Helen Bradford

WOMEN, GENDER AND COLONIALISM: RETHINKING THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH CAPE COLONY AND ITS FRONTIER ZONES, c. 1806-70

That many studies in African and imperial history neglect women and gender is a commonplace. Using a case-study - the British Cape Colony and its frontier zones - this article attempts to demonstrate some consequences of this neglect. It argues, firstly, that it generates empirical inaccuracies as a result of the insignificance accorded to gender differentiation and to women themselves. Secondly, representations of women as unimportant, and men as ungendered, result in flawed analysis of both men and the colonial encounter. This view is argued in detail for two events : an 1825 slave rebellion and an 1856-7 millenarian movement. The article concludes that if gender and half the adult populace are marginalized in this way, the price is frequently interpretations which have limited purchase on the past.

Olive Schreiner's hidden agony: fact, fiction and teenage abortion

Scholars exploring Olive Schreiners life have provided diverse interpretations of a crucial year: 1872, when Schreiner was a teenager in the Cape Colony. Primary sources relating to this period were destroyed; it is impossible to provide conclusive evidence of what ‘really happened.’ Nonetheless, this article argues that the possibility that Victorian women could induce abortions has been neglected by both historians and literary critics. It contends that Schreiners fiction displays acute awareness of pregnancy terminations. It concludes by arguing that the most likely interpretation of events is that Olive Schreiner fell pregnant in 1872, contributed to her own miscarriage, and repeatedly reworked this painful experience in fiction, creating new versions of the past to serve the needs of the present.

Akukho Ntaka Inokubhabha Ngephiko Elinye (No Bird Can Fly on One Wing): The ‘Cattle-Killing Delusion’ and Black Intellectuals, c1840–19101

The agenda was set a century and a half ago. In a war zone in southern Africa, bureaucrats manning the states of the Cape Colony and adjacent British Kaffraria were witnessing – and transforming – what they deemed an extraordinary event. They coined names for it: ‘Cattle-Killing mania’, ‘Cattle-Killing’, ‘delusion’. They delineated its spatial boundaries: the mania was confined to Xhosaland and colonised Thembuland. They periodised it: the delusion lasted a year, beginning one thousand eight hundred and fifty-six years after the birth of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. They defined its racial and gender dynamics: the central actors were black men (who virtually monopolised cattle); they were inspired by a male prophet, Mhlakaza, assisted by his niece, Nongqawuse. Subsidiary pathologies were noted, including goat-killing, a ‘non-planting mania’ and preparations for an apocalypse, when the English would be replaced by peace, prosperity and black rulers, headed by resurrected forefathers bearing resurrected cattle.

Peasants, Historians, and Gender: A South African Case Study Revisited,1850–1886

A gender revolution allegedly occurred in the British Cape Colony (and South Africa at large) in the nineteenth century. African patriarchs, traditionally pastoralists, took over womens agricultural work, adopted Victorian gender attributes, and became prosperous peasants (nicknamed black English). Scholars have accepted the plausibility of these seismic shifts in masculinity, postulated in Colin Bundys classic, The Rise & Fall of the South African Peasantry. I re-examine them, for Bundys Case Study of Herschel, acclaimed as one of the regions that best fits his thesis. This Case Study omits women, who were the typical peasant producers. It marginalizes men failing to conform to bourgeois Victorian gender norms. It misrepresents class formation, causation, periodization, and peasant well-being. It misdates proletarianization by at least three decades. The zenith of commodity production is misdated by at least half a century. A labor reservoir characterized by severe subsistence problems is represented as a prosperous peasantry. Bundy postulates that patriarchs rose into womens work and colonial masculine scripts in response to favorable conditions; I argue instead that younger men fell into these domains in response to disasters. A silent gender bias-towards black Englishmen, against African women-had a marked impact on Bundys analysis of class formation. The purpose of this article is to interrogate this silence and to show how it has warped a classic text.