30. Atrocious Conditions
Things got dark pretty quick in the concentration camps, where conditions were atrocious. The administrators were incompetent, supplies were spotty, and the internees suffered from bad sanitation, poor hygiene, overcrowding, inadequate shelter, and often nonexistent medical care. Food rations were scanty, 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.
Many internees died of malnutrition, which left many more vulnerable to a host of contagious diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, and measles, that swept the camps. About 115,000 Boer civilians were herded into 45 concentration camps. In the eleven-month period from June, 1901, to May, 1902, roughly 28,000 Boer internees perished – a tenth of the entire Boer population. The Boers’ African servants were held in separate concentration camps, where conditions were if anything even worse. Those camps did not garner the same attention as the camps housing the white Boers, but an estimated 20,000 Africans died in them.
