South African Ghost Stories: Jan Smuts' House
It is difficult to write a short story about a ghost that involves the life of Jan Smuts, the 2nd Anglo/Boer War, concentration camps, hidden treasure, the Great War, WWII, a Greek princess, Prime Ministers, pickles, tough Boer chicks and a spot that I just love to visit. I will continue to remind myself throughout, however, that I'm telling a ghost story.
I knew the British invented concentration camps during the Boer War, but had idea it was this bad.
Hi there,
Thanks for the reblog.
Conditions in the camps were truly awful. It was always quite removed from me, growing up as I did in predominantly English-speaking suburbs of Johannesburg. My husband grew up in Pretoria though and many of his Afrikaans-speaking friends were warned agains playing with “die engelse” (the English) by their grannies who remembered well stories from the camps.
We grew up in the 1970s and while 170 years seems like a long time, it isn’t really in the bigger scheme of things.