An Imperfect Occupation

Author(s):  
John Boje

The South African War (1899–1902), also called the Boer War and Anglo-Boer War, began as a conventional conflict. It escalated into a savage irregular war fought between the two Boer republics and a British imperial force that adopted a scorched-earth policy and used concentration camps to break the will of Afrikaner patriots and Boer guerrillas. This book delves into the agonizing choices faced by Winburg district residents during the British occupation. Afrikaner men fought or evaded combat or collaborated; Afrikaner women fled over the veld or submitted to life in the camps; and black Africans weighed the life or death consequences of taking sides. The book’s sensitive analysis showcases the motives, actions, and reactions of Boers and Africans alike as initial British accommodation gave way to ruthlessness. Challenging notions of Boer unity and homogeneity, the book illustrates the precarious tightrope of resistance, neutrality, and collaboration walked by people on all sides. It also reveals how the repercussions of the War’s transformative effect on Afrikaner identity plays out in today’s South Africa. The book provides a dramatic account of the often overlooked aspects of one of the first “modern” wars.

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Stanley ◽  
Sue Wise

Feminist fractured foundationalism has been developed over a series of collaborative writings as a combined epistemology and methodology, although it has mainly been discussed in epistemological terms. It was operationalised as a methodology in a joint research project in South Africa concerned with investigating two important ways that the experiences of children in the South African War 1899-1902, in particular in the concentration camps established during its commando and ‘scorched earth’ phase, were represented contemporaneously: in the official records, and in photography. The details of the research and writing process involved are provided around discussion of the nine strategies that compose feminist fractured foundationalism and its strengths and limitations in methodological terms are reviewed.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett M. Bennett ◽  
Frederick J. Kruger

This articles analyses the establishment of state forestry programs in the Orange Free State and Transvaal following the end of the South African War/Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). British imperial administrators, led by Alfred Milner, sought to reconstruct the economy of the Transvaal and Orange Free State by using personnel who had worked previously in India and Egypt rather than by drawing on local experts in the Cape Colony or Natal Colony. Colonial foresters from the Cape Colony used the opportunities provided by reconstruction to export Cape-centric ideas about forest management to the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Ultimately, Milner's desire to bring in a top-rate forester from India failed, although his program of reconstruction instead brought in foresters from the Cape Colony who helped to harmonise South African forestry practices before Union in 1910. The interpretation put forward in this article helps to explain how Cape foresters exported ideas about climatic comparison and afforestation from the Cape into the rest of South Africa.


Author(s):  
Johan Wassermann

In this article, the spirituality and the memorialisation of the dead of the Durban Concentration Camps during the South African War (1899-1902) are analysed diachronically. As a study in micro-history, primary and secondary sources were used. Four clear memorialisation events were recognised: external British Imperial memorisation by means of obelisks that spiritually honoured Empire; Afrikaner Christian Nationalist memorisation that celebrated symbolic victory over the British Empire; rededication of the memorials in the inclusive spirit of the ‘new’ South Africa; and the partial abandonment of physical memorisation for remembering and honouring the dead in a virtual world. Each of these events offered its own seen and unseen forms of spirituality and understanding.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-648
Author(s):  
Robert I. Rotberg

South Africa’s Jameson Raid ultimately betrayed African rights by transferring power to white Afrikaner nationalists after helping to precipitate the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). The Raid also removed Cecil Rhodes from the premiership of the Cape Colony; strengthened Afrikaner control of the South African Republic (the Transvaal) and its world-supplying gold mines; and motivated the Afrikaner-controlled consolidation of segregation in the Union of South Africa, and thence apartheid. Perceptively, Charles van Onselen’s The Cowboy Capitalist links what happened on the goldfields of South Africa to earlier labor unrest in Idaho’s silver mines. Americans helped to originate the Raid and all of the events in its wake.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 162-176
Author(s):  
Maphelo Malgas ◽  
Bonginkosi Wellington Zondi

The basis of this article is an article published by Thomas (2012) whose objective was to track over a two-year period the performance of five strategic South African state-owned enterprises with regards to issues of governance. These enterprises were ESKOM, South African Airways (SAA), South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), Telkom, and Transnet. The paper revealed that there were serious transgressions in these entities and recommendations were made to address these. The aim of this article therefore was to establish whether or not the transgressions reported by Thomas are still happening within these entities. The data was collected from the 2014/2015, 2015/2016, 2016/2017, and 2017/2018 financial reports of these entities. The study revealed that the transgressions are still taking place. With regards to issues of sustainability SAA and SABC continue to make loses, with SAA continuing to be bailed out by the South African government against the will of the South African general public. Fruitless and wasteful expenditure increased in all the five entities mentioned above and no serious action has been taken by the South African government to hold the people responsible accountable. While Telkom, Transnet and Eskom were making profits these profits are not at the envisaged level.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 586-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thembisa Waetjen

Summary Controls over trade and consumption of narcotic medicines emerged as both a concern and emblem of progressive governance around the turn of the twentieth century. This article traces political struggles over drugs regulation in the case of colonial South Africa. It focuses on two parallel streams of law-making by the British occupation regime in the Transvaal, following the Anglo-Boer war. Controversies over the availability of traditional ‘Dutch medicines’ to Boer farmers and prohibitions of certain patent medicines to African consumers were elements of, and contradictions within, the process of building a modern pharmaceutical economy. An influx to the region of new curatives coincided with the growth of vernacular newspapers as well as temperance campaigns. Working to nurture white national cohesion and support a mining industry premised on unskilled black labour, the South African state created race-based drugs controls. These developments proved significant to regulatory statecraft later in the century.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Donaldson

This article explores the relationship between sport and war in Britain during the South African War, 1899–1902. Through extensive press coverage, as well as a spate of memoirs and novels, the British public was fed a regular diet of war stories and reportage in which athletic endeavour and organized games featured prominently. This contemporary literary material sheds light on the role sport was perceived to have played in the lives and work of the military personnel deployed in South Africa. It also, however, reveals a growing unease over an amateur-military tradition which equated sporting achievement with military prowess.


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