“Did You Really Have a Place in the Boer War?”: Colonial Conflict and the Contested Production of “Finnish” Nationality, 1899–1908

Abstract

Drawing on the archive of public memory, published memoirs, and the official records of British and European authorities, this chapter examines the colonial encounters of Finnish émigrés in the South African War (1899–1902). Organized around three subtopics, the chapter first discusses the experiences of Finnish volunteers during mobilization and combat, nuancing Finnish “adventure stories” by including a discussion of how the Boer high command actually used foreign volunteers in their combat operations. Second, the chapter discusses Finnish experiences of military internment as prisoners of war, during which they were subject not only to detention but also to political surveillance intended to structure the process of post-war colonial reconstruction in southern Africa by preventing foreigners or intransigent Boers from returning there. We argue that such experiences contributed meaningfully to the creation of “Finnishness” as a national identity pursuant to the needs of Britain’s imperial security apparatus. As such, Finnishness became a marker of foreignness in the colonial world. And third, the chapter examines how these “Finnish” colonial encounters of a few hundred expatriates was appropriated as an experience shared by all Finns in the context of a burgeoning early twentieth-century nationalist movement.