Reconsiderations in Southern African History – serie

An exploration of the often conflicted relationship between the United Democratic Front's large-scale resistance to apartheid and its everyday struggles at the local level. Interviews with Cachalia and other personalities in the UDF examine the organization's workings.

An exploration of the often conflicted relationship between the United Democratic Front's large-scale resistance to apartheid and its everyday struggles at the local level. Interviews with Cachalia and other personalities in the UDF examine the organization's workings.

The South African revolution of the 1990s was predicated on the energy of a youthful black population; one that has been increasingly at odds with its elders since the onset of industrialization in the late-19th-century. This book traces the origins and history of this conflict.

An ideology of African ignorance arose in South Africa during the first half of the 20th century: Africans were hungry because they didn't know how to feed themselves properly. This work tells of the foods Africans ate, the maladies they suffered, and how the doctors and politicians reacted.

What was it like to be a slave in colonial South Africa? What difference did freedom make? The questions themselves are simply put, but John Edwin Mason has found complex answers after delving deeply into the slaves' experience within the slaveholding patriarchal household, the work that slaves performed, the families they created, and the religions they practiced. Grounding his analysis within the context of South Africa's incorporation into the British Empire - primarily examining the period of 1820-50 - Mason investigates a wealth of documentation from the British Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. Colonial officials, particularly the slave protectors, created and preserved a rich archive within which the voices of slaves and slaveholders, free blacks, and poor whiles are recorded, and from which Mason presents vividly descriptive and telling accounts of slave life. In Social Death and Resurrection Mason draws upon Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson's theory that a slave's social degradation rendered him socially dead. ""Social death"" defined slavery in the ideal, slavery as it would have been had the slaves played along. But in colonial South Africa slaves did not play along: they fought the lash and resisted domination, retaining a cultural and moral community of their own. Mason investigates the subsequent ""resurrection"" of slaves following their successful struggle to preserve family, faith, community ties, and human dignity, despite their class domination and racial subjugation by slaveowners. Although slavery officially came to an end with a series of reforms during a mid-nineteenth-century period of modernization and reform, the British colonial state's commitment to formal equality was in fact compatible with continued class domination. As a result, slaves did not entirely cease to be slaves, but through their own efforts and some governmental assistance, they achieved at least a partial victory over slavery's violence, marginalization, and degradation.

The Afrikaners: Biography of A People, the first comprehensive history of the Afrikaner people based on—and critical of—the most recent scholarly work, draws on the author’s own research and interviews conducted with leading political actors. Hermann Giliomee weaves together life stories and interpretation to create a highly readable narrative history of the Afrikaners.The revised and expanded edition also offers a fresh contextualization of apartheid, its paradoxes and its complex effects, and of the increasingly fraught relationship between the ANC government and the powerless Afrikaner minority. Giliomee revises current orthodoxies on white supremacy in South Africa in important ways. The result is not only a magisterial history of the Afrikaner people, but also a fuller understanding of that history, which for good or ill resonates far beyond the borders of South AfricaReconsiderations in Southern African History

One Love, Ghoema Beat: Inside the Cape Town Carnival takes readers behind the scenes of one of the world’s least known and most colorful carnivals. Similar in many ways to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, the Cape Town Carnival is unique in its history, which is rooted in South Africa’s troubled past, and in its music, which is propelled by the mesmerizing ghoema beat.In 2006, historian and photographer John Edwin Mason joined the Pennsylvanians Crooning Minstrels, one of the best known of Cape Town’s sixty-plus Carnival troupes. For the next four seasons, he took part in the troupe’s rehearsals, street marches, and competitions. He also spent time with other troupes, getting to know their members and traditions. This unprecedented access allowed him to photograph every phase of the troupe’s life—the spectacular parades and grueling late-night practice sessions, the frenetic workshops of drum makers and tailors, the rituals of donning costumes and makeup, and the joy and agony of inter-troupe competitions. His photos simultaneously dazzle the eye and engage the mind.Mason lived in Cape Town in 1989 and 1990 and has visited the city yearly ever since. One Love, Ghoema Beat is his second book about the city’s culture and history.

Based on documents from a long-lost and unexplored colonial archive, Slavery by Any Other Name tells the story of how Portugal privatised part of its empire to the Mozambique Company. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the company governed central Mozambique under a royal charter and built a vast forced labour regime camouflaged by the rhetoric of the civilising mission. Oral testimonies from more than one hundred Mozambican elders provide a vital counterpoint to the perspectives of colonial officials detailed in the archival records of the Mozambique Company. Putting elders' voices into dialogue with officials' reports, Eric Allina reconstructs this modern form of slavery, explains the impact this coercive labour system had on Africans' lives, and describes strategies they used to mitigate or deflect its burdens. In analysing Africans' responses to colonial oppression, Allina documents how some Africans succeeded in recovering degrees of sovereignty, not through resistance, but by placing increasing burdens on fellow Africans -- a dynamic that paralleled developments throughout much of the continent. This volume also traces the international debate on slavery, labour, and colonialism that ebbed and flowed during the first several decades of the twentieth century, exploring a conversation that extended from the backwoods of the Mozambique-Zimbabwe borderlands to ministerial offices in Lisbon and London. Slavery by Any Other Name situates this history of forced labour in colonial Africa within the broader and deeper history of empire, slavery, and abolition, showing how colonial rule in Africa simultaneously continued and transformed past forms of bondage.

Cradock, the product of more than twenty years of research by Jeffrey Butler, is a vivid history of a middle-sized South African town in the years when segregation gradually emerged, preceding the rapid and rigorous implementation of apartheid. Although Butler was born and raised in Cradock, he avoids sentimentality and offers an ambitious treatment of the racial themes that dominate recent South African history through the details of one emblematic community. Augmenting the obvious political narrative, Cradock examines poor infrastructural conditions that typify a grossly unequal system of racial segregation but otherwise neglected in the region’s historiography. Butler shows, with the richness that only a local study could provide, how the lives of blacks, whites, and mixed-race coloureds were affected by the bitter transition from segregation before 1948 to apartheid thereafter.

In this eloquent memoir, already widely read and praised in the author’s native South Africa, Hermann Giliomee weaves together the story of his own life with that of his country-a nation that continues to absorb and inspire him, both despite and because of its tortuous history.An internationally respected historian-his landmark The Afrikaners, writes J. M. Coetzee, ""includes an account of the origins and demise of apartheid that must rank as the most sober, objective and comprehensive we have""- Giliomee has devoted a lifetime to exploring the origins and perpetuation of the deep divisions in South African society. Although he grew up in the heart of the Afrikaner nationalist movement, he soon began to cut his own path in examining the rise and entrenchment of exclusive Afrikaner power and became one of the National Party’s chief critics. As an ""outside insider""-or, to his critics, a ""snake in the grass""-Giliomee has an understanding of Afrikaner power that is informed and nuanced. He has engaged with members on all sides of South Africa’s debates-many of whom appear in these pages through vivid and insightful portraits-and his outspokenness has hit nerves across the political spectrum. The personal journey of this original and courageous thinker will appeal to anyone interested in the complexities of South Africa’s past and present.Reconsiderations in Southern African History

On the morning of May 24, 1921, a force of eight hundred white policemen and soldiers confronted an African prophet, Enoch Mgijima, and some three thousand of his followers. Called the Israelites, they refused to leave their holy village of Ntabelanga, where they had been gathering since early 1919 to await the end of the world. While the Israelites maintained they were there to pray and worship in peace, the white authorities viewed them as illegally squatting on land that was not theirs. After many months of fruitless negotiations, the South African government sent an armed force to Bulhoek, a village in the Eastern Cape, to expel them. In the event that has come to be known as the Bulhoek massacre, police armed with rifles, machine guns, and cannons killed nearly two hundred Israelites wielding knobkerries, swords, and spears.In The Finger of God, Robert Edgar reveals how and why the Bulhoek massacre occurred. Edgar asks: Why did Mgijima prophesize that the end of the world was imminent, and why did he summon his followers to Ntabelanga? Why did the South African government regard the Israelite encampment as a threat? Examining this clash between a government and a millenial movement, Edgar considers the Bulhoek massacre both as a signal event in South African history and as an example of similar conflicts worldwide.

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 more than a century, the failed revolution has been interpreted through the lens of British imperialism, with responsibility laid at the feet of Cecil Rhodes. Yet, the raid was less a serious attempt to overthrow a Boer government than a wild adventure with transnational roots in American filibustering.In The Cowboy Capitalist, renowned South African historian 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 Africa’s critical 1948 general election, with which the foundations of Grand Apartheid were laid.

Diverging from the studies of southern African migrant labor that focus on particular workplaces and points of origin, Bound for Work looks at the multitude of forms and locales of migrant labor that individuals—under more or less coercive circumstances—engaged in over the course of their lives. Tracing Mozambican workers as they moved between different types of labor across Mozambique, Rhodesia, and South Africa, Zachary Kagan Guthrie places the multiple venues of labor in a single historical frame, expanding the regional historiography beyond the long shadow cast by the apartheid state while simultaneously exploring the continuities and fractures between South Africa, southern Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa.Kagan Guthrie’s holistic approach to migrant labor yields several important conclusions. First, he highlights the importance of workers’ choices, explaining not just why people moved but why they moved in the ways they did: how they calculated the benefits of one destination over another, and how they decided when circumstances made it necessary to move again. Second, his attention to mobility gives a much clearer view of the mechanisms of power available to colonial authorities, as well as the limits to their effectiveness. Finally, Kagan Guthrie suggests a new explanation for the divergent trajectories of southern and sub-Saharan Africa in the aftermath of World War II.

While the story of modern South Africa has long captured global attention, the story of one of its key forefathers has been eclipsed by those of more iconic political figures. In Sol Plaatje: A Life, Brian Willan restores to history the importance of a remarkable man whose contributions as an intellectual, politician, teacher, linguist, and journalist expanded and advanced the vision of a common South Africa.Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources reflecting decades of archival and field work, Willan animates Plaatje’s personal and professional fortunes in the context of the tumultuous changes that overtook South Africa during his lifetime, spanning the country’s industrialization and the rise of African nationalism in the early twentieth century. A pioneer in the history of the black press and a literary luminary, Plaatje translated Shakespeare into his native tongue, Setswana, the first such into any African language. Plaatje was a founder of the African National Congress in 1912 and led its campaign against the notorious Natives Land Act of 1913, efforts resonant more than a century later as the ANC today seeks to salvage its legacy from the stain of twenty-first-century corruption. This richly woven biography is essential reading for anyone interested in the generation of black leaders who came before Mandela.

The Natal Midlands in South Africa was ravaged by conflict in the 1980s and 1990s between supporters of the United Democratic Front and Inkatha. The violence left thousands of people dead, injured, homeless, and emotionally wounded. In Violence and Solace, Mxolisi Mchunu provides a historical study of the origins, causes, and nature of political violence in the rural community of KwaShange in the Vulindlela district, one of the areas most affected by the political violence in the Natal Midlands. Mchunu survived the internecine violence in Natal and reflects on his childhood experiences and the complex political situation in the homelands between 1985 and 1996. Threading individual and local factors with regional and national forces, he entwines autobiographical reflections with historical scholarship to explain the political violence that rocked parts of Natal. While provincial and national leaders emerge as complex actors negotiating a chaotic world with no predictable outcomes, Mchunu shines the brightest spotlight on the women and children who suffered most during the conflict. The result is a seminal work on transition violence during the twilight of apartheid.

Divided by the Word refutes the assumption that the entrenched ethnic divide between South Africa’s Zulus and Xhosas, a divide that turned deadly in the late 1980s, is elemental to both societies. Jochen Arndt reveals how the current distinction between the two groups emerged from a long and complex interplay of indigenous and foreign-born actors, with often diverging ambitions and relationships to the world they shared and the languages they spoke.The earliest roots of the divide lie in the eras of exploration and colonization, when European officials and naturalists classified South Africa’s indigenous population on the basis of skin color and language. Later, missionaries collaborated with African intermediaries to translate the Bible into the region’s vernaculars, artificially creating distinctions between Zulu and Xhosa speakers. By the twentieth century, these foreign players, along with African intellectuals, designed language-education programs that embedded the Zulu-Xhosa divide in South African consciousness.Using archival sources from three continents written in multiple languages, Divided by the Word offers a refreshingly new appreciation for the deep historicity of language and ethnic identity in South Africa, while reconstructing the ways in which colonial forces generate and impose ethnic divides with long-lasting and lethal consequences for indigenous populations.

An Age of Hubris is the first comprehensive overview of the impact of missionary enterprise on the Xhosa chiefdoms of South Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century, chronicling a world punctuated by war and millenarian eruptions, and the steady encroachment of settler land hunger and colonial hegemony. With it, Timothy Keegan contributes new approaches to Xhosa history and, most important, a new dimension to the much-trodden but still vital topic of the impact—cultural, social, and political—of missionary activity among African peoples.The most significant historical works on the Xhosa have either become dated, foreground imperial-colonial history, or remain heavily theoretical in nature. In contrast, Keegan draws fruitfully on the rich Africanist comparative and anthropological literature now available, as well as extant primary sources, to foreground the Xhosa themselves in this crucial work. In so doing, he highlights the ways in which Africans utilized new ideas, resources, and practices to make sense of, react to, and resist the forces of colonial dispossession confronting them, emphasizing missionary frustration and African agency.

An Age of Hubris is the first comprehensive overview of the impact of missionary enterprise on the Xhosa chiefdoms of South Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century, chronicling a world punctuated by war and millenarian eruptions, and the steady encroachment of settler land hunger and colonial hegemony. With it, Timothy Keegan contributes new approaches to Xhosa history and, most important, a new dimension to the much-trodden but still vital topic of the impact—cultural, social, and political—of missionary activity among African peoples.The most significant historical works on the Xhosa have either become dated, foreground imperial-colonial history, or remain heavily theoretical in nature. In contrast, Keegan draws fruitfully on the rich Africanist comparative and anthropological literature now available, as well as extant primary sources, to foreground the Xhosa themselves in this crucial work. In so doing, he highlights the ways in which Africans utilized new ideas, resources, and practices to make sense of, react to, and resist the forces of colonial dispossession confronting them, emphasizing missionary frustration and African agency.

The first comprehensive history of Indian migrants and their descendants in Zimbabwe Becoming Zimbabwean tells the long-overdue story of the Indian community in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Centering the stories of individuals and families, and building on a foundation of extensive archival research, Trishula Rachna Patel—a Zimbabwean of Indian origin herself—shows that the history of Indians in Zimbabwe is not of a transient diaspora but one of deliberate permanence. Indians initially played a critical part in the settler colonial process in Southern Rhodesia, but as new generations were born and raised, their politics and social lives evolved to localized forms of citizenship. Eventually, they functioned as part of the resistance to the Rhodesian white minority government, either through participation in the system as nonwhites or by joining the Black anticolonial nationalist movement. They did all this through their shops, African-rooted institutions that became social, economic, and political spaces through which Indians became Zimbabwean. In this highly readable and authoritative study, Patel makes clear that Zimbabwe cannot be properly understood without accounting for the substantial Indian community that has woven itself into the fabric of the nation.

The first comprehensive history of Indian migrants and their descendants in Zimbabwe Becoming Zimbabwean tells the long-overdue story of the Indian community in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Centering the stories of individuals and families, and building on a foundation of extensive archival research, Trishula Rachna Patel—a Zimbabwean of Indian origin herself—shows that the history of Indians in Zimbabwe is not of a transient diaspora but one of deliberate permanence. Indians initially played a critical part in the settler colonial process in Southern Rhodesia, but as new generations were born and raised, their politics and social lives evolved to localized forms of citizenship. Eventually, they functioned as part of the resistance to the Rhodesian white minority government, either through participation in the system as nonwhites or by joining the Black anticolonial nationalist movement. They did all this through their shops, African-rooted institutions that became social, economic, and political spaces through which Indians became Zimbabwean. In this highly readable and authoritative study, Patel makes clear that Zimbabwe cannot be properly understood without accounting for the substantial Indian community that has woven itself into the fabric of the nation.

Examining the evolution of South African activists' attitude toward the state of IsraelIn recent decades, scholars and activists have increasingly drawn on the language of apartheid to describe the sociopolitical situation in Israel and Palestine. In South Africa today, Israel is notorious for its collaboration with the former white minority regime. This prevailing association, however, belies a more complex relationship between radical South Africans and the state of Israel that existed from the 1940s to the 1960s. During these years, Israel and Zionism divided opinion within South Africa's anti-apartheid movement.Shifting Solidarities traces the transition among anti-apartheid activists from support for a Jewish state in 1948 to anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian stances by the 1970s, showing how various ideologies—from Trotskyism to Pan-Africanism—shaped changing attitudes over time. Both an intellectual and a diplomatic history, the book illustrates how for several decades many South African radicals thought of Israel as a potential ally and admired its struggle for independence and postindependence achievements, but eventually came to see it as an apartheid-like state perpetuating the same kinds of injustices they had confronted for years.