The South African War of 1899–1902 has been traditionally framed as one of Britain’s final colonial wars and a last gasp of nineteenth-century military conventions. In this article, I argue that—far from being the last “gentlemen’s war”—the South African War can be seen as a newly modern form of warfare that is mediated and modulated through sound. I draw on archival research and earwitness accounts from both combatants and observers to reconstruct aspects of historical sense perception that demonstrate how the confluence of new military and media technologies elevated the role of sound in sensing (and making sense of) the battlefield. In particular, I consider the pervasive metaphors of gunfire as music and of the guns themselves as musicians as a way for earwitnesses to make sense out of the chaos of wartime listening, before turning to other ways in which music filtered through into the wartime soundscape. Understanding this intertwining of sound, perception, and technology allows us to trace the audile techniques through which participants perceived the war. Heard in this way, the South African War lays a foundation for how modern wars have been listened to and imagined.
“To give a short account of what I have found war to be, I can say: no music is as thrilling and as immensely captivating as to listen to the firing of the guns on your own side. It is like enjoying supernatural melodies in a paradise to hear one or two shots fired off the armoured train.”1 This arresting opening to the wartime diary of Solomon “Sol” Tshekisho Plaatje (1876–1932) positions sound as the central experience of war. Plaatje, a Tswana man born in the Orange Free State and educated in the Cape Colony, worked as a journalist and court interpreter in the frontier town of Mafeking in what is now the North West province of South Africa. Between October 1899 and March 1900, he chronicled daily life as the British garrison in the town was besieged by forces of the Boer Republics during the South African War, leaving behind the only known account of these events by a black South African.2
Plaatje was not, of course, the only black South African witness to the siege: beyond those who lived in the town or accompanied one or the other army, the Barolong who lived in the adjacent community of Mafikeng played an active role in its defense.3 Nonetheless, Plaatje’s writing is particularly notable for its color and detail, and offers us some sense of the complexity of wartime audition. In particular, it opens up two intersecting avenues for further exploration: first, the nature of focused and aesthetically sensitive listening in and to war at the turn of the century, and second, the racial dynamics of such listening at a point widely (if erroneously) imagined to be defined by conflict between two groups of white Europeans.4 The latter poses a considerable historical challenge to the scholar: the voices of the Barolong, and those of almost all other non-white South Africans, have been erased from archival records. The strategy I have pursued is not to insist that Plaatje fill the archival lacuna, but rather to place him alongside his white contemporaries to foreground the partiality of experience. In exploring historical listening from a number of viewpoints, I trace three themes from Plaatje’s diary entry, namely, the impact of new technologies on the war’s soundscape (“the armoured train”), the relational aspect of listening (“guns on your own side”), and, perhaps most curiously, the interpretation of the sounds of war as analogous to music’s “supernatural melodies.” Drawing out diverse perspectives, I consider how listener positionality, the complexity of wartime politics, and the technologies of war itself shaped perception of the bang, rattle, and pop of the South African War.
In what follows, I examine historical experiences of sound, the senses, and sense-making during the South African War of 1899–1902.5 This conflict between the British Empire and the allied forces of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic, though greatly overshadowed by later twentieth-century conflicts, offers the opportunity to trace a particular set of listening practices at the turn of the century—an inflection point both in the history of warfare and in the history of listening and perception. Although the South African War has been popularly framed as the last imperial war or the last “gentlemen’s war,” its intertwining of technology, sound, and musical metaphor indicates that it might better be considered the first sonically modern war. To claim that this or that war bears the hallmarks of modernity is not in and of itself new: the historian Steve Attridge made this very claim about the South African War in the early years of the current century.6 However, he backdates modern warfare on the basis of parallels in military endeavors between the South African War and the First World War and does not engage with the senses or with sound. In contrast, I argue that the hows, whens, and whys of hearing—the audile techniques—signal modernity in the South African War. In other words, it is precisely the ways in which the sounds of the South African War were heard and interpreted both as noise and as music that make it distinctively modern.
In recent years, sonically attuned explorations of human sensory perceptions in war have attempted to deepen understanding of the embodied experience of conflict, often by examining its lesser-known corners. For example, Suzanne Cusick and others have detailed the use of music and sound as a technique of no-touch torture, suggesting that the twenty-first century’s War on Terror has made its own distinctive contribution to the intertwining of sound, technology, and violence.7 Meanwhile, Martin Daughtry, Steve Goodman, and Jim Sykes have used ethnographic research to draw out subthemes within the sounds of twenty-first-century warfare that range from machinic noise to rock music to protective chants, with a focus on the experiences of soldiers (Daughtry and Goodman) and civilians (Sykes).8 Looking further back in history, Gascia Ouzounian details the intersection of acoustic science, technology, and defense in the First World War, while in The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege Mark M. Smith counteracts the dominance of photographs in documenting the American Civil War by fleshing out its story through each of the five senses.9 Each of these projects attempts to grasp how the perception of phenomena has shaped the mediation and representation of the world: how the senses have contributed to sense-making, or sometimes, the un-making of sense.
In this context, the lack of attention paid to the South African War is notable, though an exception is Erin Johnson-Williams’s recent study of the transformation of the concertina from an instrument closely associated with the Boer farming community to a weaponized metaphor for cultural degeneracy to a reclaimed signifier of Afrikaner cultural trauma.10 Another key text is Anne-Marie Gray’s 2004 doctoral dissertation on vocal music of the period, which draws out the significance of singing, and of religious music in particular, for Boer identity and morale during the war by focusing on diaries and a collection of hand-notated scores drawn from prisoner-of-war and concentration camps.11 But much other work within music studies has focused instead on later periods of South African history, including the lingering and reconstructed memories of the British-Boer conflict refracted through genres such as volksliedjie and boeremusiek or events such as the Voortrekker centenary in 1938.12 The war has also been passed over in scholarship on black musical expression, where the pre-Union focus is on choral (and less commonly, brass band) music stemming from colonial encounters.13 Even Denis-Constant Martin’s seminal discussion of South Africa’s creolized soundscapes in Sounding the Cape pays scant attention to the period of the Boer-British conflict.14
Part of the challenge is that inferring wartime sensoria and perception from the historical record increases in difficulty with distance from the present, on account of both the availability of source materials (or lack thereof) and changes in human perception. In the case of the former, written references to sound from the South African War are found in material scattered across languages, countries, and continents. Very few of these materials reflect South Africa’s non-white population; moreover, extant records largely chronicle the experiences of the literate middle or upper classes.15 What remains is a necessarily fragmentary account of how the war was heard by members of a small minority. As for making the link between the description of sounds and perceptual changes, it is worth remembering with Smith that “what is loud, quiet, and noisy now was qualitatively and quantitatively different in a preautomobile, prejet, preelectronic age.”16 This experiential gap warns against anachronistic explanations for the senses even as it invites the exploration not just of historical sensory experience, which is in many ways as irrecoverable as it is intriguing, but of what Jonathan Sterne calls “the conditions under which that experience became possible.”17 By tracing the rise and fall of distinctive ways of hearing or listening through particular technological forms, we can investigate Sterne’s “audile techniques” at specific historical moments.
Thus, Gavin Williams, in his introduction to the pioneering collection Hearing the Crimean War, identifies six lenses through which historical wartime sound and its perception might be viewed: organology, voice/writing, time and mediation, silence, archives, and vibrational ontology.18 Over the course of Williams’s edited volume, the shaping of wartime auditory perception is linked to technologies both antique and emergent, from the development of military music that imitated the sounds of war to the rise of the telegraph that whisked news from the war front to the home front faster than ever before. The Crimean War (1853–56) is thereby positioned as a turning point in a century in which the capacity of new technologies to implicate various publics in distant battlefields expanded, from the telegraphed dispatches of the Crimean War to the painstaking photographs of the American Civil War (1861–65) to the staged films of the Spanish-American War (1898).
As Williams and the other volume contributors suggest, the Crimean War sits at the dawn of an era of rapid telecommunication that would radically transform the long-distance ways in which war could be perceived, yet on the battlefield its military technologies and techniques are recognizably consistent with earlier methods of war. In contrast, the end of the nineteenth century witnesses a more profound transformation evident in the confluence of new weapons, adapted military techniques, and advanced media technologies, many of which played a key role in the South African War. The Boer-British conflict is thus ideally placed as an example of how emerging auditory perceptions of war were mediated through new technologies in a rapidly changing media and cultural landscape. Its scale and positioning within that landscape make it a more significant site for the development of intersections between media and perception than its contemporary, the Spanish-American War. Yet one point of connection with earlier wars persists: although the South African War stands at the dawn of the recorded age, there are no known audio recordings of the war itself. It remains the last silent war. Thus, I undertake what Ana María Ochoa Gautier has called “an acoustically tuned exploration of the written archive,” or what might more broadly be termed a listening out for those traces of audibility made legible in written and visual forms.19 This includes published diaries and memoirs kept by combatants, civilians, and journalists sent to report on the conflict, as well as news reports and letters. Reading these sources for accounts of sounds and how they were experienced and interpreted offers a glimpse of how those perceptions continue to influence the way we might hear the South African War today.
The South African War
The South African War began on October 11, 1899, and had two clear phases. The first featured conventional battles between the Boers (a citizens’ army comprising Dutch-descended settler colonists and others) and British imperial forces; it was marked by multiple British defeats (including those of the “Black Week” of December 1899) and prolonged sieges of British garrisons. An imperial troop surge in early 1900 allowed the British to lift the blockades at Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking and occupy the two Boer Republics (the Orange Free State and the South African Republic) by June 1900. At this point, the second phase began. Rather than face the British directly, the Boer forces now broke into small groups and went on commando, a form of guerilla warfare in which bands of mounted men harried troops and sabotaged railways and telegraph offices while living off the land. The war dragged on under increasingly harsh conditions until the 1902 Peace of Vereeniging formalized the annexation of the Boer Republics as British colonies.
The Boers’ recourse to guerilla warfare links the South African War with other contemporary colonial wars, including the Cuban Independence War (1895–98), the Philippine Revolution (1896–98), and the Philippine-American War (1899–1902). So too the imperial response, whereby the British commanders Lords Milner, Roberts, and Kitchener sought to deprive the commandos of all means of support by forcibly clearing large sections of land and building chains of military outposts known as blockhouses to protect infrastructure. In an echo of Spain’s treatment of Cuban farmers, the British scorched-earth policy included removing Afrikaner and black civilians to concentration camps, destroying homesteads, and killing or confiscating livestock and other foodstuffs. Over the course of two years (1900–1902), up to 200,000 civilians were interned in appalling conditions as part of the effort to force a surrender. It is estimated that 10 per cent of the white Boer population, amounting to more than 25,000 people, alongside up to 20,000 black South Africans, perished in the camps. In both cases, most of the casualties were women and children who died of disease, exposure, and starvation and it is for this that the South African War is best known.20 The imperial weaponization of civilian populations would similarly characterize the later German genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in present-day Namibia (1904–7), as well as playing a role in the genocidal campaign carried out by the Ottoman Empire against ethnic Armenians (1915–16); it is notable that the expulsion of civilian populations in pursuit of military objectives continues to feature in twenty-first-century warfare.
Despite these similarities to other colonial conflicts, the South African War stands out as the longest, bloodiest, and most expensive war fought by the British Empire between 1815 and 1914. Beyond noting its human, economic, and environmental cost, the historian Thomas Pakenham adds that for the British it was the “most humiliating” conflict of the period.21 Over the course of two and half years, 450,000 soldiers drawn from across the empire struggled to overcome a Boer force that numbered less than 20 per cent of their total. Among the difficulties faced by the British was the fact that, differently from most colonial wars of the period, their opponents shared many of the same technologies, whether military or those of information and communication. This shaped the course of the conflict and the sensory experiences of those caught up in it. From this technological confluence emerged a distinctively modern form of wartime listening that would soon spread around the globe.
Sound out of Sight
Today, the distance between Cape Town and Pretoria by rail is almost 1,000 miles across rugged terrain, while the railway lines linking Pretoria to the port cities of Maputo (in 1899 the Portuguese-held Lourenço Marques) and Durban are 350 and 500 miles, respectively. The immense geographical spaces involved in the South African War, and the necessity of transmitting information across those spaces, rendered modern technology crucial in determining outcomes. In addition to the struggle to control the railways, the war was notable for its deployment of cutting-edge technological advances in communication: for example, it featured the first successful military application of wireless telegraphy in the Royal Navy’s use of it to communicate between ships in Delagoa Bay.22 Both sides in the conflict were interested in this new technology, although the British Army’s attempt to use Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless equipment to coordinate troop movements was confounded by unfavorable geophysical conditions and atmospheric interference, while the Siemens and Halske equipment ordered by the South African Republic was captured by the British and never saw service.23 Despite limited success for wireless transmission, wired telegraphy and the field telephone (another new technology) played key roles in coordinating military movements, especially in the first phase of the war.
At the outbreak of war, the Boer Republics had a total of 215 telegraph offices as well as field telegraphs and heliographs.24 In his 1902 report on the war, published as With Steyn and De Wet, the telegraphist in the Transvaal Civil Service (and sometime commando) Filip Pienaar (1877–1948) recounts the ingenious way in which the Boer forces instituted a mobile telegraph for communication between military laagers by using insulated fence wire and a vibrator, “an instrument so sensitive that the most faulty line will carry sufficient electricity to work it.”25 In the Orange Free State, where all farms were required to have wire fencing, a ready-made telegraphing service became available:
Soon messages were gaily buzzing to and fro over the fence. There was naturally a great loss of electricity, but not enough to prevent the working of the sensitive little vibrator.
As with the cable in Natal, however, there were frequent interruptions. A herd of cattle would knock a few poles over, a burgher hurrying across country would simply cut a passage through the fence, or a farmer in passing through a gate would notice the cable, dig it up, and take it along, swearing it must be dynamite, and that the English were trying to explode the Free State with it.26
The vibrator also allowed a sensitive listener to intercept messages coming through the telegraph lines. Pienaar was one such skilled listener, and his account of wiretapping is worth quoting at length:
After breakfast I walked down to the telegraph line connecting Heilbron and Frankfort, which ran past this point. Taking about ten yards of “cable” wire, I cleaned about a foot of it in the middle, tied one end to my spanner, and threw the latter over the line. The swing carried it over a second time, the two ends hanging just above the ground. Attaching one end to the instrument, I heard the English telegraphist in Heilbron calling up Kroonstadt, and the Boer telegraphist in Frankfort working to Reitz.
I immediately climbed the pole and cut the Frankfort side of the line. Then I took another piece of cable, and connected the earth terminal of the vibrator with the telegraph pole. The British signals now came through beautifully clear. The first message that passed was one from General Hamilton to Lord Roberts, announcing his arrival at Heilbron, the details of the two engagements fought during the march, the number of killed and wounded, and the state of his force—“often hungry, but cheerful.”…
We two rode on until almost on top of the hill overlooking Heilbron, when we dismounted. Drawing the horses behind a low stone wall, we attached the instrument to the line. I listened. There were no fewer than five different vibrators calling each other, some strong and clear, others sounding weak and far, like “horns of Elfland faintly blowing.” Presently the disputing signals died away, and one musical note alone took up the strain.
Never was [a] lover more absorbed in the thrilling sound of his divinity’s voice than I in the notes of that vibrator, seemingly wailing up from the bowels of the earth.
Nor was my attention unrewarded.
“From Chief of Staff, Honingspruit,” came the words, “to General Hamilton, Heilbron.” Then followed orders. How Hamilton was to march from Heilbron; how Broadwood was to move from Ventersburg, the entire plan of campaign for the next few weeks! A mass of information to gladden the heart of our steadfast chief. “Hurrah!” we whispered to each other, as I carefully put the precious message in a safe place.
Then some harsh, grating sounds were heard in the microphone. The wires were evidently being overhauled in Heilbron. Complete silence followed.27
Though the telegraph and its affordances for eavesdropping were not new in 1899, listening in the ways Pienaar describes demonstrates how the military forces in South Africa adapted both the landscape and the available technologies. Together with control of the railway lines (the importance of which had been demonstrated in the American Civil War and the two Prussian wars of the 1860s and 1870s), wired technologies and the audile techniques they engendered represented military attempts to compress the vast distances of South Africa into spaces across which both communication and control were possible via metallic taps and the hiss of tape and wire. In particular, amid a description of the practicalities of his work, Pienaar provides a counterpoint to Plaatje’s “musical” account of British gunfire by offering his own distinctively musical interpretation of the telegraphed sounds as “horns of Elfland” (a quotation from Tennyson’s poem “The Splendour Falls” from The Princess) before he homes in on the “one musical note.” Though the originators of the sounds here are not weapons as at Mafeking, they seem to have been equally thrilling to the right audience.
If we narrow our focus to the battlefield, other distinctive sonic contours emerge. In the early months of the war, new weapons technologies, including long-range bolt-action magazine rifles, smokeless powder, improved artillery, and a combination of trench warfare (in the initial part of the war) and guerrilla tactics (later on) served to shape the strategies of long-distance bombardment and sniping. In particular, the range of the Boers’ Mauser rifles (up to four thousand meters, with good accuracy at over two thousand meters), combined with the marksmanship and skill of the Boer fighters themselves and their facility in using natural cover, made them deadly and often unseen opponents. As the American war reporter Howard Hillegas (1872–1918) wrote of the Battle of Sanna’s Post in March 1900,
the use of smokeless powder, causing the panorama to remain perfectly clear and distinct, allowed every movement to be closely followed by the observer. Cannon poured forth their tons of shells, but there was nothing except the sound of the explosion to denote where the guns were situated. Rifles cut down lines of men, but there was no smoke to indicate where they were being operated, and unless the burghers or soldiers displayed themselves to the enemy there was nothing to indicate their positions.28
British soldiers complained vociferously about both their inability to see the enemy and the slowness of their military commanders to adapt tactics.29 Shortly after the end of the war, an officer wrote in the United Service Magazine, “War is not what it was when armies manoeuvered in sight of each other.…That was old-time fighting and some sport about it too. Now Bill is killed at 2,400 yards, and Bill’s pal hasn’t an idea where the shot was fired. That is modern warfare.”30 It is striking that the primary technological advantages identified with the advent of modern rifles—namely, their long range and flat trajectory, magazine loading mechanisms, and smokeless powder—had the effect of increasing the importance of sound as a delimiter of battle by expanding the range of fire, increasing its rate, and rendering its location invisible, respectively.
Although the British rarely matched the Boers in terms of marksmanship, they carried similarly powerful rifles (Lee-Metfords) and were amply endowed with artillery (including repurposed naval guns), which they deployed in large batteries that could be accurate at a range of several miles. In a curious paradox, artillerymen encountered the problem of too much visibility, rather than too little, as South Africa’s exceptionally clear atmosphere rendered range-finding difficult.31 Nonetheless, when the range was found, British weaponry could be devastating. Deneys Reitz (1882–1944), a young Free State commando, described the effects of shelling during a battle at Ladysmith:
There came the sound, once heard never forgotten, of shells tearing towards us and exploding around us, and overhead, with deafening concussions.
By now, what with the thunder of the British guns and of our own, the crash of bursting shells and the din of thousands of rifles, there was a volume of sound unheard in South Africa before. I was awed rather than frightened, and, once I had got over my first impression, I felt excited by all I saw.32
A short time later, Reitz was on the Tugela line when he first encountered lyddite shells, a kind of British artillery round whose effect combined hearing, sight, taste, and smell when they “went off with an appalling bang, emitting acrid green and yellow fumes that gave one a burning sensation in throat, and chest.”33
Whether in entrenched positions, out in the comparative open, or manning gun posts, soldiers learned to distinguish between different types of ordnance and to recognize the relative distance and direction of incoming shells.34 For example, the “pom-pom” gun, the 37 mm Maxim-Nordenfelt or Vickers-Maxim automatic cannon, gained its nickname from the distinctive sound it made as it spat out dozens of rounds per minute. The rapid onslaught of noise and shell arriving with no visual warning was terrifying; as the professional filmmaker William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson recalled of the Battle of Spion Kop in January 1900,
the British were being mowed down by rifle and cross-fire from the “door-knockers,” or Maxim-Nordenfeldt [sic] repeating guns, making it quite impossible for our men to escape.…Our men shudder at the very sound, the moment they hear it; and no wonder, for the accurate shooting accomplished with this murderous weapon is something fearful to see—men disembowelled, legs and arms carried away, and the ground torn to pieces.35
These descriptions highlight the crucial role of sound in orienting oneself on a battlefield that was a maelstrom of the “pop” and “crack” of rifles, the “rat-tat” of the Maxim machine gun, and the “roar” of artillery. In the open battlescapes of South Africa, the sounds of munitions traveled unaccompanied by visual signals of their origins and were amplified through multiple echoes as their reports ricocheted off the rugged landscape. Successfully navigating this sonic environment required directing attention, as Ouzounian puts it, “not toward the visible source of sound, but toward the path of sound.”36 In short, the South African War demonstrates how new technologies rendered sight inadequate, reorienting attention toward the sonic and thereby shaping fundamentally new sensory and tactical approaches.
A dozen years later, the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo recognized the significance of the inversion of prior sensorial hierarchies that had been heralded by the environment of the South African War. In his 1913 treatise The Art of Noises (written in the immediate aftermath of the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12) Russolo asserts that
in modern warfare, mechanical and metallic, the element of sight is almost zero. The sense, the significance, and the expressiveness of noise, however, are infinite.…From noise, the different calibers of grenades and shrapnels can be known even before they explode. Noise enables us to discern a marching patrol in deepest darkness, even to judging the number of men that compose it. From the intensity of rifle fire, the number of defenders of a given position can be determined. There is no movement or activity that is not revealed by noise.37
For Russolo, this new noisiness came about first in war, and it not only revealed the necessity of coming to grips with the changes to humanity wrought by technological progress, but also demanded a new artistic paradigm that heard musicality in what was called noise. Although the South African War’s audiences were more immediately concerned with questions of physical safety and military advantage than with art, in their recollections of wartime sound we can hear an echo of a peculiar music made of and by the noisiness of guns.
Guns ’n’ Music
For those civilians who found themselves within earshot of the guns, perception of their consonance or dissonance was strongly shaped by the hearers’ allegiances. Sol Plaatje’s evocative descriptions—such as the one that opens this article—are particularly striking for their equation of music and gunfire, but alongside this are his observations about the effects of the guns on the minds and bodies of those who hear them. Immediately after his discussion of the guns’ “thrilling” sound he writes, “no words can suitably depict the fascination of the music produced by the action of a Maxim, which to Boer ears, I am sure, is an exasperation which not only disturbs the ear but also disorganizes the free circulation of the listener’s blood.”38 Thus, from his earliest descriptions of the siege, Plaatje draws a distinction between the guns of the two sides in terms of both musical quality and listener pleasure. Moreover, he imagines that those sounds that to him are “captivating” beyond all music have an equal but opposite effect on the Boers, causing physical symptoms such as disorientation and nausea.39 Acknowledgment of the reverse position—that Boer guns might seem musical to the Boers themselves—is comparatively lacking.
In fact, Plaatje seems to take pride in and comfort from his ability to hear the British guns as musical while approving of their unmusical effects on the enemy. Throughout the early portion of the diary, Plaatje is disparaging toward the Boer guns, referring to the sound made by high-velocity Mausers as a “sickening rattle” but otherwise considering them a nuisance; he is somewhat more deferential to the bang of the Boers’ long gun, which he calls “Au Sanna,” particularly as the siege progresses and damage and privation begin to wear.40 In contrast, he is unstinting in expressing his pleasure in the British guns. Describing one encounter, he writes,
All of a sudden four or five “booms” from the armoured train quenched their metal. It was like a member of the Payne family silencing a boisterous crowd with the prelude of a selection she is going to give on the violin. When their beastly fire “shut up” the Maxim began to play: it was like listening to the Kimberley R.C. choir with their organ, rendering one of their mellifluous carols on Christmas Eve; and its charm could justly be compared with that of the Jubilee Singers performing one of their many quaint and classical oratorios.41
Plaatje’s rich description comparing the sounds of gunfire to performances by these contemporary musical groups reveals him as a person of extensive experience and knowledge of diverse musical styles.42 Later on in his diary, the guns themselves become musical performers. He writes, “we enjoyed that sweet and enchanting music from our musketeers. It gave us an entertainment of the sweetest music imaginable when slow volley after volley was directed at the angry Boers: now and then a 7-pounder would harmonize the proceedings with an occasional ‘boom’ in sweet bombardment.”43
As striking as Plaatje’s rhetorical conflation of musical performance and gunfire may be, hearing the mechanisms of war in musical terms was not limited to sympathizers of one side. In the later months of the war, Pienaar describes riding into a battle at Bethlehem “quite cheerfully…listening to the music of the bursting shells and the lively rattle of the small-arms,” while his evocative narrative of a skirmish describes how “the bullets all went high, singing overhead like a flight of canaries.”44 Dr. James Alexander Kay (1849–1914), a British surgeon in besieged Ladysmith, occasionally also described the firing of guns as musical, as in the following extracts from his diary, written during the final month of the siege of Ladysmith in 1900:
5 February. Today the music of the guns from Colenso cheered us all and towards afternoon it was one continuous roar.…
22 February. We’ve had such lovely music again—heavy firing from Colenso for three days, and today it sounds quite close45
Interestingly, at this point Kay makes no mention of the returning fire of the Boer guns. Rather, his account highlights the anticipatory quality of listening required by life under siege: a life in which increasing or decreasing artillery sounds were often subjects of intense discussion and interpretation by Ladysmith’s beleaguered inhabitants. Moreover, Kay’s use of “lovely music” to describe gunfire indicates a moral-aesthetic approval that echoes Plaatje’s description of the British guns at Mafeking. This semantic echo is all the more notable given that Kay hopes the guns will come closer; his perception that the guns are on his side renders what might have been threatening into something that “cheered us all.”
A month later, the American observer Hillegas would take a different line on musical gunfire in his report on the Battle of Sanna’s Post, writing that “men and horses continued to fall, the wounded lay moaning in the grass, while shells and bullets sang their song of death more loudly every second to those who braved the storm.”46 Even musical rhythm is given a brief metaphorical role in his description of how “the regular volleys of the British soldiers seemed to be beating time to the minor notes and irregular reports of the Boer rifles.”47 This last comment is not merely a poetic device, however, but a musicalized comment on the varying rhythms of sonic participation in the battle that were themselves the result of different tactics (volley fire versus individualized marksmanship) and technologies (the higher pitch of the high-velocity Mauser rifles favored by the Boer forces) combined with the reverberant features of the landscape. In both instances, the aestheticized descriptions of gunfire are undercut by acknowledgment of the violence that followed in their wake.
Plaatje, Pienaar, Kay, and Hillegas were all choosing to remain within earshot of the guns; so too was Dickson, but his account also includes a brief note regarding those (both human and animal) who remained in auditory range not through choice but because they had been hired to assist the filmmaker. At the battle of Colenso he comments,
Our horses, trembling and jumping at every shot, behaved splendidly, however, never moving from the spot, but scared out of their wits. My companions used cotton-wool in their ears to prevent the tremendous concussion, but as I wished to hear which way the shells were coming I preferred to drop the jaw at the word “Fire,” a trick I learned at Sandy Hook, U.S., at the firing of the 10in., which answered the purpose very well.48
Likewise, Hillegas notes that while he responded to the sounds of battle relatively dispassionately, not all were so sanguine. A group of British women and children caught up in the fighting at Sanna’s Post
were in perfect safety so far as being actually out of the line of fire was concerned, but bullets and shells swept over and exploded near them, and they were in constant terror of being killed. The nervous tension was so great and continued for such a long time that one of the children, a twelve-year-old daughter of Mrs. J. Shaw McKinlay, became insane shortly after the battle was ended.49
In a tragic counterpart to Plaatje’s assertion that the sound of British guns “disturbs the [Boer] ear” and “disorganizes the free circulation of the listener’s blood,” Hillegas’s report offers a glimpse of how the disturbing and disordered music of gunfire could cause what nineteenth-century physicians called neurasthenia or traumatic neurosis and would later be called shell shock, combat stress reaction, or post-traumatic stress disorder.50 Although these are but brief asides in stories that otherwise exhibit deep admiration for the overpowering sound of the guns, they are salutary reminders that such military “music” was not heard by everyone.
Music away from the Front
The musicalized sounds and silences of military machines are prominent in many accounts from the war, but overlapping with the sound of guns were other, less immediately threatening melodies. Music, whether provided by military bands or through more informal music-making, had long been a characteristic of British military life and played an important role in the South African War.51 In particular, the British military still used fife and drum bands, pipers, and buglers to rally troops on the battlefield. In addition, folk instruments such as the concertina may have been used as entertainment and occasionally to lure curious soldiers to expose themselves to enemy fire, as detailed by Johnson-Williams.52 Among the British troops, two buglers won renown in early battles in South Africa. The first was John Shurlock, a fourteen-year-old with the 5th Royal Irish Lancers who shot three Boer soldiers at Elandslaagte on October 21, 1899. His exploits were transformed into a popular music hall song, “Only a Bugler Boy,” just days after they were reported in the British press.53 Scarcely a month later at the British defeat at the Tugela River, bugler John Francis Dunne continued to sound the charge even after he had been seriously wounded. Dunne’s feat earned him a commendation (and a new bugle) bestowed by Queen Victoria, alongside a form of immortality in the song “Bugler Dunne.”54
Patriotic accounts of the war from both sides were sung across a wide range of venues in South Africa and beyond, and while South Africa lacked recording facilities, in Europe recordings were an important means of galvanizing popular support. The musical setting of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Absent-Minded Beggar” is the most famous song from a British perspective—it was written for a fundraising drive that eventually raised over £250,000—but also notable is Ian Colquhoun’s “Marching on Pretoria” from 1899, which is the earliest known mention of South Africa in recorded song.55 Pro-Boer (or anti-British) sentiment also made its mark through musical recordings. In January 1900, recordings of the national anthems of the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State were made in The Hague and Berlin, and pro-Boer songs were popular across a wide swathe of Europe, from the Netherlands and France to Hungary and Russia.56 Here, the music-making of the home and war fronts collided with wider geopolitical rivalries, fueled by the nascent recorded music industry.
In the conflict zone, music was more than a tool for rallying troops; it also provided rest and entertainment off the battlefield and included performances by both military and civilian musicians as well as featuring new audio technologies such as the gramophone. Thus, Dickson notes with some fondness the night of February 22, 1900, in which
we were regaled by a soldiers’ concert of the very best; bright spontaneous humour prevailed; clever impromptu songs and dances; a gramophone was handled very well by an officer; the accompaniments were played by the landlord’s daughter. The piano had been hauled out on the porch, and the little intervening space between the little inn and the store covered over. All was bright and happy, and the war was forgotten for a time.57
Similar reports of concerts and their salutary effects on morale appear in several other accounts, including Kay’s description in a letter of a somewhat slapdash attempt at entertainment during the Ladysmith siege:
We frequently hold open-air concerts at Intombi. If the music is not first-class and the songs are not drawing-room, we none the less appreciate them.
We have no band, but a small harmonium, and the omission is much felt. A band is most enlivening, and although a scratch band has been raised, with amateur-made instruments which emit sound but not music, it is meant more as a burlesque than as a substitute for a band.58
Among the Boers, music was equally important, with religious music featuring particularly strongly. The Dutch Reformed tradition of hymn and psalm singing was a twice-daily feature in many laagers, and even in commando bands instrumentalists and singers kept morale high with marches, dances, and comic songs.59 In towns such as Pretoria, “a victory was celebrated in the Dutch church by the singing of psalms, and a defeat by the offering of prayers for the success of the army.”60 The American war correspondent Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916) was in Pretoria during the final days before the British Army occupied the city; he noted that “up to the very last the Boer residents gave concerts for the benefit of the sick and wounded, at which one could hear the best classical music excellently played and sung.”61 Even under British occupation, music had a place in the city, though public forms of music-making often came under military scrutiny. Johanna Brandt (née van Warmelo) recounts that she had to request a special permit from the British General Maxwell on behalf of the Pretoria Ladies’ Vocal Society in order to hold rehearsals. The permit was granted, but on the condition “that you promise to talk no politics and to be in your own homes before 7 p.m.”62 Rehearsals were duly held, and at home Brandt played the piano and sang every evening.
Music also provided occasional moments of seeming unity among combatants, as witnessed by Kay’s description of Boer soldiers at his hospital who “once attended one of the concerts, and ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ was a great favourite. This did not cause them much uneasiness but when it came to ‘God Save the Queen,’ they gradually disappeared and did not attend the concerts again.”63 Interestingly, uneasiness in the face of British patriotic songs was not always shown by Boer soldiers; indeed, Hillegas recounts another musical incident involving “Soldiers of the Queen,” this time in the aftermath of a skirmish won by the Boers:
A soldier commenced to sing another popular song, British and Boer caught the refrain, and the noise of tramping feet was drowned by the melody of the united voices of friend and foe singing—
The image of Boer soldiers happily singing a song in praise of their opponents in these circumstances is striking, but “Soldiers of the Queen” appears to have been a particular favorite among those on either side of the conflict in South Africa as well as among wartime audiences in Britain.65 Lest this give the impression that wartime songs were exclusively patriotic, uplifting, and free from “popular Music Hall effusions,”66 Kay also includes in his diary a bitingly satiric lyric from the conflict’s early days that takes aim at Liberal and radical opposition to the war while repurposing the tune of “God Save the Queen”:
Moments of music-making such as these may seem far removed from the environment of the battlefield, but they indicate (and encourage) a listening orientation that frames military action through music.
Given the pervasiveness of music in South African conflict zones, it is unsurprising that music was used by both sides as an opportunity to remember the past and to inspire military action. One such moment is flagged by Hillegas, who notes in his report that before the Boer forces crossed the border into British-held Natal at the outbreak of the war, they held a service in which “hymns were sung, and for a full hour the hills, whereon almost twenty years before many of the same burghers had sung and prayed after the victory at Majuba, were resounding with the religious and patriotic songs of men going forward to kill and be killed.”68 The religious fervor of such services overlapped with patriotic commitment, and both were articulated musically. Yet despite the Boer army’s military and musical strength, it would not be long before those same hills that had witnessed the British Army’s defeat in 1881 would again echo with the death song of rifle fire, this time compelling a Boer retreat back over Laing’s Nek.
Understanding the uses of music during the South African War allows us to further contextualize the importance of sound during this conflict, and to explore how emerging technologies produced, amplified, and altered the act of listening. Within this framework, the persistence of music as a metaphorical description for gunfire is arresting; it draws attention to the ambiguous relationship between music and noise and the degree to which the identity and allegiance of the listener could allow one to fade into the other. No longer was musical sound the preserve of military bands or of informal performance; instead, depending on the point of audition, the very machines that generated death and destruction could also be heard as musical. Moreover, even though the experience of gunfire as overwhelming or terrifying was shared across battle lines, the ability to classify the sounds of one’s enemies as sickening and those of one’s friends as lovely allowed individuals (and, via journalistic dissemination, larger audiences) to make sense of the field of battle in and through sound.
Conclusion
For all their significance, the vibrating sounds of the South African War have vanished. Yet the war left behind a rich archive of visual and written information, often from people who were witnesses of the ear as much as of the eye. Examining these accounts reveals the South African War as a pivotal moment in the global history of listening in which war became inescapably sonic. It also reveals how descriptions of listening—musical, rhythmic, noisy, vibrational—became inextricable from new technological encounters. This points to what Alyson Tapp has called “the sense-making work of consciousness, the ways we perceive, mediate, and represent the world to ourselves.”69 To those under siege or in the open field the sounds and rhythms of the guns were defining characteristics of the South African battlefield; the positive and negative impressions they made on both soldiers and observers would influence the way the war was further mediated and represented. Moreover, beyond the battlefield music remained a key feature in a soundscape that was in many ways newly heard.
Such attention to sound and to the senses was characteristic of the late nineteenth century, an era John Picker describes as full of “unheard-of loudness”—much of it generated by new technologies or through new, and often colonial, encounters.70 This inspired multiple attempts to cultivate novel ways of hearing. In his Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, the nineteenth-century philosopher of technology Ernst Kapp (1808–96) argues for the products of technology to be understood as what he calls “organ projections.”71 In this framework, bodily organs serve as both models for machines and the lenses through which human activities, including music, are interpreted. Thus, the vibrating fibers of the organ of Corti in the ear furnish connections to the harp and piano, and Kapp enjoins his readers to “recall that the ear drum, the tympanic cavity, the Eustachian trumpet already took their names from musical instruments (even the cochlea recalls the violin’s scroll).”72 The ear itself is thus figured as a medium that in its very structure connects instrumental technologies to the cultural phenomenon of music. The accounts from the South African War are not concerned with the intricacies of human organs, but a similar instrumentalization of the body and the human sensorium as a lens for understanding technology is evident, as when Pienaar connects the buzzing of the vibrator on the telegraph line to the vibration of the throat as he listens to a voice “wailing up from the bowels of the earth.”73
Given the technological and perceptual changes that separate the period of the South African War from today, it is worth returning briefly to the question of how listeners today hear or do not hear that war. As I suggest at the beginning of this article, within music and sound studies we encounter relatively little of this conflict, and shifting cultural ideas about the power of sound, technology, and the nature of music render its historical experiences enigmatic. We cannot escape our twenty-first-century ears. Yet even with these caveats in place, a clear sense emerges of the South African War as expanding the contexts for thinking about auditory culture.
In the primary-source accounts of war dealt with here, auditory perception, musical metaphor, and military technology are revealed as deeply intertwined. That these peculiar descriptions speak alongside other descriptions of more conventional experiences of music offers another approach to interpreting Paul Virilio’s suggestion that “weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception.”74 We understand the world at once through our sense perceptions and through the tools both metaphorical and material that form the basis for utility, knowledge, and being. In South Africa, changes in the sensorial hierarchy necessitated by new forms of war produced sensitive listeners not only among soldiers, but among civilians, journalists, and even animals. For some, these new and deafening military technologies were made comprehensible through comparisons with music and musical sound—considered as melodious (or odious) as the more obvious music-making that permeated life away from the battlefield. This does more than reverse the familiar refrain of music as a weapon; it suggests that the moment war became sonic was also the moment war became music.
Notes
I would like to thank Alexander Hutton, the editors of the Journal of Musicology, and the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for the thoughtful critiques offered during the review process. This work was supported in part by the European Research Council under Grant 638241, “Sound and Materialism in the 19th Century.”
Solomon Plaatje, The Boer War Diary of Sol T. Plaatje: An African at Mafeking, ed. John L. Comaroff (London: Macmillan, 1973), 1.
In this article, I have chosen to refrain from capitalizing the racialized identities of black and white, as to do so in a South African context evokes the official apartheid-era racial categories.
The Barolong boo Ratshidi are also responsible for the preservation of Plaatje’s diary in Mafikeng, where it was shown to the anthropologist John L. Comaroff in the 1960s. The manuscript is now housed at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Black South Africans were central to the war: both armies in South Africa relied heavily on black labor (sometimes paid, often not) to support military operations, and non-white people (especially members of mixed-heritage, Khoikhoi, and San communities) were often recruited as scouts, messengers, and spies. More than 10,000 were under British arms by the war’s end and perhaps 100,000 were either conscripted or employed by the British military overall. The numbers of non-white people in the Boer forces are less clear but estimates range from 10,000 to 15,000 conscripts and volunteers in the commandos, while more would have served as conscripted labor on farms and homesteads. Other participants in the war included anti-imperial volunteers from Europe and North America, regiments from British colonies such as India (though a group of Māori from Aotearoa/New Zealand were refused), and African groups not under the aegis of one or the other main force (e.g., independent chiefdoms such as the Swazi). See Peter Warwick, Black People in the South African War, 1899–1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Hulme T. Siwundhla, “White Ideologies and Non-European Participation in the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902,” Journal of Black Studies 15, no. 2 (1984): 223–34.
The naming of the war is a matter of ambivalence in scholarly sources. See Bill Nasson, “The South African War / Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902 and Political Memory in South Africa,” in The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, ed. T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper (London: Routledge, 2000), 111–27, and Louis Changuion, “To Name a War: The War of 1899–1902,” Historia 44, no. 1 (1999): 101–9. Terms such as the Boer War, the Transvaal War, the Tweede Vryheidsoorlog (Second Freedom War), and the Engelse oorlog (English War) reflect a narrow view of the affected parties. Some reduction is inevitable, but while I use “Boer” to describe the forces arrayed against the “British,” I refer to the broader conflict here as the South African War.
Steve Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Suzanne G. Cusick, “‘You Are in a Place That Is out of the World…’: Music in the Detention Camps of the ‘Global War on Terror,’” Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 1 (2008): 1–26.
J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); J. Martin Daughtry, “Thanatosonics: Ontologies of Acoustic Violence,” Social Text 32, no. 2 (2014): 25–51; Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Jim Sykes, “Ontologies of Acoustic Endurance: Rethinking Wartime Sound and Listening,” Sound Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 35–60.
Gascia Ouzounian, “Powers of Hearing: Acoustic Defense and Technologies of Listening during the First World War,” in Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology and the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 37–60; Mark M. Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Erin Johnson-Williams, “‘The Concertina’s Deadly Work in the Trenches’: Soundscapes of Suffering in the South African War,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 20 (2023): 119–51.
Anne-Marie Gray, “Vocal Music of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902): Insights into the Processes of Affect and Meanings in Music” (DMus diss., University of Pretoria, 2004).
Annemie Stimie, “Songs, Singing and Spaces in South Africa: Afrikaans Folk Songs in Nationalist Publications,” in Music and Propaganda in the Short Twentieth Century, ed. Massimiliano Sala (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 375–90; Willemien Froneman, “Seks, ras en boeremusiek: Agter die retoriek van gebrekkige sanglus by die 1938-Voortrekkereeufees,” LitNet Akademies 11, no. 2 (2014): 422–49; Willemien Froneman, “The Ears of Apartheid,” Social Dynamics 49, no. 1 (2023): 100–115. Although it focuses on the relationship between music and literature in a much later period (1980s–), Carina Venter’s 2015 article “Negotiating Vision: Listening with the Eyes and Hearing Landscape Critically,” SAMUS: South African Music Studies 34–35 (2015): 364–90, is exceptional in that it offers intriguing points of contact with the discussion of sound, vision, and landscape in the present article.
See Fanie Jooste, “The British Influence on South African Wind Music during the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Band Research 27, no. 1 (1991): 56–65; Austin C. Okigbo, “Musical Inculturation, Theological Transformation, and the Construction of Black Nationalism in Early South African Choral Music Tradition,” Africa Today 57, no. 2 (2010): 43–65; Grant Olwage, “Discipline and Choralism: The Birth of Musical Colonialism,” in Music, Power, and Politics, ed. Annie J. Randall (New York: Routledge, 2005), 25–46; and David Smith, “Colonial Encounters through the Prism of Music: A Southern African Perspective,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 33, no. 1 (2002): 31–55. Scholars such as Veit Erlmann have also examined hybrid popular genres such as isicathamiya whose roots lie in the nineteenth century. Veit Erlmann, “Migration and Performance: Zulu Migrant Workers’ isicathamiya Performance in South Africa, 1890–1950,” Ethnomusicology 34, no. 2 (1990): 199–220.
Denis-Constant Martin, Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa (Somerset West, South Africa: African Minds, 2013).
Basic literacy, such as the ability to read and sign one’s name, was widespread among white South African populations, but Fransjohan Pretorius estimates that less than 40 per cent of either British or Boer forces attained “more than just the barest level of literacy.” Fransjohan Pretorius, “Reading Practices and Literacy of Boer Combatants in the South African War of 1899–1902,” War in History 24, no. 3 (2017): 286–307, at 290. Literacy rates for non-white populations are unknown, but outside of missionary schools, very little schooling was available to non-white populations, even though—as Plaatje demonstrates—education could be of high quality.
Smith, Smell of Battle, 3.
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 28.
Gavin Williams, “Introduction: Sound Unmade,” in Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense, ed. Gavin Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), xv–li, at xx–xlv.
Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 3.
See Fransjohan Pretorius, “The White Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Debate without End,” Historia 55, no. 2 (2010): 34–49, and B. E. Mongalo and Kobus du Pisani, “Victims of a White Man’s War: Blacks in Concentration Camps during the South African War (1899–1902),” Historia 44, no. 1 (1999): 148–82.
Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (New York: Avon Books, 1979), xix.
See Brian A. Austin, “Wireless in the Boer War,” Journal of Defence Science 6, no. 2 (2001): 119–25, at 123.
See Austin, “Wireless in the Boer War,” 120–22.
See T. D. Potgieter, “Nineteenth Century Technological Development and Its Influence on the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902,” Southern Journal of Contemporary History 25, no. 2 (2000): 116–35, at 122.
Philip [Filip] Pienaar, With Steyn and De Wet (London: Methuen, 1902), 33.
Pienaar, With Steyn and De Wet, 61.
Pienaar, With Steyn and De Wet, 89–92.
Howard C. Hillegas, The Boers in War: The Story of the British-Boer War of 1899–1900, as Seen from the Boer Side, with a Description of the Men and Methods of the Republican Armies (New York: D. Appleton, 1900), 146.
“You never see your enemy, even at 900 or 500 [yards]; and the Boer is a busy fellow if he feels so inclined. He will stay and fire 300 shots at you before you can clap your hands. If he wants to go to a better place he will go, but you can’t see him move.” An officer in the Devonshire regiments, quoted in Edward M. Spiers, The Victorian Soldier in Africa (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004), 173. See also Keith Surridge, “‘All You Soldiers Are What We Call Pro-Boer’: The Military Critique of the South African War, 1899–1902,” History 82, no. 268 (1997): 582–600.
Quoted in Spencer Jones, “‘Shooting Power’: A Study of the Effectiveness of Boer and British Rifle Fire, 1899–1914,” British Journal for Military History 1, no. 1 (2014): 29–47, at 32.
See Hillegas, Boers in War, 95, and Jones, “Shooting Power,” 31. Meteorological conditions in South Africa, especially relative humidity, atmospheric turbulence, and air pollution, differed substantially from those in which British artillerymen had been trained or of which they had experience, resulting in significant under- and overestimations of distance. Jones notes that the British commander Colonel Charles Long blamed atmospheric conditions for his overestimation of the distance to the Boer lines at Colenso, which led to the disastrous loss of two artillery batteries in close combat, though this may be a post hoc rationalization.
Deneys Reitz, Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War, rev. ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), 41–42.
Reitz, Commando, 63.
Daughtry (following Jonathan Cullers and Robin Bernstein) describes the ability to distinguish the sounds of different firearms as listening “competence,” while the fine-grained choices over how to react to those sounds indicate auditory “virtuosity” (Listening to War, 150–51). The recorded accounts from South Africa focus on the distinguishing characteristics rather than on actions taken or deferred, perhaps because the range of munitions brought to bear in South Africa was a significant expansion on those of previous wars.
William K.-L. Dickson, The Biograph in Battle: Its Story in the South African War (1901), repr. (Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 1995), 134–35. Dickson (1860–1935) was a British-American inventor and filmmaker who worked initially for Thomas Edison developing the Kinetoscope and Kinetograph before founding the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1895. He was working as a cameraman for the British arm of the company when war broke out in 1899 and traveled to South Africa to document the war. The Biograph in Battle, which is a reworked diary of his time in South Africa, is the first book to be published by a film cameraman.
Ouzounian, “Powers of Hearing,” 60.
Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 49–50. Russolo’s treatise was originally published as L’arte dei rumori in 1913.
Plaatje, Boer War Diary, 1.
This is congruent with a widespread discourse among white British observers that framed the Boers as both racially degenerate and unable to appreciate so-called high culture. See Johnson-Williams, “‘Concertina’s Deadly Work,’” 124–31.
Plaatje, Boer War Diary, 2, 7.
Plaatje, Boer War Diary, 1–2.
The reference to the “member of the Payne family” may be to the Payne Family of Bellringers, an Australian musical troupe of singers and instrumentalists who had toured the Transvaal earlier in 1899. The Kimberley Roman Catholic diocese was established as a vicariate in 1886; Plaatje grew up nearby and moved to Kimberley in 1894. The Jubilee Singers are likely to be the Virginia Jubilee Singers, a group modeled on the Fisk Jubilee Singers and led by Orpheus McAdoo that toured South Africa for five years during the 1890s. There was also a group known as the African Jubilee Singers from Kimberley (modeled on the Virginia Jubilee Singers) active between 1890 and 1893.
Plaatje, Boer War Diary, 20. Musicalized military sound would continue to be a feature of writings of the First World War, as in these evocative lines by poet and composer Ivor Gurney: “Got gassed, and learned the machine gun, how it played / scales and arpeggios.” Quoted in Oliver Soden, “Like Buttermilk from a Jug,” review of Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney by Kate Kennedy, London Review of Books, September 22, 2022, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/oliver-soden/like-buttermilk-from-a-jug.
Pienaar, With Steyn and De Wet, 131, 154.
Henry John May, Music of the Guns: Based on Two Journals of the Boer War (London: Jarrolds, 1970), 57, 60. In this volume May edits together journals by Kay and by Freda Schlosberg, a young Boer girl in Ladysmith. Schlosberg’s diaries do not indicate the same sensitivity to sound as Kay’s.
Hillegas, Boers in War, 143.
Hillegas, Boers in War, 146.
Dickson, Biograph in Battle, 74. Sandy Hook was the US Army’s artillery proving ground.
Hillegas, Boers in War, 296–97.
On neurasthenia, see Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia: From Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001).
See Trevor Herbert and Helen Barlow, Music and the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), and Emma Hanna, Sounds of War: Music in the British Armed Forces during the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Johnson-Williams, “‘Concertina’s Deadly Work,’” 124–31. As Johnson-Williams notes, the newspaper accounts of these incidents “may well be apocryphal”; indeed, the quoted description by a war correspondent of the use of the concertina at the siege of Mafeking suggests an intimacy between troops that is not evident in the extant maps of troop positions—though a shorter distance would certainly facilitate the hearing of the concertina requisite for the Boer soldiers’ curiosity to be aroused.
“The London Music Halls,” The Era (London), November 18, 1899, 21.
See the newspaper reports available via https://www.netley-military-cemetery.co.uk/passing-through-convalescents/bugler-dunne/ (accessed October 16, 2023).
See S. D. van der Merwe, On Record: Popular Afrikaans Music and Society, 1900–2017 (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2017), 1n4. For information about the tangled history of “Marching on Pretoria” and a link to a 1902 recording by Colquhoun, see “Ian Colquhoun: Marching on Pretoria,” Flatinternational: South African Audio Archive, accessed October 16, 2023, https://www.flatinternational.org/template_volume.php?volume_id=150.
For a more complete list, see Aletta M. Swanepoel, “Music Inspired by the Afrikaner Cause (1852–1902), with Special Reference to the Transvaal Volkslied” (MMus thesis, University of Cape Town, 1979), 141–210, 600–757.
Dickson, Biograph in Battle, 156.
May, Music of the Guns, 59–60. Intombi was the neutral camp and hospital at Ladysmith where Kay worked.
Pienaar’s diary mentions a “banjoist” and “an impromptu smoking concert” that featured selections from Byron as well as camp and comic songs. Pienaar, With Steyn and De Wet, 166, 111–12.
Hillegas, Boers in War, 20.
Richard Harding Davis, With Both Armies in South Africa (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 225.
Johanna Brandt, The Petticoat Commando, or Boer Women in Secret Service (London: Mills & Boon, 1913), 49.
May, Music of the Guns, 60.
Hillegas, Boers in War, 153.
On musical life in Britain during the South African War, see Frank Gray, “Our Navy and Patriotic Entertainment in Brighton at the Start of the Boer War,” in Early Cinema and the “National,” ed. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini, and Rob King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 79–89, and Simon Popple, “Fresh from the Front: Performance, War News, and Popular Culture during the Boer War,” Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no. 4 (2010): 401–18.
Preface to Marching Songs and Tommy’s Tunes: A Handbook for Our Soldiers (1914), quoted in Hanna, Sounds of War, 76.
May, Music of the Guns, 9–10.
Hillegas, Boers in War, 72.
Alyson Tapp, “Earwitness: Sound and Sense-Making in Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Stories,” in Hearing the Crimean War, 196–213, at 196.
John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4.
Ernst Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture, ed. Jeffrey West Kirkwood and Leif Weatherby, trans. Lauren K. Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Kapp’s work has been discussed further in Jeffrey West Kirkwood and Leif Weatherby, “Operations of Culture: Ernst Kapp’s Philosophy of Technology,” Grey Room, no. 72 (2018): 6–15; Maurizio Esposito, “En el principio era la mano: Ernst Kapp y la relación entre máquina y organismo,” Revista de humanidades de Valparaíso, no. 14 (2019): 117–38; and David Trippett, “From Distant Sounds to Aeolian Ears: Ernst Kapp’s Auditory Prosthesis,” in Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, ed. David Trippett and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 134–54.
Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 71.
Pienaar, With Steyn and De Wet, 91. Implicit in this account, as in many others, is that the voice, body, and senses in question are both white and male.
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), 8.