Ordinary Springboks

Ordinary Springboks PDF Author: Neil Roos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351152025
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
'Springbok' was a term used to describe the 200,000 white South African men who volunteered to serve during the Second World War. Volunteers developed bonds of comradeship, and rites of passage were expressed in the idiom of 'the front'. Without exception, volunteers nurtured hopes for some form of post-war 'social justice'. Neil Roos provides a fresh approach in considering comradeship and social justice ethnographically, as a way of focusing on ordinary Springboks' expectations and experiences during and after the war. As troops were demobilized, the contradictions of social justice in a colonial society were exposed. The majority of white veterans used the memory of service to stake their claim as white men who had served their country, and to negotiate a better position for themselves within the context of segregated colonial society. However, social justice amongst white veterans did not necessarily assume a racist character. A small group of radical white veterans invoked their war experience and traditions of anti-fascism to challenge the very precepts of racialized South African society. These veterans featured in the struggle against apartheid during the 1950s, and were especially prominent in the shift towards armed resistance to apartheid in 1961. Drawing heavily on the testimony of veterans, the book includes previously unreferenced documentary and visual material on the history of white servicemen, including official responses such as military intelligence reports on the political mood of serving soldiers, as well as material produced by veterans' organisations, such as the Springbok Legion, the War Veterans' Torch Commando and the Memorable Order of Tin Hats (MOTH). Roos offers a new framework for examining the social, cultural and political history of whites (and whiteness) in South Africa. The book will appeal to those interested in the elaboration of apartheid society and the types of acceptance and resistance that it engendered, and will also co

Ordinary Springboks

Ordinary Springboks PDF Author: Neil Roos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351152025
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Springbok' was a term used to describe the 200,000 white South African men who volunteered to serve during the Second World War. Volunteers developed bonds of comradeship, and rites of passage were expressed in the idiom of 'the front'. Without exception, volunteers nurtured hopes for some form of post-war 'social justice'. Neil Roos provides a fresh approach in considering comradeship and social justice ethnographically, as a way of focusing on ordinary Springboks' expectations and experiences during and after the war. As troops were demobilized, the contradictions of social justice in a colonial society were exposed. The majority of white veterans used the memory of service to stake their claim as white men who had served their country, and to negotiate a better position for themselves within the context of segregated colonial society. However, social justice amongst white veterans did not necessarily assume a racist character. A small group of radical white veterans invoked their war experience and traditions of anti-fascism to challenge the very precepts of racialized South African society. These veterans featured in the struggle against apartheid during the 1950s, and were especially prominent in the shift towards armed resistance to apartheid in 1961. Drawing heavily on the testimony of veterans, the book includes previously unreferenced documentary and visual material on the history of white servicemen, including official responses such as military intelligence reports on the political mood of serving soldiers, as well as material produced by veterans' organisations, such as the Springbok Legion, the War Veterans' Torch Commando and the Memorable Order of Tin Hats (MOTH). Roos offers a new framework for examining the social, cultural and political history of whites (and whiteness) in South Africa. The book will appeal to those interested in the elaboration of apartheid society and the types of acceptance and resistance that it engendered, and will also co

Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society

Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society PDF Author: Neil Roos
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253068045
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
How were whites implicated in and shaped by apartheid culture and society, and how did they contribute to it? In Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society, historian Neil Roos traces the lives of ordinary white people in South Africa during the apartheid years, beginning in 1948 when the National Party swept into power on the back of its catchall apartheid slogan. Drawing on his own family's story and others, Roos explores how working-class whites frequently defied particular aspects of the apartheid state but seldom opposed or even acknowledged the idea of racial supremacy, which lay at the heart of the apartheid society. This cognitive dissonance afforded them a way to simultaneously accommodate and oppose apartheid and allowed them to later claim they never supported the apartheid system. Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society offers a telling reminder that the politics and practice of race, in this case apartheid-era whiteness, derive not only from the top, but also from the bottom.

Springboks On The Somme - South Africa in the Great War 1914 - 1918

Springboks On The Somme - South Africa in the Great War 1914 - 1918 PDF Author: Bill Nasson
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
ISBN: 0143027166
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
The Great War of 1914-18 was a conflict which engulfed the whole world, directly or indirectly. It was an imperialist world war that tugged the new Union of South Africa and its people into a series of separate but connected conflicts - from the domestic Afrikaner Rebellion on the highveld, through the sands of German South West Africa, the steamy bush of German East Africa, and on to the mud and blood of France and Flanders. This book is the first general study of the complex ways in which South Africans experienced the impact of the First World War, and responded to its demands, burdens and opportunities. Told with his customary narrative energy and ironic style, Bill Nasson's new history is a lively account not only of how South Africa fought the war, but also of the miscalculations and illusions that surrounded its involvement, and of how South African society came to imagine and remember that great and terrible conflict.

Fighting the People's War

Fighting the People's War PDF Author: Jonathan Fennell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107030951
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 967

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Book Description
Jonathan Fennell captures for the first time the true wartime experience of the ordinary soldiers from across the empire who made up the British and Commonwealth armies. He analyses why the great battles were won and lost and how the men that fought went on to change the world.

Sights, Sounds, Memories

Sights, Sounds, Memories PDF Author: Ian van der Waag
Publisher: African Sun Media
ISBN: 1928480918
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
The Second World War involved most of the countries of the world and left so many millions dead and maimed, disorganised and devastated through personal and communal loss. This book recovers some of South Africa’s soldiers’ experiences from the physical and mental debris of the war. Individuals are important; their lives – used as lenses – give us colour and texture, and their voices tell the stories of ordinary soldiers. Using their memoirs and diaries, the vitality of their endeavours is reasserted, their successes and failures, victories and indecencies are re-examined, and their magnanimity and the general triumph of the human spirit are celebrated.

In Different Times

In Different Times PDF Author: Ian van der Waag
Publisher: AFRICAN SUN MeDIA
ISBN: 1928480349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This is the first attempt to bring together diverse scholars, using different lenses, to study South Africa’s Border War. As a book, it is critical in approach, provides deeper reflection, and focuses specifically on the SADF experience of the war. The result is a more complex picture of the war’s dynamics and its legacies. Although South Africa is a vastly different country today, the study of the Border War opens a range of questions, also relevant to contemporary deployments such as in Lesotho (1998) and the Central African Republic (2013). It includes the debate on participation in foreign conflicts; on the deployment, design and preparation of appropriate, modern armed forces and their use as foreign policy instruments in far‑off theatres; on military planning; and, as the historical controversies regarding the battles at Cuito Cuanavale and Bangui illustrate, on the interface between foreign campaigning and domestic politics.

Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa

Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa PDF Author: Duncan Money
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100003254X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
This book showcases new research by emerging and established scholars on white workers and the white poor in Southern Africa. Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa challenges the geographical and chronological limitations of existing scholarship by presenting case studies from Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe that track the fortunes of nonhegemonic whites during the era of white minority rule. Arguing against prevalent understandings of white society as uniformly wealthy or culturally homogeneous during this period, it demonstrates that social class remained a salient element throughout the twentieth century, how Southern Africa’s white societies were often divided and riven with tension and how the resulting social, political and economic complexities animated white minority regimes in the region. Addressing themes such as the class-based disruption of racial norms and practices, state surveillance and interventions – and their failures – towards nonhegemonic whites, and the opportunities and limitations of physical and social mobility, the book mounts a forceful argument for the regional consideration of white societies in this historical context. Centrally, it extends the path-breaking insights emanating from scholarship on racialized class identities from North America to the African context to argue that race and class cannot be considered independently in Southern Africa. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of southern African studies, African history, and the history of race.

In Enemy Hands

In Enemy Hands PDF Author: Karen Horn
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
ISBN: 1868426521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
'To all intents and purposes I am as sexless as a block of wood. To eat is the extreme fundamental of living.' - South African POW, 1942 Books on World War II abound, yet there are remarkably few publications on South Africa's role in this war, which had such an influence on how we live today. There is even less written about those who participated on the margins of the war, especially those who were physically removed from the battlefields through capture by enemy forces. South Africa's prisoners of war during World War II, their experiences and recollections, are largely forgotten. That is until now. Historian Karen Horn painstakingly tracked down a number of former POWs. Together with written memoirs and archival documents, their interviews reveal rich narratives of hardship, endurance, humour, longing and self-discovery. Instead of fighting, these men adapted to another war, one which was fought on the inside of many prison camps. It was a war against hunger and deprivation, at times against ever-encroaching despondency and low morale amongst their companions in captivity. In their interviews, all the POWs expressed surprise at being asked to share their experiences of almost 70 years earlier. The author found it astonishing that almost all of them claimed not to be heroes of any kind. Perhaps this is not surprising when one considers that they returned home in 1945 to a country which soon afterwards tried its utmost to promote national amnesia with regard to its participation in the war. With great insight and empathy, Karen Horn shines a light on a neglected corner of South African history.

Military Education and the British Empire, 1815–1949

Military Education and the British Empire, 1815–1949 PDF Author: Douglas E. Delaney
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 077483756X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Common military education was the lifeblood of the armies, navies, and air forces of the British Empire. It permeated every aspect of the profession of arms and was an essential ingredient for success in both war and peace. Military Education and Empire is the first major scholarly work to address the role of military education in maintaining the empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing together the world’s top scholars on the subject, this book places distinct national narratives – Canadian, Australian, South African, British, and Indian – within a comparative context. The contributors examine military education within the British Empire as a generator of institutional knowledge, as a socializing agent, and as an enhancer of interoperability. This volume is the first to examine military education from a transnational perspective, which allows readers the opportunity to consider the connections between education and empire.

Waste of a White Skin

Waste of a White Skin PDF Author: Tiffany Willoughby-Herard
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520280865
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A pathbreaking history of the development of scientific racism, white nationalism, and segregationist philanthropy in the U.S. and South Africa in the early twentieth century, Waste of a White Skin focuses on the American Carnegie CorporationÕs study of race in South Africa, the Poor White Study, and its influence on the creation of apartheid. This book demonstrates the ways in which U.S. elites supported apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism in the critical period prior to 1948 through philanthropic interventions and shaping scholarly knowledge production. Rather than comparing racial democracies and their engagement with scientific racism, Willoughby-Herard outlines the ways in which a racial regime of global whiteness constitutes domestic racial policies and in part animates black consciousness in seemingly disparate and discontinuous racial democracies. This book uses key paradigms in black political thoughtÑblack feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical traditionÑto provide a rich account of poverty and work. Much of the scholarship on whiteness in South Africa overlooks the complex politics of white poverty and what they mean for the making of black political action and black peopleÕs presence in the economic system. Ideal for students, scholars, and interested readers in areas related to U.S. History, African History, World History, Diaspora Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science.