Agamben, Todorov and the British concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War, 1900-1902: Reflections on memory and the state of exception

Abstract

Historians debate whether the first concentration camps were the campos de concentrations established by the Spanish regime in Cuba in 1896, to suppress the people’s insurrection of the colony, or the concentration camps into which the English imperial government herded the Boer civilians at the start of the 20th century. In both these instances, the declaration of a state of emergency during a colonial war was enforced on an entire civilian population. The concentration camps were thus established not in terms of ordinary law, but were the products of a state of exception and Martial Law. The juridical basis for the internment of civilians was protective custody and regarded to be a preventative police measure insofar as it allowed individuals to be “taken into custody” (Schutzhaft) independently of any criminal behavior, solely to avoid danger to the security of the state. In his work Homo Sacer, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers the moral implications of the notion of Schutzhaft, the biopolitical context thereof, and concludes that the concentration camps represent “the biopolitical … threshold of absolute indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological life.” Tzvetan Todorov’s work Hope and Memory investigates the moral implications of the concentration camps and the memory of individuals who remained human in the midst of tempests and monumental battles like war. To Todorov these examples of “remaining human” under severe conditions – similar to those of Schutzhaft – should keep the past alive in the present through memory, historical inquiry and commemoration. In this paper, the author investigates the narratives of survivors of the British concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902 within the Agamben-Todorov paradigms. It is argued that these testimonies of camp inmates give meaning to life and the construction of an identity and of moral-sensitivity amidst dire circumstances of life in the concentration camps.

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