The African and Jewish sacrifice to remember this Heritage Month

South Africans rightly remember the SS Mendi. During World War I, the troop ship carrying members of the South African Native Labour Corps sank in the English Channel after colliding with another vessel. More than 600 South Africans died. The Mendi has become one of our most powerful symbols of black military sacrifice, and deserves its place in our national memory. But a generation later, another ship carried Southern African servicemen to their deaths. Its name is far less familiar. 

On 1 May 1943, during World War II, the British troop ship SS Erinpura was sailing in an Allied convoy in the Mediterranean when a Nazi Luftwaffe aircraft attacked north of Benghazi, Libya. The ship was struck and sank rapidly. Among the casualties were 140 Jewish soldiers of 462 Transport Company and 644 Sotho, Tswana, and Swazi members of the African Auxiliary Pioneer Corps. 

The Jewish soldiers came from British Mandate Palestine, territory where the State of Israel would be established five years later in 1948. The African pioneers came largely from Southern Africa. The meeting of these men aboard Erinpura represents a remarkable intersection between African, Jewish, and Middle Eastern history that deserves a place in our Heritage Month conversations. 

Their contribution began long before that final voyage. Recruitment from Basutoland, today’s Lesotho, began in 1941. These Basotho servicemen built roads and defensive positions, unloaded ships, transported supplies, and helped construct railways that kept the Allied military machine moving. Some served in British Mandate Palestine and Lebanon. They helped construct sections of the coastal railway running northwards from the Haifa region towards Lebanon, including work around Rosh Hanikra. Many had skills acquired in Southern African mines, including working with explosives, and those skills became valuable to the Allied war effort. 

The Jewish soldiers of 462 General Transport Company also had an important record of service. Jewish volunteers from British Mandate Palestine served in British forces across the Middle East and North Africa. Members of 462 Company transported the supplies without which armies simply could not fight. They served through the Western Desert campaign and the battles that eventually forced Axis forces backwards across North Africa. 

Erinpura therefore carried not spectators of history, but men who had been doing the hard, dangerous, and often forgotten work that made Allied victories possible. 

Their journeys finally converged in April 1943. Erinpura sailed from Alexandria on 29 April as part of Convoy MW 27. On 1 May, the Nazi German aircraft attacked. The ship went down off the Libyan coast, taking hundreds of African and Jewish servicemen with it. This is a moment when different people, carrying different languages, memories, and histories, nevertheless stood beside one another without surrendering who they were. That, to me, is the real Heritage Month lesson of Erinpura: solidarity does not require cultural surrender. 

Perhaps this history affects me so deeply because my own South African identity cannot fit neatly into one cultural box. My Sotho lineage reaches me through my grandmother, Puleng Paulinah Mokoena-Nekhavhambe. My family stretches across this country, while my heritage carries Sotho, Venda, and Tsonga influences. I grew up in Orange Farm among Sesotho and isiZulu-speaking communities, and later in Alexandra, surrounded by South Africans from across the country and Africans whose family journeys began elsewhere on this continent. 

At the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) that lesson became even more powerful. I have, among my leadership roles, served two terms on the Student Representative Council and participated in youth activism. I have organised, protested, argued, celebrated, and dreamed alongside people who do not speak my language, share my religion, come from my culture, or agree with my politics. Wits sometimes feels like South Africa compressed into one room. Christians, Jews, Muslims, traditional African believers, atheists, and others share lecture halls and libraries. We may disagree, but we also study together, struggle together, and imagine the future of the country together. 

That experience has convinced me that human beings are never one-faceted. Like millions of South Africans, I am the product of histories that have travelled, encountered one another, and mixed. The Basotho pioneer aboard Erinpura did not have to stop being Basotho to stand beside the Jewish soldier. The Jewish soldier did not have to surrender his Jewishness to serve beside an African. They carried their identities with them while serving a common cause. 

This intertwined history did not disappear beneath the Mediterranean in 1943. It reappeared in another defining chapter of our history: the struggle against apartheid. Ruth First, born to Jewish immigrant parents, became a journalist, intellectual, and anti-apartheid activist, and was eventually assassinated by the apartheid state with a parcel bomb in Mozambique in 1982. Joe Slovo became a central figure in the South African Communist Party and Umkhonto we Sizwe before serving in Nelson Mandela’s government. Denis Goldberg stood alongside Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, and others in the Rivonia Trial and spent more than two decades imprisoned by the apartheid state. Helen Suzman and the women of the Black Sash fought apartheid in and outside Parliament, challenging discriminatory laws, and visited political prisoners, including Mandela. 

There is a powerful historical thread here. Southern African and Jewish soldiers fought Nazi Germany. Decades later, Jewish South Africans stood alongside black South Africans fighting apartheid. Today, another generation inherits a democratic country that still requires us to work together against poverty, unemployment, inequality, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and the many other forces capable of dividing us. 

That is why this history matters now. 

We live at a moment when the world constantly seems to demand that we choose camps. Politics can make disagreement feel like permission for hatred. Social media reduces complicated human beings to labels. Yet our history tells a richer story. We don’t need identical politics to respect one another’s heritage, nor identical histories to recognise one another’s suffering. Respecting Jewish history does not diminish African history. Celebrating Sotho heritage does not threaten Zulu, Venda, or Tsonga heritage. Remembering one community should never require forgetting another. 

Heritage Month should therefore be more than a festival of difference. It should teach us how to live with difference. Unity in diversity doesn’t mean becoming culturally identical. It means being secure enough in who we are to respect what made somebody else who they are. The South Africa we should be building isn’t one in which our cultures disappear into one another, but one in which they can stand proudly beside one another. 

That is why the SS Mendi and SS Erinpura belong in the same national conversation. Mendi reminds us of black South Africans whose World War I sacrifice must never be forgotten. Erinpura expands that memory by showing us Southern Africans and Jews from British Mandatory Palestine, now Israel, serving together against Nazi Germany. One is already embedded in South African remembrance. The other deserves to be. 

More than eight decades after Erinpura disappeared, the message beneath those Mediterranean waters remains remarkably relevant. We are different people carrying different histories, but we are beneath the same sea. This Heritage Month, South Africa should remember that. 

• Kamohelo Chauke is a community and student activist at the University of the Witwatersrand.