Lizzie van Zyl

Lizzie van Zyl (1901)

Lizzie van Zyl (* 1894 in Orange Free State ; † May 9, 1901 in Bloemfontein ) was a young Boer girl in South Africa who died of typhoid at the age of seven in a British concentration camp during the Second Boer War . The British interned her there because her father refused to cease fighting on the part of the local Boers.

Emily Hobhouse made the case public after visiting the camp in her home England in 1901. She reported how the little girl was treated very roughly in a British camp hospital. The doctor and nurse staff called Lizzie an "idiot" in particular because she did not speak English - while they themselves were unable to understand Afrikaans . One day Lizzie screamed for her mother; when a woman came to comfort her, one of the English nurses stopped her on the grounds that the girl was a "nuisance". She died in 1901 at the age of seven.

Lizzie van Zyl subsequently became a symbol of the atrocities of the British concentration camps, in which over 26,000 civilians, mostly women and children, perished in that war alone.

photo

The photo of the emaciated van Zyl was reportedly given to Joseph Chamberlain by Scottish author Arthur Conan Doyle , who served as a volunteer doctor during the Second Boer War . Both Doyle and Chamberlain were proponents of the Boer War; Doyle wrote the short text The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct ( Eng. "The war in South Africa: Reason and implementation") to justify the war.

The picture was used as propaganda , as writer Hélène Opperman Lewis notes, to convince the British public that Boer children were being neglected by their parents. The photo was published with the note that it would have been shot when van Zyl and her mother were admitted to the concentration camp. Chamberlain was quoted in the Times on March 5, 1902 as saying that Lizzie's mother was being prosecuted for abuse.

Hobhouse was investigating the case and was unable to find any evidence of a legal case against Lizzie's mother. She tracked down the photographer, a man named de Klerk, who confirmed that the picture was taken two months after Lizzie arrived at the camp.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ »A tool for modernization? The Boer concentration camps of the South African War, 1900-1902 ", BCCD
2. ^ The Concentration Camps . Boer.co.za. May 21, 1995. Retrieved June 3, 2013.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Hélène Opperman Lewis: Lizzy van Zyl . Archived from the original on February 27, 2015. Retrieved February 25, 2015.