People & Histories
11 October 1899 – 31 May 1902

The South African (Anglo-Boer) War

Britain conquers the gold-rich Boer republics after a long guerrilla war, burning farms and herding women and children, Boer and Black, into camps where tens of thousands die.

  • The Boer War — Thomas Pakenham, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1979)
  • The South African War, 1899–1902 — Bill Nasson, Arnold (1999)
  • Black People and the South African War, 1899–1902 — Peter Warwick, Cambridge University Press (1983)
  • The Afrikaners: Biography of a People — Hermann Giliomee, University of Virginia Press (2003)
  • Concentration camps of the South African War (Anglo-Boer War) — South African History Online

Well established warempiretraumaidentity

The discovery of diamonds at Kimberley around 1870 and of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 transformed South Africa. Johannesburg mushroomed, drawing Black migrant workers and foreign miners (uitlanders). Britain, which had already crushed the Zulu kingdom in 1879 after an early defeat at Isandlwana, wanted to bring the Boer republics into a British-led South Africa. After a failed British-backed raid in 1895–96 and failed talks over uitlander rights, President Paul Kruger’s Transvaal and the Orange Free State declared war in October 1899.

  • The Boer War — Thomas Pakenham, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1979)
  • A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)

The Boers won early victories and besieged Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. British reinforcements took Bloemfontein and Pretoria in 1900, but Boer commandos fought on as guerrillas. Lord Kitchener’s answer was “scorched earth”: tens of thousands of farms were burned and livestock killed, and civilians were removed to concentration camps.

  • The Boer War — Thomas Pakenham, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1979)
  • The South African War, 1899–1902 — Bill Nasson, Arnold (1999)

Conditions in the camps were terrible. According to South African History Online, about 26,370 Boer women and children died, along with an official count of 14,154 Black Africans in separate camps, which historians consider an undercount. In all, about 22,000 British soldiers and some 7,000 Boer fighters died, most British deaths from disease.

The Treaty of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902 ended the republics’ independence but left the question of Black voting rights to future self-governing colonies, a decision that effectively shut Black South Africans out.

  • The South African War, 1899–1902 — Bill Nasson, Arnold (1999)
  • A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)

How it's seen
Afrikaner memory

A small people fought the world's greatest empire for its freedom. Britain, unable to beat the Boer commandos, burned their farms and let their wives and children die of hunger and disease in the camps; it was a crime against the nation, remembered at the National Women's Monument in Bloemfontein.

Black South African perspective

Over 100,000 Black people served the British as scouts, transport workers and armed men, and many hoped for rights in return; at least 14,000, perhaps 20,000 or more, died in separate camps. The peace treaty left their political future to white governments, and they were betrayed.

  • Black People and the South African War, 1899–1902 — Peter Warwick, Cambridge University Press (1983)
  • The South African War, 1899–1902 — Bill Nasson, Arnold (1999)

British and historians' views

Britain went to war to secure supremacy in southern Africa and control of the Witwatersrand gold fields, presented as defending the rights of British "uitlanders". The camps began as a military measure, and the deaths came mainly from disease and neglect; Emily Hobhouse's reports caused a scandal in Britain.

  • The Boer War — Thomas Pakenham, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1979)
  • The South African War, 1899–1902 — Bill Nasson, Arnold (1999)

Why it matters today

South Africa

For Afrikaners the war, and above all the camps, is a defining trauma that fed a nationalism determined never again to be ruled by others; that determination later helped build apartheid. Black South Africans, whose part in the war was long ignored, gained nothing from the peace. The war's names, the "Boer War", the "Anglo-Boer War" or the "South African War", themselves reflect whose story is being told.