Empire of Violence (2) Boer War

During the South African war (1899 to 1902),

The British introduced a new blockhouse strategy that combined with barbed-wire fences, divided the massive interior into smaller areas. A scorched earthy policy systemically burned crops and dumped salt to prevent future cultivation. Thirty thousand prisoners of war were deported to remote corners of the empire. British troops also razed homesteads, poisoned wells, and corralled into concentration camps Afrikaner women and children as well as African labourers.

British forces herded into camps more than one hundred thousand Afrikaners who died at alarming rates. Malnutrition, starvation, and outbreaks of endemic diseases wiped out approximately thirty thousand, the disproportionate number of whom were children… The establishment of British concentration camps in South Africa represent the first time a single ethnic group had been targeted en masse for detention and deportation (p.86).

The conditions in the sixty-four black concentration camps were worse than in those of the Afrikaners. Emaciated and disease-ridden Blacks undertook forced labour for reduced rations, and their death rates climbed to over ten percent of camp populations (p.90).