Design for a Monument in South Africa

This wood engraving satirizes President Steyn's proposal for a monument in South African concentration camps. A skeletal Death figure stands astride a pedestal inscribed Vae Victis ("Woe to the Vanquished"), trampling fallen bodies below. The caricatured Boer leader, rendered in the heavy-lined style of early-twentieth-century Dutch political prints, clutches a rifle and cane while perched on corpses. The image deploys the grotesque visual language inherited from Gillray and Daumier to condemn violence during the Boer War. Such prints, rooted in the Northern European broadsheet tradition, translated partisan anger into accessible graphic form—a direct ancestor of modern editorial cartooning and comics' capacity to fuse image and ideology.