Bøger i Reconsiderations in Southern African History serien

<p><p>In <i>Imagining a Nation,</i> Ruramisai Charumbira analyzes competing narratives of the founding of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe constructed by political and cultural nationalists both black and white since occupation in 1890. The book uses a wide array of sourcesincluding archives, oral histories, and a national monumentto explore the birth of the racialized national memories and parallel identities that were in vigorous contention as memory sought to present itself as history. In contrast with current global politics plagued by divisions of outsider and insider, patriot and traitor, Charumbira invites the reader into the liminal spaces of the regions history and questions the centrality of the nation-state in understanding African or postcolonial history today. </p><p>Using an interdisciplinary methodology, Charumbira offers a series of case studies, bringing in characters from far-flung places to show that history and memory in and of one small place can have a far-reaching impact in the wider world. The questions raised by these stories go beyond the history of colonized or colonizer in one former colony to illuminate contemporary vexations about what it means to be a citizen, patriot, or member of a nation in an ever-globalizing world. Rather than a history of how the rulers of Rhodesia or Zimbabwe marshaled state power to force citizens to accept a single definition of national memory and identity, <i>Imagining a Nation</i> shows how ordinary people invested in the soft power of individual, social, and collective memories to create and perpetuate exclusionary national myths.</p></p><p><p>Reconsiderations in Southern African History</p></p>

Before the railway system linked South Africa's major cities in the mid-1890s, the country was largely dependent on a horse-drawn economy. Diamonds from Griqualand West and gold from the Witwatersrand were transported by coach and horses to distant ports for export. For some Irish soldiers based at Fort Napier in Pietermaritzburg, this temptation proved impossible to resist: they deserted in droves and, as members of what later became known as the criminal "e;Irish Brigade,"e; they embarked on a spree of bank, safe, and highway robberies across southern Africa. With tales of heists, safe-cracking, illegal gold dealings, prison breaks, and hidden roadside treasure, Masked Raiders follows the exploits of legendary Irish brigands such as the McKeone brothers and "e;One-Armed Jack"e; McLoughlin, who ravaged the subcontinent, from the mining towns of Barberton, Kimberley, and Johannesburg to the borders of Basotholand, Bechuanaland, Mozambique, and Rhodesia in the years leading up to the Jameson Raid in South Africa.

<p><p>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 <i>Sol Plaatje: A Life,</i> 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. </p><p>Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources reflecting decades of archival and field work, Willan animates Plaatjes personal and professional fortunes in the context of the tumultuous changes that overtook South Africa during his lifetime, spanning the countrys 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.</p><p>For sale in the US only.</p></p>

Using archival sources from three continents written in multiple languages, this book offers a 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.

Based on documents from a long-lost and unexplored colonial archive, Slavery by Any Other Name tells the story of how Portugal privatized 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 labor regime camouflaged by the rhetoric of the civilizing 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 labor system had on Africans' lives, and describes strategies they used to mitigate or deflect its burdens. In analyzing 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, labor, 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 labor 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.

The Natal Midlands in South Africa was ravaged by conflict in the 1980s and 1990s between supporters of the United Democratic Front and Inkatha. 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.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century through to 1960, Protestant missionaries were the most important intermediaries between South Africa's ruling white minority and its black majority. The Equality of Believers reconfigures the narrative of race in South Africa by exploring the pivotal role played by these missionaries and their teachings in shaping that nation's history.The missionaries articulated a universalist and egalitarian ideology derived from New Testament teachings that rebuked the racial hierarchies endemic to South African society. Yet white settlers, the churches closely tied to them, and even many missionaries evaded or subverted these ideas. In the early years of settlement, the white minority justified its supremacy by equating Christianity with white racial identity. Later, they adopted segregated churches for blacks and whites, followed by segregationist laws blocking blacks' access to prosperity and citizenship-and, eventually, by the ambitious plan of social engineering that was apartheid.Providing historical context reaching back to 1652, Elphick concentrates on the era of industrialization, segregation, and the beginnings of apartheid in the first half of the twentieth century. The most ambitious work yet from this renowned historian, Elphick's book reveals the deep religious roots of racial ideas and initiatives that have so profoundly shaped the history of South Africa.

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.

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. In the event that has come to be known as the Bulhoek massacre, police killed nearly two hundred of these `Israelites'. In The Finger of God, Robert Edgar reveals how and why the Bulhoek massacre occurred.

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.

"Originally published in 2017 by Jonathan Ball Publishers, South Africa, a division of Media24 (Pty) Ltd."

Provides 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 the author 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.

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.

What was it like to be a slave in colonial South Africa? What difference did freedom make? John Edwin Mason presents complex answers after delving into the slaves' experience within the slaveholding patriarchal household, primarily during the period from 1820 to 1850.

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.

The politics of black education has long been a key issue in southern African studies, but despite rich debates on the racial and class dimensions of schooling, historians have neglected their distinctive gendered dynamics. A World of Their Own is the first book to explore the meanings of black women's education in the making of modern South Africa. Its lens is a social history of the first high school for black South African women, Inanda Seminary, from its 1869 founding outside of Durban through the recent past. Employing diverse archival and oral historical sources, Meghan Healy-Clancy reveals how educated black South African women developed a tradition of social leadership, by both working within and pushing at the boundaries of state power. She demonstrates that although colonial and apartheid governance marginalized women politically, it also valorized the social contributions of small cohorts of educated black women. This made space for growing numbers of black women to pursue careers as teachers and health workers over the course of the twentieth century. After the student uprisings of 1976, as young black men increasingly rejected formal education for exile and street politics, young black women increasingly stayed in school and cultivated an alternative form of student politics. Inanda Seminary students' experiences vividly show how their academic achievements challenged the narrow conceptions of black women's social roles harbored by both officials and black male activists. By the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, black women outnumbered black men at every level of education-introducing both new opportunities for women and gendered conflicts that remain acute today.

Finalist for the Alan Paton AwardIn his latest book, renowned historian Hermann Giliomee challenges the conventional wisdom on the downfall of white rule and the end of apartheid. Instead of impersonal forces, or the resourcefulness of an indomitable resistance movement, he emphasizes the role of Nationalist leaders and of their outspoken critic Frederick van Zyl Slabbert. What motivated each of the last Afrikaner leaders, from Verwoerd to de Klerk? How did each try to reconcile economic growth, white privilege, and security with the demands of an increasingly assertive black leadership and unexpected population figures? In exploring each leader's background, reasoning, and personal foibles, Giliomee takes issue with the assumption that South Africa was inexorably heading for an ANC victory in 1994. He argues that historical accidents radically affected the course of politics. Drawing on primary sources and personal interviews, Giliomee offers a fresh and stimulating political history that attempts not to condemn but to understand why the last Afrikaner leaders did what they did, and why their own policies ultimately failed them.A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic TitleReconsiderations in Southern African History

Takes readers behind the scenes of one of the world's least known and most colourful 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.

Did white South Africa crack, or did its leadership yield just in time to avert a revolution? The transformation has been called a miracle, belying gloomy predictions of race war. Why did it happen? David Welsh views the topic against the backdrop of a long history of conflict spanning apartheid's rise and demise, and the liberation movement's suppression and subsequent resurrection.