Page 6 - Bulletin 23- 2020

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be barred from the trains to curb this – while some Africans blamed whites and their govern-
ment who, they believed, wished to kill them. For instance, white relief workers in the Ciskei

reported that they were preceded by a local “telling the people that this disease was a device

of the Europeans to finish off the Native races of South Africa, and as it had not been quite
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successful, they were sending out men with poison to complete the work of extermination”.
For many rural Africans, therefore, hospitals and whites offering medicine or anti-flu vaccine
were to be shunned at all costs. “The people simply would not have us”, noted an Anglican

bishop trying to help treat Africans in the Transkei. “One stood outside his hut & insisted his

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child was better: another woman took our medicines but said we had come to poison them.”

Given that it was wartime, not a few patriotic fingers were pointed at Germany and
particularly at its use of poison gas. A Bloemfontein newspaper reported that it had received

numerous letters concerning “the Kaiser’s alleged share in or authorship of this calamity” ,
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while one doctor insisted that “Spanish influenza is not a suitable name. German plague is

more accurate”. Local white politics delivered up its own brand of accusations too. Several
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diehard members of the Hertzog’s National Party believed that General Botha’s government
had deliberately let the flu loose to wipe out his political opponents, while others expressed

the view that the epidemic was a divine warning that “we should not interfere in wars which
did not concern us.”
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Fuelling the panic and terror behind such accusations was a rising tide of corpses. Residents
of the country’s towns and cities were hardest pressed to cope with this. In Cape Town

municipal carts toured the streets, picking up those who had died at the roadside, while
families resorted to all manner of transport to convey their loved ones to the cemetery –

private cars, taxis, trollies and even wheelbarrows. The office of the Cemetery Board was

besieged by crowds wanting to arrange burials, while morgue attendants, undertakers and
clergymen were swept off their feet by the immense demands placed on them. An Anglican

Minister was put on permanent standby at the city’s main cemetery, while the chaplain went
there every day to officiate at any funerals for which there was no minister available.

In Kimberley, funerals went on into the night by the light of car headlamps. Coffins were in

short supply, making it necessary for some of the dead to be buried wrapped only in a

blanket. Many of these corpses were placed in mass graves, a measure to which the giant De
Beers mining company also turned on its own property when the soaring number of its dead