Diyatalawa Camp

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 educated, others were of very mean intelligence. They were mostly Free Staters who had gone on commando with Olivier, the majority young men, with the beard just showing in ragged points on their chins; round, soft looking faces, bearing on them nothing of the stress of haggardness of war. Many were boys scarcely out of their teens, but all sturdy boys at that. Some of the captives were very old men.

Source: Boere Krygsgevangenes in Ceylon