Kronos: Southern African Histories

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/97

Kronos: Southern African Histories is published annually by the Dept of History and the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC. It is an accredited South African journal that aims to promote and publicise high quality historical research on southern Africa. The journal also encourages comparative studies and seeks to break new ground in its dynamic integration of visuals and text.

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Now showing 1 - 17 of 17

Not quite fair play, old chap: The complexion of cricket and sport in South Africa
(Published by History Dept, University of the Western Cape, 2009) Nasson, Bill
This review essay explores the racial and social divides that have permeated cricket in South Africa.
Utopia Live: Singing the Mozambican struggle for national liberation
(History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2009) Israel, Paolo
This article engages a historical reconstruction of the formation of Makonde revolutionary singing in the process of the Mozambican liberation struggle. The history of ?Utopia live? is here entrusted to wartime genres, marked by heteroglossia and the use of metaphor, and referring to moments when the ?space of experience? and the ?horizon of expectation? of the Struggle were still filled with uncertainty and the sense of possibility. Progressively, however, singing expressions were reorganised around socialism?s nodes of meaning. Ideological tropes, elaborated by Frelimo?s ?courtly? composers, were appropriated in popular singing. The relations between the ?people? and their leaders were made apparent through the organization of the performance space. The main contention of the article is that unofficiality, heteroglossia, metaphor and poetic license, although they feature in genres that have been marked out as ?popular? in academic discourse, are by no means intrinsically ?popular?. Much on the contrary, they are the first victims of populist modes of political actions, that is, of a politics grounded on a concept of ?people?.
Demanding satisfaction: Violence, masculinity and honour in late eighteenth century Cape Town
(Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2009) Worden, Nigel (Univ. of Cape Town)
This article analyses two separate cases of public violence which took place in Cape Town in the summer of 1772/3. At surface level they appear to be very different in character. One was a scrap among low-ranking soldiers who were playing cards at a shoreline outpost. The other was a formalised challenge between two captains of the VOC return fleet as they were lunching with the Governor, which resulted in a death and the flight of the murderer. Yet closer analysis suggests common ritualised codes of behaviour that intriguingly reveal how violence, masculinity and notions of honour operated at all social levels within the town. Both cases were complex and coded social conflicts, rooted in northern European early modern social beliefs and practices as transferred to a colonial context. However, none of these perpetrators of violence was viewed sympathetically by the VOC authorities at the Cape. By contrast, the assailant Captain who had escaped back to Europe was able to successfully appeal to the VOC directors in the Netherlands.
A flying Springbok of wartime British skies: A.G. "Sailor" Malan
(Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2009) Nasson, Bill
This article, an expanded version of a 2008 public lecture, explores the life and times of Adolph Gysbert ?Sailor? Malan, a South African who rose to prominence as a combatant in the 1940 Battle of Britain and who, after his post-war return to the Union, became a notable personality in liberal reform politics. A classic Anglo-Afrikaner empire loyalist or ?King?s Afrikaner?, Malan became ?Sailor? through his interwar merchant marine service, joining the Royal Air Force in the later 1930s. An exceptional fighter pilot, his wartime role as an RAF ace in defending Britain turned him into a national hero, a migrating loyal Springbok who had sprung selflessly to the defence of Great Britain. Subsequently, as an ex-serviceman, Malan drew on his wartime sensibilities and beliefs to return to political battle in his home country, in opposition to post-1948 Afrikaner nationalism and its apartheid policies. The mini-biography of Sailor Malan analyses several key life-story elements, including his seafaring apprenticeship, British wartime identity and combat experience, and troubled relationship with post- 1945 South Africa as a gradualist liberal.
Contestations over knowledge production or ideological bullying? A response to Legassick on the workers' movement
(Published by History Dept, University of the Western Cape, 2009) Sithole, Jabulani (Univ. of KwaZulu-Natal)
The key characteristic of the vast amount of literature on the South African workers ? movement in the post-1973 period is the denial that the class and national struggles were closely intertwined. This denial is underpinned by a strong ?antinationalist current? which dismisses the national liberation struggle as ?populist and nationalist? and therefore antithetical to socialism. This article cautions against uncritical endorsement of these views. It argues that they are the work of partisan and intolerant commentators who have dominated the South African academy since the 1970s and who have a tendency to suppress all versions of labour history which highlight these linkages in favour of those which portray national liberation and socialism as antinomies. The article also points out that these commentators use history to mobilise support for their rigidly held ideological positions and to wage current political struggles under the pretext of advancing objective academic arguments.
An early modern entrepreneur: Hendrik Oostwald Eksteen and the creation of wealth in Cape Town, 1702�1741
(Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2009) Groenewald, Gerald
This article uses the career of Hendrik Oostwald Eksteen at the Cape between 1702 and 1741 to illustrate the mechanisms free burghers could use to create wealth in an economically restrictive environment. By making use of the concept of entrepreneurship and its attendant issues, the article describes Eksteen?s rise to fortune and prestige through his exploitation of a combination of economic opportunities afforded by Cape Town?s position as a port servicing passing ships. Crucial to Eksteen?s later success was his successful use of the opportunities provided by the monopolistic alcohol retail market at the Cape. Eksteen?s initial success in this arena provided him with a capital base to pursue other opportunities in agriculture, fishing and meat provision, making him the wealthiest man at the Cape by the 1730s. The article also illustrates how Eksteen?s upward mobility was linked to his use of social capital and the cultivation of large social networks through kinship. It demonstrates, furthermore, that economic success was wound up with social power and prestige. In using the biography of Eksteen, the article argues for the importance of economic history in the study of the early modern Cape, but calls also for a study which links economic developments with social and cultural ones through a focus on individual entrepreneurs. Shown, too, is the fact that the existing conception of the rise of a Cape gentry in the eighteenth century needs to be revised to take into account the role of entrepreneurship, the urban foundations of wealth creation, as well as the role of the free black community in this process.
Land distribution politics in the Eastern Cape midlands: The case of the Lukhanji municipality, 1995-2006
(Published by History Dept, University of the Western Cape, 2009) Wotshela, Luvoyo (Univ. of Fort Hare)
Since its initiation, South Africa?s post-apartheid land reform programme has generated extensive analysis and critique that in turn has yielded a body of scholarship. Discussion revolves around the official policy of the programme, the challenges associated with its implementation and its reception at local levels. It cannot be overstated that much of the discourse on the formulation of the programme itself commenced in the dying years of apartheid, through a series of workshops, policy conferences, research projects and publications. Prompted by glaring disparities in the country?s social and living conditions and primarily by entrenched imbalanced landownership, contemporary land reform dialogue has a well-built backdrop. What, however, is our understanding of local community politics that played perceptible roles in triggering land redistribution and facilitating patterns of settlement? This article gives some insight into a veiled history of interplay between community mobilisation politics, governance and official land reform policy in the Lukhanji municipality of the Eastern Cape during South Africa?s transitional years of 1995 to 2006. After outlining how land redistribution was initially driven by forces operating outside government action, the article proceeds to illustrate the frailty of the government land redistribution accomplishment. Moreover, it demonstrates the complex nature of a rural setting that has arisen from community-facilitated and incipient government land redistribution achievements in the area.
Laughing with Sam Sly: The cultural politics of satire and colonial British identity in the Cape Colony, c. 1840-1850
(Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2010) Holdridge, Christopher
This article examines Sam Sly�s African Journal (1843�51), a literary and satirical newspaper published by William Layton Sammons in Cape Town. It contends that the newspaper utilised satire to forge British cultural affinity in the colony, as well as to encourage and preserve the conservative social boundaries of propriety and family values espoused by white middle-class colonists. This differed from the more widely studied position of satire as a subversive challenge to the established order, with Sammons avoiding sexually explicit, scandalous humour or overt attacks on personal character. In a period of growing white consensus, the African Journal�s use of satire in the 1840s formed part of the cultural politics of establishing bourgeois values through the medium of appreciation of British literature and popular culture. Satire in Sam Sly�s African Journal thus functioned ideologically to extend British cultural dominance and affinities, and to preserve and instil white bourgeois moral codes. Although much satire was shorn of the racial reality of the Cape Colony, seeking to replicate an impression of metropolitan whiteness, those satires that focused on race derided the Khoikhoi and Xhosa as incapable of achieving equality with whites, drawing on growing anti-humanitarian sentiment in the Cape. The African Journal�s popularity, however, diminished in the face of the anti-convict agitation of 1848�50, when colonists opposed the landing of ticket-of-leave convicts from Ireland as an impediment to the goal of representative government, through petitions and boycotting supplying to the government. Satirising these measures as a radical betrayal of British loyalty, Sammons�s support dwindled owing to his criticism of popular feeling.
Family law and "the great moral public interests" in Victorian Cape Town
(Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2010) Malherbe, Vertrees C.(University of Cape Town)
In the wake of the mineral revolution, and the Cape Colony�s attainment of responsible government, Cape Town�s population doubled in the nineteenth century�s latter years. Its largely British ruling class, seeing opportunities for wealth and a greater significance in empire and world, sought to construct a social order conducive to those goals. Faced with increasing ethnic heterogeneity, gender imbalance due to the numbers of male immigrants, and frustration in combating the endemic poverty and slums, city fathers and their closest colleagues � doctors, clergy � perceived the way forward in terms not of extending rights but of moral reform. This article carries the ongoing investigation of family life and law in Cape Town through the Victorian period. It examines legal enactments and social developments where they impacted on marriage, divorce, concubinage and related matters, with particular reference to the welfare of children and those born out of wedlock.
Living in exile: daily life and international relations at SWAPO�s Kongwa Camp
(Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2011) Williams, Christian A.
From 1964, when it was first granted by the Tanzanian government to OAU recognized liberation movements, Kongwa camp has been a key site in southern Africa�s exile history. First SWAPO and FRELIMO, and later the ANC, MPLA and ZAPU, inhabited neighbouring sites near the town of Kongwa in central Tanzania, where they trained their respective members in guerrilla tactics and prepared to infiltrate their countries of origin. Despite the importance of Kongwa for any history of southern Africa�s liberation struggles, few secondary sources draw attention to Kongwa as a lived space, and none consider it beyond the historiography of a particular national movement. In contrast, this essay highlights the experiences of Namibians living in an international community at Kongwa during the 1960s. Drawing on taped interviews, published memoirs, the ANC�s Morogoro Papers, and Tanzanian historiography and ethnography, it argues that Kongwa shaped a social hierarchy among exiled Namibians determined by their differing abilities to form relationships with non-Namibians around the camp. The essay traces the formation of this hierarchy through histories of how Kongwa camp formed; of how Namibians related to Tanzanian officials, other liberation movement members, and local farmers there; and of how such relationships shaped the form and resolution of conflicts within SWAPO. I emphasize that these histories are obscured by southern Africa�s national historiographies and that they demand a regional approach to exile which attends to the particular sites and kinds of spaces in which exiles lived.
Reading and representing African refugees in New York
(Published by University of the Western Cape, 2011) Field, Sean
Tracy Kidder and Jonny Steinberg have constructed evocative biographies of African refugees� dislocation, journeys and struggles to settle in the USA. These books are reviewed through the lens of how South African readers might read these books given local imaginings of African refugees. The article describes how African refugee experiences are portrayed in both books and it critiques their representation of trauma and memory; and how each �author� approached their relationships with the �authored�. Kidder tended to be the ventriloquist for the Burundian refugee�s life story and while offering useful narrative analysis, his conclusions have a redemptive tone. In contrast, Steinberg shares his draft manuscript with two Liberian protagonists, which produces complex encounters between author and authored. Steinberg�s analysis of how the past Liberian civil war is mirrored in present conflicts within and amongst refugees in Little Liberia leads to a more complex account of refugee lives and of how memory and history intertwine.
Road to Ghana: Nkrumah, Southern Africa and the eclipse of a decolonizing Africa
(Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2011) Ahlman, Jeffrey S.
This article interrogates the position of Accra as an �extra-metropolitan� centre for southern African anti-colonial nationalists and anti-apartheid activists during the so-called �first wave� of Africa�s decolonization. Drawn to Ghana by a narrative of decolonization and continental pan-Africanism that was at once peaceful and revolutionary, southern African �Freedom Fighters� and expatriates first traveled to the Ghanaian capital of Accra in anticipation of the 1958 All-African Peoples Conference. Inside Ghana, southern African parties including the ANC and NDP and later the PAC, ZAPU and ZANU worked with the government of Kwame Nkrumah�s Convention People�s Party (CPP) in establishing an anti-colonial policy that spoke both to the unique settler situation in the region and the heightening international tensions of the emergent Cold War � a transnational dialogue to which the Nkrumah administration was not always receptive. As such, this article argues that the southern African presence in Accra and the realities of settler rule in the region challenged Nkrumah�s and others� faith in the �Ghanaian� model of decolonization, thus leading to a radicalization of African anti-colonial politics in Ghana during the early and mid-1960s as Nkrumahand his allies faced the prospect of the continent�s �failed� decolonization.
Decolonization of a special type: rethinking Cold War history in Southern Africa
(History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2011) Lee, Christopher J.
Introduction: This special issue of Kronos: Southern African Histories speaks to this imbalance, contributing in small measure to a recent turn in Cold War studies that has sought to incorporate regional perspectives found in area studies to readdress the parameters and politics of this extended period. Departing from the influential early work of scholars like John Lewis Gaddis � who helped to define the field of Cold War history in books such as The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972) and Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (1982) � scholarship published over the past two decades has reached beyond an exclusive American-Soviet dynamic and a �great men� approach to history � whether Stalin or Eisenhower, among other leaders � to consider the role of social movements and popular trends, the factor of identity politics such as racial solidarity and, perhaps most significant, a broader political geography created through the global wave of decolonization after the Second World War. This change in focus can be attributed to a generational shift, as well as the end of the Cold War itself, which has resulted in the opening of archives and research areas previously unavailable. In fact, the expansion of Cold War history and diplomatic history more generally � at least in the American academy � has generated calls for renaming the field as �international history� in order to move Decolonization of a Special Type: Rethinking Cold War History in Southern Africa 7 attention away from nation-state interactions to examine instead patterns of social and cultural history that transcend the totalizing effect that the �Cold War period� as such has had.
The South Africa-Angola talks, 1976-1984: a little-known cold war thread
(Published by History Dept, University of the Western Cape, 2011) Saunders, Christopher (University of Cape Town)
That South Africa invaded Angola in 1975, in an abortive attempt to prevent a Marxist government coming to power there, and that the South African Defence Force then repeatedly attacked Angola from 1978, is relatively well known. That representatives of the South African and Angolan governments met on many occasions from 1976 is a largely untold story. This article uses documentation from the archives of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, along with other sources, to analyse these talks and the Cold War context in which they took place.
Rationalizing gukurahundi: cold war and South African foreign relations with Zimbabwe, 1981-1983
(Published by University of the Western Cape, 2011) Scarnecchia, Timothy (Kent State University)
This article examines the role of diplomatic relations during the first stages of the 1983 Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe. Based on a preliminary reading of South African Department of Foreign Affairs files for 1983, the article suggests that Cold War relations between Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom helped to provide cover for the Zimbabwean National Army�s Fifth Brigade�s campaign of terror. Similarly, American support for Mugabe�s claims to be a pro-Western leader committed to non-racialism helped provide international cover for the atrocities. At the same time, evidence shows high-ranking ZANU-PF officials negotiated with the South African Defense Forces in 1983 to cooperate in their efforts to keep ZAPU from supporting South African ANC operations in Zimbabwe. The 5th Brigade�s campaign therefore served the purposes of South Africa, even as ZANU-PF officials rationalized the Gukurahundi violence in international and anti-apartheid circles as a campaign against South African destabilization. The article suggests that the diplomatic history of the Gukurahundi can provide a useful lens for understanding the tragedy in both regional and international Cold War contexts.
A native of nowhere: the life of South African journalist Nat Nakasa, 1937-1965
(Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2011) Brown, Ryan Lenora
This article examines the life and work of South African journalist Nat Nakasa (1937-1965), a writer for the popular news magazine Drum, the first black columnist for the Johannesburg newspaper the Rand Daily Mail, and the founding editor of the African literary journal The Classic. He has long lurked on the fringes of South African historiography, never playing more than a bit part in studies of early apartheid-era journalism, literature and intellectual culture. Indeed, the specifics of his life have been overshadowed in both popular memory and academic study by the potent symbolism of his death, frequently evoked as a marker of the destruction wrought on black intellectuals by National Party rule. Nakasa committed suicide in exile in the United States at the age of only 28. Drawing on interviews, newspapers and magazines, memoirs, government surveillance documents, and personal papers, this article aims to fill in but also to complicate this legacy. In a broader sense, it also seeks to show how biographical narrative can be employed to cut across time periods, movements, perspectives, and geography, providing an important reminder that every history is peopled by the sprawled and frequently contradictory lives of individuals.
Imagining nation, state, and order in the mid-twentieth century
(Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2011) Irwin, Ryan M.
This essay considers the relationship between the United Nations and the Third World. Using the apartheid debate as a framing device, it explores Indian and African nationalism in the mid-1940s and early 1960s. In focusing on themes of nationhood, statehood, and international order, the essay explicates the factors that separated Indian nationalists from their contemporaries in Africa, and hints at a novel portrait of the Third World as a contested political project in the mid-twentieth century.

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