Britain’s inglorious tactics during the Boer war

SIR – Writing about a memorial for soldiers in the South African War of 1899-1902, Robert Tombs (Comment, August 7) suggests that the war against the Boers was humanitarian in intent.

This strains credulity. His reference to the “severe impact on Boer civilians” avoids the fact that the British Army employed devastating scorched-earth tactics, including concentration camps, which amounted to a war on women and children – and blacks. Henry Campbell-bannerman famously called these “methods of barbarism”.

Professor Tombs dismisses the European volunteers who fought with the Boers as “extreme nationalists”; mostly they were motivated by principled opposition to the British empire at its jingoistic height. Far from being the aggressors, the Boers launched surprise attacks only after sustained pressure orchestrated by high commissioner Alfred Milner, and following a botched attempt sponsored by Cecil Rhodes to overthrow Paul Kruger’s government in 1895-6.

Professor Tombs omits to mention the large body of historical opinion which holds that the real motivation of mining magnates like Rhodes was to gain control of the huge gold wealth of the Transvaal. His argument that Afrikaners went on to establish apartheid against Britain’s protective embrace neglects the fact that members of Milner’s “Kindergarten” were instrumental in designing racial segregation, apartheid’s forerunner.

Many leading Africans (and Mahatma Gandhi) supported the British cause, hoping that their loyalty would be rewarded by the retention and extension of franchise and citizenship rights. Yet Britain reneged on its promises and allowed the Union of South Africa to be constituted in 1910 as a white supremacist state.

Professor Tombs is proud to be on a government advisory panel helping to navigate the “minefield” of public memorials and statues. He shows himself here to be anything but a reliable or balanced guide. Saul Dubow

Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History

Cambridge University