Browsing by Author "Nasson, Bill"
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- ItemThe beasts of Berlin(AOSIS Openjournals, 2011-04) Nasson, BillIn 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.
- ItemFording the Amazon(AOSIS OpenJournals, 2010-06) Nasson, BillIn 1928, with the Wall Street Crash and the start of the Great Depression only a year away, prospects for the Ford Motor Company still looked rosy. Henry Ford’s celebrated Model T had been a major success. His firm’s new Model A was just around the corner and had already received 700 000 orders. But there were flies in the ointment. Market competition from newer car manufacturers with lower production costs was denting sales and squeezing profits. The wages of Ford’s mass assembly line workers could not be slashed because they were the essential purchasers of the vehicles they produced. Suppliers of key motor components, particularly the big rubber companies of Firestone, Goodyear and General, would not discount their prices. Thus, although Ford’s factories continued to expand, allowing him to maintain his status as the world’s richest man at the pinnacle of his wealth and power, lowering the vehicle production costs was becoming a preoccupation. Yet, the rising demand for rubber after the First World War continually frustrated Ford’s plans.
- ItemFrom Lord’s to the Union: The imperial foundations of South African cricket(AOSIS OpenJournals, 2009-12) Nasson, BillReaders of the right sherry vintage will remember the unsavoury 1968 clash between the Union Buildings and Lord’s Cricket Ground. Basil d’Oliviera, the prominent coloured South African cricketer who features in this book, had earlier left his discriminatory country for better prospects in England, where playing fair did not require a fair complexion. Having done well in the first-class game, he was picked for the late-1960s MCC tour of South Africa.
- ItemThe great changing room of colour and class(AOSIS OpenJournals, 2010-08) Nasson, BillReflecting on the issue of winning and losing in a chapter on sport in his 2005 work entitled, The angry island: Hunting the English, the acerbic Scottish writer, A.A. Gill, makes two acute observations, both of which have some bearing on the book under review. The first of these is that, in sport, the lesson to be learnt from the English is that it is comforting to be beaten, for the measure of how well you lose is a moral audit of character. The second is that irrespective of which sport is being played, whether it be tennis, football, rugby or even bridge, the English thing is fairness. Or, rather, it is unfairness with which the English are preoccupied, in the sense that what most provokes resentment is a playing field that is not level; hence, their creation of intricate sporting codes and rules to ensure fairness. As South Africa’s 2010 FIFA World Cup tournament has again illustrated, if sport is a circus of symbol, simile and metaphor, then its greatest – and endlessly repeated – truism is that the playing field is level.
- ItemI braai, therefor I am(AOSIS OpenJournals, 2010-02) Nasson, BillThis is a big book about how and why the human world has come to be the way it is. Notwithstanding a glib cover endorsement from celebrity chef, Nigella Lawson, Catching Fire bears comparison to other modern classics on evolutionary biology and environmental determinism, such as Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasurement of Man (1981) and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1997). A British primatologist and Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University, Richard Wrangham, has spent a long time chewing over the behavioural ecology of apes and, as this volume reveals, he has not been taken in completely by his tree-hopping research subjects.
- ItemMe, Mine and Yours: Mining and Imperialism(AOSIS OpenJournals, 2009-12) Nasson, BillWhen it comes to price, this British academic publisher is known for being astronomical. On that score, it is hard not to wonder whether this volume in its series is worth its weight in gold. Or, if not that, then at least its measure in copper or zinc futures. That aside, the claim staked out by Raymond Dumett’s new edited volume is certainly two-fold. In part it seeks to provide an understanding of the lives and machinations of some largerthan- life international businessmen who, in the later-19th and early-20th centuries, personified what the former British prime minister, Edward Heath, once called the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism. His 1973 comment was on the dodgy dealings of Lonrho and its buccaneering chairman, ‘Tiny’ Rowland. Appropriately enough, that conglomerate had started out in 1909 as the London and Rhodesian Mining Company which went on to make its pile from African mining ventures.
- ItemThe Memories and Mythologies of South Africa’s Great War(AOSIS OpenJournals, 2009-06) Nasson, BillFor those who start them, wars are almost always an illusion, in the sense that the conflict with which they end up is rarely the contest which they had imagined at the beginning. In forcing war upon South Africa’s Boer Republics in 1899, Britain’s War Office envisaged a short little colonial war, easy on the purse and light on casualties. Instead, in its bid to crush settler republicanism and thereby complete the imperial conquest of southern Africa, London got rather more than it had bargained for. The British found themselves lumbered with a draining, costly and controversial military campaign which did them little credit. Likewise, the Boers, too, discovered that they had bitten off more than they could chew. Running down to the wire, they had to wage a desperate and tormented ‘people’s war’ for existence.
- ItemNot the peace train but the piece train(ASSAf, 2020-05-27) Nasson, BillIn 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.
- ItemThe over the orange times, World War One imaginary : an explanation(Historical Association of South Africa, 2016-05) Nasson, BillAre 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.
- ItemR.O. Dudley: Teacher, Educator and Political Dissenter (1924–2009)(AOSIS OpenJournals, 2010-10) Nasson, BillIn 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.
- ItemSharp-nosed at Sharpeville(AOSIS OpenJournals, 2012-02) Nasson, BillVereeniging, a drab and sooty industrial spot south of Johannesburg, was the spot where the British and the Boers signed the peace treaty of May 1902 which ended the South African War and paved the way to the first New South Africa. It was also there that, 94 years later, Nelson Mandela signed the final draft of his country’s new post-apartheid constitution into law, sealing the arrival of the second New South Africa. Symbolically, it was a telling choice of place, and in more ways than one. Because that adoption ritual took place in Vereeniging’s African township of Sharpeville, the location where in March 1960 South African police opened fire with live ammunition on Pan Africanist Congress (PAC)-led African demonstrators who had assembled to protest against the detested pass laws of the apartheid regime.
- ItemSheep, soil and stability(AOSIS OpenJounals, 2010-04) Nasson, BillIn concluding Dinosaurs, diamonds and democracy (2009), his pocket history of South Africa, the economist, Francis Wilson, reports a reputed prime ministerial observation by Jan Smuts. During the 1930s, he considered the haemorrhaging of the country’s topsoil to be the country’s gravest issue, far more important than its political problems. There, unlike as with his cranky scientific and philosophical theories, such as holism, Smuts may well have been on to something. Wilson stresses the extent to which environmental degradation is sure to dominate South Africa’s future. In The rise of conservation in South Africa, William Beinart underlines its importance in the past. Recently re-issued in paperback, this major study by the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at Oxford University is more about grass and grazing than ethnicity. Still, in that respect, it may owe something to Smuts who, incidentally, gets three listings in the index.