The Gordonia region of the Northern Cape province has received relatively little attention from historians. In Hidden Histories of Gordonia: Land dispossession and resistance in the Northern Cape, 1800–1990, Martin Legassick explores aspects of the generally unknown ‘brown’ and ‘black’ history of the region. Emphasising the lives of ordinary people, his writing is also in part an exercise in ‘applied history’ – historical writing with a direct application to people’s lives in the present. Tracing the indigenous history of Gordonia as well as the northward movement of Basters and whites from the western Cape through Bushmanland to the Orange River, the book presents accounts of family histories, episodes of indigenous resistance to colonisation, and studies of the ultimate imposition of racial segregation and land dispossession on the inhabitants of the region. A recurrent theme is the question of identity and how the extreme ethnic fluidity and social mixing apparent in earlier times crystallised in the colonial period into racial identities, until with final conquest came imposed racial classification.

This book offers an innovative new framework for reading British and settler representations of Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century. Taking the representation of the Southern African San as its case study, it uses methodologies drawn from critical anthropology, imperial history and literary studies to show the role that literary representations of Indigenous peoples played in popularising the hierarchical view of racial difference. The study identifies an ‘ethnographic poetics’ in which the claims of scientific discourse blend with a consciously literary preference for metaphor and analogy. This created a set of mobile figures that could be disseminated to different reading publics in both Britain and the colonies through a variety of literary genres and textual media. It advances research on race and imperial history by focusing on the importance of literature - from newspapers and periodicals to popular novels - in shaping discourses of national and racial belonging in Britain and the Cape Colony.

This book explores the challenge of dismantling colonial schooling and how entangled power relations of the past have lingered in post-apartheid South Africa. It examines the ‘on the ground’ history of colonialism from the vantage point of a small town in the Karoo region, showing how patterns of possession and dispossession have played out in the municipality and schools. Using the strong political and ontological critique of decoloniality theories, the book demonstrates the ways in which government interventions over many years have allowed colonial relations and the construction of racialised differences to linger in new forms, including unequal access to schooling. Written in an accessible style, the book considers how the dream of decolonial schooling might be realised, from the vantage point of research on the margins. This Karoo region also offers an interesting case study as the site where the world’s largest radio telescope was recently located and highlights the contrasting logics of international ‘big science’ and local development needs. This book will be of interest to academics and scholars in the education field as well as to social geographers, sociologists, human geographers, historians and policy makers. Chapters 1 and 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This edited collection illustrates contestations over land and political authority in South Africa’s rural areas, focusing on threats to popular rights and how they are being supported. Who controls the land and minerals in the former Bantustans of South Africa - chiefs, the state or landholders? Disputes are taking place around the ownership of resources, decisions about their exploitation and who should benefit. With respect to all of these issues, the courts have become increasingly important. The contributors to Land, Law and Chiefs in Rural South Africa capture some of these intense contestations over land, law and political authority, focussing on threats to the rights of ordinary people. History and customary law feature strongly in most disputes and succession to chieftaincy is also frequently disputed. Judges have to make decisions in a context where rival claimants to property or office assert their own versions of history and custom. The South African constitution recognizes customary law and the courts are attempting to incorporate and develop this branch of jurisprudence as ‘living customary law’. Lawyers, community leaders and academics are called on to assist in researching cases around restitution, land rights and customary law. The chapters in this collection discuss legal cases and policy directions that have evolved since 1994. Some chapters analyze the increasing power of chiefs in the South African rural areas, while others suggest that the courts are giving support to popular rights over land and supporting local democratic processes. Contributors record significant pushback from groups that reject traditional authority. These political tensions are a central theme of the collection and thus serve as vital case studies in furthering our understanding of rights and restitution in South Africa.

Reflecting emerging scholarship on the entanglement of colonial histories, this book examines British and South African perspectives on, and involvement in, the genocide of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa from 1904 to 1908. Seeking to present a transnational and trans-colonial perspective on the war imposed by Germany, the book sheds light on Anglo-German relations during ‘native' rebellions and exposes shared experiences of colonial violence. This approach aligns with a new surge of historiography which emphasises the co-operation between colonial powers to maintain order in Africa. The author focuses on British involvement in counter-insurgency efforts, its awareness of the extent of the genocide, and how the Herero-Nama War impacted colonial rule in British territory. The book sheds light on how the British government intentionally managed sensitive information on German colonialism according to the geopolitical needs: While reports were ignored and censored prior to 1914, these became instrumental to Britain’s foreign policy in confiscating Germany’s colonies in 1919. Not only exploring the war years, the book covers the entire period of German colonial rule in Africa (1884-1919), and highlights British and South African perspectives throughout this period. Offering fresh insights on the first genocide of the century, this book builds on a growing body of research into trans-colonialism and contributes to modern German history.

Why has land reform been such a failure in South Africa? Will expropriation without compensation solve the problem? What can be done to get the land programme back on track? In Land Matters, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi tackles the past, present and future of the land question in South Africa. Going back in history, he shows how Africans’ communal systems of landownership were used by colonial rulers to deny that Africans owned the land at all. He explores the effects of the Land Acts, Bantustans and forced removals. And he evaluates the ANC’s policies on land throughout the struggle years, during the negotiations of the 1990s, and in government. Land Matters unpacks the government’s achievements and failures in land redistribution, restitution and tenure reform, and makes suggestions for what needs to be done in future. The book also explores the power of chiefs, the tension between communal landownership and the desire for private title, the failure of the willing-seller, willing-buyer approach, women and land reform, the role of banks, and the debates around amending the Constitution. Steering clear of the simplistic and polarising terms of the land debate, Ngcukaitobi argues for a return to the nuanced constitutional requirements of justice and equity in South Africa’s land policy. Thoughtful and provocative, Land Matters sheds light on one of the most topical, complex and urgent issues in South Africa today.

Even leaving aside the vast death and suffering that it wrought on indigenous populations, German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile for most. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort of turning outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In his innovative environmental history, Martin Kalb outlines the development of the colony up to World War I, deconstructing the common settler narrative, all to reveal the importance of natural forces and the Kaisereich’s everyday violence.