Elliot Malunga Delihlazo’s grandmother would say that her brother Bhesengile went to war and never came back. The family knew he had died in the first world war, but they never had a body to bury, only a memorial stone in the rural family homestead in Nkondlo in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.
Now the Delihlazos know that Bhesengile died on 21 January 1917 of malaria in Kilwa, Tanzania, more than 2,000 miles from home. He was a driver in the British empire’s military labour corps, but was never given a war grave.
Bhesengile Delihlazo was one of 1,700 mainly black South Africans named on a memorial unveiled in Cape Town on Wednesday, as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) begins to honour hundreds of thousands of black and Asian service personnel who died fighting for Britain, but were not commemorated like their white counterparts.
“It pained us that … we can’t find the remains,” Elliot Malunga Delihlazo, a retired history teacher, said after the ceremony to open the memorial to his great uncle. “But we are happy that at last we know exactly that he died in 1917.”
The CWGC was founded in 1917 as the Imperial War Graves Commission, to commemorate those from the British empire who lost their lives in the first world war. It was meant to treat people equally in death, with names engraved on a gravestone or on a memorial.
More than four million black and Asian men served in European and American armies, according to research by Dr Santanu Das, many conscripted or coerced from Egypt and colonies in west and east Africa.
A 2021 inquiry found that 116,000 to 350,000 first world war casualties were never commemorated because of “pervasive racism”. A 1923 letter from the colonial governor of the Gold Coast (now Ghana), cited in the report, said Africans were “hardly in such a state of civilisation as to appreciate such a memorial”.
Another 45,000 to 54,000 African and Asian service members were commemorated “unequally”, according to the report, commissioned after a 2019 Channel 4 documentary, The Unremembered, highlighted missing war graves.
Another memorial is being prepared in Freetown to honour 1,100 members of Sierra Leone’s labour corps. The CWGC is also looking into how to commemorate 90,000 service members who do not have graves or memorials in east Africa.
White South African racism also played a part in Delihlazo and his comrades going unremembered, said David McDonald, CWGC’s operations manager.
“In [other] colonies, black Africans were armed and allowed to fight. In South Africa, there was a strong desire at the time that that was not to be the case, and that’s why these men were filling labour requirements,” he said. “The government didn’t want them to be involved … and I think that’s why the story was gradually forgotten over time, apart from families, who knew that they lost loved ones.”
Sonwabile Mfecane, a local historian, tracked down descendants of six of the men commemorated with wooden posts inscribed with their name and date of death, opened by the CWGC’s president, Princess Anne, in Cape Town’s Company’s Garden.
Many thought their relatives were among the 600 South African Native Labour Corps who died on the SS Mendi when it was rammed by another British ship in the Channel in 1917. On being told what had really happened, two men told Mfecane that recurring dreams about their missing relatives now made sense.
“What we believe in our African spirituality is … we are not cursed, but there is that thing we didn’t break, that chapter we didn’t close,” Mfecane said. “We close the chapter and allow the deceased to proceed.”
