One hundred years ago today – in 1917, during the height of the First World War, one of the greatest military tragedies ever to befall South Africa occurred just off the coast of England.
The SS Mendi was a British passenger ship reclassified as a troop ship that sank after sailing from Cape Town, carrying 823 men of the 5th Battalion of the South African Native Labour Corps to serve in France.
The South African Native Labour Corps men aboard her came from a range of social backgrounds, and from a number of different peoples spread over the South African provinces and neighbouring territories: 287 were from Transvaal, 139 from the Eastern Cape, 87 from Natal, 27 from the Northern Cape, 26 from the Orange Free State, 26 from Basutoland, eight from Bechuanaland (Botswana), five from the Western Cape, one from Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and one from South West Africa (Namibia).
Most had never seen the sea before this voyage, and very few could swim.
At 5 am on February 21, 1917, in thick fog about 19 km south of the Isle of Wight off the English coast, the cargo ship Darro accidentally rammed Mendi’s starboard quarter, breaching her forward hold.
Darro survived the collision but the Mendi sank, killing 616 South Africans (607 of them black troops) and 30 crew.
The sinking was a major loss of life for the South African military, and was one of the 20th century’s worst maritime disasters in UK waters.
The collision killed some men outright while others were trapped below decks.
Many others gathered on Mendi’s deck as she listed and sank. Oral history records that the men met their fate with great dignity.
An interpreter, Isaac Williams Wauchope, who had once served as a Minister in the Congregational Native Church of Fort Beaufort and Blinkwater, is supposed to have calmed the panicked men by raising his arms aloft and crying out in a loud voice:
“Be quiet and calm, my countrymen. What is happening now is what you came to do… you are going to die, but that is what you came to do. Brothers, we are drilling the death drill. I, a Xhosa, say you are my brothers…Swazis, Pondos, Basotho… so let us die like brothers. We are the sons of Africa. Raise your war-cries, brothers, for though they made us leave our assegais in the kraal, our voices are left with our bodies.”
The tragedy is commemorated by a number of monuments in South Africa, Britain, France and the Netherlands, as well as in the names of two South African Navy ships: the SAS Isaac Dyobha, a Sa’ar 4-class missile boat, and the SAS Mendi, a Valour-class frigate.
As part of Armed Forces Day 2017 in Durban, the President will lay a wreath in honour of the fallen members of the South African Native Labour Corps who perished in the sinking of the Mendi while a memorial service at sea will be held in the English channel where the Mendi went down.
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