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If a mere seven more MPs had voted with Prime Minister JBM Hertzog in favour of neutrality, South Africa's history would have been quite different. Parliament's narrow decision to go to war in 1939 led to a seismic upheaval throughout the 1940s: black people streamed in their thousands from rural areas to the cities in search of jobs; volunteers of all races answered the call to go 'up north' to fight; and opponents of the Smuts government actively hindered the war effort by attacking soldiers and committing acts of sabotage. World War Two upended South Africa's politics, ruining attempts to forge white unity and galvanising opposition to segregation among African, Indian and coloured communities. It also sparked debates among nationalists, socialists, liberals and communists such as the country had never previously experienced. As Richard Steyn recounts so compellingly in Seven Votes, the war's unforeseen consequence was the boost it gave to nationalisms, both Afrikaner and African, which went on to transform the country in the second half of the 20th century. The book brings to life an extraordinary cast of characters, including wartime leader Jan Smuts, DF Malan and his National Party colleagues, African nationalists from Anton Lembede and AB Xuma to Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela, the influential Indian activists Yusuf Dadoo and Monty Naicker, and many others.
South Africa is recognized as a site of both political turmoil and natural beauty, and yet little work has been done in connecting these defining national characteristics. Washed with Sun achieves this conjunction in its multidisciplinary study of South Africa as a space at once natural and constructed. Weaving together practical, aesthetic, and ideological analyses, Jeremy Foster examines the role of landscape in forming the cultural iconographies and spatialities that shaped the imaginary geography of emerging nationhood. Looking in particular at the years following the British victory in the second Boer War, from 1902 to 1930, Foster discusses the influence of painting, writing, architecture, and photography on the construction of a shared, romanticized landscape subjectivity that was perceived as inseparable from "being South African," and thus helped forge the imagined community of white South Africa. In its innovative approach to South Africa's history, Washed with Sun breaks important new ground, combining the persuasive theory of cultural geography with the material specificity of landscape history.
Place is a moving love letter to South Africa, merging literature and land­scape, and taking the reader on a breath-taking journey – into the heart of South Africa’s spectacular landscape and the inner-worlds of its most cel­ebrated authors.
At the age of 14, author David Bristow stuck a large touring map of South Africa on his bedroom wall, determined to mark off every road one day. It was the start of a life-long love affair with the land – indeed, in 40 years of dedicated travelling David has pretty much ‘been there, done that’, visiting almost all of South Africa’s game parks, nature reserves, mountain ranges, beaches, towns and dorps, as well as hiking and biking countless trails. This book is the accumulated knowledge of all that exploration: the very best (and sometimes the worst) of everything this country has to offer: wildlife, history, geography, art and culture, things to do, places to stay and routes and trails to be discovered by car, bike and on foot ... Anyone who’s ticked off more than a tenth of the entries in this book is, according to the author, qualified to wear the T-shirt. David Bristow began his writing career as a news journalist before reading for a Master’s Degree in Environmental Sciences. Although he claims to prefer riding his mountain bike, surfing and playing with his children to working, he has written around a dozen books for Random House Struik alone and spent 13 years as the editor of Getaway travel magazine.
'A precious and rare publication ... The moving stories of love, longing and suffering provide valuable new insights into tumultuous times that helped shape South Africa.' – Max du Preez It is nine months this evening since I last saw the light in my own house, when I had to tear myself away from all that is dear to me. And today is also my little son's birthday. Oh, how I long for home. So wrote Michael Muller in 1901 as he gazed at the lights of Cape Town from a ship bound for Bermuda, after months of internment in a British POW camp in Simon's Town. The camps were full, so Boer prisoners were being sent to other parts of the empire. Michael's brothers, Chris and Pieter, were exiled to Ceylon while Lool was held in the Green Point camp in Cape Town. Remarkably, three of the brothers kept diaries, the only known instance of this happening in the Boer War. The scrawled notes of Chris on the evening after the legendary Magersfontein battle, the rain-dashed pages written by Lool in Colesberg, and the angry words penned by Michael about his treatment at Surrender Hill have the urgency of men determined to go on record. When Beverley Roos-Muller began to explore writing about the Boer experience of the war, she read the tiny diary of Michael, grandfather of her husband, Ampie Muller. It led her to the discovery of the other diaries and many more documents. She also records the brothers' difficult return home and examines the consequences for South Africa of the bitterness this strife evoked. This is a beautifully told account of the fellowship of four brothers in war, their capture and eventual recovery.
During his exile in Madagascar, Boer soldier Deneys Reitz wrote about his experience of the Second Boer War (1899-1902). When it was eventually edited and published in 1929 as Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War, it still had the freshness and detail of an account written soon after the war. Reitz’ descriptions of the tumult through the eyes of a warrior in the saddle form not only a succinct narrative and important source for the Second Boer War, but his family connections (his father Francis William Reitz was State Secretary of the Transvaal), sheer luck, and participation at virtually every major event of the War all provide for a unique account. A vivid, unforgettable picture of mobile guerrilla warfare. Richly illustrated throughout.
The Greater War is an international history of the First World War. Comprising of thirteen chapters this collection of essays covers new aspects of the French, German, Italian and American efforts in the First World War, as well as aspects of Britain's colonial campaigns.
This volume emerged from an international research colloquium jointly organised by National Museums Scotland and the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies, University of Edinburgh, funded by the Scottish Government and administered by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Historians and museum curators from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa were invited to join with their Scottish counterparts to consider the functioning, and the meaning, of 'military Scottishness' in different Commonwealth countries and in Britain from the late Victorian period to the present day, with a particular focus on the impact of the First World War. Another key objective was to throw light on the 'hidden' culture of social networking which potentially operated behind local regiments and military units amongst Scotland's global diaspora. This edited collection provides a comparative overview of the nineteenth century emergence of military Scottishness and explores how the construction and performance of Scottish military identity has evolved in different Commonwealth countries over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it looks at the ways in which Scottish volunteer regiments in Commonwealth countries variously sought to draw upon, align themselves with or, at certain key moments, redefine the assertions of martial identity which Highland regiments represented.
Alfred, Lord Milner was a brilliant public servant and one of Britain's most celebrated – or notorious – empire-builders, who left an indelible imprint on the history of South Africa. Sent to southern Africa to bring President Paul Kruger's obstreperous Boers to heel, Milner was primarily, though not solely, responsible for the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), a conflict that marked the beginning of the end of the British Empire. In the aftermath of the war, a determined Milner set out to reconstruct the former Boer republics, but his policies stoked resentment among Afrikaners, particularly in respect of language and education. He left behind a coterie of young administrators, the so-called Kindergarten, who contributed significantly to the unification of South Africa and the fostering of imperial ideals through the Round Table Movement. In this biography, the first by a South African, Richard Steyn argues that Milner's reputation should not be defined by his eight years' service in South Africa alone. Despite his controversial stance on the issue of Irish Home Rule, Milner's legendary administrative ability made him the obvious choice for War Secretary in Lloyd George's five-man War Cabinet, and Milner did much to shape the Allied victory in the First World War. If his personal qualities and beliefs made him the wrong man to send to South Africa, where he failed to accomplish the over-ambitious goals he set himself, he was the right man in a far greater international conflict.