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The Cape Herders
A History of the Khoikhoi of Southern Africa
Emile Boonzaier
Ohio University Press, 1996

The Cape Herders provides the first comprehensive picture of the Khoikhoi people. In doing so, it fills a long-standing gap in the resources of Southern African studies, and at a time when interest in the indigenous populations of South Africa is growing daily.

Combining the insights of archaeology, history, and anthropology, this account ranges from the origins of the Khoikhoi in Southern Africa to the contemporary politics of the Namaqualand “reserves.” Its authors have produced a scholarly, yet accessible, book, lavishly illustrated and supplemented with short biographies and fascinating detail.

The Cape Herders explodes a variety of South African myths—not least those surrounding the negative stereotype of the “Hottentot” and those which contribute to the idea that the Khoikhoi are by now “a vanished people.” The story it tells instead is one of enduring interest—the history of a herding people in Southern Africa, its society, economy, and culture, its relationship to the indigenous hunters of the Cape, its encounters with European expeditions, and its subsequent exposure to the first effects of colonization. It is a story of change and adaptation, and it confirms the Khoikhoi’s central role in the making of today’s South Africa.

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The Changing Past
Trends in South African Historical Writing
Ken Smith
Ohio University Press, 1989

E.H. Carr said: “Before you study the history, study the historian.” Written history often tells us more about the historian’s own times than it does of the times about which he is writing. The historians and the way in which each generation has rewritten history in the light of its own preoccupations is the subject of The Changing Past. This is the first book-length survey in English that covers all the main trends in South African historiography. Starting with the first documents and histories, it goes on to trace the 19th century. British and settler “schools,” Afrikaans historiography from its pre-academic 19th century phase to the present, and the liberal historians who struck out in a new direction from the 1920s. The book highlights the break with the past that historians of the “new radical school” have made in the last 15 years, and surveys the position of historical writing to the present.

The canvas is delineated in bold strokes that sketch in the main outlines rather than seek an exhaustive treatment of all existing literature. This, together with a conscious effort to minimize theoretical discussion, makes it a highly readable text.

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The Changing Past
Trends in South African Historical Writing
Ken Smith
Ohio University Press, 1989

E.H. Carr said: “Before you study the history, study the historian.” Written history often tells us more about the historian’s own times than it does of the times about which he is writing. The historians and the way in which each generation has rewritten history in the light of its own preoccupations is the subject of The Changing Past. This is the first book-length survey in English that covers all the main trends in South African historiography. Starting with the first documents and histories, it goes on to trace the 19th century. British and settler “schools,” Afrikaans historiography from its pre-academic 19th century phase to the present, and the liberal historians who struck out in a new direction from the 1920s. The book highlights the break with the past that historians of the “new radical school” have made in the last 15 years, and surveys the position of historical writing to the present.

The canvas is delineated in bold strokes that sketch in the main outlines rather than seek an exhaustive treatment of all existing literature. This, together with a conscious effort to minimize theoretical discussion, makes it a highly readable text.

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Chris Hani
Hugh Macmillan
Ohio University Press, 2021

This biography shows how Black political leader Chris Hani’s life and death were pivotal to ending apartheid and to establishing a democratic government in South Africa.

Chris Hani is one of the most iconic figures in South Africa’s history, as a leader within the African National Congress (ANC) and as chief of staff of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. His assassination in 1993 by a far-right militant threatened negotiations to end apartheid and install a democratic government. Serious tensions followed the assassination, leading Nelson Mandela to address the nation in an effort to avert further violence:

Tonight I am reaching out to every single South African, black and white, from the very depths of my being. A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, this assassin. The cold-blooded murder of Chris Hani has sent shock waves throughout the country and the world… Now is the time for all South Africans to stand together against those who, from any quarter, wish to destroy what Chris Hani gave his life for: the freedom of all of us.

Hugh Macmillan’s concise biography details Hani’s important role in shaping twentieth-century South African history.

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City of Broken Dreams
Myth-Making, Nationalism and the University in an African Motor City
Leslie J. Bank
Michigan State University Press, 2019
What role should universities have in revitalizing rust-belt motor cities left to decay by economic and political transformation? In City of Broken Dreams, author Leslie J Bank addresses this question through a detailed case study of East London, a city in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Here, as in American motor cities like Detroit and Flint, the car’s cultural power and association with the endless possibilities of modernity lie at the heart of the refusal to seek alternative development paths leading away from racially inscribed automotive capitalism. Rooting the university in a history of industrialisation, placemaking and city-building, this book examines contemporary debates about the role that urban universities should have in building economies, creating jobs and reshaping the politics and identities of their communities. In South Africa as in many other nations, institutions of higher education represent potentially powerful cultural and socioeconomic agents, but the 2015 #FeesMustFall student protests against rising tuition costs highlighted the limits of their power. Firmly grounded in the particulars of East London, this thoughtful study illuminates questions common to rust-belt cities and universities around the world.
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City of Extremes
The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg
Martin J. Murray
Duke University Press, 2011
City of Extremes is a powerful critique of urban development in greater Johannesburg since the end of apartheid in 1994. Martin J. Murray describes how a loose alliance of city builders—including real estate developers, large-scale property owners, municipal officials, and security specialists—has sought to remake Johannesburg in the upbeat image of a world-class city. By creating new sites of sequestered luxury catering to the comfort, safety, and security of affluent urban residents, they have produced a new spatial dynamic of social exclusion, effectively barricading the mostly black urban poor from full participation in the mainstream of urban life. This partitioning of the cityscape is enabled by an urban planning environment of limited regulation or intervention into the prerogatives of real estate capital.

Combining insights from urban studies, cultural geography, and urban sociology with extensive research in South Africa, Murray reflects on the implications of Johannesburg’s dual character as a city of fortified enclaves that proudly displays the ostentatious symbols of global integration and the celebrated “enterprise culture” of neoliberal design, and as the “miasmal city” composed of residual, peripheral, and stigmatized zones characterized by signs of a new kind of marginality. He suggests that the “global cities” paradigm is inadequate to understanding the historical specificity of cities in the Global South, including the colonial mining town turned postcolonial megacity of Johannesburg.

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Clicko
The Wild Dancing Bushman
Neil Parsons
University of Chicago Press, 2010

During the 1920s and ’30s, Franz Taibosh—whose stage name was Clicko—performed in front of millions as one of the stars of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Prior to his fame in the United States, Taibosh toured the world as the “Wild Dancing Bushman,” showing off his frenzied dance moves in freak shows, sideshows, and music halls from Australia to Cuba. When he died in 1940, the New York Times called him “the only African bushman ever exhibited in this country.” In Clicko, Neil Parsons unearths the untold story of Taibosh’s journey from boyhood on a small farm in South Africa to top billing as one of the travelling World’s Fair Freaks.

Through Taibosh’s tale, Parsons brings to life the bizarre golden age of entertainment as well as the role that the dubious new science of race played in it. Beginning with Taibosh’s early life, Clicko untangles the real story of his ancestry from the web of myths spun around him on his rise to international stardom. Parsons then chronicles the unhappy middle period of Taibosh’s career, when he suffered under the heel of a vicious manager. Left to freeze and nearly starve in an unheated apartment, Taibosh was rescued by Frank Cook, Barnum & Bailey’s lawyer. The Cooks adopted Taibosh as a member of their family of circus managers and performers, and his happy—if far from average—years with them make up the final chapter of this remarkable story.

Equal parts entertaining and disturbing, Clicko vividly evokes a forgotten era when vaudeville drew massive crowds and circus freaks were featured in Billboard and Variety. Parsons introduces us to colorful characters such as George Auger the giant and the original Zip the Pinhead, but above all, he gives us an unforgettable portrait of Franz Taibosh, rescued at last from the racists and the romantics and revealed here as an ordinary man with an extraordinary life.

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Confronting Leviathan
Mozambique Since Independence
Margaret Hall
Ohio University Press, 1997

Confronting Leviathan describes Mozambique’s attempt to construct a socialist society in one African country on the back of an anti-colonial struggle for national independence. In explaining the failure of this effort the authors suggest reasons why the socialist vision of the ruling party, Frelimo, lacked resonance with Mozambican society. They also document in detail South Africa’s attempts to destabilize the country, even to the extent of sponsoring the Renamo insurgents. The dynamics of that insurgency and its roots in Mozambican society are examined as well as the process of negotiation that brought it to a close. Finally the authors analyze the more recent attempt to construct a liberal capitalist society in Mozambique. From their findings it appears that this may prove no easier than the construction of socialism.

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Contested Histories in Public Space
Memory, Race, and Nation
Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer, eds.
Duke University Press, 2009
Contested Histories in Public Space brings multiple perspectives to bear on historical narratives presented to the public in museums, monuments, texts, and festivals around the world, from Paris to Kathmandu, from the Mexican state of Oaxaca to the waterfront of Wellington, New Zealand. Paying particular attention to how race and empire are implicated in the creation and display of national narratives, the contributing historians, anthropologists, and other scholars delve into representations of contested histories at such “sites” as a British Library exhibition on the East India Company, a Rio de Janeiro shantytown known as “the cradle of samba,” the Ellis Island immigration museum, and high-school history textbooks in Ecuador.

Several contributors examine how the experiences of indigenous groups and the imperial past are incorporated into public histories in British Commonwealth nations: in Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum; in the First Peoples’ Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization; and, more broadly, in late-twentieth-century Australian culture. Still others focus on the role of governments in mediating contested racialized histories: for example, the post-apartheid history of South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument, originally designed as a tribute to the Voortrekkers who colonized the country’s interior. Among several essays describing how national narratives have been challenged are pieces on a dispute over how to represent Nepali history and identity, on representations of Afrocuban religions in contemporary Cuba, and on the installation in the French Pantheon in Paris of a plaque honoring Louis Delgrès, a leader of Guadeloupean resistance to French colonialism.


Contributors. Paul Amar, Paul Ashton, O. Hugo Benavides, Laurent Dubois, Richard Flores, Durba Ghosh, Albert Grundlingh, Paula Hamilton, Lisa Maya Knauer, Charlotte Macdonald, Mark Salber Phillips, Ruth B. Phillips, Deborah Poole, Anne M. Rademacher, Daniel J. Walkowitz

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Convening Black Intimacy
Christianity, Gender, and Tradition in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa
Natasha Erlank
Ohio University Press, 2022

An unprecedented study of how Christianity reshaped Black South Africans’ ideas about gender, sexuality, marriage, and family during the first half of the twentieth century.

This book demonstrates that the primary affective force in the construction of modern Black intimate life in early twentieth-century South Africa was not the commonly cited influx of migrant workers but rather the spread of Christianity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African converts developed a new conception of intimate life, one that shaped ideas about sexuality, gender roles, and morality.

Although the reshaping of Black intimacy occurred first among educated Africans who aspired to middle-class status, by the 1950s it included all Black Christians—60 percent of the Black South African population. In turn, certain Black traditions and customs were central to the acceptance of sexual modernity, which gained traction because it included practices such as lobola, in which a bridegroom demonstrates his gratitude by transferring property to his bride’s family. While the ways of understanding intimacy that Christianity informed enjoyed broad appeal because they partially aligned with traditional ways, other individuals were drawn to how the new ideas broke with tradition. In either case, Natasha Erlank argues that what Black South Africans regard today as tradition has been unequivocally altered by Christianity.

In asserting the paramount influence of Christianity on unfolding ideas about family, gender, and marriage in Black South Africa, Erlank challenges social historians who have attributed the key factor to be the migrant labor system. Erlank draws from a wide range of sources, including popular Black literature and the Black press, African church and mission archives, and records of the South African law courts, which she argues have been underutilized in histories of South Africa. The book is sure to attract historians and other scholars interested in the history of African Christianity, African families, sexuality, and the social history of law, especially colonial law.

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Culture and Liberation
Exile Writings, 1966–1985
Alex La Guma
Seagull Books, 2020
One of South Africa’s best-known writers during the apartheid era, Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the 1950s and 60s, La Guma went into exile in the United Kingdom with his wife and children in 1966, eventually serving as the ANC’s diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba. Culture and Liberation captures a different dimension of his long writing career by collecting his political journalism, literary criticism, and other short pieces published while he was in exile.
 
This volume spans La Guma’s political and literary life in exile through accounts of his travels to Algeria, Lebanon, Vietnam, Soviet Central Asia, and elsewhere, along with his critical assessments of Paul Robeson, Nadine Gordimer, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pablo Neruda, among other writers. The first dedicated collection of La Guma’s exile writing, Culture and Liberation restores an overlooked dimension of his life and work, while opening a window on a wider world of cultural and political struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century.
 
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