The British adopted a scorched-earth policy during the Second Boer War to deny Boer commandos the farms and supply lines that sustained their guerrilla campaign. Farmsteads were burned, livestock slaughtered, and the women and children left behind were herded into camps. Conditions were atrocious. Overcrowding, contaminated water, inadequate food, and rampant disease turned the camps into death traps. Measles, typhoid, and dysentery killed thousands of children who had committed no offense except being born to families on the wrong side of a colonial war. Emily Hobhouse, an English anti-war activist, traveled to South Africa and documented what she found. Her reports shocked the British public, though not enough to stop the policy. The camps remain among the most contested episodes in South African history -- a wound that never fully closed.

The idea for the monument came from Martinus Steyn, the last president of the Orange Free State Republic, while he was recovering from illness in Europe after the war. His wife Rachel Isabella Steyn -- known as Tibbie -- had lost family members in the camps and maintained a close friendship with Hobhouse. Back in South Africa, Steyn organized a committee and began fundraising. The Afrikaner community raised ten thousand pounds over four years, from 1907 to 1911. Not everyone welcomed the project. English-speaking members of the Bloemfontein Town Council tried to delay construction, arguing the memorial would reflect poorly on Britain. Even Prime Minister Louis Botha, pursuing reconciliation between Boer and Briton, disapproved. The monument was built anyway. Architect Frans Soff designed an obelisk roughly 37 meters tall, flanked by low semicircular walls, with Hobhouse's bronze scene at its center.

On 16 December 1913, roughly 20,000 South Africans gathered for the unveiling. The date was significant -- it was Geloftedag, the anniversary of the Battle of Blood River, already a day of Afrikaner commemoration. Thirteen years later, Emily Hobhouse died in England, and her ashes were brought to South Africa and interred at the foot of the monument she had helped inspire. Over time, the site became a place of burial for other figures from the Boer War era. Christiaan de Wet, the guerrilla general, was buried there in 1922. President Steyn was interred in 1916, and Reverend John Daniel Kestell in 1941. When Tibbie Steyn died in 1955, she was buried beside her husband despite her own protests that the graves of war veterans were diluting the monument's original focus on the suffering of women and children.

The monument's meaning has shifted over the decades. For years it stood as the primary symbol of Afrikaner suffering and resilience. Then the Voortrekker Monument was erected in Pretoria in 1949, shortly after the National Party came to power, and it eclipsed the Women's Monument as a national symbol. Since 1960, additional memorials to Boer War civilians, volunteers, prisoners of war, and the so-called Bittereinders -- those who fought to the bitter end -- have been added to the grounds. The Anglo-Boer War Museum sits permanently on the same premises. The Women's Monument has become less a single monument than a memorial complex, layered with competing narratives. Tibbie Steyn's worry proved prescient: the focus on women and children has broadened into a general war memorial. But the bronze group at the center has not changed. Two women. A dying child. A grief that went beyond tears.