So the British forcibly interned at most 200,000 people. But why did they need to treat them so poorly? Back then food was cheap, the internees probably looked as nice and white as the British themselves and the British authorities actually intended to rule over them after the war forever after, for which general goodwill never hurts. So why couldn’t they allocate a bit more money and effort into making this whole affair a bit more civilized, sort of like the bloodless interment of Japanese-Americans during WW2?
Keeping large numbers of people healthy in crowded conditions is a problem with even the best intent and plentiful resources. When it’s a matter of actual prisoners things are even worse. You have a huge number of internees who have to be presumed to be hostile (and if they weren’t before you put them behind barbed wire, they probably were afterwards), guarded by the fewest number of soldiers that can do the job (you need the soldiers out in the bush hunting guerillas). To maintain security, the rule is when in doubt about anything, say no; so common sense things like letting volunteers grow or process food get tied up in bureaucracy. I presume there was no deliberate intent to starve civilians, but even mild shortages coupled with an attitude that security is the first, last and all things inbetween priority can easily lead to starvation.
Regarding disease: planning and building the camps is usually a rush job. Even with a knowledge of sanitation, it isn’t always easy to put into practice (making sure waste doesn’t come anywhere near your water supply, etc.) At the time there were lots of deadly diseases that were both directly communicable and vector borne by such things as body lice, and the forced close quarters allowed sickness to spread rapidly. If the internees were from a rural population (which I’d suppose), they might never have been previously exposed to and survived childhood illnesses like whooping cough and measles.
Prison camps were in general a terrible place to be anywhere in the nineteenth century. The only Confederate officer to be tried and executed after the American Civil War was the commandant of the infamous Andersonville p.o.w. camp, and yet conditions there were apparently the result of nothing more malevolent than poor planning and wartime food shortages.
Disease was the most likely cause. Confine a bunch of people in close proximity and you created a natural breeding crowd for infectious diseases. And back before antibiotics were available there was no good general treatment.
Hardly bloodless.
These hastily-setup camps were very lacking in medical facilities, so people who were injured or became sick sometimes died.
Also, there were camp regulations prohibiting people from going ‘too close’ to the fence wire. Those who did get too close were shot by the guards, and often killed.
Many of the inmates suffered psychological problems, but these were ‘bloodless’ – except for those who were driven to suicide.
how about quarantining sick people? And just how “close” is “close quarters”? In Russia during and immediately after WW2 there was big shortage of housing, so living 5 or even 10 people per room was nothing special. But you don’t hear of 10% casualties from disease in 3 years or anything.
You’re making the assumption that the British military authorities who ran the concentration camps were concerned about the welfare of the Boers. The British authorities probably could have done things to reduce the number of deaths, by improving sanitation, improving the quality of food and shelter, and providing adequate medical care, but until the Fawcett Commission, when they were turned over to civilian control, nobody cared all that much if the people in the camps lived or died.
While the Boers were white, the British still held them as inferior. From the British point of view they were natives interfering with the business of the Empire, the fact that they were white natives was irrelevant.
There was also a belief that some of the suffering was the Boers fault. Specifically, some of their beliefs about disease and medicine were outdated so when they got sick the British attitude was that the Boers own ignorance was responsible.
Also the British had very little interest in ruling the Boers after the war. They wanted the gold mines, the people who happened to live on or near the mines were irrelevant except as a source of labour.
wiki has a good answer : The camps were poorly administered from the outset and became increasingly overcrowded when Kitchener’s troops implemented the internment strategy on a vast scale. Conditions were terrible for the health of the internees, mainly due to neglect, poor hygiene and bad sanitation. The supply of all items was unreliable, partly because of the constant disruption of communication lines by the Boers. The food rations were meagre and there was a two-tier allocation policy, whereby families of men who were still fighting were routinely given smaller rations than others. The inadequate shelter, poor diet, inadequate hygiene and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery to which the children were particularly vulnerable. An additional problem was the Boers’ use of traditional medicines like a cow-dung poultice for skin diseases and crushed insects for convulsions.[30] Coupled with a shortage of modern medical facilities, many of the internees died.
If you take a look at one of the pictures of an internee, she resembles the Jews held in the Nazi camps.
With grossly over-crowded camps, there was nowhere to quarantine them. The Russian situation you quote is a bit different, there is far more opportunity for diseacse to spread when thousands of people are confined together.
Probably difficult to say how much damage was done out of indifference and how much was due to incompetance. 20 years later, in WW1, the British command was pretty divorced from reality. They famously thought things were going pretty well at the Battle of the Somme, where there were 60,000 casualties on the first day alone. Regardless, the camps have to be considered a war crime.
No, it was not. Food was more expensive per capita and relative to income. Never mind logistical costs at that time.
Leaving aside naive racialism, Americans internment of Japanese-Americans benefited from being in home country with 60 odd more years of sanitary and infra structural innovations and investment than the Boer wars.
Quite right, easy to forget the advances made in sanitary sciences even in the early 20th century relative to the late 19th.
The comparison to Russia is pure bollocks (better to look at Russian Gulag mortality, that would be an actually semi relevant comparator)
Russian gulag mortality was driven by insufficient food, low winter temperatures and overwork in hard manual labor. Such problems were either non-existent during Boer internment or else could have been dealt with if the authorities were to give a damn (i.e. if they would have supplied sufficient food or even moved the camps into areas closer to the coast where food was more accessible).
Didn’t the British traditionally have a hard time with logistics for their own armies never mind prisoners? It’s the impression I get from whenever such a subject is mentioned.
in terms of food, that was the time for a great deal of international trade in grain and meat, with big exports from America, Russia, Australia and Argentina. Well, I guess South Africa is (relatively) close to Argentina.
Conditions in the camps were very bad, but more because the British didn’t prioritize better care and food for the internees, and not so much out of malevolence, I’d say. The scandal is alluded to in the excellent Boer War courtroom drama Breaker Morant, by the way.
Yes the British used scorched earth tactics to deny the guerillas their supplies. The camps were a consequence of this policy because the inhabitants were taken off of their now desolate farms in order to prevent them trying to rebuild.