The prototypes of English concentration camps in Africa and around the world are likely to have been camps in New Mexico, where the US Army was gathering the Navajo, Cherokee and Mescalero Indians before the reservations were formed. From 1863 to 1868, more than 3,500 people died there from hunger and disease. “The Americans have transformed millions of Redskins into hundreds of thousands by shooting, and this modest remnant is now kept in a cage under surveillance,” Adolf Hitler described in a 1928 speech.
This is what preceded it …
The first Dutch settlements in South Africa appeared in the middle of the 17th century. Later, Germans and French Protestants arrived there. The settlers will be called Boers, they will call themselves Afrikaners. Using the labor of black slaves, Europeans quickly developed agriculture. The Cape Colony flourished.
Reference: The Cape Colony was founded by Jan van Riebeck in 1652 in a bay near the Cape of Good Hope. Operated by the East India Company. Became the most successful among the projects for the resettlement of Europeans in Africa.
The colony occupied an extremely important position on the sea routes from Europe to Asia, and in 1806 the British Empire took it from the weakened Holland. The Boers lived in relative peace with the British until 1834, when the Prohibition of Slavery Act came into force. The settlers could not imagine farming without the forced labor of Africans and decided to start all over again. About 15 thousand people went into the interior of the continent, where they created the Transvaal republics and the Orange Free State.
The new region turned out to be rich in gold and diamonds. English prospectors and Whitlander poured into the Boer republics. Paying high taxes, migrants demanded civil rights for themselves. But there were so many Englishmen that they could come to power through elections. The Boers hesitated, the Whitlander insisted, the British Empire fired. In 1899, the war broke out.
Anglo-Boer War. In the photo on the left - trench of the Boers, on the right - position of the British, 1900. Source: Imperial War Museums / Wikipedia.
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The forces of the parties were hopelessly unequal. For three years of hostilities, the empire increased its contingent to 450 thousand soldiers - against 83 thousand Afrikaners and 3 thousand foreign volunteers.
But the locals were excellent trackers and snipers. Having lost the cities, they scattered across the farms and stabbed the enemy painfully in the back. To destroy the partisans, they had to be deprived of their bases and support from the population. The British began to finally resolve the Boer question.
The Imperial Army adopted a scorched earth tactic. Farms were burned to the ground. The fields were sprinkled with salt to deprive them of fertility. Corpses were thrown into wells to poison the water. The captive men were taken out of the country.
All women, children and elderly people were taken from their homes to the tent "concentration camps". Officially they were called "Refugee" (places of rescue). There were 45 created for whites and 64 for blacks.
The administration did not intend to deliberately starve the prisoners of the camps. Make significant efforts to address supply and sanitation problems, too.
A typical weekly ration for a white adult woman should have been 3 kilograms of flour, 900 grams of meat (usually canned), 100 grams of salt, 300 grams of sugar, 170 grams of coffee. He was calculated to provide 30% fewer calories from the required minimum.
The situation was greatly aggravated by frequent disruptions in food supplies. If the head of the family was listed as fighting in the Boer army, his wife and children received food last or received a special ration without meat. By this, the relatives of the partisans were doomed to starvation. They were killed by measles, typhoid fever and dysentery.
In January 1901, English activist Emilia Hobhouse, founder of the South African Women and Children Aid Foundation, visited several camps. She was shocked.
“I SAW A CROWD OF THEM: IN THE COLD, IN THE RAIN, HUNGRY, SICK, Dying, AND ALREADY DEAD. THERE WAS NO SOAP. WATER IS NOT ENOUGH. BEDS AND MATTRESSES WERE NOT PROVIDED. FUEL WAS LITTLE, PEOPLE SEARCHED FOR IT IN THE BUSH. THE PIKES WERE EXTREMELY LITTLE AND AS I WERE FREQUENTLY OBSERVED THEY WERE LESS THAN PRESCRIBED."
In May, Hobhouse returned home and submitted a report on the drama she had seen to the UK government.
From the fall of 1900, Britain was ruled by a government formed by the Conservative Party. The Hobhouse Report has become a trump card in the hands of the opposition. Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman accused the authorities of using "barbaric methods."
Photos of emaciated and sick people made it into the world press. It was not possible to hand off prisoners for refugees. In the camps, 50 children died a day.
An employee of one of the concentration camps wrote home: “The theory that only weak children die, and after they leave this world, the death rate will decrease, is fundamentally wrong. Those who were considered strong are already dying. And they will all be dead by spring."
The concentration camps had a two-tiered food distribution system: families of men who were still fighting the British army received even less rations than others. Poor housing, poor nutrition and lack of hygiene led to the rapid spread of diseases such as measles, typhoid fever, dysentery, especially among children. Many people died in such conditions. The bodies of the dead were unloaded into wagons and taken out of the camp. They buried 4 - 5 in one grave. On the same cars, rations were delivered from the city to the camp.
Feminist Millicent Fossett chaired a formal panel that reviewed the conditions of the Boers and confirmed Emilia Hobhouse's findings. To save the day (and the reputation of the Conservative Party), the military administration in the concentration camps was replaced by a civilian. The number of medical personnel was increased and nutrition was improved. Money was paid to work in the camp, which could be spent at a grocery stall.
In the meantime, the command of the British army decided not to evacuate to the camps any more women and children captured during the "sweeps". This was not motivated by considerations of humanity, quite the contrary. So the burden of responsibility for the life of the civilian population among the burned farms and destroyed fields fell on the Boer partisans. They lost mobility and food supplies.
By February 1902, the death rate among white prisoners in the camps had dropped by almost 4 times and soon became lower than in most cities in England. But by this time about 26 thousand people had died, of which 24 thousand were children. The exact number of deaths among black Africans is impossible to establish.
WHAT WAS NEXT:
- On May 31, 1902, the Afrikaners admitted defeat. The British crown gained power over the Transvaal and the Orange state. The white population of the republics was promised self-government, the prisoners of war - an amnesty, the farmers - to compensate the losses.
- To improve the economic situation after the war and to compensate for the loss of population in South Africa, the British organized the migration of 50 thousand Chinese.
- In 1971, one of the three submarines of the South African Navy was named after Emilia Hobhouse.