Second Boer War
The bitter 1899-1902 war in which Britain seized the gold of southern Africa from two Afrikaner republics, staining its name with concentration camps.
In 1899 the British Empire, the most powerful state on Earth, went to war against two small farming republics of Dutch-descended settlers and expected a quick, easy victory. Instead it got nearly three years of humiliation, guerrilla warfare, and a scandal that still shadows its name: the concentration camp.
Gold under the veld
The prize was gold. The 1886 discovery of the world's richest goldfield on the Witwatersrand turned the Boer-run South African Republic, the Transvaal, into a magnet for foreign fortune-seekers and a target for British greed. Mining magnates like Cecil Rhodes and imperial officials in London wanted the Transvaal and its sister republic, the Orange Free State, folded into a British-run South Africa. The public pretext was the uitlanders, the mostly British miners whom President Paul Kruger's government taxed heavily and refused to give the vote. Behind the talk of rights lay a simpler aim: control of the richest gold reserves on the planet. Kruger, seeing the trap closing, declared war first in October 1899.
Black Week and the guerrilla war
The Boers stunned the empire. In December 1899, remembered as Black Week, they beat British armies in three separate battles and laid siege to the towns of Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking. Farmers and hunters, the Boers were superb marksmen armed with modern German Mauser rifles, and they made the British pay dearly for every advance. Britain poured in nearly half a million troops and by mid-1900 had captured the Boer capitals, expecting the war to end. It did not. The Boers refused to surrender, scattered into fast-moving mounted commandos, and waged a guerrilla war across the open veld, blowing up railways, ambushing columns, and vanishing into the countryside.
Scorched earth and the camps
To starve the guerrillas of support, Lord Kitchener laid waste to the land. British troops burned some 30,000 farms, killed livestock, and swept Boer women and children, along with their African workers, into what the army called concentration camps. The camps became death traps of disease and hunger. Around 28,000 Boers, most of them children, died in them, together with at least 20,000 black Africans held in separate, worse-supplied camps. An English activist, Emily Hobhouse, exposed the conditions, and a critic branded them 'methods of barbarism.' Britain won the war and imposed the Treaty of Vereeniging in May 1902, but the victory was poisoned. The three-year war cost Britain over 20,000 lives and shook its confidence as a military power. The peace folded the republics into the empire and, in 1910, into a self-governing Union of South Africa built by and for whites, leaving the black majority with nothing. Britain got the gold. But the phrase 'concentration camp,' hardened on the South African veld, would echo through the darker history of the century to come.