British Concentration Camps

During the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the British operated concentration camps in the South African Republic, Orange Free State, the Colony of Natal, and the Cape Colony. In February 1900, Lord Kitchener took command of the British forces and implemented controversial tactics that contributed to a British victory.

Using a guerrilla warfare strategy, the Boers lived off the land and used their farms as a source of food, thus making their farms a key item in their many successes at the beginning of the war. When Kitchener realized that a conventional warfare style would not work against the Boers, he began initiating plans to destroy their farms and detain them, which would later cause much controversy among the British public.

Scorched-earth policy

In early March 1901, Lord Kitchener initiated a series of systematic drives aimed at killing, capturing, or wounding Boers, organized similarly to a hunting expedition, with success measured by a weekly "bag" of casualties. Kitchener also sought to sweep the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, such as livestock, women, and children. Historian Thomas Pakenham describes the last phases of the war as being dominated by "the clearance of civilians—uprooting a whole nation."

Boer farms were destroyed by the British under their "Scorched Earth" policy, including the systematic destruction of crops, the slaughtering or removal of livestock, and the burning down of homesteads and farms in order to prevent the Boers from resupplying themselves from a home base. As this happened, many tens of thousands of men, women, and children were forcibly moved into camps. Eventually, authorities built a total of 45 tented camps for Boer internees and 64 additional camps for Black Africans. The vast majority of Boers who remained in the local camps were women and children. Between 18,000 and 26,000 Boers perished in these concentration camps due to diseases.

The camps were very poorly administered from the outset, and they became increasingly overcrowded when Lord Kitchener's troops implemented the internment strategy on a vast scale. Conditions were terrible for the health of the internees, mainly due to neglect, poor hygiene, and bad sanitation. The supply of all items was unreliable, partly because of the constant disruption of communication lines by the Boers. The food rations were meager, and there was a two-tier allocation policy, whereby families of men still fighting were routinely given smaller rations than others. The inadequate shelter, poor diet, bad hygiene, and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid, and dysentery, to which the children were particularly vulnerable. Many internees died due to a shortage of up-to-date medical facilities and medical mistreatment.

UK public opinion and political opposition

Although the 1900 UK general election, also known as the "Khaki election", had resulted in a victory for the Conservative government on the back of recent British victories against the Boers, public support quickly waned as it became apparent that the war would not be easy. Further unease developed following reports filtering back to Britain concerning the treatment of Boer civilians by the British. Public and political opposition to government policies in South Africa regarding Boer civilians was first expressed in Parliament in February 1901 in the form of an attack on the government by the Liberal Party MP David Lloyd George.

Emily Hobhouse, a delegate of the South African Women and Children's Distress Fund, visited some of the camps in the Orange Free State in January 1901. In May 1901, she returned to England on a ship known as the ''Saxon''. Alfred Milner, High Commissioner in South Africa, also boarded the ''Saxon'' for holiday in England, but he dismissed Hobhouse, regarding her as a Boer sympathizer and "trouble maker". On her return, Hobhouse worked to publicize the distress of the camp inmates. She managed to speak to the Liberal opposition Party leader, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who professed to be outraged but disinclined to press the matter, as his party was split between the imperialists and the pro-Boer factions.

St John Brodrick, the Conservative Secretary of State for War, first defended the government's policy by arguing that the camps were purely "voluntary" and that the interned Boers were "contented and comfortable". Lacking firm statistical evidence to support this assertion, he later argued that all measures being taken were "military necessities" and that everything possible was being done to ensure satisfactory conditions in the camps.

Hobhouse published a report in June 1901 that contradicted Brodrick's claim, and Lloyd George then openly accused the government of "a policy of extermination" directed against the Boer population. The same month, Campbell-Bannerman gave a speech criticizing British war methods, including the policy of the camps, stating "When is a war, not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa". The Hobhouse Report caused an uproar both domestically and internationally.

The Fawcett Commission

Although the government had comfortably won the parliamentary debate by a margin of 252 to 149, it was made concerned by the escalating public outcry, calling on Kitchener for a detailed report. Complete statistical returns from camps were sent out in July 1901. By August 1901, it was clear to government and opposition alike that Hobhouse's claims were being confirmed – 93,940 Boers and 24,457 black Africans were reported to be in "camps of refuge" and the crisis was becoming a catastrophe as the death rates appeared very high, especially among the children.

The government responded to the growing clamour by appointing a commission to investigate the conditions. The Fawcett Commission, as it became known, was, uniquely for its time, an all-woman affair headed by Millicent Fawcett. Despite being the leader of the women's suffrage movement, she was a Liberal Unionist and thus a government supporter who was considered a safe pair of hands that would help fend off criticism. Between August and December 1901, the Fawcett Commission conducted its own tour of the camps in South Africa. In the end, it confirmed everything that Hobhouse had said and made even further recommendations; the Commission insisted that rations should be increased and that additional nurses be sent out immediately, along with a long list of other practical measures designed to improve conditions in the camp. Millicent Fawcett expressed that much of the catastrophe was owed to a simple failure to observe elementary rules of hygiene.

In November 1901, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain ordered Alfred Milner to ensure that "all possible steps are being taken to reduce the rate of mortality". The civil authority took over the camps from Kitchener and the British command, and by February 1902, the annual death rate in the concentration camps for white inmates dropped to 6.9 percent and eventually to 2 percent. However, by then the damage had been done. A report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers, of whom 24,074 were children under 16 (50 percent of the Boer child population), had died in the camps. In all, about one in four of the Boer inmates died, most of them children.

Improvements were much slower in coming to the black camps. It is thought that about 12 percent of black African inmates died (about 14,154), but the precise number of deaths of black Africans in concentration camps is unknown as little attempt was made to keep any records of the 107,000 black Africans who were interned.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had served as a volunteer doctor in the Langman Field Hospital at Bloemfontein between March and June 1900. In his widely distributed and translated pamphlet "The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct", he justified both the reasoning behind the war and handling of the conflict itself. He also pointed out that over 14,000 British soldiers had died of disease during the conflict (as opposed to 8,000 killed in combat), and that at the height of epidemics, he was seeing 50–60 British soldiers dying each day in a single ill-equipped and overwhelmed military hospital.

Kitchener's policy change

Scottish historian Niall Ferguson has argued that "this was not a deliberately genocidal policy; rather it was the result of disastrous lack of foresight and rank incompetence on hepart of the ritishmilitary". He further stated that "Kitchener no more desired the deaths of women and children in the camps than of the wounded Dervishes after Omdurman, or of his own soldiers in the typhoid-stricken hospitals of Bloemfontein."

To Lord Kitchener and British High Command, "the life or death of the 154,000 Boer and African civilians in the camps rated as an abysmally low priority" against military objectives. As the Fawcett Commission was delivering its recommendations, Kitchener wrote to St John Brodrick defending his policy of sweeps, and emphasised that no new Boer families were being brought in unless they were in danger of facing starvation. However, the countryside had by then been devastated under the "Scorched Earth" policy, meaning the refusal to allow Boer families into camps would leave them without sustenance. The Fawcett Commission's recommendations stated that "to turn 100,000 people now being held in the concentration camps out on the field to take care of themselves would be cruelty". Now that the New Model counter-insurgency tactics were in full swing, it made little sense to leave Boer families by themselves in desperate conditions in the countryside.

According to one historian, "at he Vereeniging negotiations in May 1902Boer leader Louis Botha asserted that he had tried to send oerfamilies to the British, but they had refused to receive them". A Boer commandant, referring to refugees from the "Scorched Earth" policy, was quoted as saying, "Our families are in a pitiable condition and the enemy uses those families to force us to surrender .. and there is little doubt that that was indeed the intention of Kitchener when he had issued instructions that no more families were to be brought into the concentration camps". Thomas Pakenham writes of Kitchener's policy change:

List of concentration camps

Afrikaner concentration camps

The exact number of incarcerated victims of the concentration camps for Afrikaners is estimated to number around 40,000 by May 1902, the majority of which were women and children.
The total deaths in camps are officially calculated at 27,927 deaths.

Black African concentration camps

By May of 1902, when The Treaty of Vereeniging was signed, the total number of Black South Africans in concentration was recorded at 115,700.
The total Black deaths in camps are officially calculated at a minimum of 14 154.
81% of the fatalities were children.

Notes

References

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concentration camps
Second Boer War
Second Boer War
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Ethnic cleansing in Africa
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