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This article examines the British Government's decision to establish the Royal Commission on the War in South Africa and how the Edwardian press presented its findings to the public. It will discuss how the Conservative media attempted to downplay the significance of the report and how the Liberal and Radical presses attempted to use it to raise questions about the Government's ability to manage crises and, by linking the failures of military planning to new Conservative economic and education policies, challenge the competency of the Colonial Secretary and powerful Unionist leader, Joseph Chamberlain. Finally, it will show how the press, regardless of political leaning, remained supportive of the military leadership which conducted the war effort despite it playing a significant role in the faulty planning and operational failures of 1899. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of South African Journal of Cultural History / Suid-Afrikaanse Vereniging vir Kultuurgeskiedenis is the property of South African Society for Cultural History and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of South African Journal of Cultural History / Suid-Afrikaanse Vereniging vir Kultuurgeskiedenis is the property of South African Society for Cultural History and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (1876–1932) is one of South Africa's best known political and literary figures, his novel Mhudi now part of the literary canon. Yet his Mafeking Diary, written during the siege of Mafeking, one of the best known episodes of the South African War of 1899–1902, has been surprisingly neglected. In this article I suggest that this may have to do with the indeterminate status of the genre of the diary, and the fact that it does not fit in easily with a nationalist narrative that has privileged the political. In arguing for its importance, I look at the social and intellectual influences that helped form Plaatje's world view as reflected in the diary; the circumstances in which he wrote it; his reasons for writing it; who he envisaged would read it; how its nature and form were affected by the events that went on around him; the choices he made about what to include and what to omit; the literary models upon which he drew; the linguistic choices he made; the opportunities the diary provided to develop not only his literary skills but a wider sense of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1899, the Australian colonies sent military contingents to South Africa to support the British in fighting the Boer enemy. While some questioned the justice of the conflict, the public reaction to the war was akin to a 'national insanity'. British victories in the first half of the war, particularly the relief of Mafeking in May 1900, saw noisy jingo crowds filling the streets of capital cities in celebration, resulting in public drunkenness and damage to property, behaviour typically deemed 'mad'. Colonial society, faced with increases in lunacy rates, was not only in the process of comprehending madness, but also ideas about Australian nationalism in the period approaching Federation of 1901. These factors, added to popular involvement in a British war in South Africa, shaped political, police and press responses to the new manifestation of jingoism. The press, a site of both the production and advancement of public conceptions of insanity, drew upon the social language of madness to communicate the acceptability or unacceptability of specific jingoistic behaviour. This paper examines the metaphorical use of mad vocabularies by the colonial press during this period to explore the 'arbitrary boundary' between madness and sanity in Federation era Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper recounts the early history of the South African Rugby Football Board (SARFB). The Board's official records are investigated to shed light on its institutional character, functions and development from 1889 to 1914. The organisation's inner workings on both a local and international level will be explored to open a window into the history of rugby administration in South Africa. This is an aspect of the sport, which, despite its general popularity, have hitherto remained largely unexplored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of South African Journal of Cultural History / Suid-Afrikaanse Vereniging vir Kultuurgeskiedenis is the property of South African Society for Cultural History and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Camps that interned black civilians during the South African War (1899-1902) are known as concentration camps, yet this is an inaccurate and misrepresentative picture of what actually transpired during the conflict. Rather, the concentration camps established for black civilians in South Africa late in 1900 and early 1901 were, by mid-1901, incorporated into the newly formed Native Refugee Department which fell under direct command of the British Army. At this point, the camps were mostly closed down and the internees relocated to Boer farms cleared of civilians. There, camps were established by the Native Refugee Department with a completely different function to that of the concentration camp system. These camps operated as forced labour camps in which women, children and elderly men were compelled into the labour of growing crops for the British military in exchange for food. If they refused, they were starved to death under the 'let die' policy. The Dry Harts Forced Labour Camp forms the focus of this article. A combination of sources was used to reconstruct its history: archaeological surveys, the fragmentary written archive, and through accessing local oral history and memory at the site, from 2001-2008. A narrative emerges from this research of the fight for land, the implementation of forced labour, civilian displacement, and the horror of total war, which are not, as some scholars claim, a shared experience with the Boer population at the hands of a common enemy, commensurate with mutual suffering, or even of black participation in the war. The experience of black civilians inside Dry Harts Forced Labour Camp was fundamentally different: theirs was not so-called participation but rather a separate experience of land loss, forced labour, war and displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australians who enlisted in the South African War were representatives of the bushman ideal popularised in the late 19th century, and were thus associated with the masculine model connected to this ideal. Most men were literal bushmen, rural labourers unemployed due to widespread drought in the decade preceding the conflict. However, this model of masculinity created difficulties for soldiers who developed psychiatric disorders during their military service, as society's feminisation of mental illness meant that it was deemed a loss of manhood. This article examines the application of the masculine bushman ideal to Australians who developed war trauma during the South African War (1899–1902), initially arguing that the conflict served as a testing ground for the larger-scale militarisation of the ideal from the First World War. It explores the role of military doctors in shaping diagnoses of combat breakdown while operating within limited psychological understanding and their attempts to avoid the demasculinisation—and thus stigmatisation—of the traumatised soldier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns eight women's testimonies produced over a period of some 50 years, which describe a protest about meat rations at Brandfort concentration camp in November 1901, during the 1899–1902 South African War. The focus here is not the ‘event itself’, which cannot now be recovered except in its archival or documentary forms, but on the subsequent re/telling of this incident, and on the politicised, (proto-) nationalist content and tone of the Brandfort protest testimonies. While proto-nationalism is present from the earliest extant testimony, the development of this is traced over time, showing how the later testimonies evince a strongly triumphalist nationalist tone. The retrospectively inscribed testimonies of the protest are examined to show how, over time, the story of the Brandfort protest became universalised, retold well away from specificities of time and place. If nationalism depends on the creation of ‘stories that find their place’, then it was partly through the construction and repetition of what Van Heyningen has called ‘costly mythologies’ about women's concentration camp experiences that Afrikaner national unity was achieved. This also supports Bradford’s important claim that the 1899–1902 war regendered Afrikaner nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The South African War is unambiguously associated with men. Their conflicts, politics and war-time activities are well known and dominate research trends. More recently, however, there has been a shift in focus to specifically deal with black and white women and children, exposing their lifeways during the conflict period. Telperion Shelter in western Mpumalanga Province affords us an archaeological insight into a South African War refuge camp. The site was occupied by both Boer women and children, who were imprisoned in the Balmoral and Middelburg concentration camps in 1902, and by black Africans of whom little is known. Either while living in Telperion or after the war, it appears that both groups inscribed the shelter's wall, writing their names and producing depictions of life as a refugee. Through these records it is possible to develop a historiography of Telperion's war-time use and consider the antagonistic, defiant, and rebellious nature of veld-life seen through the site's 'graffiti'. The art further functions as an identity marker and artefact of memorialisation. These testimonies are unlike those written in diary entries and provide us with an unusual narrative about the difficulties faced by the women and children who took to the veld to avoid capture by the British and to assist Boer commandos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of South African Journal of Cultural History / Suid-Afrikaanse Vereniging vir Kultuurgeskiedenis is the property of South African Society for Cultural History and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article places remembrance in the context of the development of an English-speaking South African identity until 1939. It looks at the interconnectedness between identity and memory and traces the emergence of a group memory common to the majority of English-speakers and linking them to other members of the British diaspora, particularly in the other dominions. The way in which English-speakers commemorated and memorialised the wars in which they fought is the main focus, beginning with the Cape eastern frontier wars, the Anglo-Zulu War and the South African War. The article then concentrates on the commemoration and memorialisation of the First World War until 1939, examining the role of organisations such as the South African Legion of the British Empire Service League and the MOTHS and touching on the role of the patriotic associations, schools and churches. The emphasis is on the memorialisation of the battle of Delville Wood and the commemorations associated with Delville Wood and Armistice Days and the way in which the First World War reflected the continuing British identity of English-speakers as well as the growth of a South Africanist identity. The way in which honouring the fallen was linked to service and duty is examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internment of Boer civilians in concentration camps by the British military authorities during the South African War of 1899–1902 was a highly controversial policy, not least because around 26,000 women and children were estimated to have died as a result of epidemics in the camps. Both supporters and opponents of the camps addressed the policy using gendered language rooted in ideas about British standards of ‘civilization’. Apologists defined the camps as one of the protective measures of the chivalrous British authorities, and downplayed the significance of the mortality rates by blaming infant deaths on the maternal shortcomings of Boer women. Opponents, however, stressed similarities between the British and Boer peoples, and invoked gendered language to attack what were held to be barbaric policies towards defenceless members of the community. At the heart of both discourses was a belief in British aspirations to embody an ideal ‘civilization’, underpinned by traditional gender ideologies. The association of this concept of ‘civilization’ with not merely cultural but racial difference led to the development of a racialized image of the enemy, rooted perhaps more strongly in perceptions of the female Boer civilian than of the male soldier. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Historia is the property of Historical Association of South Africa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Belgium, France and the Netherlands, state-induced punishments were inflicted on collaborators with the German occupation. In this article, Boer collaboration with the British is explored by recounting the careers of three high-profile officers of the Winburg commando, Commandants Harry Theunissen, Fanie Vilonel and Gerrie van der Merwe. There were hundreds of ordinary men and women in the district who also collaborated, but after the war there was no Boer state to bring them to book and the Dutch Reformed Church, as the only coherent social structure to survive the war was, unsurprisingly, more inclined to reconciliation than to retribution. Within post-war Afrikaner society there were furthermore social and political pressures for not settling accounts with those who had been disloyal. Consequently, collaborators were speedily reintegrated into society and the mythology of a united and heroic struggle against British imperialism could be sustained. Today the individualistic and pragmatic way in which Boers responded to occupation helps us to see the past and therefore also the present and the future in a different light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contends that new cultures of military professionalism were crucial to the emergence of the concentration camp as a social phenomenon in the late 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. It uses an analysis of the interaction between professional military culture and the process of war-fighting to provide a better understanding of the origins of the camp. Military professionalism, despite important national differences, took instrumental rationality as a core value. This produced a willingness by soldiers to take responsibility for organizing civilian populations on a macro-social scale. In each of four case studies, clearing the population from the rural areas in a 'scorched earth' response to guerilla activity led to the development of the camps. The article argues that this approach has more explanatory adequacy than those based on theories of genocide, biopower, exceptional states, racial ideology, or rational choice. The paper suggests that a major way in which the camps of 1896-1907 were linked to mid 20th century camps was through a global diffusion of the concept, via new forms of print media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Van Onselen's Masked Raiders is reviewed comparatively to suggest that Irish identities are always contested; that during early capitalist competition, like that in the Old Transvaal before Union, amateur 'primitive rebels' or 'outlaw heroes' cannot match harder professional accumulators, like Cecil John Rhodes; that murder is not heroic; that subaltern history is inevitably about subalterns, who cannot rationally be promoted to 'lead the parade'; and that Rhodes and his ilk made a major contribution to the long run project, begun in the 17th century, which culminated in English's dominating the world by the 21st century; whereas the primitive bandits in question, whether hanged, shot dead, jailed or escaped, were largely irrelevant to history, despite the fascination with which humans approach the murderous criminal mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 1899 an association football team from Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, South Africa, arrived in the United Kingdom. The team comprised 16 black South Africans who played under the auspices of the whites-only Orange Free State Football Association and was the first ever South African football team to tour abroad. In a four-month tour the team played 49 matches against opposition in England, France, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. A small but growing body of work focuses on black sport and football in particular and the 1899 tour is referred to in passing in a few publications, although none have attempted to uncover details of the team or the matches that were played in Europe. This article attempts to do this by drawing on a range of sources in South Africa and the United Kingdom and argues the case for the significance of this team for football history in general and South African sports history in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the role of horses in war through the lens of their mortality in the South African War (1899-1902). This conflict was the biggest and most modern of the numerous precolonial and colonial wars that raged across the southern African subcontinent in the late nineteenth century. Aside from the human cost, the theater of war carried a heavy environmental toll, with the scorched-earth policy shattering the rural economy. The environmental charge extended to animals. Both sides relied on mounted troops, and the casualties suffered by these animals were on a massive scale. This is widely regarded as proportionally the most devastating waste of horseflesh in military history up until that time. This paper looks at the material context of-and reasons for-equine casualties and discusses the cultural dimension of equine mortality and how combatants on both sides were affected by this intimate loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the life of the missionary J.A. Winter who is best known for his role in the formation of the Lutheran Bapedi Church in 1890. It explores the vital part he played in a range of other important historical processes, including the struggles over the political and economic controls imposed on Pedi society after colonial conquest in 1879, the violent conflicts which took place in the region during the South African War and the form of administration that emerged in its aftermath. We argue that understanding his actions and impact requires exploring a range of contexts and conclude that there was not a single coherent vision which drove him. We dispute the interpretation which gives pride of explanatory place to the effect of his immersion in an alternative culture. We show how, over time, particular combinations of his material interests and conceptual constructs moulded his choices and their consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass public commemoration of war dead is often held to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, with its genesis in the Great War. This article argues for a pre-history occasioned by commemoration of the South African War (1899-1902) that built on shifts in the form and function of war memorials that had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia is the property of Historical Association of South Africa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)