The British Empire and the Boer Concentration Camps

The British use of concentration camps during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) remains one of the most controversial episodes in the history of the British Empire. Set up to hold Boer civilians displaced by the British scorched-earth strategy against Boer guerrillas, the camps became associated with appalling mortality — particularly among children — and a humanitarian scandal that helped topple the Conservative government in 1906. The episode also marked an early 20th-century inflection point in imperial violence, leaving a legacy that prefigured, and was directly referenced in, the propaganda of later twentieth-century conflicts.

The most striking fact about the camps is the racial asymmetry of mortality. The official British figures record 27,927 Boer deaths (of whom 26,370 were women and children); the historians of the African side, exemplified in the work of Peter Warwick, have shown that perhaps 14,000 Black Africans died in 64 separate camps. The African deaths were a smaller political scandal in 1901 than the Boer deaths, and they remain a smaller scandal in 2002; the camps are still, in the British popular memory, “the Boer War concentration camps.”

The Scorched-Earth Strategy

The conventional phase of the Second Boer War ended with the British capture of the Boer capitals in mid-1900, but the Boers simply shifted to guerrilla warfare. The new British commander, Lord Kitchener, responded with a sweeping counter-insurgency policy. Homesteads were destroyed, livestock killed or confiscated, crops burned, and women and children removed from the land. By the war’s end some 30,000 Boer farmsteads had been razed. The camps were, in Kitchener’s words, “a necessary evil” to prevent displaced civilians from re-supplying the commandos.

The Establishment of the Camps

The first camps were hastily set up in 1900 as tented holding centres for refugees, initially Boer prisoners of war and displaced persons. As the scorched-earth campaign expanded in 1901, the camp population swelled to a peak of about 120,000 white Boers in 45 main camps at the peak, and roughly 100,000 Black Africans in over 60 separate camps. The white camps were administered by the Army; the black camps, where mortality was even higher, were run by civilian authorities and have been less well remembered. A later inquiry, the South African Native Affairs Commission, documented their neglect.

Conditions and Mortality

The early camps, particularly those established in 1901, were overcrowded, underfunded, and disease-ridden. Inadequate shelter, contaminated water, and a lack of soap, bedding, and medical care allowed measles, typhoid, and especially diarrhoea to spread with devastating effect. Between October 1901 and May 1902, roughly 27,927 Boers died in the camps — about 4,177 of them children under five. The peak mortality of 1,006 deaths in a single week was reached in late January 1902. The total mortality, including Black Africans, is estimated at more than 28,000.

Emily Hobhouse and the Humanitarian Campaign

The British humanitarian Emily Hobhouse, who toured the camps in early 1901 at her own expense, was the first outsider to publicise conditions inside them. Her reports, published in the Manchester Guardian and circulated to Liberal politicians, described emaciated children, untreated enteric fever, and ration levels well below subsistence: “I was, at the time, hardly able to realise the situation. It was not so much what I saw, but what I did not see, that produced the shock.” Hobhouse was expelled from South Africa in June 1901, but her campaign was taken up by figures such as Lloyd George, who denounced the camps from the back benches.

The political pressure led the government to appoint the Fawcett Commission, led by the suffragist Millicent Fawcett, in mid-1901. The Commission’s findings largely confirmed Hobhouse’s account, and forced substantial improvements: rations were increased, hospitals expanded, and tented camps replaced with more permanent structures. Mortality fell sharply in the second half of 1901 and continued to fall in 1902, but only after thousands had already died.

The Political Fallout

The camps became a domestic political issue. The Liberal opposition, alongside radical papers like the Morning Leader and the Manchester Guardian, hammered the government. After Arthur Balfour’s Unionist Party won the “Khaki election” of 1900 on a wave of wartime patriotism, it lost to the Liberals in the 1906 general election. The Conservative defeat was a culmination of issues, but the camps were central to the shift in public mood.

The Camps and the History of Total War

The Boers were the first civilian population in modern warfare to be systematically interned, and the British high command in South Africa coined the term “concentration camp” for the practice. The episode was directly cited by later critics of British imperial policy, including Indian nationalists in the early twentieth century and anti-colonial movements in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising. The Afrikaner community has long remembered the camps as a foundational trauma. The Vrouemonument in Bloemfontein, unveiled in 1913, has long been the principal Afrikaner memorial. In 1998, at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, President Nelson Mandela made a landmark statement of regret for the suffering of Boer women and children in the camps.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the camps was, for a long time, dominated by the British liberal and feminist accounts of the early twentieth century — the work of the Fawcett Commission, the reports of Emily Hobhouse, and the more recent writing of the South African historians of the Afrikaner national trauma. The post-independence revisionist literature, led by Peter Warwick’s Black People and the South African War, 1899–1902 (1983) and the more recent work of Elizabeth van Heyningen and the contributors to The Anglo-Boer War: A Reappraisal, has produced a more critical picture, in which the African deaths are treated as part of the same system. The current debate, exemplified in the writing of the contributors to the South African Historical Journal, is over how far the British concentration camp system should be read as a military expedient that went wrong and how far it should be treated as a structural feature of British counter-insurgency in the colonial period.

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