“God’s will”

I’ve recently looked at the ideology of Afrikanerdom, after taking some criticism for ‘bashing’ a small but very vocal sect of anti-Smuts Afrikaners (some even in my own family). I’ve contested that they do not epitomise Afrikanerdom but seem to think they do. It’s a complex subject, as ‘Afrikanerdom’ is as white as it is black, but bear with me.

When it comes to the ‘Boer War’ (The South African War 1899-1902), there are two very hotly debated areas, both ‘shape’ Afrikanerdom – certainly in the white sense of it. The first is the idea of the “Bitter-Einder” (the Bitter Enders), the group of Afrikaners who painfully decided to continue the war on ‘guerrilla principles’ after the ‘conventional phase’ ended and Pretoria fell. Some historians point to these guerrillas as having brought the catastrophe of the concentration camps and the scorched earth farm buring policy on themselves – they’re to blame as the British had little choice. Little is really understood as to ‘why’ they continued the fight, as the fight was clearly lost – sheer madness the only conclusion. But, it’s in the ‘why’ that we find Afrikanerdom.

Jan Smuts during ABW2 as a Boer General with his horse

The second hotly debated subject is Jan Smuts, his impact to South African politics and ‘Afrikaner’ identity spans 6 decades, no other ‘Afrikaner’ can hold a flame to it. His detractors fall on old National Party propaganda and political smearing and old family folklore to paint him as ‘turning British’ for reconciling the warring British and Boer races (and by some strange leap in logic some also point to him as responsible for the concentration camps). Little time is given to actually reading what Smuts said or wrote and a strange almost belligerent hatred overrides all reason.

Sir Winston Churchill said of Smuts that “He fought for his own country; he thought for the whole world.” by that he meant Smuts remained an Afrikaner patriot for one but also philosophised for all mankind. Churchill’s long time admiration for Smuts also lay in his abilities as one of the few successful Bitter-Einder Boer Generals, not in a need for him to identify as somehow British. Smuts’ context of Afrikanerdom is found in his justification for being a Bitter-Einder’ and there is nothing better to understand his mind and to understand the ground zero of 20th century ‘Afrikanerdom’ and the modern white Afrikaner psyche than to read what Smuts himself puts down.

What follows are some extracts .. they are well worth the read, and anyone who walks away from reading this still thinks that Jan Smuts is somehow ‘English’ needs their brain replaced – for they have never taken the time to read what the man actually wrote. Here’s an Afrikaner at heart – simple.

Image: General Jan Smuts (seated centre) with his Commando, colourised by Tinus Le Roux

This is a letter, written to W.T. Stead by Jan by Smuts whilst in the field with his commando at Vanrhynsdorp on 4 January 1902 (Source: Published from his private papers by Hancock and van der Poel) – it covers some excerpts as the full content is too long to publish here, but they more than adequately make the point.

“I know the difficulty of the modern man of action and intelligence, accustomed as he is to ideas of natural laws and physical or economical explanations of all phenomena, to understand or appreciate the tremendous force of faith in the affairs of the world, but unless he overcomes this difficulty the present war will, in all essential respects, remain for him an insoluble mystery. A mustard seed of real faith avails more in the affairs of the world than mountains of might or brute force – and only he who thoroughly understands this will be able to appreciate the true inwardness of the present struggle.

The condition of the two South African Republics in very truth baffles description. Not William the Conquerer himself created a more complete desert between the Tyne and the Humber in the eleventh century than Lord Kitchener has created in the twentieth. All living animals – horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, fowls, even dogs, have been killed, and generally in a manner too shocking to relate. More than once I set my commandos to kill the poor brutes which had been maimed by the British soldiery and then left by them to slow death and starvation; even four or five days after atrocities had been committed one would find these poor dumb brutes writhing in pain, and struggling and bleating for water and food among the dead. I have seen strong and brave men with tears in their eyes – totally overcome by the sight of this horrible suffering.

To me the saddest sight in this war has been the sufferings which women and children have endured to escape capture by the British columns. Like wild beasts they have been everywhere hunted out with Lee-Metford and Maxim and consigned to the death-in-life of the camps. For these reasons the brave Boer women have endured hardships and undergone privations such as one only reads of in the ancient records of Christian martyrdom. ‘They were tempted, were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented (of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth’. (Hebrews XI: 37,38).

I do not ask what rules of international law sanction this rapine and ruin. I only state it as a fact – as a fact which I have seen with my own eyes and which is beyond all manner or doubt or dispute: quaeque ipse vidi et quorum pars magna fui. No wonder that for many burghers the state of their desolate country has become a sight too painful to bear; no wonder they prefer to continue the war beyond its borders.

The British military authorities adopted a policy of devastation and of treating non-combatant women and children as prisoners of war. They expected the Boers to quail before the absolute destruction of their property and the sufferings of their women and children. The said military authorities , however, made one fatal error in their calculations-an error which they will continue to make to the very end of the war. They had learnt in the case of all the tribes that with which they had come in contact during recent generations that one big defeat, followed by the burning of their chief town or kraal and the raiding of their cattle , was sufficient to utterly cow and prostrate them. And so they expected from the despised Boer. But the policy of spoliation and the infliction of suffering on non-combatants – so far from producing the expected result – had exactly the opposite effect. It raised the spirit of the Boers; it sent the iron deeper into the soul; that the God of Battles might not be with them yet the Spirit that dies not quench the smoking flax nor bruise the broken reed was with them to strengthen and sustain.

A second important consequence of this policy of spoliation has been the elimination from the Boer ranks of all those elements which are useless from a military point of view. The ordeal has been too terrible for the weak and the faint. First of all went the irresponsible braggarts who had clamoured for war and had called the peacemakers cowards and traitors. The man who expected to gain something from continuing in the field; the man who preferred to protect his property; the man who had lost all hope of a successful issue followed. There remain the stout-hearted and able-bodied – the men of physical courage, the men of moral endurance, whom self-respect and honour keep true to their country’s cause; the men of invincible hope in the future and child-like faith in God – truly a select band, the like of whom, I fondly think, is not to be found in the wide world today.

And these are the men whom Mr. Chamberlain, standing in the House of Commons, does not shrink from classifying as brigands and ruffians. These are the men against whom the High Commissioner (Milner) has the infantile audacity to hurl his proclamation of permanent banishment and universal confiscation.

‘How long is this war still going to last’ is the question asked by almost every Englishman who meets a Boer. The English are evidently weary and tired to death of the whole business. And no wonder, for their feeling of racial revenge must be pretty well satiated after the ruin and sorrows in which the Boers have been involved. For every thinking Briton, even the most hostile to the Boers, must feel in his heart of hearts, that this sorry business has added no glory and never will add any glory to the Empire – no military glory, for the odds were too uneven; the methods resorted to by the British too shocking to the humaner feelings of mankind, and the unique tenacity of the Boers has finally come to overshadow every other feature of war; no political glory, because the issue had become one of their freedom or subjugation. And mankind reserves its lasting honour for, and award its crown of glory only to, those who have striven for the highest ideals of humanity; who have made deathless sacrifices for liberty or justice or religion; and who by heroic self-sacrifice for the highest ends have raised and ennobled the ethical consciousness of mankind. But this much is certain, that the issue of glory is against the British Empire, and that the world has only seen another proof of universal moral law that they who deliberately seek glory shall not find it.

What are the principal moral forces operative within the area of the war today? I ask the question here because only he who thoroughly appreciates their character will be able to understand the factors on which the continuance and issue of the present war depend. The flower of the Boer army …. and who to a large extent still continue in the field today, were actuated by a vaguer but profounder aspiration …. purified and deepened a hundredfold by loss and suffering and sorrow during the course of the war, remains today the most vital and vitalizing force in the Boer mind, and must be carefully studied by all who wish to understand the true conditions of the continuance and issue of the present war.

The Boers, as a people, have an extraordinary faith in God. Theirs is not a God of the mechanical type …. Theirs is a God …. rather of the type of the Hebrew prophets – …; who from and with the passions and aspirations, the good and evil deeds of men, shapes the divine policy, moulding sin and sorrow, deeds of honour and of shame, like some potter at the wheel, into the divine ends of His world-government. The barbarous measures of the enemy, which bring a blush of shame to the fair face of Christian civilization, were expected by them, for had not Scripture to be fulfilled? All these things, and even worse, were foretold by the prophets, and with patience and resignation they are prepared to bear the yoke which not so much the enemy as God has laid on them; the inhuman proclamations of Lords Kitchener and Milner were read and pondered by them in the sacred writings before they were issued in SA, and the remarkable resemblance in the procedure of the Nebuchadnezzar of prophecy and the Kitchener of our day is to them only another confirmation of their belief that this is God’s work and that the final issue will also be His. …. this remarkable faith in God and in their destiny has only become stronger; broken and bleeding they have clung all the more passionately to the great hope, praying indeed that the cup of agony might be taken away from them, but never dashing it down in impatience or despair. For the Boers feel that they are not enduring themselves, and inflicting on their loved ones, mere useless suffering, as Lord Kitchener is so fond of reminding them, but that victory will yet be theirs, and the seed now sown in sorrow and tears will be reaped by posterity as a glorious harvest in the land that is far away…

This view, which will seem strange and intelligible to matter-of-fact politicians, is today held by the bulk of the Boers in the field. The Boers fight now in a spirit akin to that of the early Christian martyrs; they listen to reports of defeat and rapine, of the suffering of their wives and children in the prison camps, with that calm resignation which springs from the assurance that such is God’s will”.

Images: Lord Kitchener’s policy of Scotched Earth, Boer farmsteads been destroyed by British and Imperial Troops.

Images: British Boer War period concentration camps, colourised by Jenny B

Researched by Peter Dickens

With much thanks to ‘Boer War Crank’ on-line. Master images of a young Jan Smuts and concentration camp children – colourised thanks to Tinus Le Roux.

Debunking the myth that the British invented the ‘concentration camp’

Posted by Peter Dickens

It’s an almost ingrained idea in South Africa that ‘concentration camps’ were invented by the British during the 2nd Anglo Boer War (1899 – 1902) and there is an equally ingrained idea in some circles in South Africa which holds that the Nazi holocaust styled concentration camp simply followed on the lead set by the British in South Africa.

However, both of these ingrained concepts are untrue – they are myths.

This is not to say the concentration camps did not happen, they did. It’s also not to say the concentration camp system in South Africa visited death to a civilian population on an unacceptably large and traumatic scale – they did. It’s also not to ‘Boer Bash’ by way of any sort of ‘deniability’, the Boer nation suffered greatly under the concentration camp policy – no doubt about that at all.

It is to say that historic perspective and facts need to come to the fore to debunk myths and in the ‘concentration camps’ legacy in South Africa there are certainly a couple of myths – and they arose because of political expediency and the cognitive bias generated by the National party’s ‘Christian Nationalism’ education policy over five very long decades – so they are strongly rooted and tough to challenge.

There are three basic myths at play surrounding the 2nd Anglo Boer War (1899 – 1902) concentration camps.

That Concentration Camps first came into existence during the 2nd Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) and the British invented them.
That Hitler modelled the Nazi concentration camp system on the British system used in the 2nd Anglo-Boer War.
That it was the Boer women and children in South Africa who experienced the indignity and tragedy of a concentration camp system, with no thanks to the British.

That’s a lot to take in for someone with an ingrained belief, so let’s start with each of these myths:

Did the British invent the ‘Concentration Camp’?

The straight answer is; No.

The actual term ‘concentration camp’ was invented by the Spanish (as campo de concentración or campo de reconcentración) in 1896 – three years before the 2nd Anglo-Boer War (1899 – 1904) started. It originated during The Cuban War of Independence (Guerra de Independencia cubana, 1895–98) was the last of three liberation wars that Cuba fought against Spain.

A rebellion had broken out in Cuba, then a Spanish colony in 1895. The rebels, outnumbered by Spanish government troops, turned to guerrilla warfare (and here another myth which says the Boer’s invented ‘guerrilla warfare’ is debunked).

Colon Cemetery, Havana, Cuba, 1898

In response to guerilla warfare the Spanish commander Valeriano Weyler ordered the civilians of Cuba to be ‘concentrated’ in concentration camps under guard so they could not provide the rebels with food, supplies or new recruits.

Initial rebel military actions against the Spanish had been very successful and it forced Spain to re-think how to conduct the war. The first thing they did was replace their commander on the ground in Cuba, Arsenio Martinez Campos, who had for all intents and purposes failed to pacify the Cuban rebellion. The Conservative Spanish government of Antonio Canovas del Castillo sent Valeriano Weyler out to Cuba to replace him. This change in command met the approval of most Spaniards back home in Spain, who thought him the proper man to crush the rebellion.

Valeriano Weyler reacted to the rebels’ guerilla tactics successes by introducing terror methods: periodic executions, mass exile of residents, forced concentration of civilians in certain cities or areas and the destruction of their farms and crops. Weyler’s methods reached their height on October 21, 1896, when he ordered all countryside residents and their livestock to gather within eight days in various fortified areas and towns occupied by his troops.

Hundreds of thousands of people had to leave their homes and were subjected to appalling and inhumane conditions in the crowded towns and cities.

Civilians interned into these concentration camps were in a perilous situation as poor sanitation quickly lead to deadly disease and combined with the lack of food an estimated 25 to 30 percent of the civilian population subjected to these concentration camps died during the three years of warfare.

Patients in San Carlo Hospital, Matanzas, in the last stages of starvation

In the end 225,000 ‘non combatant’ Cuban civilians died in just 18 months between 1896 and 1897. That is some number, nearly a quarter of a million Cubans, and its a stain of blood which sits with modern Spain and one for which there has been little by way of reparation or apologies.

It also means Spain holds the rather dishonourable mantle of inventing the concentration camp system and even the term itself, not the British.

Then was South Africa the 2nd place where Concentration Camps were used?

The straight answer is again – No.

The second country to operate concentration camps was the United States of America in September 1899 in the Philippines. At this point in the historic time-line the British had not yet engaged the ‘Concentration Camp’ system in its full-blown manifestation in South Africa (which started in earnest at the beginning of 1901).

By 1899, the United States of America had recently acquired the Philippines from Spain, only to be confronted by a rebellion by Filipinos who wanted independence rather than American rule. Known as the Philippine–American War or the Tagalog Insurgency 1899 – 1902 (same timing as the 2nd Anglo-Boer war more or less).

The Filipinos turned to guerrilla warfare and in response the Americans copied the Spanish solution used in Cuba earlier.

In September 1899, American military strategy shifted to suppression of the resistance, in coordination with the future president, William Howard Taft, then the U.S. civil administrator of the islands changed course. Tactics now became focused on the control of key areas with ‘Internment’ and ‘segregation’ of the civilian population in “zones of protection” from the guerrilla population which became defined as ‘concentration camps’.

Government issuing rice to civilians in a Bauan concentration camp

Concentration camps were set up on the islands of Marinduque and Mindanao, and civilians from rebel-sympathising districts were forced to reside there. As in Cuba, the death rate in these concentration camps from disease was horrendous.

These “reconcentrados,” or concentration camps, were crowded and filled with disease; as the frustrations of guerrilla warfare grew, many U.S. fighters resorted to brutal retaliatory measures, one U.S. camp commandant referred to the concentration camps as the “suburbs of hell.”

The U.S. State Department estimates that around 20,000 Filipino and 4,000 U.S. combatants died in the fighting in the Philippines, and as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died as a result of violence, famine and disease, with most losses attributable to cholera. Stanley Karnow observers that the American treatment of Filipino citizens “as cruel as any conflict in the annals of imperialism.”

The concentration camps policy was highly effective to the American War effort , As historian John M. Gates noted, “the policy kept the guerillas off-balance, short of supplies and in continuous flight from the U.S. army, As a result many guerrilla bands, suffering from sickness, hunger and decreasing popular support, lost their will to fight.” America had won, but at what cost?

A concentration camp in Tanauan, Batangas

As with the Spanish in Cuba, the United States of America generally also does not view their use of concentration camps as a crime against humanity, but rather as an extreme measure to stop ‘guerrilla warfare’ by cutting off the civilian support of the guerrilla fighters.

So, no apology from the United States for their status as the second country to use a concentration camp system, it also is not the last time they would use a ‘concentration camp’ system – they would use it again during the Vietnam War (more of that later).

Then was South Africa the 3rd place where Concentration Camps were used?

This time, sadly – the straight answer is – Yes.

The third country to set up concentration camps was Britain, but they did not initially call them concentration camps, they called them ‘Government Laagers” and ‘Refugee Camps’.

The reasons were similar to that of Spain in Cuba and the USA in the Philippines; Britain was at war with the two Boer Republics of South Africa, which had turned to guerrilla warfare once their conventional field armies were defeated. This stage is known as ‘Stage 3’ – The Guerrilla Phase of the South African War 1899-1902.

Stage 1 (Boer Success) and Stage 2 (British Response) end the ‘Conventional Phase’ of the war in late 1900 with the capture of Pretoria – Stage 3 – the Guerrilla Phase starts in earnest from the start of 1901 and lasts a year and a half ending May 1902.

The decision taken by the British was to hasten the end of the Guerrilla Phase, in essence the policy was to concentrate civilians located in conflict zones into government run camps (concentration camps) and destroy stock, crops, implements and farm buildings so the Boer guerrilla forces would run out of supplies and their support network would be crushed. As with the two previous situations perpetuated by Spain and the USA before, these British camps soon became rife with disease and thousands of people died, mostly from measles, pneumonia, typhoid and dysentery.

Why do the British refer to their ‘Concentration Camps’ as ‘Refugee Camps’ when they are clearly not?

The reason for the British sticking to the use of the term ‘Refugee Camps’ instead of ‘Concentration Camps’ is because these camps in South Africa actually started out as ‘refugee camps’: The first two of these camps (refugee camps) were established by the British to house the families of burghers who had surrendered voluntarily.

On the 22nd September 1900, Major-Gen J.G. Maxwell signalled that “… camps for burghers who voluntarily surrender are being formed at Pretoria and Bloemfontein.” As result of this military notice the first two ‘refugee’ camps were indeed established at Pretoria and Bloemfontein respectively.

Imperial War Museum caption “A refugee Boer family, the wife in traditional black and white costume, surrounded by their possessions, at a railway station”.

The aim outlined by the British for these two refugee camps was supposedly to protect those families of Boers who had surrendered voluntarily. A proclamation was even issued by Lord Kitchener by 20th December 1900 which states that all burghers surrendering voluntarily, will be allowed to live with their families in ‘Government Laagers’ until the end of the war and their stock and property will be respected and paid for.

But (and its a big BUT), by 21st December 1900 (the very next day) Lord Kitchener comes up with a different intention completely, and this one does not the safe-keeping of people, property and stock in mind. In a stated memorandum to general officers Lord Kitchener outlined the advantages of interning all women, children and men unfit for military services, also Blacks living on Boer farms, as this will be;

“the most effective method of limiting the endurance of the guerrillas … The women and children brought in should be divided in two categories, viz.: 1st. Refugees, and the families of Neutrals, non-combatants, and surrendered Burghers. 2nd. Those whose husbands, fathers and sons are on Commando. The preference in accommodation, etc. should of course be given to the first class. With regard to Natives, it is not intended to clear (Native) locations, but only such and their stock as are on Boer farms.”.

A group of Boer children with a native African woman at a ‘refugee’ camp. Imperial War Museum image.

With that memorandum now writ, effectively by January 1901, the camps stopped becoming ‘Refugee Camps’ and became ‘Concentration Camps’ governed by forced removal, in effect – displacement camps of civilians forcibly removed from their farmsteads.

The British, for the sake of politically sanitizing this policy from a public opinion perspective, continued to call these camps as ‘Refugee Camps’ and in many circles in the United Kingdom they are still referred as such even today, a good example of this is the Imperial War Museum – when they any publish picture showing Boer families being rounded up on their way to a concentration camp they are almost always (and incorrectly) tagged as ‘refugees’ in the caption.

So how is it that Nazi German Concentration Camps are linked to the ‘British’ Concentration Camps?

The answer is simply, because of Hermann Göring.

During a press interview Hermann Goring (the then spokesperson on behalf of Adolph Hitler), served to deflect a challenge from a British ambassador who protested about the Nazi concentration camps, and by using a ‘press stunt’ when he dramatically sprung up and quoted from a reference book that the British invented them in the first place (when in fact this is factually incorrect) and it just served as a skillful stroke of political deflection of which Hermann Göring was a past master.

Why a deflection? Because the German ‘Concentration Camps’ were fundamentally different from those initiated by the Spanish, and then the Americans and finally the British, their camps were all tactical responses to guerrilla warfare, whereas the Nazi ‘concentration camps’ started out for camps for political dissent in opposition to National Socialism (Nazism) as ‘re-education’ camps, as a central theme to them.

Socialist systems driven on nationalist lines, whether German Nazi or Russian/Chinese Communism all have in them this phenomenon to re-educate (and if necessary exterminate) anyone in their society not conforming to their idea of the ‘social hive’ or ‘community’. The Soviet system of ‘Gulag’ re-education camps are no different to the early German Nazi concentration camps in their purpose (and as deadly).

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German Nazi Concentration Camp for Political Prisioners

That the German ‘concentration camps’ later evolved into systematic pre-meditated murder with the idea of exterminating entire populations of specific races to solve an ideological problem, and it is an entirely different objective to those objectives behind the British concentration camps in South Africa.

In Nazi Germany and their occupied countries the ‘concentration camp’ evolved into the ‘extermination camp’ for people following the Jewish faith – primarily but not exclusive to Jews – the system also included other people not deemed Aryan enough within the confines of Nazi philosophy or conformist enough to their idea of socialism – gypsies (travellers), free-masons, homosexuals, communists and even the mentally ill all found themselves on the wrong side of Nazism.

Auschwitz concentration camp for the extermination of Jews and other Nazi undesirables.

But, for some reason, certainly in some circles in South Africa, Hermann Göring’s master class in deflecting a press junket is held up as Gospel, now, in the hindsight of history who would really believe anything Hermann Göring came up with?

What’s the big difference between a Nazi concentration camp and a British concentration camp?

The fundamental differences between a Nazi concentration camp (re-education/extermination camp) and a British concentration camp (forced removal/refugee camp) are massive.

Himmler’s report to Hitler detailing the executions of civilian prisoners – especially Jews.

For starters, unlike Nazi Germany, there is no historical document or any supporting record that the British embarked on the extermination of the Boer nation using systematic pre-meditated murder. Not one document or letter whatsoever, whereas in the case of Nazi extermination camps there is an entire undeniable record of premeditated murder.

Secondly, the concentration camps in South Africa were isolated and relatively unguarded, mostly unfenced and they were relatively porous affairs where people came in and out and aid workers came in and out – very different to the Nazi German idea of lining people up on a train platform under armed escort without a suitable aid worker in sight and marching them straight into gas chambers and/or mass graves in their tens of thousands.

The fundamental difference however is in the core thinking behind the military objective requiring concentration camps, for the British the military objective was to bring a quick end to a guerrilla campaign initiated in the final phase of the South African war, They did this by rounding up civilians in support of Boer guerrillas, placing them into camps and cutting off these ‘commando’ guerilla groups from their supply of food, feed, ammunition and recruits.

On the other hand, the objective of the German concentration camps of WW2 was not to put an end to any form of guerrilla warfare whatsoever, it was to systematic exploit and exterminate entire populations along ideological lines of race superiority.

What is common in respect of both forms of concentration camp is that many people died, and in both respects that single act qualifies a tragedy and a failure of the human condition.

Did the deaths in the camps come about because of a hatred for the Boer race?

The answer simply to this question is – No.

The argument that the British concentration camps were designed to systematically wipe the Boer population from the planet by way of extermination because of race hate for Boers falls apart when you consider the British did not target only the ‘Boers’ for deportation to concentration camps.

The truth is the British targeted everybody who they perceived to be involved in the supply of horse feed, ammunition, weapons and food to guerrilla Boer commandos. This included Black Africans in addition to the Boers themselves.

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Medical inspection inside a Black concentration camp as administered by the Native Refugee Department. Orange Free State, 1901. Photo research by Dr Garth Benneyworth.

The unfortunate truth that central to the concept of concentration camps to South Africa is simply railway supply.

When the British marched into Pretoria, raising the union jack in victory of the conventional war – they found themselves stretched deep into ‘hostile’ territory with extended and vulnerable supply lines stretching over hundreds of kilometres.

On losing their capital cities, the Boer strategy switched and they moved their government ‘into the field’ to embark on a ‘Guerrilla Warfare’ phase – with the intention to disrupt supply to the British now based in Bloemfontein and Pretoria and isolate the British into pockets (mainly along the railway lines).

To do this they would need food, ammunition and feed supplied directly from their own farmsteads or supporters surrounding their chosen targets. The relatively easy targets were trains and train lines (due to isolation and expanse), and after many a locomotive steamed into Pretoria riddled with bullet holes or didn’t make it all, Lord Kitchener got fed up at the arrogance of Boer resistance after the war had been effectively ‘won’ in his eyes and he acted decisively.

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Locomotive No. 99 “KOMAAS” destroyed by the Boers near Middelburg.

Wherever and whenever an attack took place, or where sufficient threat existed to this system, Kitchener took to the policy of depopulating the radius area, burning down the farmsteads, killing the livestock and moving all the people – both Black and White (it mattered not to the British what colour they were) into their ‘Government Laagers’ which were in effect – concentration camps.

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British burning of Boer farmsteads as a tactic to cut the supplies to and support of Boer Commando’s food, feed, recruits and ammunition.

Two different systems of concentration camps existed in South Africa, one specifically for Blacks only and one mainly for Whites (these also contained Black servants and staff to Boer families). Both were run very differently. The outcome was however tragically the same for both. Disease, mainly water-bourne ones took hold and in the Boer civilian’s camps the official death toll is 26 370 people, whereas in the Black camps it is estimated that 20,000 people died (the official records here were not accurately kept by the British – as they were in the Boer camps).

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African women in a Black concentration camp in Klerksdorp,

For a deeper history on the Black concentration camps of The South African War (1899 – 1902) click on this link; To fully reconcile The Boer War is to fully understand the ‘BLACK’ Concentration Camps

Another point to consider as to the tragedy of the British Concentration camps in South Africa, is that some of the British staff working in the camps died from the same diseases that the killed Boer inhabitants of these camps – a sure sign of poor management and lack of proper medical understanding, medicine and aid – rather than a premeditated intention to murder. The sad truth here, disease is indiscriminate.

Did we learn the lesson not to use concentration camps again?

The answer to that sadly is … No.

As said earlier, the Spanish and the Americans found the Concentration Camp system highly effective in bringing guerrilla warfare to an end – a grisly, painful, barbaric end yes, but and end none the same. The British, rather sadly found the same – that despite the unacceptable damage to a civilian population, the tactic of concentration camps proved very succesful in bringing about a prompt end to what was proving to be a protracted war with an equally protracted affair of all round misery to civilian and combatant alike.

But at what price? Such a tactic of rounding up civilian groupings and containing them so they cannot supply guerrilla fighters in the field has time and again brought unacceptable death rates to civilians – along with fundamental setbacks in a culture or population’s wellbeing and evolution. The consequences of concentration camps, whether they are culturally, politically, economically or emotionally considered are far-reaching, highly negative and very deep.

Which brings us back to the United States of America, the second country to use a concentration camp system at the end of the 1800’s, because they were back at it again as late as the 1960’s – not even forty years ago – during the Vietnam War.

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US troops Burning villages in Vietnam

In Vietnam they would engage exactly the same system – create ‘firebases’ in ‘protected zones, whenever there was a ‘flashpoint’ of guerrilla activity they would starve the guerrillas of their means to fight by cutting off their supplies (food and weapons), and they would do this by burning suspected villages and homesteads to the ground and moving all the affected civilian population into government-run ‘Strategic Hamlet’ camps – concentration camps in effect.

The only saving grace in all of this is that by the mid 1960’s medicine had moved on and diseases which had killed civilians in their droves in concentration camps at the end of the 1800’s could now be easily cured and even stopped in the 1960’s – as simply put better medical understanding, vaccination, antibiotics and penicillin had all come a long way by the end of the 1960’s – so too had government agencies handling civilian affairs during wartime.

Villages in a ‘Strategic Hamlet’ – Vietnam War

So instead of getting any form of admission to running ‘concentration camps’ and wholesale displacement and civilian death in the Philippines and even later in Vietnam – what we get from modern-day America are bland, soulless American military definitions outlining incidents when they the accidentally kill a bunch of citizens – and they now call it unavoidable “collateral damage.”

From a military strategic and tactical perspective, in many respects, the techniques used by the Americans for fighting ‘guerrilla warfare’ in the Vietnam War during the 1960’s and early 1970’s is almost no different to the techniques used by the British fighting the same type of guerrilla warfare in 1901 and early 1902. The Americans built ‘fire-bases’ to protect strategic points and fan out from to find Vietcong guerrillas, the British built ‘blockhouses’ next to protected strategic points and fanned out to find Boer guerrillas. The Americans rounded up Vietnamese civilians around flashpoints and burnt the farmsteads … the British did the same and burnt the farmsteads. During the Vietnam War the Americans and their proxy state ran camps for displaced civilians under the strange alias of ‘The Strategic Hamlet Program’ – in effect concentration camps, the British ran camps for displaced civilians under the strange alias of ‘Government Laagers’ – in effect also concentration camps.

Vietnam War ‘Strategic Hamlet’ – note the containment and defensive perimeter

So what’s the difference? It’s the concept of ‘Total War’ that has blurred the lines, it starts to become almost impossible to separate the idea of combatants and non combatants from soldier and civilian – when civilians aid the soldiers by maintaining their combat readiness. The ANC used the same excuse to bomb Southern Cross Aid offices, a civilian charity supplying the SADF with gift aid and the SADF even used the same excuse when a whole bunch of civilians came into the cross-fire at Cassinga in Angola during the Angolan Border War.

In conclusion

The impact of the British concentration camp policy in South Africa is far-reaching, deeply traumatic and still has bearing today as it’s an issue that requires national healing and international recognition. It is not a light matter. However, we have to be true to pursuing the facts and discarding the propaganda and politically motivated miss-truths.

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Boer women and children in a British Concentration Camp

So, we stand by the myth now debunked – the British did not invent the ‘concentration camp’, and certainly not the ‘concentration camp’ as we have come to know the system employed by the Nazis.

History however does show us that a policy to counter-act Guerrilla Warfare by herding civilians into concentration camps is generally a very bad idea from a purely humanitarian perspective, nothing of any good has come from it, its morally corrupt and the British (like the Americans and the Spanish before them) are complicit and guilty of using this policy, and it is to their eternal shame.

As to guerrilla warfare bringing on ‘total war’ and the consequences thereof it’s an American General, William Tecumseh Sherman whose comment rings so tragically true in this respect

“War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueller it is, the sooner it will be over”.

Written by Peter Dickens

“The force of his intellect has enriched the wisdom of the whole human race”- the death of Jan Smuts.

Posted by Peter Dickens

There are still a handful of conservative ‘Afrikaner nationalist’ white people in South Africa who would still toe the old Nationalist line on Smuts, that he was a ‘verraaier’ – a traitor to his people, his death welcomed. However, little do they know that many of the old Nationalist architects of Apartheid held Smuts in very high regard.

DF Malan, on the day of Smuts’ death, 11th September 1950, was the Prime Minister of South Africa, his Nationalist party had defeated Smuts’ United party two years earlier in 1948 whilst pushing the Nationalist proposals to further entrench racial segregation with a concept they called Apartheid. Smuts on the other hand, foresaw the need to extend the ideas of ‘Union’ which had brought Afrikaner and Briton together to include Black South Africans. On voting rights, he had made his views clear to Hertzog as early as 1920 when in a private meeting he proposed a Qualification Franchise (not a Universal one though) for black South Africans (Hertzog was an ardent Nationalist and rejected the idea outright).

Smuts was born into a system of ‘Empire’ and that was the socio-political sphere everyone understood, including Smuts. Over time Smuts’ views on racial segregation gradually evolved from the generally understood divided evolution edicts of his day (based on where nations stood on the ‘civilisation’ continuum). On the international stage by the mid 1940’s, when Smuts was outside of the pressures of South Africa’s race politics (even from inside of his own political party) and not toeing his party’s line, here his views started to really shape up.

By the middle of World War 2 he had taken on a deep sense of individual liberty for all mankind, emancipation and freedom from any sort of oppression (including State). These views, based on what he termed man’s universal “spirit” for freedom forged by two world wars, they were consolidated in his work on the United Nations and exposed on an international stage in a number of speeches.

Back in South Africa after the war, as a precursor to these views on universal liberty, Smuts had already changed from his old positions on segregation and proposed ‘integration’ instead of ‘separation’ and he had also already promised black community leaders greater political representation if they supported his war effort, voting rights under Smuts were already secure for South Africans of Indian origin and the Cape Coloured community. On the Nationalists proposals of Apartheid he once said:

“The idea that the Natives must all be removed and confined in their own Kraals is in my opinion the greatest nonsense I have ever heard”.

The nationalists touted a fear of ‘black danger’ under this more democratically minded Smuts if he won, and it struck a cautionary chord with many white voters and the Nationalists won the day, surprisingly and against the odds, and not by a majority mind – but on a constitutional seat basis.

On losing the election Smuts made one of his greatest speeches in 1949 at the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument to a largely Afrikaner crowd, it says everything of where he stood on integration and the future of South Africa, he said:

“Only on the basis of taking from the past what was beautiful could ‘fruitful co-operation and brotherhood’ between the two white communities be built. And only on this basis could a solution be found for the greatest problem which we have inherited from our ancestors, the problem of our native relations”. He went on to say, that this was “the most difficult and the final test of our civilization.’

Simply put, the country’s white community at Smuts’ death was very split down the middle on the issue of ‘Apartheid’ and what it would bring, the majority of South Africans did not favour it and they had heeded Smuts’ warnings of what entrenched race politics would bring to South Africa’s future.

The death of Jan Smuts

DF Malan

DF Malan was attending a National Party political rally to the party faithful and whipping up support for the edicts of Apartheid when Smuts’ died. An aide walked up to him and handed him a note with the news of Smuts’ death, what he does next would surprise even the hardest right-wing Afrikaner Nationalist.

Instead of gleeful celebration of the demise of this most hated enemy of the Apartheid cause, the man repeatedly called a ‘traitor’ by the Nationalists, a man who had the ‘blood’ of Jopie Fourie on his hands, the ‘hansopper’ and ‘joiner’ turncoat who favoured the union of the Afrikaner with the hated British to heal South Africa over and above separationist Afrikaner rule, the King’s ‘hanskakie’ puppet, old ‘slim Jannie’ who put global interests and governance ahead of his ‘volk’ (white Afrikaner peoples) – no Dr. Malan’s reaction to the news was somewhat different to what most people now would even think.

DF Malan immediately turned pale, he slowly sat down, slumped over and cupped his hands to his face. He had lost a lifelong and very close friend. Their political positions aside, Malan had a deep sense of admiration for his old friend.

He had to be helped up to stand at the microphone, where he announced that “a great figure of our time” has just died, he called the Nationalists to silence and then cancelled the rally. His colleagues reporting that they had never seen Malan so distressed.

DF Malan’s reaction says a lot about Smuts, the importance he had in the formation of South Africa, he was the original ‘reconciler’ of the warring nations in South Africa, his idea of union based his philosophy of holism – all parts of the sphere make the whole, made the state of South Africa as we know it, he was quite literally the ‘father’ of the South African nation, and now he was lost.

The universal appreciation of Smuts at the time, both by his supporters and his detractors, would see a nationwide and even worldwide outpouring of grief, Smuts’ funeral was something else, a funeral not seen since in South Africa and only seen again when Nelson Mandela died.

To even begin to contemplate Smuts’ importance to not only South Africa, but to the free world consider what Winston Churchill wrote to Isie (Ouma Smuts), his wife, expressing his condolences, and what he wrote sums up the loss perfectly.

“There must be comfort in the proofs of admiration and gratitude that have been evoked all over the world for a warrior-statesman and philosopher who was probably more fitted to guide struggling and blundering humanity through its suffering and perils than anyone who ever lived in any country during his epoch.”

In his lifetime, Smuts had advanced to a level of greatness that is more substantive and more far-reaching to the modern human race than any South African before and even after him (with all respect to Nelson Mandela and his legacy).

Add to this what King George VI wrote Ouma Smuts and you start to see a pattern. He wrote:

“the force of his intellect has enriched the wisdom of the whole human race”.

To understand his impact to humankind by way of an obituary to his milestone accolades, consider the following:

The birth of South Africa

The establishment of the state of South Africa in 1910. His proposal of ‘Union’ with the British colonies of the Cape and Natal brought South Africa out of the devastation of the Boer War and the resultant decimation of the Boer nation. Despite winning the war, in just four years of Colonising everything, Britain had handed all control of her colonies in South Africa to an independent parliament to Westminster, able to make its own laws to forge its own destiny, headed up by two Boer Generals of which Smuts was one.

The Boers had lost their two small Republics to war and now, thanks to Smuts’ skill and British confidence in his vision and him, the Boer commanders were very quickly back in governance of both their ‘old’ Republics and in addition, both the British Colonies as well – without a shot been fired. To quote Smuts ‘they gave our country back’. He reflected that at no time in Britain’s long history had such a ‘miracle of trust and magnanimity’ ever happened.

British ‘meddling’ and ‘warmongering’ in South Africa would never happen on the same scale again, and in fact they were making reparations for the damage they had caused by way of economic support.

The League of Nations and United Nations

He played a key role in the establishment of the League of Nations, the exact design and implementation of which relied upon Smuts, he even drafted the outlines for the The Treaty of Versailles. His outline was not fully followed and he warned the League of a future calamity with Germany – how prophetic he was.

With the demise of the League of Nations (the USA left it), Smuts still held the view that a more robust world peace body was required involving all nations holding each other to account. He later urged the formation of a new international organisation for peace: The United Nations (UN).

Smuts wrote the first draft of the preamble to the United Nations Charter, and was the only person in history to sign the charters of both the League of Nations and the United Nations (see earlier Observation Post link Jan Smuts drafted the Preamble to the United Nations Charter).

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Smuts signing the United Nations Charter

The British Commonwealth of Nations

He sought to redefine the relationship between the United Kingdom and her colonies, he helped establish the concept of a ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ based on devolved British authority instead of a ‘British Empire’ and by doing so he served to end Britain’s ‘Empire. He in fact came up with the term ‘Commonwealth’ and it was to his recommendations that the King listened.

The birth of Israel

In 1932, the kibbutz Ramat Yohanan in Israel was named after him. Smuts was a vocal proponent of the creation of a Jewish state, and spoke out against the rising anti-Semitism of the 1930s. His relationship with the Jews and Israel did not stop there, he was one of the driving forces behind the Balfour Declaration which established the state of Israel (see earlier Observation Post A Kibbutz called Jan Smuts.)

World Wars and Military Milestones

He became South Africa’s only Field Marshal, having taken South Africa to both World Wars on the side of democracy and freedom. The Second World War alone launched the manufacturing might of South Africa largely due to the support of the war effort. By the end of WW2, South Africa, a muddle of small colonies and republics just 40 years earlier, now stood as a key contributing world player.

He was the only person with in-depth military experience to join The British War Cabinet, at the insistence of the King, during World War 1 (the rest were Politicians) and in so played a key role in guiding the outcome of World War 1.

He gave birth to the idea of an independent Air Force free from Navy or Army control in 1917, that saw the formation of the Royal Air Force (RAF), the oldest independent air arm in the world and in addition carried this over to form The South African Air Force, the second oldest. Modern military construct now still follows The Smuts Report on the use of air power (see earlier Observation Post links Centenary of the ‘Smuts Report’, the instrument which gave birth to the Royal Air Force,).

Smuts had a long string of successful military command, notwithstanding his Command of a Boer Commando during the Anglo-Boer war, evading defeat for the entire duration of the war. He founded the South African Defence Force after Union, commanded UDF forces alongside Botha in taking German South West Africa during WW1, the first ‘Allied’ victory of the war. He went on to command all the British and Commonwealth Forces in the East African campaign during WW1, chasing General Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces all over East Africa, and in so doing he captured Dar-es-Salaam, the German East Africa capital. However, to really put Smuts in perspective, when he heard that his old enemy, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck had fallen into destitution after WW2, it was Smuts who personally extended aid and food to him (to Smuts war was not a personal thing amongst soldiers).

During the Second World War he was appointed to the British King’s Privy Council. The King was even warm to an idea proposed by Jock Colville (Churchill’s Private Secretary) that should Prime Minister Winston Churchill die during the war, Smuts would replace him, however this idea was never tested as Smuts would have need to have been made a peer and constitutional issues would have prevented it. Whether possible or not it does give an idea of just how close Smuts was to Churchill and how indispensable he had become (see related Observation Post: Churchill’s idols; Napoleon, Nelson &…Smuts!).

Again, as a member of the British War Council, he played a key role in the outcome of World War 2 and the Allied Victory. He even accompanied Winston Churchill shoulder to shoulder to oversee Operation Overlord (D Day) and the liberation of France and subsequently Western Europe.

Smuts and Churchill in France overseeing Operation Overlord (D Day)

Many historians would now even point to the notion that Churchill regarded Smuts’ advice above anyone else’s advice on his war effort and strategy (see related Observation Posts Jan Smuts, Winston Churchill and D-Day and Smuts’ keen sense of smell detects Germans hiding nearby).

Domestic acclaim

Emily Hobhouse

The deep-seated pain of the Boer War concentration camps and how it affected Afrikaner identity was also something that Smuts actively addressed (Ouma Smuts was herself interned in a concentration camp, and Smuts had also tragically lost family to the system). He became a friend and confidant of Emily Hobhouse in addressing the issue with the British over many years. The Magnolia seeds she gave him in friendship now stand as a full botanical statement to this outside his house in Irene.

He brought the government to take measures to bring the treatment of Indians in South Africa into line with the provisions of the United Nations, putting them to the same equality and status of the ‘Cape Colourds’ who already enjoyed an equal universal franchise in South Africa at the time. In doing so he became a life-long admirer of Mahatma Ghandi, who in turn also regarded Smuts as one of the greatest statesmen of his time.

To illustrate this admiration, Before Gandhi returned to India in 1914, he presented General Smuts with a pair of sandals made by Gandhi himself. In 1939, on Gandhi’s 70th birthday, Smuts returned the sandals with the following message:

“I have worn these sandals for many a summer, even though I may feel that I am not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man.”

(see earlier Observation Post story “… I am not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man”).

In domestic policy, Smuts instituted a number of social security reforms. Old-age pensions and disability grants were extended to ‘Indians’ and ‘Africans’ respectively (although there were still differences in the level of grants paid out). He also instituted the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1941 and the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1946.

International acclaim

Smuts was honoured by many countries and on many occasions, as a standout Smuts was the first Prime Minister of a Commonwealth country (any country for that matter) to address both sitting Houses of the British Parliament – the Commons and the Lords during World War 2. To which he received a standing ovation from both houses.

Such was the admiration of Smuts that his statue stands outside Westminster on Parliament Square in London for his contribution to world politics and as a great reformer.

Now he stands alongside the likes of Ghandi, Mandela and Abraham Lincoln as the only other ‘foreign’ statesmen honoured in the square. Whilst, ironically, in South Africa his legacy has taken an absolute battering and his statues removed.

Take the time to listen to Smuts’ speech to both houses of Parliament, note his views on all mankind’s basic freedoms and what he envisions as the future by way of fundamental reforms. Also note the short praise by Winston Churchill when Smuts concludes his speech and the reaction of the British Parliament, a reaction that has not been seen in British politics since, it is very unique.

Charity

In 1921 Smuts, along with Field Marshal Haig, established The Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League (RCEL) in Cape Town. The RCEL sought to consolidate war veteran’s charities all over the world to care for the returning military service personnel in the Commonwealth. It saw the establishment or re-purposed institutions which now play a significant role in care for servicemen worldwide, The Royal British Legion, The Royal Canadian Legion, The Returned Services League Australia and The South African Legion to name a few.

He also made South Africa available to Jewish orphans escaping the Pogroms of Eastern Europe (despite resistance from South African nationalists). For a full story on this remarkable chapter, see an earlier Observation Post 200 Jewish orphans saved, the story of Jan Smuts and Issac Ochberg

He again made South Africa available to Polish orphan children escaping the Nazi German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, establishing a grateful and thriving small Polish community in South Africa (see earlier Observation Post South Africa provides sanctuary for Polish refugee children during WW2 ).

Academia

Smuts was also an accredited philosopher, his work on Holism brought him high acclaim from his Philosopher peers. Holism can be defined as “the fundamental factor operative towards the creation of wholes in the universe” and was published in 1926. For Smuts it formed the grounding behind his concepts of the League of Nations and United Nations.

Smuts was also an accredited Botanist, his books and illustrations on South African grasses (veld) are still regarded as the definitive work.

Whilst studying law at Christ’s College at Cambridge University, he was rated as one of the top three students they have ever had (Christ’s College is nearly 600-year-old). The other two were John Milton and Charles Darwin.

His intellect was unsurpassed, to pass an exam at Cambridge he learnt Greek (fluently) in just 6 days. His wife was no intellectual slouch either, later in life Jan Smuts and Ouma Smuts used to tease one another when one would recite a Bible verse and the other would be expected to recite the following one, from memory, in Greek!

In 1948, Smuts was elected Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the first real non-Briton outside of British Royalty to be elected to the position in the 800 year-old history of Cambridge University.

Vision

Smuts’ idea of ‘Union’ and vision for South Africa was that of a ‘United States of South Africa’ including countries like Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe in the Union. It was to be a significant player on the world stage drawing on Africa’s vast resources to see it as a leading political and economic power block (much like the USA is now). Can you imagine if Botswana and Rhodesia voted to join the Union (they chose not to at the time), what a different history we would have seen in Southern Africa – ‘Apartheid’ may never have happened just for starters.

A humble man

Personally, Smuts was a God-fearing, frugal and humble man. He chose as his house an old rickety, uninsulated, fully corrugated iron, transportable military head office. He preferred to sleep outside on the ‘stoup’ (veranda) on a small single hard wood bed, his garden was the natural veld. There were no stately mansions or ‘Nkandla’ with ‘fire pools’ for Smuts and he would not have had it anyway.

Legacy

The National Party in a sinister move, gradually and over the long period of Apartheid insidiously smeared Smuts and his legacy, erasing from the general consciousness of just what a great South African Smuts had become. Modern South Africans grew up with almost no regard for Smuts, and if you had to ask a young Black South African today who Smuts was he’ll probably say he was one of the white Apartheid monsters, the white English children will have no idea and the White Afrikaans ones may remember something about him been traitor to Afrikaners. A student in Canada studying world politics would have a better grip on Smuts than a South African student.

Luckily this is beginning to change, and landmark Biographies are being written now which start to fully explore who and what Jan Smuts was, and it is both fascinating and eye-opening. It is very hard to sum up all the greatness Smuts was to attain, and certainly for his time his deeds set him well apart from any of the other Statesmen South Africa has produced, certainly if you consider all the subsequent South African Premiers other than Mandela. We have a wonderful story in Smuts, and what we have a character of force – a polyglot, philosopher, botanist, intellectual, lawyer, politician, statesmen, reformer and warrior – a story and a man who is best summed up by Alan Paton who said:

“Even the great thought he was great.”

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Written and Researched by Peter Dickens. References: Jan Smuts reconsidered Hermann Giliomee 26 January 2016, Richard Steyn’s Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness 2015. Video footage copyright Associated Press. My deep thanks to Philip Weyers for the Smuts family insight and access.

This article serves to highlights Smuts’ achievements by way of an Obituary. There are other issues any national leader faces that highlight decisive but ‘unpopular’ action depending on the affected party’s point of view. For more related articles in The Observation Post on Jan Smuts please have a look at this link:

South Africa’s very own Communist Revolution – The Rand Revolt of 1922

The ‘BLACK’ Concentration Camps of the Boer War

Posted by Peter Dickens

To fully reconcile The Boer War is to fully understand the Black Concentration Camps.

Two Different Narratives

To many Afrikaans speaking white people in South Africa the narrative of what many in South Africa call; The Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) or just shortened to The Boer War, is one of a struggle of the Boer nations for independence, the backdrop set against one of British greed for gold in The South African Republic (Transvaal) and colonial expansion by the subjugation of independent nations. The Boer’s boldly fighting against the odds against a British Imperialist invasion and then having to endure the indignity of a systematic eradication of the Boer nation and culture by means of a punitive genocide initiated by what some now regard as a Nazi styled system of British ‘concentration camps’ which murdered their women and children in their tens of thousands. An indignity and outrage which now calls for an apology and war repatriation from the British.

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To many of the British, the story is somewhat different. The British call the war; The South African War (1899-1902) and it is one of a struggle of British migrant miners fighting against oppression and for citizen rights in The South African Republic (The ZAR or Transvaal). Followed by brave pockets of British garrison troops in border towns in the Cape Colony and Natal fighting off an invasion by the Boers of their colonies, the siege of their towns initiated by the Boer’s declaration of war on the British, and by besieging their towns subjecting British civilian men, women and children to starvation and indiscriminate shelling by surrounding Boer guns – calling for a national outrage in the UK and a ‘call to arms’ of the biggest expeditionary force seen to date to ‘get their cities back’ and save the civilians. Then after winning the conventional in a lightning war of only 9 months the British felt forced to depopulate large swathes of land bordering their supply routes to Pretoria. This was done to prevent constant attack on their supplies by Boer commandos (now with governments ‘in the field’ instead of their capital cities). Their reaction, wherever there was an attack, just put all the surrounding farmstead folk into ‘refugee camps’ (their term for the camps) and burn the farmsteads supplying the Boer forces to the ground. All because some renegade Boer commandos didn’t ‘play by the rules’ of a conventional surrender and embarked on an unconventional phase of the war instead (guerrilla war) which threw the generally accepted rules of engagement out the window.

Nasty, very nasty history this war was, and these two different views on the subject are to a degree both ‘politically’ motivated, both conveniently serving to underpin ‘Nationalist’ ideologies and in so supporting political agendas – whether it is a Boer or British one.

A third dimension

So, somewhere between the two vastly different narratives lies the truth, but there’s a third part of the war neither of the above two narratives even begins to properly consider, and it’s a part of the Boer/South African War which fundamentally shifts all previous narratives on the war, moving it away from a war between two white tribes to a more holistic one involving all South Africans. Ground breaking research is now been done on the ‘Black’ involvement in the war and the impact to the Black community. New understanding is coming about and it is shaking the traditional British and Boer narratives and historical accounts to the core.

african_a-b_war_prisoners_of_war_on_st_helena_parliament — Black African South African War (1899-1902) prisoners of war who were fighting on the Boer side on St Helena

At the very centre of understanding this previously overlooked aspect of the war is the unveiling of the history of the ‘Black’ concentration camps of the Boer War. Their impact to the Black community, almost no different to the impact to the Boer community. The only difference is the politically driven race politics post the Boer War, and especially during the Apartheid period, which simply brushed it aside as something less relevant with a brutal degree of apathy, leaving us all now with a ‘perception’ of the war rather than a truth.

In an odd sense, it is only by understanding this aspect of the war that full account and truths are established, that anything by way of ‘apologies’ or ‘reparations’ in our modern context can even be possible.

The Black History of the Boer War

So, if you are unfamiliar with the ‘Black’ part of the Boer War here it is. South Africa’s ‘Black’ tribal population also took part in the war, on a scale most people are unaware of.

In the case of the Boer forces, very often Black farm workers took on the role of ‘agterryers’ (rear rider) in fighting Commandos, their job was a combination of military ‘supply’ and one of a military ‘aide-de-camp’ (assistant) to one or more of the Boer fighters. These ‘agterryers’ ferried ammunition, weapons, supplies and food to the Boer combatants, they arranged feed for horses and in some cases, they were even armed.

10848845_10203197575321417_1902673332588762700_o — Boer officer and his agterryer

It was not only Black men in support, but Black women too, they supported the Boer women in providing food and feed to frontline commandos and when the concentration camp systems started they (with their children) were also swept up and in many cases also accompanied and lived in the tents with the Boer families interned in the ‘white’ concentration camps themselves, primarily looking after the children (black and white), sourcing food and water as well as cooking and washing. They too were exposed to the same ravages of war in the camps as the white folk, mainly the water-borne diseases which so decimated the women and children in these camps.

20375883_1942095356068953_3486044989180576012_n — A Black women in a Boer Concentration Camp

The British were no different, they quickly employed the local Black population as ‘scouts’ and numerous examples exist of these ‘scouts’ conducting surveillance of Boer positions and intelligence on Boer movements as well as guiding the British through the unforgiving South African terrain.

The British also sought manpower from the local Black population in cargo loading and supply haulage. These people were as much a part of moving British military columns as any military person involved in logistics and supply and to a degree they were also exposed to hazards of war.

Black Africans in British Service, the brass armband signifies military service – Imperial War Museum

The British would also ‘commandeer’ entire Black tribal villages for the use of setting up forward bases, strong points and defences – putting entire village populations at risk and literally bringing them into their ‘war effort’.

native stronghold — Black African village taken over by the British for a strong-hold position – Imperial War Museum

There is even a recorded event when Black South Africans took a more direct role in the war. On 16 May 1902, Chief Sikobobo waBaqulusi, and a Zulu impi marched on Vryheid and attacked a Boer commando at dawn with losses on both sides.

Context behind the Concentration Camp policy

However, the biggest and most deadly impact to the Black African nations in the Boer War, came in their own earmarked British concentration camps. So how did that come about? To understand why the concentration camps initially came about and their purpose we need to put both the white and black concentration camps into context.

To the British, the war should have ended when they marched into Pretoria in June 1900, having now relieved the Boer sieges of their towns of Ladysmith in their Natal Colony, Mafeking and Kimberley in their Cape Colony, and having already taken The Orange Free State’s capital, and Johannesburg – the Transvaal’s economic hub. The war was over, ‘officially’ they had annexed both republics and they even called for a post war ‘khaki election’ back in the UK to reshuffle Westminster to post war governance.

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Not for the Boer forces it wasn’t over – not by a long shot. The British in marching into Pretoria found themselves stretched deep into ‘hostile’ territory with extended and vulnerable supply lines stretching over hundreds of kilometres. Boer strategy was to move their government ‘into the field’, abandon the edicts of Conventional Warfare and embark on ‘Guerrilla Warfare’ tactics instead, to disrupt supply and isolate the British into pockets. To do this they would need food, ammunition and feed supplied directly from their own farmsteads surrounding their chosen targets. Isolated British garrisons came under attack with some initial Boer successes, their forces then melting away into the country. Easy targets were also trains and train lines, and after many a locomotive steamed into Pretoria riddled with bullet holes or didn’t make it all, Lord Kitchener got fed up at the arrogance of it all and acted decisively.

Kitchener concentrated on restricting the freedom of movement of the Boer commandos and depriving them of local support. The railway lines and supply routes were critical, so he established 8000 fortified blockhouses along them and subdivided the land surrounding each of them into a protective radius. Short of troops to man all these strong points (he needed 50 000 troops) and control the protective areas, Kitchener also turned to the local Black African population and used over 16 000 of them as armed guards and to patrol the adjacent areas.

Wherever and whenever an attack took place, or where sufficient threat existed to this system, Kitchener took to the policy of depopulating the radius area, burning down the farmsteads, killing the livestock and moving all the people – both Black and White (it mattered not to the British what colour they were) into what was termed a ‘refugee camp’ by the British, these camps however were in reality a concentration camp of civilian deportees forcibly removed from their homes.

52966827_2062656877104244_6953808788189085696_o — Image: British soldiers burning a Boer farmstead. Note displaced Boer family sitting with whatever possessions they could salvage in time. Colour by Tinus Le Roux

Two systems of concentration camps existed, one for Blacks and one for Whites. Both were run very differently. Victorian sentiment at the time was very racially guided.

The Boer Concentration Camps

The ‘White’ camps were tented and the ‘refugees’ (more accurately forced removed and displaced civilians) were given rations of food and water. The British could also not afford the resources to ‘guard’ and administrate these camps, and herein lies the problem. It was due to the lack of ability to manage the camps that some camps were managed well and others simply were not, some fell under British military command others were ‘outsourced’ to local contractors manage, and both British and quite often Afrikaner entrepreneurs were brought in to administrate the camps. In most instances these camps were very isolated, and by isolation it simply meant the people in them had nowhere else to go (there were no Nazi styled ‘wire’ fences with prisoners shot trying to escape), the camps were in fact relatively porous with regard the movement of people in and out of them.

Image: Children fetching water, Bloemfontein concentration camp. Note general conditions and bell tents. Colourised by Tinus Le Roux

Some camps were well run, orderly with demarcated tent lines and health policies implemented based on running a normal military camp (tents and bedding were regularly aired out) and ablutions correctly located with drainage. Other camps were not well run at all, the administrators allowing the Boer families to ‘clump’ their tents together with no proper ablution planning or health policy. Policies on food rationing also differed from camp to camp. In some camps, sadistic camp administrators took to punitive measures to ‘punish’ the Boer families whose menfolk were still fighting in the field to get them to surrender, literally starving these people to the point that just enough food was given to keep them alive.

47687166_1942108895825710_8580116721963106304_n — Boer family in a concentration camp with their Black domestic helper. Colourised by Tinus Le Roux

It follows that in these camps, especially the poorly administrated ones, that disease would take root, and it came in all sorts forms ranging from poor nutrition to exposure, but it mainly came in the form of waterborne diseases from poor sanitation. Here again, some camps were medically geared to deal with it, others not. The net result of all of this is a tragedy on an epic level.

The official figure of the death toll to white Boer women and children in the camps is 26 370, a staggering figure when you consider that only an estimated 6,000 Boer combatants in the field died in the war. Another tragedy (lesser so than life) was the loss of family heirlooms and family records to the relocation and scorched earth policies, this served to erase the inherent culture and history of the Boer peoples. The combination of both the systematic erosion of Boer culture and the astronomical rise in death rates of the ‘fountain’ of Boer race – their women and children, has left a deep scar of hatred and loss which still openly exists to this day, and for good reason.

The Black Concentration Camps

The ‘Black’ concentration camps were a different matter entirely. On the 21st December 1900, Lord Kitchener made no bones about his new concentration camp policy at the inaugural meeting of the Burgher Peace Committee held in Pretoria, where he remarked that in addition to the Boer families, both ‘stock’ and ‘Blacks’ would also be brought in.

As said, Victorian sentiment was very racially guided, and where the ‘white’ concentration camps were at least given some semblance of tents for shelter, food, aid workers, water rationing and some medical aid albeit entirely inadequate, the ‘Black’ concentration camps had very little of that.

Black concentration camps, were also earmarked to isolated areas bordering railway lines so they could be supplied – with both deportees and supplies. The isolation also became the means of containment. However no ‘tented’ constructs were provided in most instances and these Black civilians were simply left on arid land to build whatever shelters they could scourge for. They were also not given food rations on a system resembling anything near the system provided ‘white’ camps, in the white camps the food rations were basically free of charge, in the black camps they had to pay for it.

black women on way to concentration camp — Black women on their way to a concentration camp in the Transvaal – Imperial War Museum image

In all an estimated 130 000 black civilians (mainly farm labourers on Boer farms) were displaced and put into this type of concentration camp, 66 camps in total (with more still been identified, some sources say as many as 80 camps), all based primarily on the British fear that these Black people would assist the Boers during the war.

During early 1901, the black concentration camps were initially set up to accommodate white refugees. However, by June 1901, the British government established a Native Refugee Department in the Transvaal under the command of Major G.F. de Lotbinier, a Canadian officer serving with the Royal Engineers. He took over the black deportees in the Orange Free State in August that year and a separate department for blacks was created.

20448955_10155633958753980_1228035049095603465_o — Medical inspection inside a Black concentration camp as administered by the Native Refugee Department. Orange Free State, 1901. Note the black mourning band worn by the RAMC Doctor and the armed African wearing a British army tunic top. Children with distended stomachs inspected, including the toddler with a ruptured umbilical – starvation. In the background to right of the Doctor a child bites its fingers while witnessing this inspection. Note the shelters. No tents – caption and research by Dr. Garth Benneyworth.

Entire townships and even mission stations were transferred into concentration camps. The Black camps differed from the Boers in that they contained large a number of males. This meant the camps were located by railway lines where the men could provide a ready supply of local labour. Work was however paid, and it was via this economy that the Black deportees could properly sustain themselves in the camps. In this respect to better understand what these camps were, the concept of a ‘forced labour camp’ would be a better definition.

Of the Black concentration camps, 24 were in the old Orange Free State Republic, 4 in the Cape Colony and 36 in the old South African (Transvaal) Republic. There was a single concentration camp in Natal at Witzieshoek, and more camps are identified to this very day . Some of the camps were for permanent habitation and others were of a temporary nature intended for transit. Their stories speak volumes for the way they were treated.

On the 22 of January 1902, At the Boschhoek Black concentration camp the deportees held a protest meeting. Stating that when they have been brought into the camps they have been promised that they will be paid for all their stock taken by the British, for all grain destroyed and that they will be fed and looked after, none of which had not been forthcoming. They were also unhappy because “… they receive no rations while the Boers who are the cause of the war are fed in the refugee camps free of charge … they who are the ‘Children of the Government’ are made to pay’.

23 January 1902 records that two Black deportees of the Heuningspruit concentration camp for Blacks, Daniel Marome and G.J. Oliphant, complained to Goold-Adams: “We have to work hard all day long but the only food we can get is mealies and mealie meal, and this is not supplied to us free, but we have to purchase same with our own money. “We humbly request Your Honour to do something for us otherwise we will all perish of hunger for we have no money to keep on buying food.”

The ‘official’ rations were meagre at best and had to be purchased, for ‘Natives’ over 12 years of age: Daily: 1½ lbs either mealies, K/corn, unsifted meal or mealie meal; ¼ oz salt; Weekly: 1 lb fresh or tinned meat; ½ coffee; 2 oz sugar – all but the corn was to cost the Black deportee receiving it 4½d per ration.

By 1902 18 January, Major De Lorbiniere, writes that supplying workers to the army ‘formed the basis on which our system was founded’. The department’s mobilisation of Black labour was very successful – however really this is not surprising at all considering the incentives offered. Those in service of the British and their families could buy mealies at a halfpence per lb, or 7/6 a bag, while those who do not accept employment had to pay double, or 1d per lb and 18/- or more per bag.

The camps, usually situated in an open veld, they were overcrowded, the tents and huts were placed too close together and did not provide adequate protection from the harsh African weather. They were extremely hot in summer and ice cold in winter. Materials for roofing were scarce, also no coal was provided for warmth. In addition to this misery there was a severe shortage of both food and water (mainly fresh vegetables, milk and meat) .

Water supplies were often contaminated by disease and any form of medical attention was rare to non-existent. Abhorrent sub-human conditions meant that water-borne diseases like dysentery, typhoid and diarrhoea spread with ease and the death rate climbed drastically.

Image: Probably Bronkhorstspruit Concentration Camp. Photo source: LSE library, colourised by Jenny Bosch. Note the lack of bell-tents and use of corrugated iron sheets for shelter.

The horrific conditions these deportees subjected to were superseded only by even more abhorrent treatment, the same social diseases, exposure and nutrition problems sprung up in these camps as they did in the ‘White’ Boer camps, with the same horrific result.

Most of the deaths in the concentration camps were caused by disease, and it took root with the most vulnerable, mainly children. By this stage in the war, the death rates in the Black concentration were climbing to unacceptable levels. An aid worker, Mr H.R. Fox, the Secretary of the Aborigines Protection Society, was made aware by Emily Hobhouse that the Ladies Commission (the Fawcett Commission – looking into the problems and death rates in the concentration camps) had focussed solely on the ‘White” concentration camps and completely ignored the plight of Blacks in their concentration camps. So, he promptly wrote to Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, requesting an inquiry be instituted by the British government “as should secure for the natives who are detained no less care and humanity than are now prescribed for the Boer refugees”.

On this request Sir Montagu Ommaney, the permanent under-secretary at the Colonial Office, responded that it seems undesirable “to trouble Lord Milner … merely to satisfy this busybody”. With that swift apathy to the plight of the Black deportees came another tragedy on an epic level.

By the beginning of 1902, conditions in black camps were however improved somewhat in order to reduce the death rate. More nutrients were introduced (tinned milk, Bovril and corn flour) and shops were opened that allowed black people to buy some produce and equipment, mainly items like flour, sugar, coffee, tea, syrup, candles, tobacco, clothes and blankets.

The total Black deaths in camps are officially calculated at a minimum of 14 154 (about 1 in 10). However recent work by Dr. Garth Benneyworth estimates it as at least 20 000, this after examining actual graveyards and factoring that burials had also taken place away from the camps themselves. Dr. Benneyworth notes that the British records are incomplete and in many cases non-existent and the fact that many civilians died outside of the camps in labour or transit or were buried in shared graves, this caused the final death toll to be much higher. The high rate of child death in the Victorian period aside, a staggering 81% of the fatalities in the Black concentration camps were children.

Images courtesy of Dawie Fourie

In Conclusion

Compare that to the Boer concentration camps, where the deaths are recorded are around the 26 000 mark and it becomes clear that the Black population of South Africa suffered the same as the White population during the Boer war. However, the fact is that historical research into the Black involvement in the war is sorely missing from the general narrative. Post the Boer war and during Apartheid a lot of research around the Boer concentration camps was done, even monuments and museums were erected to them. It served Nationalist political agenda at the time in establishing Afrikaner identity along a separate race line, so almost nothing by way of research was done on the Black concentration camps, no monuments, museums or even a solid historical account exist of them at all. The Black history of the Boer war most certainly did not make it into mainstream ‘National Christian’ government education curriculum at the time. As a result the Boer war is simply just not properly understood to this day.

If you add to this the glossed over South African Black History behind their contributions and sacrifices in WW1 and WW2, you can see that Race Politics in South Africa has simply not taken the Black history and their sacrifice along with the mainstream historical account, especially the history prior to the implementation of Apartheid in 1948. What this alienation of critical parts of our history from the overall historical record has done, has reinforced the narrative that black lives were somehow of a lesser consequence to white lives. So, there is no surprise that most modern South Africans (mainly youth) simply can’t be bothered with properly understanding South African history prior to 1994.

There is still a very long way to go to fully understanding the war – but the future in reconciling the true effect of this war and redressing it as a nation – is to understand that the Boer War was not only a ‘white’ man’s war, nor the concentration camps strictly about Afrikaner women and children, a much bigger story exists and its one which needs to be reconciled with – and that is the suffering of South Africa’s black population and the extraordinary losses they experienced in these concentration camps too.

The redress for white Afrikaners in South Africa as to any form of global awareness and world condemnation of this tragedy to their nation lies in the reconciliation of the history with the previously unwritten and misunderstood black history behind The Boer War. Only if his tragedy is seen as a national issue, with a common cause and reconciliatory national healing process behind it to deal properly with it, only then can amends and long awaited apologies from the British be found.

Written and Researched by Peter Dickens with references and extracts from the Military History Journal Vol 11 No 3/4 – October 1999 Black involvement in the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902 by Nosipho Nkuna, also references from Dr Garth Benneyworth and ‘Erasure of black suffering in Anglo-Boer War’ By Ntando PZ Mbatha. Photo copyrights – The Imperial War Museum and Dawie Fourie.

	Peter Dickens on A differing outlook
	Andre van Rooyen on A differing outlook
	Peter Dickens on A differing outlook
	uloliwe on A differing outlook
	Peter Dickens on A differing outlook

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To fully reconcile The Boer War is to fully understand the Black Concentration Camps.

Two Different Narratives

A third dimension

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