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A woman out of time: New biography gloriously restores Emily Hobhouse’s place in history

A woman out of time: New biography gloriously restores Emily Hobhouse’s place in history

History has not been kind to Emily Hobhouse. Until now, those biographers who have recorded her remarkable life have reduced her to a do-gooding English lady or at worst, a traitor to the empire who helped Boer women and children incarcerated in British concentration camps during the South African War. But a new, illustrated in-depth biography by writer Elsabé Brits restores this feminist, humanitarian, anti-imperialist, socialist – who died almost penniless in London in 1926 – to her rightful place as one of the world's leading political figures. By MARIANNE THAMM.

There are those who speak to us across the ages. Individuals who, trapped in time and the currents of history, are able to see beyond the physical landscape or the politics that confine or define them. These are the activists and humanitarians, the abolitionists and freedom fighters who each, in their way, have advanced the human condition, thwarting the bloodthirsty and the brutal in an attempt to uphold justice.

Of course many of these figures have been overlooked. In a world where men (generally white men) have recorded the deeds of their fellow men, the women who have helped to shape and better the course of humanity have often been rendered invisible or relegated to minor support roles.

Emily Hobhouse died in London in June 1926 at the age of 66, alone and penniless. There were no mourners at her cremation, no clergymen. It was the undertaker who placed her mortal remains in a casket that was shipped back to South Africa where four months later thousands gathered to pay tribute to this tireless campaigner for human rights.

Today her remains are interred at the Vrouemonument (Women’s Monument) in Bloemfontein.

While much has been written about Hobhouse, and while she had been usurped as a sort of Boer heroine, she has, until now, been relatively formless. So much so that she is occasionally mistaken for Florence Nightingale. Sometimes, in the history books, women can all look the same, you know.

At Hobhouse’s funeral in Bloemfontein on 27 October 1926, Jan Smuts, leader of the South African party and a close friend and intellectual confidante of the remarkable activist, highlighted her significant historical role.

Here was a great war in which hundreds of thousands of men were engaged, in which the greatest Empire on earth was exerting all its strength and force. And an unknown woman appears from nowhere and presses the right button; and the course of our history in South Africa is permanently altered. For the future of South Africa the whole meaning and significance of the Anglo-Boer War was permanently affected by this Englishwoman.”

That Hobhouse would be claimed by a group of people – the Boers – who would later as a linguistic and cultural group define themselves as Afrikaners and come to oppress and dispossess the black majority should not obfuscate the enormous impact of this brave feminist, pacifist, socialist, anti-imperialist champion for human rights.

Emily Hobhouse is not only a “Boer” heroine, she is a timeless fighter for social justice whose commitment to the cause today still stands as an example.

Personally I believe that segregation of any of either race or colour or class is the wrong policy and one which can only lead to discontent and ultimate disaster,” Hobhouse wrote.

Hobhouse, while she was moved and enraged by the horrors of the British concentration camps in South Africa, was prompted by her conscience rather than politics. And while she concentrated on exposing British atrocities in South Africa, she did not lose sight of the suffering of black South Africans caught up in a horrific war.

Over 27,000 Boer women and children died in the camps from starvation and disease. At least 15,000 black soldiers were caught up in this “white man’s war”, many drafted by the British. Those who were captured and held in separate concentration camps were used as forced labour. Unofficial estimates are that around 20,000 black South Africans perished in the camps.

Elsabé Brits is a Cape Town-based journalist and writer. Like many, she had been aware of Emily Hobhouse’s life story, her legend and her significance to South African history in broad terms. But that all changed in 2013 when Brits came across Rykie van Reenen’s book Heldin Uit Die Vreemde (Heroine from Afar) which had left a strong impression.

Emily had been much more than an upper-class British woman who took the plight of the women and children in concentration camps in far-off South Africa to heart during the Anglo-Boer War,” Brits writes in her foreword.

Brits immersed herself in Hobhouse’s life. It was almost as if across the ages, the ghost of Emily Hobhouse began speaking to a woman, a contemporary channel, who could do justice to her remarkable life. It would be Brits’ job then to ensure that Hobhouse’s last wish, that she somehow be recreated, more fully formed and less of a shadow, has been realised.

And as is often the case with those driven by an unstoppable passion, Brits was dogged in her pursuit – a journey which led her to uncover a vast treasure trove of documents and writings that have been unseen until now. The result is a magnificent, over 300-page illustrated biography, Emily Hobhouse – Beloved Traitor (Tafelberg), which reveals the multilayered and complex individual Hobhouse was.

It fascinated me that so little was known in South Africa about Emily, the liberal socialist, the pacifist and the feminist,” says Brits.

Brits located one of Hobhouse’s relatives, Jennifer Hobhouse Balme, born in 1929 and who lives in the small fishing village of Cowichan on Vancouver Island, Canada. Balme’s grandfather, Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, had been Emily’s younger brother. Balme had kept a trunk full of Hobhouse’s effects and it was Brits who discovered this invaluable stash of historical gold.

Brits’ book is not only about history but allows us, sometimes through Hobhouse’s own eloquent writings, to see and understand how and what she thought – about the politics of the time, about war, about human suffering and about what is it that is required in the face of injustice. It is packed with photographs and other records – including from Hobhouse’s unseen scrap books (an early version of Instagram). As such Hobhouse emerges now as a moral beacon in a world still in need of these brave humans.

Some of Hobhouse’s more savage countrymen and contemporaries – including leading politicians – had delighted in deriding, belittling and sidelining her. But despite all of this Hobhouse never wavered. She was determined to expose the British human rights abuses in South Africa. Later she became involved with the women’s suffrage movement and later still in attempting to alleviate famine after the First World War.

Before her death she wrote, “I only yearn for justice, to be relieved of the weight I have borne for 25 years being unjustly looked down upon and despised as a rebel.”

Emily has finally arrived.

It is not insignificant that Brits’ book has been published in Women’s Month. It is also not insignificant that Hobhouse has been reclaimed as a feminist by a 21st Century feminist writer, Brits, who so clearly “gets” the heart and soul of this icon. DM

Photo: Emily Hobhouse (artwork by Ruan Huisamen)

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