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Thomas N. Huffman. 2007. Handbook of the Iron Age. The Archaeology of Pre-Colonial Farming Communities in Southern Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Natalie Swanepoel, Am...

Milton Shain and Richard Mendelsohn (eds), Memories, Realities and Dreams. Aspects of the South African Jewish Experience (Johannesburg and Cape Town, Jonathan Ball Publishers, n.d. [2002]), 234 pp...

There can be few more vital issues confronting Southern Africa than the pandemic of HIV and AIDS currently ravaging the sub-continent. The paper is an attempt to place the spread of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa in general and South Africa in particular in both its historical and social context. Yet what can an historian say about the AIDS pandemic? Our normal recourse is to look to the historians for the lessons of history both in order to see the epidemic in some kind of perspective and to learn from past policy prescriptions. But the lessons of history are not always so easily read. Humanity has rarely learnt from them and when it has it has frequently learnt the wrong lessons. And while there have been many epidemics in history none has had quite the same configuration as the last. Nevertheless I think history gives us a way of looking at the present. There are no simple answers but the value of historical analogy in challenging dominant preconceptions locating contemporary reactions in context and enabling a sense of perspective remains important. (excerpt)

The two volumes of Jean and John Comaroff's Of Revelation and Revolution (RR) are a tour de force, and raise major questions about the nature of consciousness and the impact of modernity over the past two centuries. Despite their apparently narrow focus on missionaries among the southern Tswana, these are perhaps the most important issues to confront historians of the modern world. Yet historians of mission Christianity in South Africa have been slow to appreciate and incorporate their work. This comment argues that both in their assertion that the colonization of consciousness as 'false consciousness' (Bredekamp and Ross 1995) and in their accusation that the Comaroffs have undermined notions of African agency (Peel 1992; Ranger 1997), critics have misconstrued the nature of their project. It ends however by asserting that the connections between consent and coercion in the making of colonial consciousness are somewhat underplayed in their text, and by suggesting at the same time that the role that missi...

(1983). Ruth first: a tribute. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 10, Women in Southern Africa, pp. 123-128.