13. The Unfortunate Children of Britain’s Concentration Camps
In addition to their scorched earth policy, the British adopted an ominous innovation recently introduced by the Spanish while suppressing guerrillas in their Cuban colony: concentration camps. Tens of thousands of Boer civilians from the countryside, mostly women and children, were rounded up and interned – thus literally “concentrated” – in vast camps behind barbed wire. Conditions in the camps were atrocious. The administrators were incompetent, supplies were spotty, and the internees suffered from bad sanitation, poor hygiene, overcrowding, inadequate shelter, often nonexistent medical care, and hunger.
Food was scant, and the British targeted the families of Boer men who were still fighting, giving them even smaller rations than the meager portions provided the rest. Malnutrition killed many internees, and left many more vulnerable to contagious diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, and measles. Roughly 115,000 Boer women and children were herded into 45 concentration camps. In the eleven months from June, 1901, to May, 1902, about 28,000 Boer internees, a tenth of the population, died. The Boers’ African servants were held in separate concentration camps, where conditions were even worse. Those camps did not garner the same attention as the camps housing the white Boers, but an estimated 20,000 Africans perished in them.
