It is impossible in a short review to do justice to Elizabeth van Heyningen's multi-faceted account of the ‘concentration camps’ established by the British for white and black civilians caught up i...

I am grateful to the editors of the for allowing me to respond to Anne Digby's reply to my original criticism of her article on the National Health Services Commission (NHSC) in the South African H...

This article is a critique of and comment on two revisionist articles by Bill Freund and Anne Digby, which appeared in the SAHJ in June 2012. The authors maintain - from different standpoints - that the National Health Services Commission (NHSC or Gluckman Report) was doomed to failure, largely because of the failings of its Chairman, but for opposite reasons: Freund because he was not radical enough, Digby because he was too radical, and failed to carry the medical profession and the politicians with him. After outlining their arguments, this article contends that paradoxically these assessments both overemphasise and underestimate Gluckman, by failing to examine the role of Smuts, the Commissioners, the Department of Public Health, the views of leading members of the medical profession and the radicalism of many in the profession during the war. It highlights the international influences, especially 'social medicine', on the Commission, and explains why it selected the health centre at Pholela as the model for the health centres it envisaged as the foundation of a national health service. Finally it suggests that the Gluckman Commission's recommendations are still relevant to South Africa and the wider world.

Thomas N. Huffman. 2007. Handbook of the Iron Age. The Archaeology of Pre-Colonial Farming Communities in Southern Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Natalie Swanepoel, Am...

PART 1. FOUNDERS AND FIRSTCOMERS PART 2. TESS - THE LINCHPIN PART 3. ASSOCIATES AND ALLIES PART 4. REVERSING THE GAZE

Isaac Williams Wauchope: Selected Writings 1874–1916 Edited and translated by Jeff Opland and Abner Nyamende Cape Town Van Riebeeck Society, Second Series no. 39, 2008 xxxvii+436 pp., ISBN: 0-95851...

2006 marked the 25th anniversary of the recognition of the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus in Los Angeles as the cause of a disease which led to a series of baffling illnesses. It was first noticed in Kinshasa in 1975 then cut a swathe through the gay community of California and has swept with devastating effect across sub-Saharan Africa. If many uncertainties remain in the biomedical field the past quarter-century has seen quite remarkable advances in the scientific understanding of the constantly changing virus and in the development of therapeutic innovations. It has also seen the growth of a voluminous if often unsatisfactory social science literature. Much of this literature has been bedevilled with what Tony Barnett and Gwyn Prins have recently dubbed factoids - the intellectual viruses of quick and dirty synthetic studies - information based on soft opinions and a very narrow evidential base that get transformed into fact through constant citation especially in speculations about the diseases future impact. (excerpt)

Mining companies in South Africa have publicised their benevolent concern for the health of their workers. However, there are legal, practical and political reasons for this concern. This article is concerned with the historical roots and complex interactions between tuberculosis, respiratory disease and HIV/AIDS. While the incidence of such illnesses remains high or growing, the post-apartheid order may compel the mining houses to take their responsibilities for the long-term health of their workforces more seriously.

Milton Shain and Richard Mendelsohn (eds), Memories, Realities and Dreams. Aspects of the South African Jewish Experience (Johannesburg and Cape Town, Jonathan Ball Publishers, n.d. [2002]), 234 pp...

There can be few more vital issues confronting Southern Africa than the pandemic of HIV and AIDS currently ravaging the sub-continent. The paper is an attempt to place the spread of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa in general and South Africa in particular in both its historical and social context. Yet what can an historian say about the AIDS pandemic? Our normal recourse is to look to the historians for the lessons of history both in order to see the epidemic in some kind of perspective and to learn from past policy prescriptions. But the lessons of history are not always so easily read. Humanity has rarely learnt from them and when it has it has frequently learnt the wrong lessons. And while there have been many epidemics in history none has had quite the same configuration as the last. Nevertheless I think history gives us a way of looking at the present. There are no simple answers but the value of historical analogy in challenging dominant preconceptions locating contemporary reactions in context and enabling a sense of perspective remains important. (excerpt)

The two volumes of Jean and John Comaroff's Of Revelation and Revolution (RR) are a tour de force, and raise major questions about the nature of consciousness and the impact of modernity over the past two centuries. Despite their apparently narrow focus on missionaries among the southern Tswana, these are perhaps the most important issues to confront historians of the modern world. Yet historians of mission Christianity in South Africa have been slow to appreciate and incorporate their work. This comment argues that both in their assertion that the colonization of consciousness as 'false consciousness' (Bredekamp and Ross 1995) and in their accusation that the Comaroffs have undermined notions of African agency (Peel 1992; Ranger 1997), critics have misconstrued the nature of their project. It ends however by asserting that the connections between consent and coercion in the making of colonial consciousness are somewhat underplayed in their text, and by suggesting at the same time that the role that mission Christianity played in South Africa's negotiated settlement in the 1990s may be better captured by the title From Revelation to Reconciliation than Of Revelation and Revolution .

Nations as well as individuals are in many ways the sum of their memories, which are shaped by perception as much as by events. This collection of essays by South African academics looks at the ways the country is dealing with its past, a complex mixture of colonialism, slavery, apartheid, struggle, and guilt. The emphasis is on how that past is being perceived and moulded in the post-apartheid era.