Confronting Horror: Emily Hobhouse and the Concentration Camp Photographs of the South African War

Abstract

In 2003 the War Museum of the Boer Republics in Bloemfontein published a selection of photographs from its holdings on the South African War of 1899-1902 under the title Suffering oj War. 2 Although most of the images depict the suffering of Boer subjects in the unequal war between Great Britain and the Boer States of the South African Republic (subsequently, the Transvaal) and the Orange Free State (Rebpublic), the text of the book reads as a condemnation of war in general. In this sense, Suffering oj War fonns the latest chapter in the evolution of the war in South African political consciousness that Albert Grundlingh has traced over the past century.3 Grundlingh shows that, despite the trauma of the war and its obvious resonance in historical memory, only nine books on it were published before 1931. As the tide of Afrikaner Nationalism rose in the 1930s and 1940s, however, many books were written to celebrate the exploits of Boer commandos and generals, on the one hand, and condemn the British treatment of the civilian population, on the other. Subsequently, as the victorious Nationalist movement sought to rally English-speaking support against a presumed common Black enemy, little attention was paid to the War as a defining moment in Mrikaner history. The occasion of the centenary of the War in the new dispensation of a liberated South Africa, however, has encouraged scholars to examine the War as it affected the entire population of the subcontinent for which reason it is now generally referred to as the South African War rather than its traditional name of the AngloBoer War. However, if these changes in historical perspective have allowed the history of the War to be examined with increasing critical rigour, it has to be said that the same is not true of the photographs of the War, especially the photographs of concentration camp victims. Like other historical photographs, pictures of the South African War are routinely reproduced in altered fonnat, with incomplete or altered caption information, and no apparent concern for their authorship, original circulation, or function. Moreover, the concentration camp photographs in particular have been made to work as propaganda, which, almost by definition, purposefully excludes the possibility of a critical reading of the images.