Blog Entry #3 – The Anglo-Boer War

The Anglo-Boer war affected the relationship between different cultures in South Africa for centuries after. It was a war that was fought between the British and the Afrikaners from 1899 to 1902. Around 500,000 British fought against 87,000 Afrikaners, or Boers. The Boers won some of the earlier battles but ultimately lost to the British. The two races were fighting for the political and economic control of the region. There was already a lot of tension between the British and the Afrikaners prior to the start of the war. In 1899, the British began a massive build-up of British forces in an area supposedly encased with gold as they were angered over a harsh treatment of the British. Afrikaner President Paul Kruger demanded the withdrawal of the troops and threatened war if they ignored his demands. The British did not comply. The war officially started on the 12^th of October 1899 by the Transvaal and Orange Free State.

The British were the people who created the world’s first concentration camps and many Boers died in these camps from diseases, malnutrition and persecution. The British used these concentration camps as a means of controlling captured populations. Human rights did not exist in those camps and many women and children were abused and forced into labour. The British lost almost 30,000 men fighting, while the Afrikaners lost around 5,000. More than 20,000 Afrikaner civilians were lost in the concentration camps. Over 60,000 men, women and children died as a result of this brutal war. In 1902, the British exhausted the Afrikaners into surrender. On the 31^st of May both the British and the Afrikaners signed a Treaty of Vereeniging where the British accepted the submission of the Afrikaners. The British promised to pay three million pounds and promised the Boers that the black majority would not be included in government until the rule returned to the Afrikaners. This decision unfortunately made the apartheid of the twentieth century a very possible outcome.

After the war the English became known as Rooineks as a result of their way of fighting. Instead of wearing dull uncoloured uniforms when fighting in battle they word brightly coloured red uniforms hence the name ‘Red necks’ or Rooineks in South African.  

The hatred towards Peekay in the book is based on the bad treatment of the British towards the Afrikaners and since Peekay spoke English, he ‘spoke the language which has pronounced the sentences that had killed their grandfathers and sent their grandmothers to the world’s first concentration camps…’ (Page2). The war was well over at the beginning of Peekay’s life however he was still severely tormented because of it. It is clear that there is still so much hatred around even so far past the war. Peekay was just an innocent child who was wrongly being punished for his ancestor’s actions.