Lizzie van Zyl was a 7-year-old Boer girl who was imprisoned in a British concentration camp in South Africa in 1901. 
After her father refused to surrender to the British, Lizzie was classified as an unwanted prisoner and deliberately starved to death. She died of typhoid shortly after this photo was taken.
After her father refused to surrender to the British, Lizzie was classified as an unwanted prisoner and deliberately starved to death. She died of typhoid shortly after this photo was taken.
The British concentration camps were a system of internment camps established by the British during the Second Boer War (1899-1902).
The camps were intended to house Boer civilians who were suspected of supporting the Boer resistance. The camps were overcrowded, unsanitary, and lacked adequate food and medical care.
As a result, an estimated 27,927 Boers (including 22,074 women and children) died in the camps.
Lizzie van Zyl's death is a reminder of the horrors of the Second Boer War and the suffering that was inflicted on innocent civilians. Her story is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, and her death is a reminder of the importance of fighting for human rights.
More details of her death
Lizzie and her mother (Elizabeth Cecilia van Zyl) were deported to the Bloemfontein concentration camp on 28 November 1900. They were labelled as 'undesirables', and placed on the lowest food rations because her father, Hermanus Eg(e)bert Pieter van Zyl (Cape Colony, 21 March 1859 – Bothaville, Orange Free State, 31 January 1921) had refused to surrender. In December 1900 or January 1901, Lizzie was separated from her mother and sent to the infirmary barracks in the concentration camp, because she was starved and had typhoid fever, where she was in constant verbal abuse and bullying.
She died on 9 May 1901, from typhoid fever and starvation, weighing about 15 pounds. She was only 7 years old, by then.
Anti-war activist Emily Hobhouse used her death as an example of the hardships the Boer civilians faced in the concentration camps set up to intern them during the war. She describes Lizzie as "a frail, weak little child in desperate need of good care". Initially, the publishers of Hobhouse's reports refused to publish the photograph.
Lizzie died in 1901 at seven years old.
The photo of the emaciated van Zyl reportedly was sent from British author Arthur Conan Doyle, who served as a volunteer doctor during the Boer War, to Joseph Chamberlain.
Both Doyle and Chamberlain were ostensibly proponents of the Boer Wars, at least publicly; Doyle wrote a short work The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, that set forth his reasoning for supporting the war. The photo was allegedly used as propaganda, not as directly anti-war propaganda, but to support the false notion that Boer children were neglected by their parents.[citation needed]
The image was released with the detail that it was taken when van Zyl and her mother entered the camp. Chamberlain was quoted in The Times on 5 March 1902, saying that Lizzie's mother was prosecuted for mistreatment.
Emily Hobhouse investigated the case and was unable to find any evidence of a case or the prosecution of Lizzie's mother for neglect. She located the photographer, a man named de Klerk, who was also a camp inmate at the time, and de Klerk stated that the photograph was taken two months after Lizzie had arrived at the camp, not when they had just arrived.
Comments
Post a Comment