1900-1902 Boer POW Revival

Part I: The Crucible of War – Context and Captivity

A Bitter Conflict: The Second Boer War (1899-1902)

 

The Political Tinderbox
The Second Boer War, which erupted in October 1899, was the culmination of decades of escalating tension between the British Empire and the two independent Boer republics: the South African Republic (ZAR, or Transvaal) and the Orange Free State.¹ The discovery of vast gold deposits on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal in 1886 had irrevocably altered the region’s political and economic landscape.²

It triggered a massive influx of foreign, predominantly British, fortune-seekers, known as Uitlanders.³ The Boer government, led by the staunchly independent President Paul Kruger, viewed this demographic shift as an existential threat to their way of life and political sovereignty.

Consequently, they denied the Uitlanders full citizenship and voting rights, a grievance that Britain, under the guidance of aggressive imperialists like High Commissioner Alfred Milner, seized upon as a pretext for intervention.⁴

A final attempt to resolve these disputes at the Bloemfontein Conference in mid-1899 failed, with Milner convinced that war was both inevitable and necessary to assert British supremacy in Southern Africa.⁴ As Britain began to amass troops on the republics’ borders, the Boers, feeling their independence was on the brink of annihilation, issued an ultimatum for their withdrawal. When it expired on 11 October 1899, the conflict began.¹

Three Phases of War
Initially, the highly mobile and skilled Boer commandos launched pre-emptive strikes into the British Cape and Natal colonies, besieging the towns of Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley and inflicting a series of humiliating defeats on the overconfident British army at battles like Magersfontein and Colenso.¹ This early success, however, was short-lived.

The second phase saw a massive British counter-offensive. Under the new command of Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener, an expeditionary force that would eventually swell to nearly 450,000 men poured into South Africa.¹ Overwhelmed by sheer numbers, the British relieved the besieged towns and captured the Boer capitals of Bloemfontein and Pretoria by June 1900.¹ With the conventional war seemingly won, Britain formally annexed the two republics.¹

The third and final phase, beginning in mid-1900 and lasting for two more brutal years, saw the Boers pivot to a determined guerrilla campaign. Led by brilliant generals like Christiaan de Wet, Louis Botha, and Jan Smuts, small commandos waged a war of attrition, attacking railways, supply depots, and isolated British columns.¹

In response, Lord Kitchener implemented a ruthless “scorched earth” policy, systematically burning Boer farms and destroying crops to deny the guerrillas sustenance and support.¹ This strategy led directly to the internment of tens of thousands of Boer civilians and captured combatants, setting the stage for immense suffering and, paradoxically, for spiritual renewal.¹

The Human Cost
The war’s human cost was staggering. While Boer combatant deaths were around 9,000, the most devastating losses occurred off the battlefield. The British swept up Boer women, children, and elderly men into a network of civilian concentration camps, where poor sanitation, inadequate shelter, and meager rations led to rampant disease.

Over 26,000 women and children perished in these camps, a national trauma that seared itself into the Afrikaner consciousness.¹ For the men held as prisoners of war thousands of miles overseas, the sporadic and censored news of this catastrophe at home compounded their own sense of defeat, isolation, and powerlessness.¹¹

This confluence of military defeat, national destruction, and personal loss precipitated a profound theological crisis. The Boers, deeply rooted in a Calvinist tradition, had long viewed their history through the lens of a divine covenant. They saw themselves as a volk, a people akin to ancient Israel, with a sacred destiny to establish a Christian civilization in Africa.¹³

The Great Trek was their Exodus; their victories over indigenous tribes were signs of God’s favour. This “civil religion” provided a powerful framework of meaning and purpose. The crushing defeat at the hands of the British Empire shattered this narrative. The loss of their independence, the destruction of their farms, and the deaths of their families created a spiritual vacuum.

For the captive Boer soldier, sitting behind barbed wire in a foreign land, the central, agonizing question was not merely political but theological: “Where is God in this?” It was in the desperate search for an answer to this question—for a new way to make sense of their suffering—that the seeds of a widespread religious revival were sown.

The Global Gulag: Britain’s Internment Policy

As the guerrilla war intensified, the number of captured Boer combatants swelled, overwhelming the temporary camps in South Africa. The British command, fearing escapes and the potential for local uprisings, particularly in the Cape Colony, made a strategic decision to deport the majority of prisoners overseas.⁹ This policy served a dual purpose: it physically removed thousands of fighters from the theatre of war and was intended as a psychological blow to demoralize the bittereinders—the “bitter-enders” who continued to resist.¹⁵

Between 1900 and 1902, approximately 24,000 of the 28,000 Boer POWs, including boys as young as ten and elderly men, were shipped to a network of camps scattered across the British Empire.¹⁵ This act created a global archipelago of confinement, isolating communities of defeated men in environments that would prove unexpectedly fertile for spiritual awakening.

The Camps: A Comparative Overview
The primary destinations for the Boer POWs were fourfold, each presenting unique challenges and conditions.

• Helena: This remote South Atlantic island, famous as Napoleon’s final place of exile, became home to nearly 6,000 Boers.¹⁷ They were housed in two main camps, Deadwood and Broadbottom, in tents so crowded that many prisoners began constructing their own small huts from biscuit tins and scavenged wood.¹⁵ A third, separate “Peace Camp” was established for the hensoppers (“hands-uppers”) who had sworn an oath of neutrality, a measure necessary to quell the intense political bitterness between them and the irreconcilables.¹⁸

• Ceylon (Sri Lanka): Over 5,000 prisoners were sent to this island in the Indian Ocean. The main camp at Diyatalawa, set in the cool central highlands, grew into a virtual “Boer Town” with a highly organized internal life.¹² Another camp at Ragama housed dissidents and those who refused to cooperate with British authorities.²⁰
• Bermuda: Between 4,000 and 5,000 Boers were interned across a string of small islands in the Great Sound, including Darrell’s, Burt’s, and Morgan’s Island.¹¹ The camps here were notably not enclosed by barbed wire, and as long as prisoners adhered to military rules, they enjoyed a degree of freedom to move about their designated island.¹⁵
• India: The largest contingent of prisoners, over 9,000, was sent to India and dispersed across some 17 cantonments from the south to the Himalayan foothills.¹⁵ Conditions in the Indian camps were widely regarded as the most severe, with the prisoners enduring extreme heat, monsoonal floods, and a higher incidence of diseases like smallpox, resulting in over 140 burials.⁹

Location	Approx. No. of Prisoners	Key Camps	Notable Conditions	Key Revival Figures/Events
St. Helena	~6,000	Deadwood, Broadbottom, Peace Camp	Crowded tents, self-built huts, strong camp organization.	Ministry of Rev. A.F. Louw; widespread conversions and a focus on mission work.
Ceylon (Sri Lanka)	~5,100	Diyatalawa (“Boer Town”), Ragama	Organized camp life, skilled artisans, convalescent camp.	Preaching of Gen. P.H. Roux; revival sparked by public reconciliation of two enemies.
Bermuda	~4,600	Darrell’s, Burt’s, Morgan’s, etc.	No barbed wire, relative freedom of movement on islands.	Organized church services led by figures like Dirk Postma; active Boer Relief Committee.
India	~9,100	Ahmednagar, Bellary, Trichinopoly	Harshest climate (heat, floods), highest mortality from disease.	Largest number of prisoners; many future missionaries volunteered from these camps.

Life Behind the Wire
Despite the geographic diversity, a common culture of captivity emerged. The daily routine was one of monotonous military discipline: roll calls, ration distribution, and assigned duties.²⁴ The emotional strain was immense, stemming from confinement, uncertainty about their future, and the agonizingly irregular and censored mail from home that brought news of the suffering in the civilian camps.¹¹

To combat the “soul-killing” boredom and despair, the prisoners organized their communities with remarkable resilience.²¹ They elected their own corporals and captains to maintain discipline and liaise with the British authorities.¹⁵ The camps evolved into miniature villages, complete with makeshift shops, schools for the hundreds of boy prisoners, and, most importantly, churches.¹⁵

The men filled their time with sports, debating societies, choirs, and intricate handicrafts carved from wood, bone, and stone, which were sold to buy extra food or tobacco.¹⁵ In creating this global network of prison camps, the British Empire inadvertently engineered a unique set of social and psychological conditions. These camps, designed for control, functioned as unintentional monasteries.

They stripped men of their familiar roles as farmers, husbands, and fathers, removing them from the rhythms of their former lives. The enforced separation from the world, the rigid daily routine, and the vast stretches of enforced idleness created a captive audience for introspection.

With few distractions and confronted daily with their own mortality—as one historian wrote, “Many realised: the way through the hospital to the grave can also be the road that I will take” ¹²—the prisoners were forced to turn inward. The barbed wire, intended to confine their bodies, also created a bounded space for an intense and transformative spiritual journey.

Part II: The Awakening – Manifestations of the Revival

Born from the shared trauma of defeat and exile, a powerful spiritual awakening ignited among the Boer prisoners. It was not a movement orchestrated by a central body or spread by traveling evangelists. Instead, it was a spontaneous combustion of faith, flaring up almost simultaneously in camps separated by thousands of miles of ocean, a testament to a collective spiritual hunger seeking sustenance in the bleakest of circumstances.

This revival was not only a defining experience for the prisoners themselves but also holds a significant place in the history of modern Christianity, marking the very beginning of a global wave of awakenings in the early 20th century.

A Spontaneous Outpouring

The most remarkable aspect of the revival was its synchronicity. As revival historian J. Edwin Orr noted, the first phenomenal manifestations of the great “decade of revival” (1900-1910) occurred “simultaneously among Boer prisoners of war in places ten thousand miles apart, as far away as Bermuda and Ceylon”.²⁵

With no means of communication between the camps, this parallel eruption of religious fervor points to a common cause: the profound spiritual and existential crisis faced by the prisoners.¹² The Boer POW revival predated and, through the return of the prisoners, helped to fuel the more widely known Welsh Revival of 1904-05, establishing it as a critical, if often overlooked, catalyst in a worldwide spiritual movement.¹²

Across the camps, the revival shared a consistent set of characteristics. It was marked by an intense focus on prayer, with small prayer groups often growing to encompass thousands of men.¹² The preaching was direct, uncompromising, and evangelical in nature, emphasizing the conviction of sin, the necessity of personal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, public confession, and genuine repentance.²⁶

The result was thousands of “lasting conversions”.²⁶ Men who had entered the camps as nominal or unsaved Christians, for whom religion was more a cultural inheritance than a lived reality, were transformed into passionate, “born-again” believers.¹² The makeshift church tent became the most important place in the camps, the center of a new, spiritually-defined community life.¹²

This spiritual transformation can also be understood as a profound form of resistance. The British internment policy was not merely about confinement; it included a concerted effort at “re-education,” an attempt to pacify the Boers and remold them into loyal subjects of the British Empire.¹⁶ The revival offered a powerful counter-narrative that subverted this imperial project.

By re-framing their suffering, the prisoners reclaimed their agency. Their defeat was no longer a political humiliation at the hands of a superior earthly power, but a spiritual trial orchestrated by an omnipotent God. As one minister preached in Ceylon, God had sent them away to a place where He could deal with their sin.²⁷

In this new narrative, they were not passive victims of Britain but active participants in a divine drama of purification and redemption. This spiritual redefinition of their identity—from defeated subjects to redeemed sons of God—was a declaration of a freedom that their captors could not touch, a powerful assertion of a sovereignty that transcended earthly empires.

Epicenters of Faith: St. Helena and Ceylon

While the revival was a widespread phenomenon, its character and intensity are most clearly documented in the camps on St. Helena and in Ceylon, where charismatic leadership and pivotal events fanned the embers of spiritual seeking into a full-blown blaze.

St. Helena – The Call to Repentance
The spiritual awakening on St. Helena was profoundly shaped by the voluntary ministry of several Dutch Reformed Church (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk or NGK) pastors, most notably the Reverend A.F. Louw.¹² A man with a deep, pre-existing passion for missionary work, Louw was described as a “serious man” who held special prayer and preaching meetings almost every evening.¹²

His preaching was not escapist; it directly confronted the prisoners’ reality, drawing a powerful analogy between their physical and spiritual conditions. In one sermon, he declared, “You are sitting here locked in behind sixteen wires, surrounded by many soldiers as well as sea water all around us. God will not let you go out to freedom before you will take the freedom that there is for you through accepting Jesus as Saviour”.¹²

This message, linking release from captivity to spiritual liberation, resonated deeply with the men.

A watershed moment in the St. Helena revival came in the form of a public confession. During one meeting, a prisoner from the town of Heilbron stood up and recounted a haunting memory from the battlefield. He had sent his black farm worker, Jacob, to fetch water during a firefight.

Jacob was mortally wounded, and as he lay dying, he said to his master, “Master, I am going to die. You know about the blood of Jesus, but you never told me about it”.¹² This simple, powerful testimony struck a chord of collective guilt. It triggered what was described as “deep repentance amongst the prisoners regarding their neglect to share the gospel with Africans” and other groups.¹²

This event was transformative, shifting the focus from personal salvation alone to a collective sense of mission and responsibility, a theme that would have profound consequences after the war.

Ceylon (Diyatalawa) – The Power of Reconciliation
In the sprawling Diyatalawa camp, which held 5,000 men, the revival was sparked not by a sermon, but by a dramatic act of public reconciliation. Two prisoners, who were known throughout the camp for their deep and bitter personal animosity, stunned their comrades by coming together in the middle of the camp, forgiving one another, and immediately starting a small prayer group.¹²

This single act of grace proved astonishingly contagious. It demonstrated a power that could overcome even the most entrenched human bitterness, offering a tangible model for healing in a community fractured by defeat and internal division. From this small beginning, the movement grew exponentially. “Within a few weeks,” one account records, “thousands attended the prayer meeting, and many came to the Lord”.¹²

The spiritual hunger was so intense that it overwhelmed the camp’s pastor (Dominee), General P.H. Roux. A former Boer general and an ordained NGK minister from Senekal, Roux was a figure of immense credibility. He found that his regular weekly sermon was no longer sufficient to meet the demand. At the height of the revival, he was asked to preach twenty times in just three weeks, and every meeting place was packed to capacity.¹²

The revival in Ceylon demonstrated a powerful dynamic: that profound corporate spiritual change could be unlocked by a single, authentic act of personal transformation.

Echoes in Bermuda and India

While the narratives from St. Helena and Ceylon are the most vivid, the spiritual awakening echoed throughout the global network of camps, adapting to local conditions in Bermuda and India.

Bermuda – Organized Religion
For the thousands of prisoners held on the islands of Bermuda, religious life was a central and highly organized feature of their captivity. A large wood-and-canvas building was erected specifically for use as a church, a clear indication of the priority given to worship.²¹

Regular services were conducted by Boer ministers from among the prisoners, such as Dirk Postma, and by visiting clergy like Reverend Albertyn and Reverend van Blerk, who were part of a sympathetic Boer Relief Committee that provided both material and spiritual support.²¹

While the sources do not describe a singular “revival” event on the scale of Ceylon, the memoirs of prisoners like August Carl Schulenburg attest to a deep and abiding personal faith. After a severe bout of dysentery that brought him near death, Schulenburg wrote of his recovery and return to his comrades, “I was thin as a rake but happy and thankful for the grace and help of my Saviour”.²¹

This sentiment reflects a faith that was not merely formal but personal and sustaining, nurtured by the organized religious structures within the camps.

India – Faith in a Harsh Climate
The Boer prisoners sent to India faced the most arduous conditions of all. Scattered across numerous camps, they endured a climate of punishing extremes and suffered the highest mortality rate from diseases like smallpox and enteric fever.¹⁵ In this environment, faith was not a comfort but a necessity, a bulwark against despair in the face of constant death.

The presence of over 140 Boer graves in cemeteries across the Indian subcontinent, many marked with Celtic crosses and scriptural texts carved by the prisoners themselves, stands as a silent testament to the centrality of their Christian faith in confronting their fate.¹⁷ Although detailed narratives of revival meetings are less prominent in the available records for India, the same underlying pressures of suffering, isolation, and spiritual questioning were intensely present.

It is significant that a large number of the approximately 200 prisoners who, inspired by the revival, volunteered for missionary service after the war had been interned in the camps of India and Ceylon, suggesting that the spiritual fire burned just as brightly, if less documented, in the harsh Indian climate.³²

Part III: The Converts and Their Shepherds

The revival was more than a collective phenomenon; it was a deeply personal encounter that transformed individual lives. This transformation was facilitated by the leadership of Boer ministers who shared the prisoners’ captivity and spoke their language, both literally and spiritually. Examining the experiences of the converts and the character of their leaders reveals the inner dynamics of the awakening.

Voices from Captivity: The Experience of Conversion

The revival fundamentally altered the spiritual landscape of the camps, moving men from a state of “much nominalism” to one of fervent, personal faith.²⁷ For many Boers, their pre-war religious identity was largely cultural—a matter of heritage and social conformity within the Dutch Reformed tradition.

The trauma of the war stripped away this veneer of cultural Christianity, forcing a raw and personal confrontation with matters of sin, mortality, and salvation. The diaries, letters, and memoirs from this period, though scarce, provide glimpses into this profound inner shift.³³

In the stark environment of the camps, with worldly distractions removed, the Bible became the primary text for thousands of men.³³ The Psalms of lament, in particular, resonated powerfully, giving voice to their deep feelings of abandonment and sorrow.

As one German POW from a later war would recall of his own camp experience, “I found words to express my feelings of isolation and forsakenness in these psalms of lamentation… I found in Jesus somebody who understood me. And from that time, I’m a Christian”.³⁵

This sentiment captures the experience of the Boer prisoners, who found in scripture not abstract doctrine, but a language for their suffering and a personal encounter with a compassionate Savior.

The singing of hymns, drawn from the evangelical tradition of the late 19th-century Dutch Reformed Church, provided the emotional and theological soundtrack for this awakening, with themes of redemption, grace, and personal devotion reinforcing the message from the pulpits.³⁶

While the diary of Reverend A.D. Lückhoff was written from a civilian concentration camp in Bethulie, South Africa, it offers an invaluable parallel account of the spiritual dynamics at play. Lückhoff, a young, newly trained minister, was thrust into a world of unimaginable suffering, at times conducting seventeen funerals in a single day.³⁹

His diary records his own emotional and spiritual anguish, his struggles with faith, and the evangelical core of his ministry, which focused on preaching “reconciliation with God” and “the way of salvation” to the dying.⁴⁰ He confessed that only in the camp did he truly understand the meaning of his own religion and of love, a testament to the transformative power of ministry in the midst of extreme trauma.⁴⁰

Lückhoff’s experience demonstrates that the revival was part of a broader spiritual intensification among all Afrikaners touched by the war’s devastation.

A key feature of the revival was the practice of public confession, which served not only as an act of personal piety but also as a powerful tool for social repair. The Boer community was deeply fractured by the war. Animosity ran high between the bittereinders who fought to the end and the hensoppers who had surrendered, a division so toxic that separate camps were sometimes required.⁴

The revival’s emphasis on confessing one’s sins before God created a new, level foundation upon which community could be rebuilt. In the act of confession, wartime status and choices became secondary to the shared identity of being a sinner in need of grace. The dramatic reconciliation of the two enemies in Ceylon was the archetypal example of this dynamic.¹²

Their public act of forgiveness provided a powerful model for healing, replacing a community identity based on political grievance with one based on shared spiritual redemption. Public confession thus became a crucial social technology for mending the torn fabric of the volk.

The Revival’s Leadership

The revival was an indigenous movement, led not by foreign missionaries but by the Boers’ own spiritual and military leaders. These men possessed an innate credibility and a deep understanding of the prisoners’ psyche, which enabled them to guide the spiritual awakening with authenticity and power.

Rev. A.F. Louw (1866-1960)
Reverend Andries Adriaan Louw was a pivotal figure, particularly on St. Helena. A product of the evangelical wing of the NGK and heavily influenced by the revivalist tradition of figures like Andrew Murray, Louw’s life was already dedicated to missions before the war.²⁹ He was not an official military chaplain but a volunteer who chose to share the captivity of his countrymen, a decision that lent immense moral authority to his ministry.¹²

His preaching was direct and challenging, insisting on genuine repentance as the prerequisite for both spiritual and eventual physical freedom.¹² His tireless work, holding meetings nearly every evening, transformed the spiritual climate of the camp and ignited a passion for missions that would outlast the war itself.

General P.H. Roux (1862-1911)
In Ceylon, the revival’s key leader was a figure who embodied the fusion of Boer military and spiritual identity: General Paul Hendrik Roux. An ordained NGK minister who had taken up arms to defend the Orange Free State, he was captured and sent to the Diyatalawa camp.¹² As both a respected general and aDominee, he commanded a unique authority.

When the revival of reconciliation broke out, the prisoners turned to him for spiritual guidance. The massive demand for his preaching—up to twenty times in three weeks—shows that the awakening was a grassroots movement that sought leadership from within its own ranks.¹² Roux’s role underscores that the revival was not an external phenomenon imposed upon the prisoners, but an organic outpouring of their own collective spiritual yearning.

The ministry of these men, and others like them, was intensely pastoral and practical. It was a ministry forged in the face of constant death. As Lückhoff’s diary reveals, a chaplain’s day was a relentless cycle of visiting the sick and dying in hospital tents, offering prayers and scripture readings, and conducting an endless succession of funerals.⁴⁰

The sermons preached were not abstract theological treatises but urgent, evangelical appeals tailored to men confronting their own mortality. They focused on foundational themes: the reality of sin, the promise of salvation through Christ’s sacrifice, and the hope of eternal life as the only true freedom in a world of barbed wire and despair.¹²

Part IV: The Lasting Legacy

The revival among the Boer prisoners of war was more than a fleeting emotional episode confined to the camps. Upon their return to a devastated South Africa after 1902, the thousands of spiritually renewed men became a powerful force for change.

The revival’s legacy was profound and multifaceted, reshaping the missionary vision of the Dutch Reformed Church, energizing the post-war reconstruction of Afrikaner identity, and contributing, in a complex and often troubling way, to the political trajectory of the Afrikaner people in the 20th century.

From Prisoner to Missionary: The Great Commission Renewed

Perhaps the most direct and tangible legacy of the revival was an unprecedented explosion in missionary zeal. Prior to the war, many Boers, particularly in the independent-minded northern republics, harboured a “strong resistance… towards any form of mission work”.¹²

This attitude stemmed from a complex mix of racial prejudice, a negative perception of missionaries who had criticized their social order, and a theology that often emphasized a rigid separation between themselves and the surrounding “heathen” nations.³²

The revival shattered this resistance. The confessional moment on St. Helena, sparked by the story of the dying farm worker Jacob, was a watershed, instilling a collective sense of guilt and responsibility for evangelism.¹²

This newfound passion translated into action. In the camps of Ceylon, India, and St. Helena, between 175 and 200 former soldiers made commitments to enter full-time missionary service—a staggering number from a community that had previously been largely indifferent to the cause.¹²

Upon their return to South Africa, this created a practical challenge. Many of these zealous volunteers were hardened veterans of the veld, not scholars, and they lacked the formal academic qualifications required to enter the main NGK theological seminary at Stellenbosch.³² In response to this unique situation, the church, with the energetic Rev. A.F. Louw at the forefront, took a remarkable step.

In 1903, it established the Boere Zendinginstituut (Boer Mission Institute) in the town of Worcester.³⁰ With Louw serving as its first principal, this new institution was specifically designed to train the ex-POW volunteers for the mission field.

The Institute became a vital engine for the NGK’s missionary outreach, sending hundreds of evangelists and pastors across Southern Africa and beyond in the subsequent decades, a direct and enduring legacy of the awakening behind the wire.

The Revival and the Volkskerk

The returning prisoners did not just populate mission stations; they re-energized their local congregations. Infused with the evangelical fire of the revival, they brought a new spiritual vitality to the Dutch Reformed Church, often referred to as the Volkskerk (the People’s Church) due to its deep entanglement with Afrikaner identity.

This influx of fervent believers reinforced the evangelical wing of the NGK, which had been gaining strength since the mid-19th century revivals associated with Scottish-descended ministers like Andrew Murray.⁴²

In the bleak aftermath of the Treaty of Vereeniging, which ended the war and Boer independence in May 1902, the NGK emerged as the central institution for the reconstruction of the Afrikaner people.¹⁰ With their political structures dismantled and their farms in ruins, Afrikaners turned to their church for social, cultural, and spiritual leadership.

The NGK played a pivotal role in organizing relief efforts, rebuilding communities, and, crucially, in preserving a distinct Afrikaner identity in the face of a concerted British policy of anglicization.⁴⁵ The spiritually-steeled faith of the thousands of returned POWs provided much of the moral and psychological energy for this immense project of national rebuilding.

As the church ministers became increasingly involved in the social and political “upliftment” of the Afrikaner people, many became leading spokesmen for the new political ideology of Afrikaner nationalism.⁴⁵

Conclusion – Faith, Trauma, and the Forging of a Nation

The revival that began in the despair of the overseas prison camps became a foundational element in the 20th-century Afrikaner narrative. The experience of profound suffering followed by a dramatic spiritual renewal fit seamlessly into the Boers’ long-standing Calvinist self-perception as a chosen people being tested and purified by God for a special purpose.⁴⁶

The war, in this re-telling, was transformed from a humiliating military defeat into a sacred trial by fire, a national sacrifice that merited a divine reward and confirmed the volk’s unique destiny.⁴⁶ This interpretation provided a powerful source of resilience and hope, but it also contained the seeds of a dangerous exceptionalism.

The intense, personal faith forged in the revival gradually became intertwined with, and in many ways subsumed by, what historian T. Dunbar Moodie has termed Afrikaner “civil religion”.¹³ This was a potent ideology that fused Reformed theology with a radical, ethnic nationalism.

The belief in a God-ordained national destiny, confirmed in the crucible of the camps, was harnessed to a political project that sought not only cultural survival but political dominance.¹³ Over the ensuing decades, theologians and nationalist intellectuals would build upon this foundation, arguing that God had created nations as separate entities with a divine right to preserve their purity.¹³

This ideology provided the theological justification for the policy of segregation, which became church dogma by 1939 and, after the National Party’s victory in 1948, was codified into the system of apartheid.¹³

The 1900-1902 revival among the Boer prisoners of war was, by all accounts, a genuine and powerful movement of the human spirit in response to immense suffering.

It brought profound comfort, purpose, and transformation to thousands of defeated men, sparking a missionary movement that reshaped the Dutch Reformed Church. Yet, its legacy is deeply and tragically ambiguous. The spiritual energy that renewed a people’s hope also provided the moral and theological fuel for an ideology of ethnic nationalism that would ultimately lead to the oppression of millions.

The historical line from a prayer meeting in a Ceylon POW camp to the segregated benches of apartheid-era South Africa is a sobering testament to the complex and often perilous intersection of faith, trauma, and the construction of national identity.

Works cited

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