This article is based on a talk by Dr Mpho Manaka to the Archaeological Society on 1 June 2023. It was titled: Herstory lost in Memory: The Amnesia on the Commemoration of African Women in the South African War .
Dr Mpho Manaka, who recently completed her PhD at the University of Pretoria, presented an illustrated talk on a neglected aspect of our history, namely the experiences of African women in the concentration camps set up during the South African War of 1899-1902.
It is a difficult aspect of the war to research as, unlike the rich trove of recollections and diaries left behind by Boer women interned in these camps, Black people left no record of their camp experience other than a handful of testimonies collected by researchers at Wits University during the 1970s. The only recorded recollection by an African woman is that of the nonagenarian Emilia Mahlodi Pooe who as a young woman was interred at the Vredefort Road camp for two and a half years. For the remainder, the experiences of black women must be sympathetically inferred from those of their counterparts in the white camps.
Shelters at the Black camps (War Museum of the Boer Republics)
Nevertheless, the letters of Emily...
