The camps originally established by the army remained under Kitchener’s control until 1 March 1901 when those in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal passed over to civil control under Milner. On 1 November 1901 all were turned over to the civil government. The army treated the inmates as though they were so many soldiers. The rations issued were those served out to regular soldiers in garrison, but what the uncomplaining Tommy meekly accepted the Boer civilians complained of bitterly—and with reason. After the war Kitchener said, “I consider that the soldier was better fed than in any previous campaign,”13 but civilian politicians had not realized how bad the food was they served to their soldiers. For the first time it occurred to those in authority that the rations of the British army were execrable.
People in institutions, particularly when they have little to do, always complain of the food, even when it is good. In the concentration camps the food was neither good nor plentiful, and certainly it did not make for a balanced diet. Still, no one died of starvation. The amount of food issued varied somewhat from camp to camp: in the Transvaal and in Natal the meat ration was usually four pounds per adult each week; in the Orange Free State it was three and a half pounds. When Milner took charge of the camps he increased the ration and took pains to see that the diet was more varied.
Discrimination in the issue of food-first-class rations for the families of hands-uppers or men who worked and second-class rations for the families of fighting burghers or men who refused to work—created cries of protest even from supporters of the government in Britain, and there were questions in the House of Commons. It did not seem right that women and children should be given less or inferior food because their men were fighting. The practice was discontinued in the Transvaal on 27 February 1901 and in the Orange Free State nine days later.
Bad though the food was, particularly in the first months, it was not as bad as many Boers claimed. Nor were the rumours that flew from camp to camp true: it was said that ground glass was put in the food, there were “blue things,” poison, in the sugar, and fish hooks in the bully beef (most of which was processed in the United States). Many were afraid to eat the food they were issued. The only basis for any of these charges was that there were indeed sometimes “blue things” in the sugar, a harmless colouring agent used in processing sugar to make it white.
Miserable as they were, the women of the fighting burghers remained defiant. On President Steyn’s birthday a large number of women and children marched about one camp waving Transvaal and Free State flags and singing the volkslieds. Sometimes they saved up their rations and tried to smuggle food out to commandos on the veld. Kitchener, who regarded the back-veld Boers as “uncivilized Afrikaner savages with a thin white veneer,” wrote to St. John Broderick: “The Boer woman in the refugee camps who slaps her great protruding belly at you and shouts, ‘When all our men are gone these little khakis will fight you,’ is a type of the savage produced by generations of wild lonely life.”
Kitchener wrote as though reporting an incident he had witnessed, but it must have been reported to him, for he never visited a concentration camp. Although the deaths of the women and children were the most poignant, the most tragic consequence of the war, Kitchener took no interest in the camps at all until he was forced to. And he was forced to take note of their conditions by a remarkable English spinster, Emily Hobhouse, who came to be called by Kitchener simply “that bloody woman.”
Emily Hobhouse (1860-1936) was born in the rectory of St. Ives, a village near Liskeard in eastern Cornwall, and spent the first thirty-five years of her life there. Her mother died when she was nineteen, and her father, the Reverend Reginald Hobhouse, became a chronic invalid. Emily spent her youth nursing her domineering father and busying herself obediently with parish affairs. When she fell in love with a farmer’s son her father thought the match unsuitable; the lovers parted and the young man went to America. When she was thirty-five her father died, and without hesitation Emily left the village in which she had lived all her life. She never returned.
With the intention of doing missionary work, she went, strangely enough, to Virginia, Minnesota, a rough, raw mining town in the Masabi iron range. If she was shocked by her new surroundings, it was not for long; she took the people as she found them: “Four houses of ill-fame are looked on as a necessity which alone makes it possible for respectable women to walk abroad.” Although she accepted the miners’ sexual customs, their drinking habits were something else and she launched a temperance campaign. Could an archdeacon’s daughter in her late thirties find happiness in a Minnesota mining town? She tried. For two years she was engaged to J. C. Jackson, the lean and handsome mayor of the town who also ran a general store.
In 1897 Jackson fell into financial difficulties and left town in some haste for Mexico, where Emily joined him. There she lost what money she had in a speculative venture probably suggested by Jackson. When her money vanished so did Jackson. She returned to England. Exit all notions of romantic love.
For a while Emily worked for the Women’s Industrial Council. Then came the Boer War. In it Emily Hobhouse found a mission that was to make her a heroine in the eyes of Afrikaners for all time. Her first involvement was with the South African Women and Children’s Distress Fund, for which she was the chief fund-raiser; soon after she began to work with the South African Conciliation Committee. Then she decided to go to South Africa and see conditions for herself. On 7 December 1900 she sailed, second class, for Cape Town. There she heard for the first time of the existence of the concentration camps and contrived to obtain an interview with Milner, who finally consented, reluctantly, to allow her to visit the camps and to distribute food and clothing paid for from the monies she had raised for the Distress Fund. On the afternoon of 24 January 1901 she arrived on a military train at Bloemfontein with a letter of introduction to General George Pretyman, military governor of the Orange River Colony, who greeted her cordially, gave her a permanent pass to visit the camp at Bloemfontein, introduced her to the camp superintendent, and politely told her that he would be interested in any comments she might have after her visit. He could hardly have realized the consequences.
Emily did not merely tour the camp, she examined it minutely, asked questions, talked with the women, listened with a ready sympathy that drew from them their stories. While no one can be sure which histories she first heard, those now known are doubtless similar enough to give an idea of the sufferings revealed to her.
Mrs. Lillian du Preez, née Pienaar, was a little girl of six when the British came to her parents’ farm. Her father, Johannes, and her two eldest brothers were on commando. Her mother, Christina, was on the farm alone with five of her children. The soldiers allowed them to take some clothes, bedding, and small articles and then they were loaded onto a horse-drawn trolley and taken away. They travelled all afternoon across the veld, being joined by wagon loads of other women and children guarded by soldiers. That night the wagons were drawn into a circle and they watched the soldiers kill their poultry and cook the fowls over fires. No one offered them anything. The next day they were given their only food, a loaf of bread, and eventually they reached the Standerton concentration camp. While sitting with her confused and frightened children, waiting for a bell tent to be erected, Christina asked another woman if it was possible to get anything to eat. “Our tears are our sustenance,” was the reply.14
There were touching stories of children being parted from their pets, taken or slaughtered by the soldiers. At one farm where the women and children fled at the approach of the troops, a child pinned a note to the door: “Please feed my chickens and turkeys.” Little Lillian Pienaar had rescued and kept with her a lame chicken, a pet she nursed and cared for. Not long after her arrival at Standerton, a woman came to her mother begging for her grandfather who was ill and hungry; could she have the chicken? Christina Pienaar persuaded her little girl to “give it to the sick old man, as it would die in any case.” Lillian handed over her pet; nearly sev
enty-five years later she remembered: “My first sacrifice, but it broke my heart to part from that lame chicken.”15
When the soldiers came for Alida Badenhorst they gave her fifteen minutes to collect what she could, but “I was so crushed,” she said, “I did not know what I was doing, and they kept saying, ‘quick, quick,’ so I gathered a few necessities together, and thus was driven forth from my home.”16
Catherine Labuschagne had buried her baby only a week before the British came to her farm. Suspecting a buried arms cache, the soldiers dug open the grave.
On 11 May 1901 Dr. T. N. Leslie wrote in his diary:
A large column under Major Weston crossed the river [Vaal] with guns, prisoners and women and children.... the poor women and children were ragged and unkempt, and looked half-starved.... They wore a haunted look and their fragile bodies, worn down with the long privations and hardships they had shared with the men, were in striking contrast to the old-time buxom Boer vrow whose size and capacity was so long a byword throughout South Africa.17
The war had become a bitter experience indeed for some. One woman said to Leslie: “What is the independence of the country to me when my man is dead?”
Emily Hobhouse was a woman of strong passions, a sharp sense of righteous indignation with a compulsion to help underdogs, the disadvantaged, and the unpopular. All of the accumulated force of the suppressed rebellion of her first thirty-five years under her stern-willed father seems to have erupted when she saw other women and their children paying a male-exacted price for the determination of their men to fight. One wonders how her father managed to keep her bridled, for from this time on no other man ever succeeded in suppressing her except by brute force. She was intelligent, persuasive, energetic, determined, and resourceful; no hardship, no indignity, no sense of propriety, no criticism prevented her from carrying out what she set her mind to do. British officialdom, military and civil, had unwittingly allowed a most formidable enemy to penetrate its lines and view its most disgraceful example of ineptness. A male relative, a member of Parliament, was asked later if he was related to “the Miss Hobhouse”; when he told Emily she said, “I thought I was really that Miss Hobhouse.”
The conditions of the women and children might well have remained largely unknown and the disaster might have been of greater magnitude had it not been for the light of publicity thrown on the camps. This light was flicked on in a dramatic fashion by Miss Hobhouse.
Only two days after she had visited the Bloemfontein camp she wrote to the Distress Committee at home:
I call this camp system wholesale cruelty. It can never be wiped out from the memories of the people. It presses hardest on the children. They droop in the terrible heat.... If only the English people would try to exercise a little imagination and picture the whole miserable scene. Entire villages and districts rooted up and dumped in a strange bare place. To keep these camps going is murder for the children. Of course by judicious management they could be improved; but do what you will, you can’t undo the thing itself.18
She had found conditions worse than she had imagined. Both soap and water were scarce; many were sleeping on the bare ground, and swarms of flies buzzing through the heat and filth added to the misery. In one tent she entered, a puff adder, common in South Africa, crawled out of hiding. The Boer women sensibly fled; Emily, typically, stayed and flailed away at it with her parasol.
In her recommendations to General Pretyman she included a want list: a boiler large enough to boil all the drinking water, a wash house with soap and running water, better medical equipment, more nurses, and more clothing, particularly for the children. In a letter home she wrote: “The authorities are at their wits end, and have no more idea how to cope with the one difficulty of providing clothes for the people than the man in the moon. Crass male ignorance, stupidity, helplessness and muddling. I rub as much salt into the sore places of their minds as I possibly can because it is good for them.”19 General Pretyman must at this point have had at least an inkling of the character of the extraordinary woman who had suddenly appeared on his horizon.
Emily was impressed by the Boer women she met: “simple ... calm and composed in manner, but always brimming over with hospitable impulses. They possess shrewdness and mother-wit in abundance, and they are wrapped in suspicion like a coat of mail.” The Bloemfontein camp was but one of many; Emily wanted to see others, was determined to do so, and did. But a lone Englishwoman travelling about the war-torn country was regarded by the military authorities as an eccentric, and she found that being a woman was a handicap: “I should get on better,” she told those at home, “if I were shaped like a truck and ran on wheels.”
At Springfontein she sat on the stoep of a farmhouse with three boxes of clothes. The women were brought to her, and she heard their stories and dispensed what she had; even the boxes themselves were coveted, for wood was scarce. To the Distress Committee she wrote:
But it is interesting to note the various ways in which the great common trouble is met by divers characters. Some are scared, some paralysed and unable to realize their loss, some are dissolved in tears; some, mute and dry-eyed, seem only able to think of the bleak, penniless future; and some are glowing with pride at being prisoners for their country’s sake.
A few bare women had made petticoats out of the brown rough blankets....
I have been giving some material for women to make their own boys’ clothing, but we are stopped by the utter famine of cotton or thread. Scissors are handed round from tent to tent; thimbles are very few. Everything here is so scarce....
The crying need in this camp is fuel. Wood there is none....
I just want to say, while it’s on my mind, that the blouses sent from England, and supposed to be full grown, are only useful here for girls of twelve to fourteen or so—much too small for the well developed Boer maiden, who is really a fine creature.20
From camp to camp she went, discovering their inadequacies and complaining of them in her letters home and to the authorities in South Africa. At Norval’s Pont, however, she found a well-run camp; the tents were neatly arranged, there was some furniture in them—even some beds and mattresses—a tennis court had been laid out and a school started. Emily suggested that Mr. Cole Brown, the camp superintendent, be sent to other camps to show how things ought to be done.
In many of the camps the inadequacies were beyond the powers of the superintendents to remedy. When Emily first visited Springfontein in February the camp held 500; by April the superintendent was trying to cope with 3,000. It became a frequent occurrence for a camp superintendent, warned by a telegram to expect several hundred people by a certain date in the near future, to find that no provision had been made to supply him with additional tents, food, and medical supplies.
Emily was horrified by the number of sick she found and by the mortality rates. In her letters home she described in vivid detail the sights she had seen:
Next, a girl of twenty-four lay dying on a stretcher. Her father, a big gentle Boer, kneeling beside her, while in the next tent his wife was watching a child of six also dying, and one of about five also drooping. Already this couple had lost three children in the hospital, and so would not let those go, though I begged hard to take them out of the hot tent. “We must watch these ourselves,” they said.21
Although she compared the sickness and mortality rates with the “Black Death and the Great Plague,” they were not nearly as bad as they were to become. She had returned to England before these rates reached their height. No one wanted thousands of children to die in the white tents of the concentration camps. But die they did—of measles, typhoid, dysentery, pneumonia, scarlet fever, influenza, bronchitis, whooping cough, diphtheria, and malaria.
At the time there was much finger pointing, and there has been much since, by those who would fasten on one side or the other the entire guilt for this slaughter of innocents. The burghers who refused to recognise the right of their fellow countrymen to be neutral, who left their
families in the hands of the enemy, acquiesced in the formation of the camps, and then attacked convoys and trains and destroyed railway tracks, cutting off supplies, even occasionally cutting off the water; those Boer women who through ignorance or fear or superstition unwittingly allowed many to die; the British authorities who formed the camps, forced the people into them, and then failed to provide proper facilities and necessities—all must bear their share of the blame. That the British authorities must bear the ultimate responsibility seems irrefutable, but that among these guilty parties the blame is not evenly distributed gives none cause for self-righteousness.
A close examination of the causes of the high mortality rates among the children in the camps can only lead one to echo Schiller: “Against stupidity the very gods themselves struggle in vain.”
“All superintendents agree that most of the mortality is amongst the new arrivals,” said W. K. Tucker, general superintendent of all the Transvaal camps, in October 1901 when the death rate was the highest.22 This was probably true and led many Englishmen to maintain that the women and children would have died anyway if they had not been brought in. Dr. Alexander Kay wrote in his diary: “It is my firm belief that if the camps had not been established, sickness and mortality would have been far greater on the farms and villages, and even in the towns.”23 Perhaps so, but the crowded and often unsanitary conditions of the camps, the failure of the authorities immediately to isolate new arrivals carrying infectious diseases, and the transportation of persons suffering from those diseases from one camp to another, spreading the infection, must also be taken into account.
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