The South African War/Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902 and political memory in South Africa

Violence and intimacy in colonial and postcolonial Africa

“…Yet questions of violence and intimacy have been perceived as virulent in settler-colonial contexts. Southern Africa's early colonial history was marked by clashes between metropolitan forces, groups of settlers and African communities, and this context has attracted many scholars (working, for example, on the Herero and Nama genocide and the South African War; Gewald 1999;Krüger 1999;Zimmerer and Zeller 2008;Nasson 2010). Beyond warfare, scholars have analysed quotidian practices of violence as 'core technologies of colonial rule' (Muschalek 2019).…”

Marshalling a Splintered Society: Censorship, Publicity and Propaganda in South Africa During the Second World War

“…As Bill Nasson observes, it was a 'messy, controversial and unresolved story of a reluctant war'. 148 Participation in the war was contested and the underlying fractures in society became even more evident than before. Anti-war attitudes, particularly among Afrikaners, created apathy (at best) and undermined public and military morale.…”

The Lady in White: British Imperial Loyalism and Women’s Volunteerism in Second World War Durban

“…In his excellent overview of South Africa in the Second World War, Bill Nasson treats her as marginal, eccentric and benign, "a dignified and homely crooner … Managing to be both stirring and sentimental …". 5 I want to suggest however that Gibson's life can be an important lens through which we are directed to a broad and serious set of historical issues. In this article, I will consider what that life tells us about the role of South Africa in World War II, about Natal settler loyalism and its racial ideologies, and about the highly gendered politics of the management of wartime commitment in South Africa and across the British empire.…”