Author: Charles van Onselen
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813941369
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 812
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Book Description
The Jameson Raid was a pivotal moment in the history of South Africa, linking events from the Anglo-Boer War to the declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910. For more than a century, the failed revolution has been interpreted through the lens of British imperialism, with responsibility laid at the feet of Cecil Rhodes. Yet, the raid was less a serious attempt to overthrow a Boer government than a wild adventure with transnational roots in American filibustering. In The Cowboy Capitalist, renowned South African historian Charles van Onselen challenges a historiography of over 120 years, locating the raid in American rather than British history and forcing us to rethink the histories of at least three nations. Through a close look at the little-remembered figure of John Hays Hammond, a confidant of both Rhodes and Jameson, he discovers the American Old West on the South African Highveld. This radical reinterpretation challenges the commonly held belief that the Jameson Raid was quintessentially British and, in doing so, drives splinters into our understanding of events as far forward as South Africa’s critical 1948 general election, with which the foundations of Grand Apartheid were laid.
Author: Charles van Onselen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197580491
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
This seminal book reveals how black labor was exploited in twentieth-century South Africa, the human costs of which are still largely hidden from history. It was the people of southern Mozambique, bent double beneath the historical loads of forced labor and slavery, then sold off en masse as contracted laborers, who paid the highest price for South African gold. An iniquitous intercolonial agreement for the exploitation of ultra-cheap black labor was only made possible through nightly use of the steam locomotive on the transnational railway linking Johannesburg and Lourenço Marques. These night trains left deep scars in the urban and rural cultures of black communities, whether in the form of popular songs or a belief in nocturnal witches' trains that captured and conveyed zombie workers to the region's most unpopular places of employment. By tracing the journeys undertaken by black migrants, Charles van Onselen powerfully reconstructs how racial thinking, expressed logistically, reflected the evolving systems of segregation and apartheid. On the night trains, the last stop was always hell.
Author: Bill Nasson
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
ISBN: 1776090284
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419
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Book Description
History Matters is an eloquent selection of writings over four decades by Bill Nasson, one of South Africa’s most popular and highly respected historians. The pieces in this compendium are lively and entertaining, written with wit, humour and a finely tuned sense of irony. Chapters cover the South African War, the two world wars, cricket, District Six, schooldays and education, Hollywood and history, Mandela and other political biographies, and a great many other topics. Resembling a pudding of spicy plums, this is a perfect book for anyone interested in South Africa and its history, and in a broader appreciation of tweaking the tail of life in the past.
Author: Jean Comaroff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022642491X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
This new book by the well-known anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff explores the global preoccupation with criminality in the early twenty-first century, a preoccupation strikingly disproportionate, in most places and for most people, to the risks posed by lawlessness to the conduct of everyday life. Ours in an epoch in which law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcement are ever more critical registers in which societies construct, contest, and confront truths about themselves, an epoch in which criminology, broadly defined, has displaced sociology as the privileged means by which the social world knows itself. They also argue that as the result of a tectonic shift in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance, the meanings attached to crime and, with it, the nature of policing, have undergone significant change; also, that there has been a palpable muddying of the lines between legality and illegality, between corruption and conventional business; even between crime-and-policing, which exist, nowadays, in ever greater, hyphenated complicity. Thinking through Crime and Policing is, therefore, an excursion into the contemporary Order of Things; or, rather, into the metaphysic of disorder that saturates the late modern world, indeed, has become its leitmotif. It is also a meditation on sovereignty and citizenship, on civility, class, and race, on the law and its transgression, on the political economy of representation.
Author: Charles Van Onselen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781868426225
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 515
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Book Description
'This enthralling saga of crime, passion, and betrayal, is a compelling portrait of one of empire's great, unsung anti-heroes. The book is a scintillating achievement.' - Jean Comaroff, Harvard University Johannesburg was - and is - the Frontier of Money. Within months of its founding, the mining camp was host to organised crime: the African 'Regiment of the Hills' and 'Irish Brigade' bandits. Bars, brothels, boarding houses and hotels oozed testosterone and violence, and the use of fists and guns was commonplace. Beyond the chaos were clear signs of another struggle, one to maintain control, honour and order within the emerging male and mining dominated culture. In the underworld, the dictum of 'honour among thieves', as well as a hatred of informers, testified to attempts at self-regulation. A 'real man' did not take advantage of an opponent by employing underhand tactics. It had to be a 'fair fight' if a man was to be respected. This was the world that 'One-armed Jack' McLoughlin - brigand, soldier, sailor, mercenary, burglar, highwayman and safe-cracker - entered in the early 1890s to become Johannesburg's most infamous 'Irish' anti-hero and social bandit. McLoughlin's infatuation with George Stevenson prompted him to recruit the young Englishman into his gang of safe-crackers but 'Stevo' was a man with a past and primed for personal and professional betrayal. It was a deadly mixture. Honour could only be retrieved through a Showdown at the Red Lion.
Author: Mark Shaw
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
ISBN: 1868427129
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Hitmen for Hire takes the reader on a journey like no other, navigating a world of paid hitmen, informers, rogue policemen, criminal taxi bosses, gang leaders, and crooked politicians and businessmen. Criminologist Mark Shaw examines a society in which contract killings have become commonplace, looking at who arranges hits, where to find a hitman, and even what it is like to operate as a hitman – or woman. Since 1994, South Africa has seen a worrying increase in the commercialisation of murder – and has been rocked by several high-profile contract killings. Drawing on his research of over a thousand incidents of hired assassinations, from 2000 to 2016, Shaw reveals how these murders are used to exert a mafia-type control over the country's legal and illegal economic activity. Contracted assassinations, and the organised criminal activity behind them, contain sinister linkages with the upperworld, most visibly in relation to disputes over tenders and access to government resources. State security actors increasingly mediate relations between the under and upper worlds, with serious implications for the long-term success of the post-apartheid democratic project.
Author: HJ Pang
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd
ISBN: 9815084003
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 151
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Book Description
Xiao Shiong led a mediocre existence, studying for a degree he hated. One day, his violent junkie father was released from prison but immediately returned to his old ways, beating his wife for not properly welcoming him back. When Xiao Shiong confronted him outside, his father attempted to kill him, stabbing himself in the process. After his father's death, Xiao Shiong read countless online news comments praising the one that killed his addict father. Enlivened by the support, Xiao Shiong took on the superhero identity of Red Puma. Dian Nao, a university friend who does projects for the government surveillance system pieced together the identity of Red Puma. He offered to help Xiao Shiong track criminals down through the nationwide network. Xiao Shiong couldn't deny the good vibes he felt when people on his online feed congratulated him for his deeds. One day, Xiao Shiong managed to access Dian Nao's unattended laptop. There, he discovered Dian Nao was earning revenue from Xiao Shiong's exploits by mining online user accounts. Xiao Shiong discovered most of the user comments online were actually negative, with Dian Nao manipulating them to keep Xiao Shiong motivated. Tired of being betrayed by those he’d trusted, Xiao Shiong ended his partnership with Dian Nao. Shortly after, he received a call from Red Lion. An ex-commando turned fitness-blogger, Red Lion took up his own superhero identity to play copycat to Xiao Shiong's popularity online and offline. Enraged that his cop brother got killed, Red Lion warned Xiao Shiong that if he didn't show up to a televised one-on-one fight on a national landmark, Dian Nao whom he recently kidnapped, would die in a live-internet streaming broadcast. Xiao Shiong has to decide whether to risk his life and freedom in trying to save the friend who’d betrayed him. It was a difficult choice that all heroes eventually face; to protect oneself, or others who depend on them. Validation explores the inadequacy felt when we are unable to live up to the expectations of society. It also explores the phenomenon of people turning to the internet for instant gratification and validation for their actions, getting virtual shares and likes that ultimately mean nothing.
Author: Charles van Onselen
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
ISBN: 1776192494
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
The Three Wise Monkeys trilogy culminates with a forensic examination of South Africa's long struggle to suppress gambling, and especially lotteries. The opposition of the Calvinist churches – both Afrikaans and English-speaking – had its counterpart in the eager embrace of games of chance by the white working class on the Witwatersrand. Focusing on the career of Rufe Naylor, an Australian bookmaker, horse dealer and entrepreneur who, with the help of a defrocked Portuguese Catholic priest, ran the Lourenço Marques Lottery, The Quest for Wealth without Work shows how the efforts of church and state to control the leisure time and morals of the working class intersected with the need to ensure the flow of cheap mine labour from Mozambique. Ultimately, in the suppression of the Lourenço Marques Lottery – and in campaigns against pinball machines, dog racing and other 'social evils' – can be seen the emerging outlines of the apartheid police state.
Author: Jennifer Robinson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119697514
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 474
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Book Description
COMPARATIVE URBANISM ‘Comparative Urbanism fully transforms the scope and purpose of urban studies today, distilling innovative conceptual and methodological tools. The theoretical and empirical scope is astounding, enlightening, emboldening. Robinson peels away conceptual labels that have anointed some cities as paradigmatic and left others as mere copies. She recalibrates overly used theoretical perspectives, resurrects forgotten ones long in need of a dusting off, and brings to the fore those often marginalised. Robinson’s approach radically re-distributes who speaks for the urban, and which urban conditions shape our theoretical understandings. With Comparative Urbanism in our hands, we can start the practice of urban studies anywhere and be relevant to any number of elsewheres.’ Jane M. Jacobs, Professor of Urban Studies, Yale-NUS College, Singapore ‘How to think the multiplicity of urban realities at the same time, across different times and rhythmic arrangements; how to move with the emergences and stand-stills, with conceptualisations that do justice to all things gathered under the name of the urban. How to imagine comparatively amongst differences that remain different, individualised outcomes, but yet exist in-common. No book has so carefully conducted a specifically urban philosophy on these matters, capable of beginning and ending anywhere.’ AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Research Fellow, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield The rapid pace and changing nature of twenty-first century urbanisation as well as the diversity of global urban experiences calls for new theories and new methodologies in urban studies. In Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies, Jennifer Robinson proposes grounds for reformatting comparative urban practice and offers a wide range of tactics for researching global urban experiences. The focus is on inventing new concepts as well as revising existing approaches. Inspired by postcolonial and decolonial critiques of urban studies she advocates for an experimental comparative urbanism, open to learning from different urban experiences and to expanding conversations amongst urban scholars across the globe. The book features a wealth of examples of comparative urban research, concerned with many dimensions of urban life. A range of theoretical and philosophical approaches ground an understanding of the radical revisability and emergent nature of concepts of the urban. Advanced students, urbanists and scholars will be prompted to compose comparisons which trace the interconnected and relational character of the urban, and to think with the variety of urban experiences and urbanisation processes across the globe, to produce the new insights the twenty-first century urban world demands.
Author: Thula Simpson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526159066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
This edited volume encompasses a range of themes and approaches relevant to the field of South African history today, as viewed from the perspective of practicing historians at the cutting edge of research in the discipline. The collection features the historians offering critical reflection on the theoretical and methodological aspects of their work. This involves them both looking back at the inherited historiographical tradition in the respective areas of their research, while also pointing forwards to possible future directions for scholarly engagement.
