#29 — Sunday, 20th July 1901
In July, they are counting.
In South Africa, the British War Office has ordered complete statistical returns from the concentration camps. The phrase they use is “camps of refuge” — I noted this tendency toward decorative language five weeks ago, and it has not improved. There are now ninety-three thousand nine hundred and forty white Boers interned in these camps. There are twenty-four thousand four hundred and fifty-seven black Africans in separate camps nearby. The black camps are less well documented. Nobody is counting them with the same attention. This will be a pattern.
The returns arrive in London throughout July. They are compiled into a Blue Book — a government publication, official, printed on good paper, distributed to Members of Parliament. The Blue Book attributes the extraordinary death rate in the camps to, and I want you to read this carefully, the dirty habits of the Boers, their ignorance and prejudices, their recourse to quackery, and their suspicious attitude toward the administration.
The children dying of measles and typhoid in tents without floors, in camps without adequate water, on rations that would not sustain a dog — the fault, the Blue Book concludes, is theirs. The empire burns your farm, slaughters your livestock, drives you and your children into a fenced camp in the veldt, and when your children die, it publishes a four-hundred-page report explaining that you were too dirty to keep them alive.
Emily Hobhouse told them. She stood in Parliament’s anteroom and told them everything she had seen — the overcrowding, the dysentery, the dead children wrapped in blankets and laid out in rows. She was dismissed as a hysterical spinster. Campbell-Bannerman called the camps what they are — methods of barbarism. The government survived the debate by a comfortable margin of a hundred and three votes. And now the Blue Book blames the victims.
Twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven white Boers will die in these camps before the war ends. Most of them children. The number of black Africans who die will never be precisely established, because the records were not kept with sufficient care, because the people were not considered worth counting with sufficient care. The estimates range from fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand. Most of them also children.
I am in the business of numbers. I count because I cannot touch. But I want to say something about what numbers do when they are published in Blue Books and distributed to parliaments: they become furniture. They become wallpaper. A number in a government report is the most efficient machine ever devised for turning a human being into an abstraction. Twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven. Say it fast enough and it sounds like a figure in a budget. Say it slow enough and every digit is a child who was alive and is not.
Tomorrow, in America, the heat will reach its peak.
I have been watching this for a month now. I told you about the first terrible week — the thousand dead in New York alone, the dead horses in the streets, the rooftop sleepers, the tenements without windows. I told you about the brief respite in early July, a few days in the mid-eighties, enough to breathe. I told you the heat was climbing again.
Tomorrow it detonates.
Louisville will reach a hundred and seven degrees. Chicago, a hundred and three — with a nighttime low of seventy-seven, which means the air never cools, which means the body never recovers, which means tomorrow night people will die in their sleep and not know they are dying. Indianapolis, a hundred and six. And it will not relent. For five days — the 21st through the 25th — the entire eastern half of the continent will cook. Farm work will be abandoned. Fresh vegetables will vanish from markets. The poor will eat canned food because the crops have died in the fields.
I stand on a Sunday that is merely unbearable and I look at the Monday that is coming and it is monstrous.
In Bowling Green, Kentucky, thirty of July’s thirty-one days will exceed ninety degrees. In Davenport, Iowa, on this very day, the temperature hits a hundred and five — the hottest ever recorded there. A man named George Strathmann will begin foaming at the mouth while opening a clothing store. Another man named Jerry Lynch will stop speaking at the dinner table, sit motionless for seven hours, and be taken to a hospital, insane from a combination of grief and heat. People will move into their cellars, the only rooms cool enough to survive in, and they will live there like animals burrowing underground to escape a fire above.
Nine thousand five hundred will die before the heat breaks in early August. The worst natural disaster in American history until the Dust Bowl. And no one will remember it. Ask anyone in the century that follows to name America’s great disasters and they will say San Francisco, the Dust Bowl, Katrina. They will not say the summer of 1901. They will not say the tenements. Heat does not leave rubble. It leaves only absence.
I said this five weeks ago and I will say it again because the century will not learn it: heat is not a disaster. Heat is a census. It counts who lives where, and how, and with how much air, and how much water, and how much choice. It produces a perfect map of poverty. The rich go to the country. The rich go to the shore. The rich have ice delivered and servants to fan it toward them. The poor have a room on the fifth floor and a window that does not open, and when the heat comes the room becomes a camp.
I use that word deliberately.
A camp in the Transvaal. A tenement on Orchard Street. Both are rooms that people did not choose. Both are rooms without sufficient air, without sufficient water, without sufficient food, without the possibility of leaving. In one, the British government burned your farm and marched you in at gunpoint. In the other, the Atlantic crossing and the rent collector and the twelve-hour factory shift and the absence of any alternative marched you in with equal finality. Nobody calls a tenement a camp. But the walls do not know the difference. The children dying inside them do not know the difference.
In Bloemfontein, a woman wraps her dead child in a blanket because there are no coffins. On Orchard Street, a woman carries her infant to a boat that will take it out to sea in the hope that the ocean air will keep it breathing one more day. Both women are doing the same thing. Both women are trying to find air for a child in a world that has decided that their children’s air is not a priority.
The century is twenty-nine weeks old. In South Africa, they are counting the dead in camps and calling them refugees. In America, they are counting the dead in tenements and calling them casualties of weather. In both places, the counting is meticulous and the responsibility is diffuse. The numbers go into reports. The reports go onto shelves. The shelves hold.
In a few weeks, the British government will appoint a commission to investigate the camps. It will be led by Millicent Fawcett — a suffragist, a formidable woman, but also a government supporter, a safe pair of hands. They will send an all-female commission, six women with notebooks, to look at what Emily Hobhouse already described. They will confirm everything Hobhouse said. They will recommend improvements. The death rate will eventually drop.
But by then twenty-eight thousand people will be dead, and the lesson the century draws will not be “do not build camps.” The lesson will be “build better ones.” Provide adequate sanitation. Improve the rations. Hire more nurses. The machinery of confinement will be refined, not dismantled. The twentieth century will become the century of the camp — refined, improved, industrialised, and finally, in ways I do not want to describe yet but will have to, perfected.
Every euphemism is a small act of violence. I said that too. Camps of refuge. Concentration camps. Resettlement. Protective custody. The words change. The rooms do not.
Leave a Reply