An awful lot of revisionist PC nonsense in this article, most of it pushing the ANC's agenda.
No one denies that large numbers of blacks took part in the Boer War, but it is equally undeniable that it was fought very differently from every other Colonial War. A few quotes:
The British also used increasing numbers of armed Africans to man blockhouses as the guerrilla war dragged on and by the end of the conflict it was reckoned that the British had been supported by around 10,000 such armed blacks. Though this may sound a lot, it actually represented only around five per cent of the Imperial forces in South Africa at the time. One should not, therefore, allow these anomalies and the tragic civilian deaths to cloud the reality that, by and large, both sides overwhelmingly fought the war using white troops.
And this is the critical point as Great Britain usually waged her colonial campaigns by deploying a small hard-core of British troops backed by a large number of locally raised forces. Of the 71,700 Imperial troops deployed to Afghanistan in the 1870s, for example, only 25 per cent were British, while at the battle of Atbara during the 1898 Sudan campaign, General Kitchener commanded three brigades of Sudanese and Egyptian troops, but only one of British. Two years earlier, at Abu Hamed, General Hunter's force boasted no British infantry at all. Even at Omdurman—one of the most famous battles of the colonial period—Kitchener's army comprised just 8,000 British troops, while his Egyptian and Sudanese regiments added a whopping 17,000 to his bayonet strength; that is, uniformed non-white Imperial troops outnumbered British troops by more than double in the deciding battle of the campaign. As well as all the locally recruited wagoneers, muleteers, camel drivers, labourers, cooks, and bottle-washers, the Imperial order of battle contained ten Egyptian and six Sudanese infantry battalions, as well as four Egyptian field artillery batteries, a horse artillery battery, and a Maxim machine-gun battery. In terms of the number of non-white combat units, no order of battle in the Boer War looked anything like this.
The Sudan campaign was how colonial wars were usually fought, and the Boer War was indeed a glaring exception. Both Matabele wars of the 1890s saw large numbers of Africans serving in combat roles on the side of the Rhodesian/Imperial forces. When Dr Jameson's columns invaded Matabeleland in 1893 the Rhodesians only fielded around 750 white troops. The balance of the invasion force was made up of about 500 warriors recruited from the Mashona and groups of dissident Matabele, and 1,000 warriors supplied by King Khama of the Bechuana. The most famous of all colonial wars—the Zulu War of 1879—followed the same pattern. The British bolstered their own comparatively paltry numbers of redcoats by raising units of native allies such as the Natal Native Contingent and the Natal Native Horse. Indeed, hundreds of black Imperial soldiers were even slaughtered at Isandlwana—every Brit-basher's favourite colonial defeat—with several companies of the NNC wiped out.
And it was not just the British who fought their colonial wars in this fashion: it was the standard of the day. The French, Portuguese, Belgians, and Germans all relied heavily on locally raised units throughout the period. The garrison of German East Africa, for example, was not made up of German army units, but of Schutztruppe Feldkompanies, each formed from six German officers and NCOs, and 160 African NCOs and soldiers. At the outbreak of the First World War, fourteen such feldkompanies formed the garrison and throughout the war in East Africa, 14,498 askari fought for Germany alongside just 3,595 white Germans. Initially Britain deployed a force of around 8,000 fighting troops against these German forces, of which just one battalion (the 2nd Battalion Loyal North Lancs) was British. The rest were Indian.
In stark contrast, and however upsetting this might be to those with a politically-correct mind-set, the Boer War was quite simply fought differently. Even during extreme situations, like the siege of Wepener, so determined were the British to fight a ‘white man's war' that they turned down offers of assistance from black allies and restrained the Basuto even though their position was surrounded and under threat:
‘…if there was a force eager to attack them, it was the Basutos, and these were only held back from rushing into the fray by the personal influence of Sir Godfrey Lagden and his British colleagues who can never sufficiently be applauded for the skill and diplomacy with which they managed to keep, by invisible moral coercion, a fiery horde from rushing over the borders and possibly massacring the Free Staters as came in their way.'
‘Throughout this war, we have given instructions that natives should not be employed as belligerents. We have undoubtedly made a great and immediate sacrifice in doing that. We might have had, if we had lifted one little finger, 20,000 Basuto horsemen on the flanks of the Boers, and we might have had a large force of Swazis and Kaffirs in Cape Colony and elsewhere.'
This cannot simply be dismissed as empty rhetoric: when New Zealand offered to send mixed-race units to South Africa, these were respectfully declined. The Malay States offered 300 guides and Nigeria a similar number of Hausas, but their offers were also turned down on racial grounds. Even when Kitchener's request for the deployment of African troops (like the Sudanese he had commanded during his campaign there, men whom he felt would ‘forget their stomachs and go for the enemy') was firmly rejected by the War Office, and the Commander in Chief was reminded that he was fighting a white man's war.
Offers of support continued to roll in for as long as the war went on:
‘The British high command received continual offers of assistance from African leaders, offers which could have, at a stroke, unleashed 60,000 Basutos to sweep down from their mountain fastness onto the Free State or—worse still—100,000 Zulus to storm into the Transvaal and take terrible revenge against their traditional foe. All such offers were politely declined.'
More remarkable still, the magnificent, 191,000-strong Indian Army's offers of non-white troops were also courteously refused even though the British Army was absolutely stretched to the limit throughout the war. Instead contributions of white contingents as small as ‘150 mounted infantry and a machine gun from New Zealand' and ‘a 200-strong contingent of mounted infantry drawn from the white planter community in Ceylon' were jubilantly accepted and trumpeted in the press.
And it's not as though there was no precedent for deploying the Indian Army's splendid regiments overseas: indeed, Indian troops were regularly deployed in a colonial wars all over the place. Leo Amery described this oddity in theatrical terms: ‘A British war in which the Indian Army, European and native, plays no part is almost like the play of Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark left out.'