Research Articles (History)

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Browsing Research Articles (History) by Author "Nasson, Bill"

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    The beasts of Berlin
    (AOSIS Openjournals, 2011-04) Nasson, Bill
    In the early stage of the First World War, the Union of South Africa invaded the neighbouring colony of German South West Africa at the request of the British War Cabinet. The assignment was to knock out a German coastal wireless station, but South Africa’s war leaders, Generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, got above themselves. Going the whole hog, they seized the territory from Berlin. In the peace negotiations which finally ended the Great War, Pretoria persuaded the victorious powers to allow it to keep the former enemy colony under its jurisdiction as a League of Nations mandate territory.
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    Not the peace train but the piece train
    (ASSAf, 2020-05-27) Nasson, Bill
    In what should fall foul of any literary trades description Act, Charles van Onselen describes his latest work as a ‘little book’ (p.14). It is, as anyone who opens The Night Trains will quickly discover, anything but that. Forged as a ‘self-contained outgrowth’ of a larger regional study underway into the historical nexus between ‘industrial and Protestant South Africa’ and ‘rural, commercial and Catholic Mozambique’ (p.209), this is a pioneering, relentlessly nightmarish transnational story of human exploitation. More than anything, what The Night Trains resembles is an insistently high-octane treatise or an extended forensic investigation with unimaginably disturbing recurring findings. In his introduction, Professor Van Onselen suggests that any choice of the technological innovations of the early 19th century that had the deepest and most enduring influence on the making of world history well into the first half of the 20th century, would surely have to include the locomotive. Indeed, far more so than, say, the telegraph or the steamship, the locomotive train has long enjoyed the lion’s share of attention, with various notable writers having singled it out as a dazzling element of material progress by the age of iron.
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    The over the orange times, World War One imaginary : an explanation
    (Historical Association of South Africa, 2016-05) Nasson, Bill
    Are centenaries surely not the best times imaginable for fabrication, invention or otherwise making it up? Conventionally, it is nationalists who refract the history of their countries through heroic narratives - including tall stories - of one kind or another. Indeed, those sacrificial narratives of trial and tribulation have come to be anointed as the agent of history itself. While the pugnacious sentimentalism of South Africa's woeful nationalists, past and present, has produced some first-class national fictions, one ought not to overlook impressive competition from various other places with a colonial past.
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    R.O. Dudley : teacher, educator and political dissenter (1924–2009)
    (Academy of Science of South Africa, 2010-10) Nasson, Bill
    In education and anti-racist politics in South Africa’s Western Cape region, Richard (Dick or R.O.) Dudley was an exceptionally influential intellectual figure who was revered by those who knew him and enjoyed legendary status among many others who had simply heard of his towering reputation. In the school classroom, far more than just a gifted teacher, he was a probing and challenging educationist in the deepest philosophical sense. Likewise, in his left-wing political activism and caustic opposition to segregation and apartheid, Dudley was a true radical nonconformist, dismissing the politics of liberalism, African nationalism and Communism as either tepidly reformist, vacuously populist or slavishly Stalinist.