A picture is worth 34,000 numbers

On statistics, psychic numbing and three Fourie girls in the Anglo-Boer War

A photograph crossed my Facebook feed last week. Three girls in front of a tent flap. The eldest stands in a green-print dress; the youngest sits on a wooden chair in the middle; the third, in navy, leans on the chair-back. All three have very short, almost shaven hair. The original caption notes the probable reason: poor camp hygiene, treated by shears. The photograph is from the Frankfort concentration camp, taken between 1900 and 1902. It has been colourised by Tinus le Roux, then sharpened with AI, and published in the second edition of his book, The Boer War in Colour.

I looked at the for a long time, because they looked somehow familiar. And then I read the caption and turned cold. The three girls have the same surname as me: Fourie.

The surprising thing was how surprised I was by my own reaction. I have spent the last decade counting people who died young. Most of human history, when written as a graph, is the death of children. Before vaccination and knowledge about hygiene and sanitation, roughly half of all children did not see their fifth birthday. This was true everywhere across the world before 1800, including the death notices of the early twentieth-century Cape Colony I’ve analysed and written about. A few years ago, I even co-authored a paper on mortality in these particular camps.¹

And yet a single photograph stopped me in my tracks.

This essay is about why. It is also about what that asymmetry – the gap between what we know and what we feel – means for those of us whose craft is to count…