Boer History1901 in South Africa: Kitchener, Botha, the Camps, and the October Mortality
Kitchener’s Clean Sweep, Middelburg, and Civil Control — January–February 1901
War between Britain and the two Boer republics — the South African Republic and the Orange Free State — was in its second year. Britain held the Cape Colony and Natal. Lord Kitchener had taken the British command from Lord Roberts in December 1900. On the 21st of December 1900 he addressed a memorandum to the British commanders: from the districts successively occupied by Boers, all men, women, children, and even the African inhabitants were to be carried off. That order still stood when 1901 opened. Louis Botha was commandant-general of the South African Republic. What hung on January and February was whether the clean-sweep would empty the farms into camps, whether Botha would make peace at Middelburg, and whether the camps would stay under army officers or pass to civil officials. [6]
From a women’s laager in the district of Potchefstroom a letter dated the 5th of January 1901 was handed to the mine commissioner J. L. van der Merwe. Coloured women riding with the troops sat on the wagons, while Boer women — “our sisters,” the letter said — had to walk behind and be driven on by African drivers; a few collapsed, and one gave birth on the road. On the 14th of January President Steyn and General De Wet issued a joint proclamation: British soldiers had shown no pity on sick women, had caused the death of a great number of women, and had dragged father and mother from the house and left all to the wild animals. Some mothers were allowed to travel in their own tent-wagons. In most cases the people were loaded on bare wagons or trolleys and had to face sun and weather. Mrs Hester Jacobs of Hartebeestfontein stayed on the wagons the whole night until daybreak, half frozen, while the wagon-drivers made fire and drank coffee round the wagons. In mid-July Mrs Elizabeth van Rensburg saw a sick woman carried out by force when the house had to be burned; the wind blew bitterly cold, and there was no firewood, no blanket. Mrs M. Ferreira, taken in February, was without any shelter against sun and rain on a bare trolley. [6]
Where wagons were not set at their disposal they had to go to camp on foot, driven by British soldiers and even by African and Coloured drivers. Women and children were even driven on horseback; soldiers threatened to let the horses trample prisoners who would not walk or could not stumble on from exhaustion. The protests of De Wet and Botha against the mishandling of families drew from Kitchener, at the talks with the commandant-general at Middelburg on the 28th of February 1901, a promise that proper means of transport would be provided to women and children, and that if such means were not at hand the families would not be moved. Middelburg was a Transvaal town on the railway east of Pretoria. The meeting mattered because Botha was still in the field as the Republic’s senior general, and because a peace talk was also a chance to bind Kitchener on how families were to be moved. The transport promise does not appear to have been carried out. Those sent by train rode not in saloon carriages but in coal-trucks and cattle-trucks; 30 passengers to a truck was no rarity, and in a few cases the number rose to 50 women and children. The trucks were not always cleaned; women had to wipe dung and filth with their clothes, or stand in the layer of dung, mud, and water. Between sick and healthy no distinction was made; births took place on the trucks, with fatal consequences for mothers and newborns. [6]
Until February the camps had stood under the military: district commissioners, with Colonel Flint for general control at Pretoria and Major Armstrong for the military chest. Kitchener held that system unserviceable and told the military governor he could no longer spare army officers for camp organisation. The military governor at Pretoria was J. G. Maxwell, already loaded with army work, under whom the camps had sprung up like mushrooms. On the 1st of February 1901 a group of officials arrived at Pretoria to take civil control of the camps; of that group only 1 was a medical man. On the 7th of March an army order made the military governor at Pretoria and the deputy administrator of the Orange River Colony responsible for the erection and maintenance of Burgher Refugee camps; military officers would thenceforth answer only for outward defence. The transfer did not change the ration scales. Of the officials who came to take the camps, the want of a medical staff already told what the year would cost in sick women and children. [6]
On the 4th of February Colin MacKenzie, military governor of Johannesburg, wrote desperately to Maxwell at Pretoria that he had been obliged to disregard the B-scale, under which no meat might be issued: want of meat had given about 2500 people diarrhoea of a more or less vexing kind, and meat was issued on the representations of the medical officer. The A-scale was the fuller ration, issued at first to families who had surrendered with their husbands — the hands-uppers. The B-scale was the half-ration, issued to families whose men were still on commando. On the 18th of February Lloyd George told the House that the object was to force the Boer fighters to infidelity toward their own ideals by the spectacle of their starved and suffering children. On the 26th of February, pressed by John Ellis, Brodrick at last conceded that a distinction had been drawn between those who had surrendered with their husbands and those who came in to be fed while their relatives were still in the field. On the 27th of February Goodwin, general superintendent, issued instructions that all camp inhabitants be placed on the A-scale, the half-ration to be kept only as a punishment for the unruly and troublesome. Despite Brodrick’s assurance to the House that the B-scale had been abolished on that day, the instructions were not carried out: at Potchefstroom the half-ration lasted until June, at Krugersdorp until July, at Vryburg even after August. [6]
Camps Named, Overcrowding, and the Tents — 1901
The camps of 1901 were not a Cape municipal list. They were the places into which Kitchener’s clean-sweep poured the families taken off the republican farms. In the Transvaal the camps of 1900 had been Barberton, Heidelberg, Johannesburg, Irene, Klerksdorp, Krugersdorp, Mafeking, Potchefstroom, Standerton, and Vereeniging. In 1901 there were added Balmoral, Belfast, De Jagersdrift, Middelburg, Nylstroom, Pietersburg, Van der Hovensdrift, Volksrust, and Vryburg. De Jagersdrift, from the district commissioner of Utrecht on the 23rd of April, existed only for a time. In the Free State the camps of 1900 had been Bloemfontein, Heilbron, Kroonstad, Norvalspont, and Vredefort Road; in 1901 there rose Aliwal North, Bethulie, Brandfort, Harrismith, Kromellenboog, Kimberley, Ladybrand, Orange River, Springfontein, and Winburg. Kromellenboog, reported on the 7th of September, was likewise temporary. In Natal, Pietermaritzburg of 1900 was followed in 1901 by Howick, Isipingo, and Merebank. In the Cape, Port Elizabeth still stood from 1900. From September 1900 these were no longer refugee camps: the people brought there had been forced; many had fled day and night to keep from that protection. [6]
When civil control took the camps in February, Johannesburg Racecourse already held 5144 souls and Potchefstroom 4313, housed anyhow, so that healthy administration and control of epidemics could scarcely be spoken of. By the end of March the Racecourse had grown to 5487, Potchefstroom to 5373. By the end of April Potchefstroom had risen to nearly 6000. By the end of May Middelburg had jumped from 1292 in April to 6637; Potchefstroom stood at 6149; Irene at 4319; Volksrust at 4810; Standerton at 2983. Bloemfontein already housed 3584. Already in May, while Kitchener’s clean-sweep was still in its first stage, 5 Transvaal camps and 2 in the Orange Free State had passed the 3000 mark. In June and July no fewer than 10 of the 15 Transvaal camps each held more than 3000, and 6 of the 12 under the Orange River Colony likewise. Numbers reached their height in October 1901 at 58883 in the Transvaal camps and 45306 in the Free State camps. [6]
In April the general superintendent of the Free State camps expressed his regret at the overcrowding of tents: the ordnance department had quite broken down and could not supply the requisite number of tents. He added that Boers had never been used to being herded together in large numbers, and that unless immediate steps were taken to rectify the sanitary state of Bloemfontein the death-rate would be largely increased. The worst examples of tent overcrowding came in May at Springfontein, where 19 and 20 inhabitants were packed in some round tents; Irene in the same month had like cases of 19 and 20 in one tent. On the 11th of July Kendal Franks still found a distinct overcrowding: in one tent 3 families, parents and children numbering 14, all had measles. Franks was a medical inspector sent through the camps. 9, 10, even 12 persons to a tent was no exception when the Ladies Committee later visited. Pratt Yule declared that foul air from crowding had a worse effect on the health of children than of adults; it was the children who were hit hardest. [6]
At Johannesburg Racecourse women and children had been brought in large numbers into horse-stables and even under the main pavilion, after suburbs such as Ophirton, Rosettenville, Booysens, and even the compounds of the Robinson and Village Deep gold mines had been stuffed with as many families as possible. At Vredefort Road in May part of the housing was sack-huts, worse, the English inspector Daller reported, than the African camp nearby with its excellent patrol tents or huts of tough thick thatch. At Nylstroom on the 8th of August Franks found 62 persons housed in the 13 small, dark, close cells of the local gaol, so that cells and inmates alike were unclean. At Heidelberg he found on average 5 persons in each sod-house room of 12 by 10 feet. Some camps were fenced with barbed wire so that inhabitants should not escape. Kimberley stood inside an eight-foot barbed-wire fence supposed to be impregnable. Port Elizabeth, reported on the 27th of March, had 2 camps about 20 yards apart, surrounded by wire fencing; the sentries had orders not to interfere with the inmates unless they attempted to escape. Standerton, Volksrust, and Mafeking were surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence; inhabitants might not go in or out between six in the evening and six in the morning. Vryburg, situated in a hollow, was enclosed with barbed wire and guarded by African scouts; at Nylstroom, which boasted it was not wired, 6 Zulus were kept outside as guards. [6]
On the 27th of June Lloyd George brought tent housing before the House: the canvas was so open that the slightest rain — even dew — soaked through, and with hundreds of cases of sickness among the children the consequences would be still more fatal unless precautions were taken at once. Mrs Maxwell, wife of the military governor at Pretoria, appealed through the New York Herald of the 16th of April in the name of the little children living in open tents without fires and possessing only the scantiest of clothes. In July Mrs A. H. Bosman and Mrs H. S. Malan, visiting Transvaal camps with leave, confirmed that the death-rate was especially high among the children, from want of decent food and from exposure to night air. In December Maxwell himself wrote that tents, though better than nothing, were hardly sufficient protection in the camps on the high veld. Emily Hobhouse, sitting on khaki blankets rolled up inside Mrs B’s tent at Bloemfontein, found the sun blazing through the single canvas and the flies thick and black on everything; no chair, no table, nor any room for such. Hobhouse was an English visitor who had leave to see the camps and who reported what she saw. She offered to make mattresses if the military would give hay or straw; even that could not be supplied in small quantities. At Norvalspont Cole-Bowen told the Ladies Committee at the end of August he had not many sleeping on the ground but more than he liked, and that more little children in his camp had died from sleeping on the ground than from any other cause — it was no over-statement to say two-thirds. Even in November more than half of Springfontein’s inhabitants, and about four-fifths of those at Bethulie, still slept on the ground. Toward the close of the year, to fight the tent problem, frame houses were put up in various camps — wooden frames like the gable end of a house, with green-painted canvas stretched tight, from 14 by 13 feet to 18 by 15; Pietermaritzburg had begun them as early as March. [6]
Half-Rations, Meat, and the A and B Scales — 1901
Food in the camps was not a side question. It was the daily test of whether the people taken off the farms would live. General Wynne, commanding at Standerton, complained that the actual quantity of food received over about 2 months had worked out at nearly 2 ounces a head a day, so that the camp was not far from actual starvation. After repeated complaints the military governor pointed out that Standerton, by permits, had received more stores than other stations up to the 31st of January; Wynne answered that stores allowed by permit in Pretoria and stores that actually reached Standerton were two different things. On the 24th of February, after civil control had taken the camps, Wynne still told Pretoria that the system upon which food had been supplied to civil inhabitants under British protection was a failure. Dr R. P. MacKenzie, acting chief medical officer of the Racecourse camp, had on the 19th of December 1900 judged the rations insufficient to keep the refugees in health, and had recommended meat and fresh vegetables at least 3 times a week. Dr Henry A. Becker of Bloemfontein, in his May report dated the 1st of June, condemned the ration scale there as insufficient, especially as to meat. Pratt Yule, after inspection on the 1st of July, noted that the diet standard was certainly low, and recommended a potato ration twice a week as a supplement to the meal ration, not as a substitute. Kitchener sent that report to Chamberlain on the 26th of July; no marked reaction followed. When the Opposition on the 20th of June pleaded for improvement, Brodrick assured the House that the responsible persons in South Africa had pronounced the rations sufficient. [6]
On the 25th of April Osmond-Williams asked Brodrick in the House whether he knew of MacKenzie’s report that the food issued to the Johannesburg camp was unfit for human use. Brodrick answered yes, and added that the food was exactly the same as that supplied to British troops, but that, from disruption on the railways, privations might be expected. The food that matched the troops’ in quantity was that of the small group of hands-upper families on the A-scale; those of whom MacKenzie had written were on the B-scale — the half-ration. Emily Hobhouse found that either Free State scale was sufficiently small, but when, as she constantly found, the actual amount given did not come up to scale, it became a starvation rate. On the 17th of June Lloyd George showed the House that the quantity of food was less than the amount allowed in England to criminals under hard labour. Humphreys-Owen cited a letter working from the blue books the cost of rations in October at threepence to fivepence a head — nothing like sufficient for any but the poorest food; as a prison visitor he had thought it well if inmates were fed for two shillings and sixpence a week. In the Free State camps Champion and Co. held the tender at ninepence a day per white; a considerable part of that was profit. [6]
The raising of the undesirables to a higher scale was more than cancelled by the poorer quality of food — first of all meat — supplied from May 1901. Over nearly the whole extent of the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal, the Ladies Committee later reported, fresh meat is poor, thin and comparatively innutritious. The slaughter-stock taken from the farms in Roberts’s and Kitchener’s destruction was, by mid-year, lean as a brand; by September the flocks threatened to die of misery. Johanna van Warmelo, serving at Irene, reported at the beginning of May that the meat issued there was of such quality that soup could not even be boiled from it; on the 6th of June the people could not use it and hung it along the tent-lines to dry in the sun — unfit even for a dog. Superintendent Scholtz’s May report recorded a great murmur: yesterday 2000 sheep averaging 15 pounds each were so taken for the use of this camp. Franks, inspecting Irene on the 11th of July after the ladies’ complaints, found carcasses not rejected and buried to be lean as a brand, average weight about 15 and 16 pounds, yet still called them sound meat. At Johannesburg on the 18th he found the same 15 pounds, about 50 per cent bone, about 15 sheep a day discarded as unfit for human food. At Krugersdorp on the 31st of July the sheep averaged only 13¾ pounds, more than half bone. [6]
2 medical men, Davies and Geo. Turner, after a visit to the Johannesburg camp slaughter-houses on the 26th of September, declared the animals very emaciated, the meat mostly connective tissue and bone, the muscle atrophied, absolutely unfit for human consumption. The Racecourse superintendent calculated that 3½ pounds of bone and meat yielded at most 2 pounds of meat. Mrs Bosman and Mrs Malan wrote that for a period of 10 days 100 persons had received no meat at all. Lean beasts were almost carried to the slaughter-poles; such meat, despite the hunger of the camp-dwellers, went straight into the refuse tins; the name vrekvlys — dead-beast meat — was given almost generally to that particularly lean meat. The Rev. A. D. Luckhoff at Bethulie wrote that the vrekvlys becomes nauseous as the days roll by, a dreaded nightmare. On the 26th of September Davies, Turner, and the veterinary Pye stated that many beasts do actually die in the yards while waiting to be slaughtered. July, August, and September reports swarmed with jeremiads over the weak meat. When the Ladies Committee visited the camps in October they found the meat condition extremely grave; at Balmoral the lean sheep reached the record low of 11 pounds, and 69 slaughtered sheep were rejected on the day of the visit. Under the pressure of meat-scarcity from May to October, animals that had suffered lung-sickness or brand-sickness, and even stock already dead of brand-sickness, landed on the block. [6]
By September the sheep flocks held at the camps for slaughter were almost used up. Middelburg, Belfast, Barberton, Pietersburg, and Nylstroom still had to be content with the wretched vrekvlys for a time; the general superintendent of Transvaal camps then hoped that facilities might soon be forthcoming for at least one ration a week of frozen meat, and tinned corned beef was resorted to. Superintendent J. Swart at Potchefstroom reported on the 1st of September that several days during the month tinned meat had to be issued. The corned-beef ration does not fit the burgher by any means, and is really injurious to the health of the young children. At Kroonstad on the 28th of October the women went to the camp commandant and spoke of the meat having been maggoty and dirty. The Ladies Committee, satisfied with neither the lean mutton nor the tinned beef, recommended definite measures for frozen meat. No special food for children was provided; small and great received exactly the same. 2 pounds of lean meat a week for an adult was here and there eked out by a superintendent with half a pound to a pound extra; in some camps half a pound of rice a week was issued at long intervals, usually as a medical comfort. Most superintendents clung to the routine scales in accordance with the economy continually pressed upon them. [6]
Smuts, De la Rey, Cd. 524, and the Farms — 1901
The consequence of the clean-sweep, as Smuts put it, was that in the winter of 1901 the poor land and people had been brought to a state of destruction and misery beyond all description: almost all places and towns in both Republics destroyed and burned; almost all grain and means of existence destroyed; almost all livestock killed or rather cruelly murdered. Smuts was not a British commissioner. He was a republican officer writing to the Free State president from the western districts he had ridden since July 1900. To Steyn on the 25th of June he wrote that when he now thought back on all he had seen and lived since July 1900 in the western districts, he felt wholly unable even in general strokes to describe the destruction wrought there. He took as example that part of the Krugersdorp district between the Magaliesberg and the Witwatersberg, the Moot, one of the fairest, most fertile, and most cultivated stretches of South Africa: when he had arrived in July 1900 the region had still been green with unbroken lands, gardens, and well-built farms — a delight to the eyes and a proof of what the people had been able to achieve in 10 years of agriculture. And now? A barren devastated wilderness; lands destroyed, gardens cut down and rooted out, farms burned, the houses in many cases not only burned but blown with dynamite so that not a stone was left upon another; a dwelling-place for the night-owl and the vulture. Where so lately all had been life, prosperity, and joy, death now reigned. No living animal more; no servant, no woman or child, but one saw on the features fear, care, even hunger. How often had he sat on the slope of the Magaliesberg and looked at the many farms, lands, stacks, and storehouses in one unbroken fire and flame. The enemy now relied more on the consequences of a famine than on his own weapons: all foodstuffs destroyed, all wagons, carts, mills, ploughs, threshing-machines burned, dams broken, even coffee-mills destroyed because the women ground corn with them. [6]
In the same spirit De la Rey reported in November 1901: our land lies in a heap of ruins; one finds nothing more than the walls of buildings where those too have not been blown with dynamite. De la Rey was Botha’s western colleague, still in the field. In the destruction none was excluded: the property of neutrals as of those fallen, of prisoners of war sitting today on the islands, and of widows and orphans. Churches, parsonages, and schools were not spared. In his division the towns Wolmaransstad, Bloemhof, Schweizer-Reneke, and Hartebeestfontein, not occupied by the enemy, had been wholly burned. So it was in the Orange Free State and also in the eastern districts of the South African Republic where General Botha was. He described the treatment of women and children in the removal as the blackest page in the many black pages of that sad history. On the 9th of May Brodrick, answering Swift MacNeill in the House, admitted that a number of farms near Bronkhorstspruit had been burned because two trains had been fired on from that direction; when MacNeill asked whether there was no official information of any kind as to the fate of these women and children, the secretary for war kept silence. [6]
On Wednesday the 31st of July Dillon told the House: when you failed to crush the Boers in the veld, you turned your weapons against the women and children, and closing the channels of information, and steeling your hearts against the cry of conscience, you had to take recourse to an infamous policy of farm-burning. He predicted that farm-burning would brand an unforgettable hatred in the memories of the children and children’s children, and strengthen the consciousness that the subject of this war is to put the Dutch under the iron heel of the Anglo-Saxon. Flynn spoke of whole families turned out on the veld because the male members were fighting, of furniture ruthlessly destroyed, of homes burned, of helpless women and children swept into concentration camps where disease was prevalent. Swift MacNeill declared the war had been waged with a maximum of cruelty and a minimum of humanity. On the 4th of July Brodrick told the Commons that Roberts had abandoned his intention of sending women and children to Europe, as after correspondence he feared they must inevitably suffer greater hardships and privations. On the 15th of August Steyn remonstrated with Kitchener, citing among other things the events at Graspan near Reitz, where English troops had sought shelter behind a women’s laager, and assuring him he could name hundreds of such cases, to be confirmed by truth-loving soldiers. The protest remained without result. Smuts put it: when we wished to fight the enemy, the troops sought shelter behind the dwelling-houses in which our women and children sat, so that it was impossible for us to fire on them; when we wished to bombard his camps, those were filled with our captive women and children. [6]
After a journey to Johannesburg even Milner could not refrain, on the 11th of September, from confessing to Mrs Montefiore that the condition of the country was horrible and death and destruction to be perceived everywhere; he laid the responsibility on the Boers for a senseless guerrilla war that had compelled the British military to sweep the land from one end to the other. Of the Free State he added that this territory was practically a desert and that about the whole population was housed in the refugee camps along the railway. No survey of how many dwellings Roberts and Kitchener had destroyed was ever made. By a blue book, Cd. 524, laid on the table of the British Parliament in 1901, the military authorities tried to create the impression that during the whole war to January 1901 only 634 dwellings had been destroyed, and that according to the declarations of British statesmen the destruction had since ceased. Of 10 destroyed dwellings named in a memorial to Milner as examples from the district of Winburg, only 1 was named in the blue book. In a letter of protest against the barbarous dealings of Kitchener and his troops, the government of the South African Republic on the 22nd of November 1901 addressed lord Salisbury and rejected those figures with emphasis: of the houses from which these Boer families had been removed by force, hardly a single house now stood on the whole surface of the two Republics; not 500 — as recently asserted in the British Parliament — but at least 30000 dwellings had been burned and destroyed on the orders of the military authorities, to say nothing of the towns wholly laid waste. Against the whole removal acting President Schalk Burger and F. W. Reitz had on the 21st of November protested to Salisbury, and laid bare the hard treatment women and children had had to endure on the road to the camps; they declared outright that the removal had taken place in the most uncivilized and barbarous manner. [6]
Sanitation, Medical Service, and the Ladies Committee — 1901
Of the officials who arrived at Pretoria on the 1st of February to take civil control, only 1 was a medical man. That fact is why this heading is not a side note on tents. The earliest medical treatment the sick received was in the form of medical comforts — milk, but also candles and soap, articles that ought to have been supplied abundantly to all camp-dwellers; the camp-dwellers had first to become patients before they received essential foodstuffs. On the 17th of February Goodwin reported that diarrhoea, measles, and sore eyes were having high times among the children at the Racecourse; Dr C. Graham could not master the condition and was sent to the coast. Dr Crook’s first medical report on the 11th of March attributed an improvement to the free distribution of milk and arrowroot among the children and to the well-directed efforts of the Dutch nurses Lucy Mears, Lettie van Aswegen, and Hermina Brough. The poorly equipped hospital, lacking even the most elementary hospital stores, had room for only 20 patients — in a camp of 4000, with only one medical man, Crook, who was unsympathetic toward the prisoners. After the high mortality of April and May — 90 out of 3170, and 80 out of 3379 — the committee of the Dutch Church, which had placed 12 nurses at the camp’s disposal, pointed out that one physician with insufficient help could not possibly visit the great number of patients, when there were daily 150 to 200 cases of sickness. [6]
Dr Turner, appointed medical officer of health at the civil takeover, reported at the beginning of March on Irene: the number of sick is apparently great; if all the other 52 weeks were equally sickly, every man, woman, and child would come under the doctor’s hands 6 times a year. Measles and diarrhoea reigned severely; no fewer than 154 persons out of a population of 1324 were bedridden. There was only one medical man, Dr J. Bulpin, and no hospital at all. The death-rate, 16 persons between the 6th of February and the 3rd of March — 174 per thousand per year — Turner branded enormous. On the 24th of May superintendent Scholtz reported that he then had hospital facilities and was having a building put up for persons who might fall prey to lung affections. At Vereeniging Turner found 44 cases of enteric among a population of only about 664, all arisen in the camp, which he attributed to polluted drinking-water. At Middelburg in the Transvaal Dr H. A. Spencer in June anxiously begged for more help, especially Dutch-speaking nurses if obtainable: the work is most arduous; one nurse should be provided for every thousand people. [6]
Trollope, after a personal visit on the 10th and 13th of May to Brandfort and Vredefort, had to concede he did not consider there was enough room and ordered a convalescent hospital to be formed. Trollope was general superintendent of the Free State camps. At Brandfort enteric was very general; there was no trained nurse and only 6 beds available, while 30 patients had to be housed; a good few had of necessity to be nursed on the ground. At Bethulie on the 28th of June Trollope found, for 3440 inhabitants growing daily, not even a full-time medical man; the district surgeon visited twice a day but was too overworked for the necessary tent-to-tent visits; hospital facilities and medicine were sharply short. At Aliwal North, with 4428 inhabitants, the people had to make do with one marquee tent that could house at most 3 or 4 patients. At Kroonstad there was a good hospital, but only one medical man despite a particularly high sickness-rate and a great number of enteric cases; he warned that owing to the situation of the camp in the cold mist belt always formed by rivers, lung affections might be expected to occur largely. The deputy administrator of the Free State declared with the greatest firmness that the camps were very poorly supplied with physicians: the military having drained South Africa of those who are suitable. [6]
At Bloemfontein in April the weak provision for removal of night-soil was laid to the town council; on the 28th of April Colonel R. Exham declared the ditches were used solely from want of sufficient provision. Trollope wrote to the Orange River Colony administration on the 22nd of April; H. G. Adams in a draft of the 25th of April instructed the superintendent to take out of the hands of the town council the duties of the removal of night-soil and refuse if they continued to neglect the work. A report of the 6th of May on the newly formed Bethulie camp brought to light that the latrine provision was wholly unsuitable; the camp surroundings were already fouled. Becker’s findings of the 1st of June on insufficient water for washing were confirmed by the Ladies Committee, who visited Bloemfontein from the 16th to the 19th of September and saw the women trying to wash clothes in small pools of water, sometimes using the water more than once. The Ladies Committee was a British committee of women sent out to inspect the camps. They first visited Mafeking on the 20th of August and found the latrine accommodation highly ineffectual; Franks inspected that camp on the 19th of October and his extremely unfavourable report itself confirmed their testimony. Kroonstad was examined from the 24th to the 28th of October, just after it had been moved from the previous site, on which the lives of many camp-dwellers had already been lost. The British Medical Journal of the 9th of November declared that the sanitary system has been attended by calamities. [6]
To protect its good name England was at long last obliged to send out a committee of ladies to investigate, and, in following their report, to bring revolutionary improvements in the camps. Those improvements were carried through only after the end of 1901. Pratt Yule on the 28th of September, in a kind of defence after Tomory’s report, did acknowledge that there were abuses, but otherwise condemned Tomory’s report as somewhat exaggerated and even wrong; on that ground the camp authority resisted a possible move of the camp, which weighed heavy on them as extra cost. Lucy A. B. Deane wrote to Goold-Adams on the 2nd of November. The slaughter-houses in general could not stand a health inspector’s examination; many were a bait for flies; Johannesburg and Irene were dirty and unhygienic. J. E. Tucker at Pietersburg was an exception: in his August report the stock was very lean, but great care was taken that only healthy animals were slaughtered, 6 refugees of experience told to examine all animals before killing. Meat was sometimes issued that tasted sharply of Cooper’s Dip, or was so soaked with a carbolic smell, from being stored with carbolic in one store, that it could not be eaten. [6]
October Mortality, Chamberlain, and the Protests — October–November 1901
In the Free State camps, especially Springfontein and Kroonstad, the death-rate now reached an average of 178.7 per thousand per year; Trollope tried to shift the blame onto persons lately admitted who had endured so many privations before admission that their resistance to disease was extremely limited — among the refugees brought in by General Elliot’s column a great number were in a most deplorable state. In the Transvaal the figure had also risen to an average of more than 238 per thousand per year, with a child mortality of 423 per thousand per year; superintendents and physicians fell back on the old story that negligence, ignorance, indifference, and even irresponsibility of mothers toward their children were responsible. Franks, visiting a few Transvaal camps in July, concluded that the death-rate of measles was attributed not so much to the severity of the epidemic as to the ignorance, perverseness and dirty habits of the parents themselves — without mentioning that want of soap was still the order of the day and that washing facilities in the heart of winter did not exist at all, nor the shortage of fuel, so that people were dependent on dung which they collected, until military regulations stopped even that. Dr Haldane showed that average mortality in the camps from June to August was about 10 times the normal mortality in England; mortality of children in June was 7 times, in August 13 times, the normal. He reduced the chief causes to two: abnormal spread of infectious diseases under conditions of overcrowding, and exposure to cold. [6]
On the 1st of October Emily Hobhouse wrote to Brodrick, pleading by the still-rising death-rate for immediate drastic improvements: in the name of the little children whom I have watched suffer and die, I make bold to plead with you once more. If the children in the camps under the Free State administration had had to die at the October rate, the entire child population would have vanished completely in 1 year and 7 months. That terrible mortality — which had followed a severe measles epidemic — opened many eyes to the true causes. Camp physicians and superintendents this time tried to hold the measles epidemics before the world as the cause; their conclusion was doubted even by the British Medical Journal, which on the 9th of November wrote that unless the measles in the camps displayed a virulence hitherto unknown, other factors must have been at work, and declared outright that the conditions of life in the camps were in high degree responsible for the evil of the high mortality: dysentery and diarrhoea and pneumonia, as well as measles, probably prevail in them. From the statistics it was deduced that if existing conditions continued, all the Boer children would be wiped out in 3 years, while it would take 20 years of exposure of children in England to English conditions of life to produce a similar result. Dr Morrow of Mafeking wrote that the causes of this deplorable mortality, so far as he could ascertain, were want of proper and systematic disinfection of the camp, and want of proper medical attention; the nursing staff was unable to overtake the work devolving upon them. [6]
Chamberlain himself still seemed determined to show that the mortality did not spring from the camp system. He instructed Milner to collect statistics of mortality in the larger towns of the Cape Colony, the Transvaal, the Free State, and Natal, hoping thereby to explain away the camp deaths. Because rural birth and death statistics were so inadequate that no conclusion could be drawn, and because the conditions of the concentration camps more nearly resemble the conditions of a town than of a rural district, it was decided to collect the figures of 32 towns in the Cape Colony. Chamberlain did not succeed in his object. Infant mortality under one year from 1896 to 1900 in the Cape stood at 147.47 per thousand per year, while the ten-year average for 28 of the principal towns in England was 162. With few exceptions the death-rates in smaller rural villages in the Cape were lower than those of the larger towns. A better conclusion for the comparatively blooming health of the Boer population could be drawn from the well-cared-for Port Elizabeth camp: while the enormous mortality in the Transvaal and Free State camps had high times during the four months July to October, in that camp, with an average child population of 229, not one death occurred. The attempt to explain away the mortality in the camp by saying that the ordinary death rate among the Boers in the country districts was abnormal and appalling thus fell through. [6]
Outside England the criticism was still sharper. The October mortality even found an echo in the French Chamber of Deputies. On Monday the 4th of November Georges Berry asked leave that the French government furnish information on practical means by which, in co-operation with other countries, it might approach Great Britain with a request no longer to leave women and children in the concentration camps; the matter was postponed. On the 8th of November Chamberlain, passing over the War Office and the British commanders in South Africa, instructed Milner that the only remedy is to break up the camps in smaller units, and gave him clearly to understand that expense must not be allowed to stand in the way. Milner agreed and now began to strive for the transfer of large portions of the population of the greatest camps in the Transvaal and Free State to the camps in Natal and the Cape. In Natal the average mortality for July to November was only 99 per thousand per year, with a height of 206 in September and only 123 during Black October. In the Cape the death-rate was likewise low. All the measures to combat the conditions responsible for the mortality could be brought into application only after several weeks; their effect could therefore hardly be observed during the remaining two months of 1901. The average November mortality, though lower than October’s, was still appallingly high in both Free State and Transvaal camps — 362 and 321 per thousand per year respectively — and in several camps far above that figure, for instance Bethulie at 625 per thousand per year. [6]
The Ladies Committee, after careful inspection of almost all the camps, declared toward the close of the year that the camp always suffers materially when its numbers exceed, at the outside, 3000; they would welcome the reduction of Bloemfontein, Middelburg, Potchefstroom, Aliwal North, Bethulie, Irene, Krugersdorp, and Volksrust, and the formation from their overflow of new camps elsewhere. Maxwell claimed by the end of October to have succeeded in systematically reducing numbers in densely populated camps, but the liberal norm of at most 3000 was not reached. On Peace Sunday, the 22nd of December, Charles F. Aked, minister of Pembroke Chapel, Liverpool, preached the annual sermon on our cowardly war: Great Britain cannot win her battles without resorting to the most despicable cowardice of the most loathsome cur on earth — the act of striking at a brave man’s heart through his wife’s honour and his child’s life. Between a quarter and a fifth of those brought to the camps died in the space of some 8 months, May to December 1901. The fear gradually seized the leaders among the fighting burghers that if no end were made of the camps the whole Afrikaans people would die out. That fear belonged to this year; the peace that would later be signed did not. [6]
Sargant’s Schools, Teachers, and the Close — 1901
Milner had invited E. B. Sargant in 1900; he had stepped ashore at Capetown from Quebec on the 6th of November of that year. Sargant was not a camp superintendent. He was the official charged with schools in the two new colonies, and the camps were where the children now were. On the 5th of February 1901 Sargant wrote to Fiddes and Wilson from Norvalspont, where there were then 1350 prisoners. He let the parents clearly understand that the language of instruction at Norvalspont would be English only; when some parents showed unmistakable displeasure he soothed them with a promise that religious instruction would indeed be given through Dutch as medium. After a tent-to-tent search he succeeded in recruiting enough teachers from the camp ranks for the time; he stayed 14 days in the camp, acted as head of the school, and at the same time taught the higher classes. Of the proverbial dirtiness of the Boers he found no trace: most of them were neatly dressed. The camp commandant proposed that the Dutch school be suppressed in a drastic way; Sargant did not for the time support the proposal, yet the little Dutch private school died within less than 2 months from want of support. On the 12th of February Fiddes, secretary of the Transvaal administration, wrote that Mr Sargant appears to me to have done everything he has touched, well. On the 17th of February Sargant could report in a short account to Goold-Adams that the educational work in the camps was already in full swing and a source of great satisfaction to camp-dwellers. His first circular to heads and assistants of schools appeared on the 19th of February: they were to obtain the co-operation of the camp commandants; parents would not for the time be obliged to send their children to school; teachers were as far as possible to be recruited from the camp ranks. [6]
Dr W. A. Macfadyen, formerly lecturer in English at the State Gymnasium, acted from March 1901 as administrative chief officer of the Education Department in the Transvaal, with his office in Pretoria. On the 26th of March he informed Fiddes that plans were being laid for the founding of schools in various camps and asked free transport for teachers or school organisers; leave was granted on the 30th of March. J. H. Corbett worked the camps along the Natal line and soon founded schools at Heidelberg, Standerton, and Volksrust; on the 10th of September Franks reported that Mr Corbett seemed a very keen and energetic official putting his whole soul into his work. Noaks took the Potchefstroom region — schools at Potchefstroom, Klerksdorp, and Vereeniging; M. White the eastern line — Middelburg, Barberton, and Belfast; J. Robinson, already controlling the Rand schools, was to organise a school in the Racecourse camp at Johannesburg. For April Sargant could already furnish valuable figures on the number of children of school-going age in various Free State camps, the number actually attending, housing facilities, and available teachers. From May the number of school-going children in both Free State and Transvaal camps increased with rapid strides: from 1293 in Transvaal and 1370 in Free State camps on the 30th of April — the Free State rolls stood at 2893 in May and 7712 by the end of August. At the end of May there were in 8 Transvaal camps no fewer than 54 teachers, and 47 in the Free State. Teachers at first received only 4 to 6 pounds with rations and housing, or 9 pounds without, a month; heads 10 to 15 pounds — in a few cases only 7 pounds 10 shillings — with rations and housing, or 15 without. [6]
3 factors from the start harmed the quality of the teaching: the rapid growth of numbers, so that demand for teachers far exceeded supply; the rule that the medium must be English; and the fact that the majority of teachers were not professionally trained and usually also lacked an academic training. The Ladies Committee repeatedly complained of the poor knowledge of English the teachers displayed; of Van der Berg, able and spirited head of the greatest camp school, Volksrust, they said he was a good little fellow, but can’t speak English. The number of children in the schools at Volksrust was 1100 at the Ladies Committee’s visit on the 25th and 26th of November. At Harrismith the rule that all classes should be taught in English was disregarded; at Irene they found Richardson teaching a huge class and addressing them wholly in Dutch. On the 4th of November Franks wrote in unvarnished language that, considering the enormous influence upon the future of South Africa which the education of the rising generation will exercise politically as well as intellectually, the headmaster in all the schools in the burgher camps should be a loyal Britisher and if possible at least half of his assistants should be the same. Sargant himself had already on the 14th of June written to Milner that the opportunity during the next year of getting them all to speak English is golden. On the 20th of September Chamberlain wrote to Milner of historical readers to be used in the schools of the new colonies with a view to counteracting the anti-British tendencies of many of the text books now in use; the offer of Wm. Creswell was not accepted, for Sargant had already assigned the task to Miss Bertha Synge. For want of class-books and writing material many teachers taught only orally or with a blackboard and a picture-card; slates were bought, but as there were no school-desks with writing-tables the pupils could write on them only with difficulty. Long planks laid over empty biscuit-boxes served as benches; such planks were often needed for making coffins, so that need could be met only for a time. At Brandfort the children came daily carrying little pads which they placed upon some large stones to form their seats. A second inspectors’ conference was held at Pretoria on the 14th of September. [6]
On the 27th of September Milner wrote to Chamberlain that it needed a man of great enthusiasm and courage to set to work so away, as Mr Sargant did, despite most discouraging conditions. Humbly was appointed head of the Howick camp school at 20 pounds a month from the 15th of November. J. E. Davies of the Johannesburg camp school received a salary of 25 pounds; Hannion of Nylstroom 200 pounds a year. A telegram of Chamberlain on the 13th of December informed Milner that 22 teachers would leave the next day by the Arundel Castle for South Africa and that 28 others would follow on the 21st of December by the Galeka. Those ships had not yet landed when the year closed. What hung on that December list was whether English heads would yet take the camp schools, and whether the children still on the ground at Bethulie and Springfontein would yet have desks that were not also coffin-planks. [6]