Boer Civilians Perished by the Tens of Thousands in British Concentration Camps
In the Second Boer War (1899 – 1902), Britain had a rough go of it trying to subdue the Boers of the Orange Free State and of the Republic of Transvaal. The British initially assumed that the fighting would be quickly over after a swift campaign, but their opponents proved tougher and more resilient than expected. Although greatly outnumbered, the Boers flat footed the British by going on the offensive and achieving some remarkable early successes. Before they knew it, the British had a full scale war on their hands, that required the commitment of roughly 600,000 troops and auxiliaries to the fight.
The disparity in numbers forced the Boers to eschew pitched battles and rely instead on hit and run tactics and guerrilla warfare that caused the British no end of trouble. In late 1900, Herbert Kitchener was put in charge of the British effort, and he proceeded to defeat the guerrillas by depriving them of the civilian support upon which they relied. The British adopted a scorched earth policy of burning down Boer farms and homesteads, killing their livestock, poisoning their wells, destroying their crops, and salting their fields.
The British also adopted a new and ominous innovation that had recently been introduced by the Spanish while suppressing guerrillas in their Cuban colony: concentration camps. The British herded tens of thousands of Boer civilians from the countryside, mostly women and children, and interned their captives – “concentrating” them – in vast camps behind barbed wire.
Conditions in the concentration camps were atrocious. The administrators were incompetent, supplies were spotty, and the internees suffered from bad sanitation, poor hygiene, overcrowding, inadequate shelter, and often nonexistent medical care. Food rations were scanty, and the British targeted the families of Boer men who were still fighting, giving them even smaller rations than the meager portions provided the rest.
Malnutrition claimed the lives of many internees, and left many more vulnerable to contagious diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, and measles, which swept the camps. Roughly 115,000 Boer civilians were herded into 45 concentration camps. In the 11 month period from June of 1901 to May of 1902, about 28,000 Boer internees perished, representing a tenth of the entire Boer population. The Boers’ African servants were held in separate concentration camps, where conditions were, if anything even worse. Those camps did not garner the same attention as the camps housing the white Boers, but an estimated 20,000 Africans perished in their camps.