Mutating memories and the making of a myth: remembering the SS Mendi Disaster, 1917-2007

The SS Mendi, carrying the last detachment of the South African Native Labour Contingent to work as non-combatants in France during the First World War, sank just off the Isle of Wight on 21 February 1917. The death toll was high: of the 882 men on board, 615 died and 267 were saved. The grim details are easily verifiable; the subsequent afterlife of the incident is more complex. This article addresses the way in which the Mendi disaster has been recalled over decades and contextualised in terms of public memory at different historical junctures, and how a heroic narrative was constructed with certain elements more pertinently being foregrounded recently to serve a useful purpose in the present.