South African History

In Mandela, former foreign correspondent Bob Crew demystifies the icon and his legacy. After over a decade of travels in South Africa, Crew seeks truth in the unexpected details of the lives of Mandela and current South African president Jacob Zuma, comparing them to other world icons in order to bring a new understanding of their legacies to Western listeners.

The Boer War was the defining conflict of South African history and one of the most important conflicts in the history of the British Empire. Naturally, complicated geopolitics underscored it, going back centuries. In fact, the European history of South Africa began with the 1652 arrival of a small Dutch flotilla in Table Bay, at the southern extremity of the African continent, which made landfall with a view to establishing a victualing station to service passing Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) ships.

At 7:30 a.m. on June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinney, Jr., was escorted by four guards to the death chamber. Wearing socks but no shoes, the 14-year-old Black boy walked with his Bible tucked under his arm. The guards strapped his slight, five-foot-one-inch frame into the electric chair. His small size made it difficult to affix the electrode to his right leg and the face mask, which was clearly too large, fell to the floor when the executioner flipped the switch. That day, George Stinney became the youngest person executed in the United States during the 20th century.

Most Australians have heard of the Boer War of 1899 to 1902 and of Harry 'Breaker' Morant, a figure who rivals Ned Kelly as an archetypal Australian folk hero. Born in England and emigrating to Queensland in 1883 in his early 20s, Morant was a charming but reckless man who established a reputation as a rider, polo player and writer. He submitted ballads to The Bulletin that were published under the name 'The Breaker' and counted Banjo Paterson as a friend.

Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa’s most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.

James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern Black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing Black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into Black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters.

In the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century, crusading African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett bravely reported on the scourge of white supremacist violence that had personally impacted her own life and work. Her reporting exposed and riled the South, enlightened uninformed Northerners, and captured international attention. Southern Horrors and The Red Record offer extensive accounts of the lynching, cruelty, and hate that African Americans faced in the early years of the Jim Crow South.

Police Investigation: In the atlas of world history, it would occupy a small space of time. Without warning a bomb goes off in a shopping complex. Two housewives and three children are left dead. An act of anger and retaliation in a holiday resort, which triggered a violent chain of events.

In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a Black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a White businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge.

New York Times best-selling author Kristen Green draws on years of research to tell the extraordinary and little-known story of young Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who blazed a path of liberation for thousands. She was forced to have the children of a brutal slave trader and live on the premises of his slave jail, known as the “Devil’s Half Acre”. When she inherited the jail after the death of her slaveholder, she transformed it into “God’s Half Acre”, a school where Black men could fulfill their dreams.

One of our most influential anthropologists reevaluates her long and illustrious career by returning to her roots and the roots of life as we know it. When Elizabeth Marshall Thomas first arrived in Africa to live among the Kalahari bushmen, she was 19, and these last surviving hunter-gatherers were living as humans had for 15,000 centuries. After a lifetime of interest in the bushmen, Thomas has come to see that their lifestyle reveals great, hidden truths about human evolution.

Police Investigation: In the atlas of world history, it would occupy a small space of time. Without warning a bomb goes off in a shopping complex. Two housewives and three children are left dead. An act of anger and retaliation in a holiday resort, which triggered a violent chain of events.

Frederick Courteney Selous (1851-1917) was a British explorer, hunter, and conservationist. In this work, The Lion in South Africa, he describes his numerous encounters with wild lions and notes that as far back as the 1890s, lion numbers were shrinking from overhunting.

It is January of 1879. While three columns of British soldiers and their African allies cross the Uminyathi River to commence the invasion of the Zulu Kingdom, a handful of redcoats from B Company, 2/24th Regiment are left to guard the centre column's supply depot at Rorke's Drift. On the morning of 22 January, the main camp at Isandlwana, just 10 miles to the east, comes under attack from the entire Zulu army and is utterly destroyed.

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Douglas Rogers is the son of White farmers living through that country's long and tense transition from postcolonial rule. He escaped the dull future mapped out for him by his parents for one of adventure and excitement in Europe and the United States. But when Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe launched his violent program to reclaim White-owned land and Rogers' parents were caught in the cross fire, everything changed.

In January 1879, three columns of British soldiers under the command of Lord Chelmsford, commenced the invasion of the Zulu Kingdom. The southern No. 1 Column led by Colonel Charles Pearson advances on the old mission station at Eshowe. Their intent is to establish a fort and supply depot from which to support the centre No. 3 Column’s advance on the Zulu royal kraal at Ulundi. As the vast column of British soldiers and their African allies slogs its way across the coastal hills, the incessant rain and threat of typhoid promise to be as fearful a nemesis as the lurking armies of Zulu warriors.

At a time when most of the public discourse was dominated by men, Anna Julia Cooper’s writings offered a blistering rebuke to that status quo. The essays and speeches collected here anticipated the debates about racism, sexism, and intersectionality that we are still having today. Cooper argues in particular for the importance of Black women’s participation in identifying and combating the structures of oppression that surrounded them - and that made life so much more difficult for many other groups as well.

The Napoleonic Wars radically altered the old, established European power dynamics, and in 1795, the British, now emerging as the globe’s naval superpower, assumed control of the Cape as part of the spoils of war. In doing so, they recognized the enormous strategic value of the Cape as global shipping routes were developing and expanding. Possession passed back and forth once or twice, but more or less from that point onward, the British established their presence at the Cape, which they held until the unification of South Africa in 1910.

The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. In 1884, Prince Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, brought the plenipotentiaries of all major powers of Europe together, to deal with Africa's colonization in such a manner as to avoid provocation of war. This event - known as the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 - galvanized a phenomenon that came to be known as the Scramble for Africa.

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