ABSTRACT
Almost a century ago, Rudyard Kipling, that most ironic bard of the British Empire, despaired of the Boer War as a bad business, plainly and bleakly, ‘No End of a Lesson’. 1 Britain had prevailed in its imperialist war to crush the white colonial nationalism of independent Boer republican communities, but it had been a costly job. London's colonial war effort was characterized by humiliating military reverses, an increasing financial burden and a rising moral fuss within domestic Liberal and other anti-war opinion over the rigour of its internment policy and other anti-guerrilla tactics which inflicted great suffering upon Boer civilians, especially women and children. The Transvaal and Orange Free State Boer Republics, products of nineteenth-century migrant settler state-formation in southern Africa, lost a bitter struggle to maintain their national independence from the influence and authority of the Crown. For their radical anti-British-imperialist leadership, the war was a disaster, for it broke what one scholar has nicely termed the Irish or ‘Sinn Féin variety of Afrikaner nationalism, 2 as the die-hards or bitterdniers could not long sustain a will or the means for a fight to the end. The war also signified more than nationalist defeat. Horrendously high mortality rates in British concentration camps, and the loss of perhaps as much as 20 per cent of the tiny Boer republican populations, meant that it represented a form of historical trauma for Afrikaner society, the depth of which imperial and other English-speaking historians have perhaps rarely fully recognized.
