The British political, military and business alliance had, as one of its objectives, restoring the gold, coal and diamond mining industries centred on the Witwatersrand and Kimberley. Milner believed that a resumption of gold mining would further demoralize Boer military resistance. The
Witwatersrand Native Labour Association was created and permitted by the Minister for Native Affairs, to recruit mining labour from the Native Refugee Camps.
The first gold mine reopened on 4 May 1901, the opening ceremony attended by Kitchener himself, and by July 1901 seven shafts were back at work.118 There can be no co-incidence that these gold mines were brought back into production at the around same time that the formal structure for the existing Phase One Native Refugee Camps was being established, from which would emerge the Phase Two forced labour camps, operated by the newly formed Native Refugee Department, which fell under direct British military command. By July 1901, the Transvaal camps were brought under this institutional framework and by 1 August 1901, the Orange River Colony camps followed.119 All black refugees were to be administered by this department, which had as one of its aims underwriting the British war effort by reducing the financial cost of the war through coercion into forced labour.
While the interned Boers were not compelled to labour, the black refugees, due to widespread destitution and British military policy, were coerced into growing crops for the Native Refugee Department and to act as a labour reserve for the British army.120 The black internees employed
118 H.W. Wilson, After Pretoria: The Guerrilla War, London, The Amalgamated Press Ltd, Vol. 2, (1902), p. 629.
119 P. Warwick, African People, p. 145.
120 NASA, Transvaal Administration Reports, Final Report, p. 3.
73 and their families were allowed to purchase mealies at ½ d per pound or 7s 6d a bag.121 Those internees who refused to work had to pay double this amount. Simply put, the camps operated on a no work no food policy, which coerced the internees into the labour system. December 1901 saw over 6,000 workers channelled to the army, while some 13,000 camp internees were employed by the military.122
After the siege, Kimberley had always remained a key military centre due to its diamond mines and its geographical position as a supply terminus for military columns operating in the nearby Orange River Colony and Transvaal. With the land clearances in the Boshof Magisterial District during the last quarter of 1900 and into 1901, refugees were dispatched to Kimberley. Boers were interned near Reservoir Road in an area which today is occupied partly by Newton suburb, the Virgin Active Gym and a rugby stadium.123 Citizens of the Cape Colony who took up arms on the Boer side who assisted the Boer forces were known as Cape Rebels and they were incarcerated in a separate section of the camp. One of these rebels was J.A. Raubenheimer and his wife who were removed from their farm Vygeboomsvlakte at Dry Harts, where shortly a forced labour camp was going to be established.
Black refugees were directed by the military to Blankenbergvlei farm which was owned by De Beers Consolidated Mines. The first refugees arrived on 24 November 1900.124 Numbers increased continually as other magisterial districts in the Orange River Colony and Vaal River districts of the Transvaal were cleared of civilians.
121 NASA, Transvaal Administration Reports, Final Report, p. 3.
122VAB, CSO, Vol. 86, 358/02. Correspondence from De Lotbiniere to Major HJ Goold-Adams.
123 This is local knowledge in Kimberley, particularly amongst the older residents and where the camp memorial and burial site is located in this area.
124 De Beers Consolidated Mines Archives, GM Collection, F & E 1/1/1.
74 Figure 2, Google Earth. Contemporary Kimberley overlays the Boer camp, Blankenbergvlei and Mankurwane's Location.
Throughout the 1901 creation of this camp, De Beers Consolidated Mines demanded that the military remove these refugees from their property, though to no avail. The military, similar to the infighting during the Siege between Rhodes and Kekewich, were having none of it. As the counter guerrilla war strategy intensified, railway truck allocations for civilian supplies to Kimberley, Beaconsfield and the mining houses were to fall under direct military command, and be curtailed.125
By August 1901, a second native refugee camp was established outside of Kimberly on New Klippiespan Farm. The archival evidence shows that towards the end of September 1901, the refugees at Blankenbergvlei were railed to Dry Harts, and at some stage those at Klippiespan
125 De Beers Consolidated Mines Archives, GM Collection, F & E 1/1/1/; Interview May 1900 with Major Armstrong.
75 joined them. Dry Harts then formed the ultimate destination for these two camps and also for the camps at Orange River Station and Taung which were relocated around the same time.
With the departure of the two native refugee camps in Kimberley, life continued much as did under wartime conditions. Civilians went about their business, black mineworkers remained locked inside the compounds and working the mines, while the Boers remained interned, rationed and sheltered, until after the cessation of hostilities on 31 May 1902.
What is important to note about the closed compounds of Kimberley (and those on the
Witwatersrand) is that they formed the model on how black civilians would be treated during the guerrilla war. The conceptual framework and manifestation of closed compounds on the Kimberley mines and the later concentration camps were structurally identical. Both forms of ‘wartime
camps’ and ‘work-time’ camps bring home the understanding, ‘of the seamlessness with which the more visible sovereign violence of the camp has long intersected with a more dispersed, bio
political mode of state and market-sanctioned violence’.126
Weiss distinguishes between ‘state killing’ and the more amorphous condition of ‘letting die’, an angle which this thesis covers in the remaining chapters.127 Letting die as a direct result of forced labour, inadequate shelter, negligible food supplies and virtually non-existent medical attention was a core characteristic of the Phase One Native Refugee Camps and the Phase Two forced labour camps.128
With the separation of internees in the Boer and black camps along racial lines the internee experiences were fundamentally different to each other. Much like the mining compound system versus white suburban Kimberley, this forcible enclosure resulted in two completely separate
126 L.M. Weiss, Exceptional Space, 21-32.
127 L.M. Weiss, Exceptional Space, 21-32.
128 Note that this thesis refers to the Phase Twocamps as forced labour camps. During the war the British authorities called them Native Refugee Camps and all other contemporary scholars repeat this descriptor or referred to them as black concentration camps.
76 experiences. Camps for black refugees were operated according to an entirely different vision than that of the Boer camps. Internees had to build their own shelters. Privacy, domesticity as well as food and basic medical care were methodologically neglected. The public veneer of protective custody in the instance of the black camps gave way to a disciplined existence and extractive labour according to the presumption that they would voluntarily or involuntarily have become complicit with the rural Boer guerrilla campaign.
This strengthens the realisation that the black camps during the South African War and those that this thesis will examine should not be seen in isolation, but within a wider socio-economic and political paradigm of colonial expansionism and exploitation of human and natural resources on a grand scale.129