Welcome to the first blog to appear on the South African War Memorials website, with prototype versions tested from 1 January 2020. The public launch day, planned for March, was thenpostponed because of the coronavirus until July 2020.

Public acts of commemoration in the shape of monuments and memorials remain an important if often taken for granted part of cityscapes and townscapes. Private acts of remembrance have a public aspect too, in funerals, cemeteries, memorial headstones to graves and similar devices. The SAWM website is concerned with both private memory and public remembrance concerning those who died in the concentration camps of the South African War 1899-1902 and the political and social contexts in which such commemoration was subsequently enacted. There remains considerable emotive force surrounding these matters, not least because Nazi propaganda abrogated the term concentration camp for its death camps as a deliberate anti-British propaganda strategy. It is nonetheless important to remember that many people, most of them children, died in the epidemics that swept the South African War camps and this should not have happened. The ‘sweeps’ which produced the concentrations of population in the concentration camps were part of military policy targeting civilians though aimed at the fighting commandos. And as in other wars, now as well as then, it was children who suffered the most.