GREYLINGSTAD AFRICAN FORCED LABOUR CAMP 1901–1902: LOCATING THE SITE AND RECOVERING THE EVIDENCE

The South African War of 1899–1902 saw the targeting of civilians by all sides throughout the conflict. It is also remembered as a ‘Total War’, when civilians and their resources were used to support British military objectives, in response to a guerilla war initiated by the Boer forces. It took the form of a counter-insurgency campaign achieved through scorched earth tactics and mass civilian internment at sites later known as concentration camps. Civilian internment was not genocidal by design and purpose yet camps for Boer and African civilians differed vastly in their modalities. African concentration camps and forced labour camps were far more lethal to their internees. Designed along a work or starve policy, and combined with the denial of food, medical support and shelter, in these camps, many unaccounted-for thousands of forced labourers perished from systemic neglect. Yet their memory and this experience has only recently entered the historical discourse. To date, only a few scholars have utilised the archaeological record of these camps to decipher them. The African forced labour camp at Greylingstad is one such forgotten site. It existed from mid-1901, until at least October 1902, and was one of many such camps established by the British military across the Transvaal, Orange Free State and Cape Colony. In the Greylingstad camp, several thousand civilians toiled and died, their graves only recently identified in the veld. This article outlines the recovery process and demonstrates that, when using the twin resources of archaeology and the written archive, it is possible to locate the site of an African forced labour camp, such as the one in Greylingstad, Mpumalanga.