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Military History – South Africa – Europe – England 19th Century
.Article – Online Historic Information | Military
.Page 66
Concentration Camps, Black
The concentration camps in which Boer women, children and old people were confined eventually
received substantial publicity. The black African camps, on the other hand, were scarcely mentioned,
although the death rate was at one time higher than the worst of the mortality in the white camps. The
numbers of black Africans involved are also uncertain. What records there are show that 115,700
were interned, slightly more than half of those in Orange River Colony, as it was known at the time,
and the rest in Transvaal. The records also show that 14,154 died, over 80 per cent of them children,
but the true number has been estimated in the region of 20,000.
Conditions prevailing in South Africa at the end of the war compounded the damage to black
African self-sufficiency caused by the war itself, and increased the proportion of the black population
who were dependent on wage labour.
The black African camps housed refugees who can be classified in two broad groups. One group
was either fleeing from war zones or from Boer hostility because of support given to the British, in
which case they tended to head for major British-held towns or military establishments. The other
group of refugees was the result of British land clearance activity, either because the blacks were
servants of displaced Boers or because they were cultivating land in their own right in areas the
British wanted to lay waste. These people were usually taken to the same areas as the Boers. The
need to establish separate camps was not at first recognised, but in the early months of 1901 the first
black camps were set up and by the end of the war there were sixty-six for which records exist and
possibly eighty in total.
When a Native Refugee Department was set up by the British in mid-1901, the idea was to make
the camps self-supporting. The men were to provide paid labour for the British army and the camps
were therefore usually set up beside the main railways; from Bloemfontein to Pretoria, from
Johannesburg to Klerksdorp, from Johannesburg to Volkrust, from Pretoria to Komati Poort and from
Orange River Station to Dryharts, north of the Vaal on the railway to Mafeking. Shelter was
rudimentary and those confined were expected to build their own huts from the insufficient materials
available. The food provided by the British was not only too little but was also ill-balanced, lacking
vegetables and milk. Disease carried off the enfeebled internees, and it was alleged by British
officials that chicken-pox, measles and other such diseases were the cause. However, an incomplete
sets of reports from camp administrators in Orange River Colony states that between May 1901 and
April 1902 pneumonia accounted for 60 per cent and dysentery 26.5 per cent of deaths. This suggests
that the conditions of their confinement, rather than infections to which they had no resistance, were
the root cause of mortality.
With popular political pressure having led to the improvement of conditions for the whites, the
early
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