photo #7870883

The most famous inmate of Bloemfontein camp was a little girl, Lizzie van Zyl, who died in May 1901. Her photograph, of a skeletal child clutching her doll, has become the symbol of the inhumanity of the camp system and appears in almost every book about the camps, but her death also became a political football. Probably the full story will never be known but it is worth looking more carefully at her. The Bloemfontein camp registers were not well kept but the most likely candidate was Elizabeth Cecilia, from Twistniet farm, Ventersburg.Lizzie van Zyl.Note that her hair had been cut, a common practice when children had high fevers.14 .She was seven years old when she died, of typhoid fever, on 9 May 1901. Lizzie was one of seven children, from a bywoner family, whose father was on commando. Her 31-year-old mother had much to cope with and Lizzie was not the only member of the family to die. Her brother, Hermanus Egbert, died of the terrible cancrum oris, in March 1902, and a sister, Hester Wilhelmina, may have died as well, in February 1902. For Emily Hobhouse, Lizzie was the archetypal suffering child, the consequence of an inhumane system; the British authorities suggested that she died because of her mother’s neglect.The British academic, Liz Stanley, has examined part of Lizzie’s story and points out that Lizzie’s death was not seen as unusual at the time. It came to public notice because Emily Hobhouse published her picture as an example of the horrors of the camp system. Dr Pern indignantly defended himself in the British press, asserting that the mother had neglected the child and Hobhouse replied with equal force, arguing that the child’s death was the product of unsuitable food and great heat. From that point, Lizzie’s story has been used and abused repeatedly.But there are other aspects of the case. Lizzie died early, in a camp where sick children could easily be missed by the authorities for a long time. She was probably very ill by the time that she entered the hospital. Lizzie was seven, no longer an infant and past the age when a parent’s ‘neglect’, of which Mrs van Zyl was accused, was critical. The problem was that, although typhoid as a disease was partially understood (as a bacteria, Salmonella typhi., typhoid had been identified in 1896), treatment was rudimentary. Doctors understood that the disease damaged the intestine and usually put patients on a diet of milk and eggs, which the Boers regarded as little more than deliberate starvation. If Lizzie had also contracted measles, her intestine may have been damaged further and it was very difficult for such patients to ingest any food. Children like Lizzie faded and died in the early twentieth century, despite the best medical attention. Her brother, Hermanus, died even more horribly. Cancrum oris (Noma) was a kind of gangrene of the jaw, which sometimes occurred in children who were severely debilitated. It was usually fatal and there was no treatment for it in the camps.15