Koos de La Rey - Peace

Peace

To counter the guerilla campaign the British - under first Roberts and then Kitchener - adopted a scorched-earth counter-insurgency policy. This involved sweeping the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the Boer guerrillas, including women and children, and included the destruction of crops, burning down homesteads and farms, poisoning wells, and salting fields, and saw non-combatants (Boer families and sympathisers) interned in concentration camps where mortality among the women and children reached an extreme whereby 50% of the population of Boer children under 16 died. Such attritional tactics slowly eroded the will of the Boer fighters still in the field, and ultimately they realised that the costs exceeded the cause; there would soon be little left for them to fight for. The British interned tens of thousands of blacks in appalling conditions in the concentration camps as well, while on the other hand the Boers suspected other Blacks of sympathising with the British and of betraying the whereabouts of guerillas, leading to harsh reprisals.

The British offered terms of peace on various occasions, notably in March 1901, but Botha rejected the idea. Lord Kitchener requested that De la Rey meet with him at Klerksdorp on 11 March 1902 for a parley. The two enemies formed a bond of friendship which gave De la Rey confidence in the sincerity of the British proposals. Diplomatic efforts to find a way out of the conflict continued and eventually led to an agreement to hold peace talks at Vereeniging, in which De la Rey took part and urged peace. The belligerents signed the Treaty of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902. De la Rey and General Botha visited England and the United States later in the same year. The Boers, promised eventual self-government (granted in 1906 and 1907 for the Transvaal and Orange Free State respectively), received £3,000,000 compensation, while acknowledging the sovereignty of Edward VII.

After the war De la Rey travelled to Europe with Louis Botha and Christiaan de Wet to raise funds for the impoverished Boers whose families and farms had been devastated. In 1903 he was in India and Ceylon, persuading the prisoners of war interned there to take the oath of allegiance and return to South Africa. Finally he returned to his own farm with his wife and remaining children. Jacoba had spent most of the war trekking in the veld with her children and a few faithful servants; she subsequently wrote a book about her wanderings, Myne Omzwervingen en Beproevingen Gedurende den Oorlog (1903), which was translated into English as "A Woman’s Wanderings and Trials During the Anglo-Boer War" translated by Lucy Hotz, and published in London (1903).