The Boer War (1899-1902; you’re welcome) was fought between white settlers who’d already colonized parts of South Africa–they’re the Boers–and the British, who’d done likewise and wanted the parts the Boers already had. You might be more familiar with the Boers if we call them Afrikaaners. 

Spoiler alert: the British won, although, as Britain’s National Army Museum’s website puts it, “not without adopting controversial tactics.”

Um, yeah. The controversial bit is that the British pioneered the use of concentration camps. I’d have used a stronger word myself, but in our enlightened times I doubt you’d have to go far to find someone ready to defend them.

Most summaries of the war sideline the African people–the original people whose land the two sides were fighting over. 

 

The war 

The British and the Boers had already fought one war, from 1880 to 1881, and the Boers won it. Or at least the British didn’t. It’s not our focus, so let’s not bother.

Then 1886 came around and gold was discovered. Whee. Ring out the bells, because everyone can get rich quick. Or at least they can dream about getting rich quick. As long as they’re white, anyway. Immigration from Britain skyrocketed. Tension grew between the bits ruled by the Boers and the bits ruled by the Brits until war broke out. 

Am I oversimplifying? Hell yes. If I didn’t, we’d never get to the end.

The Boers fought a guerrilla war. The British had a professional army and outnumbered them. But a-symetrical warfare’s an unpredictable beast: the Boers won a few battles, sending the British public into shock. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way, and in a fit of patriotic fervor, men signed up to join the military until Britain had 400,000 soldiers in South Africa. The Army Museum counts this as “the first campaign in which British people from all sectors of society took up arms”–a kind of foreshadowing of the First World War. 

 

The context

In the early stages of the war, both sides made what the Army Museum website calls a tacit agreement not to arm the Black population. Because when you take someone else’s land–and what else is colonization?–it’s so much nicer if you’re armed and they’re not. But as the war ground on, neither side could hold to it. 

Eventually something like 15,000 to 30,000 Black Africans served as scouts and sentries for the British Army. Another 100,000 worked as labourers, transport drivers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, farriers, and builders. Some smaller number of Indians (another British colony, remember, and many Indians had immigrated to South Africa) served as stretcher bearers and servants. Some 300 of them were free, another 800 were indentured workers from sugar estates, who didn’t get a choice: they were sent by what the museum, keeping a straight face the whole time, calls their employers. 

The early battles, when the Boers were winning, involved sieges and hunger among both British soldiers and civilians, and especially (no surprise here) among the Black population.   Then the tide turned and the British began to conquer territory but their control kept slipping away as soon as the army moved on. That’s guerrilla war for you. So the British began burning farms, destroying crops and livestock, and poisoning wells to deny food to the enemy and punish people who’d been supporting the Boers, and if that has a familiar sound, you’ve been following the news.

After a while, the British created those concentration camps I mentioned, imprisoning both the Black and the Boer women and children. In separate camps, mind you, because the decencies had to be maintained. 

Why imprison the Black population? It was partly about denying supplies to Boer fighters but it was at least as much about forcing the men into the gold mines as laborers, which you could do more easily if you’d driven them off the land and taken their families prisoner.

And here at last Emily Hobhouse makes her entrance.

 

Enter Emily Hobhouse

Hobhouse was from St. Ive (not to be confused with the better known St. Ives), Cornwall, and was an archdeacon’s daughter. After her father’s death and with the support of her uncle–a baron, no less–she did what the website of a museum dedicated to her calls “social upliftment work” among the Cornish miners in Minnesota. She got engaged, bought a farm in Mexico (yes, that is a long way from Minnesota), and lost most of her money. The museum website calls it a failed engagement. A different site calls it a failed romance and links the farm (and presumably the man) to the disappearing money. I don’t know anything more than you do but I’m placing my bet on the second version. It not only sounds more realistic, it makes her sound more interesting. That doesn’t make it right but it is more fun.

In 1898, with all that under her belt and (I assume) sadder but wiser, she went back to Britain–to London, not Cornwall–where she became a Suffragist, campaigning to expand the vote not just to women but to all men and women. She became chair of the People’s Suffrage Federation and then the Women’s Industrial Council, investigating child labor.

When the Boer War broke out, she became involved in the South African Conciliation Committee, which opposed it, chairing its women’s branch (anyone here old enough to remember the days of ladies’ auxiliaries?). When word reached Britain about the conditions of Boer women and children in the camps, she  established the South African Women and Children Distress Fund and in 1900 went to South Africa to distribute aid and investigate conditions.

What she found in the camps was hunger, disease, overcrowding, and terrible sanitation. The death rate in 1901–the year it was highest–was 344 per 1,000 people in the white camps. One source says the dead were mostly children and that the numbers may be an underestimate. 

I can’t find parallel numbers for the Black camps but one article says they were similar. I’ll go out on a limb and guess they weren’t as well documented.

All told, 28,000 white and 20,000 Black people died in the camps. Civilians made up more than 60% of the war’s dead. Measles were probably the greatest single killer but malnutrition, overcrowding, and poor sanitation paved the way. And typhoid. We mustn’t forget typhoid.  

With the permission of the military, Hobhouse waded into the camps, distributing aid and demanding milk, clothing, soap, and medicines. Although the officers in charge of the camps apparently had no idea who she was, she had the clothes, the accent, and the sense of entitlement that can perform magic if all the stars are in the right position. I don’t say that to diminish what she did, only to keep it in perspective.

More importantly, though, she documented conditions in the camps and when she got back to Britain published a report, lectured the secretary of state for two hours, wrote reams of letters to newspapers, and turned the issue into a national scandal. She was called a traitor, “that bloody woman,” and “a weapon used wherever the name of England was hated.”  

As far as I can tell–and I’m working from secondary sources, so take that into account–her focus was on conditions in the Boer camps, not the Black ones.

In response to the scandal, the government sent a committee to investigate. It reported back pretty much what Hobhouse had, although it managed not to mention her. In 1901 she returned to South Africa. She was refused permission to land and put on a ship bound for Britain.

She went back in 1903, after the war, to set up rehabilitation projects–again they seem to have been focused on Boer women–and returned again in 1913 for the unveiling of a monument to the Boer women and children who’d died. 

During that visit, she met Gandhi, who talked to her about the suffering of the Indian community and she helped set up a meeting between him and the South African prime minister, Louis Botha. 

Was she cluelessly racist? As far as I can tell, yes. She doesn’t seem to have seen past the Boers–or if she saw she didn’t act on what she saw. On the other hand, meeting with Gandhi wasn’t something most whites would’ve done at the time, and he wrote in her obituary that she “was one of the noblest and bravest of women. She worked without thinking of any reward. . . . She loved her country and because she loved it she could not tolerate any injustice caused by it. She realised the atrocity of war. She thought Britain was wholly in the wrong. . . . She had a soul that could defy the might of kings and emperors with their armies.” 

Let’s acknowledge both sides of the story. Reality’s a bitch but I’m committed to it, at least as far as I’m able to find it.

 

Aftermath

We’ve now gone past the Boer War, but let’s follow Hobhouse a little further. When World War I broke out, she wrote to every well-placed contact she had, trying to stop it. (You have to have well-placed contacts to think you can stop a war by talking to a few people.) That included Lloyd George, who had backed her on the camps during the Boer War and who became prime minister after the war started, in 1916. 

She also wrote letters to newspapers. In one to the Manchester Guardian, she wrote “Few English people have seen war in its nakedness. . . . They know nothing of the poverty, destruction, disease, pain, misery and mortality which follow in its train. . . . I have seen all of this and more.’ 

The war started in spite of her efforts–you saw that coming, right?–and at Christmastime she organized an open letter from 100 British women to German and Austrian women: “Do not let us forget our very anguish unites us. . . . We must all urge that peace be made. We are yours in this sisterhood of sorrow.” In March, a matching open letter was published from a similar number of German and Austrian women, carrying warm greetings.

When the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (it was founded in 1915) based its office in Amsterdam, she served as secretary for three months while its main organisers were in the United States, making it to Amsterdam although Britain had asked its embassies in France, Italy, and Switzerland to send her home.

Before the war’s end, she attended the socialist Second Zimmerwald Conference, along with socialists from both warring and neutral states. The manifesto they hammered out opposed the war, which had been a contentious issue among socialist parties. 

The Foreign Office revoked her passport, but it took them a while to find her, since the Swiss police couldn’t give out foreigners’ addresses, and when they did find her and asked her to call in at the Legation, she hightailed it to Belgium–then occupied by Germany–to look into the conditions of noncombatents. Then she spent five days in Germany, where she met with the foreign secretary and came away convinced that he wanted peace and that she’d been asked to serve as an intermediary. When she got home, the British government wasn’t convinced. 

Two or three years later, when Britain was negotiating an exchange of internees with Germany, the negotiator found the Germans offering the same concessions Hobhouse had listed.

After the war, she worked for the relief of civilians who’d been caught up in the war. 

Toward the end of her life, money was raised in South Africa to buy her a house in St. Ives (this is the town with the S at the end), Cornwall, and much later South Africa’s apartheid government honored her by naming a submarine after her. 

She would have hated that.