Abstract:
Camps that interned black civilians during the South African War
(1899–1902) are known as concentration camps, yet this is an inaccurate
and misrepresentative picture of what actually transpired during
the conflict. Rather, the concentration camps established for black
civilians in South Africa late in 1900 and early 1901 were, by
mid-1901, incorporated into the newly formed Native Refugee
Department which fell under direct command of the British Army. At
this point, the camps were mostly closed down and the internees relocated
to Boer farms cleared of civilians. There, camps were established
by the Native Refugee Department with a completely different function
to that of the concentration camp system. These camps operated as
forced labour camps in which women, children and elderly men were
compelled into the labour of growing crops for the British military in
exchange for food. If they refused, they were starved to death under the
‘let die’ policy. The Dry Harts Forced Labour Camp forms the focus of
this article. A combination of sources was used to reconstruct its
history: archaeological surveys, the fragmentary written archive, and
through accessing local oral history and memory at the site, from
2001–2008. A narrative emerges from this research of the fight for
land, the implementation of forced labour, civilian displacement, and
the horror of total war, which are not, as some scholars claim, a shared
experience with the Boer population at the hands of a common enemy,
commensurate with mutual suffering, or even of black participation in
the war. The experience of black civilians inside Dry Harts Forced
Labour Camp was fundamentally different: theirs was not so-called
participation but rather a separate experience of land loss, forced
labour, war and displacement.