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10/30/12
Kevin Karaki
The Boer War: Imperialism in Society:
A Historiographical Examination of the Concentration Camps of the Second South African War
Ending in 1902, The Second South African War is a war that lives in the shadow of the
Great War, or the War to End all Wars. Most of the people one meets on the street have never
heard of it. It still remains, however, a part of history. But like all history, there are different
perspectives. A Boer account differs greatly from that of any British account, with some facts
omitted, others embellished, and others fabricated altogether. When approaching a subject as
delicate as the internment camps of the Second Boer War, or “concentration camps”, as they
have been popularly labeled today, one is challenged to divorce emotion from fact.
Five authors in particular stand out in this paper. This first to be examined is Emily
Hobhouse, an English delegate to report on the Boer internment camps. Secondly, the famous
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was in South Africa at the time of the war as was the third author, Sir
Frederick Robert St. John. Both wrote their accounts of the war, as observed by them and
others. The last two authors are more modern ones, with Thomas Pakenham’s work published
in the late seventies, and Nicholas Cull‘s book published in only the past decade. While Cull’s
work is not exclusively historical in nature, he has much to say on the literature of the time. The
purpose of this paper is not to debate the veracity of any one account, but to merely follow the
reports of the ages in a historiographical sense. It seeks to examine the various authors and
their interpretations impartially, so that the readers may be more informed as to this tragic,
dark and largely-forgotten period of history.

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Emily Hobhouse, a delegate of the South African Women and Children's Distress Fund,
wrote her account of the visit in her book, “The Brunt of the War, and Where it Fell.” Her
account paints Holocaust-like pictures of men, women, and children starved, tortured, and
beaten: "In almost every case they (the women) have been taken from their comfortable homes
at a moment's notice, and not even allowed to take a morsel of food with them. They were, and
still are, thrust into open cattle trucks and wagons, while their own beautiful wagons, carts, and
vehicles are being burnt before their eyes, their homes set on fire, or blown up if too strongly
built. . . .” 1 The book consists largely of personal letters and correspondence of the various
families Hobhouse came in contact with, each with their own stories, all too familiar to the
scene of war. A little girl’s diary in the camps, or a woman’s letters to her sisters abroad, each
chapter is filled with heart-wrenching first-hand accounts of the hardships endured by the
Afrikaners. One woman writes to her sister in England, “I can say for a fact that there is not a
farmhouse fit for habitation in the Free State or Transvaal. They are nearly all burnt, and those
that are not burnt are deprived of all woodwork, such as window-frames, doors, and beams.
Wood is very scarce here.”2 Sickness, exposure, neglect, and malnutrition all plague the Boers of
Hobhouse’s book. There is a great human aspect to the work, as Hobhouse does not attempt to
create the material herself, but instead she merely assembles the journals, letters, and tales of
those living within the barbed wire of the camp. Camp life, as described by Hobhouse, sounds
eerily similar to the refugee camps in modern-day Africa: “I went immediately for the doctor,
but he had his hands so full that he could only come three days later; he took her to the hospital,
1Hobhouse, Emily,“The Brunt of the War, and Where it Fell” , (London: Methuen and Co.) 1902 pg. 177
2 Ibid,pg. 96

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where she died the same day.”3 The camps were overcrowded, under-supplied, and conditions
deteriorated rapidly.
Hobhouse’s account paints vivid pictures in the minds of her readers and the stories of
the mistreatment and hardships endured by these men and women wring tears from the eyes
of the sympathetic reader. However, hers is not the only account of the war. The famous Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlockian fame, also wrote an account of “The Great Boer War” in a
book of that title, covering the same events and times as Hobhouse. His report however, differs
greatly from hers. Doyle worked closely and was personal friends with many senior officers in
the Boer War. The result is that Doyle’s tome speaks from the British point of view, which is
altogether absent in Hobhouse’s work. Doyle claims “The reasons for this [the organization of
the camps], both military and humanitarian, were overwhelming. Experience had proved that
the men if left at liberty were liable to be persuaded or coerced by the fighting Boers into
breaking their parole and rejoining the commandos.”4 According to Doyle, the cause for building
these camps was for the holding of prisoners of war.
However, there was a humanitarian side-effect, borne out of the British regard for the
civilian population. “As to the women and children, they could not be left upon the farms in a
denuded country. That the Boers in the field had no doubts as to the good treatment of these
people was shown by the fact that they repeatedly left their families in the way of the columns
so that they might be conveyed to the camps.”5 In Doyle’s account, the problem was not, as
Hobhouse claims, a genocidal attempt of the British overlords to exterminate the native
3 Hobhouse, pg. 297
4 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, “The Great Boer War”, (New York: McClure,Philips,and Co.) 1902 pg. 362
5 Ibid,pg. 362

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population, but rather one of mere organization. Families of both rebel and loyalist alike were
inducted into the camps, either for their own protection or to keep a watchful eye upon them.
However, as in most relief efforts, the need was underestimated. The British, never anticipating
the size and scope of the displaced, could not cope with the masses that gathered in and
around the camps. “So great was the difficulty in providing the supplies for so large a number
that it became more and more evident that some at least of the camps must be moved down to
the sea coast.”6 The camps become less of a prison in Doyle’s account, and more of a
humanitarian refugee camp. The barbed wire becomes not a wall to keep prisoners in, but a
defense to keep marauders and wild animals out. The British guards assume the role, not of
overseers or slave drivers, but as protectors.
Doyle even makes mention of Emily Hobhouse’s account in his book, claiming it to be a
misinterpretation of the British government’s best intentions: “…consternation was caused in
England by a report of Miss Hobhouse, which called public attention to the very high rate of
mortality in some of these camps, but examination showed that this was not due to anything
insanitary in their situation or arrangement, but to a severe epidemic of measles which had
swept away a large number of the children.” 7 The horrors of Hobhouse’s tome are dismissed in
a single sentence of Doyle’s work. Doyle paints the British Empire, predictably, as a protector of
her children in a vast wilderness. Nationality and ethnic background come second-place in his
mind, as “the British flag under our best administrators will mean clean government, honest
6Doyle, pg. 363
7 Ibid,pg. 363

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laws, liberty and equality to all men. So long as it continues to do so, we shall hold South
Africa.”8
Sir Frederick Robert St. John takes Doyle’s picture of a British protectorate and pursues
it one step further in his work, “The Boers and the War.” Rather than being in the camps (as
Hobhouse was) or back in the rear headquarters (as Doyle was), St. John observed the war from
the front lines. He saw first-hand the atrocities of war and the devastation caused by the
guerrilla tactics of the Boers. In this work, the white farmers are not only rebels, but a menace
to everyone dwelling around them. He calls upon the British government’s responsibility to
protect even their non-white African subjects: “The Boers of the Transvaal have always shown
themselves to be raiders, and England has had much trouble to protect the native tribes from
their incursions.”9 In his account of the concentration camps, he states that the camps are a
magnanimous gesture of a civilized British people towards a barbarous and backwards Boer
culture. St. John grows more and more impatient with critics of the British Empire as his work
progresses, crescendo-ing into this tirade:
“We allow our enemies to fight with light hearts knowing that their
wives and familiesare living in comfort and safety. We have given these wives
and families the best provisions that it was possible to procure — better
provisions, indeed, than our own soldiers received. We found them medical
attention and medical comforts, and yet, certain of our fellow- countrymen at
home rise and accuse the soldiers who are fighting for them of barbarism!”10
He also points out the very true historical fact that Lord Kitchener (the commander of
the British forces) wrote to the Boer commanders offering to release their families from the
8 Doyle, pg. 425
9 Robert St. John, Sir Frederick, The Boers and the War, (Portsmouth : Charpentier & Co.) 1903,pg. 81
10 Ibid,pg. 91

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camps. “Steyn and De Wet [the Boer commanders] immediately sent a message to say that if
Lord Kitchener attempted to send the women and children back they would resist it by force of
arms [emphasis author’s].” 11 For Boer commanders, the obligation of caring for families was
not convenient to attempting guerilla warfare with a vastly larger British force. In St. John’s
eyes, this makes them the villains, not the Empire. The idea of the “gallant Boer” or “freedom
fighter” goes for very little in his book.
Though today the Boer conflict is almost forgotten outside of South Africa, at the time
of actual fighting (1880 -1902), the eye of the world was upon the Horn of Africa. The Boer War
(or the Second South African War, though the two are so closely related they could almost be
categorized as a single conflict) was unique in all the wars of the world up to that point. Prior to
this war, war correspondents and reporters were few and far between when it came to
battlefield reporting. “Whereas previous British colonial wars had been covered by a handful of
reporters, the Boer War involved about two hundred journalists at its height.” 12 More reporters
and journalists were onsite for the war than any of the other wars previous. It was also one of
the first wars to be documented so fully by camera, both filmand photograph. Public opinion
and outrage was global as Hobhouse’s and others’ account of atrocities and “concentration
camps” spread (the term borrowed from the Spanish-American War to refer to the brutal
Cuban death camps). Doyle, St. John, and other British writers were largely ignored in the public
outcry against British practices in the Transvaal. Scandal sold more papers than compromise.
11 Robert St. John, pg. 92
12 Cull,Nicholas,“Propaganda and Mass Persuasion” (Santa Barbara,California:ABC Clio,INC.) 2003,pg. 12

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Nicholas Cull, in his Propaganda and Mass Persuasion, is extremely dismissive of the
emotional reports of Hobhouse and the like. “By the war’s end (May 1902), the British were
actually turning people away from the camps. Boer propaganda exploited both the British
burning of farmsteads and the countless deaths from disease in the concentration camps…” 13
According to Cull, the camps were not unlike any other refugee camp. The deaths from disease
were a result of overcrowding and poor hygiene that could result any time you gather large
numbers of people together without proper organization. Cull labels any attempt to lay guilt at
the feet of the British as some kind of genocide as Boer propaganda. With the advent of the
first World War, public interest in the affairs of South Africa waned. The Boer “propaganda
machine”, as Cull calls it, sputtered and died. American had been the prime location for pro-
Boer writers to publish and distribute their work. However, with the entrance of America into
the Great War, books critical of Great Britain became frowned upon. Publishing within South
Africa was extremely censored by the British authorities, and foreign presses were awash with
the “War to End All Wars.” British governors in South Africa and elsewhere established a system
of rewards and punishments for both writers and publishers that allowed them to control the
reports and writings about the war.14 Compared to the fighting in the trenches and the
daredevil stories of Lawrence of Arabia, the happenings and details of a British colonial struggle
seemed unimportant by comparison. No Boer authors could make their voice heard, and no
British author cared to address the subject. The topic of the Boer Wars remained dormant for
more than half a century before another serious study of the time was made.
13 Cull,pg. 13
14 Cull,pg.12

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Thomas Pakenham is an author best known for his work in horticulture and the
study of African flora and fauna. However, the historian published one of the first in-depth
looks at the Boer War in 1979 with the publication of his work “The Boer War.” In this work,
Pakenham, though a British subject, takes a closer look at the events, both cultural and military,
of the conflict. The resort to guerilla tactics – and the effective execution of those tactics –
drove the British from a mere colonial conflict to a war of attrition, says Pakenham. However,
Pakenham does take care to show the other side of the British forces. Pakenham’s uses of
unpublished sources prove to be a great asset. The eye-witness accounts and recounting of the
events of the war by survivors of the camps and veterans of the war give weight to his message:
That the devastation of the war was caused by the stubborn tenacity of the Boers, coupled with
the ruthlessness of commanders such as Kitchener. “I have found that much new evidence that
Kitchener’s methods of warfare, like the ruthless methods adopted by many modern armies
against guerillas, were self-defeating. The removal of civilians added to the bitterness of the
guerillas. It also freed them from trying to feed and protect their families.” 15
Such tactics, while militarily effective, proved to be a political blunder by Kitchener.16 Pakenham
combines the best of Doyle and Hobhouse’s approaches, sticking to the practical facts of
Doyle’s work, and calling upon the first-hand accounts of Hobhouse.
In the American Civil War, General Robert E. Lee is credited with the famous quote, “It is
well that war is so terrible; lest we should grow too fond of it.” War is always a devastation of
the peaceful existence of humanity. The South African Wars were no exception, and were
15 Pakenham, Thomas, The Boer War, (New York, NY: Random House Publishing) 1979, pg.xxii
16 Pakenham, , pg. 581

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fought with tenacity and radicalismhitherto reserved only for wars of religion. Whether it is
Hobhouse’s tale of war and genocide, exercised by invading British forces upon a
Dutch/German Afrikaaner population, or Doyle’s and St. John’s tale of a British Empire bringing
order and prosperity to an area torn by war and lawlessness, the desolation and destruction of
the war remains unquestioned. Less than thirty years after the last camp in the Transvaal was
closed, a secret meeting in Germany convened to discuss a “Final Solution” to the problem of
the Jewish (and other undesirable) population in the Third Reich. Their solution was eerily
similar to the South African scene, with the mass round-up of a civilian population and their
internment into military-run and military-organized camps. Coincidence? That is the question
of the day.
The observant reader will notice that, thanks to British censorship and American foreign
policy decisions, there is a huge gap in the literary history of the conflict. In the initial aftermath
of the war, the press was awash with discussions, counterarguments, defenses, and articles of
every sort on the Boer War. However, with the outbreak of the World Wars, it was no longer
considered practical to write books blaming American allies of human rights violations. The
British were certainly not going to highlight the situation. After Robert St. John’s work in 1903,
there was no serious publication on the Boer war until Pakenham’s work in 1979. This is an
unacceptable void. A quote from Emily Hobhouse’s work comes to mind:

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“The deaths of the Boer children will not have been in vain if their
blood shall prove to be the seedof this higher ruleof nations. Their innocent
histories ought to become fully known and widely understood, and so
implant a hatred of war and a shrinking from its horrors, which shall issue
in a ripened determination amongst the kingdoms of the world to settle
future differences by methods more worthy of civilized men.”17
Every day, more and more information (previously inaccessible) is unearthed about the
rich history of the Boers and British in this conflict. The world is ready and waiting for the next
treatise on this “War that Time forgot.” For, as little-known or forgotten as this conflict may be,
like all history, its repercussions echo into the present and on into the future. Were the
concentration camps organized at Auschwitz and Buchenwald by Himmler and Mengele
inspired by the model proposed by Kitchener for the Boer population? Was South Africa the
birthplace for a new kind of warfare? Was this the beginning of the idea of genocide as a social
solution? Or was this merely another British colonial conflict? Or even a humanitarian effort,
understaffed and overworked? These are questions that have plagued academia since the
beginning of the twentieth century and shall in all likelihood continue into the twenty-first and
twenty-second. This topic begs, nay, demands further research and study by the historical
world. For no portion of history, no matter how small, deserves to be forgotten.
17 Hobhouse, pg. xvi

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Bibliography
1. Hobhouse, Emily, “The Brunt of the War, and Where it Fell”, London: Methuen and Co.,
1902
2. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, “The Great Boer War”, New York: McClure, Philips, and Co.,
1902
3. Robert St. John, Sir Frederick, The Boers and the War, Portsmouth: Charpentier & Co.,
1903
4. Pakenham, Thomas, The Boer War, New York, NY: Random House Publishing, 1979
5. Cull, Nicholas, “Propaganda and Mass Persuasion” Santa Barbara, California: ABC Clio,
INC., 2003