Editor as Mediator: A Profile of Albert Cartwright in Early Twentieth Century South Africa

This chapter examines the politics of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Africa. It considers the South African War and itsrole in shaping modern South Africa through the postwar program of reconstruction under the watch of Milner’s kindergarten, in the context of the British imperial project. Factors that led to the war are outlined, including the role of Randlords, followed by a discussion of the reconciliation between the British and the Boers at the expense of black South Africans, the standoff between Smuts and Gandhi, reconstruction, segregation, the marginalization of black South Africans, and the genesis of organized black resistance to white minority rule under which union was forged.

Early twentieth-century South Africa was a composite society—“part settler state and part African colony … includ[ing] diverse recently conquered African polities as well as a divided white population.” Mining industrialization and British imperialism, particularly after the discovery of substantial gold deposits and the founding of Johannesburg in 1886, put pressure on southern African peoples and states to function as an integrated labor market, and on their leaders to submit to an overarching political authority. These developmental and administrative rationalizing forces were given greater scope in the years following the South African War of 1899 to 1902, especially in the defeated Boer republics of the interior. Renamed the Transvaal and Orange River Colonies, these territories were initially under the direct rule of British High Commissioner Alfred Milner. They took the lead in a process of state-building that continued well beyond their political amalgamation with the coastal colonies of the Cape and Natal to form the Union of South Africa in 1910. It has been argued that this institutional reconstruction left South Africa with “a modern civil service, with controls and an information-gathering capacity sophisticated enough to … make the competence, helpfulness, and honesty of individual state officials relatively less crucial.”

This paper elucidates the material, spatial, social and infrastructural contexts of reading in early twentieth century South Africa. It adds to a growing body of work on reading practices and patterns of book consumption by drawing attention to the neglected question of the “where of reading” – the physical contexts and settings of reading and the ways in which the organisation of space and the allocation of resources impacted on particular reading experiences and habits. The article also takes up a related set of questions pertaining to the access of books, the nature of specific reading encounters, the social relations that developed in these contexts and the reading practices that ensued. It focuses in detail on the contexts of reading which developed around the various “Non-European” reading initiatives and advances the concepts of the “poor library” and “fugitive reading” in order to describe both the rudimentary and improvisational nature of black reading spaces at this time and the various practices of tactical, opportunistic and itinerant reading which arose in response. Finally, it draws attention to the sociable, convivial and inherently public nature of black reading encounters and highlights a pervasive practice of mediated reading in which book interests were shared and encouraged.

This article examines Mohandas Gandhi’s writing on Indian masculinity in early twentieth-century South Africa which was a period of his life that was seminal for his political career. The author explores how, in the context of being removed from many personal and professional constraints that he encountered in India, Gandhi fashioned prescriptions that would transform the emasculated, effete and cowardly Indian man constructed by colonial discourses in nineteenth-century British India. Building on the scholarly literature pertaining to Gandhian bodily ascesis, I argue that Gandhi held the belief that Indian men would be able to face the hazards of anticolonial satyagraha once their masculinity had been restored, for which various practices of military training were indispensable. I suggest that Gandhi attempted to catalyse somatic and moral reform by encouraging South African Indian men to serve in the British army during the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) and the Zulu Rebellion (1906). I explain how Gandhi viewed military service as a transformative disciplinary experience that would afford Indian men with the ability to endure physical duress, bodily strength and, lastly, knowledge in the use of arms. I illustrate how military service ultimately generated a masculine Indian subject, according to Gandhi, one who possessed mastery over his bodily senses, moral fortitude and fearlessness.

The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War. By Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xv, 379. $60.00. Ronald Hyam is emeritus reader in imperial history, University of Cambridge. Peter Henshaw studied under Hyam at Cambridge and is now a research professor in history at the University of Western Ontario. They have both been actively involved in the massive Documents at the End of Empire Project and have published widely on imperial and South African history. Much of the information presented here is not new, as many chapters were previously published in professional journals or books. Hyam and Henshaw have selected from their various writings, however, to provide a connected narrative and analysis of relations between Britain and South Africa from 1895 to 1961. Hyam and Henshaw's approach is limited in two ways not reflected in their title. First, the authors' data comes principally from government archives and therefore mainly presents the view of British-South African relations. This is a study of imperial and Commonwealth history as much as of South African history. Second, by ending in 1961, when South Africa left the Commonwealth and became a republic, their study seems incomplete. In Chapter 12, the authors attempt to provide some South African perspective by using South African newspaper articles to show how South Africans viewed Britain from 1948 to 1961. They devote the last chapter to British reactions to apartheid, 1948-1994, which is again based primarily on newspaper articles. They end with a short Epilogue that looks at events surrounding the collapse of apartheid and South Africa's return to the Commonwealth. Both the last two chapters and the Epilogue are interesting but none are of the same quality or depth as the rest of the book. Since the first permanently occupied the Cape in the early 1800s relations between the two major white populations, and Afrikaners, have been tenuous at best and deadly at their worse, as during the South African War. Indeed, during the first half of the twentieth century, when white South Africans spoke of race relations, they were referring to relations between and Afrikaners, rather than the more obvious black and white relations. And yet, white fear of the swart gevaar (black peril) of black rule and the loss of white economic privilege in South Africa united both peoples and also significantly influenced relations between South Africa and Great Britain. Hyam and Henshaw begin their work with a historiographical essay, however, that challenges the view that economic interests alone shaped imperial policy toward South Africa, as has been the position of revisionist historians, particularly Marxists, since the 1960s. …

The study compared how the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) financial scandal was framed in English and Chinese online newspapers published in Malaysia. Content analysis was conducted for 200 articles for two English newspapers (The Star, 50; Malaysiakini English, 50) and two Chinese newspapers (Sin Chew Daily, 50; Malaysiakini Chinese, 50). The four newspapers were similar in the reliance on episodic framing and government sources of information, and the valence of the articles. Government sources is the opinion leader in 1MDB events but space is given to the voices of the opposition, foreign entities and the public. The English newspapers and Malaysiakini Chinese have more articles with a positive valence (46%-56%) in favour of investigations to resolve the financial corruption case and about 31% of the articles had a negative valence. However, Sin Chew Daily is more critical of the investigations than the other three newspapers. There are significant differences among the newspapers in frame dimensions of news headlines. The responsibility frame is used in close to 80% of the 1MDB articles in the Chinese newspapers but only in 40%-50% of the 1MDB articles in the English newspapers. Instead the English newspapers highlight the economic consequences of 1MDB and the conflict between individuals and groups, as well as contradictions between rumour and fact. The findings suggest that framing of controversial high-profile financial corruption case may differ due to the readership of the English and Chinese newspapers. Keywords: 1MDB, framing, financial scandal, mainstream newspapers, alternative newspapers.

Transnational governmentality and the ‘poor white’ in early twentieth century South Africa

The South African War (1899-1902, or called Anglo-Boer War or Boer War), which was a war between the British Empire and two Boer nations, was one of the greatest wars in Southern African History. The British Empire eventually conquered the Republic of South Africa (also known as Transvaal) and the Orange Free State in 1902. The South African War was an experiment of new weapons such as Cartridge Rifle, Smokeless Powder, Quick Firing Gun and Maxim Gun, which were equipped by the British Army and the Boer Commando. Although the British Army has the newest weapons, they can not oppose against the two Boer nations with old military theories at the beginning of the war. The British Army was defeated in Magersfontein, Stormberg and Colenso at the “Black Week” in December 1899, which shocked the British Army and the British Empire. For the British Empire, military reform was the most primary issue after the war. The Boer tactic not only impacted British military theories, but also impacted military theories of Europe. The South African War was a cruel war in the nineteenth century, especially for the damage of civilians. About 26,370 civilians died in Concentrate Camp, which was uncommon in nineteen century war. It became a public issue at that time. The leader of Liberal Party, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, claimed that Lord Kitchener’s military policy was a “Method of Barbarism”. Humanity also emerged from the South African War which resulted in the Hague Convention and the Geneva Convention. By the limitations of Hague Conventions, Dum Dum bullet can not be used in South African War. The treatment of war prisoners was also improved by the Geneva Convention. It was an achievement of humanity in the South African War.

What do cinema houses have to tell us about the experience of collective leisure in early twentieth-century South Africa? This article considers how the cinema house points to unprecedented social conditions that allowed the emergence of new publics. Drawing on scholarship on the development of cinema in South Africa, the article considers how the historical transformations through which the cinema has passed since the 1910s suggest attempts to domesticate the space of projection of the cinema as well as the formation of new cinema audiences. Diverging from readings of the cinema in South Africa that focus on film, the article considers how the cinema house is inscribed in this scholarship as an evocative cipher of incipient publics and as a metaphor for the containment of a new public sphere during the periods of segregation and Apartheid. While today the cinema house no longer occupies the place it once did, the paper concludes with a reflection on recent recreations of the space of the cinema in two South African art installations. The restaging of these cinemas offers a way into the making of a collective space and the kinds of distinct publics they forged.

Reviewed by: The Founders: The origins of the ANC and the struggle for democracy in South Africa by Andre Odendaal Melissa Armstrong The Founders: The origins of the ANC and the struggle for democracy in South Africa By Andre Odendaal. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. The Founders argues that the character and form of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), established in 1912, was fortified and refined by more than fifty years of African participation in constitutional politics and protest. The notion that the ANC had deep intellectual roots is not likely to be new to scholars of South Africa, however the detailed cataloguing of the lives, writings, and ideas of groups and individuals make Odendaal’s work an important contribution. The author makes extensive use of both English and Xhosa newspapers printed prior to 1912. With meticulous precision and detail, he uses these sources to trace the political ideas and debates considered by Western-educated African men. Odendaal recognizes and articulates the subtle changes and divisions that occur within the political resistance formed by mission-educated Africans between 1860 and 1912. In order to emphasize these changes, The Founders is divided into four roughly chronological sections. In the first section, the author highlights the beginnings of organized African constitutional debate and political resistance between 1860 and the late 1880s. The rise of African constitutional challenge to the colonial regime started in the Eastern Cape and was linked to the early establishment of missionary schools in the region as well as the military devastation suffered by the Xhosa and the Zulu in 1856–57 and 1878 respectively. Africans educated by missionary institutions—like Tiyo Soga—voiced their political views conservatively, optimistic that processes of education and assimilation would bring equal rights to Black and White men in South Africa. However, Western-educated Africans were not made the legal equals of their White counterparts and by the late 1870s and early 1880s, African intellectuals grew more radical in their political approach. The main body of the work examines the process by which African political resistance moved from the confines of the Eastern Cape to grow into a nationally unified movement that represented African rights and freedoms. The author highlights two historical developments that initially enabled African constitutional politics to gain a wider regional base. First, the discovery of diamonds and gold in the South African interior and the subsequent colonial desire to control African labor created new spaces in which resistance could form. Second, the rise of the religious separatist movement, Ethiopianism, became an outlet for nascent political expression; while not a lasting movement, the separatist church used Christian values to challenge colonial power and oppression. At the turn of the century, with budding political dissention growing in the South African interior, the South African war and its aftermath became crucial to the growth of unified African political expression. Most politically involved African men sided with the British war effort, believing the British to be the champions of equal rights for Africans. However, after the British victory in 1902, the political cause for equality and African rights was not extended in the former Boer Republics. The disenchantment with the British corresponded to the growth in political organizations that aimed at encouraging African awareness and action in securing equal rights. Editors of African newspapers in the first decade of the twentieth century were quick to provide political commentary on the implications of a South African federation. Furthermore, South African political organizations debated how best to respond to the growing Boer-Briton colonial alliance forming against African political interests. When the Union in 1910 provided neither direct political representation for Africans nor any hope for Black assimilation, the educated elite that had been driving African constitutional politics for the past fifty years were able to finally bridge regional boundaries, coordinate with traditional chiefs, and mobilize a united African front. In 1912, African representatives from across South Africa met and together formed the South African National Congress. Odendaal’s research on the political precursors to the ANC has benefited from thirty-five years of consideration. As stated in his introduction, The Founders is a compilation of Odendaal’s master’s thesis “The...

This article employs a critical Black Atlantic frame to re-examine, re-evaluate and reinterpret the historical memory of the Black Peril in South Africa. It exposes the Black Peril as a wide-ranging racist discourse that demonised Black men as potential rapists of white women. This racist narrative was vehemently expressed in early twentieth-century South Africa. A key finding of this work is that the Black Peril was a highly successful racist campaign because it not only led to the criminalisation of interracial sex between Black men and white women but was also used to justify racist laws that had far-reaching effects on social relations in the broader society – eventually yielding a white supremacist state (apartheid) – which proceeded to use the Black Peril discourse to mobilise an aggressive racialisation process for both whites and Blacks.

The South African Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was a significant source of sex education for white youth in particular, and encouraged adults to equip their children with the information that would prepare them for marriage and parenthood. This article argues that while much of the WCTU’s interest in sex education was informed by eugenic anxieties about the health of the new Union of South Africa, the organization’s archive can also be read for evidence of mothers’ reasons for seeking sex education. It suggests there was a heightened demand for sex education in the 1910s–1930s that was driven, in part, by women’s desire to prepare their daughters for adulthood in a rapidly changing society. Analysis of the WCTU’s promotional periodical The White Ribbon (including the rhetoric used by its leadership) is complemented here by an examination of local branch committee minutes and by a quantitative and qualitative study of the educational materials that the organization distributed across South Africa.

This article analyses the intersection between cosmopolitanism and racist ideologies in the faith healing practices of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. Originally from Illinois, USA, this organization was the period's most influential divine healing group. Black and white members, under the leadership of the charismatic John Alexander Dowie, eschewed medical assistance and proclaimed God's power to heal physical affliction. In affirming the deity's capacity to remake human bodies, church members also insisted that God could refashion biological race into a capacious spiritual ethnicity: a global human race they referred to as the “Adamic” race. Zionist universalist teachings were adopted by dispossessed and newly urbanized Boer ex-farmers in Johannesburg, Transvaal, before spreading to the soldiers of the British regiments recently arrived to fight the Boer states in the war of 1899–1902. Zionism equipped these estranged white “races” with a vocabulary to articulate political reconciliation and a precarious unity. But divine healing was most enthusiastically received among the Transvaal's rural Africans. Amidst the period's hardening segregation, Africans seized upon divine healing's innovative racial teachings, but both Boers and Africans found disappointment amid Zion's cosmopolitan promises. Boers were marginalized within the new racial regimes of the Edwardian empire in South Africa, and white South Africans had always been ambivalent about divine healing's incorporations of black Africans into a unitary race. This early history of Zionism in the Transvaal reveals the constriction of cosmopolitan aspirations amidst fast-narrowing horizons of race, nation, and empire in early twentieth-century South Africa.

This article provides a corrective to recent scholarship surrounding modern migration control, which has emphasised the shared origins of the legal systems created to control migration in the us, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The article demonstrates that the implementation of migration controls in British colonies was arbitrary. It uses the personal papers of Clarence Wilfred Cousins, the Chief Immigration Officer in the Cape, then South Africa (1905–1922), to demonstrate the role of frontier guards in shaping migration experiences. The article highlights the uses and limitations of using ‘ritual’ to understand migration control and how border spaces are experienced.

In this paper I trace knowledge flows between South Africa and the United States in the early twentieth century. I analyse these flows as parts within a broader white supremacist political project and technology of power. Focusing on the early Union period from the 1910s to the 1930s, I explore links, networks and exchanges within and across imperial and colonial spaces that spanned the Atlantic. These include institutional, financial, intellectual and personal relationships and networks between philanthropic institutions, race relations ‘experts’ and social scientists. In particular, I focus on the South African Institute of Race Relations’ role in importing education models from the American South and shaping narratives around ‘native education’ in South Africa. In this case, positivist science functioned to instil and root a racial order. I argue that attending to the circulation and entanglement of ideas between these global spheres offers new insight into the genealogy of anthropological and social scientific knowledge during the historical conjuncture of the Union period.