Scorched Earth and Concentration Camps in South Africa
The British Empire liked to present itself to the world as the champion of civilization, chivalry, and the protector of innocents. So much so, when a dictator Cromwell took over England, he proclaimed him as Lord Protector.
In ground reality the moral outrage of British is strictly reserved for its own kind and its imperial interest. It sheds proverbial crocodile tears on humans rights for others but imbibes nothing in its military doctrine.
In 1857, during the Indian War of Independence, when British women and children were killed at Bibighar in Kanpur, the British state and media cried hoarse to the world. They manufactured an international moral panic. They used those deaths to justify horrific reprisals by hanging entire villages along the road from Kanpur to Allahabad. They also blew freedom fighters from the mouths of cannons. As if it was not enough, they branded an entire nation as “savages.”
Yet, barely four decades later in South Africa, when the exact same British Empire faced guerrilla resistance from Boer farmers, Lord Kitchener deliberately swept over 115,000 women and children into barbed-wire concentration camps. Over 22,000 children were starved to death under British watch. There were no tears, no moral outrage, and no international campaigns from London.
This double standard connects directly to the present. Today, Western media and politicians still cry hoarse when Western lives are lost, demanding immediate global condemnation. But when post-colonial or non-Western civilians are killed, starved, or displaced by state power, the same media outlets dismiss it as “collateral damage,” “administrative necessity,” or “complex geopolitical reality.”
The imperial pen decides when a killed woman or child counts as a human being.
Greed for Gold and Diamonds
Until the mid-19th century, Southern Africa was viewed by Britain mainly as a strategic naval waypoint on the route to India. That changed rapidly with two massive discoveries:
- 1867: Diamonds were discovered at Kimberley.
- 1886: The world’s largest gold deposits were discovered in the Witwatersrand region of Johannesburg, inside the independent Boer Republic of the Transvaal.
British imperialists, led by figures like Cecil Rhodes, could not tolerate independent republics sitting on top of the richest goldfields on earth. After imperial intrigue and the illegal Jameson Raid of 1895 failed to overthrow the Boer government, Britain provoked full-scale war. They named this Gold War as Second Boer War. It began in October 1899.
Total War Against Civilians
The British military expected a swift victory. They presumed that they are fighting rustic Dutch-descended farmers. Instead, the Boer burghers utilized their knowledge of the terrain to wage an effective guerrilla war. British supply lines were disrupted and embarrassing defeats were inflicted on the imperial army.
Unable to defeat the guerrilla fighters in direct combat, the British commander, Lord Kitchener, initiated a barbaric policy. He gave it a fancy name of total war. If you cannot catch the soldier, destroy his home, starve his children, and turn his land into a desert.
The British army executed a systematic Scorched Earth Policy:
- Over 30,000 Boer farmsteads were burned to the ground.
- Entire towns, crops, and granaries were destroyed.
- Livestock was slaughtered en masse, and wells were poisoned or sealed.
The Invention of Mass Concentration Camps
With their homes in ashes and food sources destroyed, tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly civilians were stranded in the open countryside. Kitchener’s solution was to sweep them up at gunpoint and force them into enclosed, barbed-wire camps.
This was the birth of modern mass concentration camps. Decades before Hitler was born.
Over 115,000 Boer civilians (mostly women and children) were interned across more than 40 camps. Simultaneously, the British established separate, even harsher concentration camps for over 115,000 Black Africans who worked the land or served as farm laborers.
The conditions inside these camps were negligently or deliberately lethal:
- Rations were kept at starvation levels. Families of active Boer guerrillas were intentionally given reduced food rations as punishment.
- Tents were overcrowded, unheated, and lacked basic bedding.
- Sanitation was grossly inadequate, leading to rampant outbreaks of typhoid, measles, dysentery, and pneumonia.
The human toll was horrific. Over 27,927 Boer women and children died in the camps. This was more than 24 percent of the entire inmate population. Of those who died, over 22,000 were children under the age of 16. In separate camps, more than 20,000 Black Africans perished under even worse conditions with minimal record-keeping.
It was a carnage without firing a bullet.
Discrediting the Witness: Emily Hobhouse
When British welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse visited the South African camps in 1900–1901, she was horrified by what she witnessed. Starving children were covered in flies. They were slowly dying of preventable diseases on bare dirt floors. She returned to England and published a devastating report exposing the truth.
The official British response matched the playbook seen throughout this series: deny, discredit, and attack the messenger.
War Secretary St John Brodrick accused Hobhouse of emotional exaggeration and labeled her a sympathizer with the enemy. Major British media outlets attacked her patriotism. But the moral outrage generated by her report forced the government to appoint an official committee of women, led by Millicent Fawcett (the Fawcett Commission). The commission corroborated Hobhouse’s findings in full, confirming the catastrophic death rates and forcing emergency administrative reforms.
The Blueprint for Apartheid
After winning the war through civilian starvation, Britain established the Union of South Africa in 1910. To appease the defeated Boer population and secure British mining interests, the British government drafted a constitution that stripped political rights from the Black African majority.
British imperial policy laid the legal and economic groundwork for apartheid. The Natives Land Act of 1913, allocated 87% of South Africa’s land to the white minority. A first step towards the formal system of Apartheid adapted decades later.
Conclusion
The Boer War concentration camps demonstrated once again that British civilization had no bottom floor when its power was challenged. When British armies could not win on the battlefield, they turned their weapons against defenseless women and children in concentration camps.
When military honor failed, state barbarism took over.
In the next chapter, we shall examine how identical methods of dispossession and violence were deployed across Caribbean Sea.
References:
-
Hobhouse, Emily. Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies. Friars, London, 1901. (The original investigative report exposing British concentration camp conditions in South Africa).
-
Pakenham, Thomas. The Boer War. Jonathan Cape / Random House, 1979. ISBN: 978-0394427423. (The definitive historical study detailing Kitchener’s scorched-earth policy, farm burning, and concentration camp mortality).
-
Spies, S.B. Methods of Barbarism? Roberts and Kitchener and the Civilians in the Boer Republics, January 1900 – May 1902. Human & Rousseau, 1977. ISBN: 978-0798107570. (Academic analysis of British military decisions targeting civilian populations).
-
War Office Records, UK. Report of the Committee of Ladies on the Concentration Camps in South Africa (Fawcett Commission Report). HMSO, Cd. 893, London, 1902. (Official British parliamentary paper confirming Emily Hobhouse’s findings).