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The Second Boer War: Farm Burning and the Concentration Camps

1900–1902 · Sub-Saharan Africa

Confinement

Confined

270,000

Roughly 110,000-120,000 Boer women, children and elderly men and about 115,000-140,000 black Africans passed through the camps; totals differ because the camp registers were kept separately for the two systems and the African camps were poorly recorded. The British National Archives education resource counts forty-five camps for Boer internees and sixty-four for black Africans. The figures rest on British camp returns, the reports of Emily Hobhouse and of the Fawcett Ladies Commission, and later reconstruction of the African camp registers.

Share of the population affected

84%

of the white republican population of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State at the outbreak of war in 1899, 1899

Killed

34,000–48,000

deaths in transit or in camps

Open on the interactive map →

What happened

From 1900 the British army answered Boer guerrilla warfare by burning farms and removing the civilian population that supported the commandos into fenced camps served by the railway lines. The National Archives records forty-five camps for Boer internees and sixty-four separate camps for black Africans, many of whom had worked on Boer farms and were held under worse conditions and set to labour. Overcrowding, poor rations, contaminated water and epidemics of measles, typhoid and dysentery killed tens of thousands, most of them children. Emily Hobhouse's 1901 report and the subsequent Fawcett Commission forced improvements and made the camps a scandal in Britain. The camps are widely treated as an early instance of the mass internment of a civilian population by a modern state, though they were not established with the purpose of killing.

Parties

British forces under Lords Roberts and Kitchener burned Boer farms and interned Boer civilians and African labourers in fenced camps in the Transvaal, Orange River Colony, Cape Colony and Natal

Disputed

The death tolls, particularly for the African camps whose records were far less complete, and the question of whether the high mortality reflected deliberate policy or administrative incompetence, remain disputed.

The denominator

The Transvaal census of 1896 counted about 245,000 whites and the Orange Free State roughly 78,000, giving some 320,000 Boer civilians; the two republics also held around 900,000 black African inhabitants. About 116,000 Boers and a comparable number of Africans were interned, and roughly 28,000 Boers, four-fifths of them children, died in the camps along with an estimated 20,000 Africans.

Roughly half of the affected figure consists of black Africans interned in separate camps, who are not part of the white republican baseline; against the Boer population alone the internment rate was about a third.

Where the baseline comes from

Second Boer War — Wikipediaopen-edited
Second Boer War concentration camps — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

The UK National Archives states that about 26,000 Boer women and children died and over 14,000 black inmates, mainly of disease and malnutrition; the commonly cited camp registers give 27,927 Boer deaths. Estimates for the African camps range from roughly 14,000 to over 20,000 because those registers are incomplete. Deaths were overwhelmingly from epidemic disease and undernourishment in the camps rather than from killing.

Documented forms of violence

Arbitrary DetentionDestruction of PropertyForced LabourStarvation and Siege

Farm burning, internment and the use of African inmates as labour are documented in British military records and in the reports of Emily Hobhouse and the Fawcett Commission, summarised by the UK National Archives.

Movements mapped

Burned farms of the Transvaal and Orange Free State -> camps at Bloemfontein and elsewhere110,000

Countries touched, on present-day borders

South Africa