Colonial South Africa and the origins of the racial order

Name: Colonial South Africa and the origins of the racial order
Author: Timothy Keegan
ISBN: 0813917352

by Timothy Keegan (1996)

Read Free Sample Buy on Amazon Audible Free Trial

About this book

In this masterly work of synthesis and reinterpretation, Timothy Keegan looks anew at the relatively neglected period of South African history before the mineral age - in particular the years of British rule up to the 1850s - and decisively establishes its importance in the shaping of South African society. For whereas a previous generation of historians saw the twentieth-century racial state emerging from the forces unleashed by the mineral revolution, Keegan argues that its roots lie in an earlier period, when the Cape was first integrated into the British empire of free trade of the early nineteenth century. It is a story that is strong in notable events - slave emancipation, the arrival of the 1820 British settlers, a series of frontier wars, the Great Trek of Boer emigrants - as well as in striking personalities, among them Dr John Philip, Andries Stockenstrom, John Fairbairn, Moshoeshoe and Sir Harry Smith. In Keegan's pages these familiar historical landmarks and characters emerge in entirely novel ways, the subject of fresh interpretations and original insights.

Setting / LocationGlobal

Story EraModern Era

Protagonist / CoreColonial South Africa and the origins of the racial order Lead Character

Themes & Moods

History Race relations History South africa, race relations Africa, social life and customs Modern Era

Readers who enjoyed this also loved

Reconstructing the Dreamland

Alfred L. Brophy

"The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot was the country's bloodiest civil disturbance of the century. With perhaps 150 dead, 30 city blocks burned to the ground, and more than a thousand families homeless, the riot represented an unprecedented breakdown of the rule of law. It left the prosperous black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma reduced to rubble.". "In Reconstructing the Dreamland, Alfred Brophy draws on his own extensive research into contemporary accounts and court documents to chronicle this devastating riot, showing how and why the rule of law quickly eroded. Brophy offers a gut-wrenching portrait of mob violence and racism run amok, both on the night of the riot and the morning after, when a coordinated sunrise attack, accompanied by airplanes, stormed through Greenwood, torching and looting the community. Equallty important, he shows how the city government and police not only permitted the looting, shootings, and burning of Greenwood, but actively participated in it. The police department, fearing that Greenwood was erupting into a "negro uprising" (which Brophy shows was not the case), deputized white citizens haphazardly, gave out guns and badges with little background check, or sent men to hardware stores to arm themselves. Likewise, the Tulsa-based units of the National Guard acted unconstitutionally, arresting every black resident they could find, leaving Greenwood property vulnerable to the white mob, special deputies, and police that followed behind and burned it."--BOOK JACKET.

Children of the civil rights era

Catherine A. Welch

Recounts the courageous involvement of many young people who marched, protested, were arrested, and risked their lives to end racial discrimination in the South during the 1950s and 1960s.

The marrow of tradition

Charles W. Chesnutt

"This edition of Charles W. Chesnutt's 1901 novel about racial conflict in a southern town features an extensive selection of materials that place the work in its historical context. Organized thematically, these materials explore caste, gender, and race after Reconstruction; postbellum laws and lynching; the 1898 Wilmington riot on which the narrative is based; and the fin de siecle culture of segregation. The thematic sections are rich with documents such as letters, photographs, editorials, speeches, legal decisions, journalism, and essays from leading periodicals of the era. The writers represented include such well-known figures as W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman as well as fascinating, half-forgotten characters like the black newspaper editor Alexander Manly and the white supremacist Thomas Dixon."--BOOK JACKET.

We shall overcome

Reggie Finlayson

Uses the words of spirituals and other music of the time to frame a discussion of the civil rights movement in the United States, focusing on specific people, incidents, and court cases.