Abstract
White South African children entered the international imagination during the South African War. After several years of escalating tension between Britain and the independent Zuid-Afrikaanshe Republiek (ZAR, the South African Republic, or ‘Transvaal’), Paul Kruger, the president of the Transvaal, declared war on Britain on 11 October 1899. The Orange Free State soon entered into the war on the side of the ZAR. The conflict lasted until 1902 and was, as Bill Nasson argues, a war which ‘belonged simultaneously to two different eras’. On the one hand, ‘it was a traditional countryside war of movement, with cavalry and mounted infantry carrying the fight over enormous spaces’, but on the other, it was an industrial war fought over control of the gold mines of the ZAR. British and Boer fighters used modern weapons, railways, telegraphs, and various forms of censorship and propaganda. It was also a total war, as British forces rounded up civilians — Boer and black women and children — into concentration camps.1
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Notes
B. Nasson, The South African War, 1899–1902 (London: Edward Arnold, 1999), p. 17.
The most comprehensive and sophisticated account of the concentration camps is E. van Heyningen, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2013).
M. Godby, ‘Confronting War: Emily Hobhouse and the Concentration Camp Photographs of the South African War’, Kronos, vol. 32 (November 2006), pp. 34–48.
A. Grundlingh, ‘The National Women’s Monument: The Making and Mutation of Meaning in Afrikaner Memory of the South African War’, in Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South African War, 1899–1902, Greg Cuthberton, Albert Grundlingh, and Mary-Lynn Suttie (eds.) (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), pp. 37–66.
L. Stanley, Mourning Becomes … Post/Memory, Commemoration and the Concentration Camps of the South African War (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 128–129.
J.S. Mohlamme, ‘African Refugee Camps in the Boer Republics’, in Scorched Earth, Fransjohn Pretorious (ed.) (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 2001), p. 121.
S.V. Kessler, ‘The Black and Coloured Concentration Camps’, in Scorched Earth, Fransjohn Pretorious (ed.) (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 2001), p. 150.
E. van Heyningen, ‘A Tool for Modernisation? The Concentration Camps of the South African War, 1900–1902’, South African Journal of Science, vol. 106, no. 5–6 (2010), pp. 1–10.
P. Zietsman, ‘The Concentration Camp Schools: Beacons of Light in the Darkness’, in Scorched Earth, Fransjohn Pretorious (ed.) (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 2001), pp. 87–89.
S. Mintz, ‘Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis’, JHCY, vol. 1, no. 1 (2008), pp. 93.
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© 2015 S.E. Duff
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Duff, S.E. (2015). Conclusion. In: Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380944_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380944_7
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