AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 2
The name van Onselen is probably familiar to a number of South Africans, as two of them, Lennox and Charles are well-known writers. Their beginnings could not have been more different. Lennox was a policeman, but his first book dealt with the relatively little known subject of antique furniture. As he says himself in the foreword of “Cape Antique Furniture” ( Timmins 1959) when he tried to obtain information during his Cape Town days, from bookdealers – possibly along Long Street – there were none to be found, so the enterprising man decided to write a modest introduction himself.
He attempts to give a brief outline of the origin of individual items, the timbers used and illustrates their development with some black and white photos. Interestingly he already acknowledges the early Eastern influences of the Malay craftsmen on the early Dutch efforts; they probably brought designs such as the ball and claw, and the cabriolet leg, as well as marquetry, rattan and laquer work to the Cape. The second wave of influence came through the Huguenots, who were to have a profound effect on local designs. Then came the English occupation and further continental ideas were brought into the mix.
The author wrote chapters on furniture development in the city and country districts, and features items which would grace reception rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms and he concludes with a chapter on long case clocks and some tips for the aspirant collector.
This little book was published in a limited edition of a thousand copies, so copies are reasonably hard to find, especially in good condition. Still, a worthwhile addition to your library, if antiques are in your field of interest.
Not surprisingly, his second book entitled “A Rhapsody in Blue” (Timmins 1960) deals with the development of the police, starting with the office of Fiscal in the late 17th century, later ably assisted by men of the Watch. A further body of men, the Dienaars, followed, and the office of Fiscal was made purely administrative. By the mid-19th century the Cape Constabulary was organized according to London principles, while in the country districts the Landdrosts were assisted by their veldcornets in keeping the peace..
The same period saw a proliferation of various armed, semi-military bodies, such as the Cape Regiment, Cape Mounted Riflemen, Imperial Cape Mounted Riflemen Corps, Cape Police, Frontier Armed and Mounted Police etc. Many of these were deployed in the Frontier Wars that were being waged on the Eastern Cape and on the Orange River. In the Boer Republics too, there were the notorious ZARP’s and the OFS Republican Police, while Natal had its Natal Mounted Police. After the cessation of hostilities the Transvaal Town Police and the S A Constabulary paved the way to the formation of the SAP. The author’s narrative is full of anecdote, as well as solid historical fact, but occasionally the book is a little ‘bare-bones’ for the serious scholar, as all this information is crammed into the first thirty pages of the book. The remainder is an ode to the life of a policeman, mostly tough, sometimes rewarding, often heroic, with dashes of humour – an eminently readable work.
He concludes with some of his own experiences, including his time as a personal bodyguard to General Smuts. He also saw service in the Sixth Infantry (Police) Brigade during WWII in North Africa, where he was captured by the Italians at Tobruk. With a few friends he escaped in 1943 and made it to Switzerland, where he had to remain due to that country’s neutral status, until the end of the war. A short concluding chapter sketches an ideal police force in an ideal state – a far cry from what happened in the thirty years after the book’s publication.
His third book is probably the most sought-after. “Trekboer” was published by Timmins in 1961, and once more the author draws on his own meetings and interviews with these nomadic stockmen of the arid interior and in the Northwest. By the time the book was written, they were already an almost extinct breed. The advent of the water-drilling machine, and then the ubiquitous windmill, made it possible for stock farmers to lead a more settled life with their flocks on the plains of Bushmanland, and the government promoted land-ownership as well as fencing of properties. All was well during the years when the Twa grass stood knee-high after good rains, but drought inevitably followed and the farmers had once again to muster their starving flocks, pack their wagons and trek along the dusty roads in search of better pasture.
Both van Onselen in “Trekboer” and F A Venter in his book “Kambro-kind” sketch the heartache and privation of the desperate farmer and his dwindling capital on the seemingly endless plains, shimmering in the white-heat, hoping to find a flush of green from a fleeting shower of rain. Many of them ended up eking out an existence on the banks of the Gariep, often dependant on the goodwill and charity of their more fortunate kinfolk, while others trekked into the Kalahari, which though a desert, still could support livestock in years when Bushmanland lay bare under successive droughts.
The author also had his brush with the glittering wealth of Namaqualand and he relates some of the history of the discovery of diamonds, their effect on the Namaqualanders, who saw so much wealth coming from their lands, without any benefits coming their way. One senses a certain amount of sympathy in this policeman’s stories of IDB’s, police-traps and men who became inexplicably well-off almost overnight.
Lastly, as a dessert, he dishes up an account of the searches of a Pretoria chiropractor for the Lost City of the Kalahari. This struck a real chord in my memory, as I shared a schoolbench with the good doctor’s two children. After each vacation, which they had spent flying up and down the desert and camping within earshot of the lions’ roars, Lynn and Scott Haldeman would give their classmates another thrilling episode of their adventures – enough to make me green with envy. On the other hand, they never did find anything, nor were they likely to do so. It is now generally accepted that the much-vaunted Lost City described by the American traveler G A Farini ( actually his real name was William Hunt) was a geological phenomenon amplified by a fertile imagination and some good old-fashioned showmanship.
His fourth, and presumably last book, “Head of Steel” was published in 1962. This time he traces the development of the rail network from the Cape into the Transvaal. While quite an interesting read for the layman, I would suspect it is a little superficial for the railway enthusiast. Generally all of Lennox van Onselen’s books are worth reading and they are good, unpretentious ‘poor man’s Africana’.
Charles van Onselen, on the other hand, is an academic, a sociologist and historian, who has written a number of books on the economic development of the Southern African region, labour exploitation and crime. His first book, “Chibaro” (Pluto Press, 1976) is certainly an eye-opener. Most people know about the Belgian king, Leopold having the chutzpah to not only assume ‘ownership’ of a huge chunk of Africa, but then he set his minions to enslaving the population, and strip-mining everything in sight, from ivory to rainforest timbers and minerals, while committing some of the ghastliest atrocities you can imagine. His descendants still own a few dozen palaces spread around Europe – makes you think, doesn’t it?
The Rhodesian populace underwent similar exploitation; van Onselen examines the labour practices of the mining companies in Rhodesia, after the BSA Co had successfully quashed the last remnants of rebellion. Taxes were imposed, to pay which meant that men had perforce to work in the mines. When mining proved to be unprofitable due to the patchy presence of pay-dirt, the first to suffer were the African mineworkers, who laboured under horrendous conditions, ill-fed, and ill-housed, for progressively lower pay, powerless to alter their working conditions. Life in closed compounds became the standard option imposed by the capitalists of the whole subcontinent, and vice, alcohol, drugs, and credit were all used to keep workers in lengthy labour contracts which resulted in increasing social upheaval, poverty, disease and often death.
Lastly, the author considers the response of the black worker to this labour coercive economy: drunkenness, theft, desertion, property destruction, forgery and absenteeism – the only responses that the workers, brutalized and cowed by the system, could use against their masters. Not a pretty picture, and a far cry from the benevolent face which mining companies would like to portray to the world. In short, an uncomfortable read; typically a reworked doctoral thesis, which requires some specialized interest to persevere with.
The author then wrote a duo of books on the social and economic history of the Witwatersrand up to WWI. Entitled “New Babylon” and “New Niniveh”, van Onselen approaches the phenomenon of unlimited wealth generation, not from the perspective of the beneficiaries, the Randlords, but from the points of view of the underclasses. In the former book, he examines the role alcohol played in ridding the ZAR of agricultural surplus, while providing an anodyne to the masses as well as an incentive for labour recruitment. Sex was the other attraction, and prostitutes streamed to the Rand, first from the Cape, then in increasing numbers from the slums of America, Britain and Europe, closely followed by their symbiotic pimps and gangster elements.
President Kruger, the arch-reactionary statesman, actually connived in the launching of Republican rotgut, and condoned prostitution as a necessary evil, only to be forced into passing the ‘Ontugt Wet’, in effect the first legislation which prohibited relations between black miners and European women – when the ‘swart gevaar’ raised its ugly head in the minds of the local gentry. The Boer War altered all that, but only briefly, and soon Milner was forced into putting the first Immorality Act into force.
Lastly, transport, and in particular the cabbies, come under the magnifying glass. As the New Babylon grew from a scant few square miles some forty-fold in size within a few years, the transport needs of the masses had to be addressed. Once again President Kruger proved to be the reactionary influence, as he wanted his constituency, the agriculturalists, to have an outlet for their products, ie forage. He steadfastly refused to grant concessions for anything but horse-drawn vehicles and trams, when electricity was already a viable alternative. The author follows the power struggle between cabbies from different racial groups, their organizations, changes from the basic Cape cart, to the modish Victorias and Landaus, and on to the motorised taxi. He describes the stratification of cabbies by laws and regulations into classes, which in turn determine the fares and race of the passengers. Lastly, in 1906, the electrified tram, or trolley, made its appearance – and to my wonder, I actually still made use of those historic conveyances in the late fifties and early sixties!
The second book in this series “New Niniveh”, concerns itself, among others, with the role and composition of the servant-class. Firstly sturdy Irish and Scottish lasses were the preferred imports (after all in a society of 88% unmarried men, they could prove to be useful as breeding stock) but these inevitably succumbed to the white colonialist class-consciousness, which decreed that manual labour was unfitted for those of paler hue. Enter the Zulu ‘houseboy’ who would handle the menial work under supervision of the cook-general. Inevitably the economic fluctuations in the fortunes of the mining industry, made this structure too expensive, and black women joined the rank of servants, and then ‘picaninnies’ became the logical lowest rung of this labouring class.
Another interesting sub-class was that of the dhobi’s, or amawasha – who laundered the dirty apparel of Rand society. These consisted again mainly of Zulus, who formed a guild of micro-entrepreneurs wielding no little power and influence in the burgeoning city. The author sketches their rise and inevitable decline as mechanized steam laundries, shortage of water and capitalist intrusion crept into their kingdom.
A section of the book deals with the role of the Afrikaner poor, especially after the Boer War. From the ruins of their agricultural origins they streamed into the city and competed for work with foreign workers and the black labour force. The author traces the proletarianisation of this group, unemployment and the rise of a class-consciousness which was to play a growing political role as the century progressed.
Lastly the book deals with the shadowy criminal army that inhabited the caves, derelict mines and prisons on the Reef – the Umkosi Wezintaba – a Mafiosi-type brotherhood, rooted in social injustice, but which changed to robbery, extortion, burglary and murder. The mine compound system, the prisons as well as the free-roaming members of this army, were well-organised and informed and became a serious threat to law and order for several decades. Both of the above books are recommended reading for serious historians and students of the South African industrial revolution, but for a casual reader they may be too academic in flavour.
Another tour de force by this author was “The Seed is Mine” (Hill & Wang 1996); an award-winning biography of a black share-cropper, Kas Maine, whose life spanned most of the 20th century. From the edge of the Kalahari, where he spent the first half century of his life, he was a subject of the forced removals that became such a feature of the apartheid regime. As farming became increasingly mechanized, his services became less and less valuable to the white farmers on whose land he lived. Finally he ended up in the puppet state of Bophutatswana, with a plot of land which was too small to be farmed economically, and from where he had to send his children off to the cities to make a living.
Politics hardly entered into this man’s life, rather it was the economic and social changes that affected him most, leaving him powerless to alter the environment in which he lived. His working relationships with the white landowners and the representatives of the white government, both only concerned with their own interests, were surprisingly good, though he was never their equal socially. He is often portrayed as being critical of individual whites, but never rails against them as a group. The book is a real tribute to a hard-working black farmer, who showed remarkable forbearance and patience with his lot.
The latest book written by this author, “The Fox and the Flies” is visibly the result of his previous researches into the underbelly of the Witwatersrand demi monde. It chronicles the life and times of Joseph Liis, aka Joe Silver, thief, burglar, racketeer, gangster, whoremaster and psychopath. His nefarious career started in southern Poland, from where he emigrated to London with one of the early waves of migrants in the 1880’s. He wasted no time in establishing himself as a petty criminal and pimp on the streets of the East End at the time of the horrendous Whitechapel murders – of which more later. At the ripe old age of 21, already syphilitic, he decided to bless New York with his presence.
His American chapter saw him continuing in a similar vein, but even though he made full use of the corrupt lawmen of his adopted country, he spent his first two spells in Sing Sing and Riverside prisons in Pittsburgh, after which he left the States as a naturalized US citizen and returned to London, where he was soon incarcerated in Pentonville for a stretch. His next target was Johannesburg, and here van Onselen gives a fascinating insight into the low-life of this city in the making, where almost ninety percent of men were single, perpetually thirsty and looking for diversions. He describes Silver’s racketeering, his interaction with South African notables, such as Smuts, Manie Maritz and Mostyn Cleaver, which was to result in lengthy court cases as well as the first stirrings of an immorality act being passed by the old president, Kruger. The beginning of the Boer War found Silver in jail once more. First the Fort in Johannesburg, then the Potchefstroom prison. When the Brits threatened the town, Silver was shown the open gate and he departed thankfully to Kimberley, which was celebrating the lifting of the siege. Here again he did not last long doing what he did best, and once more he landed briefly in jail before being deported to Cape Town.
The Mother City, and particularly District Six, proved to be congenial surroundings until the war ended, when our man departed to – wait for it – Bloemfontein, of all places. Yes, even that placid Boer capital was to feel the impact of the brothelkeeper and white slaver from hell. But once again his intrigues resulted in imprisonment and finally he was deported back to the Cape. He managed to spend a year there more or less out of trouble – except for leaving a ‘wife’ maddened with syphilis in Valkenberg, for whom he had to pay maintenance, so when the Germans were forced to ship out large numbers of troops to quell the Hereros in South West Africa in 1904, he judged that he might as well make the sleepy little town of Swakopmund, and later Windhoek, his new business locale. Finally, in 1906, his luck ran out and several of his prostitutes ganged up on him and the German authorities incarcerated him once more before deporting him again. In vain he tried to leave ship at Cape Town, as well as at Durban, but the subcontinent had become too well informed about his activities, so he had to return to Europe.
His further adventures include Germany, France, Belgium, Argentina, Chile, New York and London again, before he finally departs almost inexplicably towards Poland, where he belatedly meets his just deserts – apparently for a completely different reason. I’m not going to spoil that one for you though.
The book is a tour de force of meticulous research and dogged pursuit of information. The subject is not a pleasant one; in fact, the author makes a case for Silver to have been ‘Jack the Ripper’, but to all devotees of things criminal, this book is a must. For those with an interest in the social history of the late 19th and early 20th century, it is also a valuable work and a thumping good read. Happy reading!
The name van Onselen is probably familiar to a number of South Africans, as two of them, Lennox and Charles are well-known writers. Their beginnings could not have been more different. Lennox was a policeman, but his first book dealt with the relatively little known subject of antique furniture. As he says himself in the foreword of “Cape Antique Furniture” ( Timmins 1959) when he tried to obtain information during his Cape Town days, from bookdealers – possibly along Long Street – there were none to be found, so the enterprising man decided to write a modest introduction himself.
He attempts to give a brief outline of the origin of individual items, the timbers used and illustrates their development with some black and white photos. Interestingly he already acknowledges the early Eastern influences of the Malay craftsmen on the early Dutch efforts; they probably brought designs such as the ball and claw, and the cabriolet leg, as well as marquetry, rattan and laquer work to the Cape. The second wave of influence came through the Huguenots, who were to have a profound effect on local designs. Then came the English occupation and further continental ideas were brought into the mix.
The author wrote chapters on furniture development in the city and country districts, and features items which would grace reception rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms and he concludes with a chapter on long case clocks and some tips for the aspirant collector.
This little book was published in a limited edition of a thousand copies, so copies are reasonably hard to find, especially in good condition. Still, a worthwhile addition to your library, if antiques are in your field of interest.
Not surprisingly, his second book entitled “A Rhapsody in Blue” (Timmins 1960) deals with the development of the police, starting with the office of Fiscal in the late 17th century, later ably assisted by men of the Watch. A further body of men, the Dienaars, followed, and the office of Fiscal was made purely administrative. By the mid-19th century the Cape Constabulary was organized according to London principles, while in the country districts the Landdrosts were assisted by their veldcornets in keeping the peace..
The same period saw a proliferation of various armed, semi-military bodies, such as the Cape Regiment, Cape Mounted Riflemen, Imperial Cape Mounted Riflemen Corps, Cape Police, Frontier Armed and Mounted Police etc. Many of these were deployed in the Frontier Wars that were being waged on the Eastern Cape and on the Orange River. In the Boer Republics too, there were the notorious ZARP’s and the OFS Republican Police, while Natal had its Natal Mounted Police. After the cessation of hostilities the Transvaal Town Police and the S A Constabulary paved the way to the formation of the SAP. The author’s narrative is full of anecdote, as well as solid historical fact, but occasionally the book is a little ‘bare-bones’ for the serious scholar, as all this information is crammed into the first thirty pages of the book. The remainder is an ode to the life of a policeman, mostly tough, sometimes rewarding, often heroic, with dashes of humour – an eminently readable work.
He concludes with some of his own experiences, including his time as a personal bodyguard to General Smuts. He also saw service in the Sixth Infantry (Police) Brigade during WWII in North Africa, where he was captured by the Italians at Tobruk. With a few friends he escaped in 1943 and made it to Switzerland, where he had to remain due to that country’s neutral status, until the end of the war. A short concluding chapter sketches an ideal police force in an ideal state – a far cry from what happened in the thirty years after the book’s publication.
His third book is probably the most sought-after. “Trekboer” was published by Timmins in 1961, and once more the author draws on his own meetings and interviews with these nomadic stockmen of the arid interior and in the Northwest. By the time the book was written, they were already an almost extinct breed. The advent of the water-drilling machine, and then the ubiquitous windmill, made it possible for stock farmers to lead a more settled life with their flocks on the plains of Bushmanland, and the government promoted land-ownership as well as fencing of properties. All was well during the years when the Twa grass stood knee-high after good rains, but drought inevitably followed and the farmers had once again to muster their starving flocks, pack their wagons and trek along the dusty roads in search of better pasture.
Both van Onselen in “Trekboer” and F A Venter in his book “Kambro-kind” sketch the heartache and privation of the desperate farmer and his dwindling capital on the seemingly endless plains, shimmering in the white-heat, hoping to find a flush of green from a fleeting shower of rain. Many of them ended up eking out an existence on the banks of the Gariep, often dependant on the goodwill and charity of their more fortunate kinfolk, while others trekked into the Kalahari, which though a desert, still could support livestock in years when Bushmanland lay bare under successive droughts.
The author also had his brush with the glittering wealth of Namaqualand and he relates some of the history of the discovery of diamonds, their effect on the Namaqualanders, who saw so much wealth coming from their lands, without any benefits coming their way. One senses a certain amount of sympathy in this policeman’s stories of IDB’s, police-traps and men who became inexplicably well-off almost overnight.
Lastly, as a dessert, he dishes up an account of the searches of a Pretoria chiropractor for the Lost City of the Kalahari. This struck a real chord in my memory, as I shared a schoolbench with the good doctor’s two children. After each vacation, which they had spent flying up and down the desert and camping within earshot of the lions’ roars, Lynn and Scott Haldeman would give their classmates another thrilling episode of their adventures – enough to make me green with envy. On the other hand, they never did find anything, nor were they likely to do so. It is now generally accepted that the much-vaunted Lost City described by the American traveler G A Farini ( actually his real name was William Hunt) was a geological phenomenon amplified by a fertile imagination and some good old-fashioned showmanship.
His fourth, and presumably last book, “Head of Steel” was published in 1962. This time he traces the development of the rail network from the Cape into the Transvaal. While quite an interesting read for the layman, I would suspect it is a little superficial for the railway enthusiast. Generally all of Lennox van Onselen’s books are worth reading and they are good, unpretentious ‘poor man’s Africana’.
Charles van Onselen, on the other hand, is an academic, a sociologist and historian, who has written a number of books on the economic development of the Southern African region, labour exploitation and crime. His first book, “Chibaro” (Pluto Press, 1976) is certainly an eye-opener. Most people know about the Belgian king, Leopold having the chutzpah to not only assume ‘ownership’ of a huge chunk of Africa, but then he set his minions to enslaving the population, and strip-mining everything in sight, from ivory to rainforest timbers and minerals, while committing some of the ghastliest atrocities you can imagine. His descendants still own a few dozen palaces spread around Europe – makes you think, doesn’t it?
The Rhodesian populace underwent similar exploitation; van Onselen examines the labour practices of the mining companies in Rhodesia, after the BSA Co had successfully quashed the last remnants of rebellion. Taxes were imposed, to pay which meant that men had perforce to work in the mines. When mining proved to be unprofitable due to the patchy presence of pay-dirt, the first to suffer were the African mineworkers, who laboured under horrendous conditions, ill-fed, and ill-housed, for progressively lower pay, powerless to alter their working conditions. Life in closed compounds became the standard option imposed by the capitalists of the whole subcontinent, and vice, alcohol, drugs, and credit were all used to keep workers in lengthy labour contracts which resulted in increasing social upheaval, poverty, disease and often death.
Lastly, the author considers the response of the black worker to this labour coercive economy: drunkenness, theft, desertion, property destruction, forgery and absenteeism – the only responses that the workers, brutalized and cowed by the system, could use against their masters. Not a pretty picture, and a far cry from the benevolent face which mining companies would like to portray to the world. In short, an uncomfortable read; typically a reworked doctoral thesis, which requires some specialized interest to persevere with.
The author then wrote a duo of books on the social and economic history of the Witwatersrand up to WWI. Entitled “New Babylon” and “New Niniveh”, van Onselen approaches the phenomenon of unlimited wealth generation, not from the perspective of the beneficiaries, the Randlords, but from the points of view of the underclasses. In the former book, he examines the role alcohol played in ridding the ZAR of agricultural surplus, while providing an anodyne to the masses as well as an incentive for labour recruitment. Sex was the other attraction, and prostitutes streamed to the Rand, first from the Cape, then in increasing numbers from the slums of America, Britain and Europe, closely followed by their symbiotic pimps and gangster elements.
President Kruger, the arch-reactionary statesman, actually connived in the launching of Republican rotgut, and condoned prostitution as a necessary evil, only to be forced into passing the ‘Ontugt Wet’, in effect the first legislation which prohibited relations between black miners and European women – when the ‘swart gevaar’ raised its ugly head in the minds of the local gentry. The Boer War altered all that, but only briefly, and soon Milner was forced into putting the first Immorality Act into force.
Lastly, transport, and in particular the cabbies, come under the magnifying glass. As the New Babylon grew from a scant few square miles some forty-fold in size within a few years, the transport needs of the masses had to be addressed. Once again President Kruger proved to be the reactionary influence, as he wanted his constituency, the agriculturalists, to have an outlet for their products, ie forage. He steadfastly refused to grant concessions for anything but horse-drawn vehicles and trams, when electricity was already a viable alternative. The author follows the power struggle between cabbies from different racial groups, their organizations, changes from the basic Cape cart, to the modish Victorias and Landaus, and on to the motorised taxi. He describes the stratification of cabbies by laws and regulations into classes, which in turn determine the fares and race of the passengers. Lastly, in 1906, the electrified tram, or trolley, made its appearance – and to my wonder, I actually still made use of those historic conveyances in the late fifties and early sixties!
The second book in this series “New Niniveh”, concerns itself, among others, with the role and composition of the servant-class. Firstly sturdy Irish and Scottish lasses were the preferred imports (after all in a society of 88% unmarried men, they could prove to be useful as breeding stock) but these inevitably succumbed to the white colonialist class-consciousness, which decreed that manual labour was unfitted for those of paler hue. Enter the Zulu ‘houseboy’ who would handle the menial work under supervision of the cook-general. Inevitably the economic fluctuations in the fortunes of the mining industry, made this structure too expensive, and black women joined the rank of servants, and then ‘picaninnies’ became the logical lowest rung of this labouring class.
Another interesting sub-class was that of the dhobi’s, or amawasha – who laundered the dirty apparel of Rand society. These consisted again mainly of Zulus, who formed a guild of micro-entrepreneurs wielding no little power and influence in the burgeoning city. The author sketches their rise and inevitable decline as mechanized steam laundries, shortage of water and capitalist intrusion crept into their kingdom.
A section of the book deals with the role of the Afrikaner poor, especially after the Boer War. From the ruins of their agricultural origins they streamed into the city and competed for work with foreign workers and the black labour force. The author traces the proletarianisation of this group, unemployment and the rise of a class-consciousness which was to play a growing political role as the century progressed.
Lastly the book deals with the shadowy criminal army that inhabited the caves, derelict mines and prisons on the Reef – the Umkosi Wezintaba – a Mafiosi-type brotherhood, rooted in social injustice, but which changed to robbery, extortion, burglary and murder. The mine compound system, the prisons as well as the free-roaming members of this army, were well-organised and informed and became a serious threat to law and order for several decades. Both of the above books are recommended reading for serious historians and students of the South African industrial revolution, but for a casual reader they may be too academic in flavour.
Another tour de force by this author was “The Seed is Mine” (Hill & Wang 1996); an award-winning biography of a black share-cropper, Kas Maine, whose life spanned most of the 20th century. From the edge of the Kalahari, where he spent the first half century of his life, he was a subject of the forced removals that became such a feature of the apartheid regime. As farming became increasingly mechanized, his services became less and less valuable to the white farmers on whose land he lived. Finally he ended up in the puppet state of Bophutatswana, with a plot of land which was too small to be farmed economically, and from where he had to send his children off to the cities to make a living.
Politics hardly entered into this man’s life, rather it was the economic and social changes that affected him most, leaving him powerless to alter the environment in which he lived. His working relationships with the white landowners and the representatives of the white government, both only concerned with their own interests, were surprisingly good, though he was never their equal socially. He is often portrayed as being critical of individual whites, but never rails against them as a group. The book is a real tribute to a hard-working black farmer, who showed remarkable forbearance and patience with his lot.
The latest book written by this author, “The Fox and the Flies” is visibly the result of his previous researches into the underbelly of the Witwatersrand demi monde. It chronicles the life and times of Joseph Liis, aka Joe Silver, thief, burglar, racketeer, gangster, whoremaster and psychopath. His nefarious career started in southern Poland, from where he emigrated to London with one of the early waves of migrants in the 1880’s. He wasted no time in establishing himself as a petty criminal and pimp on the streets of the East End at the time of the horrendous Whitechapel murders – of which more later. At the ripe old age of 21, already syphilitic, he decided to bless New York with his presence.
His American chapter saw him continuing in a similar vein, but even though he made full use of the corrupt lawmen of his adopted country, he spent his first two spells in Sing Sing and Riverside prisons in Pittsburgh, after which he left the States as a naturalized US citizen and returned to London, where he was soon incarcerated in Pentonville for a stretch. His next target was Johannesburg, and here van Onselen gives a fascinating insight into the low-life of this city in the making, where almost ninety percent of men were single, perpetually thirsty and looking for diversions. He describes Silver’s racketeering, his interaction with South African notables, such as Smuts, Manie Maritz and Mostyn Cleaver, which was to result in lengthy court cases as well as the first stirrings of an immorality act being passed by the old president, Kruger. The beginning of the Boer War found Silver in jail once more. First the Fort in Johannesburg, then the Potchefstroom prison. When the Brits threatened the town, Silver was shown the open gate and he departed thankfully to Kimberley, which was celebrating the lifting of the siege. Here again he did not last long doing what he did best, and once more he landed briefly in jail before being deported to Cape Town.
The Mother City, and particularly District Six, proved to be congenial surroundings until the war ended, when our man departed to – wait for it – Bloemfontein, of all places. Yes, even that placid Boer capital was to feel the impact of the brothelkeeper and white slaver from hell. But once again his intrigues resulted in imprisonment and finally he was deported back to the Cape. He managed to spend a year there more or less out of trouble – except for leaving a ‘wife’ maddened with syphilis in Valkenberg, for whom he had to pay maintenance, so when the Germans were forced to ship out large numbers of troops to quell the Hereros in South West Africa in 1904, he judged that he might as well make the sleepy little town of Swakopmund, and later Windhoek, his new business locale. Finally, in 1906, his luck ran out and several of his prostitutes ganged up on him and the German authorities incarcerated him once more before deporting him again. In vain he tried to leave ship at Cape Town, as well as at Durban, but the subcontinent had become too well informed about his activities, so he had to return to Europe.
His further adventures include Germany, France, Belgium, Argentina, Chile, New York and London again, before he finally departs almost inexplicably towards Poland, where he belatedly meets his just deserts – apparently for a completely different reason. I’m not going to spoil that one for you though.
The book is a tour de force of meticulous research and dogged pursuit of information. The subject is not a pleasant one; in fact, the author makes a case for Silver to have been ‘Jack the Ripper’, but to all devotees of things criminal, this book is a must. For those with an interest in the social history of the late 19th and early 20th century, it is also a valuable work and a thumping good read. Happy reading!
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