DIAMONDS,GOLD.AND BRITISHIMPERIALISM
steads. He exiled captured commandos
to Saint Helena, Bermuda, and
Ceylon and removed the civilian population to camps, where they suffered
.great hardships under inefficient administrators.
Nearly 28,000
Afrikaner
civilians, most of them children, died of dysentery, measles, and other
diseases in the camps. The British also built eight thousand blockhouses at
one-and-a-half-mile
intervals along the railway lines and elsewhere, linked
them with 3,700
miles of barbed-wire fences, and made a series of sweeps
within the perimeters of the fenced areas.
These methods gradually undermined
the fighting capacity of the re-
publics. By 19°2,
eroded by deaths, captures, and desertions, their field
strength had declined to about
22,000
men, most of whom were under-
nourished, ill-clad, exhausted, and dispirited. President Kruger had gone
to Europe, where he would die in 1904
without ever having revisited his
native land.. The gold mines were in production
again. Africans were oc-
cupying abandoned farms and collaborating with the British forces. Many
Afrikaners had surrendered voluntarily and resumed farming operations,
and
1,800
Afrikaners, most of them members of the landless class, had
gone over to the British side.