1. ON THE SOUTH AFRICAN veld, farmhouses burned easily. With paraffin oil poured over curtains and set ablaze, or dynamite charges nestled in the floor, sturdy structures exploded into debris or blossomed into flame, sending plumes of smoke skyward. It took little time to annihilate a home.
Beginning in 1900, the British Empire’s soldiers became experts in these wartime demolitions. Carrying out a scorched-earth policy against Boer families in the Orange Free State and Transvaal, they leveled more than thirty thousand houses and obliterated dozens of towns.1 Soldiers became proficient at other tasks as well—smashing mirrors to prevent signaling; wetting stored grain or dumping it into the fire; stripping stinkwood window and door frames for fuel; stealing jewelry, candlesticks, and money; burning orchards; and shooting thousands of horses and cattle in a single day. In theory, houses were torched only when an arms cache was discovered or as direct retaliation for sabotage. In practice, procedures were murky as soldiers ransacked homesteads, stealing an oven from one family while taking all the valuables from another, or asking for a cup of milk before slaughtering pigs singly or burning a herd of sheep alive.2
The British had already faced a challenge from Boer fighters twenty years before, when the descendants of Dutch settlers had insisted on independence in the Transvaal. After humiliating the British in three months of fighting, Boers there won the right to self-rule in 1881, joining the Orange Free State as an independent Boer republic.
Though granting self-rule, Britain continued to insist that both republics were officially part of the British Empire. And after the discovery of mineral deposits in Boer territory sparked a gold rush that led to British immigration, London began to assert control. Faced with British troop deployments, the Boers demanded the removal of soldiers from the republics’ borders. The British refused, and on October 11, 1899, the Boers declared war.
As in the Philippines, the war had begun with more or less conventional battles, but traditional combat had not proven an effective strategy for a small force fighting an empire. Once the British set their sights on securing control of the republics’ major cities, Boer leaders switched battle plans. With their horsemanship, knowledge of the country, and skilled marksmanship, they turned to guerrilla tactics, organizing commando raids to harass British forces and supply lines. In response, the British implemented a plan similar to that used in Cuba against the rebels. Long stretches of barbed-wire fence connected manned blockhouses, dividing the countryside into zones and hampering Boer mobility.
Yet the Boers proved effective guerrilla fighters. Just three months into the conflict, Britain felt compelled to deploy nearly two hundred thousand men to southern Africa. By the time British soldiers began appearing on their doorsteps, Boer men of fighting age were rarely found at home. Unable to pin down the commando groups and strike the fighters directly, invading soldiers generally had to settle for punishing women and children. After giving families only a short time to gather what they could carry, British soldiers sometimes watched the women they had ordered out of their homes run back into burning farmhouses to retrieve necessities. Those given the mercy of more time packed possessions in wagons, which some pulled themselves after their animals had been shot. The families were instantly homeless.
2. In the first months of the Boer War, Parliament had been inclined to accept the military’s need to act without interference. But as rumors of farm burning appeared again and again, members began to question the War Office, only to have the allegations flatly denied.
After reported pieces appeared in established newspapers, the accusations were harder to dismiss. In a May 1900 debate in the House of Commons, member of Parliament John Bryn Roberts pointed to well-known reporters at respectable newspapers who were now attributing accounts directly to officers they had interviewed—officers who had themselves ordered or carried out the devastation. He read aloud from the Morning Leader: “The column commanded by General French, with General Pole-Carew at the head of the Guards and 18th Brigade, is marching in, burning practically everything on the road. It is followed by about 3,500 head of loot cattle and sheep. Hundreds of tons of corn and forage have been destroyed.”3
Roberts noted that it was one thing to burn homes in retreat, quite another to do so as an invading force, driving civilians before you. Estimating that the tiny Boer force fighting the British Empire was equivalent to the British Empire “fighting eight worlds at once,” he wondered whether moderation might be in order.4
Accounts of Boer suffering found a sympathetic audience among British pacifists. Emily Hobhouse, a welfare activist recently returned from work with miners in America, was moved by the stories of civilians driven from their homes for the sake of a war many ascribed to simple greed. She had joined the South African Conciliation Committee earlier that year, and after reading soldiers’ letters in the papers, organized a women’s protest the first summer of the war.
The work was not without its risks, as British soldiers were dying in battle, and many Englishmen saw compassion for Boer families as treason. At a meeting organized by Quakers that July, a hostile audience shouted down Hobhouse and other speakers, throwing chairs at them before storming the stage.5
Thirty-nine years old at the start of the war, Hobhouse had already lost her parents to disease and most of her inheritance to failed investment. A round-shouldered woman with a delicate mouth and unruly hair, she had lived in Minnesota and Mexico before moving back to London and settling in a Chelsea apartment. Her influential aunt and uncle, Lord Arthur and Lady Mary Hobhouse, encouraged her liberal activism.
Encountering Boers who had come to England to plead their case, Hobhouse conceived of the idea of setting up a distress fund for South African women and children. Visiting prominent figures during the fall of 1900 in search of support, she met with cool receptions and fears of ostracism. After managing to raise £300, she revealed to her family that she herself planned to travel to South Africa to distribute the money. Her brother worried that she might catch a disease from the suffering Boers or be slandered in England, to which she replied, “Life has no attractions, Death a good many; so the argument has no weight.”
Lord and Lady Hobhouse said they would not try to stop her from going but didn’t have enough faith in her plan to fund the trip. She explained that she did not want or expect money from them. In short order, Hobhouse rented out her apartment, bought a second-class ticket, and set sail that December for the Cape of Good Hope.6
3. Early complaints by activists and even liberal members of Parliament failed to disrupt the army’s scorched-earth policy. Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain insisted that no British soldier had been justly accused of wrongdoing, and that the burning of farms had been greatly exaggerated. Where it had occurred, he claimed, it was done only in cases of clear civilian complicity in the rebellion, and regardless, the government could not tie the hands of the military in the conduct of the war.7
In July 1900, antiwar MP David Lloyd George noted that Britain was in the process of repeating Spanish atrocities in Cuba. “This war,” he predicted, “will brutalise the people, and the savagery which must necessarily follow will stain the name of this country.”8 Months later, MP Samuel Smith declared that by burning homes, the empire was careening toward a catastrophe on the scale of Weyler in Cuba, “storing up for ourselves a heritage of hatred [to] last for generations. Future historians would look upon our present action as one of the most deplorable blunders that this country had ever made.”9
Newspapers also noted the echoes of the Spanish approach in Cuba, and some of them enthusiastically called on the government to embrace a policy of reconcentration. The Pall Mall Gazette advocated the use of camps and recommended adopting Weyler’s model but stopping just short of starving Boer civilians.10 The St. James Gazette likewise recommended “copying” Weyler, but in more extreme form: it encouraged the government to relocate the entire population of Dutch descendants to St. Helena, a desolate island two thousand miles away in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Or, they suggested broad-mindedly, reconcentrados could be sent to Ceylon, even farther from South Africa.11
The government tried to gin up popular support, creating propaganda squads of celebrity writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling to help promote the war. Yet even everyday citizens recognized the path the conflict was taking, writing letters to the editor predicting that if reconcentration were done along Cuban lines, the same starvation and epidemics could easily result.12 Among those who remembered recent history, it was apparent what would happen next.
4. Emily Hobhouse sailed into port on December 26, 1900, arriving in time to watch the sun rise over Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak. Passengers had to wait to disembark, as Cape Town boomed with the business of war: ships clogged the coastline, supplies choked the docks, military trucks filled the streets, and soldiers in uniform seemed to be everywhere.
Her luggage was lost in the melee but later made its way to her, while she spent her first days meeting with local families. Four days into her trip, she wrote her aunt about a soldier who claimed to have taken part in burning six hundred farms himself, and of boys down to the age of eight held as captured soldiers. Rumors had come out of Johannesburg, too, describing “4,000 women and children in some sort of camp prisons there.”13
She soon made her way to the office of Sir Alfred Milner, governor of the Cape Colony. By then she had heard stories of several large refugee camps, but details about them remained a mystery. Offering her letter of introduction from Lady Hobhouse, she made an appointment with Milner to discuss the condition of Boer women and children. Fear that she was not up to the task she had taken on consumed her.
When Hobhouse finally sat with the governor in his drawing room, she spent more than an hour telling him everything she had learned. For someone with no political portfolio, she was audacious in her requests, pleading for Milner to offer good terms to the Boers in a peace settlement. Current policies, she warned, were creating “thousands of Joans of Arc.”14 She had been told of at least eleven camps and felt certain more existed.
Milner did not try to convince her of the legitimacy of burning homesteads and acknowledged that he himself had been uneasy at the sight of women and children transported in cargo trucks. He offered to do what he could to support her. She got as far as demanding two vehicles—one for clothing and one for food—before he clarified that permission to go to any camp would depend on the approval of Lord Herbert Kitchener, who had taken charge of the war.15
Hobhouse first visited a prisoner-of-war camp for wounded Boers, learning the arcane details of military passes required to travel any distance from town. She also found that her plan to distribute funds only with the approval of British civil and military authorities was already alienating radical supporters at home, who, she noted, did not have to live on the verge of martial law, surrounded by soldiers carrying Maxim guns.16
Two weeks later, she got approval from Kitchener to go inland. Kitchener allotted her one truck and permission to journey as far as Bloemfontein, six hundred miles northwest of Cape Town. She would be allowed no farther into contested territory. He denied her request for a Boer traveling companion—despite her poor Dutch, she would have to travel alone.
After a day spent directing the packing of a military supply truck with more than ten tons of food and clothing, she was still unsure of exactly what to take. Perhaps the military could be pressured into providing better provisions for those it had rendered homeless, but she feared that necessities would be in short supply. After seeing the truck off, she caught the train to Bloemfontein, winding through the Karoo desert, full of storms and red sand. The dust made its way everywhere, even inside her compartment, covering her skin and hair. The view from the carriage was littered with decomposing bodies of slaughtered cattle and horses, unidentifiable bones, and the occasional razed farm.
On arrival, Hobhouse found herself immersed in a military milieu, the only woman in the station at Bloemfontein. Faced with problems getting a hotel room, she pushed for approval to stay with the widow of a Boer general, which did not make a good first impression with George Pretyman, the British general in charge. After talking to the captain who had recently served as the camp commandant, it was apparent that soldiers had no more idea “than the man in the moon” how to handle the civilian crisis that had been dumped in their laps.17
Hobhouse headed off to see her first concentration camp two miles outside town. On the blazing open veld, uneven rows of round bell tents splayed along the side of a low hill, with a mortuary tent and tin-roofed hospital buildings at one end. She soon learned that each family was allotted one tent built out of canvas hung from a central pole and supported by ropes cinched to stakes in the ground. In time, there would not be enough of the shelters to go around, leaving new arrivals to sleep in wagons or railway carriages.18
Making her way down a row of tents in the broiling heat, she tracked down the sister of a woman she had met in Cape Town. With no chairs available, they used rolled-up blankets for stools. Flies buzzed inside and out, forming black carpets over every surface. While Hobhouse asked the woman about life in the camp, a deadly puff adder slid through the tent. She struck at it with her parasol until someone brought a mallet to finish it off.
Other camp residents came to visit, too. Hobhouse met a wife who had been separated from her five children and unable to visit her husband, who was held prisoner somewhere in Bloemfontein. Sleeping on the ground at night, she was in the last weeks of pregnancy with a sixth child. “This is but one case,” Hobhouse wrote to her aunt, “quite ordinary, amongst hundreds and hundreds.”19
There was not enough water; there was no soap; measles were spreading. Dead bodies sometimes remained in tents long enough to begin rotting. In a concentration camp of two thousand, almost half the prisoners were children. On her first visit, she heard of shelters that leaked in storms, children with typhoid, and husbands punitively shipped thousands of miles away to prisoner-of-war camps on the island of Ceylon.
Hobhouse acknowledged that the head of the camp wanted to make life as livable as he could for detainees, but she instantly felt that the creation of the camps had been a colossal mistake. “Do what you will,” she wrote, “you can’t undo the thing itself which is odious.” She was overwhelmed but aimed to show the public that “to keep these camps going is murder to the children.”20
Within a week after her arrival, she had put out a call for trained nurses and come up with a universal plan to boil river water to stop a burgeoning typhoid epidemic. Some officials offered support, but on the ground she discovered that she was viewed as a fool or a traitor. After thousands of British deaths at the hands of Boer guerrillas, many soldiers seemed to feel that extreme measures were justified to bring an end to the war. Now that these measures had been taken, they were resentful at being saddled with thousands of refugees and a conflict that continued to rage.
The constant disapproval of the soldiers felt like banishment to Hobhouse. When a new commandant arrived, he was less than enthusiastic at discovering her already in his camp. She was no more enthusiastic about him. She made a scene over surveillance of her work, refusing to accept any interference that did not come directly from Milner in Cape Town.
The suspicious captain who monitored her during her visits seemed impervious to her badgering as she tried to make him provide milk for the malnourished or pay attention to the children dying around him. In her frustration, she wanted to hit him.21
The censor refused to approve the letter she wrote describing conditions in the camp, so she waited for someone she could trust to carry her letters back and mail them from the coast. Meanwhile, her running tally of camps was nearing forty, and she wanted to see them all herself. She braced herself to leave Bloemfontein.
Feeling cowardly and overwhelmed, she dreaded facing the unknown alone, with her poor Dutch and limited supplies. She knew well what impression she made, “a mere woman, middle-aged, and somewhat dowdy at that.”22 On the train, she found it difficult to push in among the soldiers to get food at each station, so she packed her kettle and a tin of apricot jam and wondered what the next stop would bring.
5. As she made her way over a hundred miles to camps at Norvals Pont and Aliwal North, Hobhouse disappeared into a whirlwind of permits, passes, and cool lakes that existed only as mirages spun by the fierce heat. She traveled mostly in the guard’s car on the cargo train, spending one night upright in her seat and another sleeping on the floor of a borrowed room at a roadside hotel inside a circle of bug repellent. Women’s bathrooms were generally locked or had been commandeered for use by the military. She lived for days at a time on jam and cocoa.
To her surprise, conditions at Norvals Pont and Aliwal North, two of the more rural camps, were better than those at Bloemfontein. Norvals Pont housed 1,500 detainees, with much less overcrowding. British loyalist refugees fleeing the war got large marquee tents, which stood apart from the standard bell tents of Boer women and children. Camp residents did not have to resort to using river water to drink and cook with, as at Bloemfontein, because the captain in charge of the camp had pipes laid to carry spring water from a nearby farm. The tents had one bed and a table, as well as eating utensils.
Though he had been rebuked for doing so, the commandant had bought clothing for those who needed it, and had some men in the camp build a tennis court where anyone could play.23 Still, many who had fallen sick at Norvals Pont died due to a lack of trained nurses. And the daytime heat was blistering, with the attending physician unable to test for fever as temperatures inside the tents hovered around 110 degrees Fahrenheit, rendering thermometers useless.
At Aliwal North, she found that the small town of eight hundred had created a committee to prepare for more than two thousand detainees they had been told would be sent by the military. A sympathetic commandant had tried to demilitarize the camp: no sentries were posted, and camp and town residents could mix at will. Rations were more generous, and large families were given a second tent or canvas and wood to expand their accommodations as needed.24
It was a relief to find some solutions that could be brought back to Bloemfontein, but even at Aliwal North, clothing was running short. Hobhouse wondered at those who accused the Boers of being filthy when none of the camps provided the basics for hygiene. She went to town and bought soap and material with which to sew clothes, and had them delivered to the camp.
Returning to the misery of Bloemfontein, she aggressively pushed for changes. Despite her empathy, class sometimes loomed as a blind spot for Hobhouse. At Norvals Pont, she referred to the British civilians who had taken refuge in the camp as “generally a very inferior type of underbred English.” Others she held in contempt were referred to as “low class.” It was necessary, she felt, for teachers of Boer children to have not just manners and morals but good “breeding” as well.25 Yet without the power that class gave her, how much harder it would have been for a woman of the era to cross the globe to assail the empire’s wartime conduct, demanding to speak only with governors and generals. She thought little of any damage to her reputation, using society connections in London to demand attention from the government and accountability on the ground.
Race, too, played a role in Hobhouse’s camp relief work. She noted the presence of “little Kaffir servant” girls even in the Boer camps—black Africans who had been taken with their mistresses and herded from burned homesteads into detention. Her first letter back to England after arriving at her own camp had mentioned a camp of about five hundred “Natives (Kaffirs)” on the outskirts of Bloemfontein. She was concerned about the suffering there, addressing the local Loyal Ladies League just a month after her arrival and suggesting they take up the cause of the native camps, where she had been told “there is much sickness and destitution.”26
She was willing to go hundreds of miles by train to visit other Boer camps, but never set foot in the Native camp close at hand near Bloemfontein. She did, however, continue to call for someone to investigate, asking her aunt in March 1901 whether the British even realized the “Native (coloured)” camps existed. Tremendous sickness reigned in them, she had heard, and the death rate was apparently very high. She recommended that the Quakers send someone. Or perhaps a representative from the Aborigines’ Protection Society could visit. But as she wrote to Lady Hobhouse, “I cannot possibly pay any attention to them myself.”27
6. Emily Hobhouse was hardly alone in choosing not to visit the black African camps. They went unnoted by many of the newspapers and activists in England who took on the Boer camps as part of an antiwar, humanitarian mission. Improving conditions for black Africans was touted as an ideal by British imperialists who supported the war, but actual concern for the effects of the war on this part of the population failed to take root in the field.
As with the Boer families, some black Africans initially came into camps as refugees fleeing raids and fighting. Later, African families were likewise forced out of the countryside during scorched-earth campaigns. The military rationale for detaining Boer women had been the suspicion that they were passing intelligence and food to men on commando duty. But holding women en masse as prisoners of war would not do for public consumption in England. A justification for not releasing them became that women without husbands at home had to be protected from black savages. Soon enough, it was argued that blacks themselves could not be left free on the veld.28
As camps were set up, the British began by housing black Africans alongside Boer families. As refugee numbers grew, they began to establish separate facilities for Boer and black detainees. The early, adjacent camps were run by superintendents of the Boer camps, but the British government later set up a Native Refugee Department to administer black camps.29
These camps ranged from formal concentration camps to some without superintendents, and even one self-organized enclave of thousands only nominally under government control. Other black Africans ended up outside the black camps, hiding out on the veld, going on commando missions with the Boers, or ending up servants in Boer camps.
Early on, when black men were cleared off the land, they were turned over to the military and expected to work at assigned duties to support their families, who were consigned to conditions worse than those in the Boer camps. Where Boers received tents in the first months of concentration, those in the black camps had to make do with sail covers, sticks, bits of wood, blankets, metal, mud, and anything that might improvise a shelter. Unlike the Boer camps, black camps did not provide free rations, though some exemptions were made for destitute families without a male head of household. It was assumed by the British that Africans had different nutritional needs, which translated into half the provisions given to whites.30
Even those who had reserves of grain were not allowed to bring it to the camps, where it might have kept them from taking on work to earn money. Reports are filled with references to supposed native gratitude for the camps and a chance to earn money, but the missionaries who made their way into the black camps got a starkly different impression. “They are in great poverty and misery,” wrote the Reverend W. H. R. Brown. “Many are dying from day to day—what is to become of the survivors I cannot think.”31
One early report from Heidelberg reported that camp residents had nothing to eat but the corpses of diseased cattle.32 In another black camp, residents managed to raise pigs and sow a crop only to watch British troops trample the field and seize their animals. The loss completely ruined the holdings of some six hundred Africans in the camp, an official report noted, but “the Natives themselves admitted such losses were incidental in wartime.”33
Those in the black camps found themselves likewise tormented by Boers on commando duty. Night raids at Potchefstroom and Taaibosch led to the death of one native, as well as the loss of money and clothes along with hundreds of cattle and sheep. In response, the British armed squads of pickets—blacks from the camps—to stand guard. Despite an incident in which guerrillas shot thirteen picketers, as well as worries that arming natives would only provoke new raids and bloodshed, 850 black Africans served as armed guards in black concentration camps.34
Trench latrines and overcrowding led to filth and disease. Dysentery, typhoid, chicken pox, measles, and pneumonia afflicted the refugees. At Victoria Nek, the doctor refused to visit patients in the camp, demanding that invalids see him in town.35 Many camps had no hospital and no nurses. When typhoid swept through these communities, no effort was made to quarantine the sufferers, despite the highly contagious nature of the disease.
As with Boer mothers, black mothers got the brunt of blame when their children died, with one inspector suggesting that they were eating food meant for their sick offspring. “Natives,” he wrote, “do not seem to care for their children until they reach a useful age.”36
Back in 1897, as the newly appointed high commissioner of South Africa and governor of Cape Colony, Alfred Milner had outlined his two most important goals. First, he wanted to restore good relations between the British and the Boers, and second, he aimed to protect native Africans from oppression. But realizing that the second goal rendered the first nearly impossible, he saw even before the war had begun how it would be resolved: “You have only to sacrifice ‘the nigger’ absolutely and the game is easy.”37
After the war’s end, Milner would be proved right: the British actively collaborated with the Boers to segregate and disenfranchise black Africans. But that population had already been abandoned during the war. In all, more than 115,700 black Africans had been detained in British camps by the end of the war, with no tin hospital sheds, no drives to provide clothing and mattresses for the naked refugees sleeping on the ground, and no hopes of feeding everyone.38
Founded and administered by the military, the black camps never transitioned to civilian control. Missionaries who managed to visit did what they could to draw attention to the crisis, but they were unsuccessful in alleviating the camps’ most lethal aspects.
The staggering numbers of black African deaths in concentration camps did not earn condemnation even from the superintendent in charge of native affairs for the Orange River Colony. Attaching the November 1901 statistics for black mortality, he wrote to London, “The death rate appears high, but under the circumstances, I think it can scarcely be called excessive.” Fatalities would surely decline soon, he assured his superiors; he felt the situation on the ground reflected “a very satisfactory state of affairs generally.”39 The following month, mortality in the black camps would reach the highest rates recorded during any month, surpassing even death rates in the Boer camps.
By the time peace was concluded, sixty-six camps holding more than 115,000 black Africans littered the veld. More than 14,000—some 12 percent of those who entered these camps—would not survive. Historian Elizabeth van Heyningen has noted that “it is quite clear that most of the official records were destroyed.”40 Incomplete statistics suggest a much larger number of deaths for which there are no records.41 The British head of the black camp at Bloemfontein, however, had no doubts about Britain’s largesse: “To have to leave their homes seems hard on the surface, but to be fed & sheltered and protected without remuneration amply atones for all.”42
7. Emily Hobhouse found that dysentery and intestinal disease outran her ability to corral aid even in the Boer camps. The mid-war switch from military to civilian administration meant that the army would no longer provide nurses. And the nurses sent up to Bloemfontein from the Cape, she believed, tended toward drink or petty crime and had no discernible training.43 Even those who were competent went without adequate facilities or medical supplies.
Over time, Hobhouse gained authority, but with it came the expectation that she would solve a broad range of issues. After authorizing her to distribute supplies and including her name in the new camp rules, the superintendent for the Boer camps asked her to pay for clothes for residents and to provide funds to establish a children’s hospital. She refused, declaring the government unequivocally responsible for providing both things.
The government called the camps of the Boer War refugee camps. Hobhouse argued that inmates were not refugees from war but people deliberately made homeless as part of battle strategy, driven into concentration camps as prisoners of war. Under the rules of the Hague Convention, she believed, the government was accountable for the maintenance of prisoners of war. She empathized with the superintendent, who had few available goods and little money to use in ministering to the needs of thousands of people. But she did not want to shield the government from having to address the consequences of its own poor planning and execution of a war strategy involving civilians.44
Hobhouse was often accused by British loyalists of being pro-Boer, and she was prone to praising the resourcefulness of the Boer fighters, who appeared to be outwitting the British during her time at the Cape. Perhaps more dangerous to her reputation was her tendency, in private letters and private company, to savage the British army—not just the hypocrisies of camp policies but what she saw as the laziness of the soldiers and the incompetence of officers.
She particularly resented watching the soldiers’ brisk trade in sewing machines, chairs, and jewelry, selling items looted from Boer homes to townspeople or back to camp detainees.45 Still, she was as quick to sympathize with the plight of individual British soldiers as she was with the fate of detainees in the camps. She commiserated with their hardships under siege, mended their clothes, and surrendered novels and cocoa to them in railway stations across the Cape.
Traveling ninety miles on to Springfontein, Hobhouse found the poorest Boers she had yet seen, camp residents without shoes, socks, or underwear. She emptied the pine crates of clothing she had brought along, and the crates were quickly seized and dismantled to make furniture. In the dark comedy that reigned under bureaucracy in wartime, prisoners had very little coal for fuel, while camp rations were meat, grain, and coffee—all of which required cooking.
Meanwhile at Bloemfontein, “the whole talk was of death—who died yesterday, who lay dying today, who would be dead to-morrow.”46 The corpses, most often the small bodies of children, were taken out of the camp at dawn—not through the town, where everyone would see, but along another road to the cemetery, where they were buried together in a mass grave.
Hobhouse knew she was watched in the camps and regarded with suspicion by many officers. But when the Bloemfontein Post reported on a speech she had given to a women’s group in February, she found herself publicly skewered. Calling her a “lady missionary,” the editors assailed her comments and expressed the hope that she would not “teach the refugees at the Refugee Camp, who have so much to be grateful for, to believe they have grievances—grievances quite unimagined hitherto.”47
Because she was ostensibly in the camps as an apolitical observer, she paid a price for speaking out. Her mail was censored, and she was spied upon. When Hobhouse returned to the camp at Norvals Pont, she was warned by a resident she had met on a prior visit that the nurse and the new teacher were planning to trick her into pro-Boer statements, then report her to the commandant.
Though surveillance measures against her increased, she noticed in May that restrictions in some Boer camps had eased under civilian administration. During the day, guards left their posts, and camp detainees could go to the river or the valley to gather wood or flowers.
Just as crucial to health, the practice of reducing rations for families with relatives on commando duty was stopped. Still, she complained in her letters—in an observation unlikely to generate much sympathy a century later—that the presence of “armed Natives” was routinely used to intimidate and corral the Boers, which “hurts them almost more than anything.”48
In many cases, the March 1901 shift to civilian administration further muddled questions of financial burdens and disciplinary responsibilities. At Kimberley, Hobhouse found a commandant who stayed away from his camp for days at a time. The existing buildings stood inside a narrow enclosure of barbed wire eight feet high that had cost £500—a staggering sum. She could not fathom how the fence was necessary or useful when the camp lacked a nurse and a functioning hospital.
Just after her arrival at Kimberley, three children in the camp died only hours apart. Before the burial the next morning, she came across a photographer taking portraits of the bodies to give to their absent fathers after the war. Remembering a stop on her last trip, when there was nothing to bury a dead girl in but a sack, Hobhouse was grateful to see that someone had found enough wood to make coffins.49
She met with General Pretyman, who had signed her pass on her first trip into the camps four months earlier, and requested authority to work in Kimberley as well as a return pass to Bloemfontein. He was in a foul mood, and in a rhetorical flourish she would become familiar with, he ascribed the death of the children to the unsanitary habits and folk remedies of their parents. She countered that surely sleeping on the ground while sick with measles and having a doctor ignorant of pediatric medicine played a more significant role. The arguments behind their debate would continue to play out for more than one hundred years, with evidence on both sides. But Hobhouse held the moral high ground, arguing that a government that forces civilians into detention, even in wartime, should bear the brunt of responsibility for camp fatalities.
As punishment for her lecture, or just more of the red tape Hobhouse repeatedly denounced, Pretyman said he could not give her a pass for the hundred-mile trip to Bloemfontein but would supply her with authorization good for the six-hundred-mile journey back to Cape Town, where she could ask for permission to turn around and come back. She agreed, still hoping to eventually make her way even farther north to the camps she had not yet seen.
During April 1901, she got as far as Mafeking concentration camp, where she found decent rations but shortages of clothes, soap, candles, and blankets. On the way back she witnessed the clearing of the town of Warrenton, whose women were herded into open coal trucks and carried away from their homes.
The desolation of the countryside was hardly a new sight, but the image of the stunned Boers newly transformed into refugees stuck in her mind as summing up the mayhem and idiocy of war. “Flocks and herds of frightened animals bellowing and baaing for food and drink, tangled up with wagons and vehicles of all sorts and a dense crowd of human beings,” she wrote, “combined to give a picture of war in all its destructiveness, cruelty, stupidity and nakedness.”50
Returning to Bloemfontein, she discovered that the camp population had doubled to four thousand people since her departure the month before. Meanwhile, Springfontein had grown from five hundred to three thousand detainees, with more on the way. In her travels, she saw hundreds in trucks and on cars at train stations, hearing stories of Boers going days without food and children dying in transit. Back at the camp she got descriptions of rations with meat that was maggoty or missing altogether and water pouring into tents during rainstorms. She met with administrators, who had been told thousands more women and children would be herded in, despite no tents or shelters or additional food available for them. Sir Alfred Milner again denied her request to visit the northern camps.
Four months after she had landed in Africa, Hobhouse realized that her dwindling funds and depleted stores of clothing and food could do next to nothing to address the tidal wave of humanity flooding into the camps. She asked for a pass back to Cape Town—the easiest pass for her to get, the one she had resisted the urge to request so many times while she believed there were still things she might accomplish. Only in England, she now felt, could she improve conditions in the camps in any meaningful way. It was time to go home.
She left on May 1, 1901, heading through Springfontein on her way south, running into the same crowd of homeless Boers she had encountered a week and a half before at the train station. The camp superintendent could do nothing for them, as they were not yet part of any camp. They had been burned off the land. The military was through with them, but they were temporarily living outside the civilian bureaucracy.
Hobhouse sat with a mother in a lean-to while her baby died. A husband and wife near ninety years old had managed to flee together; the wife had no skirt. Hobhouse took off her underskirt and slipped it over the woman’s hips before leaving. In time, a report came from Bethulie Camp saying the couple was dead.51
Too late to be of use on her journey, money arrived from her aunt and uncle, who finally believed in her project and were ready to lend their support. After a final stop at Norvals Pont Camp, she caught the train to Cape Town. She found a berth on the ship that was carrying Sir Alfred Milner back to England, where he would become Lord Milner, a peer of the realm.
8. The Liberal members of Parliament had meanwhile been busy in London, castigating British war policy. They mounted a low-grade perpetual rebellion against official reports about the camps. Registering their unhappiness with the half answers and misleading information fed to them, they noted that other sources sketched a very different picture of detention conditions there.
Even naming was contentious. For the first several months of their existence, the camps had no fixed description. Those opposed to their existence called them camps of detention and the people in them reconcentrados, after the Cuban example. Supporters in and outside the military called them camps for refugees. But Hobhouse, along with David Lloyd George, rebelled at the official term.
In Parliament, Lloyd George declared that despite the government telling Parliament the opposite, he had first-person reports from relatives and prior ministers of the empire that the women and children in the camps—even if they had friends or relatives who would shelter them away from contested territory—were not allowed to leave. “There is no greater delusion in the mind of any man,” he said, “than to apply the term ‘refugee’ to these camps. They are not refugee camps. They are camps of concentration, formed by the military as the result of military operations in the field.”52
If the military managed to keep the camps open despite the bad publicity, the opposition won the naming war. In March 1901, the term “concentration camp” entered the parliamentary record and the English lexicon in reference to the Boer camps as places of military detention for civilians.
Told that Lord Kitchener was “taking all steps to ensure the humane treatment of refugees” in the Boer camps, Parliament demanded to know whether there were in fact different ration scales based on political status for allotting food to prisoners.53 Was the government, they asked, aware that only 10 percent of the two thousand children in Bloemfontein Camp were receiving schooling?54 And that instruction was not in Dutch but in English? If conditions were humane, as reported, why were mortality rates increasing, and why did they exceed the rate for combat fatalities among soldiers? Accounts taken from Emily Hobhouse’s letters were quoted to counter government assertions and demand explanations, including the question of what conditions the government might be hiding by not letting her go to the northernmost camps.55
Upon her return, Hobhouse was lauded and loathed for her efforts. Her eyewitness summaries were hailed and compared to the first-person accounts by US senator Redfield Proctor of reconcentración in Cuba, with sympathetic papers saying she had “turned the light of day upon a hell of suffering deliberately created for expediting a policy of conquest.”56
She revealed the nasty underbelly of war to the British public, but war fever made sympathy for any Boer, even women and children, hard for many to stomach. Still, within days of her mid-June report on camps of women and children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies, the War Office had vowed to consider her recommendations.
Consternation in England and abroad was reflected in mockery and condemnation of the British government. A Swiss political cartoon paired British secretary of state for the colonies Joseph Chamberlain with Herod as a colleague in baby killing, with Chamberlain dismissing Herod as a bungler for his less-effective approach.57 Allen Welsh Dulles, the eight-year-old son of a Presbyterian minister in Washington, DC, gained newspaper celebrity for writing a book condemning British concentration camps and atrocities in the war.58 A British satirist suggested that the current campaign was fought primarily as a war of arson and called for a new military decoration, “The Order of the Torch.”59
It was barely a joke. “The country is now almost entirely laid waste,” wrote one soldier that September. “You can go for miles and miles—in fact you might march for weeks and weeks and see no sign of a living thing or a cultivated patch of land—nothing but burnt farms and desolation.”60
“When is a war not a war?” asked MP Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in a June 14 speech in London, answering his own question. “When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.” Serious threats were made to bring British conduct in the war before The Hague, whose convention defining war atrocities had been put into effect in 1900.
9. Lord Milner’s plan was to create good British subjects once the war was over, and he hoped to use the camps to “civilize” the rural Boer farmers and bring them into the empire. To that end, he prioritized the development of schools, with instruction in English.61 Yet even in adopting a civilizing mission, the government was working at cross-purposes with itself: Lord Kitchener still embraced using the camps for retribution. Feeling that the wives of men on commando duty had “forfeited their right to considerate treatment,” he punished thousands of detainees by authorizing their transfer away from their home areas to new camps being set up along the coast.62
The perception around the world was that the British had resorted to atrocities, with camp mortality rates shocking British politicians and subjects alike. In the first linking of concentration camps to a holocaust, the Bishop of Hereford wrote to the Times of London in 1901, “Are we reduced to such a depth of impotence that our government can do nothing to stop such a holocaust of child life?”63
To a lesser degree, the press also used black camps to shame the government. The Pilot, a weekly review, excoriated London over mortality rates there, writing, “This was the war of humanity that was to lift the Boer yoke from the neck of the blacks, yet the blacks are dying faster in our camps than both Boers and British combined in the field.” The editors added, “If we are not to be disgraced for ever, the thing must stop.”64
It was a perception that the military would not countenance. Weeks after Emily Hobhouse’s report was published, the War Office appointed a Ladies Committee to visit the camps in an official capacity. The women all had professional or activist qualifications, but many of those chosen were a direct rebuke to Hobhouse. The chair of the committee had been directly critical of her in print and refused to meet with her before sailing.65 Another member, Dr. Jane Waterson, the daughter of a British general, had previously written to the Cape Times in response to the movement to reform the camps, declaring herself “not very favourably impressed by the hysterical whining going on in England.… It would seem as if we might neglect or starve our faithful soldiers… as long as we fed and pampered people who have not even the grace to say thank you for the care bestowed upon them.”66
Hobhouse repeatedly wrote to ask why she was not permitted to serve on the committee, but Secretary of War St. John Brodrick, who had received reports—true, fabricated, or both—of unpatriotic comments made by Hobhouse, stressed to her that he wanted only apolitical members. She would not get a slot.67
If she would not be allowed to return to South Africa with the committee, Hobhouse decided, she would go on her own—not to see the camps again but to work with those who had been deported to coastal towns. She set sail for Cape Town on October 5, 1901. Unlike the Ladies Committee, she had no official portfolio; still, the threat of her reappearance rattled the military. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain suggested that he “did not think the Empire was threatened by a hysterical spinster of mature age” and believed it “foolish to take any notice of her,” but Milner would leave nothing to chance.68 Milner and Kitchener refused to allow her ashore.
When she was struck by illness and balked at being put on the next ship home, nurses were sent to examine her, though she persuaded the women to leave without doing so. The colony’s medical officer had fewer reservations—he ordered her to be wrapped in her shawl, carried off the ship, and deposited at the dock next to a passenger liner departing the next day. She was taken back to England without setting foot in Cape Town.
Hobhouse found herself partially vindicated by the report of the Ladies Committee that December, which returned from an extensive tour of the camps with accusations enough to infuriate everyone. If they had been expected to rubber-stamp government administration of the camps, they disappointed their sponsors by reporting on shocking mortality rates that had only gotten worse after Hobhouse’s departure. Noting failing after failing on the part of the government, they declared that “the deaths were not simply the result of circumstances beyond the control of the British.”69
But the committee also indicted the behaviors of Boer mothers, whose folk remedies, lack of sanitation, and refusal to follow modern medical advice, they believed, had directly caused many deaths of children in the camps—unlike the “intelligent and careful” British parents they met on their trip.70 The tension between the legitimate medical qualifications of the committee and its prejudices make their assessment difficult to analyze a century later. Yet members had come away with strong opinions about the adoption of concentration camps:
It is a huge object-lesson to the world in what not to do! for if the children had not been so massed together, the death rate from those terrible infectious diseases would not have been so great. We brought the women in to stop them from helping their husbands in the War and by so doing we have undoubtedly killed them in thousands as much as if we had shot them on their own doorsteps, and anyone but a British General would have realized this long ago.71
By the time of the Boer surrender on the last day of May 1902, British authorities had managed to cut the camp mortality rate significantly. Nevertheless, as historian Peter Warwick noted, more than twenty-seven thousand Boer internees died, a number that “probably amounted to twice the number of men killed in action during the war on both sides” and representing some 10 percent of the population.72 Nearly 80 percent of them were children.
After hostilities ended, Emily Hobhouse continued campaigning to relieve Boer suffering, making appeals for the government to help feed and provide plow animals for farmers whose homes had been burned. Moving to South Africa in 1905, she set up a spinning and weaving school for Boer women at Philippolis.
She was still working there, living in Pretoria and focused on expanding education for Boer youth, when concentration camps began to appear just over the border in the German colony of South-West Africa. A German chancellor had found a way to surpass Kitchener’s brutality, inaugurating a new kind of camp.
10. In January 1904, Herero chief Samuel Maharero led an uprising a hundred miles inland from the western coast of Africa, sabotaging rail lines from the coast in a fury over mistreatment by German traders. The Herero pinned settlers down in a fort at Okahandja, going on to several early victories that stung Berlin. Maharero’s rebellion obliterated a messy alliance with German colonial rulers that had endured for a decade.
The governor of the colony, Theodor Leutwein, had lived in South-West Africa for the duration of that alliance, which he had negotiated and then navigated during his tenure. He had learned how to bribe and play tribal factions against each other to limit bloodshed. He felt certain a peace settlement could be reached. But Kaiser Wilhelm II and officers of the German High Command were uninterested in bargaining.
A month after the uprising began, Leutwein was told to extract unconditional surrender from the Herero.73 He suspected that the order signaled a plan for the complete extermination of the tribe. Reminding his superiors that native labor was vital to the economy, Leutwein cautioned them not to listen to “fanatics who want to see the Herero destroyed altogether.”74 Three months later, he was relieved of his military command.
As with Weyler in Cuba, the man sent to secure the colony was known for his brutal methods, and demanded a free hand without interference from politicians.75 General Lothar von Trotha had seen action in both Africa and the atrocity-riddled Boxer Rebellion in China, and remained a fan of bloody, blunt force. Despite the fact that the conflict had largely subsided before his arrival in Africa, von Trotha spent his first two months on the continent plotting a decisive offensive—what one soldier referred to as “a mousetrap.” His subordinate, a major named Ludwig von Estorff, was prepared to pin down the Herero forces, then press them into negotiations to settle the war. But von Trotha did not intend to use the mousetrap for that purpose.
In August, von Trotha crushed most of the remaining Herero forces at Waterberg, in the north-central part of the colony. Having secured access to water necessary for the survival of the Herero and their cattle, he issued an order unique in the history of colonialism:
I, the Great General of the German troops, send this letter to the Herero people. The Herero are no longer German subjects. They have murdered and stolen, they have cut off the ears, noses and other body-parts of wounded soldiers, now out of cowardice they no longer wish to fight. I say to the people anyone who delivers a captain will receive 1000 Mark. Whoever delivers Samuel will receive 5000 Mark. The Herero people must however leave the land. If the populace does not do this I will force them with the Groot Roor [Cannon]. Within the German borders every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children. I will drive them back to their people or I will let them be shot at.
These are my words to the Herero people.
The great General of the Mighty Kaiser.76
He followed up with a clarifying order suggesting that he wanted men shot but did not intend for troops to commit atrocities against women and children—merely to shoot over their heads to frighten them away. But writing later in a letter explaining his bloody tactics, von Trotha declared that tribes “yield only to force. It was and remains my policy to apply this force by unmitigated terrorism and even cruelty.”77 Herero men were hanged in front of women, who were sent with the proclamation back to their people to say what they had seen. What had been a barbaric standard of engagement before the extermination order became open season on the Herero.
Only 1 percent of South-West Africa consisted of arable land. Most of its territory lay in desert and semiarid regions. Major Estorff, who had hoped to end the war with negotiations followed von Trotha’s orders. The Herero had been flushed eastward, toward open desert. If they were seen, they would be shot. But fleeing without provisions, cattle, or access to guarded watering holes, they had no chance for survival. Many died of exposure in the sands of the Omaheke Desert. Countless additional Herero caught in the field were executed on the spot after summary court-martial. Feeling that “crushing people like this was in equal measure cruel and insane,” Estorff had told von Trotha that the people had been punished enough, but von Trotha kept to his strategy.78
Mass executions, however, did not sit well with the Reichstag. Two months after the extermination order was issued, German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow responded to pressure from the left and persuaded the Kaiser to rescind it. But the Herero had little reason to rejoice—new orders from Berlin mandated limited executions and forced labor for those spared from death. Still, some desperate Herero survivors who had nowhere to go got word of the changes and made their way back to German settlements to turn themselves in. Von Trotha had the prisoners put in arm and leg and neck irons, until Chancellor von Bülow stopped that as well, worrying that it would keep the remaining natives from surrendering.
Meanwhile, von Bülow had threaded the needle of how to remove the Herero as a military threat while keeping them as a labor source. “I am of the opinion,” he wrote to von Trotha, “that the surrendering Herero should be placed in Konzentrationslager, concentration camps, in various locations of the territory, there to be put under guard and required to work.”79 The strategy was not alien to von Trotha: the general had an almost mystical faith in Lord Kitchener, the strategist for the South African war and its policy of concentration camps, seeing him as a guiding star as he navigated his own country’s conflict.80
11. The first German concentration camps in South-West Africa were built at military posts. Where the British Empire had insisted the Boer families in their care were refugees, Germany embraced the notion that every Herero—man, woman, or child—was a prisoner of war. All wore stamped, numbered metal tags. All were swept into cramped shelters, many of them skin-and-rag huts like those in the black camps set up by the British in South Africa. Some children were taken as personal slaves for German officers. More of them, male and female, were forced into hard labor on projects run by the military. Other Herero were provided as workers to private companies.
On the hillside at one of two camps at Windhoek, thick thornbush perimeter fencing hemmed in row after row of pontoks—patchwork round huts—nested together in lethal proximity. Other prisoners slept hundreds together with no shelter beyond a sailcloth canopy for a roof. The colonial capital had a population of 2,500 inhabitants at the time, but at its peak, the concentration camps at Windhoek held nearly three times as many people.
After months in the desert, many of the prisoners were half dead on arrival: “Dressed in rags or totally naked, starved to the bone,” a missionary at Windhoek wrote upon seeing the Herero come in.81 Another missionary at Kharibib Camp wrote of the newcomers, “Some of them had been starved to skeletons with hollow eyes, powerless and hopeless, afflicted by serious diseases, particularly with dysentery. In the settlements, they were placed in big kraals [corrals], and there they lay, without blankets and some without clothing, in the tropical rain on the marshlike ground. Here death reaped a harvest!”82
Missionaries initially betrayed the Herero, helping to lure them out of the bush even after it was clear that they would face disease and atrocities in the camps.83 And territorial disputes between Catholic and Lutheran missionaries for access to native converts occupied perhaps more of their time than was decent, given hardships faced by prisoners. But missionaries also attempted to alleviate suffering in the camps, running a sick bay at Windhoek, supplying clothing and bedding to prisoners, and advocating for cooking implements and better food. They also provided eyewitness accounts of the camps. Treating the prisoners, they noted firsthand the results of the thick rawhide whips used by guards, the endemic starvation, and the relentless severity of life in the camps. “Finally the mission could no longer merely look on,” wrote a missionary named Meier, when “on certain days often 10 or more corpses were carried out.”84
In addition to the inhospitable climate and disease, and the terrors of life in the camps, brutal labor conditions on work details took their toll as well. Prisoners were forced to carry goods, with one South African newspaper reporting, “The loads… are out of all proportion to their strength. I have often seen women and children dropping down, especially when engaged on this work, and also when carrying very heavy bags of grain, weighing a hundred or more pounds.”85 Women in the camps were further subject to rape and forced prostitution. As a result, sexually transmitted diseases, including venereal typhoid, raged alongside more typical camp diseases, likewise afflicting whites in nearby towns.86 Souvenir postcards were made of native girl and women prisoners, their blouses torn open and hanging in tatters so they could be photographed half naked.
War with the Herero was followed in 1905 by an uprising of the Nama people in the south. Major Estorff, the acting military commander at the time, negotiated a surrender that would permit the tribe to return to its hometown. With the arrival of a new governor, however, the promise was broken.87 Nama prisoners joined Hereros in detention and forced labor. Bordering stretches of desert and along the chilly coast, a half-dozen camps around the colony held more than seventeen thousand prisoners.
Despite the adoption of some humane measures—detainees were paid a minuscule amount in wages, and families were no longer broken up—fatalities continued.88 Women outnumbered children, and children outnumbered men, presumably because so many men had been shot. Prisoners’ rations included flour, rice, and salt—but not enough to survive. The rice often proved useless; it was an unfamiliar food to the Herero, who lived off meat and milk from their cattle. Moreover, they lacked utensils with which to cook it. Medical reports assured the government that fruit was also provided, but rampant scurvy in the camps points to its absence.89
12. One camp became legendary for its horrors. Haifischinsel, or Shark Island, a tiny slip of land just off the coast, stretched 1,300 yards long by a little more than 300 yards wide, an unforgiving granite outpost connected to the continent by a narrow causeway. The camp huddled beneath a lighthouse on the most exposed portion of the island, with the surrounding rocks beaten by the harsh winds and tides of the Atlantic. Open to the ocean on one side, detainees’ tents were hemmed in by barbed wire and guards on the other. Among German troops, it would come to be known as Death Island.
Edward Fredericks, a Nama tribesman, described his experience of surrendering and being exiled to Shark Island in 1906: “We were beaten daily by the Germans, who used sjamboks [whips]. We lived in tents on the island. They were most cruel to us. Food, blankets, and lashes were given to us in plenty, and at night the young girls were violated by the guards.… Lots of my people died on Shark Island. I put in a list of those who died, but it is not complete. I gave up compiling it, as I was afraid we were all going to die.”90 In time, even the chiefs among the prison population began to despair, with Nama leader Samuel Isaak telling one missionary, “These people are doomed.”91
The medical tent at the camp was avoided by detainees; missionaries reported that sick natives did not survive treatment there. The doctor’s tendency to autopsy the dead cannot have helped his reputation among the living. Other medical experiments were conducted offsite, with the severed heads of deceased Shark Island detainees used by German doctors developing race theories about the evolutionary proximity of black Africans to apes. Detainees in the camp at Swakopmund were assigned to work scraping down the skulls of the dead before specimens were shipped back to Germany.92
Missionaries began sounding alarm bells about the number of deaths in the Shark Island camp, making arrangements to visit. Prisoners in other camps began to get word as well. Protestant evangelist Heinrich Vedder passed along an account of one Herero man who committed suicide by tearing open his neck with his bare hands in order to avoid being sent to Shark Island.93 The camp’s apocalyptic reputation was such that it was forbidden for anyone to tell detainees where they were being sent, for fear they would revolt or escape.
When missionaries trying to save hundreds of detainees got military approval to move them from Shark Island to another camp, the governor denied the transfer specifically because the captives had been so mistreated. “Those prisoners transferred to Shark Island through trickery will not likely forget their time of imprisonment on the island any time soon,” he wrote. “[If] they are let loose they will spread their stories of hate and mistrust against us.”94
13. As belated word of von Trotha’s extermination order made its way around Europe and the United States, stories appeared describing hundreds upon hundreds of skeletons found littering the desert. The German press reported demands for von Trotha’s recall.95 Meanwhile, the acting governor argued that punishment in the concentration camps was still necessary in order to ensure that the Herero “will not revolt again for generations.”96
With the appointment of Ludwig von Estorff as the commander of the colonial army, however, Shark Island’s use as a camp would soon end. Estorff had opposed General von Trotha’s plan from the beginning, as well as the brutality that followed in its wake. Visiting the island to investigate, he was horrified at conditions in the camp. Yet his efforts to transfer detainees out were blocked by the colonial government. “Plans at headquarters to take women and children to the north where the climate is more wholesome have been opposed by the Administration,” Estorff wrote. Not only did the government refuse his request, it made an odd attempt to justify the decision, reminding him that “Britain has allowed 10,000 women and children to die in camps in South Africa.”97
In the end Estorff prevailed, but it was not until March 31, 1907, that the war ended and camps still holding detainees were shut down. Between the deliberate genocide in the desert and the informal one in the camps, more than sixty thousand Herero and ten thousand Nama died during the conflict in South-West Africa, reducing the Nama population by half and nearly exterminating the Herero.98
The legacy of concentration camps in both African colonies did not end when the barbed wire and tents disappeared. Selective memorialization of the dead reverberated in tragic ways. In ledgers compiled at the end of hostilities to account for the lives lost in the camps during the Boer War, the Dutch Reformed Church—which had both black and white members—did not even bother to include fatalities in camps for black Africans.99
Weeks after Emily Hobhouse’s return to London in 1901, with war raging, her ally (and future prime minister) David Lloyd George spoke before Parliament, saying,
Who would have thought when General Weyler had his concentration camps in Cuba that similar measures would be adopted within the bounds of the British Empire?… I would venture to say, looking at these 40,000 children in the camps, that we are only sowing the seeds of discontent, and that we may reap a terrible harvest some day—not perhaps this year or next year, but in time coming a nation will grow up which will remember all these iniquities.100
As if answering Lloyd George’s question months later, with the war still under way, Milner wrote to Chamberlain, “It dawned on me personally… that the enormous mortality was not incidental to the first formation of the camps and the sudden inrush of people already starving, but was going to continue. The fact that it continues is no doubt a condemnation of the camp system. The whole thing, I now think, has been a mistake.”101
Lloyd George proved all too correct in his assessment that the repercussions of concentration camps would be long-lived and profound. When surrender was negotiated, the British conceded on race laws in order to reconcile with defeated Boers, abandoning the rights that existed at least on paper in other colonies and fostering a hierarchy of legal distinctions that evolved into the institutionalized racism of apartheid.
At the 1913 dedication of a memorial to the dead of the camps in South Africa, Emily Hobhouse addressed race directly, asking, “Does not justice bid to remember today how many thousands of the dark race perished also in the concentration camps in a quarrel which was not theirs?” But in 1963, when the Afrikaner government published the text of her speech, Hobhouse’s eulogy for the black Africans who lost their lives in the camps had been removed.102
The dead of the black concentration camps were erased, while the memory of Boer families who had died became a rallying call for white Afrikaner nationalism. The ritualized martyrdom of “all these iniquities”—especially the very real tragedy of wives and children lost in the camps—fed the flames of state-sanctioned race terror in South Africa until 1991.
In neighboring South-West Africa, for a brief window during the First World War, details of the Nama and Herero genocide would be mercilessly recorded by the British in an attempt to show the brutality of the Germans who were now their enemy. After shocking the world’s conscience and serving its purpose in postwar territorial negotiations, however, the British blue book documenting atrocities against the Nama and Herero would be as forgotten as the black Africans who died during the Boer War.
Yet the strategy of using civilian camps in wartime would not be similarly forgotten. During the first decade of concentration camps, four empires had carried a lethal concept to three continents. Seeds of much that would unfold in the coming century had already sprouted—not just the physical manifestations of barbed wire, rotting food, and watchtowers, but the arguments supporting wholesale detention for purposes of protection, reeducation, or extermination. The bureaucracy and the brutality of the camps would soon blossom on a scale that could hardly be imagined. First, however, the world would find a way to forget just how lethal the first concentration camps had been.