Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor. Elsabé Brits
to select a few of the young girls with the most potential from the camps and send them to a good school. In Bloemfontein there was a “Ladies’ Institute” (later renamed the Eunice High School) which, from what she had heard, was one of the best girls’ schools in the country. She selected four girls: Hettie and Lizzie Botha, Eunice Ferreira and Engela van Rooyen, whose ages varied from 14 to 18 years. (The Botha girls were the daughters of Mrs PJ Botha [née Stegman] she had met on her first day at the Bloemfontein camp and who had assisted Emily diligently.) It cost £100 to keep the girls at the school for a year; the money covered school fees, clothes and boarding fees.166
It took up to a month for letters between South Africa and England to reach their destination. The committee was still reluctant to send the news they had received from Emily to the newspapers for publication. They did not know that she had already visited three concentration camps; at this stage they were only aware of the information she had gathered in the Cape, and that she was on her way to the other camps.
Though there were suspicions in England that all was not well in the camps, information was very sketchy. Meanwhile the death rates in the camps continued to rise. Emily compared the situation to the rural parish of her youth in St Ive, which had a population of about 2 000. While a funeral was a rare event there, “here some 25–30 are carried away daily”.167
“They accused me of talking politics, whereas we could only talk of sickness and death, they objected to ‘shewing sympathy’ but that was needed in every act and word. It was all kept very quiet; after a while the corpses were carried away at dawn, and instead of passing through the town approached the cemetery another way – many were buried in one grave.”168 The death rate now stood at 200 to 390 per 1 000 people, Emily reported.169
She went to see the new camp superintendent at Bloemfontein, Captain Trollope, about the high mortality figure. He asked sarcastically why she could not just provide everyone in the Free State camps with clothing! And would she also donate money for the erection of a children’s hospital?
Emily made it plain to him that it was the British government’s responsibility to build a hospital. Because she had not been permitted to visit all the camps, she undertook to supply clothing to the women and children – not the men – in the camps she was allowed to visit.170
Meanwhile some of the Cape women, led by Caroline Murray, also sent food and clothing to the camps. Emily repeatedly called for the release of people interned in the camps who had relatives outside who could care for them, but nothing came of this. Her insistence on more nurses at least resulted in the arrival of four English women from the Cape, but one turned out to be a drunk and another’s qualifications were falsified.
Every morning Caroline Fichardt’s horse-drawn carriage transported Emily to the camp outside Bloemfontein, where she would walk from one tent to another in the heat and dust all day. In the evenings she returned on foot to the Fichardts’ residence, a distance of two miles. This was her daily routine, also on Saturdays and Sundays. She hardly ever took a break. Slowly but surely the conditions in the camps improved somewhat, but Emily still wished that “the jingos would come out here and have a good course”.171
Emily now regularly came across the Reverend Adrian Hofmeyr, who ministered to the spiritual needs of the camp inmates in his own way. He endeavoured to convince the “undesirable” women that there was no hope that the Boers could still win the war. Likewise, Piet de Wet, a brother of General Christiaan de Wet, tried to persuade the women to convince their menfolk who were still on commando to lay down their arms. The women would listen to them patiently, but then turn their backs on them and walk away.
Kitchener now aggressively followed a three-pronged strategy to end the war: the scorched-earth policy was applied more ruthlessly (even churches were burnt and all forms of food were destroyed); the concentration camps were expanded and new ones were created; and systematic drives were used to herd the Boer commandos across the veld and trap them by means of barbed-wire fences between blockhouses.
In late February 1901 the British Secretary of State for War, St John Brodrick, wrote to Kitchener and asked for a report on what was happening in the field and in the camps. From what he had heard, the wives and children of Boers who were still fighting were getting only half rations. Kitchener denied that half rations were given, but conceded that coffee and sugar rations were reduced for such people. “Allowance is sufficient and families in camps satisfied and comfortable,”172 he claimed.
During a debate in the House of Commons on 25 February, there were calls for an end to farm burnings, the destruction of private property and the internment of women and children in camps without adequate accommodation and food. In reply to questions, Brodrick stated that the women were free to leave the camps if they wished to do so.173
Three days later Lord Kitchener and General Louis Botha met in Middelburg (Transvaal) for peace talks at which Kitchener demanded that the two Boer republics surrender and relinquish their independence by becoming British colonies. Botha refused.174
In an effort to make the camps look less like a military operation, they were now taken over by a so-called civil administration. Henceforth officials, including soldiers who worked in the camps, had to wear civilian clothes instead of khaki uniforms.
Emily was not fooled by this change. “So we play at pretending the war is over … It is hollow and rotten to the heart’s core,” she wrote to her brother Leonard.
“To have made all over the state large uncomfortable communities of people whom you call refugees and say you are protecting, but who call themselves prisoners of war, compulsorily detained and detesting your protection. The whole object, of course is to enable Chamberlain to say in parliament that the country is settled and civil administration begun. It’s a farce.”175
Emily became so exhausted as a result of the hard work in the camps, the emotional pressure of listening to people’s stories and working even on Sundays when she sorted supplies, that she decided to stay in bed for a day and rest. Not for long; she took up her pen and wrote to her brother to ask if he could try to get someone to attend to the concentration camps for black people. She herself did not have time to focus on those camps too, but “from the odd bits I hear it seems to be much needed”.
She also asked a Bloemfontein women’s organisation, the Loyal Ladies League, to investigate the matter of the black camps. She did not have much hope in this regard, however: “But though they said they would I could see that they were not the right kind of person to be of any use and they were quite sure beforehand that there was neither sickness, suffering or death amongst those people [blacks]. I hear there is much of all three.”176 The Bloemfontein Post got wind of Emily’s meeting with the Loyal Ladies and reported that some of the women were upset, especially because Emily had insisted that attention should also be paid to the black camps.
From that point on all her letters were censored, but this did not prevent her from sending her brother photos taken in the camp.
The circumstances weighed more and more heavily on Emily, particularly the oppressive Martial Law provisions. She was frustrated and angry about what she was witnessing in the interior, and the failure of people at home to take note of it. And even worse: that the Liberal Party did not seem to be doing much about it.177
Her sense of duty trumped her frustrations and exhaustion. She wanted to visit more camps, such as those at Kroonstad and Kimberley, as well as the “large and important ones in the Transvaal”. But Kitchener refused to permit her to travel further north than Bloemfontein. She wrote twice more to obtain permission for this; in both cases he refused.
Early in March 1901 Emily set off again to the southern camps in the Free State after leaving her relief work in the Bloemfontein camp in the hands of a small group of women. Although she had been granted a permit for the Kimberley camp, she was not allowed to go south of Norvalspont. So she first had to travel to De Aar and then north again from there to reach Kimberley. Emily did not indicate how she obtained the permit for Kimberley, as the town is 165 kilometres northwest of Bloemfontein.178
On 4 March she was at Springfontein, about 145 kilometres south of Bloemfontein, where she stayed at the home of the Reverend Sandrock, a German missionary,