Stress disease and ancestry of Mafikeng Second Anglo-Boer War skeletons

Abstract

Records exist of several Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) cemeteries around Mafikeng, North-West Province, South Africa. This study involves the Magogwe cemetery, situated roughly 1 km south of the Mafikeng concentration camp and the larger camp cemetery at the Lotlamoreng Nature Reserve. The Magogwe cemetery contains 236 marked graves but records of the origin of the cemetery are unclear. The Forensic Anthropology Research Centre at the University of Pretoria, under the mandate of the Heritage Foundation was asked to relocate the Magogwe cemetery. This would include exhumation, analyses and reburial of all individuals. Only 21 non-adults were exhumed and analysed before the project was cut short due to tensions surrounding the true ancestral origins of the individuals buried at this cemetery. The initial aim of this study was to assess the health status of all the individuals who had been buried in the Magogwe cemetery. It was attempted to determine whether pre-war malnourishment and poverty contributed to the high fatalities during the war, especially in children. A supporting study was done, using dental casts of deciduous dentition to metrically estimate ancestry using multiple discriminant function analysis of the mesiodistal and buccolingual measurements of deciduous dentition. All 21 graves contained evidence of coffins. The buried children were fully dressed or wrapped in cloth, some wearing nappies. All individuals were non-adults including 12 infants (0-1 years), 5 children (3-7 years), 3 juveniles (7-10/12 years) and 1 adolescent (10/12-18 years). Signs of nonspecific stress such as dental caries and enamel hypoplasia were identified. Though the results are preliminary and the sample small there is evidence that the stress experienced by these individuals was acute around the time of death. The discriminant functions were not suitable for use on the Magogwe sample. Therefore, the ancestry of the individuals buried at Anglo-Boer War cemetery in Magogwe, Mafikeng remains unclear.