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In scale and intensity, the war of 1899–1902 was the closest that South Africans came to total war during the twentieth century. The war left a legacy of bitter memories and mutual recriminations. It assumed a central place in Afrikaner historical consciousness, feeding into subsequent Afrikaner nationalism for the first half of the century. With developments in South Africa during the 1990s, which saw a white government making way for a predominantly black one, the cultural significance of what had publicly long been viewed as a whites-only affair became a more contested area than previously. Several competing groups tried to reshape the significance of the war along different lines. The state tried to graft its particular perceptions onto a body of congealed historical understanding; some Africanist groupings considered the centenary quite irrelevant to the ‘new’ South Africa; Afrikaners showed a lively interest in the centenary, but by and large steered away from overt political interpretations linking the war to renewed calls for ethnic mobilisation; and commercialised interests tried to package the war for the purposes of tourism. This article aims to disaggregate these permutations and explain the underlying impulses helping to shape the different forms of commemoration.
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