Black South Africans sided with the British despite British equivocation

Evidence

In this the Anglo-Boer War rehearsed at least the philosophical conflicts of the American Civil War some 35 years earlier, as Maylam remarks in a somewhat different context. It’s no wonder that blacks took to the fight, where they felt compelled to fight at all, on the part of the British, notwithstanding British equivocation or even sometime duplicity. Nor that the boers would thrust weapons into the arms of their children, girls and boys alike, as soon as they were sufficiently strong to bear the weight of defending the homestead while men were out on the battlefield. Nor again that anti-imperialists, such as an Irish Republican battalion, took to the battlefield in behalf of the boers. Ironies are sometimes so obvious as not to be noticed. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1472