Charles van Onselen – författare

This seminal book reveals how black labour was exploited in twentieth-century South Africa, the human costs of which are still largely hidden from history. It was the people of southern Mozambique, bent double beneath the historical loads of forced labour and slavery, then sold off en masse as contracted labourers, who paid the highest price for South African gold. An iniquitous intercolonial agreement for the exploitation of ultra-cheap black labour was only made possible through nightly use of the steam locomotive on the transnational railway linking Johannesburg and Lourenço Marques. These night trains left deep scars in the urban and rural cultures of black communities, whether in the form of popular songs or a belief in nocturnal witches' trains that captured and conveyed zombie workers to the region's most unpopular places of employment.By tracing the journeys undertaken by black migrants, Charles van Onselen powerfully reconstructs how racial thinking, expressed logistically, reflected the evolving systems of segregation and apartheid. On the night trains, the last stop was always hell.

Johannesburg was -- and is -- the Frontier of Money. Within months of its founding, the mining camp was host to organised crime: the African "Regiment of the Hills" and "Irish Brigade" bandits. Bars, brothels, boarding houses and hotels oozed testosterone and violence, and the use of fists and guns was commonplace. Beyond the chaos were clear signs of another struggle, one to maintain control, honour and order within the emerging male and mining dominated culture. In the underworld, the dictum of "honour among thieves", as well as a hatred of informers, testified to attempts at self-regulation. A "real man" did not take advantage of an opponent by employing underhand tactics. It had to be a "fair fight" if a man was to be respected. This was the world that "One-armed Jack" McLoughlin -- brigand, soldier, sailor, mercenary, burglar, highwayman and safe-cracker -- entered in the early 1890s to become Johannesburg's most infamous "Irish" anti-hero and social bandit. McLoughlin's infatuation with George Stevenson prompted him to recruit the young Englishman into his gang of safe-crackers but "Stevo" was a man with a past and primed for personal and professional betrayal.It was a deadly mixture. Honour could only be retrieved through a Showdown at the Red Lion.

The Jameson Raid was a pivotal moment in the history of South Africa, linking events from the Anglo-Boer War to the declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910. For over a century the failed revolution has been interpreted through the lens of British imperialism, with responsibility laid at the feet of Cecil John Rhodes. Yet the wild adventurism that characterised the raid resembles a cowboy expedition more than a serious attempt to overthrow a Boer government. In this book Charles van Onselen challenges a historiography of over 120 years, locating the raid in American rather than British history and forcing us to rethink the histories of at least three nations. Through a close look at the little-remembered figure of John Hays Hammond, a confidant of both Rhodes and Jameson, he discovers the American Old West on the South African Highveld. This radical reinterpretation challenges the commonly held belief that the Jameson Raid was quintessentially British and, in doing so, drives splinters into our understanding of events as far forward as South Africas critical 1948 general election, with which the foundations of Grand Apartheid were laid.