Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (48 page)

To prevent Boer civilians throughout the veld from providing shelter and provisions to the elusive burghers who harassed his forces, Kitchener expanded with a vengeance a policy of farm burning that Roberts had begun. So extreme was Kitchener’s version that by the end of the war some thirty thousand Boer farms would be left in black smoldering ruins. The problem then was what to do with the homeless families, mostly women and children, who were left behind. To the horror of the Boers and, soon after, the rest of the world, the British came up with a stunning solution: concentration camps.

The idea behind concentration camps was not new, but this was the first time the term had been used. More than that, it was the first time the camps had targeted a whole country and depopulated entire regions. Although the British did not intentionally kill their captives, they committed what Louis Botha called “slow murder.”
The camps quickly multiplied until there were some forty-five of them scattered across southern Africa. They did not have nearly enough food for their thousands of inmates. There was little to no medical care, and the sanitary conditions were not only appalling but deadly.
By the end of the war, more than twenty-six thousand Boer civilians would die in British concentration camps, some twenty-two thousand of whom were children. Those statistics, however, do not even take into account the roughly twenty thousand Africans who, having been forced to fight in a war that was not their own, subsequently died in separate black concentration camps.

Outraged, Botha repeatedly wrote to his British counterparts protesting the concentration camps, but to no avail. “
At our meeting at Middleburg I verbally protested against forcible removal of our families, and against the cruel manner in which it was done,” Botha wrote to Kitchener. “These families were given no opportunity of providing themselves, from their homes and goods, with sufficient necessaries for a long journey and complete change of dwelling; but on the contrary they were, notwithstanding the prevailing inclement weather, removed mostly on open trollies, by which they were exposed to every discomfort and misery, while their houses were also looted by the British soldiers….This convinces me that the British troops under Your Excellency’s Chief Command wish to do all in their power to make our helpless women and children suffer as much as possible.” In response, Kitchener just shrugged. “
As I informed Your Honour at Middleburg,” he replied to Botha five days later, “owing to the irregular manner in which you have conducted and continue to conduct hostilities…I have no other course open to me and am forced to take the very unpleasant and repugnant steps of bringing in the women and children.”

It was not until a British social worker named Emily Hobhouse visited the camps and publicized their inhumanity that the conditions slowly began to improve. Horrified by the thin tents, open sewage and starving children, Hobhouse returned to England to tell both the British people and their representatives in Parliament exactly what was happening in southern Africa. Later that year, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who would become prime minister in 1905, excoriated the leaders of the British army for their use of concentration camps. “
When is a war not a war?” he asked. “When it is waged in South Africa by methods of barbarism.”

As reprehensible as Kitchener’s methods were, they took a heavy toll on the fiercely defiant Boers. Even Botha had to admit that the scorched-earth strategy was working. As fast, invisible and skilled as they were at fighting in the open veld, even the self-reliant burghers could not survive without the farms that had fed and sheltered them. Their inability to protect their wives and children from such tactics led even the toughest Boer fighters to despair. “
Fight to the bitter end?” one Boer general asked. “But has the bitter end not come?”

Finally, in the fall of 1902, two and a half years after the war had begun, a delegation of ten men, including Louis Botha, met Kitchener in Pretoria to sign the Treaty of Vereeniging. Among the concessions the Boers were forced to make was that both the Transvaal and the Orange Free State would be annexed by the British. In return, the British pledged to give the Boers £3 million to compensate for the thousands of farms lost during Kitchener’s raids. They also promised that eventually the Boers would be allowed to once again govern their own people.

Noticeably missing from the signatures on the Treaty of Vereeniging was that of Paul Kruger, the president of the Transvaal. Fearing capture, he had fled to Europe on September 11, 1900, little more than three months after the fall of Pretoria. Although he was greeted as a hero in France, the German kaiser had refused even to see him. The kaiser’s grandmother, England’s revered Queen Victoria, had died more than a year before the Treaty of Vereeniging at the age of eighty-one, thus ending what was at the time the longest reign of any British monarch. Kaiser Wilhelm now had to forge a working relationship with his cousin the playboy prince, who had finally been crowned King Edward VII at the age of fifty-nine.

After being rebuffed by the kaiser, Kruger found sanctuary in the Netherlands with his wife and eight of his grandchildren. The children had been living with their mother, one of Kruger’s sixteen children, in a concentration camp. Their mother had not survived the camp’s brutal conditions, and her children were so sick that five of
them died soon after joining their grandparents in Europe. Not long after, Kruger’s wife also died, leaving him, nearly deaf and partially blind, to face the end of the war alone. He lived for two and a half more years, never again setting foot on African soil.

The country that Kruger had once led would eventually free itself from Britain’s grip, but it would happen so slowly that many of the men who had fought for independence would not live to see South Africa become a sovereign state. After the war had ended, eight years would pass before the Boer republics Kruger had left behind—the Transvaal and the Orange Free State—were finally reunited with Natal and Cape Colony to form the Union of South Africa. The union was better than being a colony, but it was still a dominion of the British Empire. It wasn’t until 1931, when the empire reluctantly became a commonwealth, that South Africa could shake off the last vestiges of British control. Even then, Queen Victoria’s silk-gloved hand still rested on the dusty backs of the Boers for another thirty years. Her great-great-granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II would continue to hold the title of queen of South Africa until 1961, when the Union of South Africa officially became the Republic of South Africa.

For the great majority of the inhabitants of southern Africa—the Zulu and Xhosa peoples, the mixed-race “coloreds,” and the other nonwhite populations that included even the large Indian community of which Gandhi was a part—it would take still longer to win the most basic rights of freedom and equality within their own country. During the war, the British had promised that as soon as the Boers were defeated, life for nonwhites would change dramatically. They would, at long last, be treated as citizens, with respect, rights and, most important, suffrage. Instead, the situation grew steadily worse.

With the same insular, defiant worldview that had marked their
fight against the British, the Boers did not relinquish their harsh, race-based social views, but instead worked to expand and codify them. Just a few years after the Treaty of Vereeniging, the Boers began a concerted push toward segregation, forming the South African Native Affairs Commission, which proposed dividing the republic, its rural land as well as its cities, into black and white sections. By 1913, the infamous Natives Land Act was passed, forcing nonwhite Africans, who made up 67 percent of the population, to live on just 7 percent of its arable land.

Emboldened in part by the new international attention that the war had focused on South Africa, the communities that were the target of such policies began to build their own strength. But they faced a long, uphill struggle against the well-organized regime, which began to trade the now-pejorative Boer identity for an updated image as “Afrikaners.” In 1912, the year before the act passed, leaders within the black community had gathered in Bloemfontein, less than three hundred miles south of Pretoria, to form the South African Native National Congress, which would later become the African National Congress, or ANC. Among the founding members of the ANC, and its first secretary-general, was Solomon Plaatje, the brilliant young linguist and journalist who had chronicled the Boer War from the African point of view. Taking advantage of his prodigious language skills, Plaatje traveled widely to help native Africans make their case abroad. After touring England, however, and, later, the United States, Plaatje returned to a South Africa run by and for the Afrikaners.

Resistance to the government’s hardening racial policies was initially spontaneous and largely peaceful, particularly in the Indian community, where Mohandas Gandhi used the combination of humanitarianism and courage that he had learned on the Boer War battlefield to define an entire new movement based on nonviolent protest. After a new law was passed in 1906 forcing Indians to register with the government, Gandhi, who had founded the Natal Indian Congress twelve years earlier, organized a mass meeting of
his own to protest the law. For the next seven years, Indians in South Africa, following Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent resistance, defied prejudicial laws and suffered the consequences. Thousands were imprisoned, beaten and even killed for their defiance, but nothing changed. Finally, in the summer of 1914, after more than twenty years in South Africa, Gandhi returned to India, where his peaceful protests would, in the end, find more success. When he heard that Gandhi had left, Jan Smuts felt nothing but relief. “
The saint has left our shores,” he wrote. “I sincerely hope forever.”

Among South African whites, wide-scale prejudice became increasingly rationalized and institutionalized, first with Smuts’s United Party, which ruled from 1934 until 1948, and then with the National Party. Dominated by Afrikaners, the National Party implemented an official, state-run program of racial segregation that it called apartheid, Afrikaans for “apartness.” The blatant discrimination and dangerous inequalities inherent in apartheid, however, only fueled support for the ANC, which swelled with popular support despite ever-harsher government measures to suppress it.

Finally, in the 1960s, under the leadership of a charismatic young lawyer named Nelson Mandela, a faction of the ANC abandoned peaceful methods and declared that it would take up armed struggle as the only realistic means of winning change. In response, the National Party banned the ANC from South Africa and imprisoned Mandela for twenty-seven years, embarking on a bitter and escalating conflict against the majority of its country’s own citizens and transforming itself into an international pariah. It was not until 1990, nearly a hundred years after the Boer War and just ten years before the beginning of another new century, that a new president, F. W. de Klerk, would lift the ban and free Mandela. Four years later, South Africans would finally win universal suffrage, and, in a moment that would stir the hearts and hopes of people of all races across the world, Nelson Mandela would become the first black president of South Africa.