British forces were not defeated in Boer War
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In the Jan. 29 Another Voice column, Mary Manjikian used the British defeat in the Boer War as a lesson to be learned and applied to the current conflict with al-Qaida. Before she uses history to support a premise, she should check her facts.
In 1902, Britain’s armed forces celebrated one of the hardest-fought victories the British Empire had ever known. In total, the British suffered 5,774 killed and 22,829 wounded in a brutal war in the African Transvaal region. At the end of two years and eight months, via the treaty of Vereeniging, the Boers accepted British sovereignty.
I may not have a Ph. D. like Manjikian, just a bachelor’s in history from the University at Buffalo, but I can still read a book. In the first and second world wars, South Africans supplied many of the British Empire divisions fighting in the Middle East and elsewhere, not something you would expect from a nation that allegedly defeated the Brits in 1902.
Brian Mikolon
Lancaster
Published: February 10, 2010, 12:30 am