This study of the relationship between Cecil Rhodes and the Cape Afrikaners fills many gaps in his political biography. Previous biographers have rarely consulted the abundant Cape Afrikaner sources that this book refers to and which contribute to a better understanding of Rhodes' political career. Rhodes, who appeared on the political scene of the Cape Colony in the 1880s, played an important role in the shaping of the political outlook of the Cape Afrikaners during the last two decades of the century.

Cecil Rhodes is the most written about and memorialised figure in southern African history, the subject of well over 25 biographies and numerous articles. Rhodes has featured in novels, plays and films.

This book explores how since colonial times South Africa has created its own vernacular classicism, both in creative media and everyday life.

This title focuses on the relationship between two seemingly incompatible political partners.

A highly accessible examination of an international phenomenon

Troubling Images explores how art and visual culture helped to secure hegemonic claims to the nation-state via the construction of a unified Afrikaner imaginary Emerging in the late nineteenth century and gaining currency in the 1930s and 1940s, Afrikaner nationalist fervour underpinned the establishment of white Afrikaner political and cultural domination during South Africa’s apartheid years. Focusing on manifestations of Afrikaner nationalism in paintings, sculptures, monuments, buildings, cartoons, photographs, illustrations and exhibitions, Troubling Images offers a critical account of the role of art and visual culture in the construction of a unified Afrikaner imaginary, which helped secure hegemonic claims to the nation-state. This insightful volume examines the implications of metaphors and styles deployed in visual culture, and considers how the design, production, collecting and commissioning of objects, images and architecture were informed by Afrikaner nationalist imperatives and ideals. While some chapters focus only on instances of adherence to Afrikaner nationalism, others consider articulations of dissent and criticism. By ‘troubling’ these images: looking at them, teasing out their meanings, and connecting them to a political and social project that still has a major impact on the present moment, the authors engage with the ways in which an Afrikaner nationalist inheritance is understood and negotiated in contemporary South Africa. They examine the management of its material effects in contemporary art, in archives, the commemorative landscape and the built environment. Troubling Images adds to current debates about the histories and ideological underpinnings of nationalism and is particularly relevant in the current context of globalism and diaspora, resurgent nationalisms and calls for decolonisation.

This text brings together contributions from scholars in South African and imperial history to examine the international dimensions of the war, including a historiographical review of a century of writing on the origins of the war.