Barbed-Wire Imperialism by Forth Aidan

Author:Forth, Aidan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520967267
Publisher: University of California Press

“DUTCH SERFDOM AND THE EQUAL

RIGHTS OF GREAT BRITAIN”

Authorities cited the “magnanimity of Great Britain” toward the native population as an original justification for war. Black inmates could “appreciate the difference between the serfdom of a Dutch Republic and the equal rights laid down by a Monarchy such as Great Britain,” one superintendent remarked. Scorched-earth warfare and forced relocation “runs hard on the surface,” he conceded, but “to be fed and sheltered and protected without remuneration amply atones for all.”99 Yet rhetoric rarely matched reality. Per capita, Britain spent less than a third as much on black inmates as Boers, and rations, shelter, and medical care for Africans reflected and perpetuated existing racial inequalities.100

Archival records documenting black camps were long ago incinerated—a “whitewashing” of history that fostered public amnesia about the “mutual suffering” of black inmates in the apartheid era.101 Surviving reports indicate that black and white refugees initially found themselves mixed together in the same canvas camps: the dislocations of war were too messy to maintain pristine racial geographies. At Barberton, for example, “some natives [were] sleeping, eating and drinking in the same tents with the whites.” Black servants sometimes accompanied their masters to camp and were sources of pride for families desperate to retain a semblance of their former respectability. British efforts to limit relief to the truly destitute soon militated against such arrangements, however, as did concern about “undue familiarity between white and black inmates.”102 Anyone able to support servants was by definition ineligible for relief, British mindsets maintained. Ever conscious of racial status, meanwhile, Boer refugees of more humble background experienced incarceration alongside natives as a disgrace and humiliation, especially in face of British rhetoric that questioned their claims to “whiteness.”

When not actually residing at Boer camps, native refugees congregated in shelters on the edge of formal campsites; sometimes they were “scattered over a large area,” though for the purposes of control they were eventually “concentrated in one place” and registered as inmates.103 As native camps gained administrative structure, a local example—fenced mining compounds at Kimberley and the Rand, themselves modeled on barracks for Indian coolies at Natal sugar plantations—provided direct and conscious prototypes.104 With their overriding emphasis on economy and their enclosed, self-sufficient nature, African camps “adopted the compound system,” one official observed.105

As much as they aspired to the exacting discipline of a de Beers compound, however, many African camps remained ad hoc conglomerations constructed of sailcloth, biscuit tins, and “sacks stretched over frameworks of wood.”106 Like Indian famine camps, local materials sufficed. In a surviving report on Edenburg camp, A. G. H. Daller described “slightly built wigwams covered with sacking” reminiscent of “a large gipsy encampment,” although “regular streets and intervals [were] . . . observed.” There was no school or hospital (one would later be provided) and there was “practically no expense in connection with this settlement save the rations.”107 Social spending on dark-skinned colonials was anathema to Victorian mindsets, and like their counterparts in India, South African officials hoped to make native camps as self-supporting as possible.

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