semi-official organ of the Independent Labour Party, noted: “Modern imperialism is really run by half a dozen financial houses, many of them
Jewish, to whom politics is a counter in the game of buying and selling securities” (Hirshfield, pp. 13-23).
Concentration camps
A crusading English lady, Emily Hobhouse, alerted the world to the horrors of the camps. “In some camps,” she reported, “two and sometimes
three different families live in one tent. Ten and even twelve persons are forced into a single tent.” Most had to sleep on the ground.
“These people will never ever forget what has happened,” Hobhouse declared. “The children have been the hardest hit. They wither in the terrible
heat and as a result of insufficient and improper nourishment. . . . To maintain this kind of camp means nothing less than murdering children.”
The British held 116,572 persons in their concentration camps, almost all of them women and children. That was about a fourth of the entire Boer
population. After the war, and official government report concluded that 27,927 Boers had died in the camps of starvation, typhus and exposure.
That included 26,251 women and children, of whom 22,074 were children under the age of 16.
Emily Hobhouse found that none of their hardships, not even seeing their own hungry children die before their eyes, would shake the Boer
women’s determination. They “never express,” Hobhouse wrote, “a wish that their men must give way. It must be fought out now, they think, to
the bitter end.”
Africans armed
Kitchener gave rifles to the native Bantus. The British eventually armed about 10,000 marauding Blacks, but the policy was kept secret from the
people back home.
No wonder. This was the first time in history that Europeans had given weapons to Negroes with orders to kill fellow Whites. Although they
proved poor soldiers, the primitive blacks murdered and slaughtered defenseless Boer women and children across the countryside. The fate of the
women and children who escaped the living hell of the camps was often more horrible than that of those who did not.
In his January 1902 report, General Smuts describes how the British recruited the Bantus:
“In the Cape Colony the uncivilized Blacks have been told that if the Boers win, slavery will be brought back in the Cape Colony. They have been
promised Boer property and farmsteads if they will join the English; that the Boers will have to work for the Blacks, and that they will be about to
marry Boer women.”
Arming the Blacks, Smuts said, “represents the greatest crime with has ever been perpetrated against the White race in South Africa.”
Winston Churchill
The war did help the career of at least one person, however. In the midst of the destruction, a young journalist named Winston Churchill supplied
readers of the London Morning Post back home with morale-boosting stories of the exploits of Her Majesty’s soldiers.
As the year sent by, the well-publicized story of Churchill’s capture by the Boers, internment as a prisoner of war, and escape was embellished
and radically altered in his favor.
Defeat
After thirty-three months of fanatic struggle, with their land almost entirely under enemy occupation, threatened with total annihilation and finally
outnumbered six to one, the Boers were forced to surrender in May 1902.
Summary
In a very real sense, the Boer war was no war at all, but rather a military campaign of mass murder. While over 26,000 Boer women and children
died in the concentration camps, only 6, 189 Boer fighting men died of all causes during the war. In fact, more children under the age of 16
perished in the British camps than men were killed in action on both sides.
As usually happens after a war is over, the suffering of the loser is forgotten. Like the losers of the Second World War, the Boers had no
International Military Tribunal which they could use to punish the victors for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It took the largest empire in the world almost three years, some 350,000 soldiers and 22,000 dead to crush a tough pioneer people of less than
half a million. That extraordinary tenacity is worth keeping in mind when reading predictions of how the Boers of today, the Afrikaners of South
Africa, will give up control of their country as easily as did the Whites of Rhodesia.