Science Forums 2

[Boerseun]

In South Africa, the Boers fought the Brits in the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. This was a totally just war on the Boer side, as the British decided to invade after the discovery of the world's biggest gold deposits to date in the Witwatersrand in the early 1890s. The Brits recognized the Boer republics' sovereignty, but could not ignore the lure of tons and tons of the shiny stuff.

And so, after suffering embarrassing and humiliating defeats through the first year of the war, the Brits decided to prosecute the war with a scorched-earth policy. They built concentration camps and herded all the Boer women and children there "for their own protection", and then burnt down farms and killed and confiscating livestock, chasing the Boers further and further into the bush whilst the war raged on.

It seems as if the concentration camps were built to protect the women and children, but this turned out not to be the case. It was a huge drain on the British war effort - those Boer women and kids needed to be fed, clothed and housed for however long the war might carry on. And so they invented a method to reduce the numbers, so they'll have more shillings and pounds to buy ammunition with - corned beef cans laced with broken glass. They systematically killed off the Boer population so that they can get unhampered access to the gold reefs on the Witwatersrand. 27,000 Boer women and children were intentionally killed in these concentration camps, quite a few of them family of mine. My grandfather was born in 1904, his mother was never caught and locked up in a camp during the war. But both her sisters and all their children were intentionally killed in the camp near Magersfontein with ingested broken glass.

You will nowhere read about this - like Winston Churchill said, "to the victor's go the spoils, in that they get to write the history". But there are a couple of sites on the web dedicated to keeping the memory of this atrocity (for which the Brits have never apologised nor even attempted to keep it alive in their history curricula) alive, and you should find them with little effort.

Yet, today, I am the third generation in my family since the Boer War, I'm a Boer, and I'm holding no grudges at all against Charlene, the mother of my child, who's English, and the direct descendant of those Brits who killed my people.

The point I'm trying to make is that we can't take responsibility for our ancestor's idiocy and/or suffering (depends which side they were on). But it's still interesting to note that everybody wants to keep the memory of Hitler's atrocities alive without considering that he didn't invent the concept of herding people together and then killing them - the precedent was set just a few decades before he got to the scene, by the very Brits who claim to have fought for "justice" in WW 1 & 2.

There's an old joke doing the round in SA about the Brits - they were very arrogant in the heyday of their Empire saying "The sun never sets on the British Empire", to which the Boers replied "Only because God doesn't trust those bastards in the dark."

But joking aside - I think the admirable effort people like you are willing to go to in order to ensure us "not forgetting" isn't nearly as important an effort as a global push towards freedom of speech and freedom of the press everywhere. Because that will be a much more efficient mechanism in preventing these kinda things of happening again.