The concentration camps
Britain burned the farms, then herded the women and children into camps it called humanitarian. Tens of thousands died in them — and the Black African dead were barely counted at all.
To break Boer guerrilla resistance in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the British army under Lord Kitchener adopted a scorched-earth policy — burning some 30,000 farms, destroying crops and livestock — and swept the displaced civilians into a network of internment camps it called “concentration camps.” In the Boer camps, roughly 26,000–28,000 people died, the great majority of them children, of disease, malnutrition, and neglect. In the separate camps for Black Africans — long left out of the story entirely — the death toll ran to at least 14,000–20,000, and remains undercounted to this day. This spoke of Crimes of Empire pairs the crime with two layers of dehumanization: the deadly camps rebranded as protection, and the near-total erasure of the Africans who died in them.
What this page is about
By 1900 the British had captured the main Boer cities but could not defeat the Boers' mobile guerrilla commandos. The response, directed by Lord Kitchener, was to attack the population that sustained them: a scorched-earth campaign that burned farms, salted fields, and killed livestock across the two Boer republics, and the internment of the now-homeless civilians in camps. The British called them “concentration camps” — one of the earliest uses of the term in this form — and presented them as a humane way to shelter “refugees.”
They were death traps. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate food, and disease killed roughly 26,000 to 28,000 Boers, of whom the large majority were children. The British welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse visited the camps and exposed the conditions, triggering a scandal; the Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman condemned the war's conduct as “methods of barbarism.” Almost entirely absent from that reckoning, then and for decades after, were the separate camps for Black Africans, whose dead — at least 14,000 to 20,000, quite possibly more — were scarcely recorded. This page treats both the Boer and the African tolls as fact, gives them as ranges, and names the erasure of the African dead as part of the crime.
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Step through it here, or present it fullscreen.
The Concentration Camps
Britain burned the farms, then herded the women and children into camps it called humanitarian. Tens of thousands died — and the Black African dead were barely counted at all.
The claim this page defends
Britain broke Boer resistance by making war on civilians — scorched earth followed by mass internment in lethal camps euphemistically called “concentration” or “refugee” camps — in which tens of thousands of Boer women and children, and at least as many uncounted Black Africans, died of disease and neglect. The dehumanization runs on two tracks: a deadly policy rebranded as humanitarian shelter, and the erasure of the African dead so complete that their number is still unknown.
From scorched earth to a scandal in London: 1900 – 1902
- 1900. Unable to beat the Boer commandos, Britain adopts scorched earth — burning farms and destroying crops and livestock — and begins interning displaced civilians.
- 1900–1901. A network of “concentration camps” spreads across the republics, with separate, worse-supplied camps for Black Africans.
- 1901. Emily Hobhouse tours the camps and publishes a damning report on the conditions and the child death rate.
- June 1901. Henry Campbell-Bannerman condemns the war's conduct as “methods of barbarism.”
- 1901–1902. The Fawcett Commission confirms the horrors; reforms cut the death rate only late in the war.
- 1902. The war ends; the final tolls settle at ~26,000–28,000 Boer dead (mostly children) and at least 14,000–20,000 Black African dead — the latter long left out of the count.
The record, claim by claim
Britain made war on civilians: scorched earth, then mass internment.
FACTWhen conventional victory failed to end the guerrilla war, Britain turned on the population sustaining it. Under Lord Kitchener, the army burned an estimated 30,000 Boer farms, destroyed crops, and slaughtered livestock across the Orange Free State and Transvaal, deliberately stripping the commandos of food and shelter. The displaced civilians — overwhelmingly women, children, and the elderly, since the men were fighting — were then swept into internment camps. The policy was not a byproduct of battle but a chosen strategy of collective punishment aimed at non-combatants.
The camps were called humanitarian — and roughly 26,000–28,000 Boers, mostly children, died in them.
FACTThe dehumanizing move here is the euphemism. Britain called the internment sites 'concentration camps' and 'refugee camps,' presenting them as shelter for civilians displaced by the war it had itself displaced them in. In reality, overcrowding, poor sanitation, insufficient food, and epidemic disease made them lethal: roughly 26,000 to 28,000 Boers died in the camps, and the large majority — on the order of 22,000 — were children under sixteen. A policy that produced a child-heavy death toll on that scale, while being described as protective care, is the pattern this hub tracks: brutality dressed as benevolence.
The Black African dead were barely counted — at least 14,000–20,000, and undercounted still.
FACTThe second, deeper erasure is racial. Black Africans displaced by the same scorched earth were interned in separate camps, worse supplied than the Boer ones, and put to labour. At least 14,000 to 20,000 died there — and historians stress that even this is an undercount, because the authorities did not trouble to record African deaths with the same care, if at all. For most of the twentieth century the standard histories of 'the concentration camps' meant only the white camps; the African dead were left out of the number entirely. That the toll of a whole group of victims is still uncertain, a century on, is itself the measure of how little those lives were held to count.
Emily Hobhouse exposed the camps — and was vilified for it.
FACTThe horror was documented at the time, by a Briton. Emily Hobhouse, a welfare campaigner, visited the Boer camps in 1901 and published a report detailing the overcrowding, disease, starvation rations, and the appalling child mortality. Her findings forced the issue into British politics and eventually prompted the official Fawcett Commission, which confirmed the conditions. Hobhouse was attacked by supporters of the war as unpatriotic and hysterical — the standard treatment of a witness who makes an empire's conduct undeniable — but her account is a large part of why the camps could not be entirely buried.
A future prime minister named it: 'methods of barbarism.'
FACTThe condemnation reached the top of British politics. On 14 June 1901, the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman — who would become prime minister five years later — attacked the government's conduct of the war with a phrase that stuck: 'When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.' It is a rare case in this hub where a leading figure of the perpetrating power named the crime plainly and contemporaneously, rather than the euphemism prevailing. That the camps were defended by the government even as a future prime minister called them barbarism shows the policy was contested at the time, not only in hindsight.
“A phrase will be forgiven me … When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa. — Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 14 June 1901”
This was one of the first uses of the term 'concentration camp' — and a template later borrowed.
FACTThe Boer camps did not invent civilian internment — Spain's 'reconcentración' in Cuba in the 1890s came first — but the British camps popularized the term 'concentration camp' in English and demonstrated, on a large scale, how a modern state could destroy a civilian population without a battlefield, through confinement, hunger, and disease. The phrase and the practice carried forward into the twentieth century's far larger horrors. We do not equate the Boer camps with the Nazi death camps — the intent and machinery differed — but the vocabulary and the underlying logic of mass civilian internment as a weapon have a lineage, and it runs through here.
The lines we hold
- Not death camps by design. The mass deaths came from neglect and disease, not deliberate extermination. We do not equate these with the Nazi camps that later took the name.
- Both tolls, as ranges. ~26,000–28,000 Boer dead (mostly children) and ~14,000–20,000+ Black African dead — the latter flagged as an undercount by the record itself.
- The euphemism is theirs. “Concentration camp” and “refugee camp” were the British terms — and “methods of barbarism” was a British politician's verdict.
- The Boers were not innocents in all things. They upheld their own racial order. That does not lessen what was done to their civilians — or to the Africans in the camps.
The camp as a euphemism, and the dead who don't get counted
This page belongs in Crimes of Empire because it shows two of the hub's recurring mechanisms at once. First, the euphemism: a lethal policy of civilian internment marketed as humanitarian shelter, the same move by which Britain later ran its Mau Mau camps as “rehabilitation.” Second, and more quietly damning, the selective count: the Boer dead were eventually memorialized, but the Black African dead were barely tallied, because the imperial record simply did not value those lives enough to record their end. That racial hierarchy connects it to the Pretoria Playbook, the story of the system that would later govern South Africa. A crime you rebrand as care, committed against people you do not bother to count — that is empire doing two things this project exists to undo: hiding the act, and erasing the victims.
Questions worth taking seriously
Were these really 'concentration camps,' or is that an anachronism?
It is the term the British used at the time — the camps were officially called concentration (or refugee) camps, and the Boer War is where the phrase entered wide English use. We do not equate them with the Nazi death camps that later took the name; the intent and machinery were different. But calling them concentration camps is not an anachronism or an insult — it is the historical label, and the deaths from neglect and disease were real.
Why do you keep stressing the Black African camps?
Because they were erased from the story for most of a century. Black Africans were interned in separate, worse camps and at least 14,000–20,000 died — a figure historians say is an undercount, because the authorities barely recorded African deaths. The standard “concentration camps” narrative long meant only the white camps. Naming the African dead is not a tangent; the fact that their number is still uncertain is itself evidence of how little those lives counted.
Weren't the camps just wartime necessity that went wrong?
The internment followed directly from a deliberate scorched-earth policy that destroyed the civilians' homes and food in the first place — so the “necessity” was manufactured by Britain's own strategy. And once the deadly conditions were documented by Emily Hobhouse in 1901, the death rates stayed catastrophic for many months before reforms took hold. A policy that creates the refugees and then houses them lethally is not necessity gone wrong; it is the strategy working as designed.
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The record
- Boer concentration camps — the camps, the ~26,000–28,000 Boer dead, and the Black African camps
- Second Boer War — scorched earth, internment, and camp mortality
- Emily Hobhouse — the report that exposed the camps
- Henry Campbell-Bannerman — the “methods of barbarism” speech (1901)
- Black Book Audit — The Pipeline (Britain's later Mau Mau camps)
- Black Book Audit — Crimes of Empire (hub)