Elizabeth Van Heyningen

The social evil in the Cape colony 1868–1902: prostitution and the contagious diseases acts

Prostitution was probably endemic in Cape Town from the earliest days of white settlement. Sailors and travellers recuperating from. the arduous sea voyages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not unnaturally sought more than food and drink in the way of basic refreshment at the station. At the same time the social structure created by the VOC when they permitted the introduction of slaves into the colony produced a situation of financial and personal degradation which made the sale of their bodies if they had that choice a necessity of survival for a high proportion of the few women then resident at the Cape. The first mention of a brothel was recorded in 1681 but already in 1678 the VOC had found it necessary to prohibit concubinage in the colony. The extreme deprivation of the slave women drove them to prostitution in Simon van der Stels day. In the eighteenth century it continued to be a useful way of augmenting inadequate incomes and the slave lodge became notorious as the towns leading brothel.1 Slavery, poverty and prostitution, then, were largely synonymous in early Cape Town and the pattern persisted in the period after emancipation. In the 1830s a substantial proportion of the population suffered primary poverty with freed slaves

Costly Mythologies: The Concentration Camps of the South African War in Afrikaner Historiography*

By the 1930s, a mythology of the concentration camps of the South African War had been firmly lodged in the historical consciousness of Afrikaners, establishing a paradigm of suffering that has altered remarkably little since. A major reason for the lack of a serious historiography was the failure of Afrikaners to write any critical account of the war before the 1950s. Instead, history was replaced by a ‘haze’ of poetry, memorials and ceremonies, testimonies and photographs, which offered an apparently authentic account, while inhibiting any critical examination, of the camp experience. From the 1930s, the established mythology was reinforced both by increasingly rabid descriptions of the camps and by an Afrikaner historiography framed in a discourse of scientific objectivity. In the post-apartheid era, while the black camp experience has been introduced, to some extent it has been redeployed to reinforce this paradigm of suffering.By the 1930s, a mythology of the concentration camps of the South African War had been firmly lodged in the historical consciousness of Afrikaners, establishing a paradigm of suffering that has altered remarkably little since. A major reason for the lack of a serious historiography was the failure of Afrikaners to write any critical account of the war before the 1950s. Instead, history was replaced by a ‘haze’ of poetry, memorials and ceremonies, testimonies and photographs, which offered an apparently authentic account, while inhibiting any critical examination, of the camp experience. From the 1930s, the established mythology was reinforced both by increasingly rabid descriptions of the camps and by an Afrikaner historiography framed in a discourse of scientific objectivity. In the post-apartheid era, while the black camp experience has been introduced, to some extent it has been redeployed to reinforce this paradigm of suffering.

Medical history and Afrikaner society in the boer republics at the end of the nineteenth century

Birth, death and disease are fundamental to human society and have been widely explored in the history of other countries. 1 In South Africa, however, such studies remain relatively undeveloped, except where they touch on political issues. 2 The emergence of HIV/AIDS as a national crisis, however, has drawn attention to the way in which health issues can permeate national life and social identity and makes a strong case for the need to understand the relationship between disease and society.

Recent Research on the Social History of Medicine in Africa

The books reviewed here indicate the potential richness of the social history of medicine in southern Africa. Most of these volumes would not be regarded as ‘medical history’ in the traditional sense, but health and disease have never been the province of medicine alone; they are played out in a cultural context which is shared by the medical professions and the patients. In southern Africa, where the practice of medicine is shaped by indigenous culture, colonial racisms and modernist developments, the unfortunate history of HIV/AIDS makes this abundantly clear.