City honours fallen SA soldiers for Remembrance Day
12 November 2024
*Below is the full speech text delivered by Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis at the Remembrance Day event in Adderley Street, Cape Town
High Commissioner of the United Kingdom
Consuls General of the United States, France, Germany, Russia and other
Members of the South African Military Veterans Association
Representatives of the South African Defence Force:
Brigadier General Dube of the SA Army
Rear Admiral Malepe of the SA Navy
Brigadier General Kereeditse of the SA Air Force
Religious leaders
Military Veterans
Ladies and gentlemen
Good morning, and welcome to the site of our cenotaph here in Adderley Street to share in the observation of Remembrance Sunday, where we pay tribute to our soldiers who paid the ultimate price in the Great Wars of the twentieth century so that we may enjoy our freedom today.
As we put more years between us and those terrible wars, it is important that they do not fade in our memories. Because it is through remembering that we will not repeat that history.
It is through remembering that we will continue to honour every single life given in defence of freedom – remember them not as numbers lost in the wars, but as human beings whose dreams and futures were cruelly cut short at a young age.
Sons, brothers, husbands, fathers who left behind devastated families who never got to bury their loved ones.
That is why we remember them, every year, at this cenotaph. Because while they may have not returned from the battlefields up north to be buried here at home, we offer this cenotaph as their burial site.
The Greek word from which cenotaph is derived means “empty tomb”. It’s both symbolic of these soldiers’ absence and loss, and also a physical gravesite where we can pay our respects and honour their bravery.
South Africa might have been half a world away from the cauldron of the Great Wars, but that didn’t stop hundreds of thousands of volunteers from stepping forward to serve alongside the Allied Forces.
They came from all walks of life in South Africa, and from all races, united in the simple yet devastatingly costly realisation that tyrants do not stop until they are stopped.
And if they are to be stopped, then it is everyone’s job to do so.
On the back of that belief, a quarter of a million South Africans joined the war effort between 1914 and 1918. Around 7 000 of them would not return.
When the world went to war again just 20 years later, and with the first great war still fresh in memory, another 330 000 South Africans volunteered to go into battle. My grandfather was one of them. Many of your grandparents, or parents, were too. And of those that went, 11 000 lives were lost in North Africa, Italy and other battlefields of the Second World War.
These weren’t hardened soldiers, accustomed to war. They were mostly boys – teenagers or young adults – with their whole lives ahead of them.
Today we pause to remember their sacrifice and grieve their passing, along with their families, descendants and communities.
But today is also about honour.
We are immensely grateful and blessed to be joined here by Mr Jacob Human. After extensive enquiry and to the best of our knowledge, Mr Jacob Human is South Africa’s only surviving veteran of the Second World War.
Back then Mr Human was just a teenager in what was then the Indian Malay Corps, serving in a mechanised transportation unit in North Africa.
Those of you who attended our Remembrance Day service last year will recall that Mr Human was in attendance there too, as he was the previous year.
And he will be an honoured guest at this service every year for as long as he is able to.
It is incredibly special to be able to celebrate these occasions in the presence of a living link to that part of our collective history.
And not only do we get to celebrate Mr Human’s life and contribution in the war, we also get to celebrate a remarkable milestone in his life. Because last week he had his hundredth birthday.
What a privilege it is to share this day with you, Mr Human, and we wish you a blessed belated birthday.
We also thank you for your selfless contribution all those years ago, and we are grateful indeed that you returned safely from the war and are here today to share on this occasion.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would ask now that we all be upstanding in honour of Mr Jacob Human.
Ladies and gentlemen, laying a wreath at this cenotaph is one way to honour and remember our fallen soldiers. But we can remember them in many other ways too, and not only on this one day of the year.
One of Cape Town’s proudest institutions – the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital in Rondebosch – is a living, working tribute to South Africa’s fallen soldiers of the Second World War.
A group of South African soldiers from the Western Province Regiment, who were serving the 6th Armoured South African Division in Italy at the time, came up with the idea of a children’s hospital as a war memorial.
They thought it an appropriate way to honour the sacrifice of soldiers, as children around the world were often the innocent victims of war.
What was so remarkable about this effort was that much of the funding came in the way of many small donations from the public.
There were big contributions too, from wealthy individuals, but a substantial portion of the hospital’s hefty £700,000 price tag was covered by ordinary, and often poor, South Africans.
At the time, the Cape Argus wrote: “It is thus a hospital belonging to the people and paid for by the people. A fitting memorial in every sense.”
I could not agree more. And when you see the remarkable work done there every day, and what this means to the 250,000 ill and injured children who are treated there every year, it is hard to think of a more fitting tribute to South Africa’s fallen soldiers.
For the past almost 70 years, that hospital has proudly stood in our city as both a beacon of world class paediatric healthcare, and also as a living tribute to our fallen soldiers of World War 2.
Another war memorial in Cape Town that I am particularly proud of is the carillon of bells up in our City Hall’s clock tower.
This rare musical instrument of 39 tuned brass bells was installed a hundred years ago as a memorial to the soldiers of the First World War by one of my predecessors, the then Mayoress of Cape Town, Anna Thorne.
Last year we hosted a wonderful charity auction to raise funds for the full restoration of the carillon, along with our historic pipe organ in the City Hall, so that we can keep alive this connection to the past, and preserve it as a working, functional war memorial.
Many of the bells in the carillon have inscriptions of battlefield names, or of those who donated them. It is important to us – and to me, personally – to preserve this precious instrument, and to be able to play the only working carillon on the African continent.
Having those bells ring out across the Parade and to the city beyond is a wonderful and joyous way to honour the memories of those soldiers.
But all these things – all these ways of remembering the past and the losses and sacrifices of war – have another importance too. And that is to serve as a reminder and a warning about the evils of war.
It is hard to fathom how, with all of the living memory of the horror and fire of war, that we find ourselves so frequently facing it again in our world today.
Today, various parts of the world are in great peril once more.
From the devastation in Ukraine to the devastation of Gaza, and in many other conflicts throughout the African continent and the world, innocent lives are being lost and entire communities destroyed by the senseless cruelty of war. And the risk of the escalation of these conflicts grows ever more concerning by the day.
When we remember the sacrifices of fallen soldiers and mourn their loss, we must also remember the promises that have followed every such a war: Promises of never again.
We have to do better. We have to learn to heed the lessons of history, to find common ground, and, importantly, to shun those for whom war and aggression are often the first solution rather than the very last resort.
The world does not need more war memorials and empty tombs. We have enough of those.
What we need is understanding and compassion, and leaders with a will to bridge divides.
Let that be our pledge today, as we pay our respects to our fallen soldiers: Never forgotten, but also never again.
Published by:
City of Cape Town, Media Office
