Boer War Concentration Camps (1900-1902): Civilians in the War

The Boer War concentration camps were camps set up by the British army in South Africa between 1900 and 1902 to hold civilians displaced during the Second Boer War. Boer women, children and elderly men, and separately Black Africans from the farms, were held in tented camps where overcrowding, poor rations and epidemics killed tens of thousands. The scandal was exposed by the campaigner Emily Hobhouse, confirmed by an official commission, and remains one of the most painful memories of the war in South Africa.

Background: from refugees to scorched earth

By the middle of 1900 British forces had captured the capitals of both Boer republics, but the Boers fought on as mobile guerrilla commandos. They depended on farms for food, horses, shelter and information. In response the British army, under Lord Roberts and from November 1900 under Lord Kitchener, adopted a policy of destroying the commandos’ means of support.

British columns burned an estimated 30,000 farmhouses, destroyed crops and slaughtered or seized livestock across the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The first camps were opened in 1900 for “surrendered burghers”, Boers who had laid down their arms and wanted protection. From December 1900 Kitchener extended the system to the families left homeless by farm burning, both to look after them and to keep them from helping the fighters.

The idea of concentrating rural populations was not new. Spain had used reconcentration against the insurgents of the Cuban War of Independence from 1896, and the phrase “concentration camp” entered common English use through the Boer War.

Life in the camps

By the end of the war there were around 45 camps for Boers and more than 60 for Black Africans. At their peak the Boer camps held over 110,000 people, and the African camps a similar number. Most inmates were women and children.

The camps were usually rows of bell tents on open veld, cold at night and hot by day. They were often overcrowded and short of clean water, fuel, soap and proper latrines. Rations were meagre and monotonous, and at first families of men still fighting received smaller rations than those of men who had surrendered. Medical staff were few and sometimes inexperienced. Many rural Boer families, used to scattered farms, had no resistance to diseases that spread quickly in crowded conditions.

Epidemics of measles, followed by pneumonia, typhoid and dysentery, swept through the camps in 1901. Children suffered worst. At the height of the crisis, in October 1901, the annual death rate in the Boer camps reached roughly 340 per 1,000 inmates.

The camps for Black Africans

Black Africans were also displaced by farm burning and the war, and they were placed in separate camps. From mid-1901 these were run by a Department of Native Refugees. Inmates were expected to grow their own food or work for the army, often on the railways and in mines, and they received less food and medical care than Boer inmates.

These camps attracted little attention at the time and were long neglected by historians. Records are incomplete, but at least 14,000 deaths were registered, and modern estimates suggest the real total was well over 20,000.

Emily Hobhouse and the scandal

Emily Hobhouse, a British welfare worker, travelled to South Africa in December 1900 on behalf of a relief fund for Boer women and children. In early 1901 she visited the camp at Bloemfontein and several others, and was shocked by what she saw. Back in London she published a report in June 1901 describing the hunger, sickness and high death rates.

Hobhouse described tents packed with families, children wasting from hunger and disease, and a lack of basic supplies such as soap, mattresses and fuel. She urged that families be allowed to return to relatives where possible and that rations and sanitation be improved at once. Her findings caused an uproar. On 14 June 1901 the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman asked in a speech when a war was not a war, and answered that it was when it was carried on by “methods of barbarism” in South Africa. Government ministers and much of the press attacked Hobhouse as unpatriotic. When she tried to return to South Africa in October 1901 she was prevented from landing at Cape Town and deported.

The Fawcett Commission and reform

In July 1901 the government appointed a committee of women, led by the suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, to inspect the camps. Its members toured them from August to December 1901. Though generally supportive of the war, the committee confirmed many of Hobhouse’s criticisms and recommended better water supplies, more food, more nurses and doctors, and moving some camps to healthier sites.

From November 1901 control of the camps passed from the army to the civil administration under Sir Alfred Milner. Improvements in sanitation, rations and medical care, together with the passing of the measles epidemic, brought the death rate down sharply: by May 1902 it was a small fraction of its peak. The camps were wound down after the Treaty of Vereeniging ended the war on 31 May 1902.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1900, September: First camps opened for Boer refugees and surrendered burghers.
• 1900, 21 December: Kitchener orders families from cleared districts to be brought into camps.
• 1901, January: Emily Hobhouse visits the Bloemfontein camp.
• 1901, June: Hobhouse’s report is published; Campbell-Bannerman condemns “methods of barbarism”.
• 1901, July: The Fawcett Commission is appointed.
• 1901, October: Death rates in the Boer camps reach their peak; Hobhouse is deported from Cape Town.
• 1901, November: Civil authorities take over the camps.
• 1902, 31 May: Treaty of Vereeniging; the camps are gradually closed.

Debates among historians

Historians agree that the camps caused enormous loss of life, but they have argued over responsibility. Some have stressed the brutality of a policy that targeted civilians to break the will of fighting men. Others, such as Elizabeth van Heyningen in her detailed social history, emphasise the role of disease, especially measles, and of poor administration, inadequate medical knowledge and official indifference, rather than a deliberate wish to cause deaths.

Some Afrikaner writers in the twentieth century, and some later popular accounts, described the camps as a planned genocide. Most historians reject that view, while acknowledging that British authorities were slow to respond to clear warnings. Recent research has also shown that some Boer doctors and inmates helped run the camps, and that conditions varied greatly from one camp to another.

Legacy

The camps left deep bitterness among Afrikaners and became central to Afrikaner nationalism in the twentieth century. The National Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein, unveiled on 16 December 1913, commemorates the women and children who died; Hobhouse’s ashes were placed there in 1926. The suffering of Black Africans in the camps has only received wide recognition since the end of apartheid.

Why it matters

The Boer War camps showed how a modern army fighting guerrillas could inflict mass civilian deaths through neglect rather than intention. They shaped South African politics for generations and became an early, much-cited example in debates about the treatment of civilians in war.