South Africa

Exceptional Space: Concentration Camps and Labor Compounds in Late Nineteenth-Century South Africa

Lindsay Weiss explores the relationship between the 1886 'closed labour compounds' of the South African diamond industry, the concentration camps of the 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer war, and the german camps used in th Herero and Nama massacre of 1904. The article makes a critical contribution to linking the wartime camps with to earlier colonial forced labour camps outside wartime, especially since camps in the Boer war have been almost exclusively explored by military historians.

To fully reconcile The Boer War is to fully understand the ‘Black’ Concentration Camps

South African military historian Peter Dickens on the black concentration camps during the Second Boer War in South Africa.

Year of Fire, Year of Ash. The Soweto Revolt: Roots of a Revolution?

Baruch Hirson's seminal 1979 book on the Soweto Uprising.

General strike, South Africa 1922 - Baruch Hirson

Baruch Hirson on the 1922 South African general strike. HIrson deals at length with the racial politics of the strike, which despite militancy and facing aerial bombings by the newly formed South African Air Force failed to include the black working class, who had been out on strike regularly in the proceeding three years.

The Angolan massacre of May 27 1977 - Paul Trewhala

Two articles by South African communist Paul Trewhela on the 27 maio 1977 massacre in Angola.

Paul Trewhela was a member of the South African communist party in the mid-'60s, was imprisoned for three years, then worked with Baruch Hirson in exile.

Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo

Written by a leading Fanon scholar, and with an acute philosophical intelligence, Fanonian Practices in South Africa is a sophisticated attempt to examine post-apartheid South Africa through the emancipatory lens of Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary humanism.

Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present

Biometric identification and registration systems are being proposed by governments and businesses across the world. Surprisingly they are under most rapid, and systematic, development in countries in Africa and Asia. In this groundbreaking book, Keith Breckenridge traces how the origins of the systems being developed in places like India, Mexico, Nigeria and Ghana can be found in a century-long history of biometric government in South Africa.