Kimberley Refugee Camp 1901 – 1902

Kimberley camp was located in the Cape Colony on the Cape-ORC border but formed part of the ORC system. As one of the besieged towns, Kimberley had suffered severely from the war and there was little sympathy in the town for the camp inmates, especially the families of the Cape rebels who were housed there. Kimberley was a flat, hot town, always short of water and notoriously unhealthy. The camp itself, located on de Beers property in Newton, on the outskirts of the town, was inches deep in loose, sandy soil.

Some kind of camp probably came into being in the early stages of the war for relief had to be found for destitute Boers from Griqualand West as early as December 1899. The formal camp, however, was set up by the town commandant on 4 January 1901 and run by Major Wright and the men of the Kimberley Regiment. Emily Hobhouse was contemptuous of Wright, a colonial volunteer rather than a regular soldier, whom she described as a ‘coarse, lazy, indifferent old man’ who did no work and left his son to run the camp. The result was a dirty, smelly camp where whooping cough and measles were rife and there was almost no medical attention. ‘Undesirable’ Cape rebel families, who were ‘not refugees in the true acceptance of the term’, were mixed with people from the Free State, the Transvaal and Bechuanaland.

http://www2.lib.uct.ac.za/mss/bccd/Histories/Kimberley/