Based on extensive archival research in South Africa and drawing on the most recent scholarship, this book is an original and lucid exposition of the ideological, political and administrative origins of Apartheid. It will add substantially to the understanding of contemporary South Africa.

Today AIDS dominates the headlines. A century ago it was fears of syphilis epidemics. This book looks at how the spread of syphilis was linked to socio-economic transformation land dispossession, migrancy and urbanisation disrupted social networks - factors similarly important in the AIDS crisis. Medical explanations of syphilis and state medical policy, however, were shaped by contemporary beliefs about race. Doctors drew on ideas from social Darwinism, eugenics, and social anthropology to explain the incidence of syphilis among poor whites and Africans, especially women, and to help define 'normal' and abnormal sexual behaviour for racial groups.

"In Restless Identities the prism of biography is used to capture the complex social identities of its subjects without reducing them to ciphers of larger historical transformations. But this book is not a conventional biography nor is it simply about the recovery of two forgotten nationalists. It draws us directly into the little-understood world of Zulu cultural nationalism and explores the contested process of re-imagining the Zulu nation. Lamula and Maling's hitherto lost biographies dramatise the limits of our understanding of those intellectually heterodox, socially marginal and culturally innovative individuals whose imagination and opportunism were vital to the history of African nationalism in South Africa, but whose stories have yet to be told."--BOOK JACKET.