Interview with Elizabeth van Heyningen: On Writing The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History Cape Town, 20 May 2013

This interview with the author of The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History, a work of impressive originality and admirable comprehensiveness, focuses on problems relating to the processes of writing social history and of writing on a subject that continues to retain considerable emotional power in South Africa, in which the events in the book took place. Van Heyningen highlights the role played by the imagination when writing about people who inhabit a different culture, of the necessity for the historian to extend her imagination in order to understand them as best as possible, even as she stays true to her sources. The author also tells of the necessity to place the history of the camps within the context of currents that were global, such as colonialism, the growth of professional militarism, and developments in public health policy that followed on industrialisation in Britain. But such contextualisation, especially as it has led the author to investigate records of conditions of health and hygiene in the camps, has also led to criticism from some Afrikaner historians and readers. It appears to tamper with cherished beliefs about who the inhabitants of the camps were and, importantly, with beliefs surrounding their significance in the formation of Afrikaner volk mythology and their uniqueness in the record of human suffering.