Settler women's experiences of fear, illness and isolation, with particular reference to the Eastern Cape Frontier, 1820-1890

This thesis is an exploration of diaries and letters written by middle-class English-speaking settler women living on the Eastern Cape frontier between 1820 and 1890. By according primacy to these women’s experiences and perceptions, it aims for a greater understanding of women’s encounters with the frontier, and how these were articulated in their personal writing. An emphasis on the recurrent themes of ill-health, fearfulness and solitude undermines the popular myth of the brave, conquering, invincible pioneers which dominates settler historiography to date. The tensions felt by white women living on the frontier disrupted their identities as middle-class Victorian ‘ladies’, and as a result these women either constantly re-established a sense of self, or absorbed some aspects of the Eastern Cape, and thus redefined themselves. Settler women’s experiences of the frontier changed little during the seventy year period spanned by this study, indicating that frontier life led to a rigidification and reinforcement of old, familiar values and behaviours. Rather than adapting to and embracing their new surroundings, settler women sought to duplicate accepted, conventional Victorian ideals and customs. White Victorian women identified themselves as refined, civilized, moral and respectable, and perceived Africa and Africans as untamed, immoral, uncivilized and threatening. To keep these menacing, destabilizing forces at bay, settler women attempted to recreate ‘home’ in the Eastern Cape; to domesticate the frontier by rendering it as familiar and predictable as possible. The fear, illness and solitariness that characterise settler women’s personal writings manifest their attempts to eliminate alienating difference, and record their refusal to truly engage with the frontier landscape and its inhabitants

Women's testimonies of the concentration camps of the South African war : 1899-1902 and after

This thesis concerns women's testimonies of the South African War, specifically their accounts of the 'scorched earth' policy of forced removals and concentration camps instituted by the British military. It historicisises the mythologised version of this part of South Africa's past by delineating and analysing the processes by which these testimonies became central to an emergent 'post/memory' orchestrated by nationalist political and cultural entrepreneurs as part of the development of proto-nationalism. Chapter One overviews competing perspectives on the war and the camps, sketching out some aspects of the war and its aftermaths and exploring the context in which these perspectives were located. Chapter Two examines Hendrina Rabie-Van der Merwe's 1940 testimony Onthou! [Remember!] as an exemplar of post/memory processes, and provides a re-reading which considers the highly politicised context of this book's production and original reading. Chapter Three explores women's narratives written at different times but describing a single incident that occurred in Brandfort camp and involved a protest about rations, enabling the processes of post/memory to be traced over time by showing how a mythologised version of the event was produced. Chapter Four concerns Boer women's letters and diaries written at the time, and examines the relationship between temporal immediacy and claims of referentiality in these. Chapter Five broadens what constitutes 'a testimony' by investigating the variety of ways women attested to their experiences, something which enables examples of black and other marginalised women who left deliberate 'signs' of their lives to be 'seen' and recognised. Chapter Six deals with translation matters in Boer women's testimonies, exploring translation as a process of cultural and political mediation and considering my own role in this and analysing the layers of re/working and re/writing that constitute translation as central to post/memory processes. The Conclusion considers the idea of 'post/memory' in detail.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceCommonwealth Scholarship CommissionGBUnited Kingdo

The Treatment of ‘Everyday Life' in Memory and Narrative of the Concentration Camps of the South African War, 1899-1902

This paper considers the idea of ‘everyday life’ in Boer women’s narratives of the South African War concentration camps in three published collections of camp testimonies. A striking feature of these collections is their absence of memories about ordinary daily life in camp. The focus in women’s camp narratives is largely on the brutal mistreatment of Boer women and children by the British. This is part of a wider pattern evident in Boer women’s camp accounts, which frequently testify to ‘identical’ incidents, share formulaic narrative schemes and replicate stock phrases, thus exhibiting what Gillis has called “memory work” (Gillis, 1994). The absence of the ‘everyday’ in camp narratives is symptomatic of the close relationship many of these accounts had with the growth of Afrikaner nationalism, particularly in the late 1930s

Knowledge, the ‘Moment of Writing’ and the Simulacrum Diaries of Johanna Brandt-Van Warmelo

Diary-writing is usually defined around assumptions about the temporal and spatial circumstances of writing, which underpin what kind of knowledge diaries are understood to ‘hold’. The epistemological status of diaries is rooted in an assumed ontology, concerning the time/space of their writing and the temporal location of their writer in relation to the ‘entries’ written in them. This paper explores ‘what happens’ to the knowledge a diary is seen to hold when its ontological basis is disturbed by its assumed ‘present-ness’ being shown to be an artful (mis)representation. The case study discussed concerns the published diary Het Concentratie-Kamp van Irene [The Irene Concentration Camp] (1905), and also the manuscript diary, and the letters written concurrently with the preparation of the former for publication, of a South African woman, Johanna Van Warmelo (her pre-marriage name). The diary deals with the author’s experiences of six weeks spent as a volunteer worker in Irene concentration camp during the 1899-1902 South African War. In the secondary literature, knowledge-claims about the Van Warmelo diary not only assume referentiality but also the temporal interrelationship of ‘the moment of writing’ with ‘the scene of what is written about’. In particular, the assumption is that the time of its writing, narrative time in a diary-entry, and the temporal location of the writer in relation to the diary-entries, are all ‘of the moment’. However, important temporal disjunctures exist between the manuscript and the published diary. Detailed examples of this are examined by unpacking the ‘moments of writing’ of the manuscript and the published diary, by reference to family letters written by Brandt-Van Warmelo (her postmarriage name) over the period the diary was being prepared for publication. In doing so, we develop the idea of a ‘simulacrum diary’ in thinking about the relationship between the published and manuscript diaries and the complexities of their moments of writing

"She Wrote Peter Halkett": Fictive and Factive Devices in Olive Schreiner’s Letters and Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland

The idea of ‘fictive devices’, from the work of Eakin (1985), concerns narrative devices which are deployed so as to make tellings or narratings ‘more telling’ in the colloquial sense, that is, more pointed and convincing. Such devices include neatening events and plot, re-working characterisation to fit actions and vice versa, denoting causality, and allocating or avoiding agency. They are not necessarily lies or deliberate misrepresentations, but more usually involve reorganisation and tidying so as to make ‘how it was’ more like ‘as it should have been’ in order to tell a good - in the sense of and interesting and convincing - story

“Who Will Comfort Toffle?” – creating audiences for children's preferred futures

Now once upon a time, although not very long ago. And Hidden in the forest where the tall dark pine trees grow, There lived a boy called Toffle in a house that stood alone. He always felt so lonely, and one night was heard to moan; “I feel so frightened of the dark,especially tonight…….” Who Will Comfort Toffle - Tove Jansson (1960) In this tale from the Moomin Valley Toffle finds himself driven from his home by the frightening noises of the forest. All alone, and too shy, at first to approach the many Moomin characters he passes along the way, he gains confidence by helping a scared and lonely Miffle who needs help more than he does. Toffle’s quest to save Miffle from the dreadful Groke inspires him to move beyond his own fears and anxieties, and at the same time create an audience to listen to his preferred future. What would happen if Toffle were alive today, living within a community with all his worries and anxieties, his fear of the dark and the noises of the forest? Maybe Toffle refuses to go to school or becomes aggressive when asked about his fears and worries? Maybe his parents are concerned about his social isolation or potential depression? In all probability Toffle would be referred to a child psychiatrist or a therapist. He would be evaluated, assessed, diagnosed with any number of conditions and disorders, or perhaps his parents would be mandated to attend parenting classes