1901, the high veld. The Boer republics have lost their capitals but not the war; their commandos ride at night. So the British burn some 30,000 farms and move the women and children into tented camps behind wire. Typhoid, measles and short rations do the rest. About 26,000 Boer civilians die, most of them children, and at least 14,000 Black Africans in separate camps.
Why then
Gold was found on the Witwatersrand in 1886 and turned the Transvaal, a small Afrikaner republic, into the richest ground in Africa. Kruger's government refuses the vote to the foreign miners. War comes in October 1899; the Boers win the first battles, and the empire answers with 450,000 men, then with scorched earth.
What they wanted
London wants the gold and a South Africa under the crown. The Boers fight to stay republics. Black South Africans fight and work on both sides for land and rights neither means to give. A young Churchill escapes from a Pretoria prison; a young Gandhi leads Indian stretcher-bearers.
What changed
The republics surrender in 1902. Emily Hobhouse's reports make the camps a scandal at home, and the Liberal leader calls them 'methods of barbarism'. In 1910 white men make the Union of South Africa for white men; a war fought over the foreign miners' vote leaves the Black majority without one.
Still argued
A brutal answer to guerrilla war, or a deliberate war on civilians? The century will use 'concentration camp' for worse things, and historians argue how much of that meaning belongs here. Thomas Pakenham was among the first to count the Black victims.