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Always worth remembering that people were allowed to commute to work from the camps, and bring their servants with them. Many of the deaths came from insanitary Boer farmers not digging cesspits and causing huge Typhoid outbreaks. https://twitter.com/GandalftheWhi19/status/1323352770557235206
"Animal excrement was viewed by many inmates as something of a cure-all"
"British attempts to introduce a lime-juice ration and the insistence on boiling drinking water met resistance"
"British attempts to introduce a lime-juice ration and the insistence on boiling drinking water met resistance"
Gramophones, watches, women's corsets, fresh vegetables were being sold in the Boer concentration camps, more Boer children were being educated in the camps than had attended school in either of the Boer republics.
Kitchener let Bittereinders inspect his concentration camps, they were entirely satisfied that the Boer women and children were being looked after. Most of the camp stuff is Afrikaner propaganda from the 1920s and 30s.
Inmates and black employees were being paid more in the Transvaal than the actual camp staff, residents were free to leave the camps twice a week in areas close to guerrilla activity, in safer areas they could come and go as they pleased.
A measles epidemic was raging immediately before the war, and this accounted for 43% of deaths in the camps, with pneumonia, dysentery, typhoid and whooping coughs as other major causes.
The camps prolonged the war, because with their women and children being looked after by the British, they could fight on: “Botha was then able to express his thankfulness that so many of the Boers’ families were in British hands"
Britain declined offers of help from the Zulus and Basutos with 10,000s of men, refused to use the Indian Army, turned down Malay guides, Maori army units, Hausas from Nigeria and Kitchener was denied the use of Sudanese tribesmen: the British saw it as a white man's war.
I will post more about this later, but Kruger started the war in order to establish an Afrikaner empire, and he outnumbered the imperial garrisons in the Cape and Natal by something like 3 to 1.
Kruger was wildly overconfident because of Gladstone's acceptance of the British defeat in the first Boer War. They started the war and got the shit kicked out of them, and then the UK handed SA over to the Boers. They got very good treatment for a conquered enemy.
