The Maphumulo Uprising

In 1906, the authorities in the colony of Natal put down, with great loss of life, an uprising that has become known as the Zulu or Bhambatha rebellion. Accounts have tended to concentrate on Bhambatha, the man who led the guerrilla war in the Nkandla forest, but this book shifts the focus to the Maphumulo area where two famous chiefs led their people in violent resistance to the colonial militia. This account also goes beyond the physical conflict. It examines the rituals that preceded it and the life and death struggle in the courts which followed as the colonial authorities sought to make an example of those who, they alleged, had used not just African weapons, but African medicine and superstition/religion to drive the white man out of Africa. The Maphumulo Uprising introduces many of the social and political issues around ethnicity, identity, and nationalism that have been such a feature of the subsequent history of KwaZulu-Natal.

Remembering the Rebellion narrates and commemorates the Zulu or Bhambatha rebellion of 1906 with riveting anecdotes, maps, and illustrations, many of them previously unpublished. At that time, the people of KwaZulu-Natal, already suffering the material and social consequences of colonialism, were further provoked by the imposition of a poll tax and the official determination to treat all protests against the tax as defiance. The resistance that followed was put down with uncompromising violence, but the memory of rebellion became an inspiration to those who continued the struggle against racial exploitation in South Africa.

This book recovers a major nineteenth-century literary figure, the American Claimant. For over a century, claimants offered a compelling way to understand cultural difference across the Anglophone Atlantic, especially between Britain and the United States. They also formed a political talisman, invoked against slavery and segregation, or privileges of gender and class. Later, claimants were exported to South Africa, becoming the fictional form for explaining black students who acquired American degrees. American Claimants traces the figure back to lost-heir romance, and explores its uses. These encompassed real, imagined, and textual ideas of inheritance, for writers and editors, and also for missionaries, artists, and students. The claimant dramatized tensions between tradition and change, or questions of exclusion and power: it offered ways of seeing activism, education, sculpture, and dress. The premise for dozens of novels and plays, a trope, a joke, even the basis for real claims: claimants matter in theatre history and periodical studies, they touch on literary marketing and reprinting, and they illuminate some unexpected texts. These range from Our American Cousin to Bleak House, Little Lord Fauntleroy to Frederick Douglass' Paper; writers discussed include Frances Trollope, Julia Griffiths, Alexander Crummell, John Dube, James McCune Smith, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain. The focus on claimants yields remarkable finds: new faces, fresh angles, a lost column, and a forgotten theatrical genre. It reveals the pervasiveness of this form, and its centrality in imagining cultural contact and exchange.

This edited collection gives voice to neglected public intellectuals in the arts, humanities, and journalism in South Africa who gave voice and presence to those who have been marginalized and silenced in South African history Edward Said described a public intellectual as someone who uses accessible language to address a designated public on matters of social and political significance. The essays in Public Intellectuals in South Africa apply this interpretive prism and activist principle to a South African context and tell the stories of well-known figures as well as some that have been mostly forgotten. They include Magema Fuze, John Dube, Aggrey Klaaste, Mewa Ramgobin and Koos Roets, alongside marginalized figures such as Elijah Makiwane, Mandisi Sindo, William Pretorius and Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees. The essays capture the thoughts and opinions of these historical figures, who the contributors argue are public intellectuals who spoke out against the corruption of power, promoted a progressive politics that challenged the colonial project and its legacies, and encouraged a sustained dissent of the political status quo. Offering fascinating accounts of the life and work of these writers, critics and activists across a range of historical contexts and disciplines, from journalism and arts criticism to history and politics, it enriches the historical record of South African public intellectual life. This volume makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates about the value of research in the arts and humanities, and what constitutes public intellectualism in South Africa.

Two volumes introduce the history of colonial wars in Africa and illustrate why African countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan continue to experience ethnic, political, and religious violence in the early 21st century. This sweeping study examines the wars of colonial conquest fought in Africa during the 19th and early 20th centuries. From Britain's efforts to wrest control of the Sudan from military leader Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi, to Italy's decisive defeat at the Battle of Adowa in Ethiopia, to Leopold II's brutal reign over the Belgian Congo, the work surveys the devastation reaped upon the continent by colonization and illustrates how its combative influence continues to resonate in Africa today. Written by scholars in the fields of history and politics, this complete reference includes entries on wars, campaigns, rebellions, battles, leaders, and organizations. The work delves into key historical periods including the "Scramble for Africa" (ca.1880 to 1910); early European colonial wars in Africa, such as the Dutch in the Cape and the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique; and African rebellions against the early colonial state in the 1890s and early 1900s. Entries feature prominent events and personalities as well as lesser-known occurrences and players.

Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 offers an inclusive vision of South Africa's past. Drawing largely from original sources, Paul Landau presents a history of the politics of the country's people, from the time of their early settlements in the elevated heartlands, through the colonial era, to the dawn of Apartheid. A practical tradition of mobilization, alliance, and amalgamation persisted, mutated, and occasionally vanished from view; it survived against the odds in several forms, in tribalisms, Christian assemblies, and other, seemingly hybrid movements; and it continues today. Landau treats southern Africa broadly, concentrating increasingly on the southern Highveld and ultimately focusing on a transnational movement called the 'Samuelites'. He shows how people's politics in South Africa were suppressed and transformed, but never entirely eliminated.

In 1910 Isaiah Shembe was struggling. He had left his family and quit his job as a sanitation worker to become a Baptist evangelist, but he ended his first mission without much to show. Little did he know that he would soon establish the Nazaretha Church as he began to attract attention from people left behind by industrial capitalism in South Africa. By his death in 1935, Shembe was an internationally known prophet and healer, described by his peers as “better off than all the Black people.” In A Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African Church, historian Lauren V. Jarvis provides a fascinating and intimate portrait of one of South Africa’s most famous religious figures, and in turn the making of modern South Africa. Following Shembe from his birth in the 1860s across many environments and contexts, Jarvis illuminates the tight links between the spread of Christianity, strategies of evasion, and the capacious forms of community that continue to shape South Africa today.

A both controversial and comprehensive historical analysis of how the British Empire worked, from Wolfson Prize-winning author and historian John Darwin The British Empire shaped the world in countless ways: repopulating continents, carving out nations, imposing its own language, technology and values. For perhaps two centuries its expansion and final collapse were the single largest determinant of historical events, and it remains surrounded by myth, misconception and controversy today. John Darwin's provocative and richly enjoyable book shows how diverse, contradictory and in many ways chaotic the British Empire really was, controlled by interests that were often at loggerheads, and as much driven on by others' weaknesses as by its own strength.