British Concentration Camps in the Boer War

The British authorities controversially used concentration camps for civilians during the Boer War (1899-1902) in Southern Africa. The reason was to deprive Boer guerrilla fighters of logistical support and provide some sort of accommodation for Boer families who had lost their homes and livelihoods. A lack of planning led to overcrowded camps where rations were poor and sanitary conditions even worse, a situation which led to epidemics of diseases like typhoid. During the war, up to 28,000 Boers (80% of whom were children) and 20,000 Black Africans died in the concentration camps due to malnutrition and disease.

British-Boer Rivalry

The causes of the conflict in Southern Africa known as the Second Anglo-Boer War (aka South Africa War), which was fought between the Boers (settlers with Dutch ancestry and that of certain other European countries) and the British colonies of Cape Colony and Natal, were varied. Both sides wanted land for farming and control of rich natural resources such as the diamond mines at Kimberley and the gold mines at Witwatersrand. Another bone of contention was the prejudicial treatment of British settlers in the two Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State. Mutual suspicions were raised on both sides by the unofficial British attempt at a coup in Transvaal with the failed Jameson Raid of 1895. As a consequence of this raid, the Transvaal government began to buy foreign arms and signed a treaty with Germany, much to Britain's horror, since German involvement in Southern Africa could jeopardise British interests and dominance across the entire region. The two sides had already fought in the First Anglo-Boer War (1880-81), which the Boers had won. Largely a war of skirmishes, this first conflict would be completely overshadowed by the massive scale and savagery of the second war.

The first action of the Boer War occurred on 11 October 1899 when a Boer cavalry force routed a British one. Although not formally trained, the Boers had excellent rifles and were equally good at shooting them. The Boers formed units known as commandos, and these won several victories in the early stages of the war, largely thanks to poor British generalship and the Boers' excellent knowledge and use of the local terrain. Unlike in the previous war, this time the British government sent British troops to reinforce those already in the colonies. In this way, the British Army force, which included 30,000 colonial troops from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, soon rocketed from 25,000 to 250,000 men. This numerical advantage helped the British seize the major Boer towns of Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Johannesburg.

In response to the military reversals, the Boers adopted guerrilla tactics, to which the British responded with an effective but controversial scorched-earth tactic, where crops were destroyed and livestock confiscated. Thousands of civilian farms and homes were burned to the ground during the campaign. The British commander-in-chief, Herbert Kitchener, restricted the Boers' movement by dividing "both the ex-republics into a huge steel chequerboard made of barbed wire fence lines, guarded by concrete blockhouses" (Pakenham, 577).

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The horrors of concentration camps in Kenya 🇰🇪 by the British Colonial Rule were sites for random executions and some were tortured to death for rebelling against the colonial rule. According to KHCR, over 90k were executed and maimed. #Africa

An excellent article documenting the solitary efforts of one London Orthodox Jew to protest against the abuse of Uyghur Muslims in China. 

The fact that millions are silent on acts of Chinese aggression, persecution, and brutality shows, as Andrew says, how many have been paid off by the Chinese government. 

I have yet to hear British politicians demanding action against the Chinese state for its heinous abuses. This is undoubtedly because we have sold all our industry to China and are dependent upon them for so many products. This is similar to how we turn a blind eye to Saudi Arabian brutality, on account of petroleum. 

The root reason why the Chinese government abuses human rights is Communism, a brutal and inhumane ideology which reduces human beings to objects of capital. An ideology that denies human beings the rights to follow their personal conscience and beliefs (hence the persecution of Muslims and also Christians and Jews). An ideology responsible for the suppression, economic ruin, starvation, slave labour, torture, and murder of millions during the 20th century. 

People in the West who are complacent, easily fooled, greedy for cheap products, or worse, devotees of Communism, have ignored the fact that China’s government retains its murderous allegiances to Mao. They have whitewashed the history of Communism, and point to China’s supposed prosperity. But anyone who has been to China will see that this economic prosperity is largely a myth. High production stems from extremely cheap labour, with millions of Chinese people being unable to afford a decent lifestyle. 

I am grateful for people such as Andrew who will stand against the powers of a brutal government for justice. Sadly, some have criticised him, rather than the perpetrators. 

For example, one person was quoted asking about grooming gangs-- a reference to British men of Pakistani ethnic origin who have been grooming and abusing white English girls for decades and were protected by political correctness, anti-white racism, and an incompetent legal system. Unsurprisingly, the grisly revelations of these crimes have provoked outrage and justifiably demanded introspection of British Pakistani Muslim communities. 

Even though the perpetrators of these crimes are mostly Muslim men of Pakistani ethnic origin, this has nothing to do with the Uyghur Muslims in China, for reasons that should be quite obvious. People should learn to think in clear categories. Identifying a (likely) culprit does not mean blaming everyone else. Likewise, some have criticised Andrew after the Sri Lanka terrorist attacks, committed by extremist Muslims from that nation. Again, this has nothing to do with, neither does it justify, China’s appalling actions against Chinese Muslims. 

Another asked “who cares”, showing the sad selfishness that has overcome British society today. 

Like many arguments, the fight over the term “concentration camp” is mostly an argument about something entirely different. It is not about terminology. Almost refreshingly, it is not an argument about facts. This argument is about imagination, and it may be a deeper, more important conversation than it seems.

In a Monday-evening live stream, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, called the U.S.’s detention facilities for migrants “concentration camps.” On Tuesday, she tweeted a link to an article in Esquire in which Andrea Pitzer, a historian of concentration camps, was quoted making the same assertion: that the United States has created a “concentration camp system.” Pitzer argued that “mass detention of civilians without a trial” was what made the camps concentration camps. The full text of Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet was “This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying. This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis.” Hackles were immediately raised, tweets fired, and, less than an hour and a half later, Representative Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, tweeted, “Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.” A high-pitched battle of tweets and op-eds took off down the much travelled dead-end road of arguments about historical analogies. These almost never go well, and they always devolve into a virtual shouting match if the Holocaust, the Nazis, or Adolf Hitler is invoked. One side always argues that nothing can be as bad as the Holocaust, therefore nothing can be compared to it; the other argues that the cautionary lesson of history can be learned only by acknowledging the similarities between now and then.

But the argument is really about how we perceive history, ourselves, and ourselves in history. We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison. As for history, the greater the event, the more mythologized it becomes. Despite our best intentions, the myth becomes a caricature of sorts. Hitler, or Stalin, comes to look like a two-dimensional villain—someone whom contemporaries could not have seen as a human being. The Holocaust, or the Gulag, are such monstrous events that the very idea of rendering them in any sort of gray scale seems monstrous, too. This has the effect of making them, essentially, unimaginable. In crafting the story of something that should never have been allowed to happen, we forge the story of something that couldn’t possibly have happened. Or, to use a phrase only slightly out of context, something that can’t happen here.

A logical fallacy becomes inevitable. If this can’t happen, then the thing that is happening is not it. What we see in real life, or at least on television, can’t possibly be the same monstrous phenomenon that we have collectively decided is unimaginable. I have had many conversations about this in Russia. People who know Vladimir Putin and his inner circle have often told me that they are not the monsters that I and others have described. Yes, they have overseen assassinations, imprisonments, and wars, but they are not thoroughly terrible, my interlocutors have claimed—they are not like Stalin and his henchmen. In other words, they are not the monsters of our collective historical imagination. They are today’s flesh-and-blood monsters, and this makes them seem somehow less monstrous.

Anything that happens here and now is normalized, not solely through the moral failure of contemporaries but simply by virtue of actually existing. Allow me to illustrate. My oldest son, who spent his early childhood in a Russian hospital, was for many years extremely small for his age. I spent useless hours upon hours in my study in Moscow, where we then lived, poring over C.D.C. growth charts. No matter how many times I looked, I couldn’t place him—he was literally off the chart. As far as the C.D.C. was concerned, my son, at his age, height, and weight, was unimaginable. When he was four, I took him to see a pediatrician in Boston. She entered his measurements into her computer, and a red dot appeared on the chart. I felt my body finally relax; my child was no longer impossible! He was on the chart. Then I realized that the pediatrician was working with an interactive chart. (This was in the early aughts, and there weren’t any available to me at home.) She had just put him in the system. His little red dot was still below the lowest, fifth-percentile curve. He was still the smallest child of his age. But a sort of cognitive trick had been performed. My son’s size had been documented, and this made him possible.

Donald Trump has played this trick on Americans many times, beginning with his very election: first, he was impossible, and then he was President. Did that mean that the impossible had happened—an extremely hard concept to absorb—or did it mean that Trump was not the catastrophe so many of us had assumed he would be? A great many Americans chose to think that he had been secretly Presidential all along or was about to become Presidential; theychose to accept that, now that he was elected, his Presidency would become conceivable. The choice between these two positions is at the root of the argument between Ocasio-Cortez and the critics of her concentration-camp comment. It is not an argument about language. Ocasio-Cortez and her opponents agree that the term “concentration camp” refers to something so horrible as to be unimaginable. (For this reason, mounting a defense of Ocasio-Cortez’s position by explaining that not all concentration camps were death camps misses the point.) It is the choice between thinking that whatever is happening in reality is, by definition, acceptable, and thinking that some actual events in our current reality are fundamentally incompatible with our concept of ourselves—not just as Americans but as human beings—and therefore unimaginable. The latter position is immeasurably more difficult to hold—not so much because it is contentious and politically risky, as attacks on Ocasio-Cortez continue to demonstrate, but because it is cognitively strenuous. It makes one’s brain implode. It will always be a minority position.

Masha Gessen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of ten books, including, most recently, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017