Boer Wars · War Crimes & Atrocities

The Darkest Hours

The Boer Wars produced atrocities on both sides, but they were profoundly asymmetric in scale. Boer commandos committed murders of Black Africans, executed British soldiers taken prisoner on occasion, and killed Cape Boers they considered traitors. British forces under Kitchener's command burned approximately 30,000 farms, destroyed hundreds of towns and villages, and confined nearly 116,000 Boer civilians and approximately 115,000 Black Africans in concentration camps under conditions that killed 48,000 people — most of them children. The camps were not designed as instruments of deliberate extermination: they began as a logistical response to the displacement of civilian populations from burned farms. But the systematic inadequacy of their provisions — the low ration scales, the absence of medical care, the contaminated water — reflected the same institutional indifference to civilian welfare that the British Army had displayed toward its own soldiers in the Crimean War, combined with a racial and cultural contempt for Boer and Black African life that allowed suffering on a massive scale to continue long after it had been reported to the authorities.