#lesotho

In Lesotho, a small African nation surrounded on all sides by South Africa, the combination of US aid withdrawal and President Trump's threat of imposing a 50% tariff led the nation to declare a national state of disaster.

Boer commandos, however, continued to hold the field and mounted a highly effective guerrilla war, even invading the Cape. Faced with a situation in which a Boer might be fighting one day and the next sitting peacefully on his stoep, Kitchener responded with drastic measures. Whenever guerrilla attacks took place, farm houses in the vicinity were burned and the women and children gathered in concentration camps. At the same time lines of barbed wire were strung out along the railway lines cutting up the country and reducing the commandos’ mobility. The policy of burning farms and establishing concentration camps roused humanitarian outrage in Britain. It also deepened the Afrikaner bitterness which was to be a legacy of the war. In the camps Boer families were crowded together in squalor and unhygienic conditions made worse by the fact that they were unaccustomed to life in large communities; the camps were swept by epidemics of dysentery, measles and enteric fever and about 25 000 women and children died. ... [T]he great majority of Africans in South Africa had strongly supported the British in the war. Africans in Lesotho offered military support to the British side. Zulu, Xhosa and some of the Tswana offered to serve in arms against the Boers. These offers were rejected on the grounds that this was a 'white man's war'. Both sides, however, did in practice make very considerable use of Africans in a whole variety of non-combatant but often highly dangerous roles. As the British had the loyalty of the great majority, however, they were able to make use of Africans on a much larger scale than the Boers. The Boer war diary of Solomon Plaatje, an educated African who assisted on the British side in Mafeking when it was under siege by the Boer forces, makes it clear that Africans were very directly involved in the fighting and gave considerable support to the British side. Not only were Africans directly involved in the war but they also suffered very severely from the disruptions which it produced. When Afrikaner farms were burnt and their owners taken to concentration camps their African servants were herded into separate camps. Deaths from disease were just as high in the African camps as those for the Boers but they never received a fraction of the attention, concern, and medical and nursing aid that was eventually provided for the Boer families.