Conclusion

Abstract

White South African children entered the international imagination during the South African War. After several years of escalating tension between Britain and the independent Zuid-Afrikaanshe Republiek (ZAR, the South African Republic, or ‘Transvaal’), Paul Kruger, the president of the Transvaal, declared war on Britain on 11 October 1899. The Orange Free State soon entered into the war on the side of the ZAR. The conflict lasted until 1902 and was, as Bill Nasson argues, a war which ‘belonged simultaneously to two different eras’. On the one hand, ‘it was a traditional countryside war of movement, with cavalry and mounted infantry carrying the fight over enormous spaces’, but on the other, it was an industrial war fought over control of the gold mines of the ZAR. British and Boer fighters used modern weapons, railways, telegraphs, and various forms of censorship and propaganda. It was also a total war, as British forces rounded up civilians — Boer and black women and children — into concentration camps.1