Boers are dying in camps - again
Why are so many Afrikaners dying in squatter camps? And what can you do to help?
By Adriana Stuijt. April 7 2014 – Ever since 1994, when the ANC-regime came to power, as a retired SA-Dutch journalist I’ve been keeping track of the Afrikaner people’s growing destitution – which is deliberately created by the ANC-regime’s more than 100 laws to bar ‘whites’ from the South African job market.
Following is a summary of this ongoing process of deliberate genocidal behaviour leading to the deaths of many Afrikaners as they drift into destitution.
Lately there have been a growing number of reports that Afrikaner people are dying of water-borne diseases such as cholera in these camps. They are also dying of other preventable communicable diseases such as TB – which during apartheid was kept so well under control that they had a 95% cure-rate. Many Afrikaners also die in fires in their squatter shacks because they have no access to electricity. Many children also are maimed in such fires and have to spend the rest of their lives as crippled invalids.
Avoidable cholera-deaths in Afrikaner squatter camps reported:
This is the latest such incident – a (medically-confirmed) cholera death at one of the poor-white camps run by the Nehemiah project: The people at the Afrikaner Journal are trying to alleviate the problem and desperately need help – especially clean water systems and solar-powered appliances – to be installed in these camps. One may can contact them directly: Voice: +27825236699 – (082 523 6699) Fax: +27867184596 – (086 718 4596) and via:
http://afrikanerjournal.wordpress.com https://www.facebook.com/afrikanerjournal
Cholera deaths are avoidable with cheap clean-water system for families:
These cholera-deaths are totally unnecessary: they can be prevented by a simple device which cleans out 99% of all the harmful organisms from even the dirtiest drinking water: if any donors are willing to come forward to help the poor Afrikaner families with such life-saving, clean water devices it would be very helpful. (below)
ANC regime refuses clean-water reticulation to poor white communities:
For all this misery is ALL due to the deliberate neglect by the ANC-regime towards poor Afrikaners – they refuse to lay on the free municipal services to ‘ whites ‘’ , which they do always provide to poor black communities as soon as they have set up another little squatter camp anywhere – these camps get a set minimum quantity of municipal water and –electricity and ablution facilities which are being totally denied to the Afrikaner poor. http://www.censorbugbear.org/farmitracker/reports/view/2268
I refer to the ‘Afrikaner poor’ because surveys have found that in most of these little camps, more than 98 percent of all the camp-dwellers are Afrikaners. That’s why it’s also been mainly the Afrikaner cultural structures putting up a valiant fight – in the courts and with hands-on help – to try and stop this tsunami of Afrikaner poverty. It’s conservatively estimated that at least 1million of the 3,4million Afrikaner people now live in dire poverty, many in these camps and in backyard shanties.
Ethnic cleansing of Afrikaners from the villages, towns and farms they’ve built:
People are being ethnically cleansed from traditional ‘Afrikaner’ areas and are forced to move to marginal sites – which are moreover also encreasingly encroached upon by very aggressive, very demanding and very large black groups, often illegal foreigners from other African countries demanding free municipal services.
Bloemhof attacked by 3,000 well-organized terrorist petrol-bombing youths: black police officials order Afrikaner defenders to stand down:
in a new phase in the ethnic-cleansing campaign of Afrikaners, these past weeks from April 3 to April 15 2014, in a well-organized terrorist-style campaign, some 3,000 blacks waged a three-day mini-war against the residents and business people in the Free State agricultural towns of Bloemhof & Christiana – and when Afrikaners grouped together and mounted a successful defence against the waves of petrol-bombing attackers, a black police general drove at high speed to Bloemhof and ordered the defenders of the town to stand down:
Afrikaner death toll rising:
The death toll among the Afrikaners – often horribly slaughtered and mutilated in hate-crimes – is rising by the month:
see http://www./reportscensorbugbear.org/farmitracker
In 1994 there were about 20,000 whites living on government benefits due to in destitution – in 2014 at least 1million of the 3,4million Afrikaners and Boers have no homes, no jobs and no incomes…
Afriforum and Solidariteit and Helpende Hand have over the years all done wonderful work - often financially supported by their trade-union members, mostly mineworkers, and by close-knit farming communities, to try and stop this headlong plunge into starvation and destitution. Before 1994 there were about 20,000 ‘poor whites’ on the official records. Mostly with physical or mental disabilities who were drawing small pensions from the NP-government, and were staying in a low-cost group of well-tended flats in central Pretoria and similar social-housing sites in other cities as well. As a journalist I visited those flats in Pretoria many times. People there were ‘proud poor’- ashamed of their poverty, counting their pennies. The building was guarded and the flats themselves were neat, clean and frequently inspected by the social welfare department to make certain things ran well there. These flats also provided cheap housing for the nurses at the nearby hospitals and so it was a mix of empoverished poor people and nurses. It worked.
Just after 1994, when Mandela’s terrorists came back from their violence-ridden refugee camps like Camp Quatro in Angola and were bombarded to government ministers, the very first thing this group of males did was to start tearing down those flats and the social-welfare structure which ran them so well. That apparently formed an integral part of their propaganda campaign whch claimed that ‘ nothing good which was ever done by the apartheid-government”. So they set about destroying any contrary vidence to ‘prove’ the contents of their propaganda.
Initially the local ANC-councillors and their social welfare Minister destroyed these flats by encouraging incursions of criminal gangs, mostly drug-dealers, who were setting up shop there and started dealing.
That’s always the best way to destroy any well-ordered community and it worked. Today, the human-trafficking and the drug-gangs run the streets of South Africa. In central Pretoria in 2014 - there’s hardly any white residents left unless they stand begging on street corners.
These buildings themselves were eventually deliberately destroyed by a series of large fires. In the last fire which destroyed them, people with disabilities were plucked from rooftops by military and police helicopters to save their lives. Those people were given no alternative housing by the Pretoria ANC-council: most of them ended up at the smallholdings of working-class Afrikaners, mostly mineworkers and government officials who used their old-age pensioners and their savings to buy these smallholdings.
Often these people were put up in Wendy Houses – little backyard ‘play cottages’ for children. Many moved to to Daspoort, where people put them up in tents and eventually in cottages:
http://www.censorbugbear.org/farmitracker/reports/view/892
Nobody ever thought that this would however become a permanent way of life – but that’s how these camps grew: hundreds of thousands of well-educated Afrikaner workers were kicked out of government service due to the ANC’s ‘black economic empowerment’ laws. These are increasingly barring ‘whites’ from all permanent jobs. This is a rout – a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign by the ANC regime targeting Afrikaners in their traditional towns, hamlets, smallholdings, farms and cities all over South Africa. Whenever an Afrikaner community balks and objects at the Africanisation of their schools and the destruction of their Afrikaner cultural rights, the ANC propaganda machine jumps into full gear and accuses these tiny Afrikaner communities of ‘racism’. It’s a campaign which has worked well for the ANC over the years.
Poor whites are still targeted by violent attacks from blacks in squatter camps -- even though they are dirt-poor
And even when these Afrikaner families move into a camp, they are not left alone: even though they are dirt-poor and starving, the murder-attacks continue. The Afrikaner boys and girls are targetted by the large, organized ‘human-traffickers” gangs of black males who lay in wait and kidnap these youngsters — even from in front of their schools, sell them into sexual slavery and a brief life of deliberatel drug-addiction:
http://OrthodoxChurch.nl/2010/01/katrina-hendrika-van-den-berg-65.html
http://www.censorbugbear.org/farmitracker/reports/view/822
Political rights of Afrikaners in squatter camps:
And whenever there was an attempt by cultural organizations to organize the poor Afrikaners politically there was interference, not only from government officials screaming ‘racism’ and attacking these small communities physically such as at Kleinfontein - http://www.censorbugbear.org/farmitracker/reports/view/1029 – but also from the ‘traditional Afrikaner” political structures dating from before 1994. Groups such as the Freedom Front Plus are trying to hold on to their voters’ base and even made sure that exiled ‘whites’ would be allowed to vote at embassies overseas. At the same time, to try and get more voters, they have also shifted towards the left, and tend to ‘overlook’ the suffering of their own people - even giving them a new name: ‘Afrikaanses’.
The mass-migration into squatter camps also created the problem of re-registering each new voting-age adult at these squatter camps. It’s not known how many Afrikaners have already been ethnically-cleansed off the voters’ rolls due to their migration from traditional Afrikaner areas to the white squatter camps but during this present election campaign there were renewed efforts to register them. One main problem: these Afrikaners are too poor to even afford identity documents which they need during registration and voting.
http://OrthodoxChurch.nl/2011/07/afrikaners-sign-up-enmasse-for.html
ANC knows ‘poor whites’ exist -- despite their denials:
The ANC in this forthcoming presidential election in May, has even very cynically taken poor Afrikaner squatter camp residents to their political meetings and promising them food-parcels and blankets if they sit in the front rows of election meetings and allow themselves to be photogrphed – wearing ANC tshirts: However it was reported that none were given the promised life-saving food-parcels or blankets until Afrikaans news-media journalists raised a public row about it.
http://www.censorbugbear.org/farmitracker/reports/view/994
On the Afrikaner Genocide blog alone, more than 50 articles appear about this subject alone, with pictures, sources and newspaper article citations. One often sees extended Afrikaner families relying on granddad and grandmom ‘s tiny pensions for their survival. It’s a losing battle: the ANC also tries to ‘encourage’ poor ‘whites’ to move to black townships where their children will become alienated from their own culture and ‘Africanized’. How is this social experiment of forced integration working out?
Peruse the records and make up your own mind. If you know of any long-term ‘success stories’ of the Western Afrikaners integrating in ‘black’ communities – please urgently let me know at a.j.stuijt@knid.nl
Sources:
Confirmed by clinic: Man dies cholera death in white squatter camp
http://www.censorbugbear.org/farmitracker/reports/view/2268
http://www.censorbugbear.org/farmitracker/reports/view/822
Sarah Bezuidenhout’s starvation death in black squatter camp:
http://www.censorbugbear.org/farmitracker/reports/view/1899
Louiza Preston’s death from TB:
http://www.censorbugbear.org/farmitracker/reports/view/1993
picture album on my blog censorbugbear reports on FB from 2013:
https://www.facebook.com/censorbugbear/photos_stream )
Ethnic cleansing of poor Afrikaners continues 2012:
http://OrthodoxChurch.nl/2012/09/anc-s-ethnic-cleansing-of-poor.html
Poor Boer families protest peacefully against ANC-policies 2011:
http://OrthodoxChurch.nl/2011/02/poor-boers-march-against-ethnic.html
Ethnic-cleansing of Afrikaners in Pretoria:
http://OrthodoxChurch.nl/2011/03/ethnic-cleansing-of-afrikaners-pretoria.html
Afrikaner poverty and hunger are spreading 2009:
http://OrthodoxChurch.nl/2009/11/afrikaner-poverty-hunger-spreading.html
ANC’s ethnic-cleansing of poor whites 2012:
http://OrthodoxChurch.nl/2012/09/anc-s-ethnic-cleansing-of-poor.html
Afrikaner cultural leaders Dan Roodt and Steve Hofmeyr warn of Afrikaner genocide:
http://OrthodoxChurch.nl/2013/07/afrikaner-leaders-hofmeyr-and-roodt.html
The secret war against the Afrikaners of Middelburg, Mpumalanga:
http://OrthodoxChurch.nl/2012/10/secret-war-against-middelburg-afrikaners.html
SA communists ask to visit Afrikaner squatter camp:
http://OrthodoxChurch.nl/2010/06/sa-communists-asked-to-visit-afrikaner.html
“White poverty gets little sympathy in South Africa”:
http://OrthodoxChurch.nl/2010/06/white-poverty-little-sympathy-in-south.html
http://nolstuijt.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/why-are-so-many-afrikaners-dying-in-squatter-camps/
Lizzie van Zyl died of starvation and typhoid in the Bloemfontein concentration camp on 9 May 1901
Above: Lizzie Van Zyl (1894 – 9 May 1901) was a child inmate of the Bloemfontein concentration camp who died from typhoid fever during the British scorched-earth war against the Boers in South Africa. The British incarcerated Lizzie van Zyl her in a concentration camp following the refusal of her father, a Boer combatant, to surrender. Activist Emily Hobhouse used her death as an example of the hardships the Boer women and children faced in the British concentration camps during the war. She describes Lizzie as "a frail, weak little child in desperate need of good care", who was placed on the lowest rations and, after a month, was moved to the new hospital about 50 kilometres away from the concentration camp, suffering from starvation. According to Hobhouse, she was treated harshly in the hospital. Unable to speak English, she was labelled an idiot by an English-speaking doctor and her nurses, who were unable to understand her. One day she started calling for her mother; a lady went over to comfort her, but "was brusquely interrupted by one of the nurses who told her not to interfere with the child as she was a nuisance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Hobhouse
Emily Hobhouse:
When the Second Boer War broke out in South Africa in October 1899, a Liberal MP, Leonard Courtney, invited Hobhouse to become secretary of the women's branch of the South African Conciliation Committee, of which he was president. She wrote
"It was late in the summer of 1900 that I first learnt of the hundreds of Boer women that became impoverished and were left ragged by our military operations… the poor women who were being driven from pillar to post, needed protection and organized assistance.[3]
She founded the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children, and sailed for the Cape Colony on 7 December 1900 to supervise its distribution, and arrived on 27 December. She wrote later:
"I came quite naturally, in obedience to the feeling of unity or oneness of womanhood ... it is when the community is shaken to its foundations, that abysmal depths of privation call to each other and that a deeper unity of humanity evinces itself.[3]
When she left England, she only knew about the concentration camp at Port Elizabeth, but on arrival found out about the many other camps (45 in total). She had a letter of introduction to the British High Commissioner, Alfred Milner, from her aunt, the wife of Arthur Hobhouse, himself the son of Henry Hobhouse, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office under Sir Robert Peel, and who knew Milner. From him she obtained the use of two railway trucks, subject to the approval of the army commander, Lord Kitchener, which she received two weeks later, although it only allowed her to travel as far as Bloemfontein and take one truck of supplies for the camps, about 12 tons.
Conditions in the camps: “To keep these camps going is murder to the children”:
She had persuaded the authorities to let her visit several camps and to deliver aid—her report on conditions at the camps, set out in a report entitled “Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies”, was delivered to the British government in June 1901. As a result, a formal commission was set up and a team of official investigators headed by Millicent Fawcett was sent to inspect the camps. Overcrowding in bad unhygienic conditions due to neglect and lack of resources were the causes of a mortality rate that in the eighteen months during which the camps were in operation reached a total of 26,370 deaths (as recorded at that time: since then, many more mass-graves were found and modern-day historians now believe at least 40,000 Boer camp-inmates died). 24,000 of the concentration-camp inmates who died at the hands of British ‘negligence’ were children. The children were dying at the rate of some 50 a day.
The following extracts from the report by Emily Hobhouse make very clear the extent of culpable neglect by the authorities:
“ In some camps, two, and even three sets of people, occupy one tent and 10, and even 12, persons are frequently herded together in tents of which the cubic capacity is about 500 c.f.
I call this camp system a wholesale cruelty… To keep these Camps going is murder to the children.
It can never be wiped out of the memories of the people. It presses hardest on the children. They droop in the terrible heat, and with the insufficient unsuitable food; whatever you do, whatever the authorities do, and they are, I believe, doing their best with very limited means, it is all only a miserable patch on a great ill. Thousands, physically unfit, are placed in conditions of life which they have not strength to endure. In front of them is blank ruin… If only the English people would try to exercise a little imagination –picture the whole miserable scene. Entire villages rooted up and dumped in a strange, bare place.
The women are wonderful. They cry very little and never complain. The very magnitude of their sufferings, their indignities, loss and anxiety seems to lift them beyond tears… only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out.
Some people in town still assert that the Camp is a haven of bliss. I was at the camp to-day, and just in one little corner this is the sort of thing I found – The nurse, underfed and overworked, just sinking on to her bed, hardly able to hold herself up, after coping with some thirty typhoid and other patients, with only the untrained help of two Boer girls–cooking as well as nursing to do herself. Next tent, a six months' baby gasping its life out on is mother's knee. Two or three others drooping sick in that tent.
Next, a girl of twenty-one lay dying on a stretcher. The father, a big, gentle Boer kneeling beside her; while, next tent, his wife was watching a child of six, also dying, and one of about five drooping. Already this couple had lost three children in the hospital and so would not let these go, though I begged hard to take them out of the hot tent. I can't describe what it is to see these children lying about in a state of collapse. It’s just exactly like faded flowers thrown away. And one has to stand and look on at such misery, and be able to do almost nothing.
It was a splendid child and it dwindled to skin and bone ... The baby had got so weak it was past recovery. We tried what we could but today it died. It was only 3 months but such a sweet little thing… It was still alive this morning; when I called in the afternoon they beckoned me in to see the tiny thing laid out, with a white flower in its wee hand. To me it seemed a “murdered innocent”. And an hour or two after another child died. Another child had died in the night, and I found all three little corpses being photographed for the absent fathers to see some day. Two little wee white coffins at the gate waiting, and a third wanted. I was glad to see them, for at Springfontein, a young woman had to be buried in a sack, and it hurt their feelings woefully.
It is such a curious position, hollow and rotten to the heart’s core, to have made all over the State large uncomfortable communities of people whom you call refugees and say you are protecting, but who call themselves prisoners of war, compulsorily detained, and detesting your protection. They are tired of being told by officers that they are refugees under “the kind and beneficient protection of the British”. In most cases there is no pretence that there was treachery, or ammunition concealed, or food given or anything. It was just that an order was given to empty the country. Though the camps are called refugee, there are in reality a very few of these–perhaps only half-a-dozen in some camps. It is easy to tell them, because they are put in the best marquees, and have had time given to them to bring furniture and clothes, and are mostly self-satisfied and vastly superior people. Very few, if any of them, are in want.
Those who are suffering most keenly, and who have lost most, either of their children by death or their possessions by fire and sword, such as those reconcentrated women in the camps, have the most conspicuous patience, and never express a wish that their men should be the ones to give way. It must be fought out now, they think, to the bitter end. It is a very costly business upon which England has embarked, and even at such a cost hardly the barest necessities can be provided, and no comforts.
It is so strange to think that every tent contains a family, and every family is in trouble–loss behind, poverty in front, sickness, privation and death in the present. But they are very good, and say they have agreed to be cheerful and make the best of it all. The Mafeking camp folk were very surprised to hear that English women cared a rap about them or their suffering. It has done them a lot of good to hear that real sympathy is felt for them at home, and so I am glad I fought my way here, if only for that reason.
The tents
Imagine the heat outside the tents and the suffocation inside! ...the sun blazed through the single canvas, and the flies lay thick and black on everything; no chair, no table, nor any room for such; only a deal box, standing on its end, served as a wee pantry. In this tent live Mrs B's five children (three quite grown up) and a little Kaffir servant girl. Many tents have more occupants. Mrs M. ...has six children in camp, all ill, two in the tin hospital with typhoid, and four sick in the tent. A terrible evil just now is the dew. It is so heavy, and comes through the single canvas of the tents, wetting everything… All the morning the gangways are filled with the blankets and odds and ends, regularly turned out to dry in the sun. The doctor told me today he highly disapproved of tents for young children, and expected a high mortality before June.
Hygiene
Soap has been unattainable and none given in the rations. With much persuasion, and weeks after requisitioning, soap is now given occasionally in very minute quantities–certainly not enough for clothes and personal washing.
We have much typhoid and are dreading an outbreak, so I am directing my energies to getting the water of the Modder River boiled. As well swallow typhoid germs whole as drink that water–so say doctors.
Yet they cannot boil it all, for – first, fuel is very scarce; that which is supplied weekly would not cook a meal a day…and they have to search the already bare kopjes for a supply. There is hardly a bit to be had. Second, they have no extra utensil to hold the water when boiled. I propose, therefore, to give each tent a pail or crock, and get a proclamation issued that all drinking water must be boiled.
The "cruel system"
Above all one would hope that the good sense, if not the mercy, of the English people, will cry out against the further development of this cruel system which falls with crushing effect upon the old, the weak, and the children. May they stay the order to bring in more and yet more. Since Old Testament days was ever a whole nation carried captive?
Late in 1901 the camps ceased to receive new families and conditions improved in some camps; but the damage was done. Historian Thomas Pakenham writes of Kitchener's policy turn:
No doubt the continued 'hullabaloo' at the death-rate in these concentration camps, and Milner's belated agreement to take over their administration, helped changed K's mind [some time at the end of 1901]. By mid-December at any rate, Kitchener was already circulating all column commanders with instructions not to bring in women and children when they cleared the country, but to leave them with the guerrillas... Viewed as a gesture to Liberals, on the eve of the new session of Parliament at Westminster, it was a shrewd political move. It also made excellent military sense, as it greatly handicapped the guerrillas, now that the drives were in full swing... It was effective precisely because, contrary to the Liberals' convictions, it was less humane than bringing them into camps, though this was of no great concern to Kitchener.
Charles Aked, a Baptist minister in Liverpool, said on 22 December 1901, Peace Sunday: "Great Britain cannot win the battles without resorting to the last despicable cowardice of the most loathsome cur on earth—the act of striking a brave man's heart through his wife's honour and his child's life. The cowardly war has been conducted by methods of barbarism... the concentration camps have been Murder Camps."[4] Afterwards, a crowd followed him home and broke the windows of his house.[4]
Bloemfontein Concentration Camp
Hobhouse arrived at the camp at Bloemfontein on 24 January 1901 and was shocked by the conditions she encountered:
"They went to sleep without any provision having been made for them and without anything to eat or to drink. I saw crowds of them along railway lines in bitterly cold weather, in pouring rain–hungry, sick, dying and dead. Soap was not dispensed. The water supply was inadequate. No bedstead or mattress was procurable. Fuel was scarce and had to be collected from the green bushes on the opes of the kopjes (small hills) by the people themselves. The rations were extremely meagre and when, as I frequently experienced, the actual quantity dispensed fell short of the amount prescribed, it simply meant famine."[3]
Lizzie van Zyl, visited by Emily Hobhouse in the Bloemfontein concentration camp
What most distressed Hobhouse was the sufferings of the undernourished children. Diseases such as measles, bronchitis, pneumonia, dysentery and typhoid had invaded the camp with fatal results. The very few tents were not enough to house the one or more sick persons, most of them children. In the collection Stemme uit die Verlede (Voices from the Past), she recalled the plight of Lizzie van Zyl (c. 1894 – 9 May 1901), the daughter of a Boer combatant who refused to surrender. The girl died at the Bloemfontein camp. According to Hobhouse, the girl was treated harshly and placed on the lowest rations.[why?] After a month, she was moved to the new hospital about 50 kilometres away from the concentration camp, suffering from starvation. Unable to speak English, she was labelled an "idiot" by the hospital staff, who were unable to understand her. One day she started calling for her mother. An Afrikaner woman, Mrs Botha, went over to comfort her and to tell her she would see her mother again, but "was brusquely interrupted by one of the nurses who told her not to interfere with the child as she was a nuisance."[5][6][7]
When Hobhouse requested soap for the people, she was told that soap was a luxury. She nevertheless succeeded, after a struggle, to have it listed as a necessity, together with straw, more tents and more kettles in which to boil the drinking water. She distributed clothes and supplied pregnant women, who had to sleep on the ground, with mattresses, but she could not forgive what she called
"Crass male ignorance, helplessness and muddling… I rub as much salt into the sore places in their minds… because it is good for them; but I can't help melting a little when they are very humble and confess that the whole thing is a grievous and gigantic blunder and presents almost insoluble problems, and they don't know how to face it…"[3]
Hobhouse also visited camps at Norvalspont, Aliwal North, Springfontein, Kimberley and Orange River.
Fawcett Commission
When Hobhouse returned to England she received scathing criticism and hostility from the British government and many of the media, but eventually succeeded in obtaining more funding to help the victims of the war. The British Liberal leader at the time, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, denounced what he called the "methods of barbarism". The British government eventually agreed to set up the Fawcett Commission to investigate her claims, under Millicent Fawcett, which corroborated her account of the shocking conditions. Hobhouse returned to Cape Town in October 1901, was not permitted to land and eventually deported five days after arriving, no reason being given. She then went to France where she wrote the book The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell on what she saw during the war.[citation needed]
She visited South Africa again in 1903. She decided to set up Boer home industries and to teach young women spinning and weaving when she returned once more in 1905. Ill health, from which she never recovered, forced her to return to England in 1908. She traveled to South Africa again in 1913 for the inauguration of the National Women's Monument in Bloemfontein but had to stop at Beaufort West due to her failing health.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Hobhouse