Princess Royal says black African servicemen who died for Britain will finally be commemorated

The Princess Royal has said that black African servicemen who died fighting for Britain will finally be commemorated to “right historical wrongs”.

Unveiling a new memorial to 1,700 previously overlooked South African military labourers who died in the First World War, she said the men had gone “unacknowledged for too long”.

Officials estimate colonial administrators and what was then the Imperial War Graves Commission, now known as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, failed to honour at least 100,000 African and Indian war dead with the same recognition given to Europeans.

Many of the dead were not given any commemoration at all and their bereaved relatives received little or no information about their fate.

The first new memorial unveiled on Wednesday in Cape Town will later this year be followed by similar monuments in Sierra Leone and Kenya.

The Princess, who is the president of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, said: “This memorial ceremony is far more significant than the celebration of a project completed and a task well done.

“It is the first in a series of memorials that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is committed to delivering that will right historical wrongs in the commemoration of the war dead after the First World War.

“This memorial is a reminder of a shared, but sometimes difficult past, and is also a demonstration, that with honesty, openness and working together, we can make a difference.

“It is important to recognise that those we have come to pay tribute to have gone unacknowledged for too long.

“They gave their all in the most challenging of circumstances. Their courage and dedication were essential to the allied efforts and their legacy deserves the lasting recognition that this memorial provides.”

The new Cape Town Labour Corps Memorial was unveiled in the city’s Company’s Garden, in the shadow of Table Mountain.

The memorial features wooden posts to commemorate the dead from the Cape Coloured Labour Regiment, the Cape Auxiliary Horse Transport, the Military Labour Bureau, and the Military Labour Corps of South Africa.

Claire Horton, the director general of the commission, said the memorial acted “as a poignant tribute to the predominantly black South Africans who fought in Africa during the First World War and who were not commemorated at the time”.

Geordin Hill-Lewis, the mayor of Cape Town, said the failure to commemorate black South African’s names had meant a significant gap in the war record.

He said: “If you travel through South Africa, you will find many other war memorials, honouring the enlisted white servicemen who lost their lives in World War One.

“But you will not find, until today that is, a memorial for the 1,700 black South Africans who died in non-combatant roles in the war.

“These men have no known graves and there is no memorial wall, or monument where you may read their names. Their stories have not been correctly recorded in our history and without a correct recording of history, their contribution and their sacrifices risk fading from memory. That is what this memorial now fixes.”

The commission has spent months using local historians to try to track down living descendants of the men named in the memorial.

Relatives attending the ceremony said they had grown up with family stories of a forefather who had gone away to war and never come back, but they often knew little of what had happened.

Zweletu Hlakula, a bank manager in Port St Johns, Eastern Cape, attended the unveiling as the great-grandson of Job Hlakula, who died serving with the Labour Corps.

He said: “We are very proud of him. We even rejoice when we talk about Job, it’s a pride that we’ve got in our name, for him to be remembered, for him to be in the history of our South Africa, that makes us very humble.”