Families’ relief as memorial unveiled to first world war black South African dead

The praise poet Lwanda Sindaphi performs during a service to open the memorial, which honours 1,700 mainly black South Africans. Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA

Elliot Malunga Delihlazo’s grandmother would say that her brother Bhesengile went to war and never came back. The family knew he had died in the first world war, but they never had a body to bury, only a memorial stone in the rural family homestead in Nkondlo in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.

Now the Delihlazos know that Bhesengile died on 21 January 1917 of malaria in Kilwa, Tanzania, more than 2,000 miles from home. He was a driver in the British empire’s military labour corps, but was never given a war grave.