Cecil John Rhodes once said he had only met two creators in South Africa: himself and James Douglas Logan, the Scottish-born founder of Matjiesfontein. Logan immigrated to South Africa in 1877 at the age of nineteen and almost immediately began amassing a fortune through business, politics and his high-profile association with that most favoured of imperial pastimes – cricket. Empire, War & Cricket in South Africa explores in detail how Matjiesfontein was created and how Logan developed this little Karoo town into a renowned health resort, attracting the rich and famous – including South African novelist Olive Schreiner and England cricketer George Lohmann. But, above all, this is the untold story of how James Logan was instrumental in developing the game of cricket in South Africa at a time when the country was heading towards war with the British Empire. In Empire, War & Cricket in South Africa, readers will learn how one of the first international cricket matches between South Africa and England took place at Matjiesfontein; explore the controversial 1901 South African cricket tour to England in the midst of the Anglo-Boer War; read the amazing story of how Logan once had the captain and manager of England’s cricket team arrested as they boarded their ship home; and discover Logan’s close relationship with Rhodes and how their ‘shady dealings’ brought down the premier’s first government. Illustrated throughout with rare photographs and documents, Empire, War & Cricket in South Africa is a unique social and political history of the workings of the British Empire in South Africa during the late nineteenth century; a well-researched and fascinating biography of the man who gave us Matjiesfontein; and an entertaining and at times unbelievable story of cricket’s origins in South Africa.

This book explores how cricket in South Africa was shaped by society and society by cricket. It demonstrates the centrality of cricket in the evolving relationship between culture, sport and politics starting with South Africa as the beating heart of the imperial project and ending with the country as an international pariah. The contributors explore the tensions between fragmentation and unity, on and off the pitch, in the context of the racist ideology of empire, its ‘arrested development’ and the reliance of South Africa on a racially based exploitative labour system. This edited collection uncovers the hidden history of cricket, society, and empire in defining a multiplicity of South African identities, and recognises the achievements of forgotten players and their impact.

This book provides the first comprehensive study of the ‘special relationship’ between Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. While most studies approach this from the history of British and South African relations or the history of South African territorial expansion, this book offers new insights by examining Southern Rhodesia’s relations with South Africa from the former’s perspective. Exploring relations through the lens of settler colonialism, the book argues that settler colonialism in the region was marked by a competitive and antagonistic relationship between settler communities, particularly Afrikaner and English communities. The book explores the connections between these countries by examining (high) politics, economic links, and social and cultural ties, highlighting both instances of competition and cooperation. Above all, it argues that economic ties were the cornerstone of the relationship and that these shaped the rest of the ties between the two countries. Drawing on archival records from Britain, South Africa and Zimbabwe, as well as a number of secondary sources, it offers a much more nuanced perspective of this relationship than has been previously offered.

A biography detailing Gandhi’s twenty-year stay in South Africa and his attitudes and behavior in the nation’s political context. In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. “India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma,” goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime. The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi’s first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi’s racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history. The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals. Praise for The South African Gandhi “In this impressively researched study, two South African scholars of Indian background bravely challenge political myth-making on both sides of the Indian Ocean that has sought to canonize Gandhi as a founding father of the struggle for equality there. They show that the Mahatma-to-be carefully refrained from calling on his followers to throw in their lot with the black majority. The mass struggle he finally led remained an Indian struggle.” —Joseph Lelyveld, author of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India “This is a wonderful demonstration of meticulously researched, evocative, clear-eyed and fearless history writing. It uncovers a story, some might even call it a scandal, that has remained hidden in plain sight for far too long. The South African Gandhi is a big book. It is a serious challenge to the way we have been taught to think about Gandhi.” —Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

This book provides an interpretation of sport in contemporary South Africa through an historical account of the evolution and social ramifications of sport in the twentieth century. It comprises chapters which trace the growth of sports such as football, cricket, surfing, boxing and rugby, and considers their relationship to aspects of racial identity, masculinity, femininity, political and social development in the country. The book also draws out the wider geo-political significance of South African sport, placing it in the context of the development of sport both elsewhere on the African continent and internationally. The history of sport has seen significant international growth over the past few decades. For the most part, however, the history of sport in Africa has remained largely untraced. By detailing the way in which sport’s development in South Africa overlapped with major socio-political processes on the wider African continent, this volume seeks to narrow the gap. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Forty years ago, a South African rugby tour in the United States became a crucial turning point for the nation’s burgeoning protests against apartheid and a test of American foreign policy. In Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America's Anti-Apartheid Movement, Derek Charles Catsam tells the fascinating story of the Springbok’s 1981 US tour and its impact on the country’s anti-apartheid struggle. The US lagged well behind the rest of the Western world when it came to addressing the vexing question of South Africa’s racial policies, but the rugby tour changed all that. Those who had been a part of the country’s tiny anti-apartheid struggle for decades used the visit from one of white South Africa’s most cherished institutions to mobilize against both apartheid sport and the South African regime more broadly. Protestors met the South African team at airports, chanted outside their hotels, and courted arrests at matches, which ranged from the bizarre to the laughable, with organizers going to incredible lengths to keep their locations secret. In telling the story of how a sport little appreciated in the United States nonetheless became ground zero for the nation’s growing anti-apartheid movement, Flashpoint serves as a poignant reminder that sports and politics have always been closely intertwined.

European and African works have found it difficult to move past the image of Africa as a place of exotica and relentless brutality. This book explores the status and critical relationship between politics, culture, literary creativity, criticism, education and publishing in the context of promoting Africa' s indigenous knowledge, and seeks to recover some of the sites where Africans continue to elaborate conflicting politics of self-affirmations. Itboth acknowledges and steps outside the protocols of analysis informed by ...