Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s the horror of child soldiers captured the attention of NGOs and university-based scholars. Literature about African child soldiers proliferated. It became clear that children between 10 and 18 years old were systematically recruited or forced into armies in numerous civil conflicts. Children and early adolescents were victims and perpetrators of appalling atrocities directed at civilians. There were many other examples in Africa, but Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Uganda were usually singled out as the largest scale and most egregious cases. South Africa was rarely, if ever, included in these discussions. Yet an argument can be made to view the South African comrade movement from the mid-1980s until 1994, though distinctive in many ways, through the lens of the African child soldier literature. While the child soldier pattern is perhaps most applicable to the extremely violent transition phase from 1990 until 1994, it is worth reviewing the comrade movement from its origins in about 1984. This paper attempts to bring literature on child soldiers in Africa into the conversation with South African research (from the disciplines of history, anthropology and social psychology) on the comrade movement. I begin with an overview of some of the key features of the child soldier phenomenon. I follow this by examining the South African comrade movement in relation to these features. I ask whether the comrades were distinctive and whether it is useful to view them as part of the broader trend of child soldiering in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Bantu Education system, which replaced missionary-run black schooling in the mid-1950s, expanded schooling to accommodate the basic economic needs of the South African economy but it was done as cheaply as possible. The state paid teachers? salaries and in return it expected obedience and conformity from its employees. It was a tight-fisted, authoritarian education system, which stifled aspiration and human creativity. Yet, I want to argue in this paper, it unintentionally opened spaces which could nurture human ambition. I am not talking here about ambition merely for upward social mobility but for an assertion of humanity in the midst of a dehumanising social order. Morris Isaacson High School in Soweto was one of those spaces. I will show that Morris Isaacson, from the 1960s to the early 1990s, was a place where young people from mostly very poor backgrounds could aspire to be something more than an economic unit, where they could become creative and rounded human beings. Although the academic ethos of the school should not be underestimated, a variety of cultural, intellectual, and sports activities, which had no direct economic utility, enriched the lives of students and expanded their horizons.

This largely autobiographical essay tries to assess the impact of E.P. Thompson's work on the South African social history movement during the politically turbulent 1980s. In particular it focuses on the University of the Witwatersrand, which was home to the South African History Workshop. Thompson, I argue, was only one of a number of equally significant figures who shaped the movement. Some of Thompson's ideas were certainly embraced in the critique of structuralist Marxism, which had been enormously persuasive in the 1970s, and his concept of the moral economy was developed by some historians in South Africa. Thompson was also part of, though not central to, the British History Workshop, which had important connections to the South African offshoot. Yet post-independence Africanist scholarship, radical anthropology and the burgeoning oral history movement were probably more important intellectual influences. Politically, I suggest, Thompson may have been more influential in that he offered a humanist socialist alternative for leftists disillusioned with the Leninist tradition in South Africa. He demonstrated in his own work that democratic institutions and freedoms were central to any egalitarian project.

Morris Isaacson High School in Jabavu, Soweto, has often been described as the epicentre of the June 1976 Uprising. It has become a focal point for memorials and annual commemorations. Few South Africans know anything else about the school. This paper argues that, while the school did in fact play an important role in the Uprising, it has a longer and possibly more important history as an educational institution catering to often extremely poor, working class families in the heart of Soweto. I discuss Morris Isaacson in historical memory, including an analysis of the filming of Sarafina! and conclude that in educational terms, Morris Isaacson has been much neglected. Astute leadership and committed alumni in recent years have managed to leverage the school's political fame to attract state and private sponsorship. But this material assistance has not entirely resolved the school's problems, which are mostly rooted in the deeper deprivation of its neighbourhood.

Since 2006, the AHR has published ten "Conversations" on a wide range of topics.By now, we have a standard format: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation that is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the December issue.The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging and accessible consideration of a topic at a high level of expertise, in which participants are recruited across several fields.When participants are able to respond to one another, a unique dialogue emerges, one that exemplifies the interplay of ideas that so much scholarship depends upon behind the scenes.The procedure also throws open a window onto the process by which scholars turn evidence into conceptualization; these are not polished pieces, but thought-in-action.It is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to undertake.At my instigation, the 2018 Conversation takes as its subject the concept of "generations."In part, this derived from the fact that I kept stumbling over this intriguing analytical term without fully knowing how much purchase it had, or in what fields.The idea crystallized when I met Bernd Weisbrod, one of our discussants, and discovered that in German history, at least, there exists a robust and longstanding debate about the nature of this concept.At first glance, "generation" can be hard to pin down.Obviously, when we allude, say, to the "Generation of 1968," this is gestural, anecdotal, synecdochal-or is it?Who constitutes a generation, and by what sleight-of-hand are they placed there?Is this a purely subjective concept, and if not, what are some of the driving structural forces that forge a generation and give collective experience in a moment in time some meaning?What roles does memory play in the creation of generational consciousness?And how widely applicable is this concept-can it be associated only with modernity,

During the 1960s and early 1970s Morris Isaacson High School in Soweto had probably its most successful years. It produced good quality education and graduated numerous students who went on to university and became professionals. It was among the top two most prestigious high schools in Soweto. After a series of politically related closures the school regained some stability in the 1980s and 1990s but never really achieved the success or prestige of the previous era. This paper attempts to explain how Morris Isaacson managed to be so successful in spite of the newly implemented Bantu Education system which was designed to provide mass schooling but blunt black aspiration. It notes, among other things, the relatively manageable enrolment in the 1960s, the importance of institutional discipline and good leadership, and the prestige of the teaching profession and the quality of high school teachers in Soweto, especially in the context of the professional limitations imposed by the colour bar. The paper then analyses why high schooling, while expanding, declined dramatically in effectiveness in Soweto in the late 1970s and 1980s.

This paper focuses on the now-discarded practice of corporal punishment at Morris Isaacson High School, an important public school in Soweto. Corporal punishment, widely accepted by both students and parents, was central to the disciplinary regime of the school during the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Morris’ was one of the very few high schools in Soweto to remain open and functional during the turbulent 1980s; some argue that it was the rigid discipline that allowed the school to survive in a context of generational upheaval. During the late 1980s and early 1990s pressure mounted on the educational authorities to abolish corporal punishment until it was eventually outlawed under the new constitution in 1996. Though many saw this an important victory for human dignity, there remains a very popular nostalgic narrative that blames the abolition of corporal punishment for the collapse of school discipline in the democratic era.

In recent years, the youth have captured (or perhaps recaptured) public attention in South Africa. This paper reflects on South Africa's experience of generational conflict and places it in the broader context of South African history. After attempting to define youth, this paper makes two key points. First, far from being a recent development, generational tension has been a continuous feature of Southern African history since at least the late nineteenth century. Second, organized political mobilization is not the way this tension usually manifests itself. Mass youth politics is a specific phenomenon, which needs to be explained historically rather than assumed. The paper focuses on three historical examples to illustrate this: early migrant labor in South Africa, the formation of urban youth gangs, and the sustained youth uprising from 1976 until the early 1990s. It concludes with a tentative attempt to draw some parallels between that phase of rebellion and recent student upheavals.

In spite of immensely difficult circumstances, Orlando High School and Morris Isaacson High School, probably Soweto's two most important high schools, managed to achieve reasonable levels of education under strong leadership during the first two decades of Bantu Education (1956-1975.) They engaged strategically with Bantu Education, in many ways subtly undermining the intentions of the apartheid education system. This article takes the story of these two schools, and Soweto secondary schooling more broadly, into the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1977 most of Soweto's best secondary school teachers, including the extraordinary headmasters of Morris Isaacson and Orlando High, left state schooling in protest. While the reformist apartheid government invested heavily in expanding black urban secondary schooling from the late 1970s, grievances mounted against the grossly unequal education system. High schools became increasingly politicised as student movements reconstituted. New militant teacher unions also emerged from the mid-1980s. There were ongoing disruptions to schooling: boycotts, shut-downs, political meetings, mass detentions. While the student movement and teacher unions succeeded in paralysing the hated Bantu Education system, Soweto's high schools were left with a legacy of damage which has arguably never been repaired.

There are some fascinating historical parallels between Mexico's giant teacher union, the Mexican National Education Union, and the South African Democratic Teachers Union. Although both teacher unions played an important role in challenging political oligarchies at certain points in their history, they became increasingly protectionist. Through their close affiliation to ruling parties, they were able to wield substantial political influence. In both of these cases, the unions played a controversial role in preventing central government surveillance and intervention in schools. Arguably, this often allowed not only for corruption in appointments and promotions, but also the protection of negligent teachers. There is some evidence to suggest that in protecting their sectional interests, both unions have frequently alienated parents and students at the community level. This paper addresses broader debates about the impact of powerful teacher unions on the quality of public schooling.

When I first picked up this new volume by Saul Dubow, my first reaction was to ask: do we need yet another synthesis of apartheid? Aside from several broader overviews of twentieth-century South Af...

Orlando High School and Morris Isaacson High School, the two most famous high schools in Soweto, offer a valuable lens into the shifting culture of teaching and learning in South Africa's urban public schooling. These two schools are best known for their role in the 1976 Soweto uprising, but I move away from this aspect of their history and, instead, analyse them as institutions of learning and as crucial generators of Soweto's professional elite over several decades. This article focuses on the schools as they operated under the Bantu Education system from the late 1950s until the mid 1970s. During the 1960s the Nationalist government was hostile to the very notion of African secondary schooling in the cities. Yet in spite of an authoritarian and repressive state bureaucracy, a lack of resources, and overcrowding, the schools established themselves as credible institutions of learning. Under the firm leadership of T.W. Kambule and Lekgau Mathabathe, they attracted talented, dedicated staff and highly motivated students. Working within the state system inevitably aroused suspicions and tensions; nevertheless, the schools offered the most likely avenue for ordinary Sowetan families to achieve some form of professional upward mobility.

Illegal entry was a central feature of the Madeiran immigrant experience in South Africa between the 1920s and 1970s. Unskilled Madeirans, who were generally not welcomed by the South African state, tapped into human smuggling networks to enter the country. It was a common practice to work illegally on farms or in shops owned by legally resident Madeirans. A large portion of these eventually secured work permits after having worked in the country for long periods. Not only were illegal immigrants generally destitute and illiterate, but they had to live under the radar to avoid arrest and deportation. In spite of their official status as 'white' and the many advantages this offered them, illegal Madeirans lived on, at best, the fringes of white society for several decades.

These fairly typical life stories offer some sense of the diversity of the origins of Portuguese South Africans. In spite of the fact that anywhere between 300,000 and 500,000 South Africans have 20th-century Portuguese origins and despite the long historical connection between the two countries, South Africa has been a relatively neglected corner of the Portuguese diaspora.1 While the Portuguese government has recognised the importance of the community in recent decades, probably because of its sheer size, it has rarely been the subject of social or historical research.2 In part, I would argue, this is because it is only ambiguously a 'community'. Rather, Portuguese South Africans have consisted historically of a series of tight ethnic networks and enclaves, separated along lines of regional background, occupation, and phase of migration. Some institutions began to work towards forging a broader national identity in the late 1960s and 1970s, but even in the 21st century it would be difficult to argue that Portuguese South Africans form a coherent community. It is incorrect to assume that people who share a common language and some sort of connection to the Portuguese state automatically 'imagine' themselves, in the term of Benedict Anderson, as a community. They continue to maintain a low profile, rarely projecting themselves as a group or asserting their interests as a bloc (as we see, for example, with the local Jewish community).KeywordsSouth African GovernmentSouth African SocietyLocal Jewish CommunityImmigration AuthorityIllegal ResidentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Madeiran immigration into South Africa from the beginning of the1900s to the 1970s followed a classic male-led migration pattern. It was virtually unheard of for a woman to migrate without a formal attachment to a man. The history of Madeiran migration has therefore usually under-stated the experience of women in the migration chain. This article attempts not only to recover some of the historical experience of women immigrants from Madeira to South Africa but to place gender relationships at the centre of the migration process. Initially they provided the labour and domestic continuity that made the release of young men from the peasant economy possible. After joining men in South Africa, they continued to provide crucial labour, stabilised the community, and became the most important bearers of cultural identity. The first section of the article focuses on male departure. It analyses the conditions in the Madeiran household which made migration both possible and desirable. The second section discusses the migration of women to South Africa through various forms of marriage and family reunification. The final section concentrates on the immigrant family. It examines patriarchal households, the isolation of women, the influence of the Catholic Church and the often unrecognised role of women's labour in establishing family businesses.

South Africans of Portuguese descent probably constitute ten to fifteen per cent of the white South African population. Yet it is a remarkably under-researched population. This article attempts to lay out a research agenda to address this large historiographical gap. It begins with an overview of the sparse literature on Portuguese immigrants and then provides a basic narrative of three discernible waves of migration from the late nineteenth century until the late 1970s. The first and longest wave involved impoverished citizens of the island of Madeira. The second involved more skilled mainlanders from about 1940-1980, most coming in the 1960s and 1970s. The final wave involved Mozambican and Angolan ex-colonial refugees. The paper suggest several areas of possible historical research on Portuguese-South Africans: the degree of their coherence as a "community"; their generational continuity and discontinuity; and in general, the nature of transnational hybridised identity in its racial, religious and political dimensions.