Decades before Nazi Germany, Britain invented the concentration camp — and packed it with Boer women and children. Over 26,000 died. A single British woman blew the story open.
The Second Boer War (1899–1902) began as a conventional conflict between the British Empire and two Boer republics in South Africa. After a series of embarrassing early defeats, Britain deployed nearly half a million troops — the largest force it had ever sent overseas — and eventually broke Boer conventional resistance. But the Boers refused to surrender, dispersing into guerrilla bands that struck British supply lines and melted back into the countryside. To end the war, Britain's commanders decided to deny the guerrillas their civilian support base.
The strategy was scorched earth. British forces burned Boer farms, destroyed crops and livestock, and forcibly relocated Boer civilians — mostly women, children, and elderly men, since the fighting-age men were with the guerrillas — into camps. These were called 'concentration camps,' a term Britain had introduced a few years earlier in Cuba. More than 100,000 Boer civilians were interned. Separately, over 115,000 Black Africans — whose suffering would be largely ignored for decades — were placed in their own camps.
The camps were deadly. Tents were overcrowded, food rations were inadequate, water was contaminated, and there was almost no medical care. Disease spread rapidly — measles, typhoid, dysentery. Children were especially vulnerable. Of the roughly 28,000 Boer deaths in the camps, approximately 22,000 were children under 16. In some months, the annualized death rate reached over 300 per 1,000 — a rate high enough to have exterminated the Boer population within a few years if sustained. In the Black African camps, an estimated 20,000 died.
Emily Hobhouse was a 41-year-old British welfare activist who traveled to South Africa in late 1900 to investigate reports about the camps. What she found shocked her. She toured multiple camps and documented everything: families of ten crowded into single tents, children dying of preventable disease, mothers unable to get basic supplies. She returned to England and submitted a 40-page report in June 1901. Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman read it and denounced British methods in Parliament as 'methods of barbarism' — a phrase that echoed around the world.
The government's initial response was to discredit Hobhouse. When she tried to return to South Africa in October 1901 to continue her work, she was physically detained on the ship and deported. But the pressure was too great to ignore. An independent commission was established, which confirmed her findings. The government was forced to improve conditions. By the end of the war, mortality rates had declined — but tens of thousands were already dead.
The legacy of the Boer War camps sits uncomfortably in British history. They established the term 'concentration camp' in its modern sense — a place where civilians are detained en masse under harsh conditions. When the Nazi camps were built decades later, early press reports described them using the same phrase, drawing an explicit and uncomfortable parallel. Britain's use of the technique was not forgotten by the Boer descendants either: the camps became a foundational grievance in the ideology of Afrikaner nationalism, which eventually produced apartheid.