The British authorities controversially used concentration camps for civilians during the Boer War (1899 to 1902) in Southern Africa. The reason was to deprive Boer guerrilla fighters of logistical support and provide some sort of accommodation for Boer families who had lost their homes and livelihoods. A lack of planning led to overcrowded camps where rations were poor and sanitary conditions even worse, a situation which led to epidemics of diseases like typhoid. During the war, up to 28,000 Boers (80% of whom were children) and 20,000 Black Africans died in the concentration camps due to malnutrition and disease.

The causes of the conflict in Southern Africa known as the Second Anglo-Boer War (aka South Africa War), which was fought between the Boers (settlers with Dutch ancestry and that of certain other European countries) and the British colonies of Cape Colony and Natal, were varied. Both sides wanted land for farming and control of rich natural resources such as the diamond mines at Kimberley and the gold mines at Witwatersrand. Another bone of contention was the prejudicial treatment of British settlers in the two Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State. Mutual suspicions were raised on both sides by the unofficial British attempt at a coup in Transvaal with the failed Jameson Raid of 1895. As a consequence of this raid, the Transvaal government began to buy foreign arms and signed a treaty with Germany, much to Britain's horror, since German involvement in Southern Africa could jeopardise British interests and dominance across the entire region. The two sides had already fought in the First Anglo-Boer War (1880 to 81), which the Boers had won. Largely a war of skirmishes, this first conflict would be completely overshadowed by the massive scale and savagery of the second war.

The first action of the Boer War occurred on 11 October 1899 when a Boer cavalry force routed a British one. Although not formally trained, the Boers had excellent rifles and were equally good at shooting them. The Boers formed units known as commandos, and these won several victories in the early stages of the war, largely thanks to poor British generalship and the Boers' excellent knowledge and use of the local terrain. Unlike in the previous war, this time the British government sent British troops to reinforce those already in the colonies. In this way, the British Army force, which included 30,000 colonial troops from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, soon rocketed from 25,000 to 250,000 men. This numerical advantage helped the British seize the major Boer towns of Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Johannesburg.

In response to the military reversals, the Boers adopted guerrilla tactics, to which the British responded with an effective but controversial scorched-earth tactic, where crops were destroyed and livestock confiscated. Thousands of civilian farms and homes were burned to the ground during the campaign. The British commander-in-chief, Herbert Kitchener, restricted the Boers' movement by dividing "both the ex-republics into a huge steel chequerboard made of barbed wire fence lines, guarded by concrete blockhouses" (Pakenham, 577).

At first, captured Boers and suspected sympathisers were sent to prison camps in St Helena and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), but they were, nevertheless, treated according to European conventions. By the summer of 1900, however, with the war dragging on far longer than anticipated, the British attitude to prisoners and Boer civilians in general hardened. The fighting Boers were supported in terms of food and fodder for their horses by civilian farms, very often the wives of those same men who were fighting the British. To remove this aid to the enemy, Kitchener not only ordered the scorched-earth tactics but also the arrest of women, children, and household servants (who were Black Africans) who were then sent to camps, which were so packed with people they became known as concentration camps.

The policy of detaining civilians had two purposes: to deprive the fighting Boers of logistical support and, so the British argued, to simply provide some sort of accommodation for those who had lost their homes and livelihoods during the war. Not everyone agreed with the approach. One Yeomanry trooper commented that it was "the most disgusting thing we had to do" (James, 130), but the soldiers widely believed it was the only way to bring the war to an end. There were two types of detainees: those civilians who had helped the Boers and those who collaborated with the British but who had had their farms burnt down either in error or by Boer commandos. The pro-British refugees were also kept in concentration camps but given slightly better rations than other detainees. Fighting Boers who were captured, meanwhile, were now sent to separate prisoner-of-war camps within South Africa itself.

In all, the British established 46 concentration camps where inmates were enclosed in primitive buildings or rows of tents surrounded by impenetrable barbed wire. By 1902, there were 117,000 Boer women and children and 119,000 Black Africans detained in the camps. White people and Black people were detained in separate camps. Detained Black Africans, unlike White Boers, had to work as labourers. Kitchener visited none of these camps and blithely reassured the authorities in London that, despite the growing number of reports to the contrary, everyone was 'happy' in the camps. Like most military commanders before and since, Kitchener was content to remove civilians from the war, but his negligence of the details of just how they would be accommodated had catastrophic consequences.

The rations for everyone in the concentration camps were poor, as here described by the historian T. Pakenham:

There were no vegetables, nor jam; no fresh milk for babies and children; just a pound of meal and about half a pound of meat a day, with some scrapings of sugar and coffee; much worse than the diet of the barrack room, or the official diet of the troops on campaign.

(494)

Things were even worse in the camps for Black Africans, where many detainees were obliged to eat insects to survive. Clothing was restricted in all camps, and there was little protection against the extremes of heat or cold. There were not enough doctors or nurses – just one doctor to a camp and a few nurses to assist them. The camps for Black Africans had no nurses at all. Medical supplies soon ran out. Water supplies were often tainted, and sanitary conditions were extremely poor; there was not even soap in some camps. Diseases like typhoid, dysentery, and measles quickly spread through the overcrowded camps. Pneumonia was another common killer.

Rina Viljoen, a detained mother, describes the effect of these conditions on children:

There were a lot of diseases in the camp. People were often sick and many died, especially the children…and when the authorities learnt there was a sick child in your tent, they took that child to a hospital. And the Boer women strongly believed that within three days that child would be dead. You were also not allowed to visit that child in hospital. So if a child became ill you just hid him in the tent and kept him there.

(Jackson, 153)

In the camps, "an estimated eighteen thousand to twenty-four thousand people died from exposure, typhoid, and diseases" (Corey, 54). The historian L. James puts the figure even higher at 28,000 Boers and notes that 80% of these were children. On top of that number, between 14,000 and 20,000 Black Africans died in the camps. These figures compare to around 7,000 Boers killed as combatants during the war.

It was not the intention of the British authorities that so many, or indeed anyone, would die in the camps, despite accusations of deliberate genocide from some on the Boer side. As James notes: "They were victims of a combination of bureaucratic incompetence and medical ignorance rather than malevolence: 28,000 British soldiers also died from the same infections that killed the detainees" (130). The Fawcett Commission official enquiry noted that the majority of deaths in the camps had been preventable if adequate medical measures had been taken from the start. Red tape, indifference to civilians, and general incompetence were all-too-familiar characteristics of the British Army in its colonial wars throughout the 19th century. The army medical corps could not adequately cope with diseases in its own ranks, never mind a huge number of civilians kept in conditions rife for diseases to spread.

When news of the humanitarian disaster reached Britain, there was public outrage, and the press called for answers. Parliament debated the issue. The Liberal party leader, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, called out the government and, in a public speech, described the camps as "methods of barbarism" (Fage, 479). Independent figures personally investigated the disaster. Emily Hobhouse (1860 to 1926) was one such welfare campaigner and, after touring both Boer republics over a period of four months, she wrote a damning report on the government's incompetence in April 1901. Hobhouse describes a camp in Bloemfontein, visited on 26 January 1901:

Imagine the heat outside the tents, and the suffocation inside! We sat on their khaki blankets, rolled up, inside Mrs. Botha's tent; and the sun blazed through the single canvas, and flies lay thick and black on everything – no chair, no table, nor any room for such; only a deal box, standing on its end, served as a wee pantry. In the tiny tent live Mrs. Botha, five children (three quite grown up) and a little Kaffir servant girl. Many tents have more occupants…

(Fremont-Barnes, 79)

Hobhouse's report and others, along with international outrage in the press in France and Germany, influenced the government, albeit painfully slowly, to improve the situation in the camps they euphemistically labelled 'camps of refuge.' The first step to improving conditions in the camps was to take control away from the army and put the civilian authorities in charge. Kitchener ended the scorched-earth policy in December 1901 and ordered that no more Boer women and children be arrested.

The Second Boer War came to an end in May 1902 with the Treaty of Vereeniging. Even then, many detainees in the concentration camps had to endure several more months of incarceration until they were allowed to return to their homes, if they had them to return to.

Britain took over Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and in 1910, both states, along with Cape Colony and Natal, as well as several former African kingdoms, were unified into a single colony: the Union of South Africa. The British had not been the first to use concentration camps; the Spanish army had used them in the guerrilla war with rebels in Cuba just a few years before. Nor would this be the last time they were used. Concentration camps would make an unwelcome reappearance in other 20th-century conflict arenas, such as in German South West Africa in the early 1900s, when Fascist Italy occupied Libya in the early 1930s, and, most infamously of all, by Nazi Germany in occupied Europe during the Second World War (1939 to 45).