Women’s Camp Journal – Jackie Grobler & Marelize Grobler

In the course of the Anglo-Boer War, the British authorities established separate camps for black and white civilians, whom they called refugees. The white concentration camps or the Anglo-Boer War accommodated a total of more than 110000 people, of whom the vast majority were women and children. Of those about 26 000 died while in the camps.

A large number of books have been written on those camps and their inmates. This is the first in which the history of the camps is presented in the form of a fictitious journal, as if it were a publication that appeared in monthly editions for the last 20 months of the war.

The Women’s Camp Journal narrates the history of the concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War through the eyes of the women who were incarcerated in the camps for the latter part of the war. It is much more than a history of their suffering and the terrible mortality rate which they and their children suffered. It also is a history of their cultural struggle against adversity inside the camps.

On the one hand, the patriotic Republican women had to contend with the disloyal Republicans: these were the ‘Hands-uppers’ and ‘Joiners’, who failed to stay true to the cause for which the war was being fought and in some cases openly sided with the enemy. On the other hand, the women battled against unsympathetic camp authorities and against the modernising British medical establishment which had little sympathy with the cultural traditions of Boer society.