,
26 tweets,
8 min read
Read on Twitter
Jacob Rees-Mogg doing apologism for the concentration camps in the Boer war now saying the death rate was the same as Glasgow. About 28,000 Boers died and over 20,000 black South Africans, although the British didn't bother counting.
bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-pol…
bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-pol…
There were around 230,000 people interned between the Boer, black, and overseas POW camps, so that's a death rate of about 10% over two years. Vast majority of deaths were children.
He also says people were interned for their own safety. Black camps included a whole network of forced labour camps. Boer camps were a counter insurgency measure to cut off Boer fighters from food/support, which included a scorched earth policy against farms by the British.
The British put Boer women and children in camps early on, but once the scorched earth policy meant they would starve in the countryside, decided it would be tactically more useful to leave them out there to starve. So the exact opposite of Mogg's claim amazingly.
If someone does a fact check on this Glasgow claim lmk, but taking just the Boer camps we're looking at 100-1500 out of 10,000 for two years. The only reason for slightly lower death rate in the black camps, apart from not being counted, is they had more adult men in them.
Even when people bring up the concentration camps in the Boer War, they usually exclude the black camps. The Independent managed to do this on a listicle of colonial atrocities.
There were over 100,000 black South Africans put into a network of dozens of concentration camps. This included both internment of women and children as well as forced labour near the front.
libcom.org/library/fully-…
libcom.org/library/fully-…
With the Boer camps, Mogg's claim they should be seen in the context of the time is incredibly flimsy given the Manchester Guardian was publishing reports from Emily Hobhouse calling them concentration camps in 1901 and there was uproar at the starvation
libcom.org/library/19-jun…
libcom.org/library/19-jun…
The problem is not just Rees-Mogg. How many of the people in that Question Time room had enough of a grasp of British colonial history to properly debunk him? How many journos writing it up today will be relying on Wikipedia?
[CN harrowing image] Mogg says no 'systematic murder'. Most deaths were due to malnutrition and typhoid, so more a systematic neglect than intentional murder. However relatives of Boer combatants were punished by starvation rations such as Lizzie van Zyl who died at Bloemfontein.
Hobhouse 1901: "crowded into small tents: some sick, some dying, occasionally a dead one among them; scanty rations dealt out raw; lack of fuel to cook; lack of water for drinking, for cooking, for washing; ; lack of bedding or of beds; lack of clothing" libcom.org/library/women-…
The relentless focus on the white camps and erasure of black camps has partly been a product of Boer nationalism and the apartheid regime - Boer as purely victims of the British rather than also racist colonists. This extends all the way up until today in our mentions.
The 'white genocide' narrative of Boer fash has been amplified by right wing pundits internationally, from Katie Hopkins to Joe Rogan. It's based on misrepresentations of South African crime figures and scaremongering about entirely inadequate land reform. libcom.org/news/not-white…
Kitchener was very clear that this was a counter-insurgency measure as early as December 1900, not a humanitarian measure. "the most effective method of limiting the endurance of the guerrillas..."
The legacy of the camps is not in Boer repression, but the development of concentration camps as a counter-insurgency and then explicitly genocidal technique. Just two years after the Boer war ended, the Germans used them in the Herero and Nama genocide. libcom.org/library/timeli…
Speaking of erasing the black people held in camps, two accounts with much bigger numbers than us doing just that today. This is not intentional on their part, rather there has been a structural erasure of that history since Hobhouse was sent to report on only the white camps.
Here's that fact check on the Glasgow death rate. As you'd expect you can only make the comparison based on disgusting statistical manipulation via cherry-picking a slice of the data.
Fucking hell he nearly got me. Everyone's spent the entire day talking about the Boer concentration camps (which is fine, it's not dealt with properly) but ignored that @graceblakeley's original comment included concentration camps in Kenya in the '50s while Churchill was PM.
This from Caroline Elkin's book on the camps. Around 150,000 mostly Kikuyu were put into concentration camps, hundreds of thousands more into forced villageisation schemes as homesteads were burned by colonial and loyalist troops. Entire Kikuyu population of Nairobi was detained.
Combine the Kenyan State of Emergency 1952-59 with the Malayan Emergency 1948-1960, and the UK held over a million people in various forms of concentration camp in the 1950s. The Boer war and '50s counter insurgency operations are the bookends of Churchill's career.
The concentration camps in Kenya were for forced labour and torture. The Kenyan colonial administration brought in South African race scientist J. C. Carothers to devise a torture programme for 'de-oathing'.
Catholic priests would visit the camps and give sermons, gun on hip, while guards administered mass beatings to the detainees. At least one priest was known for going on anti-Mau Mau raids outside the camps too.
One of the frustrating things the past few days has been the hyperfocus on Churchill personally, and within that his earlier career. Churchill's 1950s second term is much harder to disentangle from the colonial policies of the Labour administrations that preceded and followed it.
The Malayan Emergency began under Labour in 1948, the Kenyan State of Emergency was a *counter* insurgency, in response to a massive strike wave and widespread anti-colonial oathing in response to post-war Labour policy in Kenya.
The 1948 Batang Kali massacre in Malaya, the Enugu mine massacre in Nigeria 1949, the massacre of marching ex-servicemen in Accra 1948. These were all part of a strike wave in response to enhanced colonial exploitation to fund the welfare state.
This is a good summary of the Boer war camps and debunking of Mogg's specific statements. Let's him off the hook ignoring Kenya (as I nearly did too) though.
