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It is impossible in a short review to do justice to Elizabeth van Heyningen's multi-faceted account of the ‘concentration camps’ established by the British for white and black civilians caught up i...

I am grateful to the editors of the for allowing me to respond to Anne Digby's reply to my original criticism of her article on the National Health Services Commission (NHSC) in the South African H...

This article is a critique of and comment on two revisionist articles by Bill Freund and Anne Digby, which appeared in the SAHJ in June 2012. The authors maintain – from different standpoints – that the National Health Services Commission (NHSC or Gluckman Report) was doomed to failure, largely because of the failings of its Chairman, but for opposite reasons: Freund because he was not radical enough, Digby because he was too radical, and failed to carry the medical profession and the politicians with him. After outlining their arguments, this article contends that paradoxically these assessments both overemphasise and underestimate Gluckman, by failing to examine the role of Smuts, the Commissioners, the Department of Public Health, the views of leading members of the medical profession and the radicalism of many in the profession during the war. It highlights the international influences, especially ‘social medicine’, on the Commission, and explains why it selected the health centre at Pholela a...

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...

2006 marked the 25th anniversary of the recognition of the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus in Los Angeles as the cause of a disease which led to a series of baffling illnesses. It was first noticed in Kinshasa in 1975 then cut a swathe through the gay community of California and has swept with devastating effect across sub-Saharan Africa. If many uncertainties remain in the biomedical field the past quarter-century has seen quite remarkable advances in the scientific understanding of the constantly changing virus and in the development of therapeutic innovations. It has also seen the growth of a voluminous if often unsatisfactory social science literature. Much of this literature has been bedevilled with what Tony Barnett and Gwyn Prins have recently dubbed factoids - the intellectual viruses of quick and dirty synthetic studies - information based on soft opinions and a very narrow evidential base that get transformed into fact through constant citation especially in speculations about the diseases future impact. (excerpt)

Mining companies in South Africa have publicised their benevolent concern for the health of their workers. However, there are legal, practical and political reasons for this concern. This article is concerned with the historical roots and complex interactions between tuberculosis, respiratory disease and HIV/AIDS. While the incidence of such illnesses remains high or growing, the post-apartheid order may compel the mining houses to take their responsibilities for the long-term health of their workforces more seriously.

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...

(2000). The Role of the Humanities in Higher Education in South Africa. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 225-233.

In this paper, I revisit correspondence between Lily Moya, a fifteen-yearold school-girl growing up in the Eastern Cape, Mabel Palmer, a 74-year-old Fabian socialist and head of the 'Non-European' section of Natal University, and Sibusisiswe Makanya, the first Zulu woman to train as a social worker in the USA, which I first edited and published in 1987. Originally subtitled 'the separate worlds of three South African women', Not Either an Experimental Doll explored the divisions and misunderstandings between these three generations of South African women. Challenged by recent events in South Africa, in this paper I argue that the text can also be read as a story of the shared worlds of these three women, of the connections between them wrought by mission education and philanthropy, which in turn have provided some of the conditions of possibility for the country's negotiated settlement. In this narrative, the personal has indeed become the political. At the same time, I also argue that this micro-history ...

Isaac Williams Wauchope: Selected Writings 1874–1916 Edited and translated by Jeff Opland and Abner Nyamende Cape Town Van Riebeeck Society, Second Series no. 39, 2008 xxxvii+436 pp., ISBN: 0-95851...

The conflict that broke out on 10 October 1899, with the expiry of President Kruger's ultimatum to the British government, was South Africa's ‘Great War’, as important to the shaping of modern South Africa as was the American Civil War in the history of the United States. South African union, on the imperial agenda since the failure of confederation in the 1870s, was born in its ashes, as whites on both sides joined hands to shore up white supremacy against the background of rumours of revolt by restive Africans. If, at one level, it was a war about colonial self-determination – however limited – at another, it was also a war for the survival of a settler society, and about the credibility and international reputation of the British Empire, raising major moral issues of global importance. As the ‘biggest ever “small war” of late Victorian “new Imperialism”, the 1899–1902 conflagration has a recognised significance in world history’, not least because of the way it touched the fin de siecle European and American imagination.

In this chapter, the author reflects on her long personal association with the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL)/Council for Assisting Refugee Academics and many of its South African grantees. The academic refugees who came to the SPSL's notice in the 1960s, specially the South Africans, bent the ‘rules’ and signalled the new ways in which the SPSL was going to have to work in a very changed social and educational environment in Britain, and equally great changes in the nature of the academic refugees. Before the rise of Hitler, German scholars had advanced the frontiers of knowledge in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. And in many of these fields the Jews of Central Europe had played a crucial role. Increasingly from the 1960s, however, many of the refugee academics to the UK were from the so-called ‘third world’, especially Latin America and countries just emerging from colonialism in Africa. Academic refugees from South Africa formed something of a bridge between the old and the new. While most of the South African grantees were white and from institutions modelled on British universities, they were on the whole younger and less highly qualified than the earlier generation of grantees. The very small number of Africans assisted at this time were in fact far more eminent; significantly, however, they were the very first Africans to be assisted by the Society.

The contributions to this collection were originally given at a conference held at the British Academy on 3–4 December 2008, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Academic Assistance Council in 1933, later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (1936–98), and now the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics. This introductory chapter discusses the story of the SPSL and the flood of European refugee scholars and scientists from Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and their subsequent contribution to specific disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

In his introduction to the Ruskin symposium on History, the Nation and the Schools Raphael Samuel argues that the current debate about the national curriculum 'invites us to consider the components of national culture and the ways in which these have been reconstituted and fragmented over very long periods of time.'1 I must confess to sharing some of his concern with the imposition of the concept of 'national' history on what he terms 'the uncertainties which cluster round the idea of British nationality today' and one could add always have. Being engaged at the moment in writing (with Stanley Trapido) on the construction of black and white nationalisms in South Africa, I need little persuading as to the difficulties inherent in the concept of 'the nation' and the contradictory qualities of any so-called 6national identity'. I am also concerned by what seems to be a distorting insularity about the conception even if it is widened to include the 'Four nations' as Samuel goes on to do in his New Statesman and Society article, 'In search of Britain'.2 The notion that what we should teach children about is the construction of the British nation is, as Samuel points out, immensely problematic. I do not disagree with the need for an integrative framework, nor indeed for skills to be related to knowledge, nor even that there should be a core of such historical knowledge imparted, but what we want is something a lot more open-ended: how we come to be where we are now; how we construct and understand the most important issues facing this Britain now? How we see ourselves in the wider world? And surely in every sphere from race and gender relations and the constructions of law, order and violence in our society to the balance of payments deficit and our problematic and painful entry into Europe these issues cannot be understood outside of our understanding of Britain as an imperial and post imperial power. Yet I fear the addition of imperial history to the curriculum if it is imbued with the same Whig spirit that breathes through some of the recent debate. Nothing would be worse than a repetition of the high imperial visions of historic mission. This is perhaps no longer crudely expressed in terms of bringing civilization (for which read capitalist relations of production) to a backward world, though modernization and development theorists are often not far from this position; immanent in the mission was also as in the Whig interpretation of British history itself which we are now called upon to reinvent the notion that empire was about bringing the undeveloped peoples of the world the virtues of self-government and the Westminster parliamentary system as is shown by the judicious way in which Britain

Over the past twenty to thirty years, a silent revolution has occurred, and is still occurring, in human fertility across the region of southern Africa. In a number of countries - most notably, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Lesotho - there is hard evidence of really significant declines in fertility. In these countries, the total fertility rate (TFR)' today is around three to four children, and in the first three countries this represents a decline of 40-50 per cent from its peak level.2 The starting point for these changes varies: in South Africa, the transition among the black population was probably under way by the 1960s, although the most significant shift probably came in the 1980s;3 by comparison in Botswana it was not evident until the 1980s. In contrast with many other demographic variables, where national data are often unavailable or have to be treated with caution (e.g. for migration or rates of urban growth), reasonably reliable data on fertility are generally accessible for most southern African countries, although the official South African data only became available in the 1990s and remain the subject of debate. The changing aspect of fertility in southern Africa largely informed our decision to hold the workshop that was the precursor to this special issue. The 'fertility transition' was evidently happening to a greater or lesser degree across the region, but it was also clear that the cultural 'value' (rather than just the 'economic' value) of children remained high. The workshop attempted to explore the articulation of these two factors in contemporary southern Africa and focused on addressing fertility in its social context rather than in purely technical demographic terms. In general, the interplay between fertility, the adoption of contraceptives, education, income and the usual range of socio-economic factors is taken as read by the contributors to this volume - these issues are well addressed in the, often highly quantitative, demographic journals. Similarly, the significance of fertility in traditional cultures is also largely assumed, and is well covered in the ethnographic literature. Contributors were encouraged instead to explore the underlying reasons for fertility-related decisions and outcomes in the region and, rather than focus on the general causes of the trend to lower fertility, to examine those factors that result in variations in the downward regional trend. We were led in this direction by the belief that a close study of these regional variations would be a more illuminating way of understanding the complex

Over the last decade, historians have transformed our understanding of the racialised and gendered order of the asylum in southern Africa and of colonial psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Based on government and institutional documents, the writings of colonial psychiatrists, case histories and hospital registers, much of the small but growing body of recent work has been profoundly influenced by Foucault’s understanding of the nature of power in the clinic and the asylum, and has examined the contradictions between the universalist discourse of European medicine, colonial psychiatric theory, and colonial asylum practice.3 It has argued powerfully that in South Africa the discipline of psychiatry ‘played a key role in legitimising … [a range of] interventions’ to ‘confine, regulate and control disordered and deviant behaviour that might pose a threat to [white] society’.4 Through psychiatric classification, it is alleged that patients were stripped of their identity.5 At the same time, as racial, class and gender hierarchies were entrenched in the asylum by medical superintendents who were in the mainstream of contemporary scientific thinking, their theories of the undeveloped and primitive nature of ‘the native mind’ served to legitimate colonial racism.

Any traveller returning from South Africa since its first democratic elections in April 1994 is inevitably asked: ‘What has changed?’ And the paradox is that everything has changed and nothing has changed; equally paradoxically, in the short term stability has depended on the illusion among whites that nothing has really changed and among blacks that everything has changed.1 In the longer term, however, stability depends on whites accepting that far more needs to change than they have accepted so far, and among blacks that rather less can change than perhaps they have every right to hope for.