Colonial South Africa Research Articles

Material Culture and Colonial Networks in the Cape Colony and the Indian Ocean

ABSTRACT This review article considers four recent books published on the social and cultural history of the Cape Colony and Batavia, spanning a chronological period from the mid-seventeenth through to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The books address a wide range of topics and themes, but they all share an interest, to a greater or lesser extent, in the material culture of colonial societies and the networks of migration, political power and colonial knowledge. While Kerry Ward and Siegfried Huigen are concerned to expand the conceptual frontiers of the Cape Colony, Laura Mitchell and Yvonne Brink examine the nature of the settler society that first took root in the southwestern Cape and subsequently expanded to frontier regions. Each of these studies takes the study of colonialism in the Cape beyond the concerns of political economy that characterised the historiography of past decades. While there is much that is illuminating and fruitful in these approaches, this article also points to their limitations. Y. Brink, They Came to Stay: Discovering Meaning in the 18th Century Cape Country Dwelling. Stellenbosch: AFRICAN SUN MeDIA, 2008. ix + 220 pp. ISBN 978 1 920109 39 4. L.J. Mitchell, Belongings: Property and Identity in Colonial South Africa (An Exploration of Frontiers, 1725–c.1830. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. xv + 232 pp. ISBN 978 0 231 14252 6. S. Huigen, Knowledge and Colonialism: Eighteenth-Century Travellers in South Africa. Leiden: Brill, 2009. xii + 273 pp. ISBN 978 90 04 17743 7. K. Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xv + 340 pp. ISBN 978 0 521 74599 4.

Professor Bennie van der Walt: a bridge between white Afrikaners and black Africans

This article honours Professor Bennie van der Walt as a bridge builder between white Afrikaners and black Africans as well as a renowned Christian scholar. Historical Western colonialism in South Africa divided its citizens against each other by means of white racism and apartheid. The whites in general were pitched against the blacks on the basis of white racism and its doctrine of apartheid. This doctrine of separation of races kept the white Afrikaners from the Bantu Africans. However, apartheid as a form of political, social, cultural and religious racism is now history in South Africa. The role which Professor Van der Walt played in bridging the gap between this racial divide is highly commendable and needs to be acknowledged and appreciated, hence the primary objective of this article in honour of his 71st birthday. Furthermore, the article discusses the immense contributions of Professor Bennie van der Walt to Christian scholarship in Africa.

Prince Alfred in King William's Town, South Africa: 13 August 1860

This piece, set in 1860, uses the first visit of a British royal to the southern hemisphere to explore the clashing of worlds and lives within colonial South Africa. At this time, the eastern Cape region had reached a period of quiescence after a series of severe upheavals. British colonial rule was resoundingly in place.

Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa (review)

Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa (review)

Guns, race, and power in colonial South Africa

Guns, race, and power in colonial South Africa

Islam for the indentured Indian: a Muslim missionary in colonial South Africa

AbstractTracing the migration of Muslims from India to South Africa's Natal colony in the late nineteenth century, the article focuses on the missionary activities of Ghulām Muhammad “Sūfī Sāhib” (d. 1329/1911). Placing Ghulām Muhammad in a new religious marketplace of competing religions, and versions thereof, the article examines the strategies through which he successfully established his form of Islam among Natal's indentured and merchant Muslim classes and used the fabric of religion to bind together a distinctly “Muslim” community from the heterogeneous individuals and groups brought from India by commerce and the plantation economy. As a founder of shrines no less than madrasas, Ghulām Muhammad demonstrated the ways in which a customary Islam of holy men, festivities and hagiographies flourished and responded to the demands and opportunities of modernity. Building on the popular appeal of customary piety, Ghulām Muhammad consolidated his success by providing a range of social services (education, healthcare, burial) for the Indian poor of Natal, to create an effective public platform for the norms of Sharia in South Africa.

Anne Landsman's The Devil's Chimney:A magical realist narrative for a new nation?

In her novel, The Devil's Chimney (1997), Anne Landsman deploys the genre of magical realism to rewrite the exclusive narratives of colonial and apartheid South Africa and present a more inclusive national narrative. She achieves this via Connie, the unreliable narrator, who imagines the story of Beatrice, a colonial Englishwoman living on a farm in the Karoo. Beatrice disrupts familial narratives through improper private acts that breach the bounds of her society.As characteristic of the genre, her identity is rendered fluid and ambiguous as she trespasses into the domains of empire-building, interracial sex and miscegenation. Beatrice's story is dependent on Nomsa, her domestic worker, whose representation as the extreme other is subverted when she reclaims what she believes is hers and gains restitution from the text.The denouement is unhappy for both characters, arguably reflecting a truth about the present - that socially constructed difference lives on. However, Connie's engagement with the past and its truths are valuable for the future and for nation-building. In imagining a past, Connie finds out truths about her own life.These equip her with the courage needed to survive in the new nation, which Connie tentatively rewrites as one that celebrates difference and accommodates diversity.

Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the VictorianFin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue, by Christine Ferguson

Reviewed by: Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue Ross G. Forman (bio) Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue, by Christine Ferguson; pp. x + 180. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006, $89.95, £55.00. In his “Minute on Indian Education” (1835), Thomas Babington Macaulay infamously urged Parliament to create a class of English-speaking Indians to “act as interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern” (par. 34). Naturally, Macaulay did not consider that learning the English language would give this new set of speakers any sense of ownership over it. They were to translate from English into the vernacular but in no way to reshape the “mother tongue” of the mother country. As the nineteenth century progressed and English increasingly became the language of the elite in India and elsewhere within the Empire, this view came to vie with other conceptions of English’s global role. Many such conceptions were grounded in the Darwinian frame that Christine Ferguson takes as the jumping-off point for her lucid and compelling investigation of the relationship between language theory and [End Page 489] Victorian literature, and many were grounded in an Orientalist study of “Eastern” texts that no longer endorsed Macaulay’s view that a single shelf of a “good European library” was worth “the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (par. 10). Ferguson’s work fits into a long line of scholarship that stretches from Marxist criticism’s exploration of what Gareth Stedman-Jones has termed “languages of class” to Gauri Viswanathan’s demonstration, in Masks of Conquest (1989), that the institutionalization of English Studies was a crucial ideological tool of imperialism. Ferguson is also clearly familiar with the arguments made by many postcolonial writers and theorists that the language gifted by imperialism can be (and has been) reappropriated and rearticulated and served to contest the very hegemonies it was intended to bolster. The Brutal Tongue shares with these works an investment in the Foucauldian notion that language and power are inextricably intertwined and in deconstructive techniques that see texts as potentially self-deconstructing and promote a destabilizing of language’s normalizing potential. Ferguson’s reading of Dracula (1897), for instance—a revised version of her superb article in ELH—envisages Bram Stoker’s novel as a celebration of “an English without a centre” that “rejects both late-century language purism . . . and the reactionary concern with social homogeneity that critics often find in horror fiction” (10). She therefore sees the linguistic sterility of the vampire—his inability to modify language or to mimic the multifarious englishes which appear in Stoker’s narrative—as the key to his destruction. The Brutal Tongue also strikes out into new territory by participating in a recent twist in postcolonial studies: the focus on language theory. Like Rachel Gilmour’s Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa (2006), Ferguson’s work foregrounds Victorian linguistic discourses as a means to understand the colonial encounter and its narrativization. Moreover, Ferguson’s turn to Victorian popular culture—and her call to revise the image of popular literature as homogenizing and regressive—provides a salutary check on previous scholarship that has seen the representation of dialect and other forms of non-standard English mainly in relation to canonical literature and often in terms of such texts’ marginalization of the voices of the working classes, women, and denizens of the “Celtic fringe.” Ferguson also resurrects nineteenth-century linguistic thinkers such as Max Müller. Although their theories of the origin of language and its defining role in separating the brute from the human may be discredited or overlooked today, she demonstrates how influential their ideas were to the Victorians and how they filtered into the popular consciousness through the types of literature that she studies. In her first chapter, “What Does Brutal Language Mean?”, Ferguson focuses on Victorian science’s engagement with the principle that language distinguishes men from beasts. She notes that verbal dearth, not profusion, marked “moral turpitude” (17) and that decline, “in savage societies at least, is evidenced through a silencing of words, through an absence where...

Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa. By Rachael Gilmour

<i>Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa</i>. By Rachael Gilmour

Peter Abrahams'sMine Boy: A Study of Colonial Diseases in South Africa

Disease, most often imagined in the past as an external invasion of bacteria or viruses, can also be imagined as dis-ease, a set of political, economic, and social imbalances that disturb the well-being of people's lives. Today, these imbalances would be termed psychological and psychosomatic diseases, but in a colonial arena, such as early twentieth-century South Africa, these forms of disease were inadvertently perpetuated and ignored. In addition, certain somatic diseases, such as tuberculosis, introduced into South Africa by the Europeans, had unforeseen and often fatal effects on the health of the natives. Tuberculosis, especially, became a peculiarly raced disease. Peter Abrahams fictionally recreates this area of colonial history in his 1946 novel, Mine Boy, which presents us with characters who negotiate the uncertain and often tragic terrain of colonial introduced and induced diseases. In particular, characters confront and deal, as best they can, with somatic, psychological, and psychosomatic diseases in ways that highlight the racist society of colonial South Africa.

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: How Should We Look at Rape in Early America?

Focus Questions What are the advantages or disadvantages of various approaches to studying the history of rape? How do different approaches endorse particular perspectives (either historical or contemporary) on sexual assaults? What does the study of rape reveal about life in early America? What comparisons can you make to the understanding, process, or prosecution of sexual assaults in other times and places? What do these comparisons suggest about how we write the history of rape? Author Recommends * Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).This book is a comprehensive study of the social, legal and cultural histories of rape in early America. Looking at all of British America from 1700–1820, Block encourages readers to think beyond the legal definition of rape to unravel how early Americans thought about and treated sexual coercion in their daily lives. Her multi‐faceted analysis extends racial constructions of rape back into the colonial period and beyond the bounds of the southern slave‐labor system. * Cornelia H. Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), Chapter 5, 231–84.Dayton provides an excellent legal study of rape in the colony of Connecticut that also focuses on the people involved in sexual assaults. She traces the shifts from a seventeenth‐century religious view of rape as a sin of concern to the entire community toward an eighteenth‐century view of rape as a serious crime only when committed by outsiders. * Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), Chapter 5, 159–90.Fischer explores how rape and other forms of sexualized violence were part of the production of race in colonial North Carolina. Fischer looks at an array of rape cases, as well as violent assaults (especially on enslaved people) with less obvious sexual intent. In so doing, she suggests a wider conceptualization of the intersection of sexual and racial oppression in the colonial South. * Pamela Scully, ‘Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth‐Century Cape Colony, South Africa,’American Historical Review, 100 (1995): 335–59.Scully looks at the intersection of race, sex, class, and ideas about masculinity in colonial South Africa through an in‐depth analysis of rape law and cases. This piece provides a nice comparison to the racialized views of rape in the colonial U.S. context, particularly in the ways that it explores the sexual abuse of African women as part of the European imperial project.Online Materials 1. DoHistory http://dohistory.org/two_stories/index.html This website is centered around the diary of an eighteenth‐century New England midwife named Martha Ballard. In that diary, she mentions a rape trial in which she testifies and about which she wrote in her diary. The website allows you to look at all the known primary sources used to reconstruct what happened in this case, comparing the official documents to Martha Ballard’s comments. Click to ‘Table of Contents’ to see an overview of the story. 2. The History of Rape: A Bibliography http://de.geocities.com/history_guide/horb/ Stefan Blaschke has compiled an incredibly extensive bibliography on the history of the rape worldwide. Users can search the bibliography alphabetically by author, chronologically, geographically, topically or by keyword.

Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa

Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa

Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa. By Zine Magubane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. 222. $18.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewBringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa. By Zine Magubane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. 222. $18.00.Manu GoswamiManu GoswamiNew York University Search for more articles by this author New York UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 112, Number 4January 2007 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/513542 Views: 49Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

&amp;quot;This Is the Mark of the Widow&amp;quot;: Domesticity and Frontier Conquest in Colonial South Africa

There is poignancy to a life represented by a list things, an existence documented in material possessions whether meager or abundant. The entangled stories four widows Burger connected by marriage, maternal kinship, land claims, and frontier living show the extent to which colonial history became embedded in homes, familial relationships, and household composition. In South Africa, settlers eventually established hegemony, especially in frontier regions, not only through armed occupation although violent land alienation was admittedly a crucial feature eighteenth-century settlement but primarily in the realm the domestic. Eventually, the settlers achieved success through the intimate, quotidian structuring survival in an uncertain landscape; its progress was marked by increased creature comforts from one generation to the next, including the proliferation European markers status and civility. From a few iron cooking pots and pewter plates to copper tart pans and porcelain teacups, the material success frontier farmers entailed more than extensive land claims and fat livestock; it dwelled significantly on such subjects as furniture, crockery, and other symbols that connected scattered homesteads to the heart colonial society in Cape Town, and thus to European-derived cultural norms. Women and men forged these connections, creating households and domestic space that came to mark their sites settlement as colonial neither African nor European but distinctively of the Cape. The frontier was a place cross-cultural contact, the effects which emerge in subdued dialogue with the more obvious markers European customs evident in estate inventories, reinforcing the perception colonial hybridity. These documents offer a particularly focused lens through which to examine settler households and their material culture. Read in conjunction with property records, tax rolls, and travelers' accounts, the inventories offer a unique, if partial, perspective on the domestic life colonial settlers. The

Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa. By Rachael Gilmour

<i>Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa</i>. By Rachael Gilmour

Patterns of interaction specificity of fungus-growing termites and Termitomyces symbionts in South Africa

BackgroundTermites of the subfamily Macrotermitinae live in a mutualistic symbiosis with basidiomycete fungi of the genus Termitomyces. Here, we explored interaction specificity in fungus-growing termites using samples from 101 colonies in South-Africa and Senegal, belonging to eight species divided over three genera. Knowledge of interaction specificity is important to test the hypothesis that inhabitants (symbionts) are taxonomically less diverse than 'exhabitants' (hosts) and to test the hypothesis that transmission mode is an important determinant for interaction specificity.ResultsAnalysis of Molecular Variance among symbiont ITS sequences across termite hosts at three hierarchical levels showed that 47 % of the variation occurred between genera, 18 % between species, and the remaining 35 % between colonies within species. Different patterns of specificity were evident. High mutual specificity was found for the single Macrotermes species studied, as M. natalensis was associated with a single unique fungal haplotype. The three species of the genus Odontotermes showed low symbiont specificity: they were all associated with a genetically diverse set of fungal symbionts, but their fungal symbionts showed some host specificity, as none of the fungal haplotypes were shared between the studied Odontotermes species. Finally, bilaterally low specificity was found for the four tentatively recognized species of the genus Microtermes, which shared and apparently freely exchanged a common pool of divergent fungal symbionts.ConclusionInteraction specificity was high at the genus level and generally much lower at the species level. A comparison of the observed diversity among fungal symbionts with the diversity among termite hosts, indicated that the fungal symbiont does not follow the general pattern of an endosymbiont, as we found either similar diversity at both sides or higher diversity in the symbiont. Our results further challenge the hypothesis that transmission-mode is a general key-determinant of interaction specificity in fungus-growing termites.

MAGUBANE, Zine, Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa

Zine Magubane se propose dans cet ouvrage de renverser le rapport que l’on etablit spontanement entre colonises et colonisateurs. Il ne s’agit pas tant de montrer comment les colonisateurs (britanniques en l’occurrence) ont importe dans les colonies des conceptions politiques, morales ou religieuses qui leur etaient propres, mais plutot de s’interroger sur les effets de cette entreprise de colonisation sur la culture occidentale. La colonisation, instituant un rapport specifique entre domines...

Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa

Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa

Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa ? Zine Magubane

The British Journal of SociologyVolume 57, Issue 3 p. 538-539 Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa – Zine Magubane Gurminder K. Bhambra, Gurminder K. Bhambra University of SussexSearch for more papers by this author Gurminder K. Bhambra, Gurminder K. Bhambra University of SussexSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 August 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2006.00123_15.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume57, Issue3September 2006Pages 538-539 RelatedInformation

Zine Magubane, Bringing the Empire Home: race, class and gender in Britain and colonial South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (pb US$18.00 – 0 226 50177 9; hb US$45 – 0 226 50176 0). 2004, 216 pp.

Zine Magubane, Bringing the Empire Home: race, class and gender in Britain and colonial South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (pb US$18.00 – 0 226 50177 9; hb US$45 – 0 226 50176 0). 2004, 216 pp.