Costly Mythologies: The Concentration Camps of the South African War in Afrikaner Historiography*.

By the 1930s, a mythology of the concentration camps of the South African War had been firmly lodged in the historical consciousness of Afrikaners, establishing a paradigm of suffering that has altered remarkably little since. A major reason for the lack of a serious historiography was the failure of Afrikaners to write any critical account of the war before the 1950s. Instead, history was replaced by a 'haze' of poetry, memorials and ceremonies, testimonies and photographs, which offered an apparently authentic account, while inhibiting any critical examination, of the camp experience. From the 1930s, the established mythology was reinforced both by increasingly rabid descriptions of the camps and by an Afrikaner historiography framed in a discourse of scientific objectivity. In the post-apartheid era, while the black camp experience has been introduced, to some extent it has been redeployed to reinforce this paradigm of suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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