1900-1902
Lord Kitchener’s Genocide: ‘Methods of Barbarism’ in the Boer War
The word ‘genocide’ was unknown in 1900. It was Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer, who coined the expression in 1943, feeling that the murderous activities of the Nazis in Eastern Europe were so extraordinary that existing words were simply not adequate to describe what had been going on in Poland and Russia during the early years of the Second World War. The word may be relatively new, but the concept of systematically exterminating an entire nation or race is at least as old as recorded history. The Bible, for example, tells us in the Book of Joshua that when the Children of Israel entered the land of Canaan, they were commanded by God to kill all the existing inhabitants of the country. Every man, woman and child living in Jericho, the first city conquered by the Hebrews, was put to the sword and the city burned to the ground. Only one family escaped this holocaust.
The decimation or destruction of a people or tribe in this way may sometimes be accomplished by cold-blooded murder, but the same end can be obtained by producing living conditions which lead to starvation and death from disease. This happened of course in the nineteenth century, with the native Americans living under the jurisdiction of the United States. In 1945, the civilised world was shocked to see the conditions in German concentration camps such as Belsen, whose inmates had died in their tens of thousands from malnutrition and epidemics of illnesses such as typhoid. This too was genocide and was officially recognised as such in 1948, when the United Nations defined genocide as, ‘any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such’. The UN Convention on Genocide then went on to specify, apart from outright killing, ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part’.
Before we examine in detail the network of concentration camps set up by the British in the opening years of the twentieth century in, it has since been claimed, an effort to destroy a national group in this way, perhaps we should look at Plates 2 and 3. Belsen was mentioned above and at first glance, these images could very well have originated from events at that most infamous of concentration camps. In fact, both are from 1901; some forty-two years before Belsen opened its gates. The first is a French cartoon, designed to draw attention to the horrors of the British concentration camps in South Africa. The second is of a child from Bloemfontein Concentration Camp; one of the worst of the camps. Seven-year-old Lizzie van Zuyl and her family were deliberately starved by the British soldiers controlling the concentration camp in which they were detained. Lizzie was on the point of dying of malnutrition, when she contracted typhoid and died on 9 May 1901. Her fate was precisely the same as Anne Frank and many others who died in Belsen almost half a century later.
Before looking in detail at the concentration camps organised by the British in the opening years of the last century, it will first be necessary to set the scene by asking ourselves what the British were doing in southern Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most people in Britain have heard of the Boer War; few have any clear idea what it was all about.
The first European colony in South Africa was established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652. By the late eighteenth century, this outpost on the southern tip of Africa was looking very attractive to the British, who wished to guard their trade routes to India. Before the construction of the Suez Canal, ships bound to and from India had to sail south through the Atlantic, rounding what was known as the Cape of Good Hope, before heading north to Asia. The Napoleonic Wars provided the perfect opportunity to gain a foothold there and the first British troops landed in what became the Cape Colony in 1806. Eight years later, the territory was formally ceded to Britain.
Many of the Dutch farmers and merchants living at the Cape did not wish to become part of a British colonial possession and so, over the course of time, made their way north; setting up two independent republics. These were the Orange Free State and the South African Republic; more commonly known as the Transvaal. The Dutch living in these new states were called by the British ‘Boers’, which means ‘farmers’. They preferred to call themselves ‘Burghers’ or citizens.
As the nineteenth century drew on, there were various developments which made amicable relations between the Dutch republics and the British Cape Colony all but impossible. One notable event was the discovery of gold in the Transvaal. Such treasure was very attractive to the British and in 1880, there was an attempt to annex the Transvaal. This became known as the First Boer War. By 1899, another problem had arisen, which was that the Transvaal was arming itself heavily and had also enlisted the help and advice of German military experts. When the British finally went to war on various pretexts, such as the rights of foreigners living and working within the two Boer republics, most people assumed that there would be a brief struggle, before the tiny nations were decisively crushed by the might of the greatest empire the world had ever known.
The Second Boer War began in October 1899 and, to begin with at least, the Boers managed to carry the war into British territory, causing the army to retreat to various garrison towns such as Mafeking and Ladysmith; which the Boer forces then besieged. All of this was a terrible shock for the British public, who were accustomed to their army beating any opponent. It must be recalled that most of the British army’s actions in the late nineteenth century had been against poorly equipped natives, who were no match for well-armed colonial troops. Facing foes who had up-to-date rifles and 155 mm artillery at their disposal was a novel and not altogether pleasing experience for the British army in Africa.
It took four or five months for Britain to transport enough troops and equipment to South Africa to turn the tide of the war in her favour. Field Marshal Lord Roberts was appointed Commander in Chief and adopted an aggressive policy which paid off in a short time. On 13 March 1900, British forces entered Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, and by the middle of May, Mafeking had been relieved. On 28 May, the Orange Free State was annexed and a week later, the British captured Pretoria; the capital of the Transvaal. The Boer armies had been comprehensively defeated in the field and by all the usual rules of warfare, the war could be considered to have ended in a decisive victory for Britain. On 29 November 1900, Field Marshal Roberts believed the war to be over and left the country, handing over to his second in command: Lord Kitchener.
The fiercely independent Boers however, were playing by an entirely different set of rules to the British. Having seen their capital cities fall to a foreign invader and their armies swept aside on the field, the Boers decided that the war would need to be prosecuted by other means. The method which they adopted was to launch a ferocious guerrilla war, a series of hit and run attacks on the armed forces occupying their countries.
Central to all guerrilla wars, and crucial to their success, is the attitude of the civilian population. Mao Tse Tung, whose own guerrilla campaign captured for him the most populous nation on earth, said that ‘The guerrilla must move among the people as a fish swims in the sea.’ In other words, the goodwill of the people is vital to the guerrilla. In the case of the Boer republics, the armed forces of the Transvaal and Orange Free State certainly enjoyed the almost unanimous support of the Dutch settlers. Since most of the men were fighting the British, this meant that the great majority of the civilian population were women and children; the families of the men at war. This presented the Lord Kitchener and his army with a great problem.
In fact, the families of the Boer fighters posed several, closely interwoven problems for the British, all of which were ultimately to be solved in one way. To begin with, it was known that the women and children living in the farmhouses dotted about the land were in the main wholeheartedly in favour of what their men folk were doing. This meant that they observed the movements of British troops and passed on this information to the men in the field. They also fed the soldiers from the produce of their farms. The British, realising that they were, as they saw it, being constantly betrayed to their enemies, began to exact harsh reprisals for any attacks. The actual enemy being so elusive, these reprisals were made against the women and children whose husbands and fathers were at war. As early as January 1900, before Field Marshal Roberts arrived in South Africa, farmhouses were being burned down by the British forces and those living in them rendered homeless.
Once Roberts had taken charge of the campaign against the Boers, he instituted a systematic policy of the destruction of homes. This included not only individual houses, but also entire towns. From March to June 1900, for instance, Roberts authorised the burning of farms from which snipers had been firing on British troops. Attacks on railways and telegraph lines were causing serious problems for the British and so on 16 June 1900, orders were given that homesteads could be burned and crops and livestock confiscated in a radius of ten miles from any acts of sabotage. This meant that the cutting of a telegraph wire might cause the destruction of farms over an area of 300 or so square miles.
Having embarked upon a course of action which was guaranteed to create refugees, the British army attempted to exploit these homeless people and use them to put pressure on the Boer fighters. In July 1900, Roberts ordered that 2,500 women and children be rounded up and taken by rail to Boer military positions in the Transvaal. They were abandoned there in the open. The aim was to put pressure on the Boers, by showing them how their wives and children would suffer if they continued to fight. This cynical use of families and their treatment as hostages did not have the desired effect. The burning of their farms and enforced homelessness of their families only made the majority of the fighters all the more determined to continue the war.
Some of the actions taken by the British army would today be considered war crimes. In October 1900, for example, Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Hunter decided that the town of Bothaville in the Orange Free State was a hotbed of guerrilla activity. He ordered his men to burn the town to the ground; sparing only the church, Red Cross centre and several municipal buildings.
By November 1900, the Boer armies in the field had been defeated and Field Marshal Roberts left the country, after declaring the war to be over and handing over command to Lord Kitchener. Kitchener was of course to become famous a few years later for the First World War recruiting poster which bore his portrait. After he had assumed control of the army in South Africa, on 29 November 1900, Kitchener came to the conclusion that if the Boers would not accept their defeat gracefully, but continued with their hit-and-run attacks on his forces, he would have to adopt sterner measures. Not only were individual farmhouses now burned to the ground, but more towns were also obliterated. Soon after Lord Kitchener took over supreme command, the towns of Wolmaransstad, Bethal, Ermelo, Carolina, Reitz, Parys and Lindley were all destroyed by fire. Needless to say, this did nothing to ameliorate the growing refugee crisis.
The military problem for the British was that as soon as they had captured an area from the Boers and moved on to the next part of the country, the Boer guerrillas moved in and reoccupied the land which the British thought that they had seized. In open battle, the Boers could not hope to challenge the enormous forces which the British had now marshalled against them, but with the assistance of the inhabitants of the supposedly conquered districts, the guerrillas were able to prevent the British army exercising any real control over the vast tracts of country in which they were operating.
The establishment of the first concentration camps of the South African War was not part of a coherent and planned policy, but rather an ad hoc solution to the growing numbers of refugees created by the deliberate actions of the British forces. In July 1900, a camp was set up near Mafeking for homeless women and children and two months later protective camps were erected at Bloemfontein and Pretoria. These were intended as shelter for the families of Boers who had laid down their arms and surrendered, but they also contained what the British termed ‘undesirables’. These were people who were still opposed to the British, whose husbands and fathers were fighting a ferocious guerrilla war, but whose homes had been destroyed. They had nowhere else to go but to these camps.
Having announced that the war had been won, it was a considerable embarrassment for the leaders of the British army to find that their columns were still being ambushed and their communications disrupted by irregular troops who materialised from nowhere and then faded back into the landscape after the attacks. They determined upon a strategy which would, it was thought, bring the war to a final close. The Boer forces were being sustained by the civilian population in the Orange Free State and Transvaal. Very well then, the population would simply be removed and the countryside denuded of any shelter or sustenance for the Boer guerrillas. The aim would be to concentrate the women and children left on the farms into camps which would be guarded by the army. These were, logically enough, called in consequence ‘concentration camps’. It was the very same strategy pursued in Cuba by General Weyl six years earlier; a method of warfare that had been widely condemned in England at the time.
The concentration camps were to be one strand of the British strategy for ending the irregular warfare being waged against them. The other was to be the building of thousands of blockhouses, small stone forts, which would be connected by miles of barbed wire. In this way, the vast, open spaces through which the Boers roamed, and which they knew infinitely better than the occupying army, would be subdivided into smaller and more manageable areas which could be systematically swept for guerrillas.
Eventually, 8,000 blockhouses were built; connected by a staggering 4,000 miles of barbed wire fencing. Those living within the areas enclosed in this way were driven from their homes and herded into the new camps. Crops were destroyed and livestock either taken for use by the army or simply killed and left to rot. As Kitchener explained in December 1900, only a few weeks after taking command, ‘Every farm is an intelligence agency and a supply depot that it is almost impossible to surround or catch’. Three months later, he enlarged upon his policy, setting out the reasons why it was necessary to herd together the families of the men in the field, Speaking of the women left behind to tend the farms, Kitchener said, ‘They give complete intelligence to the Boers of all our movements’. Clearly, this army of spies would need to be moved out of the way if the army were to be successful in crushing the fighters who harried them at every opportunity.
The so-called ‘scorched earth’ policy which Kitchener adopted was ultimately successful, but at an enormous cost in human life. From January 1901 onwards, this strategy of removing everybody from the land and destroying any supplies of grain, herds of cattle or other foodstuff from the farms was vigorously pursued until by the autumn of that year 110,000 people, chiefly women and children, were detained and the countryside was neatly divided up into manageable areas surrounded by barbed wire and ringed with stout blockhouses. These zones could then be methodically swept for guerrillas.
Providing adequate food, shelter and medical attention for over 100,000 people would prove a mammoth undertaking for any organisation. Certainly the British army at the turn of the nineteenth century was not equipped for such a task. The first camps had been hastily erected and nobody had thought in detail about the logistics of housing tens of thousands of women and children in makeshift accommodation for months, perhaps years, on end.
It was early in 1901 that the expression ‘concentration camp’ first entered the English language. In the last chapter, we saw that those interned in the Cuban camps during the 1890s were referred to by the Spanish word recontrentrados. Now, for the first time, the camps themselves were being called, ‘concentration camps’. One of the earliest uses of the term is to be found in the records of Hansard, which contains verbatim accounts of debates in the British parliament. On 5 March 1901, for instance, C.P. Scott, the MP for Leigh, rose to ask the Secretary of State for War a question about the rations provided for the inmates of the camps. He said:
I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War if he can now state that the wives and children of Boers in the field are placed on precisely the same rations in the concentration camps as the other women and children, or whether a distinction is still maintained; and, in the latter case, whether he will give instructions that all should be treated alike.
Mr Broderick, the Secretary for War, brushed off this question by assuring the House of Commons that Lord Kitchener was taking every step possible to ensure that all refugees were being treated humanely. When he was pressed, he simply said that he was leaving Kitchener a free hand and that he would make whatever arrangements he found necessary.
From the very beginning, conditions in the camps were hopelessly inadequate and grew worse as time passed. Things were already grim enough when Emily Hobhouse sailed for the Cape on 7 December 1900, intending to deliver aid. Hobhouse was a well-connected woman and carried an introduction to the British High Commissioner in the Cape: Alfred Milner. With his permission and with the reluctant agreement of Lord Kitchener, Emily Hobhouse was allowed to travel to Bloemfontein, taking with her one railway truck full of supplies for the women and children in the camps.
The concentration camps that Hobhouse visited were much worse than any of the rumours reaching England had suggested. When she arrived, on 24 January 1901, at Bloemfontein, she discovered that accommodation was in tents which were unbearably hot during the day and at night allowed heavy dew to soak those within; clothes were wringing wet in the morning. Two or three families occupied each small tent. Since the average size of the tents was a mere 500 cubic feet, this made living conditions cramped and unhygienic for the ten or twelve people who might be sharing the space. There was no proper sanitation and drinking water was fetched from nearby rivers and drunk without first being boiled. The primitive arrangements for the latrines, no more than trenches dug in the ground, meant that sewage leaked freely from them, this also meant that the water supply was frequently contaminated with raw sewage. Little wonder then that typhoid was endemic.
Typhoid fever was not the only disease to spread like wildfire in the camps. Dysentery, measles, pneumonia and bronchitis were also widespread. Three factors made epidemics of deadly illness almost inevitable. The first was that the majority of residents in the concentration camps were children. This was hardly surprising. For each adult woman, there were generally a number of children. Children are of course more vulnerable to illness than adults and more likely to fall prey to complications. Most of the dead were children under sixteen. The second factor was the lack of soap and water for washing. Soap was a luxury which the army did not feel obliged to supply for those in their camps. The water which was available was often filthy and unsuitable for either drinking or washing. It might be argued that those running the concentration camps had little control over these factors and the resultant deaths. The third reason for the increasingly high mortality rate was however a direct consequence of official policy.
There were two sorts of families in the camps of South Africa. First, there were the wives and children of men who had surrendered to the British and were no longer actively opposing the army. There were also the dependants of men who were still resisting, those still engaged in a bitter struggle with what they regarded as an enemy army of occupation. These two types were known in Afrikaans, for obvious reasons, as bittereinders and hensoppers. It was felt that the families of the men who were no longer fighting deserved some extra consideration and this was given in the form of increased rations. The rations provided for the inmates of the concentration camps were not lavish and giving more to some meant, inevitably, less for others. In effect, this policy meant that the children of men still on active service did not receive sufficient food to maintain their health and vitality. They were accordingly far more likely to succumb to disease and, having fallen ill, were more prone to complications which could prove fatal.
The first prisoners whom Emily Hobhouse encountered at Bloemfontein had not even been allocated tents. They were therefore forced to sleep in the open; even when it was pouring with rain. So little food was being provided for these women and children, that they were literally starving to death.
After making a thorough nuisance of herself, to the extent that Lord Kitchener referred to her privately as ‘That bloody woman’, Hobhouse succeeded in having soap added to the list of essential rations for the inmates of the camps. She also managed to arrange for kettles to be distributed, so that drinking water could be boiled. Despite her valiant efforts, the situation for many of those in the concentration camps was to deteriorate dramatically in the course of 1901.
When she returned to England, Emily Hobhouse wrote a report which she delivered to the British government. She called it, Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies. It was not handed to the government until 1 June 1901, by which time there was increasing unease in many quarters about the stories coming out of South Africa. Try as they might, the Conservative government led by the Marquess of Salisbury was unable to silence the critics and ultimately felt obliged to set up a commission to investigate Hobhouse’s claims.
Two weeks after Emily Hobhouse’s report was sent to the government, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Liberal MP and Leader of the Opposition, gave a speech at the Holborn Restaurant in which he coined the phrase which has ever since been associated with the Boer War. On 14 June 1901, he told his audience:
A phrase often used is that ‘war is war’, but when one comes to ask about it one is told that no war is going on, that it is not war. When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.
Another point to which Campbell-Bannerman drew attention in his speech was the shockingly high mortality rates in the concentration camps. All this piled pressure on the government and the following month Millicent Fawcett, leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, sailed for South Africa, having been asked by Salisbury’s government to investigate the camps and to see if there was any truth in the allegations being made by Emily Hobhouse and others.
Before looking at the death rates in the camps, we should perhaps remind ourselves that the late Victorian world was a very different one from our own. Even in a civilised, industrial country like Britain, the death rate was a good deal higher than is now the case. It would be pointless to compare the mortality in the South African camps with that in modern Britain. Instead, we should see the figures in perspective; setting them side by side with the statistics for those who were not living in the camps. The slums of industrial cities in Northern England at the beginning of the twentieth century will give us a good yardstick, as the death rates in those areas were the highest in Britain and regarded by many as scandalous.
In July, August and September of 1901, the death rate in the English city of Newcastle was 25 per 1,000 per year. For Liverpool, it was 23 per 1,000. These figures were among the highest in the whole of Britain and reflected the poor living conditions in slums at that time. The statistics from the South African camps for the same period were almost unbelievable. In August 1901, 2,666 people, most of them children, died in the concentration camps. This worked out at an annual mortality rate of 311 per 1,000. Two months later, in October, 3,205 died in the course of the month; a death rate of 344 per 1,000 per year. In other words, deaths in the camps were running at about fifteen times the level of the worst slums in Britain.
The above figures represent the combined totals for all the camps. There was considerable individual variation, with some camps having far higher death rates than others. At the beginning of August 1901, there were 976 prisoners at the Vereen camp in the Transvaal; of whom fifty died that month. This gives a staggering annual death rate of 582 per 1,000. In other words, if nothing changed, more than half of those in the camp could expect to die of hunger or disease in the course of the following year.
By September 1901, there were thirty-four concentration camps for whites in South Africa, containing around 110,000 people. By the time that peace came in 1902, 26,251 women and children had died in them, as well as 1,676 men; most of them elderly. To understand the significance of these figures, we must bear in mind that the total Boer population of the Transvaal and Orange Free State were only 148,000 Boers in the Transvaal and another 71,000 in the Orange Free State. About a quarter of those held in the camps died, which was roughly 15 per cent of the total Boer population of the two independent republics.
There were separate concentration camps for black people, although their suffering did not excite the same sympathy in Britain as that of the white Boers. Both Emily Hobhouse and Millicent Fawcett appeared to be a good deal more concerned about the plight of the white families than they were with the situation of those in the camps for blacks.
Kitchener had two motives for rounding up the black inhabitants of the Boer republics and placing them too in concentration camps; neither of which was humanitarian. On the one hand, he wished to make quite sure that none of the black servants or farm workers offered aid and comfort to the guerrillas. Secondly, the British army needed a large number of labourers to help with building the blockhouses, laying the barbed wire and so on. It seemed to Lord Kitchener only logical to impress black men for labour. This explains why during the sweeps in which both blacks and whites were captured, native villages as well as farms were targeted by the troops. It was not only Boer farmhouses which were burned, African kraals were treated in the same way.
By July 1901, some 38,000 blacks were being held in special camps; over 30,000 of them being women and children. Thousands of black men were taken into the service of the army, while others were sent to work in the gold mines. The white camps were provided with tents, however leaky and draughty these might have been. Nothing of the sort was thought necessary for the blacks, who were expected to build their own dwellings.
As in the white camps, the mortality rate rose throughout 1901. Roughly the same number of black people as white were being held in concentration camps by the end of the war in 1902. In December 1901, 2,831 of these prisoners died, giving an annual death rate of 372 per 1,000. This was a little higher than the mortality rate for the white camps, which peaked in October 1901 at 344 per 1,000. Nevertheless, 14,154 black people are recorded as having died in the camps in total; fewer than in the white camps.
By modern standards, the actions of the British army in the Boer War were brutal in the extreme. We do not tend to look kindly these days on armies that deliberately burn civilians’ homes and then lock them in concentration camps, where they die of hunger and disease. We might term such tactics ‘ethnic cleansing’. Even bearing in mind the difference in perception over the last 115 years or so, surely most people in Britain would have been shocked and horrified to hear about these actions? The fact is, there was very little sympathy for the Boers and most people in Britain felt that they were getting what they deserved.
The early reverses suffered by the British army in South Africa came as a dreadful shock to many people. The British had become accustomed over the years to winning wars swiftly and putting upstart countries in their place without too much trouble. The sieges that the Boer forces were able to mount against the Cape towns of Mafeking and Ladysmith were something of a novelty. Imagine British forces being cooped up and kept at bay by a handful of foreigners! When news came of the relief of Mafeking, there was wild rejoicing across the whole of Britain. There were also riots, in which the homes of those felt to be ‘pro-Boer’ were attacked and the windows smashed. Anybody siding with the enemy was felt to be unpatriotic.
Later on, when the Boers resorted to guerrilla warfare, this too infuriated many people in Britain. Such methods of warfare were seen as sneaky and underhand. Honest soldiers faced each other squarely on the battlefield; there was none of these hit and run attacks and sabotage by night. Both the army in the field and the civilians and politicians at home believed that by carrying on in this way, the Boers had somehow put themselves beyond the pale and deserved everything they got.
That this was the official view may be seen by looking at what the army commanders in South Africa said at the time. By the summer of 1900, when questions were already being asked about the policy of burning the homes of civilians, Lord Roberts had defended the use of such tactics as the only means at his disposal to tackle guerrilla fighters. Much as he regretted it, he was forced to rely upon, ‘Those exceptional methods which civilised nations have found it obligatory to use under like circumstances’.
It might be worth mentioning at this point that the Boers themselves were not above striking at civilians if it seemed to suit their purposes. It might seem to us barbaric to destroy the homes of non-combatants in the way that Roberts and Kitchener were doing, but during the sieges of cities such as Kimberly, the Boers surrounded cities with heavy artillery and shelled them indiscriminately. The guns which they had acquired from the Germans in the years before the outbreak of war were thus used to hurl high explosives not at an enemy army, but into the heart of civilian areas. Even worse was the attempt to spread highly infectious and lethal diseases.
When, early in 1900, Lord Roberts had captured Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, he believed that the war was within measurable distance of its end. In fact, the occupation by the British army of Bloemfontein signalled the first large-scale guerilla action of the Boer war. On 31 March 1900, 2,000 men under the command of the Boer General Christiaan de Wet advanced to Sanna’s Post, some twenty miles from Bloemfontein. The British army had a small garrison there; centred around the waterworks which served the city. The attack on Sanna’s Post was a brilliant success for the Boers. By the time that the fighting was over, the British had lost 155 men and the Boers only three.
It was the aftermath of the attack which captured the waterworks, which was deadly. There had already been cases of cholera among the British troops in Bloemfontein. When the supply of clean water was cut off, the isolated cases turned into an epidemic which claimed the lives of over 2,000 British soldiers.
Actions of this sort, the shelling of civilian districts and precipitation of epidemics of disease, took place before the widespread use of concentration camps. They created anger and hostility against the Boers; both in the British army in the field and also the public back in Britain itself. The Boers, it was widely felt, had placed themselves beyond the pale by using such tactics and the British army had been forced to counter these unconventional acts of war by whatever means it had at its disposal.
A recurring theme in this book is the surprising way in which aspects of Nazi Germany’s treatment of its supposed enemies has been foreshadowed in the actions of the British; in some cases thirty or forty years earlier. A case in point is the way in which the Boers were represented and described. One of the most important points to note when persecuting or mistreating some opponent of your government is to try and portray these enemies as being less than human. The Nazis were of course experts at this strategy. They used expressions such as ‘vermin’ when talking of the Jews and did their best to persuade their citizens that Jews were an inferior and dangerous form of humanity; closer to animals than real humans.
In 1901, at the height of the Boer War, a book was published in England, called, On Yeoman Service; Being the Diary of the Wife of an Imperial Yeomanry Officer, During the Boer War. The author was Lady Maud Rolleston and her views and opinions of the Boers whom she encountered during the war are enough to cause modern readers to draw in their breath rather sharply. She wrote:
I can only say that I much disliked their aspect… their countenances are singularly deficient in nobility: the eyes are generally small and dark, and very close together, the nose is short and insignificant, the drooping moustache, which usually conceals the upper lip, shows the lower one to be large and sensual… the face is, to my thinking, nearly always animal… the glance is shifty, and reminds me irresistibly of a visit to the zoological gardens at home.
Lady Rolleston was not alone in the unfavourable impression which the Boers made upon her. Popular magazines covering the war in South Africa, publications such as Under the Union Jack and Pearson’s War Pictures, referred to the Boers in animal terms as, ‘herds’, ‘flocks’ ‘swarms and ‘droves’. A colonel of the Connaught Rangers wrote that he thought the Boers, ‘reptilian’ in appearance and found them, ‘quite hideous to look on’.
Hand-in-hand with the brutish appearance of the Boers, soldiers and civilians, went primitive habits and unclean behaviour. It might be mentioned here that some Nazis involved with running concentration camps blamed the unhygienic ways of the prisoners for the outbreaks of disease which killed so many of them. By this reading of the situation, those who died of typhoid at Belsen were really the authors of their own misfortune! If only they had washed their hands more frequently, then they would not have died like flies. Almost unbelievably, this is precisely the explanation advanced in 1901 for the shockingly high mortality rates in the camps of South Africa.
John Buchan, the author of The Thirty Nine Steps, was the private secretary of Alfred Milner, who, during the Boer War, was Governor of the Cape Colony. Buchan blamed the conditions in the concentration camps, which he admitted were, ‘distressing’, on the fact that the prisoners were, ‘mentally and bodily underbred’. They were ‘a class of people who have somehow missed civilisation’. At the same time that John Buchan was expressing such views, a Dr John Welenski, writing in the November 1901 edition of the British Medical Journal, was attributing the thousands of deaths in the camps to the ‘fecklessness, ignorance and dirtiness’ of the Boer mothers whose children were dying like flies. Even the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, had something to say on the subject. He told a clergyman, anxious about the terrible conditions in the concentration camps that there could not fail to be ‘a great mortality; particularly among a people so dirty as the Boers’.
This then was the British conclusion; the horrific death rate in the camps which they had set up was really the fault of the victims themselves! It might seem to us today all but incredible that even the most callous and hardened person could pass such a judgement, but this was the standard attitude of those in Britain who were challenged about what, even then, looked very much like an act of mass murder. Lord Kitchener held the strongest of such views, giving it as his own opinion that the deaths of tens of thousands of children was the direct consequence of what he called ‘the criminal neglect of the mothers’. Kitchener thought that in some cases, the mothers ‘ought to be tried for manslaughter’.
At first, the South African concentration camps were under the direct control of the military, but as this changed, so conditions improved and the death toll dropped. There can be no doubt that the the activities of people like Emily Hobhouse and Millicent Fawcett helped to draw attention in Britain to the dreadful situation, which was further publicised by the Liberal leader; Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Throughout most of 1901, when the mortality rate was at its highest, the civil authorities were nominally in charge of the camps, although in practice they were being administered by the army. It was not until November 1901 that active control of the concentration camps was taken out of the hands of the military and the number of monthly deaths began to fall dramatically. In October 1901, the month before the civil authorities assumed real control, there were 3,205 deaths. By March 1902, this had dropped to 412 and two months later, only 196 people died in the space of a month. It appeared that the appalling number of deaths from hunger and disease had been a direct consequence of army policy towards their prisoners.
The evidence at which we have so far looked seems pretty damning. There can be no doubt that the British army conducted a campaign using methods which would today be classed as war crimes. They burned homes, sometimes even entire towns, and then drove those whom they had rendered homeless into concentration camps, where the conditions were so awful that they died at an astonishingly high rate. As soon as the control of these camps was wrested from the military, the death rate fell, until it was barely a twentieth of what it had been when the army was in charge. All of this is indisputable, but there is, nevertheless, something to be said in defence of Lord Kitchener and his ‘methods of barbarism’.
The Boer War is sometimes described as the first ‘modern’ war fought by the British. Previous wars had been fought with nineteenth-century technology and weapons; frequently against pitifully armed foes such as African tribesmen brandishing spears. This was a war against a well-armed enemy, which was using up-to-date rifles and heavy artillery. Indeed, the Mausers used by the Boers were in many ways superior to the Lee-Metford and Lee-Enfield rifles issued to the British troops. Combine this with the fact that for the first time in fifty years or so, British soldiers in the field found themselves under bombardment by artillery and you begin to understand what a shocking experience this particular colonial war proved to the British, right from the beginning.
Not only were there new weapons to contend with, hitherto unknown tactics too were employed. Guerrilla warfare had been known in the past, but this was the first time that the British army had encountered well-armed and determined guerrillas. It was all rather shocking and it comes perhaps as no surprise that it took the British generals some time to work out an effective response to the threats that they were facing. Among the methods chosen to counter the threats faced by the men in the field was of course the policy of concentrating the population in special camps.
In fairness to the army, it should be mentioned that they not only had little idea of the immense task which they were undertaking, but that they did not have the resources to support any large number of civilians in reasonable conditions. The reason for this was that they themselves were not really coping very well during this war. Quite apart from the fact that they were facing a ferocious battle for every inch of territory that they seized, the troops were trying to survive in an environment quite unlike the British Isles. Many of these men were recent conscripts and had no idea at all of how to stay healthy and safe in South Africa, rather than the East End of London. The deaths from disease among the prisoners held in the camps was indeed very high, but the army also suffered greatly from cholera and typhoid. Around 22,000 British soldiers died during the course of the Boer War, but only a minority fell victim to Boer bullets and artillery. Almost two thirds of these deaths, 13,000, were due to illness.
In short, the army itself was struggling to cope for much of the time during the Boer War. If they could not prevent over 10,000 of their own men dying from faecal-oral infections; what hope for the many thousands of women and children being held captive by those same soldiers? It is possible to argue that those in the camps were really only being expected to endure the same hazards, risks and hardships as the soldiers whose job it was to guard them. The difference was of course that the British soldiers had all volunteered; they were in this position through their own choice. The same could not be said of the 110,000 Boers and 38,000 Africans who were being detained in concentration camps between 1900 and 1902.
What then is the final verdict on Lord Kitchener’s camps? Did they really constitute, as some Afrikaaner historians maintain, a form of genocide? It is of course notoriously difficult, and some would say fruitless, to judge the past by the standards of the present. The best that we can perhaps say is that if any country’s army behaved today as Lord Kitchener’s did in the opening years of the last century, then we would have no doubt that a series of war crimes were being committed. Let us recall one final time the casualty toll of the camps. Altogether, 27,927 Boers and 14,154 Africans died in the concentration camps; a total of 42,081 people, the great majority of whom were children under the age of sixteen. By any standards, not just those of today but also those of a century or more ago this was shocking in the extreme.
We might end this examination of the first concentration camp system to be established in the twentieth century by looking once more at the definition of genocide which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Genocide was defined as, ‘any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such’. The Convention on Genocide went on to list various obvious means of committing genocide by slaughtering members of ethnic or religious minorities. Also included was ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part’. Judged by this, there can be little doubt that the British treatment of both Boers and Africans during the South African War did indeed amount to genocide.