South African War

V

The Concentration Camps

The concentration camps established during this war by the British Army arose directly out of this “scorched earth” policy and anti-guerrilla military strategy. These mainly tented camps were hurriedly established, close to railway lines, to receive the many tens of thousands of Boer and black civilians whose homes were deliberately destroyed and who were “concentrated” in these internment camps, which were poorly prepared, inadequately supplied, and soon became grossly overcrowded. Some 27,927 Boer civilians, mostly women and children, died as epidemics of measles and typhus raged through these camps during 1901. This was far more than the total number of combatants killed on both sides during the war. Three quarters of these deaths were of children under the age of 16. An estimated 20,000 black civilians also died, mostly in separate “black” camps, some as servants of Boer families in the “white” camps.

When the English social worker and pacifist Emily Hobhouse visited some of the camps and revealed to the British public what was happening in them, in June 1901, there was a public outcry. The Government sent out a Commission of Enquiry of six women under women’s suffrage leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett and the reforms recommended in their report, coupled with greatly increased resources and the transfer of the camps to civilian control, led to a rapid improvement in camp conditions by January 1902. The war ended in May 1902, but it was December before the last camps were finally closed and their inmates resettled on their devastated farms.

VI

African Participation in the War

Fought in a region where the combined Boer and British populations (then just fewer than 1 million) were only about one fifth of the total, the South African War was not just “a white man’s war”. There was also large-scale African participation. Kitchener admitted arming more than 10,000 Africans and the figure was probably closer to 30,000. On the Boer side also, something like 10,000 Africans and Coloureds assisted Boer forces, although only exceptionally were they armed. At Mafeking, there were four times as many Africans as Europeans involved in the famous siege, and they played a crucial part in the defence of the town. Baden-Powell armed almost as many blacks as whites, for good practical reasons, but lied about this afterwards. It was also the black population who dug the defences, acted as spies and messengers, and rustled cattle into the town to supply it with food. While the Europeans were never acutely short of food, hundreds of Africans died from starvation and many others fled the town because of the grossly unequal distribution of food during the 217-day siege.

For many Africans in Natal and the Cape Colony the war provided a boom in employment opportunities, with better pay and better prices paid for agricultural produce, cattle, horses, and services of all kinds by the huge British Army at a time when recent drought and rinderpest, together with the cessation of work in the gold mines, had seriously affected the rural areas. For the rulers of some of the African societies so recently incorporated within the four white-settler states, the war provided an opportunity for them to secure or improve their positions through assisting the British. In several areas, Africans were armed by the British and effectively turned their territories into no-go areas for the Boer commandos. While the Boers faced mounting hostility from the African population—whose livestock they seized and whose labour they sought to commandeer—the British enjoyed widespread support and assistance from African and Coloured people during the war, most of whom looked to the defeat of the Boers for a new and better future when British rule was established throughout the region. These hopes were not without some foundation. In March 1901 the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, declared that it would be “a shameful peace” if they were left in the same position as that before the war, with not even ordinary civil rights. Yet peace between Boers and British was to require a British abdication on this issue. The exclusion of Africans and Coloureds from any political rights (outside the Cape Colony, where they had long benefited, in a very limited way, from its colour-blind franchise) was built into every attempt at peace negotiations during the war and formed Article 8 of the Vereeniging peace settlement in May 1902. There, the question of granting them the franchise was left “until after” the achievement of self-government. This effectively made their exclusion permanent.

VII

The Peace Settlement at Vereeniging

In its last phase, this was no “gentleman’s war” but a ruthless imperial, guerrilla and civil war that devastated the country and led to accusations in Britain that it was being fought with “methods of barbarism”. In June 1900 the British government had declared that it would settle for nothing less than “unconditional surrender”, but peace negotiations were attempted and failed in February 1901 on terms not very dissimilar to those which were accepted after negotiations at Vereeniging on May 31, 1902. By early 1902, many of the Boer commandos were in a desperate state, short of horses and restricted to a few areas. Defections were increasing sharply. By the end of the war, a fifth of those Boers who were still fighting were fighting on the British side. After two weeks of painful discussion among the 60 Boer delegates at Vereeniging, 56 voted in favour and 4 against the terms of a peace settlement, which meant accepting the annexation of the two republics as British colonies (with the promise of a rapid advance to self-government within the British Empire) and recognition of the British monarch as their sovereign.

The terms were generous by the standards of the day. No war indemnity was ever imposed on the defeated republics; instead, the British offered the sum of £3 million (which later increased to more like £35 million) towards the reconstruction of the devastated country. There was an amnesty for those Cape Afrikaners (except the leaders) who had committed treason by rebelling against British rule; the promise of a speedy return for the many Boer prisoners-of-war in British camps overseas; and an undertaking that all those who had surrendered would retain their property.

VIII

The Significance of the War

Who won the South African War? The British Army (which was assisted by over 30,000 volunteer troops from various parts of the Empire, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; see Anzac: Early Involvements) certainly defeated the Boers militarily, and the two republics were annexed as British colonies. All Afrikaners came under British rule and the construction of South Africa as a modern state began under British auspices. Yet within six years, self-government had been restored and Boer majority governments were elected in both the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony. By 1910, a Union of the four states of South Africa had been established that was Boer-initiated and Boer-led. Boer defeat in the South African War and the experience of British imperialism—before, during, and after that war—made a crucial contribution to the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, which dominated the politics of South Africa for much of the 20th century.

Far more deaths occurred, even among the combatants, from disease than from actual combat, and the deaths of civilians dwarfed those of combatants. Out of a total of almost 450,000 British and Empire troops put into the field during the war, there were 22,000 deaths, two thirds of them from disease. For the Boer societies of the two republics—numbering fewer than 200,000 people—their losses and the extinction of their independence as states represented a national trauma. More than 7,000 Boer commandos were killed and total deaths, including those of the mainly women and children who died in the concentration camps, amounted to 34,000 (that is more than 10 per cent of the Boer population). The full extent of losses among the African population will probably never be known.

For Britain, this war was the biggest, costliest, and most humiliating war fought during the century of its imperial pre-eminence between 1815 and 1914. It involved over four times as many troops as the Crimean War and cost more than three times as much in money (about £430 million). As Rudyard Kipling said, this war had taught the British “no end of a lesson” and helped to prick the bubble of jingoistic British imperialism and War Office complacency. Zulu, Mahdist, Asante, and Afghan wars had led the British to think of colonial wars as “small wars”, in distant places, against exotic, non-European opponents who were poorly armed and easily defeated. Such wars were no preparation for the sort of war the British found themselves fighting in South Africa.

After the war, Secretary of State for War Richard Haldane instituted reforms that insured British forces were less ill-prepared than they might otherwise have been at the outbreak of World War I. But the central tactical lesson of the South African War eluded the British. It was not so much the crack marksmanship of the Boers, with their modern rifles, nor the blunders of British generals, which were responsible for those early British reverses in 1899. It was the fact that the smokeless, long-range, high-velocity bullet from a magazine rifle or machine-gun had, in combination with the trench, decisively tilted the balance of warfare in favour of defence. That lesson had to be learned again, in the bloody stalemates of the Western Front.