the deceased children who lay around them and of British soldiers who hit them or separated them from their children. Alongside the illustrations were captions taken from Kitchener’s reports to the War Office in London, emphasising the benefits to Boer women of ‘spacious tents where air and freshness are in abundance’ and camps where ‘jovial mothers’ are able to forget ‘the melancholy of their predicament’.[7]
In these stark expressions, was there perhaps a risk that extreme forms of propaganda would actually dilute opinions of real atrocities? Would such propaganda not inevitably affect public opinion of the civilians who fall prey to the horrors of war? Would the Boers, who had been victimised by the British, not then seek revenge on black African people because the British had employed them against the Boers? Could one still question ethics within war when combatants were no longer the sole protagonists? Was there ever any possibility of considering the idea of a just or unjust war? After all, from this turning point, the use of concentration camps was going to be part of the machinery of war. The camps of the Balkan Wars and the Great War of 1914–1918 were quick to follow those of Cuba and South Africa.
Therefore, among all the hostile powers of the Great War, the internment of so-called ‘suspicious’ civilians was common, as was treating them like prisoners of war in breach of international laws. In occupied lands, suspicious civilians were also the victims of reprisals and were, at times, deported and/or sent to work camps. Incarcerating non-combatants as a means of weakening the enemy had always been a strategic method of warfare. And, obviously, the simultaneous capturing of soldiers was far from novel. By contrast, the advent of concentration camps since the events in Cuba and South Africa was an innovation in warfare: ordinary civilians, too, had become victims on the path towards total war. Their camps had become an integral part of the culture of armed warfare.
In many ways, between 1896 (the war in Cuba) and 1918 (the end of the Great War), the Anglo-Boer War also contributed to these changes in the conduct of war during the twentieth century. In South Africa, the deportation and incarceration of civilians had not culminated in mass extermination. But conditions did produce a war against civilians characterised by extreme violence. At the same time, the camp phenomenon was not yet synonymous with the later organised systems of concentration camps. In the Anglo-Boer War, the management of the camps was haphazard and uncoordinated, as this book clearly reveals. Regardless, this was still a total war. Total war requires the incarceration of enemies, be they soldiers captured during battle or civilians perceived and treated as enemies – unarmed soldiers who used their own weapons of hatred, refusal and silence to fight back and prove their resilience.
Clearly, the experience of the Boer people in the republics in South Africa was not that of genocide, as in the experience of the Armenians of Turkey in the Great War. It was that of degradation. The causes thereof were not accidental, inadvertent or intentional cruelty, but rather the essence of war policies in occupied territories, namely, incarceration and isolation. It is on that path that one finds the tragedies and horrors of the victimised women and families of the Anglo-Boer War.
Annette Becker is Professor of Modern History at the Paris West University Nanterre La Défense, and a senior member of the l’Institut Universitaire de France. A social and cultural historian of total war in the twentieth century, she is an authority on the impact of violence upon civilians under military occupation. Becker is one of the founders of the Museum of the Great War in northern France, the Historial de la Grande Guerre, in Peronne, Somme. Her recent publications include a study of the World War I experiences of French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Apollinaire: Une Biographie de Guerre 1914–1918 (2009).
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Clawing skywards into life – the Women’s Monument in 1913, towering over the flat Highveld surroundings of the Orange Free State |
Introduction
THE TRAUMATIC IMPACT OF THE 1899 TO 1902 war in South Africa on most ordinary Afrikaner people has often been viewed as the defining feature of the bitter Anglo-Boer conflict. The trauma has lingered in popular memory, and not only as a result of the anniversaries that serve to remind us of the conflict. Nevertheless, commemorations, particularly centenary ones, are potentially more than rituals. They may, in fact, give rise to a fresh outlook on history with which to revisit established perceptions of past events and people. With that in mind, the publication of this book coincides with the 2013 centenary of the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein, inaugurated after the end of the Anglo-Boer War, which is now frequently also referred to as the South African War.
Like other recent historical works, this book has been prompted by the present era, which has yielded notable centenary commemorations of events in South African history. The start of the twenty-first century has been marked by commemorations of the 1899 to 1902 conflict; the 1906 Bhambatha rebellion in Natal; the initial founding of the African National Congress in 1912; and the 1913 Land Act. And others will take place in the near future, such as the centenary of the 1914 Afrikaner rebellion at the start of World War I and the centenary of the founding of the now-extinct National Party, also in 1914 – likely to be a muted commemoration, in the light of more recent post-apartheid history.
If one were to compare commemorations, the 1913 Women’s Monument and other events would be overshadowed in scope and significance by the 1938 Voortrekker centenary celebrations. At the heart of that occasion lay the awakening of a dormant Afrikaner nationalism, which drew on a momentous past episode to galvanise the volk. Such brazen displays of nationalist excess would look out of place in our own, more sceptical age. Yet, it remains an example of how historical commemoration is always viewed through the lens of the present.
Why should the creation of the Women’s Monument be commemorated in a South Africa that has changed so much since 1913? Is its legacy still relevant and, if so, what meaning does it hold for ordinary South Africans 100 years later?
To answer these questions the authors of this book explore the shifting sands of memory and consider how the monument – a body of stone charged by emotion – has been perceived at crucial historical stages since 1913. We consider the questions of whom it spoke to originally, what it has been seen to say through the twentieth century, and what it might say now. Alongside its perspective on this particular legacy of the conflict, The War at Home: Women and Families in the Anglo-Boer War is concerned with the complexities and contradictions of the war experience of 1899 to 1902, which gave birth to enduring rituals of remembrance.
The War at Home tells readers more than simply the story of this iconic war memorial. Naturally, the 1913 Women’s Monument – with its emotional, political, cultural and other memories – embodies a public history of its own. But it also provides a glimpse into the varied lives and extreme circumstances of a vulnerable civilian society that was directly affected by the shock of a modern total war. The war of 1899 to 1902 was more than one war and more than merely a conflict between armies on the battlefields. Many ordinary rural people – white, black, women, children, families and individuals – experienced the deaths and suffering caused by hostilities beyond the battlefield.
The civilian worlds explored in this book are mainly those of women and families confronted by massive upheaval. Yet, although the collection describes the plight of helpless victims, it also analyses the ways in which the strain of war experience was uneven and often unpredictable. In other words, instead of reinforcing well-worn historical interpretations that reduce the existence of women and families to that of passive suffering, we will examine the vital aspects of civilian endurance – so often overlooked or forgotten.
In confronting the tragedy of the war, the contributors show the endeavours of those who sought to come to
