Kronos 37 (2011)

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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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