Boer Boy by Chris Schoeman

Author:Chris Schoeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Boer Boy
ISBN: 9781770221161
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2010-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

10

India

Charles and his father were just two of a large number of prisoners of war sent to India. By the end of the war, there were approximately 20 000 Boer prisoners and exiles distributed across the globe. There were the prisoners of war, consisting exclusively of burghers captured while under arms; there were the ‘undesirables’, namely men and women of the Cape Colony who sympathised with the Boer republics; and there were the internees, burghers and their families who had withdrawn across the frontier to Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) and were eventually imprisoned in Portugal.

Prisoners of war were detained in South Africa in camps in Green Point and Simon’s Town, and some in prisons in the Cape Colony and Natal. Overseas they were imprisoned in the Bermudas, St Helena, Ceylon and India. Boer prisoners of war were sent to India from April 1901, when the facilities at St Helena, Ceylon and the Bermudas became inadequate. By the end of the war, 9 125 captives, including foreign volunteers, were staying in about thirteen cantonments from Abbottabad, in what is now western Pakistan, to Trichinopoly in the south of India. With nearly 6 000 prisoners on St Helena, 5 126 in Ceylon, over 3 000 in the Bermudas and 1733 in South Africa, the Indian colony had by far the most prisoners of war.

The first Boer prisoners of war arrived in Bombay, India, in April 1901. The camps in India presented the harshest climatic conditions – the heat was probably the worst of India’s extreme weather conditions – but the prisoners were at least treated fairly well and were generally in good health. Conditions were spartan, but not unduly difficult. The lot of the Boer women and children in the concentration camps back in South Africa was surely grimmer than that of the prisoners of war.

In the Bermudas and on St Helena, quarters consisted mainly of tents and shanties. In India and Ceylon, most lived in large sheds constructed of corrugated-iron sheeting, bamboo and reeds. The exiles occupied themselves with religious activities, sports, cultural and educational work, and trade, and nearly all of them took part in producing curios. Trade among the prisoners included businesses, such as cafés, bakeries, confectioners, tailors, boot makers, photographers, stamp collectors and general dealers.

Education was given special attention and schools were established in the various camps, where bearded old men shared school benches with young boys. In the camps at Umballa and Solon in India, Charles was one of these pupils. Subjects studied included bookkeeping, mathematics and languages, with fellow prisoners serving as instructors. The burgher Jan Geldenhuys, for instance, served as a teacher in the Umballa camp. Sports gatherings were frequently arranged and cricket, football, tennis, quoits, gymnastics and boxing were all popular.

One of the prisoners in India, Dietlof van Warmelo, wrote in his memoirs:

The long, galvanized-iron bungalows in which we live here have zinc roofs to guard against the heat of the tropical sun, but at any rate the wind can blow through the openings on either side.

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