Abstract
In this chapter, I provide readers with an argumentative, critical genealogical analysis of transatlantic debates that took place as arguers deliberated about the civilians who were moved into “refugee,” “burgher,” “concentration,” or “internment,” camps during the South African (or Anglo-Boer War) fought between 1900 and 1902.3 Somewhere between 42,000 and 50,000 people may have died in the Boer and African camps during this conflict4 and, as I note below, at various times, the Boer commandos in the field, the British commanders-in-chief (Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener), the pro-Boers, the Boer women, and the black Africans (”Kaffirs”)5 were all considered to be culpable parties whose actions led to the formation of the camps. In the same ways that Cuban revolutionaries and Spanish imperialists blamed each other for the horrors of “Weyler’s” camps, the participants in the Boer conflicts were equally convinced that their enemies needed to shoulder the responsibility for the loss of life in the South African camps.
The black spot—the very black spot,—in the picture is the frightful mortality in the Concentration Camps…. our great error has been in taking a course which made us responsible for the mischiefs which ought to have rested on the shoulders of the enemy.1
Alfred Milner to Colonial Secretary Chamberlain, December 7, 1901
The men cannot end the war. The women will not end the war. Cannot the children help to bring about that peace both sides so earnestly desire?2
Emily Hobhouse to St. John Broderick, October, 1901
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Notes
Milner to Colonial Secretary Chamberlain, December 7, 1901, cited in Paula Krebs, Gender, Race and the Writing of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 39.
Emily Hobhouse, cited in “Miss Hobhouse and the Concentration Camps,” The Times [London], October 3, 1901, 5.
For an interesting discussion of the ideological valences associated with the labeling of the camps, see Elizabeth van Heyningen, “The Concentration Camps of the South African (Anglo-Boer) War, 1900–1902,” History Compass 7 (2009): 22–43.
S.B. Spies, Methods of Barbarism? Roberts and Kitchener and Civilians in the Boer Republics, Jan 1900-May 1902 (Cape Town: Human & Rosseau, 1977), 265.
Peter Warwick, Black People and the South African War, 1899–1902 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 145.
Jonathan Hyslop, “The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the Philippines, 1896–1907,” South African Historical Journal 63 (2011): 259.
See Emily Hobhouse, The Brunt of the War and Where It Fell (London: Methuen, 1902).
Hyslop, “The Invention of the Concentration,” 259. For an intriguing argument that commentators on the British camps have focused too much attention on the months that had the highest morbidity and mortality rates, see Elizabeth van Heyningen, “A Tool for Modernization? The Boer Concentration Camps of the South African War 1899–1902,” South African Journal of Science 106 (2010): 52–61. For a very different reading of the camps.
Fransjohan Pretorius, “The White Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Debate Without End,” Historia [online] 55 (2010): 34–49.
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, cited in J. A. Spender, The Life of the Right Hon. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, G.C0. B., Volume I (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923), 335–336. See also Spies, Methods, 276.
For an overview of some of Hobhouse’s efforts, see Jennifer Hobhouse Balme, To Love One’s Enemies: The Work and Life of Emily Hobhouse, Compiled from Letters and Writings, Newspaper Cuttings and Official Documents (Cobble Hill, BC: Hobhouse Trust, 1994).
Emily Hobhouse, Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies (London: Friars Printing Association, Ltd., 1901). This all began as an official investigation for the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children, and eventually it turned into a document that would be submitted to Parliament. The Fund was supposed to be a “benevolent, non-political and non-sectarian” fund that would be attractive to many diverse communities.
Arthur Davey, The British Pro-Boers, 1877–1902 (Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers, 1978), 172–173.
John Fisher, That Miss Hobhouse (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971)
Brian Roberts, Those Bloody Women: Three Heroines of the Boer War (London: J. Murray, 1991).
Johanna Fockens, Emily Hobhouse (Protea Boekhuis, 1997).
Ken Smith, The Changing Past, Trends in South African Historical Writing (Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers, 1988), 63, cited in Van Heyningen, “The Concentration Camps,” 22–23.
One of the best overviews of the causes of this conflict appears in Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (New York: Random House, 1979).
T. C. Caldwell, The Anglo-Boer War (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1965), vii.
For more on this “new or fin de siècle imperialism,” see N. G. Garson, “British Imperialism and the Coming of the Anglo-Boer War,” The South African Journal of Economics 30 (1962): 140.
Ian R. Smith and Andreas Stucki, “The Colonial Development of Concentration Camps (1868–1902),” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39 (2011): 425.
Fransjohan Pretorius, ed., Scorched Earth (Cape Town: Human and Rouseau, 2001).
A review of popular press commentaries shows that many of those who argued about the concentration camps liked to claim that there were at least 100, 000 Boers living in the camps. Emily Hobhouse once observed that 93, 000 white women and children were placed in the camps, and she also noted that there were 24, 000 Africans in other camps. Emily Hobhouse, “Concentration Camps,” Contemporary Review 80 (1901): 528–537. For an example of how calls for aid could be used to get across the idea that far fewer were in the camps, see the plea for American aid by Louise Maxwell, the wife of Pretoria’s Military Governor. In her plea, Maxwell argued that 22, 0 had been “collected” in camps where many were sleeping under tents in the open air. “Asks America to Aid Boer Women,” The New York Herald, April 16, 1901, 9.
Elizabeth van Heyningen, “A Tool for Modernisation? The Boer Concentration Camps of the South African War, 1900–1902,” South African Journal of Science 106 (2010): 1.
Louis Botha, quoted in John Rawlings, “Concentration Camps during the South Africa/Boer War, 1899–1902,” Sulair [Stanford African Collection], June 27, 2005, 2, http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/boers.html.
William R. Everdell, The First Moderns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 119.
David Lloyd-George, “Address in Answer to the King’s Speech,” House of Commons, Parliamentary Debates 89 (February 18, 1901): 405.
Jill Liddington, The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism and Anti-militarism in Britain since 1820 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 48.
Emily Hobhouse, To the Committee of the South African Distress Fund, Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Camp and Orange River Colonies (London: Rears, 1901).
Davey, The British Pro-Boers, 173. For more on the strategic usage of the term “hysterical” in the debates about the Boer camps, see Marouf Hasian, Jr., “The ‘Hysterical’ Emily Hobhouse and The Boer War Concentration Camp Controversy,” Western Journal of Communication 67 (2003): 138–163.
For excellent overviews of the iconography that developed around the ideological usages of the story of Lizzie van Zyl, see Owen Coetzer, Fire in the Sky (Weltevreden Park, South Africa: Covos-Day Books, 2000), 143–153.
Michael Godby, “Confronting Horror: Emily Hobhouse and the Concentration Camp Photographs of the South African War,” Kronos 32 (2006): 34–48
Elizabeth Van Heyningen, “Costly Mythologies: The Concentration Camps Of the South African War in Afrikaner Historiography,” Journal of Southern African Studies 34 (2008): 495–513
Liz Stanley, Mourning Becomes … Post/Memory and Commemoration of the Concentration Camps of the South African War 18991902 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2006)
Lewis Changuion, Paul Alberts and Frik Jacobs, Suffering of War: A Photographic Portrayal of the Suffering in the Anglo-Boer War (Bloemfontein: Kraal Publishers, 2003), 31.
A. Conan Doyle, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct (New York: McClure, Philips and Company, 1902), 92. Michael Godby has characterized Doyle’s attempt to link Lizzie’s photograph to a criminal case against her mother for neglect as a “vain attempt to limit the damage the photograph was doing in the growing propaganda campaign against the war” (Godby, “Confronting Horror,” 42).
The contents of the Fawcett Report were printed up for the Parliament Blue Books. One of the most widely read of the reports appeared under the title Reports on the Working of the Refugee Camps in the Transvaal, Orange River Colony, Cape Colony, and Natal (November 1901). See [Millicent Fawcett], Report on the Concentration Camps in South Africa, by the Committee of Ladies Appointed by the Secretary of War; Containing Reports on the Camps in Natal, the Orange River Colony, and the Transvaal (London: Eyre and Spttiswoode, 1902) [Herein Fawcett Report].
See, for example, Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought 1895–1914 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1968).
Geoffrey Barker Pyrah, Imperial Policy and South Africa, 1902–1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 249.
Elizabeth van Heyningen, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History (Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2013).
Anne Digby, “Revisiting the Mythology of Afrikaner Identity,” Journal of African History 54 (2013): 448.
Theodore Meron, “The Martens Clause, Principles of Humanity, and Dictates of Public Conscience,” The American Journal of International Law 94 (2000): 78–89.
Bill Nasson, “Civilians in the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902,” in Civilians in Wartime Africa: From Slavery Days to Rwandan Genocide, ed. John Laband Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007), 85–111.
Paul Krebs, “‘The Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars’: Women in the Boer War Concentration Camp Controversy,” History Workshop Journal 33 (1992): 39.
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© 2014 Hasian Marouf, Jr.
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Marouf, H. (2014). The “Faded Flowers” and the Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War. In: Restorative Justice, Humanitarian Rhetorics, and Public Memories of Colonial Camp Cultures. Rhetoric, Politics and Society series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437112_3
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