Boer War Research Articles

Foundations by Karin Speedy

Reviewed by: Foundations by Karin Speedy Heather Goodall Foundations. By Karin Speedy. Lower Hutt: Karin Speedy, 2022. This is an engaging and evocative work of creative non-fiction. Karin Speedy has cryptically described it in her cover notes as a “memoir/literary nonfiction novel.” The book depicts episodes of her life—at different ages—and intersperses them with her analyses of the situations she was researching. This is certainly memoir, but Speedy takes us further, disrupting chronological progressions with juxtaposition, shifting narrative voices and contrasting styles. This agility allows Speedy’s book to remain lucid and accessible while it draws the reader in. Foundations tells at least four stories, weaving them together so they are in conversation—sometimes disturbingly, often movingly—with each other. One story is a family history, across a number of generations of migrancy and colonialism, told through the eyes of Speedy as a young person growing up within a difficult family relationship in Auckland, Aotearoa. Beyond this troubled nuclear family, there is her far longer genealogical search across the myths and secrets which so often shroud settler family histories. Only on the final pages—and after the penultimate book manuscript had been completed—do we, and the author herself, learn a key fact which offers an answer to one of these family myths. That long family history is related to the second major narrative of this book, which is the colonial history of Aotearoa New Zealand—the invasion and then the theft of whenua—Māori land—through military force and the deceptive versions of the Waitangi treaty. This Aotearoa colonial history necessitates telling part of the story of British colonialism in Australia and across the Pacific, although most attention is on Aotearoa. Yet another major narrative is about the French empire, itself a fragmented story with many foci. In this book, one focus is on the colonies in the Pacific, particularly Kanaky New Caledonia where Speedy has researched, but also Tahiti. Another focus is on the colonies near the east coast of Africa—Reunion and Mauritius. A third is on the colonies in the Americas, both in Canada and in Louisiana. Most of these French colonies have Indigenous, settler and enslaved populations—with African enslaved people transferred to the Americas, the Indian Ocean and, post-emancipation, to the Pacific colonies as well—and with metropolitan France intervening in the interactions between each population in and between each colony. The second and third of these stories—the colonial history of Aotearoa to the present and the entangled histories of colonies and metropole in the French Empire—open up challenges for readers who, like me, are historians working largely within one empire. I have looked at very different colonies within the British Empire, namely Australia and India, as well as exploring the tensions between the diverse and often conflicting groups within each of those colonies. And because there are such complex situations to explore, even within any colony, it has been tempting to work only on one empire. My recent work, published as Beyond Borders: Indians, Australians and the Indonesian Revolution, 1939–1950 (2019), forced me to gain a much better grasp of Dutch colonialism, and the bitter decolonisation of the Netherlands East Indies. I was disturbed to realise how little I had known about the Dutch Empire, despite the geographic proximity of the Netherlands East Indies to Australia; despite the conflicts, in which Australians had been involved, in South Africa between the British and the formerly Dutch settlers, known as Boers, in the Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century and, finally, despite the Dutch retreat to Australia during the Japanese invasion from 1942 to 1945 and beyond. Recognising Australia’s place as a South Pacific Island—as I work on the relationships between First Nations people, including Indigenous Australians, in the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific campaign—I have paid much more active attention to the French Empire. Here my knowledge has proved to be even less adequate than in relation to the Dutch colonial impact. One dimension of my failure to know more about the histories of both Dutch and French colonialism has been my monolingualism—and the false sense of confidence...

Haunting Voices: Thomas Hardy's Boer War Poetry

Haunting Voices: Thomas Hardy's Boer War Poetry

The birth of Boererate: women and healing during the South African war

This article reinterprets historical works on the history of medicine in South Africa and how present-day Afrikaner home-based healing therapies known as Boererate engage with this history. By reinterpreting historical sources, we illustrate how Boer women in concentration camps during the South African War were waging an ideological war. We argue that there is a distinction between the creolised medicines that Boer women took into the concentration camps and the body of knowledge — Boererate — that emerged from the camps after the women were released. The article brings archival research and interviews with interlocutors into conversation to show how a knowledge system like Boererate has persisted through time and become very popular in online forums and Facebook groups during the Covid-19 pandemic. The article is part of a wider project investigating Boererate in historical and diverse contemporary contexts.

Promising Directions in the Studies of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902)

In November 2022, the Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, hosted an international academic conference “Researching the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902: The Practice and the Future”. The event marked the 120th anniversary of the end of the first major armed conflict of the 20th century. The goal of the conference was to help stimulating dialogue between Russian and international historians who study the Anglo-Boer War. About a hundred people attended the conference both in person and online. Seventeen Russian and South African researchers presented their papers. The participants considered the main aspects of the historiography of the Anglo-Boer War in the XX–XXI centuries. The Anglo-Boer War studies in Russia and South Africa were analysed. The Russian involvement in the Anglo-Boer War in the historical context of the Russian volunteers’ participation in military conflicts was reviewed, as well as the study of the influence of the experience of this war on subsequent military conflicts. It was concluded that there was the potential for a more robust study of the Anglo-Boer War and for exploring new themes. The participants discussed some of the most promising directions in the Anglo-Boer War studies.

Upholding the "Grand Old Flag" on Canada's Home Front Early in the Second Boer War: An Overlooked Patriotic Rally in Toronto's Massey Hall

Abstract: Although sporadic scholarship has focused on the activities of Canada's home front during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), historians have overlooked the patriotic rally at Toronto's Massey Hall in the conflict's earliest days. The most publicized participants at the rally were the orator George Parkin, a leading Canadian promotor of a British imperial federation; and England's eminent contralto Clara Butt. Extensive newspaper coverage, while lauding the oration and singing at the rally, simultaneously alluded to the rally's potentially widespread influence. This article assesses the rally's events and impact, concluding that while its influence cannot always be readily determined, it was likely a significant factor on the Canadian home front.

A Russian protectorate for the Boer republics. A rejected idea for countering British imperialism

The South African War, also known as the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, was one of the most important armed conflicts of the age of imperialism. The war evoked an immense public response in Russia; not even the power circles remained unmoved. Russian public opinion supported the struggle for the independence of the Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. For their part, the governments of the two republics convinced their fellow citizens that the Russian Empire, as the initiator of the Hague Peace Conference and the only great power that never had colonies in Africa, would be able to unite other states of Europe and the United States to help the Boers in countering British imperialism. By June 1900, it had become clear that the Great Powers would not take military action in defence of the South African republics. Moreover, they were unable to overlook their geopolitical differences in order to offer collective mediation or good offices to the belligerents. On behalf of the official Boer delegation, who was visiting the United States, the Transvaal envoy conveyed to the foreign offices of Russia and its ally France a request for a joint protectorate over the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Documentary evidence of this demarche, which has not yet received sufficient coverage in historiography, has been preserved in the archive of the Transvaal envoy Leyds, as well as in the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire. Appealing to Russia and France, the Boer delegates assumed that these powers, for humanitarian reasons, would provide friendly guardianship to the two republics in South Africa. However, the European governments of the period understood protectorate as a form of colonial dependence. Besides, Russia and France did not want a military confrontation with the mighty British Empire for the sake of the Boer states that were outside the sphere of their political and colonial interests. The attempt of the representatives of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State to secure a Russo-French protectorate for their republics was predestined to fail.

Yet Another Marks

The article describes an amazing history of a phenomenal success in South Africa at the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX centuries of a Jewish emigrant from the Russian Empire Sammy (Samuel) Marks, rising from a peddler to a multimillionaire, called at the peak of his career the “uncrowned king of Transvaal”. He founded in cooperation with his cousin Isaac Lewis several branches of South African industrial economy and helped peaceful resolution of the Anglo-Boer war of 1899–1902. Among Marks and Lewis business interests were diamonds, gold and coal. Marks and Lewis business projects included distilleries, canning and glass factories, establishing flour-mills and brick works, erecting the country’s first hydroelectric power station. Marks pioneered in using tractors and progressive farm technologies. He was also widely respected for his generous charity activities. Sammy Marks played a significant role in the peaceful resolution of the Anglo-Boer conflict. Being a friend of Transvaal president P.Kruger and trusted by both sides of the hostilities, Marks helped to organize negotiations to end the Anglo-Boer war. Peace negotiations were held and concluded in his estate at Vereneeging in spring 1902. Peace agreements opened the way for modern statehood initially in the form of South African Union. Sammy Marks was nominated senator in the first Union parliament in 1910 and held this position till his death in 1920.

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

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

Geopolitics, Migration, and Transcultural Processes

Geopolitics, Migration, and Transcultural Processes Regenia Gagnier (bio) My 2018 book, Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century, begins, "To study literatures in which global processes criss-cross distinct environments requires (1) translators and transculturalists who know diverse literary histories and history of genres, and (2) the disciplines relating to environments of nature (natural sciences), culture (the humanities), and technology (social sciences, engineering, and medicine)".1 Literature can give us precise, authentic accounts of life as felt or experienced in each specific niche of nature, culture, and technology at a particular moment. The study of global literatures therefore requires collaborators who know their own respective literary histories, genres, and styles within their specific environments. Since 2004 I have been cultivating such collaborations.2 This seems to point to a method adequate to a period of such extreme technological and geopolitical change as that covered by Cusp's remit c.1880–1920. Distinct cultures have their own temporalities, yet this period was transformative across many cultures. Before we return to methodology, it may be worth recapping a few of the features of the world at that time. Technical innovations gave rise to what is commonly called the second industrial revolution. Britain and the US saw the rise of Taylorism, Fordism, the first monopolies and corporate consolidation, trade unionism and strikes, the rise of consumer culture and women shopping rather than farming/gardening/cooking, eugenics, and social Darwinism (as noteworthy in China and Australia as in Britain). Metal detection, machine gun, AC motor, aeroplane, tractor, [End Page 96] sonar, electric ignition for automobiles, pop-up toaster, lightbulb, cash register, motion picture camera, electric trolley, and radio transformed private as well as public life; and even the spheres themselves, private and public, were transformed as more women worked outside the home up to and during the First World War. Multiple innovations enhanced railway safety, thus leading to more mobility, global time standardization, and a reification of "the working day." Britain saw the effects of massive immigration following on Russian pogroms, education became compulsory for children under ten, electric lights were introduced into homes, women won the franchise, the Boer wars, the National Insurance Act covered sickness and unemployment, the Easter Rising in Ireland, the "Spanish flu" epidemic, and the First World War. If Anglophone history reveals an interconnected world, interconnectedness is equally manifest elsewhere. From 1898, modern western thought entered China in force. The Hundred Days' Reform, the Boxer Rebellion, and anti-foreign unrest led to the fall of the Qing dynasty and the founding of the Republic in 1912. The New Youth magazine, and the New Culture and May Fourth Movements sought to liberalize Confucian culture, as did publication of Lu Xun's monumentally critical "Ah Q," amounting to the greatest rejection of a three-thousandyear-old tradition in world history. The Communist Party of China (CPC) was founded, with perhaps the greatest influence on China being the Russian October Revolution under Lenin in 1917. It is noteworthy that henceforth every major Chinese modernist was a professional translator: Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Lao She, and Bing Xin. Meanwhile, in the US, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first significant restriction of free immigration in US history. In South Asia, other ancient cultures now subalterned to a British rule initiated by a trading company saw the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885; Nehru, Bose, and Ambedkar were born 1889–91; in 1905 Bengal was partitioned; in 1906 the Muslim League formed in Dhaka; in 1911 the capital was moved by the British from Calcutta to Delhi; in 1915 Gandhi returned from South Africa; the Bengal Renaissance flourished in the arts, literature, and spiritual guidance. [End Page 97] From 1881 to 1914, Africa and the Middle East suffered the New Imperialism under the so-called Scramble for Africa by seven western European powers, with 90 percent of their populations coming under European control, entailing a massive destruction of the continent's cultures. The Kingdom of Benin was plundered for the artworks that inspired Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, Derain, and Klee. Central Africa, usurped by the Congo Free State, was plundered for ivory...

Beyond Judgements and Emotions: Understanding the Koevoet

Steve Crump: Koevoet: South West African Police Counter-Insurgency Operations During the South African Border War 1978-1984

“A Russian on Commando” (оn the History of the Participation of Russian Volunteers in the Boer War of 1899–1902)

Review of the book: A Russian on Commando. The Boer War Experiences of Yevgeny Avgustus / Ed. by Boris Gorelik. Johannesburg – Cape Town – London: Jonathan Ball Publ., 2022. 270 p.

ПЕРЕСЕЛЕНЧЕСКАЯ ПОЛИТИКА ГЕРМАНИИ В КОЛОНИЯХ: ПЕРЕСЕЛЕНИЕ БУРОВ В ВОСТОЧНУЮ АФРИКУ

The proposed article on the history of the Boer resettlement movement to the colonial possessions of Kaiser Germany in East Africa is of undoubted interest, first of all in terms of exposing completely previously unknown archival materials of the Federal Archive of Germany, as well as periodical press materials addressing the issue. The emergence of Boer migration was caused by their defeat in the Anglo–Boer War, which the colonial circles of Germany took advantage of. In addition, the author of the article tried to analyze historical events, as well as the activities of the colonial office of Kaiser Germany and the colonial administration of the East African colonies on the issue of the resettlement of Boers from various regions of South Africa: Natal, Transvaal, as well as Rhodesia and their use primarily for economic purposes to strengthen German colonial rule in East Africa. Archival materials reveal the specifics of the resettlement of migrant Boers to East Africa, the attitude of the colonial circles of Germany and the departmental employees of the colony to that process. The author of the article tried to show the features of Boer resettlement and their involvement in the creation of farms in the northern regions of East Africa. In addition, he considered the Schutze project as a basis for large-scale resettlement of Boers from the South African Boer republics to the colony of Kaiser Germany in East Africa.

Thinking with the Nation: "National" Literatures at the Cusp

Thinking with the Nation"National" Literatures at the Cusp Sukanya Banerjee (bio) Critical discussions of the nineteenth-century nation tend to be anachronistic inasmuch as we retrofit contemporary notions of the nation into nineteenth-century politico-cultural formations. One can be forgiven for this anachronistic move because nineteenth-century literary and cultural history bears ample evidence of the singularity with which the spirit of nationalism imbued itself in and through aesthetic and cultural practices, be it in Romantic imaginings or the literary artifact of the Victorian novel. However, it is worth noting that the object of nationalism—the nation—remained considerably opaque throughout the century. Incidentally, while the French Revolution is widely understood to mark the point at which state power begins to affix itself to national sentiment, the sovereign nation-state was hardly a ubiquitous phenomenon until about the mid-twentieth century.1 But it is also the case that the nation itself was quite amorphous over the course of the nineteenth century. Even as Walter Bagehot authored a definitive treatise on what is a key instrument of nationhood, the constitution (in this case, the English constitution), he also mused: "But what are nations?"2 The opacity of the nation arose not so much from its mutability (changing borders) but from the uncertainty regarding its organizing logic. What was the coherent element around which a community imagined itself? Was it language? Was it race? How much could one put store in territoriality, which, after all, could shift? As twenty-first century readers and scholars, we are all too familiar with the artifice of the nation, the fact of its constructedness. But so were thinkers in the nineteenth [End Page 84] century. What does it mean, then, to read this contingency back into the nineteenth century, when nations were are at various stages of making, nonmaking, and unmaking? How does such a chronologically apposite view impinge upon our otherwise unitary understanding of "national literature" or "national tradition" that a post–Second World War critical and political legacy has bequeathed us? How might revisiting the nation in the late nineteenth century, at the cusp, in fact, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reorient our thinking about the nation and the critical frameworks that it might generate? In addressing these questions, I want to consider analytical frameworks that might be apropos to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries given that this was a period that came in the wake of the Italian Risorgimento and German unification but also witnessed an upsurge in anticolonial agitation as well as colonial nationalisms that understood sovereignty and affiliation as nested, layered, and dispersed.3 The idea of the nation was very much in the air in Britain, too, where national sovereignty had been continually negotiated through franchise reform (the latest installment in 1882) and national identity found expression in patriotic jingoism attending the Boer wars. But the British nation was also inextricable from its empire, and if, as Hedinger and Hee point out, the tendency of "transnational history" is to "nationalize empires," such that "imperial history is read as the history of a nation-state beyond its borders,"4 then it is worth noting the inadequacy of the transnational as an analytical template in this context, not least because of the impossibility of reading the British nation as a discrete formation. In trying to read the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and the literatures and traditions that gathered under its rubric, it might be productive, instead, to consider theories of nation extant in the nineteenth century, which is to say, to read through the nineteenth century and with the Victorians—widely understood—rather than retrospectively superimpose our late twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical frameworks upon them. At one level, then, I am making a temporal argument about our reading of the nation, suggesting that while we tend to read back into the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and its literatures and cultures, we should focus instead on the nineteenth century and use that as a basis for reading [End Page 85] forward. Evidently, the famed temporal paradoxes of the nation inflect our reading habits, as well. But why focus on the...

COLONIAL UNREASON: GANDHI’S REACTION TO THE PLAGUE AND PERSECUTION IN COLONIAL SOUTH AFRICA

During his stay in Colonial South Africa over a period of almost twenty-one years, he witnessed a wanton exhibition of colonial unreason by the British. The ‘colonial unreason’ involves the process of legitimization of irrationality in order to achieve control over the colonised subjects. This paper, therefore, deals with Gandhi's reaction to the discriminatory treatment and severe persecution of the British Indians by the colonial dispensation over the outbreak of plague both during and after the second Boer war (from 11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902). Gandhi wrote extensively about the unleashing of discriminatory action against the British Indians in colonial South Africa as the coloniser apprehended or more often accused maliciously the community of having carried the plague virus. Several measures were taken to punish the Indians apart from the prevailing colonial coercion. In the name of precaution or prevention, punishments and unlawful segregation were taken up as the new normal. This was nothing new in the colonial normative. It was rather a rigorous intensification of the already prevailing colonial modes of control. The champions of reason, liberalism and human rights legitimized unreason as an instrument of control or public safety. In the name of prevention, persecution became the norm. This research revisits the plague in South Africa through the writings of Gandhi in order to understand the colonial apathy against the British Indians.

Contemplating imperialism: early film reenactments of the South African War

ABSTRACT This essay examines the differences between American and British modernity around the turn of the twentieth century. The author argues that American modernity tended to paradoxically embrace what was considered premodern, while British modernity sought to more clearly dichotomize what was perceived as rural primitivity and civil British modernity. To elucidate these ideological differences, theories of modernity and antimodernity are addressed in tandem with close textual analyses of early film reenactments of the South African War (1899–1902). While British film reenactments of the South African War tended to reify British imperialism, American films were often ideologically ambivalent, thus providing more of an opportunity for American exhibitors and audiences to contemplate and discern British imperialism for themselves. This study also explores theoretical questions related to reenactment and simulated reality, specifically how British filmmakers, unlike American filmmakers, constructed a clear distinction between civility and primitivity as real.

Transgressive body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Literator publishes research articles and essays on linguistics and literature in general, but focuses in particular on the (comparative) study of South African languages and literatures and other cultural phenomena across language, media and cultural boundaries (examples of topics would be: different manifestations of Post-Modernism, the interaction between visual arts and literature, the representation of the South African War in literature, language attitudes and language policy).

Generaal JH De la Rey in Mei 1902: 'n Bittereinder vir vrede

General J.H. de la Rey in May 1902: a die-hard Boer opting for peace General J.H. (Koos) de la Rey was, according to historians, a Christian Afrikaner and a Boer aristocrat. Not only did he play a leading role in the Boer community of the old Transvaal – in the 1890s he was a well-known member of the Volksraad or highest governing authority in the South African Republic – but in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 he became a Boer general who distinguished himself by leading his burgers in attacks on British military structures and skirmishes on horseback. De la Rey became known as a military strategist of the first rank. In the run-up to the Anglo-Boer War, which started on 11 October 1899, De la Rey tried to avoid this war with Britain as long as he could. After the war became a reality, he gave himself for his country as a die-hard fighter or “bittereinder”: somebody who fights till the bitter end. Apart from his natural military abilities, General De la Rey had a soft spot and a feeling for stressed people. He helped badly wounded enemies and in May 1902, in Boer talks about peace, he listened with compassion to those Boers who had suffered much and pleaded for peace, convincing him that they had reached the end of their tether – literally the end of the bitter end. De la Rey did not speak much at meetings, but during the peace talks at Vereeniging from 15–31 May 1902, he urged and influenced his people to accept Britain’s peace proposals. In the end, De la Rey and the die-hard fighters among the Boers who had fought for their political independence against British imperialism fought for self-rule under British rule as soon as possible. De la Rey wanted the Afrikaner people to maintain their identity as a nation in new circumstances and not to be wiped out as a nation through the Anglo-Boer War. He died as a leader and a hero of his people in 1914.

Generaal JH De la Rey in Mei 1902: 'n Bittereinder vir Vrede

Abstract: General J.H. de la Rey in May 1902: a die-hard Boer opting for peace General J.H. (Koos) de la Rey was, according to historians, a Christian Afrikaner and a Boer aristocrat. Not only did he play a leading role in the Boer community of the old Transvaal – in the 1890s he was a well-known member of the Volksraad or highest governing authority in the South African Republic – but in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 he became a Boer general who distinguished himself by leading his burgers in attacks on British military structures and skirmishes on horseback. De la Rey became known as a military strategist of the first rank. In the run-up to the Anglo-Boer War, which started on 11 October 1899, De la Rey tried to avoid this war with Britain as long as he could. After the war became a reality, he gave himself for his country as a die-hard fighter or “bittereinder”: somebody who fights till the bitter end. Apart from his natural military abilities, General De la Rey had a soft spot and a feeling for stressed people. He helped badly wounded enemies and in May 1902, in Boer talks about peace, he listened with compassion to those Boers who had suffered much and pleaded for peace, convincing him that they had reached the end of their tether – literally the end of the bitter end. De la Rey did not speak much at meetings, but during the peace talks at Vereeniging from 15–31 May 1902, he urged and influenced his people to accept Britain’s peace proposals. In the end, De la Rey and the die-hard fighters among the Boers who had fought for their political independence against British imperialism received fought for self-rule under British rule as soon as possible. De la Rey wanted the Afrikaner people to maintain their identity as a nation in new circumstances and not to be wiped out as a nation through the Anglo-Boer War. He died as a leader and a hero of his people in 1914.

British Soldiers’ Anglo-Boer War Experiences as Recorded in Their Diaries

British Soldiers’ Anglo-Boer War Experiences as Recorded in Their Diaries

An Investigation of an Anglo-Boer War Site in Barberton, Mpumalanga

An Investigation of an Anglo-Boer War Site in Barberton, Mpumalanga