Boere Krygsgevangenes in Ceylon - Boekmakierie.co.za

Journal of the Dutch Burger Union of Ceylon
VOL XXXVI October 1946 No 2
THE BOER PRISONER-OF-WAR IN CEYLON
(1900 – 1902)
BY R. L. BROHIER F.R.G.S.
[Copyright Strictly Reserved]
(Continued from our last issue).
II
Boer Town … Some Facts and Fallacies.
The portion of the Diyatalawa Camp which was ringed by the deep trench and barbed
wire entanglements, very soon came to be called Boer Town. It was divided into two
laagers or settlements. The one nearer to the railway station was dubbed by the prisoners
themselves Kruger’s Dorp, and was occupied mainly by Transvaalers. The Burghers
from the Orange River Colony occupied the other part, which they christened Steyn’s
Ville.
Several articles describing visits to Boer Town, many of them by eminent newspaper
correspondents, found a place in the Press accounts of the period. Avoiding minor details
which at this date have lost their sharpness of outline and interest, suppose we glean those
particulars which materially help to construct impressions of the life of the South African
prisoners-of-War in these settlements, and to recall the poignant observations made at the
time regarding the treatment accorded to them. Describing the surroundings, one visitor
wrote: “Having passed through the well-guarded gate of the wire entangled enclosure, we
found ourselves in a scattered settlement of huts and tin-roofed sheds, not at all unlike
one of those newly established townships one comes across in Rhodesia, or some other
young colony. And indeed, it is a township, for this Boer community as I soon
discovered, controlled by their own officers, manage everything for themselves, and have
among them their own tradesmen and artificers of every sort, their shops and their
schools and their churches, all within the limit of the wire enclosure.”
Another correspondent pictures the small shops of the Boer tradesmen, flanking the
approach road to the settlements, within the enclosure, as being precisely like the
“winkel” or village store in the Transvaal. “Here”, he says “the Boer barber and the
universal provider had settled to do business, the one was to be seen trimming the black
beard of a fellow Burgher, while the other was sitting on his tins and his boxes, with an
air of placid content that the winkel-keeper on the veldt might rightly have envied.”
“A motley crowd indeed,” was the expression in general use to sum up the inhabitants
collected in Kruger’s Dorp and Steyn’s Ville. Some, we are told, were refined and highly