through a crowdfund. Today, though, we have the hindsight to recognise that he was another generally failed historical figure, complicit in colonialism, who was not even particularly successful in furthering Britain’s power and wealth.  

 

In 1879, Buller rose to major in the Zulu War receiving a VC for leading a group of soldiers to save the lives of three men who had been left behind his troop.[1] However, the very next day he “led [a] ruthless pursuit of fleeing Zulus” who had just been defeated.[2]

 

He then spent some years in a rather pastoral military life in Britain, marked primarily by the fact that when he married Audrey Townshend in 1882, he broke off his honeymoon to go to Egypt to take part in a campaign.[3]

 

Some years later, in 1899, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in South Africa at the time of the Second Boer War. His conduct of this conflict was generally deemed to be inept, and within a year he was replaced by Lord Roberts.[4]

 

Indeed, as a result of his actions “[h]e has become a byword for military stupidity and outdated attitudes to changing 19th century society.”[5]

 

However, his military blunders should not be the only negative thing he is remembered for. Both of the wars he was involved in were a result of British imperialism and expansionism. It is important not to erase this part of history but instead openly address it and see it for what it really was. Despite being forced to resign from his position in the army as a result of his failures in the Anglo-Boer war, the people of Exeter raised funds to erect a statue in his honour.

 

During the Boer Wars, the British set up the first recognised concentration camps of the ‘modern’ era. He was complicit due to his role at the time. In South Africa, the bad administration of the camps led to poor quality of food, unhygienic conditions and inadequate medical arrangements. Consequently, civilians suffered terribly. Eventually 28,000 Boer women and children and at least 20,000 black people died in the camps.[6]

 

Though the leaders of both the Boers and the British believed that this should be a 'white man’s war,’ inevitably, black people were dragged in too, and suffered the consequences. Black people were gathered in concentration camps, partly to deprive the Boers of yet another means of getting to food producers, and to obtain black labour for the gold mines that had been re-opened by mid-1901. Further, it is also these concentration camps that are attributed as a reason Afrikaaner leaders used to effectively promote Afrikaaner nationalism in the first half of the 20th century.[7] In other words, they were the foundation stone of the dreadful Apartheid movement.

 

Few students leaving school now would be able to recount anything of the Boer War and its legacy. Even fewer would know that concentration camps were first set up as a deliberate policy and tactic of war by the British Army during the period. 

For many years, if the Boer war was taught at school, it was in the context of the growth of the empire: heroic acts, the relief of besieged towns such as Ladysmith and Mafeking, Baden Powell and Thomas Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’. It certainly did not dwell on the vast network of concentration camps that were set up to hold Boer women and children who were physically herded, often in open rail carts, from their farms and imprisoned in a network of austere, secure and utterly wretched locations.[8]

 

This shows the importance of education, and the role history plays in shaping our worldviews today. Which is why it is essential that people learn the true history of statues such as these, particularly when this one stands outside an educational institute that prides itself on values of diversity, equality and erudition. 

[1] Redvers Buller, The British Empire, Military [online], available at https://www.britishempire.co.uk/biography/redversbuller.htm (accessed September 6, 2023).

[2] Redvers Buller, The British Empire, Military [online], available at https://www.britishempire.co.uk/biography/redversbuller.htm (accessed September 6, 2023).

[3] Redvers Buller, The British Empire, Military [online], available at https://www.britishempire.co.uk/biography/redversbuller.htm (accessed September 6, 2023).

[4] Redvers Buller, The British Empire, Military [online], available at https://www.britishempire.co.uk/biography/redversbuller.htm (accessed September 6, 2023).

[5] Redvers Buller, The British Empire, Military [online], available at https://www.britishempire.co.uk/biography/redversbuller.htm (accessed September 6, 2023).

[6] BBC - History - The Boer Wars [online], available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/boer_wars_01.shtml (accessed September 6, 2023).

[7] BBC - History - The Boer Wars [online], available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/boer_wars_01.shtml (accessed September 6, 2023).

[8] A Shameful Legacy: How Britain Invented The Concentration Camp, Reader's Digest [online],  available at https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/culture/books/must-reads/a-shameful-legacy-how-britain-invented-the-concentration-camp (accessed September 6, 2023).