“Weep not my boys, for those who fell,
They did not flinch nor fear.
They stood their ground like Englishmen,
and died at Abu Klea”.

Let’s change “senseless” to “Inexplicable and without effect.”

WW I at least had a large effect on the nature of nations. The ABW may have had an effect on the nature of colonialism, but mostly a redundant one.

But what I was really thinking was that to which I refer in my comment above. If you look at European history and imagine it without WWI, do you still get, say WW II? No. (Probably). If you look at southern African History without the ABW, do you still get Namibia and the war there, Rhodesia’s war, Apartheid, and so on? Yes. (Probably).

Even more senseless than WWI?

That is saying a lot.

I won’t totally disagree with what you said, but but I need to point a couple of things out about your statement to contextualize it more or it could be easily misunderstood.

First, make no mistake that the standing policies and attitudes of Boers in Transvaal and to a (somewhat) lesser extent Orange Free State (those are the two countries fighting with the Brits at the start of the war) and the Cape Colony (a British Colony with lots of Boers in it where some of the fighting happened as well) were not even close to devoid of racist and generally atrocious presumptions. It would be very incorrect to read this as a situation in which the seeds of Apartheid lay dormant and minor and were it not for the British atrocities during the Anglo Boer War they would have never sprouted and flourished. Pretty much all of the policies that were later formalized in the named apartheid government of later times were all in place, and no, they were not just typical “white colonialist” manifestations. They were a special and rather insidious, not entirely unprecedented but for the late 19th century very much outdated and relatively nefarious version of racism.

At the same time, it is not true (in case anyone might have thought this from what I just said) that the British invaded Transvaal and OFS for the purpose of overthrowing a racist government. Well, they did actually do that quite explicitly, but the “race problem” that they percieved was the Boer race kicking around the non-Boer white races (mainly bits, but lots of Americans and others too). (This was explicitly, at the time, supposedly a “white man’s war”).

I don’t see any evidence that the racist oppressive Afrikaner government that grew up during the middle of the 20th century happened because of the AB war. (I’m not necessarily saying that you were suggesting that either.) The details may have been different, but when I read what the Boers were saying and doing from the earlies days up throgh, say, 1980, is see a more or less straight line with the AB war not turning that line one way or another. (And I oversimplify only a little!)

Actually, little was learnt in terms of tactics from the ABW, allowing generals (from the aristocracy, of course), to send waves of infantry against well entrenched machine gun positions in WW1 which led to a level of slaughter that is beyond our comprehension today.

BTW, I’m a Brit.who has known the very best of who the Afrikaaners are.

The good news (for the Brits): It is very easy for it to sound all bad … the word concentration camp all by itself can do that, although we must remember these were not explicitly extermination camps … but it is also true that the Boer fighters were at least as responsible for continuing the war as any other factor, and the way they were starting to do this was to disappear back to the farms and just be farmers while someone was looking then to reappear as belligerents. Looking at it from the British perspective at the time, the blockhouse lines, scorched earth policy, and concentration camps can not really be seen as a purely evil strategy.

The bad news: The numbers you give are typical and correct for the WHITE concentration camps. There were also Black concentration camps, which had far more people in them, were much more enigmatic as to why the even existed, in which far more people probably died, for which there were no advocates at the time, and which are to this day less known about or of than the Boer concentration camps.

The saddest thing about it all is this: If you look at why the war started, why it was fought, and how things existed say 20 years after the war ended … well, the Anglo Boer War may have been the single most senseless war fought in the history of modern Western warfare.

Yes, that’s how the Powers In Charge put the instinct to use. I was referring, though, to what I observe which may well be hard-wired into the species.

One officer, Ernest Swinton, wrote the Defence of Duffer’s Drift

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defence_of_Duffer%27s_Drift

a treatise meant to change the way young officer’s approached tactical problems.