http://www.boer-war.com/Details2nd/Camps.html
Excerpt:

These camps had were originally set up for refugees whose farms had been destroyed by the British "Scorched Earth" policy (the burning down all Boer homesteads and farms to stop the aid of Boers). Then, following Kitchener's new policy, many women and children were forcibly moved to prevent the Boers from re-supplying from their homes and more camps were built and converted to prisons. This relatively new idea was essentially humane in its planning in London but ultimately proved brutal due to its lack of proper implementation. This was not the first appearance of concentration camps. The Spanish used them in the Ten Years' War that later led to the Spanish-American War, and the United States used them to devastate guerrilla forces during the Philippine-American War. But the concentration camp system of the British was on a much larger scale.

There were a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 for black African ones. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. So, most Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children, but the native African ones held large numbers of men as well. Even when forcibly removed from Boer areas, the black Africans were not considered to be hostile to the British, and provided a paid labour force.

The conditions in the camps were very unhealthy and the food rations were meager. The wives and children of men who were still fighting were given smaller rations than others. The poor diet and inadequate hygiene led to endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery. Coupled with a shortage of medical facilities, this led to large numbers of deaths — a report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 22,074 were children under 16) and 14,154 black Africans had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about 25% of the Boer inmates and 12% of the black African ones died (although recent research suggests that the black African deaths were underestimated and may have actually been around 20,000).

A delegate of the South African Women and Children's Distress Fund, Emily Hobhouse, did much to publicise the distress of the inmates on her return to Britain after visiting some of the camps in the Orange Free State. Her fifteen-page report caused uproar, and led to a government commission, the Fawcett Commission, visiting camps from August to December 1901 which confirmed her report. They were highly critical of the running of the camps and made numerous recommendations, for example improvements in diet and provision of proper medical facilities. By February 1902 the annual death-rate dropped to 6.9% and eventually to 2%

http://christhum.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/south-africa-and-the-british-concentration-camps/#more-862
Excerpt:
South Africa and the British concentration camps16 June 2010

I’m loving the World Cup, trying to watch as many matches as I can, and even like the sound of the vuvuzelas! With many others of the English tendency, I watched England’s first match against USA with nervous excitement. ITV prefaced the match with an outdoor broadcast from Roark’s Drift, and Film4 showed Zulu earlier in the day. As much as I have enjoyed the film in the past, it belongs to the odd canon of boys-own British pseudohistory.
The Boer War is a fairly forgotten piece of British Empire history, although ending only a little over a century ago. In the UK we remember Roark’s Drift (mainly because of Zulu), the Relief of Mafeking, Cecil Rhodes and Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouts. It’s far too easy to have this jingoistic comic-book understanding of British history. In some countries, lots of them, the school history books are doctored to instill a nationalistic pseudohistory in the student, but here simple, subtle mass ignorance suffices.

Lizzie van Zyl, victim of Britain's concentration camps.

Britain began the 20th century with systematic mass murder in South Africa, which involved the invention of the concentration camp. Part of jingoistic history is to make evil other: foreigners are and do evil,which we boldly resist. By editing out the evil from our own history, we end up with an overinflated impression of our moral superiority. This makes it important to remember the evil our country has done.
After the Relief of Mafeking in 1900, General Kitchener arrived in South Africa to take command. Frustrated by fighting the Boer defenders, who adopted guerilla tactics against superior British forces, Kitchener ordered the transformation of the extant refugee camps into concentration camps for the internment of the Boer women and children left in the villages and townships. The British didn’t mean to murder these women and children, but simply interred them in disease infested camps with too little food and let nature take its course. About 26,000 Boer women and children died in the British concentration camps. A roughly equal number of Boer fighters were deported from South Africa during the same period.
More forgotten are the Black Africans caught up in the fighting who were interned in separate concentration camps. The liberal British media, outraged at the plight of the White Boers, said almost nothing about the Black camps. All we have is an estimate that around 14,000 died in the Black camps.
The Boer War was an important turning point in the history of South Africa and the British Empire. The violence, bloodshed and trauma of the war is the background for Afrikaner grievances and insecurities that lay behind Apartheid. The war was the moment that Britain learnt that we could not dictate political and economic terms around the globe, and perhaps that we should not.
As we now have official admission that British soldiers killed 14 unarmed civilians without warning in Derry almost 40 years ago, that their commanders put them in that high-pressure position, and that the authorities have led the denial and coverup ever since, we realise that the need to question authority in order to keep it accountable and responsible for its actions.