Cecil John Rhodes once said he had only met two creators in South Africa: himself and James Douglas Logan, the Scottish-born founder of Matjiesfontein. Logan immigrated to South Africa in 1877 at the age of nineteen and almost immediately began amassing a fortune through business, politics and his high-profile association with that most favoured of imperial pastimes – cricket. Empire, War & Cricket in South Africa explores in detail how Matjiesfontein was created and how Logan developed this little Karoo town into a renowned health resort, attracting the rich and famous – including South African novelist Olive Schreiner and England cricketer George Lohmann. But, above all, this is the untold story of how James Logan was instrumental in developing the game of cricket in South Africa at a time when the country was heading towards war with the British Empire. In Empire, War & Cricket in South Africa, readers will learn how one of the first international cricket matches between South Africa and England took place at Matjiesfontein; explore the controversial 1901 South African cricket tour to England in the midst of the Anglo-Boer War; read the amazing story of how Logan once had the captain and manager of England’s cricket team arrested as they boarded their ship home; and discover Logan’s close relationship with Rhodes and how their ‘shady dealings’ brought down the premier’s first government. Illustrated throughout with rare photographs and documents, Empire, War & Cricket in South Africa is a unique social and political history of the workings of the British Empire in South Africa during the late nineteenth century; a well-researched and fascinating biography of the man who gave us Matjiesfontein; and an entertaining and at times unbelievable story of cricket’s origins in South Africa.

This book explores how cricket in South Africa was shaped by society and society by cricket. It demonstrates the centrality of cricket in the evolving relationship between culture, sport and politics starting with South Africa as the beating heart of the imperial project and ending with the country as an international pariah. The contributors explore the tensions between fragmentation and unity, on and off the pitch, in the context of the racist ideology of empire, its ‘arrested development’ and the reliance of South Africa on a racially based exploitative labour system. This edited collection uncovers the hidden history of cricket, society, and empire in defining a multiplicity of South African identities, and recognises the achievements of forgotten players and their impact.

European and African works have found it difficult to move past the image of Africa as a place of exotica and relentless brutality. This book explores the status and critical relationship between politics, culture, literary creativity, criticism, education and publishing in the context of promoting Africa' s indigenous knowledge, and seeks to recover some of the sites where Africans continue to elaborate conflicting politics of self-affirmations. Itboth acknowledges and steps outside the protocols of analysis informed by ...

This book provides the first comprehensive study of the ‘special relationship’ between Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. While most studies approach this from the history of British and South African relations or the history of South African territorial expansion, this book offers new insights by examining Southern Rhodesia’s relations with South Africa from the former’s perspective. Exploring relations through the lens of settler colonialism, the book argues that settler colonialism in the region was marked by a competitive and antagonistic relationship between settler communities, particularly Afrikaner and English communities. The book explores the connections between these countries by examining (high) politics, economic links, and social and cultural ties, highlighting both instances of competition and cooperation. Above all, it argues that economic ties were the cornerstone of the relationship and that these shaped the rest of the ties between the two countries. Drawing on archival records from Britain, South Africa and Zimbabwe, as well as a number of secondary sources, it offers a much more nuanced perspective of this relationship than has been previously offered.

This book provides an interpretation of sport in contemporary South Africa through an historical account of the evolution and social ramifications of sport in the twentieth century. It comprises chapters which trace the growth of sports such as football, cricket, surfing, boxing and rugby, and considers their relationship to aspects of racial identity, masculinity, femininity, political and social development in the country. The book also draws out the wider geo-political significance of South African sport, placing it in the context of the development of sport both elsewhere on the African continent and internationally. The history of sport has seen significant international growth over the past few decades. For the most part, however, the history of sport in Africa has remained largely untraced. By detailing the way in which sport’s development in South Africa overlapped with major socio-political processes on the wider African continent, this volume seeks to narrow the gap. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Forty years ago, a South African rugby tour in the United States became a crucial turning point for the nation’s burgeoning protests against apartheid and a test of American foreign policy. In Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America's Anti-Apartheid Movement, Derek Charles Catsam tells the fascinating story of the Springbok’s 1981 US tour and its impact on the country’s anti-apartheid struggle. The US lagged well behind the rest of the Western world when it came to addressing the vexing question of South Africa’s racial policies, but the rugby tour changed all that. Those who had been a part of the country’s tiny anti-apartheid struggle for decades used the visit from one of white South Africa’s most cherished institutions to mobilize against both apartheid sport and the South African regime more broadly. Protestors met the South African team at airports, chanted outside their hotels, and courted arrests at matches, which ranged from the bizarre to the laughable, with organizers going to incredible lengths to keep their locations secret. In telling the story of how a sport little appreciated in the United States nonetheless became ground zero for the nation’s growing anti-apartheid movement, Flashpoint serves as a poignant reminder that sports and politics have always been closely intertwined.

Sports history offers many profound insights into the character and complexities of modern imperial rule. This book examines the fortunes of cricket in various colonies as the sport spread across the British Empire. It helps to explain why cricket was so successful, even in places like India, Pakistan and the West Indies where the Anglo-Saxon element remained in a small minority. The story of imperial cricket is really about the colonial quest for identity in the face of the colonisers' search for authority. The cricket phenomenon was established in nineteenth-century England when the Victorians began glorifying the game as a perfect system of manners, ethics and morals. Cricket has exemplified the colonial relationship between England and Australia and expressed imperialist notions to the greatest extent. In the study of the transfer of imperial cultural forms, South Africa provides one of the most fascinating case studies. From its beginnings in semi-organised form through its unfolding into a contemporary internationalised structure, Caribbean cricket has both marked and been marked by a tight affiliation with complex social processing in the islands and states which make up the West Indies. New Zealand rugby demonstrates many of the themes central to cricket in other countries. While cricket was played in India from 1721 and the Calcutta Cricket Club is probably the second oldest cricket club in the world, the indigenous population was not encouraged to play cricket.

In this groundbreaking book, author and specialist battlefields guide, Nicki von der Heyde, presents over 70 battles and skirmishes covering five wars that shaped the course of South African history--from the Frontier Wars that started in 1779 to the Second-Anglo Boer War of 1899-1902, a bitter and costly confrontation triggered by the discovery of

Anyone But England is a timely and entertaining exploration of the bonds which the English cricket to the English nation as both face apparently inexorable decline. Mike Marqusee, an American who has lived in England for twenty years, turns the amused gaze of an outsider on to the idiosyncrasies of the English at play, delving into the interminable wrangles over coloured clothing, covered pitches and commercial sponsorship. Yet Marqusee also displays the knowledgeability and passion of a dedicated cricket follower who has watched matches on four continents. His elegant and concise accounts of the origins of the game, its romance with the British Empire, and its traumatic adjustment to the modern market lift the lid on the paradoxes and hypocrisies that have made cricket what it is: democratic and elitist, national and international, ancient and modern. In a revealing scrutiny of the long saga of South Africa's exclusion from world cricket, Marqusee charts England's collusion with apartheid. Spectacularly failing the Tebbit test on every point, his eye-opening account of Pakistan's controversial 'ball-tampering' tour of England will provoke intense debate amongst cricket fans about the role of both the media and racism in the modern game. From the phoney war over the omission of Gower from the England side to England's women cricketers receiving the World Cup outside the Lord's pavilion from which they are banned, Anyone But England goes where no cricket book has gone before. In so doing it sheds new light not only on cricket but also on what it means to be part of a nation for whom the game is well and truly up.

If you reckon corruption in South Africa began with Zuma or even with apartheid, it’s time to catch a wake-up call. Rogues’ Gallery tells the story of some of the biggest skelms to grace our (un)fair shores, showing that dodgy dealings have been a national pastime for as long as South African history has been written down. The action starts with the machinations of three colonial governors: rotten Willem Adriaan van der Stel and the ‘twaddling’ British duo, Sir George Yonge and Lord Charles Somerset. Added to this is Cecil John Rhodes’s unparalleled success in poisoning the land with theft, fraud and war, and Oom Paul Kruger’s corrupt and compromised Volksraads (official and unofficial). Readers are then treated to apartheid’s finest feats in corruption: from the Broederbond’s perfect ten in state capture to the Department of Information’s peddling of fake news and the apartheid state’s manufacture of – no, not illegal cigarettes – Class A drugs! And let’s not forget the hotbed of corruption that was the ‘independent’ homelands. Add to this a few murders, plenty of nepotism and a state president who started out as a Nazi spy, and the gallery of rogues is complete. On the flipside, every chapter also features at least one brave whistle-blower – the true heroes of this book. Irreverent, entertaining and impeccably researched, Rogues’ Gallery busts the myth that the Zuptas were the first to capture the South African state, showing that corruption has always been around – and that the tricks politicians play haven’t changed a jot.