The ugly history of Boer prisoner-of-war camps in India

In December 1991, when Enuga Srinivasulu Reddy, a UN official, visited St Paul’s war cemetery in Ambala, Haryana, the decay was unmissable. The church still bore signs of the heavy damage it suffered during the 1965 India-Pakistan War and the cemetery had a forlorn look. Tall weeds grew around the grounds. Amid them, Reddy found a gravestone marking the resting place of 20 Boer prisoners of war who had died in Ambala.

These Boer prisoners had been brought to India from South Africa along with 9,000 others around April 1901. For the next three years, until January 1904, these multitudes were scattered across prison camps in British India: in Ahmednagar, Ambala, Bellary, Ketti Valley, Shahjahanpur, Amritsar, Bhim Tal, Dagshai, Trichinopoly, Wellington, as well as in places now in Pakistan: Upper Topa, Sialkot, Kakol and Abbottabad.

Reddy, a committed campaigner against South Africa’s racist apartheid policies since the late 1940s, laid a wreath and paid homage to the dead Boer soldiers, commemorating the struggle they waged against British imperialism during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902).

Scorched earth

The Second Boer War stemmed from a century of conflict between Britain and the Boers. The descendants of Dutch-speaking settlers in Africa, the Boers had established two independent republics in southern Africa: the South African Republic and the Orange Free State. Both of them were resource-rich.

In the early 1880s, the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand basin led to a large influx of outsiders – who were mainly British – into the South African Republic, which in turn led to a conflict over residency rights and franchise. The British Empire claimed this an outrage and went to war with the Boer republics.

The Boers, mainly independent farmers, were outnumbered but ran an effective guerilla campaign until the British commander-in-chief, Lord Horatio Kitchener, adopted two tactics that had little precedence. First, he ordered a “scorched earth” campaign, clearing large areas and destroying Boer farmers, to disrupt the resistance’s supply lines. Second, he sent masses of displaced civilians, including women and children, to “concentration camps”.

As Reddy writes, “Thirty thousand farms were destroyed. Over a hundred thousand Boers and another hundred thousand Africans were forced into concentration camps.” It was around this time that the term “concentration camp” grew in acceptance, writes historian Aidan Forth in Barbed-wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps 1876-1903.

“British concentration camps were instruments of military coercion and humanitarian care that drew from existing practices of encampment first developed in British India,” says Forth. “During famine operations in Bombay and other regions of South Asia in the 1870s and 1890s, colonial officials concentrated civilian populations in crude but purpose-built camps in order to rationalize relief within strict economic limits and discipline displaced populations in centralized sites amenable to surveillance and control.”

The British pacifist Emily Hobhouse visited the concentration camps across South Africa in 1900-1901 and found the conditions horrifying, especially the state in which women and children were incarcerated.

“Within four days, Emily discovered the nature and extent of the misery in the camp,” writes Hobhouse’s biographer Elsabé Brits. “The most basic necessities of life were lacking… Typhoid was rife. Water was limited to two buckets for eight people – for drinking, washing, and cooking. The food rations were not nearly sufficient to stave off hunger and disease. It was murder to the children to keep these camps going, which were probably housing fifty thousand people in total by this time.”

By the end, nearly 26,000 people are believed to have perished in these camps.

When Hobhouse disclosed her findings in a report, there was an immediate fallout. A formal investigation was set up and, to stem the popular outrage, the British government decided to shift prisoners to its other colonies. Beginning April 1901, an estimated 25,000-28,000 prisoners of war were transported to St Helena, Bermuda, Sri Lanka and India.

British propaganda

The stories of these PoWs have not received enough attention, largely because, as literary historian Isobel Hofmeyr says, they were seen as “failed soldiers”. But this makes it all the more necessary to revisit their history, especially in the wider context of forced migration in the Indian Ocean world.

For the prisoners, the journey to the distant camps was long and arduous. Cattle trains took them to holding stations or transit camps, from where they were put on ships.

From the beginning, they were placed into two categories: the hendsoppers or reconcilables (those who swore allegiance to the British empire) and the bittereinderes or irreconcilables (those who didn’t). Predictably, the irreconcilables encountered more hardships, were placed in the more remote camps and given fewer allowances.

Each camp had its own characteristics. The Anglo-Boer War in 100 Objects, published by the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein, lists Abbottabad in Pakistan as one of the biggest camps, hosting nearly 1,500 prisoners guarded by Gurkha soldiers. Fort Gobindgarh was nicknamed Die Hel (Hell) despite its proximity to the Himalayas and moderate temperatures. The Murree Hills camp had neither fences nor guards because it was so remote that a prison break was considered impossible. And down south, the camp in Trichinopoly reminded its prisoners of the Kalahari because water was scarce and dust storms frequent.

Complaints were common and most often about heat, water shortage and boredom. Yet newspaper reports in the British Empire spoke about the spaciousness of the accommodation, the assistance the prisoners received from “servants”, the freedom of movement accorded them, the hobbies they could pursue, and they sports they could play, such as cricket, football, rugby and even traditional Boer games like Jukskei.

The Oamaru Mail of New Zealand described the Ambala camp as “a model of neatness” where “every precaution is taken against disease. There is a special water supply, and water is drawn, boiled, and filtered. The tents are spacious, the exercise grounds large, and warm clothing has been provided to everyone.”

There were other commendations too. Camps were praised for marking special occasions in Boer life, with prisoners wearing colours associated with the Boer republics. Prisoners would get “camp money” for daily items like soap, toothpaste and cigarettes. Workshops were organised where prisoners crafted wooden candlesticks and pipes. In Shahjahanpur, prisoners had to make wood carvings for sale to tourists in a nearby town.

Most prisoners in Ambala were in their 30s or 40s, with a sprinkling of the old and the young. On one occasion, the prisoners put up a furious fight in a football match against the local regiment. Pleased with the game, the Oamaru Mail hoped that “this same spirit of genialness will end the bitterness and on their return, they will live as free and contended citizens of a united Empire”.

The Ahmednagar and Amritsar camps also organised cricket matches between prisoners and local regiments. The Anglo-Boer War Museum has, among other memorabilia, a cricket bat presented to a prisoner named Charles Morgan in Ahmednagar when he scored 77 in a match.

Prison break

There were isolated instances of prisoner resistance. In April 1902, an inmate at the Trichy camp assaulted a sentry and, when guards tried to nab him, there was more violence, leading to two prisoner deaths. Both at Trichy and Bellary, prisoners tried to escape but were apprehended quickly.

One prisoner, though, formulated an ingenious strategy and succeeded.

John L De Villiers recounted his incredible story soon after reaching home in the book How I Escaped: The Story of a Noteworthy Escape by a Boer out of British India. First published in Dutch in 1903, it was later translated into Afrikaans and more recently into English in 2021.

In the book, De Villiers said that life in the Trichy camp had been made unbearable by the exhausting heat, lack of water and unpleasant dust winds. Once he decided to escape, he picked his moment well: the period between evening and morning roll calls. He asked his Indian manservant for cloth for a turban, a long coat and trousers (memorabilia now preserved in the Anglo-Boer War Museum). Putting these on, he blackened his face with burnt cork, applied ink on his lips and eyes, and walked out of the camp behind an oxcart that regularly delivered goods from a nearby shop.

Once free, De Villiers purchased tickets to the next station Viluppuram (talking to the stationmaster with an assumed accent) and then trekked across the border to Pondicherry, a French territory where he could not be arrested by the British authorities. For the next six weeks, he stayed in Pondicherry, before finding passage aboard a Norwegian ship that did not stop at a British port where he might be rearrested. He had one close call near Aden when a British freighter gave chase to his ship, but somehow it entered international waters and finally, on July 8, De Villiers reached safety when it docked in Marseilles.

While De Villiers found India’s weather insufferable, Commandant JLP Erasmus found its religions captivating. Erasmus was a prisoner first in Shahjahanpur and then in Amritsar. Always interested in Oriental Spiritism, he deepened his knowledge upon his release by engaging with local scholars. In late 1904, he delivered a series of well-received lectures to the Transvaal Philosophical Society on India’s religions and social history. Mahatma Gandhi, then a lawyer in Johannesburg, published his first lecture on the Gita in the weekly Indian Opinion.

Gandhi, who had set up the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps during the Second Boer War, wrote in his editorial: “That a South African, and he, too, a Boer Commandant, should interest himself in Indian studies, is, to our mind, a happy augury for the future; and if we had more South Africans like him, we should hear very little indeed of anti-Indian agitation and anti-Indian prejudices…”

On May 31, 1902, a peace treaty ending the Second Boer War was signed, though the irreconcilables continued to hold out. The arrival of Boer officials in India, including General Jacobus De La Rey, finally convinced the irreconcilables to accept the treaty’s terms and return home to work towards restoration and rebuilding lives. On January 12, 1904, the last ship carrying the irreconcilables departed from Indian shores.