Africa During the Scramble: All War is an Atrocity
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By Gary Oswald.
As discussed in the previous article, the British armies in South Africa were firmly in the ascendancy during 1900. But as they advanced into the Boer Republics, capturing their capitals, they made only limited efforts to bring the Boer armies to ground. They often couldn’t do anything else, as the Boer armies were entirely mounted whereas much of the best British cavalry had died relieving Kimberley. Transport and supply difficulties slowed down the British advance and let Boer armies remain intact.
But they also often choose not to engage due to not wanting to lose men in pointless fights with armies that would soon surrender anyway. When the British captured Johannesburg, they agreed to give the Boers twenty-four hours to evacuate the town in return for the Boers not destroying the gold mines. As a result, the Boers were able to safely remove most of the heavy artillery, ammunition, and gold, which would support their guerrilla efforts. And they were never going to destroy the mines; some of the shareholders of those mines were French, German and American, destroying them would end the hope of foreign intervention, to which the Boers clung. Indeed, an attempt to do that by angry civilians had been stopped by Boer soldiers even as the British approached. (There would be a later Boer plan to destroy them among the guerillas during the later stages of the war when it was clear there would be no foreign intervention, but it was never enacted.)
The Boers did consider entirely surrendering. Or rather the Transvaal Republic considered surrendering. The Orange Free State did not. Ironically the more reluctant republic to go to war, was also the most reluctant to end that war. And they stiffened the resolve of their sister republic. The Orange Free State forces, under Christiaan De Wet, began attacking the British supply lines, springing prisoners of war and winning multiple battles, proving that the war could continue. In the Transvaal, the idea of surrender was suddenly completely off the table again.
All the armed forces the British had ignored in their advance were soon to become impossible to ignore. Thirty thousand armed men were still at large. But the Boers, constantly split by the British Armies, lacked the ability to co-ordinate big offensives. All the major towns and train lines were in British hands and this meant that the Boers couldn’t hold prisoners, whereas, despite De Wet’s efforts, over fifteen thousand Boer soldiers were British POWS. Boer Armies won victories but could not follow up on them. This was a war where all the initiative was with the British.
The rest of the war would be about the British attempt to bring these men to terms.
The first tactic they used, which they began almost as soon as the guerrilla campaigning the Transvaal and the Orange Free State did, was burning the farms of farmers they suspected of harbouring rebels. This, unsurprisingly, did little to win over hearts and minds, and encouraged those who were willing to surrender to take to the bush instead. But it also reduced the areas in which the guerrillas could feed themselves.
The Boer’s answer was simple. Their armies needed to move into the Cape Colony and Natal and survive off British farms, that way the British could only starve them out by killing their own people.
This happened and the British, worried about a Cape Rebellion starting in response, declared martial war in the Cape Colony and armed their own white loyalist militias, which drove most off the invaders back to their own Republics. The most successful tactic was to simply guard horse farms so the guerrillas could not obtain fresh horses. They also began sending their prisoners of war as embassies to the guerrillas, with them bearing messages of peace terms. In response the Boer guerrillas had their old kin tried and executed as traitors for working with the British. They also began to attack the farms and families of those who had surrendered, to encourage those in the field to not do so. Nonetheless the British kept leaning on those Boers who had surrendered to keep sending messages to those who had not, asking for peace negotiations.
In February 1901, Herbert Kitchener, now in charge of the British Army in South Africa, asked London for permission to offer anything beyond independence of the two Boer Republics in return for peace. In particular. he wanted to offer blanket amnesty, war reparations paid by the British, a complete role in their own governance, and a guarantee of white supremacy and no increased rights for non-whites within the annexed territory. It goes without saying that Kitchener would not have dreamed of offering these terms to any other African nation he had conquered.
London replied that while they were happy to offer amnesty, war reparations, religious freedom and eventual self-governance, they could not budge on rights for the natives. The treatment of the black residents of the Boer Republics had been a major part of British propaganda, and while, despite native hopes, the British army governance of those republics had kept and enforced that poor treatment, it would be shameful for the British to simply abandon that moral high ground. Instead, Chamberlain insisted that under British rule the Boer Republics must, like the Cape Colony, have a theoretically colour blind franchise that only enforced white minority rule through literacy and property requirements.
This offer was sent to the guerrillas in March 1901 and was, predictably, turned down. The British Army reacted with a renewed push, to put pressure on them to come to those terms. And one way of doing that they felt, would be removing the civilians from their farms so they could not be used to feed the guerrillas. As such, they began rounding up the civilian population of the Boer Republics and putting them in camps designed to concentrate that population into a single area. Concentration Camps.
Kitchener also asked for his white soldiers to be replaced by Indian soldiers from the subcontinent, who he felt would be less likely to show mercy to the Boers, but was firmly refused by London, and he was instead merely given another thirty thousand white troops from the seemingly bottomless well of volunteers. He stationed these men to guard every major town and railway terminal (and the concentration camps) while eight mobile columns roamed the country looking for guerrillas, capturing thousands every month. But this wasn’t enough. Soon Kitchener increased his fortifications by building block houses, often with the materials from newly empty farms, all over the country, joined by lines of barbed wire. This meant his mobile columns could pin the guerrillas against the barbed wire and run them in. By May 1902, he had built 8,000 blockhouses and made huge areas of the country impassable for enemy forces (in theory at least, in practice the guerrillas sometimes found it easy to slip between fortifications by carrying wire cutters with them). The expense of this tactic was such that the British income tax was raised to pay for it.
In the meantime tens of thousands of civilians were held in concentration camps. And they were dying in droves from diseases and starvation because of overcrowding, bad sanitation and lack of supplies.
Far more effort had been put into removing the civilians than in actually looking after them. They were dying because essentially nobody cared that they were. The death rates, as reported by the great humanist campaigner Emily Hobhouse, were 12%. During the entire length of the war around twenty-seven thousand Boer women and children died in those camps; almost half of all Boer children put in the camps did not make it out. And, while these numbers were not recorded, it is estimated that up to twenty thousand black civilians, who made the majority of those sent to the camps, also died, though this was often ignored.
It wasn’t until Spring 1902 that new nurses and a new supply of food reduced the deaths in the camps from that 12% to 2% or less, the same as an average city. Though they were still prison camps, they were no longer the death camps they had been for the last year. But with the farms empty, the crops and animals of those farms were dying. The British were making South Africa a desert. Those civilians who were not in the camps were now dying at a faster rate than those in it, due to the lack of food left in the countryside; and around the same time, Kitchener began circulating instructions to stop capturing new civilians but rather let the guerrillas try to feed them.
The title of those article is from an alleged quote by Kitchener when asked about war atrocities he had committed. “Don't talk to me about atrocities in war; all war is an atrocity.” Certainly all war waged by Kitchener was.
Kitchener was also running out of men to man his blockhouses and so began using his African scouts and labourers as guards and watchers of those block houses and of his columns. And so, while they were never official soldiers and never theoretically allowed on the front lines, it mean they were allowed guns, and so the Boers were increasingly facing armed black men. And not just as part of the British defence system.
The Boers had throughout the war attacked African peoples within the British Empire, stole their cattle, burned down their farms, and massacred them. The closest they had come to facing retaliation was an attack by the Tswana people of British Botswana on a Boer town, where two civilians, and twenty-six militiamen, had died. The Zulu people in particular had faced a brutal series of raids and attacks, and the British had refused to help their subjects beyond giving them permission to defend their own territory.
On the 8th of May 1902, a Zulu Army ran into a Boer raiding party and wiped it out, killing fifty-six commandoes, men the guerrillas could neither afford to lose or were strong enough to avenge. This was the first real response any African had dared muster. The Boers were now faced with the nightmare scenario of their position as the superior race in the country threatened, not by British laws, but by a proliferation of weapons to their subject people and their own weakness. It was the Zulus today but maybe it would be Swazi or the Pedi next.
They were also increasingly running out of horses and cattle and had lost any hope of an actual victory. Not only because they couldn’t beat the British but because they were no longer united. More and more prisoners of war, knowing that they were already deemed traitors by guerrillas who would attack their families, began openly working with the British, who were the only ones who would accept them. By the end of the war around a third as many Boers from the Republic were in the British Army as were against them. If the war continued, that number might be even.
In mid-May 1902, the guerrillas were offered terms by the British again. While the amnesty, the self-government, and the war reparations remained, the rights for the natives were quietly dropped. The Republics, under British rule, would keep all-white voting laws. The British, it turned out, didn’t actually need the moral high ground if they gained the riches of South Africa. The Boers were now given an option between a timeline wherein they kept both their unity and their whip hand over the blacks and one where they did not. Better to be run by London than the Zulus.
The Orange Free State was still keen to fight on, but the Transvaal Boers were not and convinced their allies to agree peace. They accepted the terms of the British in a vote, surrendered on the 31st of May 1902 and regained their lands and their positions as heads of a white supremacist society, just one that now had a King.
This, as many Cape Colonists said, did not need to happen. Had the British Army had better luck and better generals, they could have won the war outright, forcing actual surrender rather than an agreed peace which saw the Boers’ power remain intact. The right to vote could have been extended, in a small way at least, to residents of South Africa of all colours. That most likely results in a South African Jim Crow with a South African Boer KKK but it would not be the apartheid of our timeline.
Instead the British tried what they would call “magnanimous victory”: brutally and ruthlessly crushing the enemy as long as the war went on, and then giving them everything they wanted, afterwards. This, once again, was not a tactic they ever tried with black Africans. Jan Smuts of the Transvaal Republic and Cetshwayo of the Zulu Kingdom had similar experiences fighting the British, but Cetshwayo tried desperately to agree a peace and was only offered surrender and exile while Smuts was given generous terms. Boer generals were then recruited into the British army in the aftermath; Zulu generals were not. Cetshwayo could not possibly have had the career that Jan Smuts had, where he was in the British Imperial Cabinet, Prime Minister of South Africa and Churchill's preferred successor.
If the brutality of the Second Boer War was nationalism winning out over racial solidarity, the aftermath saw racial solidarity get its turn in the sun.
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Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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