THE
WAR
AT HOME
WOMEN AND FAMILIES IN THE ANGLO-BOER WAR
Editors
Bill Nasson & Albert Grundlingh
TAFELBERG
‘At school every year, there was “Empire Day”. Empire? What was that all about? I’ve heard of it, of course. Oh yes, wasn’t it Africa, where we Brits invented the concentration camp?’
Raymond Briggs, ‘Empire Day and all that’, in The Oldie magazine, 297, July 2013.
In this quote Raymond Briggs, a leading English cartoonist, illustrator and writer, remembers his schooldays in what he calls ‘a remote historical time’. Empire Day, the 24th of May, commenced in 1902 and was celebrated annually in schools in Britain and in many parts of the Empire for more than fifty years, until it disappeared in 1958 with the decline of British imperial power. It was intended to stimulate patriotic pride in the heroic achievements of Empire. Politically left-wing and anti-war, for Briggs, who was born in 1934, a personal memory of Empire Day in 2013 was an occasion to mock the pretensions of British imperialism, and to recall a particularly unsavoury part of its past.
|
|
In the last phase of the conflict, camps such as this one at Merebank, Durban, were established in the warmer, subtropical climate of Natal. |
Foreword
THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS, edited by Bill Nasson and Albert Grundlingh, is a significant reassessment of the Anglo-Boer War, portraying the civilian experiences of the war as bleak yet also endurable. Focusing on the plight of women and families, the contributors consider not only their victimhood but also, more importantly, their own human agency. Through a meticulous reading of the written and photographic archival material, the authors provide a detached account, allowing the reader to appreciate the subtleties of the relationships between gender, race and class in the context of a colonial war. The quality of the images and the unfolding details in this book are astounding. Women and young girls are shown with domestic products such as a broom, bucket, chair, blanket and pot. And each person is in their, seemingly, rightful place. At home? But their homes no longer exist, having been destroyed during the scorched-earth policy or involuntarily abandoned.
Homes are now tents – makeshift abodes for these nomads who live in concentration camps. In the photographs, the gazes of these people reflect both their fear and determination – the weaknesses and strengths of those transformed by their predicament.
Much like a cinematographic flashback, the book uses the inauguration of the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein in 1913 as a symbolic foundation. Its centenary is subtly contextualised within a complicated and horrific colonial war and the consequent rise of segregationist nationalism. One of the methods of imperial warfare was the concentration camps, which were designated primarily (yet not exclusively, according to one contributor) for civilians, specifically women and children, whether they were black or white. The scorched-earth policy, which was introduced by the British army in an increasingly professionalised way, had consequences beyond the brutal ordeals of these women and their families. Their incarceration also left a lasting legacy on the history of the country.
Another visible flashback here is the origin of the camps. For political writer Hannah Arendt, concentration camps came into existence long before the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century made them an important institution of government. They were not the same as prisons. Rather, they were meant to deal with people who were ‘undesirables’ – individuals who had lost their legal rights and identity in their own country.[1] Hannah Arendt was one of those scholars who mistakenly attributed the rise of concentration camps to the Anglo-Boer War. In fact, as the first chapter by one of the editors also notes, their origins lay elsewhere. Essentially, they were invented in 1896 in Cuba under Spanish General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau. They came to be refined in South Africa and went on to be implemented worldwide in the following two decades. Indeed, they continue to exist in the present day.
What exactly happened? Civilians – particularly women, children and the elderly – were incarcerated and treated as the enemy because they found themselves encircled by war. For the most part, these non-combatants were becoming accustomed to some state of emergency or martial law because this had been a part of the colonial experience and the rise of a total war. They were subjected to brutal hardships, including loss of freedom, separation from loved ones, deplorable and unsanitary living conditions, lack of food, overcrowding and disease. They had to endure under policies that did not originally have the intent to make them suffer or die. Their detention was either administrative or military but not legal, because they were never tried or condemned.
It is important to consider briefly what happened in Cuba. There, in the mid-1890s, the Spanish army’s concept of a ‘concentration of civilians’ led to the invention of camps, bearing the name reconcentrados. General Weyler’s idea was to separate the civilians from the rebels who opposed Spanish colonisation, under the pretext of protecting them from the scorched-earth policy that was designed to end the Cuban insurgency. They were to be deported and isolated in a type of exile. In other words, individuals were to be removed from their homes and transported elsewhere. Weyler understood that the Cuban rebels were reverting to guerrilla tactics and were being fed, voluntarily or otherwise, by civilians. In order to win the war, Weyler decided to cut those resources by ‘reconcentrating’, or relocating, the civilian population and dividing the island into zones. In March 1898, an eyewitness, American Senator Redfield Proctor, said that ‘it is not peace, nor is it war. It is desolation and distress, misery and starvation’ with every ‘woman and child and every domestic animal under guard ... It is concentration and desolation.’[2]
Mass media emerged during this period, and journalists were able to report on the suffering of the Cubans to a world audience. In addition, the increasingly professional photography of war covered such acts of political extermination.
The Spanish imperial power’s defence was based on the belief that the Cuban enemies were barbarians. Regardless, the civilised world was expected to protest and intervene, and the Cubans looked to the United States in the hope that it would recognise their independence. Instead, the Americans invaded the island against the will of its inhabitants and imposed a de facto American protectorate. By 1898 this, at least, ended the forced removals.
For his part, Weyler had implemented a tactic that he had already witnessed on a smaller scale in the United States. During the American Civil War of 1861–1865, he had been Spain’s military attaché in Washington and an avid admirer of General William Sherman, who used this tactic against those civilians who were hostile towards the Union forces. Most notably, such civilians in Missouri were displaced and put into what were called ‘posts’. The use of extreme force against civilians (which had been intensifying during colonial conquest) could be justified by authorities on the basis of the racial climate of the time, especially if those being conquered were non-Christian. However, in Cuba, the forced removal of civilians, in the context of colonialism and counter-strategy to guerrilla warfare, involved a population that was of European extraction and Christian.
Turning again to South Africa, it should be remembered that British (and American) opinion considered Weyler
