Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress, is reputed to have been a largely ineffective guerrilla army which hardly challenged the apartheid war machine. Instead, thi...

Kavango Zambezi (KAZA) is the world’s largest terrestrial Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA), covering vast regions of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Elephants and other specie...

Why is it that South Africa’s ‘land question’ is so stubbornly resistant to resolution? This think piece re-examines 30 years of debate, concentrating on the disjuncture between the discourses of p...

Many ethics review bodies now routinely recommend the use of written consent forms as the default method of obtaining informed consent, including for research conducted in African countries. Althou...

This article focuses on two interlinked trends in public memory in Mozambique: the rise of alternative heroes and parallel invocations of seemingly incompatible heroes, particularly as they relate ...

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

Scholars acknowledge the importance of geological knowledge in the growth of South Africa’s mining industry. While this acknowledgement extends to the analysis of the rise of eMalahleni (formerly k...

The history of black labour at the South African gold mines has conventionally been punctuated by three great African strikes, in 1920 (often obscured by the great white mine-worker strike of 1922)...

This article uses historical and climatological methods to recontextualise the first decade of Dutch settlement at the Cape, 1652–62. It draws on weather data contained in the Journal of Jan van Ri...

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

The global campaign against apartheid South Africa has been viewed as one of the most successful examples of international solidarity activism in the 20th century. Scholars examining how anti-apart...

Social conditions in post-apartheid South Africa have been widely seen as marked by persistent and often racialised inequalities. The country has also been viewed through the prism of crisis, in ec...

This study employs an explorative case study methodology, which utilises interviews, historical analysis and observations to identify and analyse the local powers and politics that influence large-...

This article examines the career of the South African undercover agent Craig Williamson in the 1970s and 1980s, arguing that the violent acts of men like Williamson must be analysed in terms of the...

Drawing on five years of intermittent ethnographic work at Kariba, I discuss the impoverishment of the Tonga of Mola chiefdom in the context of escalating human–wildlife conflict and frequent droug...

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 49, No. 5-6, 2023)

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 49, No. 5-6, 2023)

This article examines the history of black women’s Christian activity in the East Bank location of East London (also known as Duncan Village) in the early years of apartheid. Oral, textual and phot...

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 49, No. 5-6, 2023)

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 49, No. 5-6, 2023)

This article considers popular political mobilisation in East London prior to the launch of the Defiance Campaign in the city in 1952, which ignited a racial war. It suggests that the failure of th...

Narratives of political and community struggles often privilege the role of men, painting them as the faces of the struggle. Yet, women have been (and continue to be) active participants who have f...

When the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of 1996/97 was tasked with investigating gross human rights violations from 1 March 1960 to 1994, there was a presumption that apart...

This concluding overview explores themes which provide background to the four articles in the part special issue on popular protest in the Eastern Cape, with a special focus on East London. As thes...

After the South African War (1899–1902), state-makers’ efforts to control ‘dagga’ was controversial on several fronts. But ‘dagga’ also proved a moving target for official classification. Was it a ...

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 49, No. 5-6, 2023)

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 49, No. 5-6, 2023)

Historical studies of migration have largely ascribed the configuration of masculinities in Botswana to male labour migration. This discourse is beyond dispute. As a paradigm, however, it has obscu...

Fairtrade International (FTI) is an international certificatory body that seeks to restructure market relationships to support marginalised producers. In order to do this, FTI sells certified produ...

Based on interviews with 43 serving members at four Public Order Police units, this article highlights the perspectives of officers involved in arguably the most contentious and visible aspect of S...

In the 1930s the colonial authorities in Zimbabwe set aside geographical areas where Africans were allowed to purchase land. Despite having private property rights to land, a rare occurrence among ...

In August 1970, four senior African National Congress members – Flag Boshielo, Castro Dolo, Victor Ndaba and Bob Zulu – vanished during their clandestine return to South Africa from exile in Zambia...

This article endeavours to awaken a scholarly interest in the origins and early history of tennis in the city of Cape Town and the Cape Colony more broadly. By drawing on newspaper accounts and oth...

In response to the low numbers of women in elected positions of power, Tanzania reserves special seats for women in parliament and local governance structures. Consequently, the special seats syste...

Rwanda’s mid 2021 military intervention meaningfully degraded the capability of the jihadist insurgents terrorising northern Mozambique. Rwanda’s early battlefield achievements were due to a combin...

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 49, No. 5-6, 2023)

Even though the Mozambique Revolutionary Committee (Coremo) was Mozambique’s second largest liberation movement, historians have neglected its role in the struggle for Mozambican independence. This...

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 49, No. 4, 2023)

South African historians have largely overlooked the night as a frame of historical analysis. This article is an initial attempt to rectify this by exploring Drum as a source for this endeavour. Dr...

During the First World War, 312,891 men and women from Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) were recruited as porters. Their task was to ensure a steady supply of food and artillery from Northern Rhodesia to...

This article centres on |Gomxab Simon Kooper’s resistance to German colonialism in Southwest Africa (1884–1915, modern-day Namibia). First, it underscores the agency of Kooper and the Fransman Nama...

Benefit-sharing agreements are a new, prescriptive way of treating trade, biodiversity and the commercial use of traditional knowledge. However, these agreements have met with surprisingly little c...

This article tracks the involvement of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) in the strike on the Lichtenburg diamond diggings of June 1928, during which 35,000 black workers downed to...

Joining the Olympic Movement provides smaller countries with material and symbolic benefits. The Olympic Games represent a unique symbolic stage for national recognition and identity construction. ...

This article examines why land reform beneficiaries maintain linkages with their communal areas of origin two decades after Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform programme (FTLRP). This is done by inve...

Based on observation of the 2019 legislative, presidential and provincial elections in Mozambique, this article uncovers and examines models applied by the Frelimo regime in manipulating elections....

In June 2020, the government of Tanzania declared that Covid-19 had been eradicated from the country. As the figures released by Tanzania’s Ministry of Health since March 2021 show, this was not tr...

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 49, No. 4, 2023)

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 49, No. 4, 2023)

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 49, No. 4, 2023)

Following the acquisition of a 51 per cent stake in the country’s copper mines in 1969, the Zambian government issued repayment bonds (that is, ‘ZIMCO bonds’) to their minority owners, Anglo-Americ...

This article examines the failure of the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) government to secure the electoral support of Copperbelt mine communities in the 2021 Zambian election, despite its implementati...

Published in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 49, No. 3, 2023)

Tanzania has gone through two waves of resource nationalism since independence, with both having significant implications for the country’s evolving approach to governing its resources. This articl...

Heightened copper prices and the perceived profiteering of foreign mining investors in the 2000s spurred calls for greater revenue from mineral extraction in Zambia. Following the abrogation of the...

A new wave of resource nationalism washed through southern Africa in the 2000s, driven by rising popular demand for greater local participation in the mining sector value chain, more equitable redi...

In 2008, in the midst of a deepening political-economic crisis, Zimbabwe’s ZANU(PF) government introduced ‘Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment’ as a policy framework to guide the domestication ...