Abstract
M.A. (Historical Studies)
The Cape Corps was a unit of Coloured soldiers raised in the Union of South Africa as an Imperial Service Contingent during the First World War. Birthed under difficult political circumstances, the Corps was ultimately an Imperial project animated by Governor-General Buxton and other liberal whites, and it came about despite the reluctance of Jan Smuts and others within both the South African and National Parties. Despite this reluctance, Coloureds and the APO responded to the outbreak of the First World War with persistent calls to be allowed to fight and this dissertation has argued that Coloured men in particular considered the war as an opportunity to stake a claim in the masculine citizenship of the Union. This masculine aspiration in fact underpins a major theme of this dissertation, namely that Cape Corps soldiers- both Coloured enlisted and white officers- pulled together to form a powerful group identity in order to accomplish this goal. Dimensions and methods of recruiting were considered, as was the process of training and indoctrination that manufactured a cohesive regiment of soldiers out of diverse individual men. Two chapters are devoted to the Corps’ experiences on campaign, with the first considering the broad cause of the Corps’ serious encounters with tropical disease in East Africa before unpacking the resulting experiences of its men’s suffering and difficulty. This suffering was endured because the Corps was determined to demonstrate their value in military encounters, the focus of a chapter that investigates the experiences of these men as they fought in major armed engagements on the war’s East African and Palestinian fronts. This dissertation ends with a discussion of the Corps’ awkward relationship with white military authorities and argues that, despite this, bonds of loyalty and kinship between Cape Corps veterans both Coloured and white remained both important and valuable to those who had served in the regiment.