Before where the British military forces, and other foriegners, were unable to make the Boers become different and change, Lord Roberts thought to do by a direct physical attack on the family unit so as to intimidate.
Immediate plans were laid by the High Command to implement a scorched earth policy, destroy the crops and cattle, burn down the homesteads, and put the women and children in concentration camps. Hitter has often been accused of being the man who started civilian concentration camps. The truth is, the distinction belongs to the British, who at the urging of Milner and Rhodes, saw it as a way to bring the Boers to heel. It was dirty war at its worst.
The Boer housewife was particularly hated by Milner ( Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milne ) and Rhodes (Cecil Rhodes). She was the rock of the family; she did all of the domestic work. Even President Kruger’s wife milked the cows. The Boer women kept the farm going and the family together while the men were away fighting the war.
(........)
Boer farms were destroyed and cattle killed. Women and children were herded into camps, without any proper sanitation, or shelter, other than the ordinary bell tent. It was
a scene set for disaster, which was not long in coming.
(...)
Thus did the British High command demean itself. Later the same tactics were to be used against the civilian population of Germany on a hitherto unheard of scale, like in Dresden, when 125,000 German women, children and old men fell victim to Churchill’s murderous firebombing in one hellish night. This was how war was shaped, not by the Germans, but by
the most civilized nation on earth, the British, and they did it to women and children, their own kind, ..............
(...)
The Boer women and children suffered indescribable hardships in the primitive camps set up to “house” them. In the end, out of the 116,572 Boers in concentration camps, some 25,000 perished from malnutrition, dysentry, and exposure, as well as a variety of other diseases.
(......)
An English nurse, Emily Hobhouse, did yeoman work in the “death camps” and she sent back hundreds of horrifying accounts to the British Parliament over the treatment of the camp inmates. However, none of this moved Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener to do anything about the disgrace.
This policy of genocide against the Boers was fully supported by Lord Alfred Milner and Cecil Rhodes, who both expressed their satisfaction with it. The lessons learned and experience gained by Milner in South Africa were later put to use in the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
(......)
(Lord Roberts) began to think in terms of offering a peace treaty to the Boers. Rhodes flew into a rage, his high falsetto voice raised in shrill protest to Queen Victoria. The autocratic Milner was furious, and refused to entertain the idea. Roberts wrote to the Queen saying that if Milner and Rhodes wanted to grind the Boers into the dust (their expressed intentions), then they must be prepared to spend billions more on the war.
(........)
Lady Roberts in the meantime, in defiance of the orders of her Queen, arrived in Pretoria, and immediately ordered the expulsion of all Boer women and children from that city. The unfortunate civilians were herded into open cattle trucks and shipped out toward the Boer positions near the border of Portuguese East Africa. The women and children went a few days in the open trucks, without shelter or proper food and water supplies.
(......)
General Botha, .........called it “an inhuman act.” And it was. (Lord)Robert’s answer was to increase the tempo of farm burning. He wrote home saying that he would “starve into submission, these banditti” as though he was fighting rabble.
Lord Milner thought nothing of the swelling protests in England over the disgraceful treatment of Boer women and children. “If we are to do anything about South Africa we must disregard the screamers” he wrote to his associate, Richard Haldane. That attitude was carried over by
Milner into the Bolshevik revolution, where he disregarded the screams of the innocent, victims of his greed.
(......)
.... the British saw that the only way to end the war was to come to all accommodation with the Boers, not the unconditional surrender demanded by Milner and Rhodes, but one which the Boers could live with. Terms were drawn up and submitted to the Boers. After months of deliberating, they agreed to meet the British in Pretoria. General Smuts and the British together hammered out a compromise document. Finally on May 31st, 1902 the two sides got together in a great marquee tent at Vereeninging and a peace treaty was signed. The Boers lost the war, but gained a good deal of freedom and independence. The only one who did not agree with the wars end was Lord Alfred Milner. He expressed bitter shock and dismay, more so at the failure of the British Army to defeat the Boers in battle.
(.........)
After the signing of the peace treaty, some 25,000 Boer Commandos came forward to give up arms, which further astonished the British. They had reckoned on only about 12,000 armed men, and were thankful that the Boers accepted the terms in view of the forces still at their command.
(.........)
After the war the Boers struggled to put their lives together again. They returned to farms devastated and destroyed, some with their families dead in concentration camps, the country side scorched and blackened. But in a few short years those hardy men, who should be an example to us all, built the finest country on the African continent. Unfortunately they were not able to keep the Jews from entirely gaining control of the gold mines.
----------------Hofflandia
In 1910 the British allowed home rule, and the Union of South Africa was born, with the Republics of the Orange Free State and Zuid-Afrikaansche Republic [South African Republic (Transvaal)] incorporated together with the Cape Province and Natal under one government with General Louis Botha as the first Prime Minister.
The Afrikaaners continued fighting for a free Republic and with the outbreak of WWI, a rebellion occurred because most of the Afrikaaners saw England as the enemy, and refused to fight against the Germans.
The National Party was at this time was not politically strong, but was growing with greater force with General James Barry Munnik Hertzog better known as Barry Hertzog , the founder of the party.
The same scenario took place with the birth of the Ossewbrandwag at the outbreak of WWII. The Ossewbrandwag was an organization against supporting England, since the objective was to establish a free Afrikaaner Republic. But the South African Party of General Jan Smuts was then in power and hundreds of Afrikaaners were arrested and put in prison or in internment camps.
Still even with the oppression more organizations were established to help the Afrikaaners to be in the corporate world. The banks and mining houses were in the hands of the Afrikaaners.
Under the leadership of Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd in 1961, the country became a free republic, outside of the British Commonwealth. The war they had to fight was that of black nationalism.
According to Kallie van Rensburg, this has a bearing on the events in March 1961 when Dr. Verwoerd attempted to retain South Africa’s membership in the British Commonwealth after it became a republic. Dr. Verwoerd was optimistic that his application would succeed, because countries like India, Pakistan and Ghana became republics without loss of Commonwealth membership.A series of heated debates followed during the Commonwealth conference and Dr. Verwoerd was virtually forced to leave the Commonwealth. (They push oneof our men out of the front door). In his farewell speech in London, Dr.Verwoerd said: “I was shocked and overwhelmed by the hostile spirit prevailing against South Africa... opposition is based on the so-called ‘discrimination’ we practise in South Africa. But this hostility came from countries where the principles of so-called democracy is totally absent...”
-----------PROPHECIES by Siener Van Rensburg , page 65
