Throughline - Scorched Earth

Episode Date: August 8, 2019

The term "concentration camp" is most associated with Nazi Germany and the systematic killing of Jews during World War II. But colonial powers used concentration camps at the turn of the 19th century to crush rebellions. In this episode, how a war between Britain and South African Boers gave rise to some of the first camps.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Imagine you, you're fighting a war against a force 10 times, 100 times greater than you, you're fighting a war against a force ten times, a hundred times greater than you. And then suddenly they take your mother, your sister, your wife and all your children and you lose every single thing you've ever owned. They put them in a concentration camp where there's no clean water,

there are no candles, there are no blankets, there are just tents, which is scorchingly hot during the day and during the evening. It's so cold. Your children are dying. What are you going to do? Are you going to continue fighting? Is the Trump administration currently running concentration camps at the border? People saying that families and children are being held in concentration camps is an outrage. Any member who suggested, as she did, that the camps on the U.S. border are concentration camps, that's a comment that is clearly ludicrous. Never again is close to down!

Never again is close to down! Somewhat remarkably, this is a debate we are now having in this, the year 2019. Never again is close! Never again. Somewhat remarkably, this is a debate we are now having in this, the year 2019. Never again. What? Never again. Just now. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Where we go back in time.

To understand the present. The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border. Recently, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the migrant detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border concentration camps. That is exactly what they are. Her comments were met with some support. There are camps and people are being concentrated. This is very simple. I don't even know why this is a controversial thing for her to say.

This is a way of getting people to listen to it and pay attention to it. And so that's what I think she did. And a whole lot of pushback. But of course she was wrong. You cannot compare. It's a horrible moment. There's no way to compare. I've said it many times.

Some of these people need to crack open a history book before they make some comments. All of this raises the question, what historically defines a concentration camp? To understand the debate happening today, we need to go back to when a term was first used. Towards the end of the 19th century, Western colonial powers began using a strategy to deal with resistance in their colonies. They moved civilian populations into camps against their will. Have you got that? That's really important. We called up historian Ian Robertson-Smith to break down the origins of the term.

There were colonial concentration camps between 1895 and 1908 amongst all those powers. There was the Spanish in Cuba, the Americans in the Philippines, the Germans in all those powers, the Spanish in Cuba, the Americans in the Philippines, the Germans in South West Africa, the British in South Africa. And that last place, South Africa, is where we're going to focus. That's where the British Empire used concentration camps to win a war. These were not either death or extermination or forced labor camps in the way that the camps established by the Nazis

in various parts of Europe were. It's been totally changed, the meaning, by the Nazi experience. We go to South Africa when we come back. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. South Africa was first colonized by the Dutch in the 1600s. But over the next couple of centuries, Britain became the dominant imperial power and eventually took control. The Dutch landowners and farmers who stuck around under British influence

were called the Boers, which is another name for farmer. The Boers were white, and they already resented the British. But in 1834, the British did something that really made them angry. They abolished slavery. Slavery and white racial superiority were an important part of the Boer economy and culture, and they didn't want to give it up. So they moved inland to maintain their way of life and started two independent republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Britain acknowledged these two independent republics, but the tensions continued. And it's important to note, the Boer republics were poor, so there wasn't much of value that they offered to the British. But then, something happens that changes that equation.

Gold is discovered in the Boer republics. As you might expect, Britain wanted in. The Boers resisted. And in 1899, the Anglo-Boer War begins. The Boers were outmatched and resorted to guerrilla warfare. And the British did what empires do. They scorched the earth. We destroyed the livelihood that the guerrillas could have from the food they could grow. They burned farms, crops, livestock, leaving tens of thousands of people without homes.

So you clear the population from these rural areas and you then become responsible for them. It's a classic military anti-guerrilla strategy. I mean, it was the height of the British Empire's colonial conquest. I mean, they ruled the world. At that time, it was said the sun never set on the British Empire. This is Elsa B. Britz, a journalist and author based in Cape Town, South Africa. So there was a heightened feeling of jingoism that, you know, we should fight this war. But some people were completely against the war.

They called themselves Little Englanders, liberal people who thought, no, we shouldn't do this. And this is where Emily came into the story. Emily is Emily Hobhouse. She's one of those Little Englanders, a wealthy, upper-class Victorian woman born into a prominent English family. And it's through her eyes

that the rest of our story unfolds. She's well-read, she's well-spoken, she writes elegant letters and stuff, but she has that unique thing that some people are born with. She wants to do more. Emily's unique in a few ways. Not only is she politically engaged, she's single, coming up on 40, and incredibly outspoken.

Within the first few weeks of the war breaking out, she joins an anti-war group. But soon enough, Emily wants to do even more. She decides to start the South African Women Distress Fund. And with this campaign, she begins making contacts in South Africa. In that time, they had letters of introduction. So I know you, and you know somebody in South Africa, and you introduced me to some people of the same class and standing in Cape Town.

And that's what she did. This is how Emily learns about all the farms being burned, the British scorch earth policy. They laid it barren. The whole Free State, the whole Transvaal, burned every farmhouse, 30,000 farms burned. This news makes Emily decide that what she's doing is simply not enough. Raising funds on the other side of the world just isn't going to cut it.

Then she decides she's going to come to South Africa. She's going to help. At the end of 1900, Emily boards a ship on her own with 300 British pounds. She travels for three weeks, arrives in Cape Town with a plan to visit the torched homesteads and deliver food and clothing to the Boer families, who've lost everything. Little does she know, no one's there. The moment she stepped off the ship, she was met by some of the ladies here. And then within days, she heard about, oh my word, there are concentration camps where women are actually kept by force.

Emily had heard about a camp where women were being held, not through the British papers, through her own contacts. But when she arrives, she learns that there are dozens of concentration camps full of women and children. Everybody that lost everything were put in these camps. There were older men in the camps, those who were not fit to go to war, but the majority were women and children in all the cases. One reason the British started to do this was to cut off the supply of the guerrilla movement,

a practical strategy. But there was another, deeper psychological reason. By putting the women and children in the concentration camps, it was a specific policy. They thought they'd give up. Imagine you, you're a man, you're fighting a war against a force ten times, hundred times greater than you. And then suddenly they take your mother, your sister, your wife and all your children and you lose every single thing you've ever owned. And then they take your people, they put them in a concentration camp

where there's no clean water, there are no candles, there are no blankets, there are just tents which is scorchingly hot during the day and during the evening. It's so cold. Your children are dying. What are you going to do? Are you going to continue fighting? The message from the British was clear. Fight us and your family ends up in what they specifically called concentration camps.

And we want to be clear here. Black South Africans also ended up in concentration camps. Many of them lived and worked on Boer farms. So the scorched earth policy left them homeless too. They were caught up in the middle of this war. And the truth is they ended up fighting on both sides. So the British set up separate camps for the black South Africans to prevent them from fighting on the Boer side. After hearing about all of this, Emily realizes This was much, much bigger than she originally thought and decided then and then, well, now I know my destination.

I have to go to the camps. When we come back, Emily Hobhouse sees the camps with her own eyes. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. So, when Emily discovers the reality that tens of thousands of people are living in British concentration camps, this makes her even more determined not only to get the people, the resources she's carrying, but also to see what's going on behind the barbed wire fence. To access the camps, she needs to get a permit. And she needs to get it from one of the highest ranking British officers, Lord Milner. Easier said than done.

Because, remember, a woman in 1900 asking to see this very important man who was running a war, what's her business? At first, he won't see her. But she pleads for a week, and then another, and then another. And after three weeks, he finally gives in. It was an effort of three weeks to get an appointment with him, and then she had to convince him that she wants to go up north into a war zone, a female alone. And she does. So with six tons of food and clothing, she heads to a concentration camp.

She's departed in the middle of January. In the evening, we have a basket of food and bread and apricot jam and cocoa. And there she goes. And there was a military train. There were only men on the train. Can you imagine that this woman from the upper class, traveling through the dust, its sun, she's all alone, and there's a war.

And as she passed the blur of torched farms, she wrote, The land seemed dead and silent, absolutely without life, as far as the eye could reach. Only carcasses of horses, mules and cattle with a sort of mute anguish in their look and bleached bones. After three days on the train, Emily arrives at a camp, two square miles of barren landscape with nothing but tents packed inside a locked encampment. It's bleak. These people are just dropped in the middle of nowhere. And among the sights that she saw was this, a baby of six months gasping its life out on its mother's knee. Children who were

so weak from measles that they were unable to walk, lying there, white and wan. Again, Emily wrote, it was a dear little chap of four and nothing left of him except his great brown eyes and white teeth from which the lips were drawn back too thin to close his body was emaciated I can't describe what it is to see these children lying about in a state of collapse it is just exactly like faded flowers thrown away and one hates to stand and look on such a misery and be able to do almost nothing. Why did the British allow conditions to get so bad in those camps?

Was that an intentional decision? Well, it was just a logistical nightmare. They really mismanaged it. It was absolutely horrible and they just didn't care. So for instance, when they described the Afrikaners as just dirty and Emily said, well, there's not a single bar of soap. There's not clean water. There's no milk. They have nothing to boil and cook the food on, the meager ration that they're given. And they said, well, we don't issue soap to soldiers. Why should we issue sub to them?

An important thing to note here is that as bad as the Boer camps were, the Black camps were even worse. They didn't receive any rations, hardly any medical care, and were expected to literally grow their own food and build their own shelters. There were no tents provided. Meanwhile, they were used as a workforce for the British Army, growing crops for the troops, digging trenches, even working as spies on railway lines

to warn British troops of incoming Boer attacks. But it's hard to know the exact conditions of these camps. Emily never visited one. So she paints this vision of this desolate, almost apocalyptic environment and landscape. I don't fully understand how she was able to get there. I mean, was this not guarded like a top secret by the British? No, it wasn't like it was top secret. But I don't think they thought that this woman, you know, she was quite handsome with her pale blue eyes and her wonderful dresses and her dark blonde hair isn't going to give them this much trouble.

I think, well, let's think this woman, she's going to turn around in two days. I don't think they ever expected this. I mean, what is the worth of a woman in war? Nothing. She's not going to do anything. She's not going to get even to see the camp commander. I think they thought, oh, she's going to turn back. She's going to faint when she comes to Bloemfontein and see 2,000 women and 900 children in a concentration camp.

In the first day when she entered the camp, there was a snake, a deadly snake in one of the camps, and everybody ran out, and she took her umbrella and she killed it. So it's almost like she was invisible in some ways because people didn't see her as a serious threat. No woman was seen as a serious threat. It's April 1901. Emily has been in South Africa a little over three months. The war has been going on for a year and a half. There are dozens of camps.

And Emily manages to get access to seven of the Boer camps. The whole time, she's interviewing people, traveling back and forth, revisiting the camp she has permits for, and furiously documenting the conditions. She writes a report. She interviews people. She asks them all the same questions. And she writes a very good scientific report about the witnesses. And she challenges each and every commander. And she gathers evidence, eyewitness evidence, which is very important later.

And then she decides, in the beginning of May, there's nothing more she can do here. She can distribute food forever, and they won't be changed because she needs to go back to England to make the announcements there. She makes arrangements to return home, finish her report and present it to Parliament. The ship takes 21 days from Cape Town to Plymouth or Southampton and as soon as she steps foot there she tries to get an appointment. She gets an appointment with the Secretary of War and he agrees to see her on the 5th of June, which is very fast after she landed there.

And she begs him to listen to her, and he does. He gives her an hour. And she explains to him, but she is absolutely shocked by what he tells her. He thinks there are barely 50,000 or 40,000 people in camps in the country, and they are barely 50,000 or 40,000 people in camps in the country, and they are all comfortable, and they have all the necessities they need. Emily realizes Parliament has no idea, doesn't want to know,

or is lying about what's going on in South Africa. The reality is, by the end of the war, more than 230,000 people are being held in concentration camps. And every week that goes by without government intervention, At the end of the war, more than 230,000 people are being held in concentration camps. And every week that goes by without government intervention, more and more people are dying. From starvation, dehydration, disease. Emily knows this isn't an exaggeration. So she decides to take a report and go public.

On the 18th of June, she publishes a report in print in the UK. And everybody knows it's debated in the Houses of Parliament. And they said, oh, there's nothing wrong. There's nothing wrong. And even in the black concentration camps, they have everything they need. And no, people are not dying. It's totally, totally underplayed. And then her battle starts.

And because they don't believe her, Emily's no hero. She's a traitor. People throw stones at her and they throw food and sticks and they even write horrible messages in front of her flat in Chelsea and they just don't believe her. You don't want to hear in wartime that your country is doing this to defenseless women and children. People are not going to suddenly say, oh, we're so sorry, we should correct this. This is not normally, you know, in any war, people always blame the whistleblower. So with jingoism in England and everybody being patriotic, there's nothing that gives people such a nationalist feeling or patriotic feeling when there's a war on. Regardless of the facts, she was vilified in the press

as being a liar and a traitor, even though she spoke the truth. Meanwhile, the British government is dragging its feet. But finally, after a few months, Parliament decides to send their own commission down to South Africa to investigate the camps. They select a group of elite women to do the work Emily had already done months before. The only difference is that these women have a cushy setup. Their own doctors, their own translators, their own trains, and no Emily.

I wonder why did they make a very deliberate decision to exclude Emily? Imagine you close your eyes and go back to that time and you can see how people were dressed, and the men with the mustaches and the military uniforms. And you are the biggest power. You're the power on earth. It's not America. It's not China. It's the imperial Britain.

And there's this one woman who was a whistleblower who showed you up, who tackled the mightiest empire in the world and said to them, you caused the death of women and children, are you going to give her her dues? No way. They will never, never give her the credit. The Women's Commission boards a ship and leaves Emily behind. So she's like,

okay, you don't want to send me? I'll just send myself. Again. But by that time, there was strict orders on paper that she's never allowed to enter this country ever again while there's a war on. And when the Avondale Castle steamed into Cape Town Harbor, she was immediately arrested and they wanted to deport her the same day

but she resisted. She gave up the most wonderful passive resistance. She refused to pack her bags. She refused to walk with them. She just stayed in her cabin and she wrote letters and then she said she was sick.

I don't think she was. And she was very dramatic. Then later on they wanted to carry her off the ship and she jumped out. And then eventually, five days later, they carried her from the one ship to the other. So she took a three-week voyage across the ocean, was adamantly in her cabin for five days, and then had to take another three-week journey back. Yes.

And the wonderful description, so the military doctor who eventually did come to see her, he said later that she has the face of a Madonna, but she fights like a devil. Coming up, how it all ends. You're listening to ThruLight from NPR. It's late 1901. The Women's Commission gets back to England and delivers their own report, more than six months after Emily's report. It was almost identical. But because it was a government-backed report, this time it leads to action. Specific steps are taken towards improving conditions in the camp.

Basic improvements like providing more food and water. But it's too late. By now, peace talks are taking place, the war is coming to an end, and almost 50,000 people have died in the camps. The death toll is split almost evenly between the white and black camps, we think. The British kept very poor records of the black concentration camps. I mean, people are forever searching for more information about their camps. But it's estimated at least 15,000, up to 25,000 black women and children also died in the camps. The war finally comes to an end in May of 1902, after the Boers surrender and sign a peace treaty with the British.

But those still alive in the concentration camps are kind of stuck. Because they had nowhere to go, and they had to be repatriated. And that was a big, big effort to get them back to their farms. But when they returned to their farms, there was just nothing. Now that the war is over, Emily is free to return to South Africa. She spends the next few years traveling back and forth to plow farms, grow crops, breed livestock, start schools, and help rebuild. She remains a staunch pacifist for the rest of her life and continues to speak out against the horrors of war. Oh, oh, oh, tremendously. She says that I survived to tell the tale,

lived also to sum up governments as poor things, more careful of their own prestige than of justice and right. And always, when the conduct of war is in question, devoid of conscience. Elsabie wrote a biography about Emily Hothouse in part because she felt that all these years later, she still doesn't get the recognition she deserves. She didn't say my country above everything else. She said my country is wrong and I feel what is being done here is wrong. And even if it cost me dearly any dirt, I'm going to do something about it. And it's the courage of one person to leave everything that's comfortable in their life and to help somebody else, somebody that they never met,

somebody that they've never known. I think we need more inspirational stories like that. I wonder, you know, obviously concentration camps had been used, we mentioned in Cuba, but, you know, this was at the time the British Empire was the preeminent superpower in the world, right? And they used concentration camps in this war. I wonder what effect that had on the use of them in the future. Let me tell you maybe a little bit of a story that all my family was part of that war on both sides the

women were in the concentration camps and the men went to the war and even three generations later i can remember my grandmother refusing to speak english because of what happened to her family. And so the lesson I would learn from that is just don't do that to other people. So what happens maybe in America today and in Syria and all these places to put people behind walls or put them in camps and just don't look after their dignity and their humanity

is never a good thing. And all it breeds is hate. That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Randa Telfatah. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And.

Jamie York. Jordana Hochman. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Okay, smiting the summer. Nigery Eaton. And... Thanks also to Anya Brunman and Greta Pittinger for her fact-checking. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. If you like something you heard or you have an idea for an episode, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLine NPR.

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