Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
People in the early 20th century had an early 20th century worldview in which colonialism was okay, among other things bizarre and horrible to us now, in a more civilised age. They were appalled by the Boer War because the system practiced on native peoples for a long, long time was, in a mild, watered down, kid-gloves version, happening to white people.
Whereas if we think in modern terms, the Boer War is a high point as "invading people for no good reason and taking their land" goes. Our policies often involved less "concentration camps" and more "shoot 'em dead".
The reason the Boer War was considered so bad by contemporaries was because the British were fighting White people in an aggressive manner, despite the fact that the combat was relatively "civilized". If the Boers had been Zulus, the British could have virtually exterminated them with little comment from Europe.
As far as atrocities go, everything bad the British did in the entire course of the Boer War didn't equal even one exploratory expedition sent to Africa, which usually accounted for thousands of Blacks slaughtered and countless more starving due to having their lands ravaged, not to mention the death-marching of forced porters across Africa.