The World War I sinking of the troopship SS Mendi, whose centenary is next week, consisted of a series of disastrous events resulting in the tragic and wholly avoidable loss of many lives. When the Mendi (4 230 tons), on the final leg of its journey from Cape Town to Le Havre in France, was rammed by a speeding SS Darro (10 000 tons) in thick fog, it took only 20 minutes to sink.
The World War I sinking of the troopship SS Mendi, whose centenary is next week, consisted of a series of disastrous events resulting in the tragic and wholly avoidable loss of many lives. When the Mendi (4 230 tons), on the final leg of its journey from Cape Town to Le Havre in France, was rammed by a speeding SS Darro (10 000 tons) in thick fog, it took only 20 minutes to sink.
Disgracefully, no effort was made by the Darro to assist those who found themselves floundering in the icy waters of the English Channel so that 616 South Africans and 33 crew members died there. Of the 616 South Africans, 607 were black soldiers of the South African Native Labour Corps.
The famous stories of enormous courage and sacrifice exhibited by some of the victims, notably the Reverend Isaac Wauchope Dyobba, are told elsewhere in these pages.
Astonishingly, in the face of certain death these victims sang and danced their defiance on the deck of the doomed vessel. I can scarcely imagine the horror of it – yet they died with absolute nobility, serving in a war that was not even theirs.
It is this characteristic of human dignity in the face of inevitable impending death that I find so moving. And still it happens every day, every moment, somewhere in the world, including here.
We should never forget this: true heroism is so common, so ordinary, that we frequently don’t acknowledge it. Indeed, often we don’t even see it.
But courage comes in a thousand different guises. I think of how my mother, in 1953 and at the age of just 27, underwent the near-butchery of horrendous surgery to remove one of her lungs when she contracted tuberculosis.
She should not have survived; it was almost impossible, yet she did so because she would not ‘leave’ her young family. Literally refusing to give in, she lived to see all four of her children grow up, and eventually died at the age of 73. This seems almost unbelievably courageous to me now.
There are countless other examples of everyday heroism. Finding a single poem to capture it all is, of course, a futile endeavour. But here is one by Jane Kenyon who died, aged 47, of virulent leukemia in 1995. It says much of what I believe is so important:
Let Evening Come
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
– Jane Kenyon
(From Let Evening Come: Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, 2015)
So in honouring the memory of those who so valiantly lost their lives on the SS Mendi in 1917, let us also not forget the true courage that surrounds us everywhere and every day.
Though we may never prevent the evening from coming, perhaps we can each decide how to receive it.
