South African War Memorials & After
Welcome to the ‘South African War Memorials & After’ website.
The South African War was fought from 1899 to 1902 between the Boer Republics of the Transvaal and Free State, and Britain in association with its colonies in the Cape and Natal. The SAWM website features photograph galleries of all the memorial sites of the concentration camps to which many of the civilian population of Boer farming people were relocated as part of the British military ‘scorched earth’ strategy. There are also photograph galleries of a range of later South African memorials, including the ANC counter-memorialisation project. In addition, because an imperial war, there are memorials to the military dead in Britain (and in the countries of its colonial allies), and many photograph galleries of these are also featured. Memorialisation of the black dead has occurred largely post-1994, and galleries of significant sites are provided. These are mainly not linked with the South African War – commemoration and its absence are never politically innocent.
The UK’s British Academy and ESRC, and the Mellon Fund, funded the research that collected these photograph galleries, as part of a wider project investigating the rise of nationalism and women’s role in this. Liz Stanley, University of Edinburgh, was the principal investigator, with a number of other researchers involved in different components of these projects. The research on black memorials is a new, separate project concerned with these commemorations in their own right.
For further information, see the ‘Read’ guides and publications.