Note Back to Main Text — Chapter XI

Another effort of the civil administration which was carried on successfully during the war was the teaching of the Boer children in the refugee camps. The narrative of the circumstances in which the camp schools were first organised, of the manner in which teachers came forward from all parts of the empire to offer their services, and of the complete success which attended their efforts, was told three years later by Mr. E. B. Sargant, the Education Adviser to the Administration. The report in which the story appears not only affords a record unique in the annals of educational effort, but adds a pleasing and significant page to what is otherwise a gloomy chapter of the war.[305] Mr. Sargant was invited by Lord Milner to organise the work of educational reconstruction in the new colonies in the autumn of 1900. He was then travelling in Canada, in the course of a journey through the empire undertaken for the purpose of investigating the methods and conditions of education in the several British colonies; and he reached Capetown on November 6th, 1900. At that time the headquarters of the new Transvaal Administration had not been established in Pretoria; but in the Orange River Colony certain schools along the railway line and elsewhere had been opened under the military Government. From observations made in December in the two new colonies, Mr. Sargant had begun to fear that the work of educational reorganisation would have to be indefinitely postponed, when a visit to the Boer prisoners' camp at Seapoint, Capetown, gave him the idea from which the whole system of the camp schools was subsequently evolved. Here he found that a school for boys and young men had been provided by the prisoners themselves, but that it was destitute of books and of almost all the necessary appliances. Mr. Sargant's appeal on behalf of this school met with a ready response from the Cape Government. What could be done here, he thought, could be done elsewhere. The nearest refugee camp to Capetown was at Norval's Pont, on the borders of the Orange River Colony; and it was here that Mr. Sargant determined to make his first experiment.