Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

British forces herded into the camps more than one hundred thousand Afrikaners who died at alarming rates. Malnutrition, starvation, and outbreaks of endemic diseases wiped out approximately thirty thousand, the disproportionate number of whom were children.28 Whether the civilian deaths were a deliberate or an unintended consequence of Kitchener’s war plans, the establishment of the British concentration camps in South Africa represented the first time a single ethnic group had been targeted en masse for detention or deportation.