Historicalstudiesblog

In celebration of Heritage Month,  there are a number of events happening in Cape Town.     The Cape Town Family History Society annual Heritage Day Exhibition is on Saturday 17th September at St John's Church in Wynberg from  2.30 - 4.30 pm.       

One of the exhibitors will be ancestry24 who will also be exhibiting at the Cape Town Civic Centre on the Concourse Level from 20 -23 September.     

The Register of the Second Anglo-Boer War, 1899 - 1902,  is a database containing over 258 800 names, including a completely revised casualty list of 59 000 casualty records. 

SA History Online is working closely with history and heritage institutions, historians, photographers, architects and archaeologists in compiling a heritage project, One City, Many Histories to share online the histories of the nine 2010 FIFA World Cup host cities.   

Here's the link to Cape Town.  

A database of the British Concentration Camps of the South African War 1900 - 1902 is now available.

The camps were formed by the British army to house the residents of the two Boer republics of the South African Republic and the Orange Free State. They were established towards the end of 1900, after Britain had invaded the Boer republics. This database was designed to investigate mortality and morbidity in the camps during the war. Although it will include everyone listed in the registers during the war, it usually excludes returning prisoners-of-war and men who came back from commando at the end of the war, as well as the considerable movement of people which took place after 31 May 1902, when families were repatriated to their homes.

The database is an ongoing project and a number of registers have yet to be completed. Because of the complexity of the sources, most of them produced under wartime conditions, and the incomplete nature of the project, the database does contain duplicates and inconsistencies. Although they will be eliminated as far as possible, variants will always remain.

The database is searchable by person, camps and farms.

The work on the database has been undertaken by Dr Elizabeth van Heyningen, and a team of research assistants. Elizabeth van Heyningen is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town. She is co-author of Cape Town. The Making of a City, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century and The Cape Doctor in the Nineteenth Century. A Social History. In addition she has written a number of articles on the camps.

The database is hosted by UCT Libraries's Manuscripts and Archives Department. 

Thanks to colleague, Celia Walter, for passing this on.

This website is the outcome of a project, part funded by the AHRC, to document the traces of colonial (and specifically British) settlement of South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Through photographs of the built environment of small towns in the area, documentary photographer Peter Metelerkamp examines both the continuing “visible influence of colonial presence” and traces its passing and contemporary social change (less than 10f the regions rural population is of white settler descent). The website “is not intended to offer an apologia for the settler project, nor to celebrate its demise; rather it is an invitation to reflect on its character”, and it contains some 81 elegaic images of ‘settler country’. From Intute.ac.uk

From the HSRC Press blog

Professor Premesh Lalu, author of the book "The Deaths of Hintsa :  Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts" (320.968 LALU)  along with those of historians Leslie Witz and Ciraj Rassool discusses the question of whether South African history is developing an authentic new discourse or stuck in the colonial archive.  

Through mining a rich field of research, from colonial archival material to contemporary museum exhibitions, Lalu states that overcoming apartheid has required coming to terms not only with the effects of history, but with the discourse of history itself.

Here's the link to the HSRC podcast page and to the podcast itself (duration 9 mins 10 sec).