03/06/2026
British concentration camps in the South African War operated from September 1900 to 1902, across the Transvaal, Orange Free State, Natal and Cape Colony.
**Origins and policy**
After occupying Bloemfontein on 13 March 1900, Lord Roberts invited Boers to sign neutrality oaths; about 20,000 did so. When guerrilla attacks continued, Roberts issued a proclamation on 16 June 1900 that the nearest homestead would be burnt for every railway attack, extended in September to a 16 km radius with livestock killed and crops destroyed. The first two refugee camps were opened at Bloemfontein and Pretoria in September 1900 to house oath-takers. Lord Kitchener arrived as chief of staff in December 1899 and succeeded Roberts as commander in November 1900, intensifying the burning until about 30,000 Boer homesteads were razed. From early March 1901 Kitchener ordered systematic drives to sweep the country bare of livestock, women and children who could sustain commandos
**Scale and who was held**
Authorities built 45 tented camps for Boers and 64 camps recorded for Black Africans (Pretorius counts 66). About 154,000 people were interned in total. By July 1901 returns listed 93,940 white Boers and 24,457 Black Africans in camps; by May 1902 Black internees were recorded at 115,700. The vast majority were women and children. Families of men still fighting were classed as "undesirables", forcibly moved on ox wagons and open trucks, given smaller rations than families of surrendered burghers, and eventually outnumbered protected families by 7 to 3
**Conditions and deaths**
Camps were overcrowded from the outset, with poor hygiene, bad sanitation, meagre food and unreliable supply lines. Inadequate shelter and diet led to malnutrition and endemic measles, typhoid and dysentery. Emily Hobhouse visited in January 1901 and published her report in June 1901; the government-appointed Fawcett Commission confirmed her findings between August and December 1901. After civil administration took over from the military in November 1901, the white annual death rate fell from a peak of 344 per 1,000 in October 1901 to 69 per 1,000 in February 1902. Post-war returns record 27,927 white Boer deaths, of whom 24,074 were children under 16, about one in four white inmates. For Black camps, official returns give a minimum of 14,154 deaths, about 12 percent of those interned, with 81 percent of recorded fatalities being children; records for at least 107,000 Black internees were incomplete. Other historians, citing the same registers, give higher totals of 28,000 white and 20,000 Black deaths
**Documented reasons for internment**
British documents and contemporary reports state three purposes, not protection. First, to deny Boer commandos food and shelter by removing the civilian population that supported guerrilla warfare. Second, to pressure fighters to surrender by interning their families. Third, for Black Africans, to clear them from land so Boers could not obtain supplies, and to make Black men available as labourers on mines. These aims were stated in proclamations and in the evidence given to Parliament in 1901
They are remembered very differently depending on where you stand — in South Africa they are built into the landscape, in Britain they are mostly a footnote.
**South Africa — monuments you can still visit**
- The anchor is the **National Women's Monument** in Bloemfontein, opened 16 December 1913. Designed by Frans Soff and Anton van Wouw, it was dedicated to Boer women and children held in concentration camps during the Second Boer War, and today is listed as commemorating roughly 27,000 dead. The central bronze group was sketched by Emily Hobhouse from what she saw at Springfontein camp on 15 May 1901. About 20,000 people attended the unveiling; thirteen years later Hobhouse's ashes were placed at its foot, alongside the graves of Christiaan de Wet and President Martinus Steyn and his wife.
- The monument sits on the grounds of the **Anglo-Boer War Museum**, the only museum in the world dedicated to the 1899-1902 war. It still holds camp artifacts, dioramas and the Hobhouse collection.
- Beyond Bloemfontein, the South African War Memorials project documents dozens of camp cemeteries and **Gedenktuin** (memorial gardens) strung along old railway lines in the Free State and Transvaal, where families were offloaded. Commemoration began immediately after 1902, often as small "mothers' memorials" to children who died in epidemics.
That memory was quickly politicized. From the 1910s through the 1970s-80s, Afrikaner nationalist organizations used the camp dead as "ideological armoury." The nationalist state later rebuilt many sites as formal Gedenktuin, sometimes obliterating the original camp cemeteries in the process. The Women's Monument was hugely popular early on, but was later overshadowed by the Voortrekker Monument unveiled in Pretoria on 16 December 1949, a year after the National Party's 1948 election win.
Today school groups still make the annual 10 km walk from Oranje Meisieskool to the monument to lay wreaths at Steyn's grave.
**The Black camps — long neglected, now being reclaimed**
For most of the 20th century the separate Black camps had no state maintenance. Researchers note that Black cemeteries at places like Aliwal North and Brandfort took the same form as white ones but were left to local communities, with no funded infrastructure. Since 1994, post-apartheid heritage work has begun to map these sites. The Edinburgh-based memorials survey describes this as "black memorialisation and counter-memorialisation," part of a broader Liberation Heritage Project that treats commemoration as political as well as personal. Finding the locations remains difficult because records were sparse.
**Britain — remembered through a whistleblower, not a monument**
There is no national memorial in the UK to the camp victims. British public memory, when it surfaces, comes through Emily Hobhouse. She compiled a 40-page report in 1901, forced a government commission, and is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives. At home she was branded unpatriotic — the press called her a "peace crank," and Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain dismissed her as a "hysterical spinster of mature age." She never fully recovered her reputation in Britain.
In South Africa the contrast was stark: she was invited to help design the Women's Monument, and when she died in London in 1926 she was given a state funeral in South Africa, the first and only one for a foreign woman, with her ashes placed behind the monument's central figures.
British military memorials from the war do exist — plaques and regimental monuments across the UK — but they commemorate soldiers, many of whom themselves died of the same camp diseases because commanders did not inoculate troops to get them to the front faster.
**How historians talk about them now**
- In South African public history the camps are taught as a foundational trauma for Afrikaners, and increasingly as a shared trauma that included at least 14,154 Black deaths (with estimates up to 20,000).
- In academic work, Elizabeth van Heyningen's social history (the first comprehensive study in 50 years) and ongoing UCT databases stress poverty, medical neglect and incomplete records rather than a simple victimhood narrative.
- In popular British history, the camps reappear mainly in books linking 1900-1902 to later British internment, from Kenya to Northern Ireland, as the origin of the modern term "concentration camp."
So today: in Bloemfontein you can walk around a 35-metre obelisk and read children's names; in former camp towns you find fenced Gedenktuin maintained by local heritage groups; in Black communities you find oral memory and newly marked graves; and in Britain you mostly find Hobhouse's story retold on podcasts — a reminder that the same event lives as national martyrdom in one country and as an uncomfortable imperial footnote in another.
