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"The Drama of the Peace Process in South Africa" by Sylvia Neame is a book that reflects on the author's experiences and writings during the late 1980s in South Africa. Neame, a South African historian and former member of the South African Communist Party and African National Congress, provides insights into the ANC's strategy and debates surrounding negotiations with the apartheid regime. The book includes extracts from her diaries, as well as papers she wrote during that time. While the book offers valuable perspectives on the ANC/SACP alliance and the author's efforts to shape the approach to negotiations, it may not appeal to a wide audience due to its length and lack of broader context. [Extracted from the article]

When Moses Kotane founded The African Defender in 1937, he did so with the intention to encourage African self-sufficiency through teaching and publishing in indigenous languages and through sharing information on how to survive in segregated South Africa. In doing so, he entered into public conversation with writers and editors of other independent publications such as The Anti-Fascist or occasional series by groups such as the South African Jewish Deputies Board. In the decade after Kotane and his peers began their own discussions, conversations about fascism and anti-fascism in South Africa moved from the margins among those deemed alarmist into spaces where anti-racist activists increasingly saw red flags connecting European oppression with the growing populist nationalism in their own country. This article examines this decade through the language and conversations of independent publications such as Kotane's, in the face of the proliferation of groups such as the Greyshirts, The People's Movement, the South African National Democratic Party ('Blackshirts'), The South African Fascists, and the Gentile Protection League. It argues that anti-fascist philosophies not only informed but served as cornerstones to a nascent anti-apartheid movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the pragmatic stance that the United States adopted, during the Nixon era, regarding relations with Pretoria. The Nixon administration believed that Washington needed to prioritise the protection of its own strategic and commercial interests and not become overly concerned about the domestic agenda of its global partners. The vehement anti-communism of the National Party government combined with a profitable economic relationship and the abundant mineral resources of the apartheid state dictated a need on practical grounds for closer ties with South Africa. This stance was further reinforced by Nixon's contempt for sub-Saharan Africans and lack of interest in achieving racial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 1966, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) re-emerged in exile in London. The arrival of Dennis Brutus, the coloured Rhodesian-born activist, poet, and educator, into the British capital provided the stimulus to renew calls for the exclusion of apartheid South Africa from international sport. In the years 1966–1970 that marked Brutus's exile in Britain, SANROC elevated apartheid sport to the world's attention. As this paper contends, SANROC's success in discouraging foreign contact and competition with racialist sporting organisations, teams, or individuals from South Africa rested largely on Brutus's ability to position himself at the nexus of an emergent human rights discourse that dominated the agendas of state institutions and international organisations throughout the 1960s. Brutus skilfully tethered the issue of racism in South African sport to broader discussions of human rights. SANROC's anti-apartheid activism, however broad its transnational horizons, must also be read in its national context. As this paper will further contend, a deeper comprehension of the political and racial climate of 1960s Britain is central to understanding Brutus and SANROC's experiences in exile in the years 1966–1970. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing evidence from existing archives, parliamentary proceedings, presidential speeches, newspaper reports and oral testimonies, this paper demonstrates the extent to which Malawi sustained diplomatic relations with Taiwan and China from 1961 to 2014, within the broader context of southern Africa. While trade dictated the diplomatic choice of the so-called 'two Chinas', individual leadership styles as well as domestic politics remained the decisive factors. However, the paper argues that the process was dynamic, complex and highly contested – and that the broader idiographic context of southern Africa mattered. For while local circumstances created the need for diplomatic relations, it was the international political economy that acted as the impetus behind the establishment and shifting sustenance of the relationships. In making this argument, the study draws attention to how global forces interacted historically with local political economies within southern Africa to shape discourses of diplomacy as well as how economic challenges forced states to make compromises – including undermining human rights – in the making of these diplomatic relations over the last two generations in post-independence Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the run-up to the unification of South Africa labour politics were decentralised in the four British colonies. In order to voice the opinions of the South African white working-class and to promote the political amalgamation of the various labour and socialist parties and trade unions before union and the first national general election of 1910, The Worker was established in January 1909, originally under the auspices of the South African Typographical Union. The paper was followed by the founding of the South African Labour Party (SALP) in October 1909. The Worker then became the party's official mouthpiece. This article traces the rise of The Worker and the financial difficulties experienced by the management board to keep it solvent. The working class politics espoused by the paper and some counter-reactions to its editorial policies will also be investigated. By taking a militant editorial stance during the industrial strikes of 1913 and 1914, The Worker reached the zenith of its influence among the white working class. However, by October 1914 the economic consequences of the First World War would eventually force the paper to close due to paper shortages and insurmountable debts. Finally, the article also concentrates on the unsuccessful efforts to revive The Worker as mouthpiece of the SALP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1960s and early 1970s Morris Isaacson High School in Soweto had probably its most successful years. It produced good quality education and graduated numerous students who went on to university and became professionals. It was among the top two most prestigious high schools in Soweto. After a series of politically related closures the school regained some stability in the 1980s and 1990s but never really achieved the success or prestige of the previous era. This paper attempts to explain how Morris Isaacson managed to be so successful in spite of the newly implemented Bantu Education system which was designed to provide mass schooling but blunt black aspiration. It notes, among other things, the relatively manageable enrolment in the 1960s, the importance of institutional discipline and good leadership, and the prestige of the teaching profession and the quality of high school teachers in Soweto, especially in the context of the professional limitations imposed by the colour bar. The paper then analyses why high schooling, while expanding, declined dramatically in effectiveness in Soweto in the late 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual arts were fully represented within the culture of liberation that flourished within South Africa’s liberation movements. However, relatively little has been written about visual arts representing the armed struggle. This paper aims to explore the visual arts created around the armed struggle; and begin to position this within a broader understanding of the culture dynamics that emerged as part of Southern Africa’s liberation movements, and the armed struggle in particular. Most scholars agree that music, poetry and dance were integral cultural expressions within the liberation movements; styles often developed within military camps, then were adopted throughout ‘liberated zones’. In contrast, military structures provided little or no space to practice the visual arts. Active military personal had little time or resources to create visual artworks, no storage and exhibition space, and little access to reproduction or distribution. Visual representation of fighters - both in photographs and realistic portraits - could create a security risk if taken by the enemy. Unlike music and writing, most visual art of the armed struggle was therefore produced within the mass movements, and in solidarity movements supporting the armed struggle. This paper discusses direct (in some cases personal) experiences of problems confronting visual artists of the armed struggle; and solutions artists found for these. It places the failure to recognize the visual art of the armed struggle within a broader failure to explore the integration of armed resistance with cultural practice and belief in the struggle for democratic societies in Southern Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British Cape Colony was the site of multiple and interrelated constructions of the foreign and articulations of some brand of 'foreigner' as threatening. This paper, part of a longer study, explores one construction of foreignness in relation to the 'frontier'. It makes three main points. First, it analyses the frontier not as a structural condition or zone but as a subjective, political positioning. It proposes the concept of the 'marchland' to distinguish between spatial description and political space. Second, it looks at the rendition of the 'foreign' in the politics of the frontier, how African land and people 'beyond the boundary' were labelled 'foreigners' or treated as foreign through the invocation of European norms of international law. It addresses colonial politicisations of chiefly authority in those discourses. Last, it considers the frequently employed idea of 'the pale', which speaks to political difference and aids us in conceptualising foreignness in the Cape colonial marchlands. This history considers the relationship between accusations of foreignness and a specific, historical political subjectivity and politics – of the frontier – that politicised foreignness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focusses on the circumstances under which various political organisations, particularly the ANC and the SACP, in South Africa turned to the armed struggle as a means to prosecuting the liberation struggle in the early 1960s. It looks at the setbacks and shortcomings that this shift in strategy and tactics suffered and the challenges that arose at the time. From the perspective of the ANC and its allies it is important to appreciate that the armed struggle was an extension of the political struggle. The paper seeks to unravel some of the complex theoretical and empirical issues that were at play across the broad spectrum of organisations that regarded themselves as opposed to the apartheid system. We focus on the features of the mass struggles in the 1950s and the repressive actions of the state culminating in the massacres at Sharpeville and Nyanga, the imposition of the State of Emergency and the mass detentions that created a climate in which by 1960-62 almost all organisations that could lay claim to be part of the struggle had concluded that the time had arrived for armed resistance to apartheid. The paper draws together the range of groupings and organisations that entered this field in the early 1960s, looks at the response of the state and the setbacks that these different efforts endured. It concludes at the point where international solidarity becomes a significant force against the repressive actions of the apartheid state and the continuation of the liberation struggle depended on the regrouping of forces of the ANC and MK in exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liliesleaf was purchased in 1961 by the South African Communist Party and it functioned as a nerve centre for the liberation movements and key leaders of that era. The significance of Liliesleaf is that this was a place where the transition into a new form of struggle, namely armed struggle occurred, making an icon of that struggle for freedom. Liliesleaf marks a seminal shift in South Africa's liberation struggle history. On 11 July 1963 the police raided Liliesleaf. Their rolling up of Rivonia in turn culminated in the Rivonia Trial. For the apartheid government this was a coup. For the liberation movement, it represented a blow. Many theories abound as to how the police identified Liliesleaf. This paper presents new information about these complex and myriad historical events. The paper shows that the raid was the culmination of a much longer term investigation by various state agencies and not only the Security Branch of the South African Police. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Histories of the institutionalisation of the mentally ill in southern Africa have largely emphasised the power and perspectives of state officials, including psychiatrists, medical doctors, magistrates, and police. This article considers, however, the involvement of family members in determining when kin were in need of confinement by reason of madness. It argues that while police and state officials remained the major conduits through which patients were brought to mental hospitals, in many cases the initiative of family members in having a person committed can be discerned in a close reading of the official committal papers. Definitions of madness were, therefore, in some instances, dialectical and negotiated, rather than simply a form of ‘state social control from above’. Second, and as an early contribution to the emerging studies of ‘emotional communities’ or ‘emotional cultures’ and ‘the family’ in southern Africa, the paper suggests that by observing the expanding range of reasons being put forward by family members in initiating, supporting or challenging the certification of insanity we have an opportunity to glimpse aspects of the emotional worlds of families in South Africa in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On 1 May 1989, anthropologist and human-rights activist David Webster was gunned down outside his home in Troyeville, Johannesburg. Since his untimely death, Webster has been publicly remembered in numerous ways. This paper looks at some of these memorials, in particular a boundary wall erected at the site of his assassination and a portrait made in a Troyeville park, which was named after him. In the process, it focuses on the ways in which certain self-organising publics have chosen to remember and acknowledge both Webster's life, and his appalling death. The events held to launch both of these modest memorials became commemorations in themselves. The significance of the public and private memories of the individuals and groups responsible for erecting these memorials is also examined. This paper explores ways in which memory is facilitated in the production of memorials and the ways in which memories of this particular man have been inscribed into the public domain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the relationship between white liberal students and black students in the Black Consciousness-aligned South African Students' Organisation (SASO). It explores the often fraught personal relationships between young leaders, but also points out their commonalities: a search for ideas, resonances they felt with international struggles for justice, and the unique and distinctive history that characterised South Africa at this period. In South Africa in the early 1970s activists elaborated the radical ideas of the 1960s and as international movements for social justice lost their momentum in other countries, opposition to state power resurfaced in South Africa. The paper points to the personal transformations in white student leaders as they sought to accommodate the Black Consciousness challenge and respond in constructive ways. It also points to the regional histories of radicalism, focusing first on the Cape, secondly the Northern Transvaal and finally Durban. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Māori-language newspaper,Te Pipiwharauroa, vigorously supported the British side during the South African War (1899–1902). With a British policy that the conflict was to be a ‘white man's war’, Māori were officially omitted from serving as soldiers in the New Zealand contingents to South Africa. For Māori who sought to engage with the mainstream Pākehā (European) society in a meaningful way, the exclusion demonstrated that full citizenship had not yet been attained, but supporting the war allowed some degree of participation and acknowledgement. However, a number of other elements also contributed to the paper's pro-war stance. Two of the leading commentators were Rēweti Kōhere, who edited the paper on behalf of the Anglican Church, and Āpirana Ngata, the leader of an activist group that sought to reform and advance Māori society. This essay examinesTe Pipiwharauroa's reporting of the war, and explores how their schooling, tribal loyalties to church and state, notions of race, and their reformist agenda all influenced their interpretation of the war, an imperial event of international interest, to a local Māori audience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As one of South Africa's pioneer professional historians, William Miller Macmillan (1885–1974) is best remembered as the founder of the ‘liberal school’ of South African historiography. In his famous trilogy,The Cape Colour Question(1927): Bantu, Boer and Briton,The Making of the South African Native Problem(1929), andComplex South Africa(1930), he stressed the notion that the different races in South Africa constituted a single society. But he is also important for beginning the teaching of history at two of South Africa's English-medium universities, Rhodes and Wits, and for giving that teaching a strong European bias, which long survived him. The Department of History at Wits was his creation, and despite a brief reaction under his immediate successor, Professor Leo Fouché, the direction he gave it proved enduring. His contribution to South African historiography together with his inspirational teaching at Wits were cut short in 1933 when he resigned while on sabbatical in Britain, never to return to South Africa on a long-term basis and never to find another academic home as a historian. The academic career he had shaped for himself was prematurely over. In his autobiography Macmillan suggests there were two primary reasons for his resignation. The first was work related, that he was tiring of teaching and wished to focus on his research and writing. The second was political, that the University's leadership had been unsettled by his role as a public intellectual critical of government policy, and sought to silence him. This paper establishes that there was a third major reason, relating to his personal life. It indicates that the University's leadership likewise found his friendship, as a married man, with the young Mona Tweedie, daughter of the British Vice-Admiral in Simonstown, unsettling. The University's disquiet on the personal as well as the political fronts were central to Macmillan's decision to resign. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Shaped as much by fractures, uncertainties and changes in contemporary social and political life, the current dilapidation of the South African national archival system is a more complex problem than simply a matter of inefficiency and bias. The paper argues that any attempts to analyse its current situation with a view to changing it, or indeed to understand in any situation why some things are preserved in certain forms, others in other forms, and some things not at all, requires us to recognise that archives, and other preservatory forms, are artefacts, with linked practices and processes, forged and continually refashioned in the crucible of ongoing social and political life. In mapping out something of the range and form of contemporary engagements with inherited and newly collected materials about the past, looking at how they were, and are, entered into the record, and how those records change over time, the essay raises questions about the roles of archives and archive-like activities in contemporary, and past, social life. Making and maintaining archives, and the host of practices with similar features, are things that people do, for complex reasons, and in a variety of ways. In refiguring archive-as-source as archive-as-subject, the essay recognises archives as simultaneously sites of storage and as practices in social life. The paper goes on to examine the range of methods which researchers from a variety of disciplines mobilise – historical, ethnographic, literary and biographical – in order to examine records as historical and contemporary subjects of investigation in their own right rather than simply as the storehouses of sources used by historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the exhibition practice of the Crypt Memory and Witness Centre of St George's Anglican Cathedral in a post-apartheid, democratic South Africa. Being neither a museum nor a gallery, the Centre's practice is informed by a particular, significant historic relationship between Christianity and exhibiting. The paper examines how the Crypt Centre engages with selective events from South Africa's sociopolitical past through exhibition practice, and to what ends. In particular, it examines the theme of bearing witness that surfaces at multiple levels in the exhibition content and process, considering its relationship with contemporary sociality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harnessing international support for the struggle against apartheid was a major aspect of international solidarity work, and publicising the atrocities of apartheid and the role of the liberation movements in combating apartheid was therefore a campaign priority. The British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) emphasised informing the British public about developments in South Africa as one of its core functions. In this article one aspect of this activity - namely the AAM's own publication, The Anti-Apartheid News - is analysed. A survey of the paper illustrates how the AAM used it to inform the British public about both apartheid and the African National Congress's (ANC) history and ideology. Through the newspaper the AAM was able to increase international solidarity with and support for the ANC. The article argues that the AAM therefore played a pivotal role in popularising the ANC and helping to establish its reputation internationally as the authentic representative of the people of South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic and social structure of small-town South Africa offers an interesting insight into part of the country's identity. Rooiberg is a tiny town in Limpopo that should not have survived into present day South Africa. The town was born and moulded out of a specific economic activity (tin mining) that governed most of the town's existence. When the tin mine around which the town was built was officially closed in 1994, this seriously jeopardised the future of the town. Yet, while almost all of the population left the town at that time, Rooiberg did nonetheless survive. This paper examines how and why. Through a research process involving the analysis of literature of company towns, as well as 27 interviews with inhabitants and ex-inhabitants of Rooiberg, this paper assesses both the location-specific and the generic reasons for Rooiberg's continued existence.1 Rooiberg's story, while in some ways a very specific case study, illuminates the importance of local, historical, and social factors in small-town urbanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Biennial Conference "Breaking Boundaries, Blurring Borders: The Changing Shape and Scope of Southern African Historical Studies" of the Southern African Historical Society held at the University of South Africa (Unisa). The author reflects on remarks by Society president Jane Carruthers on the topic of South African historiography and a lecture by historian William Beinart.

This article studies and explains why and how Al-Qalam was transformed, and by implication, how and why it became one of South Africa's 'alternative press' in the 1980s. Whilst these aspects form the bulk of this essay, it also takes into account the role Al-Qalam has continued to play in the post-apartheid era; in addition, it shows how it embraced new projects that make up an important part of the current socio-political landscape in South Africa and to what extent Al-Qalam responds to issues within a pervading neo-liberal context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to set out an agenda for historical research into the origins of unusually high violent crime levels in South Africa. It argues that there have been few attempts to link historical research on crime explicitly to the contemporary crisis. The paper reviews some of the more recent attempts at an explanation for our levels of violent crime but finds them generally lacking in historical depth. The apartheid legacy paradigm, while essential to the discussion, is inadequate for a number of reasons. Specific indigenous cultural and social practices need to be incorporated more systematically into future research. I argue that two areas of the discussion on crime need urgent historical attention: inequality and youth socialisation. I also suggest that historians need to do much more comparative work with countries that have experienced similar political and economic trajectories in order to understand which dimensions of our criminal legacy are specific to South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to identify the differences in memory between coloured and black residents of Blouvlei from the 1930s to the 1960s. In particular it looks at residents of an area in Retreat, Cape Town that no longer exists, known as Blouvlei. It examines how people's memories of the same period are vastly different owing to their different life experiences and how they relate those stories in the present. Blouvlei was declared a coloured area in the 1960s by the National Party government and therefore black people were forcibly removed from the area. The article aims to highlight the lives of 36 people and their views on life in Blouvlei and the various areas to which they were moved. More generally the paper looks at the importance of race, class and whether race is the determining signifier, or whether it is class that separates groups. It also identifies various times in Blouvlei's history, namely before, during, and after forced removals. The article therefore encompasses issues such as race, class, identity, life and politics in Blouvlei in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ADAM: A Paper for Bachelors was published by the Central News Agency in Johannesburg from December 1920 to February 1922. The initial print run was 1 400 but by the third issue this had increased to 7 500. Although little is known about the target audience, from the content of the magazine and tone of voice of the editorial team it seems as though the intended readership was white, middle- and upper middle-class men living in Johannesburg, with a taste for entertainment that inculcates a certain Englishness. The magazine was edited by J.E. Cross, an Englishman who sailed to South Africa from London in 1915 at the age of 22 and presumably started ADAM at 27. This article is not about the readers or editors of ADAM. It is an analysis of the magazine and in particular the February 1921 issue as a sample of the magazine's somewhat paradoxical gender politics. The article considers how ADAM employed the male gaze to gently undermine and ridicule the small steps being taken by women towards sexual liberation. I argue that while ADAM represents single women as independent, confident and modern, it also sexualises this 'empowerment' for a heterosexual, male audience. In particular, it uses subtle mockery to undermine whatever authority and agency women are afforded on its pages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1990 a rich body of autobiographical writing and interview testimony together with freshly available archival materials can support an assessment of the role played by South African communists in anti-apartheid opposition during the 1950s. Numbering only a few hundred, communists were very influential in leadership positions in the Congress Alliance and shaped programmes and actions in accordance with their own strategy of a united front. This article explores the ways on which the party established its own organisational structures as well as considering the extent and impact of its wider concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his description of the men of Natal's volunteer corps who fought against the Hlubi at Bushman's Pass in 1873, Jeff Guy contended that Natal's volunteers attempted ‘to demonstrate their abilities as men of the frontier and […] to defend the more vulnerable’. This paper will attempt to clarify Guy's argument that volunteering was ‘a feature of settler society’. Acting as a continuation of the military traditions and systems that were gaining popularity in Britain, volunteering became a means through which the white citizens of Natal were able to take part in the protection of the colony while remaining viable members of the colonial civilian community. Because of their consistent and sizable place within the white colonial community and the growing concerns for colonial violence in Natal, the volunteers became the idealised form of white everyman's contributions to the protection of the colonial state. The defence and security of the colonial state, in the eyes of many within Natal, rested on the ‘gallant’ men of the volunteer corps. However, the practicality of this assumption, though largely unfounded, still resulted in the volunteer corps holding an important place within the colonial settler consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the University of Botswana (UB) branded itself among other things by changing its original and historical logo in response to severe competition for students. The logo had been made in 1983 by members of public and reflected sacrifices the population had made through contributions of cows for construction of the university in 1976. The new logo, which UB introduced in 2008, had features of the old one but in abstract form. However, this elicited strong disapproval in some quarters as people demanded restoration of the original logo which the university did in mid-2014. This paper argues that engaging members of public as opposed to foreign professional consultants in the conceptualisation of a symbol for a public institution seems to have significantly contributed to national pride and a sense of public ownership of the symbol. Change to the symbol for corporate survival was perceived as desecration of national historical heritage and was resisted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the Durban Bantu Child Welfare Society (DBCWS) came to be established by African women in Durban in the early years of public political activity by African women in Durban and its relationship to African women's welfare societies (the Durban Bantu Women's Society and the Daughters of Africa) also established in the 1930s. I consider kholwa (African, mission-educated) women's interaction with the local state and also with white liberal segregationists who were participating in a national turn towards the establishment of ‘Non-European’ child welfare societies in South Africa. The DBCWS began its work in the context of fierce opposition, particularly by kholwa women, to the promulgation of new pass law regulations aimed at controlling African women's movements into Durban. In inter-war Durban, ‘Native Welfare’ first referred to control of African male leisure time and focused primarily on migrant labourers. By the end of the 1930s the DBCWS worked with officials of the Durban Town Council (DTC) and with the Durban Children's Court. The state provided reluctant and limited assistance to impoverished African families, whilst also continuing to enforce the rule of segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a critical analysis of the ANC’s armed struggle. The core argument advanced is that the turn to armed struggle marked a strategic turn away from the masses, which was born out of a historical failure to organise and mobilise around the actual and potential militancy of the working/poor masses. The subsequent externalisation of the ANC, it alliance partners and MK situated the foundation of the liberation struggle, both in content and context, outside the mass of the movement’s own constituency. The political and practical result was that the armed struggle was prosecuted with minimal involvement of the oppressed sectors of the population, effectively side-lining specific working class struggle and organisation. In turn, armed struggle increasingly became largely an armed propaganda exercise; a pressure tactic for a larger accommodationist strategy that by necessity had to rely on international conditions and actors for sustenance. This trajectory was cemented by the specific lack of coordination of political and military aspects of the struggle which cumulatively meant that the way in which the ANC prosecuted the armed struggle ensured there would be no insurrectionary seizure of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The road and rail pipelines operated by the liberation movements in Bechuanaland (Botswana) were known as the ‘road to freedom’. An aerial pipeline enabled high value South African political refugees and freedom fighters to move through the Protectorate as fast as possible. A mini-airline called Bechuanaland Air Safaris, it was financed by Bechuanaland’s government and a local millionaire businessman. Set up to support the needs of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), this air bridge enabled close surveillance of potential security issues within Bechuanaland by the SIS, whilst simultaneously assisting organisations that would one day gain political power. This made it a key intelligence target for South Africa’s security establishment, who penetrated this operation. Through surveillance and informants, notably Captain Herbert Bartaune, the company director and operator of Bechuanaland Air Safaris, they interdicted the activities of key personnel involved in liberation struggle operations. This paper examines this air bridge, some of its key personnel, surveillance operations by the South African Police, counter-intelligence actions by the British authorities connected to supporting this pipeline and its use by prominent leaders, including Joe Matthews, Nelson Mandela, Michael Dingake and Patrick Duncan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns eight women's testimonies produced over a period of some 50 years, which describe a protest about meat rations at Brandfort concentration camp in November 1901, during the 1899–1902 South African War. The focus here is not the ‘event itself’, which cannot now be recovered except in its archival or documentary forms, but on the subsequent re/telling of this incident, and on the politicised, (proto-) nationalist content and tone of the Brandfort protest testimonies. While proto-nationalism is present from the earliest extant testimony, the development of this is traced over time, showing how the later testimonies evince a strongly triumphalist nationalist tone. The retrospectively inscribed testimonies of the protest are examined to show how, over time, the story of the Brandfort protest became universalised, retold well away from specificities of time and place. If nationalism depends on the creation of ‘stories that find their place’, then it was partly through the construction and repetition of what Van Heyningen has called ‘costly mythologies’ about women's concentration camp experiences that Afrikaner national unity was achieved. This also supports Bradford’s important claim that the 1899–1902 war regendered Afrikaner nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper sets out to portray how very ordinary people could be drawn into the struggle and play significant roles based on stances more rooted in common decency and morality than in the writings of Marx and Lenin. Ivan Schermbrucker was a member of the Central Committee of the SACP. It was he who recruited Walter Sisulu (among others) into membership of the Party. Detained under the 90 day legislation, he was tortured, and was the subject of an infamous appeal court decision. This established a precedent for limiting the rights of courts to call detainees to testify on the conditions under which they were being held. He was subsequently tried and imprisoned under the Suppression of Communism Act. To all intents and purposes, his wife, Lesley, was a ‘typical’ middle-class South African housewife. She loved entertaining, swimming, playing tennis and going to restaurants, movies and plays. What was less apparent was that she, too, was an ardent communist and served on the Central Committee. She would also be jailed for her refusal to testify against Bram Fischer and having assisted in hiding him during his ‘Red Pimpernel’ period. Neither Ivan nor Lesley was a theoretician. Neither had a university education. Both came from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Their commitment to communism, and to the SACP, grew directly out of the firm conviction that South African society was deeply dysfunctional and that the only fair solution lay in the achievement of a classless, non-racist, society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An earlier version of this paper was delivered as a keynote address at the outset of a conference on ‘The Golden Age of Apartheid’. That talk sought to set a tone for the conference by focusing on contradictions in the racial and cultural logic of Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, whose political interventions dominated events and reconfigured society during the period of apartheid's golden age. While ‘separate development’ presented an apparently moral (if anthropologically questionable) ‘separate cultures’ argument for ‘national development’, it was always fundamentally undercut by racist assumptions of apartheid. This seems to have been true of Verwoerd’s personal attitudes as well as his political initiatives at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Second World War (1939–1945), black South Africans displayed apathetic attitude and disloyal tendencies towards government. They were disillusioned with the racially induced social, economic and political discrimination policies of the state. Authorities established systems and exploited mass communication platforms such as the print media, radio and films to disseminate propaganda towards blacks. The intended objectives were to combat apathy and to mobilise black loyalty and cooperation during the war. This article focuses on state propaganda towards blacks against the backdrop of structural constraints and inherent inconsistencies pertaining to the pursuit of justice, freedom and democracy abroad, and a segregated political framework within the country. It commences with a brief overview of South Africa's political dynamics associated with the outbreak of the war, then outlines the government's propaganda policy and rationale. Thereafter, it describes the institutional arrangements to facilitate propaganda dissemination, followed by an analysis of the different measures, media platforms, contents and main themes, including the responses of blacks to propaganda. The article seeks to illustrate how propaganda was conducted to mobilise black opinion and support, and the extent of its effectiveness and limitations within the context of divisions and discriminatory policies and practices in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a prelude to the reconsideration of the writing life and contribution of an African intellectual and nationalist who, studiously and courageously, subjected the concepts of race, culture and nationalism to critical evaluation. Molema's engagement with popular politics began after his return from years of studying medicine at Glasgow University. However, from 1912 to 1921, he engaged with the history of South Africa intellectually, only later producing essays and speeches for more popular audiences. His study of black South Africans, The Bantu Past and Present (1920) challenged racist interpretations of the past, while also taking subtle aim at racism in Scotland during and after World War I. The text is multi-layered, moving from first- to third-person narration, which suggests that the author's own identity was subtly entangled with this project. In the Preface, the young writer defines his writing identity, revealing that the book's purpose is historical, ethnographical and, implicitly, nationalist. This paper examines the Preface's crucial role in defining the author's writing identity as nationalist and intellectual. Molema used his standpoint knowledge as ‘a member of the race’ whose story he ‘unfold[ed] to the world’ to begin the task of carefully reclaiming black history from the margins of South African cultural life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on Sarojini Naidu's noteworthy 1924 visit to South Africa. She was the first high profile Indian to visit after the departure of Mohandas K. Gandhi in 1914. Her visit also highlighted that Indian political figures' visits to colonies often perpetuated a reliance on India for political redress. Naidu stood out because, even though she came as Gandhi's emissary, she went well beyond him in calling for a broad-based black alliance against white minority rule. She also emphasised that Indians in South Africa were national citizens and owed their allegiance to their adopted home. By emphasising the ‘South Africanness’ of Indians, she put paid to Gandhi's idea of imperial citizenship transcending the nation-state. Moreover, she was highly critical of Empire. The question is whether Naidu's visit should be understood within a particular historical trajectory or as the individual actions of an exceptional woman, feminist, and leader. This paper argues that she reflected changes in attitudes towards race in the colonies as well as feelings in India, including Gandhi's, of disillusionment with Empire. Rather than seeing Naidu's position as that of an outstanding individual, it should be contextualised within a specific historical conjuncture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the apartheid era, a key component of the Nationalist government's strategy in combating both African nationalism and the perceived threat of communism was the compulsory conscription of young white men into the South African Defence Force (SADF) between 1968 and 1993. Conscription was one relatively small component of a system in which all South Africans' lives were profoundly affected by the political domain's imposition of racial, class and gender stratifications. This paper is based on ongoing research into the psychosocial legacies of the apartheid wars. It explores how some of the burgeoning publications about this period of South African history reflect the intrapersonal legacies and psychological stresses that were caused by the social and political discourses of this context. A particular focus in this discussion is the way in which the social and political fracturings that characterised South African society during the apartheid era have been mirrored in the psychosocial constructs that significantly shaped some conscripts' lives, both at the time and in the post-apartheid context, and continue to influence current South African society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to add to our understanding of the cultural exchanges that took place between people of far away communities during the early twentieth century by looking at a few visiting Hindu missionaries in South Africa. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Hindu Arya Samaj missionaries began arriving in the country to propagate Hinduism and promote the reformist message. While the work of travelling Hindu missionaries in other places where Hindus settled in large numbers is well documented, much less is known about their work in South Africa. This paper tries to fill that void by looking at a few missionaries and the ideas that they tried to communicate in a particular period in the history of Hindus in South Africa. These missionaries who travelled across the globe and conducted lectures, formed religious institutions and worked with existing institutions in their attempts to propagate the Hindu religion, were very popular in South Africa and thousands attended the lectures that they conducted throughout the country. They were also crucial in motivating local Hindu leaders to establish bodies to unite the very heterogeneous group of Hindus and overcome sectional divisions. However, once they departed the enthusiasm shown soon disappeared and organisations that sought to unite Hindus fell into periods of inactivity. Looking at one period in which there were a few Hindu missionaries in the country together, this paper looks at the message that they tried to communicate, how they saw the position of Hindus and Indians in South Africa and address some of ways in which South Africans responded to the missionaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the legacy and impact of Bophuthatswana on South Africa's North-West province. Formed after the introduction of a unitary and democratic South Africa in 1994, the new province comprised most of the former ‘homeland’ and the western Transvaal, and a section of the far northern Cape. Following earlier contributions made by scholars dealing with the transition of the ‘homeland’, we pursue the views and analyses expressed there, principally by updating events since c. 1996. The paper investigates institutional and other legacies (in particular the notion of Pan-Tswanaism) that might have continued into the new dispensation, concluding that they have not impacted significantly or consistently on the province's inhabitants-save in one significant aspect. This, the kernel of our argument, is that Bophuthatswana was an artificial creation in many aspects, no more so than in its ethnic formulation as a ‘Pan-Tswana nation’. It was essentially a constellation of particularistic sub-ethnic social formations, held together by President Lucas Mangope, who exercised almost complete control over all aspects of these Tribal Authorities. Once his centralising power was removed, it opened the door for a reassertion of regionally-based ethnic affiliations. This was given impetus by the unparalleled expansion in mining in the province. Due to a number of curious historical anomalies, this mining takes place on land held by these groups with the ‘tribe’ as beneficiaries, under the overall leadership of a chief and a Traditional Council. The paper provides examples to illustrate how Mangope completely dominated the sub-ethnic groups within Bophuthatswana and conversely how their fortunes revived after his fall. There are some similarities with the Bophuthatswana regime in the systems of control exercised by these traditional authorities, but the comparison is also misleading. How the tensions created within these groups eventually play out remains to be seen. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper extends the debate on black-perceived white supernatural powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Eastern Cape, South Africa – a conversation initiated by Sean Redding, and developed further by Clifton Crais, whose main contention has been rebutted by Jeff Peires. Having briefly considered their claims, this paper examines, first, Western Mpondo perceptions of missionaries’ extraordinary or supernatural powers by focusing on a dream/vision of herdboys, and second, a claim that the amaHlubi in the Matatiele district ceased resistance to dipping owing to fear of white supernatural powers. Finally, I show how, in different ways from those described by Redding and Crais, these powers were perceived by various groups, and counteracted or exploited. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on a particular event in South African history and the ways in which the event is memorialised and remembered in post-apartheid South Africa. In her book History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa, Annie Coombes remarks, 'Women's vital role in the overthrow of the apartheid state has been sorely neglected in favour of a more monolithic representation of the liberation movement'.1 In this paper I consider Coombes's claim in relation to one specific attempt at public memorial after apartheid: the Monument to the Women of South Africa located at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. As the only commemorative site dedicated entirely to women's apartheid-era political efforts, the Monument to the Women of South Africa is of vital importance to the memory of women's role in the struggle; and yet a tension exists between the monument's presence as a feminist site, and its disappearance from public view: the Monument has essentially been invisible to the public for most of its existence, due in part to the inaccessibility of the Union Buildings. The Monument's invisibility not only trivialises the political significance of the Women's March, but is also a distressing act of post-apartheid erasure of women's political agency. I argue that when one considers this alongside the more widespread exclusion of women in post-apartheid commemorative sites, this not only has implications for the telling of history, but may very well affect women's ability, in Cynthia Enloe's words, to 'sustain an authentic political life in post-war periods'.2 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the factor(s) that caused students to demonstrate in 1976 through a case study of Bodibeng High School in Maokeng, Kroonstad, in the northern Free State. It shows the role of the teachers influenced by the Black Consciousness philosophy. The latter caused the behavioural change of some of the students at Bodibeng High School, from submissive to assertive, and political. Bodibeng High School, dating back to the 1940s, was one of the major centres of education for African students in the then Orange Free State (now Free State Province). It was one of the two day schools to offer matric as early as 1940, and the only one to have its matriculants writing the Joint Matriculation Board Examination in the mid 1960s, instead of the Bantu Education's senior certificate examinations. The school attracted an influx of students from all over the country, and some of the best teachers. There were three phases in the history of the school; each phase can be characterised in terms of the degree of its engagement in the political affairs of the day. The first, from the 1940s to 1950s, was one where teachers engaged both education and politics actively. The second, from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s was a period of apparent quiescence. The third, from the early 1970s, was characterised, once again, by active engagement of students and teachers with politics. In the latter period, the Black Consciousness philosophy was the major influence. This paper will show that the influence of the Black Consciousness philosophy and the role of the younger and politically conscious teachers played an important part in influencing some of the students at Bodibeng to demonstrate in 1976. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Biennial Conference "Breaking Boundaries, Blurring Borders: The Changing Shape and Scope of Southern African Historical Studies" of the South African Historical Society held at the University of South Africa (Unisa). The author suggests a kind of provincialism pervades South African historiography and advocates a focus on topics such as environmental history, heritage studies, and intellectual history.

This article identifies three sites of Islamic politics in South Africa for closer and critical analysis and appraisal. It proposes that Islamic politics inscribed an idealistic vision for the future. It promoted a utopian vision that was by definition unattainable. Secondly, the paper argues that Islamic politics was preoccupied with representation, a relentless and somewhat impossible task of representing Islam and Muslims in the public. Utopia and perfect representation, then, were the chimeral quests of Islamic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of apartheid ‘political corruption’ have employed universal definitions which generate normative judgements rather than historical understanding of changing practices and derive measures of corruption from the macro topography of state and society not their actual micro practices. An alternative historical approach recognises political corruption as contingent and requiring situated micro readings to reveal the shifting moral economy of power. This essay offers just such a reading from the inshore fisheries and the early apartheid period (pre-1966) when the extant scholarly literature agrees that ‘political corruption’ was absent. It traces the endeavours of Dawid Johannes Louw ‘Dawie’ Walters to secure a lobster export licence for himself over the decade 1955–1964 and argues that his quixotic quest engineered a key shift in state policy to break the inherited Anglo-Jewish monopoly in the fisheries. Walters’ lack of education, naiveté and alcoholism ensured that others picked the fruits of his labours, but here too the prevailing moral economy of volkskapitalisme determined who those beneficiaries were. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ideologues responsible for the construction of hegemonic Afrikaner identity during the era that saw the rise (and fall) of apartheid, did so by painstakingly weaving Afrikaner nationalist ideology into the fabric of Afrikaner society. This had a crucial impact on Afrikaner culture, including the sphere of popular Afrikaans music. The majority of Afrikaans artists did not resist these efforts by apartheid's cultural entrepreneurs, but not all. Some preferred local indigenous music styles of the ‘racial other’ over European trends at a time of increasing racial segregation and complex identity politics. Furthermore, during this time commercial Afrikaans music lost its legitimacy among Afrikaner youths, who preferred to listen to English rock and pop hits from abroad. This preference did not, however, lead to noteworthy anti-establishment sentiments until 1979 when a group of Afrikaans music artists started to question the non-confrontational, compliant mainstream Afrikaans pop. This resonated with a wider circle of critical Afrikaner voices and led to new genres in Afrikaans music. This paper explores the dominant narratives present in the construction of Afrikaner identities by looking at examples of compliance and resistance in popular, or commercial, Afrikaans music from 1956 to 1979. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the ways of studying life-history. Its methodology, as indicated here, cannot claim to produce complete and unvarnished life-histories. The interview method employed here acknowledged the autonomy and sensitivity of narrators. The preparation of transcripts only refracted through our empathetic professional approach. A two-pronged comparative reading of oral accounts – against each other and against other literature – reveals how the meaning lying behind and within these life-histories is equally displayed through significant omission, silences, conflicting information and imaginative interpretations. The imaginative invention seen in the narrators' accounts owed, we suggest, not necessarily to free choices made by individuals for creative and imaginative reconciliation with the past and present experiences (contra Portelli 1991). Nor did the collective cultural processes determine it (contra Passerini 2011). The act of remembering by an individual engages with the collective historic cultural processes and the institutional re-fashioning of public memory (after Green 2004; Field 2008). Our informants' desires and dreams were in continual negotiation with the new family-building movement, and the effect of a measure of disenchantment with the dispensation of the current multiracial democratic government, and that of the hegemonic memory of collective struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When it appeared in 1983, Black Politics in South Africa offered a revised interpretation of developments in black South African politics in the 1950s and early 1960s. In comparison to existing academic and popular writing on this topic, Black Politics proposed that ANC-led resistance had much less organisational coherence than represented conventionally and that through the decade political opposition to apartheid would be shaped mainly by local dynamics and opportunities. This argument led to the exploration of different data sets and allowed new insights, in particular in showing how political organisations recruited among very specific social groups and in indicating the ways in which they were shaped by ‘inherent’ ideas or folk beliefs. A second section of the paper considers ways in which, if Black Politics were to be written afresh, the methodology and emphases might change in the light of fresh evidence and as a consequence of ANC's subsequent development up to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why did the African National Congress (ANC) appear to embrace violence in 1961? Can one say it did so? Was the Communist Party responsible behind the scenes? What did the ‘turn to violence’ mean? With a plethora of new sources and reminiscences emerging, one can begin to craft a set of answers. Communists as Communists did not determine the timing of the ANC's embrace of MK (Umkhonto we-Sizwe, ‘Spear of the Nation’). The ANC was a large member-based organisation which could not nimbly shift in any direction. During the state's repressive and punitive measures in 1960–1962, however, a group of Communist African men from within the ANC hierarchy made use of the unsettled nature of political life to commit the ANC to a new path. They interacted intensively, together with non-African Communists, in the Treason Trial (1956–1961), and then in jail during the 1960 ‘State of Emergency’. Their aim was revolution. Preeminent among them was Nelson Mandela. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]