Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South African War, 1899-1902

Gregor Cuthbertson, Albert M. Grundlingh, and Mary-Lynn Suttie, eds. Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South African War, 1899-1902. Athens: Ohio University Press/Cape Town: David Philip Publisher, 2002. xix + 345 pp. Maps. Index. $49.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper.

The centenary of the 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer War has afforded innumerable publishing opportunities, many of which began with research conferences that allowed both young and established scholars to revisit conventional wisdom about that epic conflict between the two dominant white oligarchies in the heartland of southern Africa. What the outside observer finds is not so much a demolition of the conventional wisdom but rather a remodeling of its structure as a result of new and hitherto unarticulated, or possibly politically incorrect, questions. Indeed, previous "unpersons" or "unplayers" (in the Orwellian sense) now move to center stage. In a certain sense, the Biblical adage about the last becoming the first expresses the situation most accurately.

This volume is the outcome of the conference "Rethinking the South African War," which was held in 1998 at the library of the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria. One of the editors, Mary-Lynn Suttie, is the senior research librarian for history and political science at that university, while Gregor Cuthbertson serves as the chairman of the Department of History at UNISA. The third editor, Professor Grundlingh of the Department of History at the University of Stellenbosch, also contributed a chapter concerning the genesis, construction, and subsequent significance of the famed women's monument on the grounds of the Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein, providing an insightful analysis of what has been termed "the politics of memory." ( see Heribert and Kanya Adam, in Wilmot James and Linda van de Vijver, eds., After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, [Ohio, 200O]). Such memories are often the driving force behind ethnic mobilization-in this instance, Afrikaner nationalism.

Although the South African War has been viewed in the past as principally a "white man's war," it actually included a type of subwar waged by several black African groups, principally against the Afrikaners to recover lost lands and cattle. This was their protowar of self-determination. The Boers, in turn, attempted unsuccessfully to have the Versailles Peace Conference reverse the results of the 1899-1902 war to reclaim their independence. Three of the chapters are devoted to such black-white conflict within the context of the war, thus laying bare the inflexibility of white paramountcy practiced by both Briton and Boer. Two other chapters thoughtfully examine the cultural and subsequent professional implications of nursing during the war, including the medical controversies surrounding the infamous concentration camps for Boer noncombatants, whose deaths are commemorated in the Bloemfontein women's memorial as well as in the plaques on the museum grounds.

Other contributors to the collection examine anti-Semitism, gender stereotyping, the part played by General Kitchener in bringing the war to a close, the attention span of the British public as the war dragged on, the role of British propagandists, moral considerations and lapses concerning the conduct of war, the significance of J. A. Hobson's economic explication of the war, the relationship of the war to the wider milieu of the British empire, and the place of the Boer commandos in the larger mythology and doctrine of Afrikaner nationalism. William R. Nasson furnishes an excellent survey of how the war has been viewed, interpreted, reexamined, and commemorated.

All in all, this is a challenging, even iconoclastic collection that is well written, cogently argued, and exceptionally well documented (although the copyeditors overlooked the untranslated Afrikaans passages [pp.200-204] in the chapter on disease in the British concentration camps).

Richard Dale

Fountain Hills, Arizona

Copyright African Studies Association Dec 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved