Springboks at the Somme: The making of Delville Wood, 1916

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 21 October 1996In late-June 1916, Private James Ross of the 1st South African Infantry Brigade's 4th Regiment, South African Scottish, added a postscript to a letter despatched home to Cape Town from Sailly le Sec in the Picardy countryside. His mind and spirit instinctively forfeit to the green and tawny fields of northern France, ‘surely the neatest part of the globe’, he wrote to his parents, ‘what impresses me most here is the colour ... the red of the poppies is breathtaking, and truly indescribable.’ At this distance, Ross's observation seems almost a moment of providential suspension; until present and future merged, he seemed blithely unaware that the grassy realm around him was a poisoned pastoral. Near Corbie, further along the British Fourth Army's line, a resting fellow soldier, John Kilgour Parker, enjoyed a brisk sluicing in the Somme before idling away the 25th June, admiring the pipe bands of the 9th Division Black Watch or taking himself off to the sinewy challenge of tossing the caber against men of the 3rd Transvaal and Rhodesia Regiment. Aware of the incongruity of his tranquil reserve situation as the war closed in upon the recently-arrived South African contingent, Kilgour Parker was made edgy by the interminable din of the massive British artillery bombardment of German defences, reflecting, 'so much for this comic fireworks war. I suppose that if we took things seriously, our nerves would probably go in a month'. Yet things were very soon to be taken seriously, and men like Ross and Kilgour Parker would then find themselves advancing to the very border of their human sanity. For not far ahead lay the terrifying resolution of the Somme offensive, and in particular the perforating shock of Delville Wood for South African forces

A flying Springbok of wartime British skies: A.G. "Sailor" Malan

This article, an expanded version of a 2008 public lecture, explores the life and times of Adolph Gysbert ʻSailorʼ Malan, a South African who rose to prominence as a combatant in the 1940 Battle of Britain and who, after his post-war return to the Union, became a notable personality in liberal reform politics. A classic Anglo-Afrikaner empire loyalist or ʻKingʼs Afrikanerʼ, Malan became ʻSailorʼ through his interwar merchant marine service, joining the Royal Air Force in the later 1930s. An exceptional fighter pilot, his wartime role as an RAF ace in defending Britain turned him into a national hero, a migrating loyal Springbok who had sprung selflessly to the defence of Great Britain. Subsequently, as an ex-serviceman, Malan drew on his wartime sensibilities and beliefs to return to political battle in his home country, in opposition to post-1948 Afrikaner nationalism and its apartheid policies. The mini-biography of Sailor Malan analyses several key life-story elements, including his seafaring apprenticeship, British wartime identity and combat experience, and troubled relationship with post- 1945 South Africa as a gradualist liberal

Fording the Amazon

The original publication is available at http://www.sajs.co.za/In 1928, with the Wall Street Crash and the start of the Great Depression only a year away, prospects for the Ford Motor Company still looked rosy. Henry Ford’s celebrated Model T had been a major success. His firm’s new Model A was just around the corner and had already received 700 000 orders. But there were flies in the ointment. Market competition from newer car manufacturers with lower production costs was denting sales and squeezing profits. The wages of Ford’s mass assembly line workers could not be slashed because they were the essential purchasers of the vehicles they produced. Suppliers of key motor components, particularly the big rubber companies of Firestone, Goodyear and General, would not discount their prices. Thus, although Ford’s factories continued to expand, allowing him to maintain his status as the world’s richest man at the pinnacle of his wealth and power, lowering the vehicle production costs was becoming a preoccupation. Yet, the rising demand for rubber after the First World War continually frustrated Ford’s plans.Publishers' versio

Not quite fair play, old chap: The complexion of cricket and sport in South Africa

This review essay explores the racial and social divides that have permeated cricket in South Africa

Gluon distribution in proton at soft and hard pp collisions

We analyze the inclusive spectra of hadrons produced in $pp$ collisions at high energies in the mid-rapidity region within the soft QCD and perturbative QCD assuming the possible creation of the soft gluons at low intrinsic transverse momenta $k_t$. From the best description of the LHC data we found the parametrization of the unintegrated gluon distribution which at low $k_t$ is different from the one obtained within the perturbative QCD.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Talk given the 5th joint International HADRON STRUCTURE '11 Conference (HS'11), Tatransk\'a Strba, Slovakia, June 27th - July 1st, 201

Forward production of beauty baryons in pp collisions at LHC

The production of charmed and beauty baryons in proton-proton collisions at high energies is analyzed within the modified quark-gluon string model. We present some predictions for the experiments on the forward beauty baryon production in pp collisions at LHC energies. This analysis allows us to find useful information on the Regge trajectories of the heavy (b barb) mesons and the sea beauty quark distributions in the proton.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figure

Open charm and beauty production in hadron reactions

The production of charmed and beauty hadrons in proton-proton and proton-antiproton collisions at high energies is analyzed within the modified quark-gluon string model (QGSM) including the internal motion of quarks in colliding hadrons. It is shown that using both the QGSM and NLO QCD one can describe the experimental data rather successfully in a wide region of transverse momenta. We also present some predictions for the future experiments on the beauty baryon production in $pp$ collisions at LHC energies and on the charmed meson production in ${\bar p}p$ reactions at GSI energies.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures. Talk given at International Conference on Hadron Structure (HS 09), Tatranska Strba, Slovak Republic, August 29th-September 3rd, 200

Trafficking Without Traffickers

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) does not recognize forced labor in circumstances where work is structurally, rather than interpersonally, coerced. By locating the power to impose coercion exclusively in individual actors, the law 1) denies relief to survivors of structurally coerced trafficking and 2) shields coercive laws from blame. As the scholarship of Mitchell Berman and Kimberly Ferzan illustrates, coercion can occur without being intentionally imposed by an offending actor. Building on the work of Kathleen Kim, I argue that forced labor can result from structural coercion, e.g., from immigration laws that exclude legally vulnerable individuals from the job market. By constraining workers’ ability to safely leave or reject exploitative work, such laws can lead to instances of forced labor, even in the absence of an individual “trafficker.” To encourage anti-trafficking efforts that target the root causes of coercion, trafficking law must recognize that structural coercion can compel labor. To this end, forced labor should be conceptualized as a condition for which there may be, but is not necessarily, individual criminal liability. Under this framework, legally vulnerable workers would be able to mount a successful claim of forced labor without showing that an actor, such as an employer, intended to coerce their labor. A definitional shift of this nature would expand access to services and immigration relief, as well as focus advocates’ attention upon laws that compel many legally vulnerable workers to labor in exploitative conditions

Rethinking the British World

Copyright @ 2013 The North American Conference on British StudiesThis article rethinks the concept of the “British World” by paying close attention to the voices of those who attended the 1903 Allied Colonial Universities Conference. They identified not one, but three different kinds of British world space. Mapped, respectively, by ideas and emotions, by networks and exchange, and by the specific sites of empire, this article suggests that, in the light of criticisms the British World concept has faced, and in the context of recent scholarship on the social and material production of space, this tripartite approach might offer a useful framework for British and imperial historians interested in the history of the global