Revisit the Boer War
DEAR EDITOR — Pauline Morris (Anglo-Boer war myth, Letters, October 1) wants to “open up a critical debate on the realities of the Boer War concentration camps” as part of the wider “de-mythologising” of South African history.
I can only say: “Bring it on!” Let us open the archives and reread the tens of thousands of letters and other evidence that have been gathering dust for over a hundred years.
I recently visited the archives in Pretoria and was the first person ever to peruse some of the files related to the barbaric destruction Britain inflicted on every farm and household in the Transvaal, and especially in the Free State. Some, but not all, victims received derisory compensation for their losses after the war.
To some extent, Dr Elma Ross (British were terrorists, Letters, October 2) has already revealed the true nature of the camps by describing her own family history. Britain was a signatory to the Hague Convention of 1899, a forerunner of the Geneva Conventions prohibiting war and atrocities on civilians.
The Hague Convention entered into force on September 4 1900, just in time to apply to the form of “total war” that Kitchener and Roberts waged upon the entire Boer population during the second phase of the war.
There can be no doubt that, were it not for the policy of “reconciliation between the two white races”, culminating in Union in 1910, Britain would have been prosecuted for war crimes under the Hague Convention. Some Afrikaner groups believe that Britain could still be prosecuted even today. At the very least Britain should be made to acknowledge its war crimes, similar to demands by former French president Jacques Chirac that Turkey should “recognise its past” and the Armenian genocide (1915-23) before being able to join the European Union.
Whatever the sophistries British historians and their colleagues at jingoist institutions like the University of Cape Town have thought up these days, it cannot be denied the camps formed part of a military operation. That they were partly successful in breaking Boer resolve to defend their sovereignty is also widely acknowledged.
The jingoist case for Afrikaner women and children “dying due to ignorance and lack of hygiene” seems to rest upon the wider English belief (or myth?) that pioneer Afrikaners in the 19th century were not, as Prof Elizabeth van Heyningen puts it in one of her journal articles, “civilised Europeans” but “dirty African peasants”.
That these “dirty African peasants” were literate enough to write letters and diaries about their war and concentration camp experiences seems to contradict many a confident English stereotype. Further undermining this stereotype is that their “civilised” British captors found it necessary to destroy their pianos and other musical instruments while burning down their homes,
Perhaps we should also inquire about the hygienic habits of Johannesburg’s much-admired “uitlander” population in the 1890s. This was the time an outbreak of syphilis relating to widespread prostitution presented a major public health problem to Paul Kruger’s republican government.