Faded Flowers

The Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa was, by the standards of the Great War that followed a decade later, relatively light in military casualties at around 28,000. However 46,000 civilians perished including over 20,000 women and children. Many of these died in what started as refugee camps but later became something akin to concentration camps. Certainly the British had not intended this to happen but the brutality of war led inexorably to thousands of deaths due to illness and malnutrition.

When reports of the state of the camps reached London, the radical Liberal opposition, including David Lloyd George, were persuaded into harrying the Conservative government into ending the war by the campaigner Emily Hobhouse. Hobhouse visited South Africa in 1901 and met a young Boer girl, Lizzie van Zyl. Read the sad story here - it played a part in the eventual acceptance of the fact of the conditions in the camps that were initially denied by the government.

It was Hobhouse who described children lying in the camps as "faded flowers thrown away".


Faded Flowers

A nation is corralled and trapped
on scorched earth and salted fields
under the never-setting sun
bitter as its barren tears

Under canvas, torn and bruised
wasted down to skin and bone
Half-starved fledglings, open mawed
fall from nests to die alone

Black or white are all the same
they stare into the stoic face
the barrel of the self-same gun
caring not for creed nor race

Bodies lie on sterile land
water dries in poisoned wells
towards the shining Southern Cross
ten thousand souls fly and swell

The brutal fist of history
sends echoes down to us today
yet we ignore the images
of faded flowers thrown away

(c) Tim Fellows 2018