BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY Black victims in a white man's war

The concentration camp deaths of 20,000 blacks bury another myth of the South African campaign, reports Chris McGreal in Aliwal Nort

The Observer,

It was once called the last gentleman's war - until the deaths of tens of thousands of Afrikaner women and children in British concentration camps nailed the first myth of the Boer War. As a changed South Africa prepares to mark tomorrow's hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the notion that it was a white man's conflict is also being challenged. The spotlight has fallen on the black men who fought on the front line, and on the black children sacrificed in the camps.

Yesterday President Thabo Mbeki unveiled a memorial next to recently discovered black Boer War graves in the Free State town of Brandfort. Blacks fought and died in large numbers for the British army in the conflict. They worked as scouts, wagon drivers and spies. And 120,000 were herded into concentration camps where one in six perished.

There is little resistance among most South Africans to recognising the role black soldiers played in the conflict. But the concentration camps have a special place in Afrikaner mythology.

For decades, evidence that black people also suffered in the camps was quietly shunned by an Afrikaner establishment keen to perpetuate the vision of Boer martyrdom. But the identification of dozens of black concentration camp sites, and new figures which suggest that their inmates died as fast as those in white camps, is finally laying to rest one of the Boer War's most abiding myths.

Nearly 28,000 Afrikaners succumbed to starvation, disease and exposure in the camps as the British army razed thousands of farm houses to deny the Boer commandos support in the bush. The immense suffering they caused helped drive the National Party to victory in 1948 and provided a justification for apartheid.

The British commander, Lord Kitchener, claimed his scorched earth policy was a military necessity and the camps were a kindness. Emily Hobhouse exposed their true nature after visiting the largest at Bloemfontein. 'It was a death-rate such as had never been known except in the times of the Great Plagues . . . the whole talk was of death - who died yesterday, who lay dying today, who would be dead tomorrow,' she wrote.

But Hobhouse never visited a black camp, although she said somebody should. In February 1901, she travelled to Aliwal North, where 716 white children, women and relatively few men died in the country's second largest white concentration camp. But Hobhouse ignored the black camp on the other side of town.

Twenty years ago the white victims were re-interred in a striking if graceless memorial. Roughly chiselled gravestones from the camp cemetery line the walls. The names of the dead are recorded on large black granite plaques. Of the four panels, three are dedicated to children. But there is no memorial to the black camp, where women and children also died in their hundreds of disease and hunger under British army guard.

Aliwal North's first elected black mayor, Eric Manzi, says that many in the town did not even know the black concentration camp existed. 'The black community was always kept in the darkness. We knew black people participated in the war because our grandfathers told us stories. We didn't take it seriously because even in school they were hiding facts.'

An American historian, Stowell Kessler, has led the field in recent research, uncovering a number of black camps. He has run into resistance from white communities and historians not keen to acknowledge blacks might have suffered equally.

'Many people have tried to argue that the blacks' camps were labour camps, that the conditions weren't so bad, because they don't want to recognise that there was equal suffering. In the black camps there were often no tents, no shelter. Rations were very different. A half pound of meat for whites; quarter pound for blacks, if it was available.'

Black camps were said to have a lower death rate. Yet, at its peak, the black death rate rose to 372 per thousand inmates, 28 above the white.

At first the British army ran white and black camps on similar lines. But while the army was content to pay for the detention of its enemies, black camps were expected to pay for themselves.

Black farm workers swept off the veld were told they would be given food only when they reported for work with the army. They were paid one shilling a day.

Each month one pound - two-thirds of their wages - was deducted towards the cost of feeding their families in the camps. Black men were paying for their wives and children to be imprisoned. If black workers escaped, they were treated as deserters.

In May 1901, Kitchener bowed to pressure from South Africa's High Commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner, to allow gold mines around Johannesburg to start production again. Most of the miners had fled the war. Kitchener looked to the black camps.

The Department of Native Refugees (DNR) was created to administer the incarcerated blacks. Those not working in the mines or for the army - mostly women, children and elderly men - were shipped off to abandoned farms to grow food for themselves and the military. The army calculated that it would save £10,000 a month.

The British military governor of Pretoria tried to get Kitchener to provide seeds, tools and oxen for the black farmworkers. He was disappointed. 'The only thing that he says he will give is the land and the Kaffirs must do the rest,' the governor noted.

Kessler said the black camps became a business. 'The white camps were purely a drain on resources. The army kept spreadsheets on the black camps.'

Despite the historical myths, the camps were not as racially segregated as all that. Kitchener thought white women should still be allowed to have servants. Emily Hobhouse noted 'little Kaffir servants'. As a result, black names show up on the death registers of white camps. Nowhere in South Africa are they included on memorials.

No one knows how many died in the 89 black camps. Recent research by Kessler and the Anglo-Boer War Museum has documented 17,182 black deaths. Kessler estimates the real figure is well over 20,000.

There are three cemeteries in Aliwal North - British, Boer and black. The towering memorial to the Boer camp victims dominates the road into the town from Jamestown. A large number of the 138 British soldiers buried in the pristine army cemetery died from disease or drowning in the Orange River. One of the officers fell off his horse.

The black concentration camp cemetery was only rediscovered two years ago. It is overgrown and unmarked. Eric Manzi, Aliwal North's mayor, wants to see a more visible memorial. 'Our people think whatever monument there is must be on equal standard as the memorial for the Afrikaner people that suffered in that war. We must be part of the history.

'The Afrikaner community has not yet come out and appreciated the participation of black people in that war. As long as the Afrikaner community think they are the only people who suffered in war, we have a problem.'

In 1913, Emily Hobhouse wrote a speech for the unveiling of a memorial. In it she pleads for all those who died in the camps to be remembered. 'Does not justice bid to remember today how many thousands of the dark race perished also in the concentration camps in a quarrel that was not theirs?'

It was not to be for eight decades.