Drummer Hodge : the poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902)

From Preface: This is not a history of the Boer War; nor is it an exclusively literary study of the poetry of that war. If the work that follows has to be defined generically at all, it may be called an exercise in cultural history. It attempts to assess the impact of a particular war on the literary culture, especially the poetry, of both the participants and the observers, whether in South Africa, in Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world, or in Europe. An assumption made throughout this study is that war poetry is not only verse written by men who are or have been under fire. Just as 'War poetry is not to be confused with political, polemical, or patriotic verse, although it can contain elements of all of these, so it is also the work of observers at home as much as that of soldiers at the front. It follows that I have not allowed myself the academic luxury of selecting, on the basis of literary merit only, a handful of outstanding war poems for rigorous analysis and discussion. "Doggerel can express the heart" wrote one of these late-Victorian soldierly versifiers, and I have roamed widely in the attempt to assemble the material which, I believe, records the full range of the impact that the Boer War made not only on Briton and Boer, but on the worId at large. A major thesis of this study is that the Boer War marked the clear emergence of the kind of war poetry which we have come to associate almost exclusively with the First World War. Poems in the style and spirit of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" were written in profusion, but the work which serves as this study's masthead, Hardy's "Drummer Hodge," clearly has --like many of its contemporaries-- more in common with Owen's verse than with Tennyson's. The reasons for the appearance of such poetry are discussed in Chapter 1; the rest of the book provides the evidence of it

Frontier Transculturation and Transgression in the Early Eastern Cape

The multicultural dynamics of the Eastern Cape frontier, and the story of the major actors in its drama of transculturation, conflict, and transgression, are foundational in South African history. It was here, after all, as Clifton Crais and Tim Keegan have reminded us, that the South African colonial and racial order came into being, and it was here, too, that major resistance to that order would in due course emerge.1 In this paper, however, my focus will not be on the captains and kings, governors and chiefs, rulers and radicals who at various times decided the fate of the Eastern Cape, be they Xhosa or settlers, Boers or Bushmen, white or black. Rather, I am intrigued by the many shadowy characters in the margin of the story - liminal, unaffiliated, intermediary figures who move in and out of the shadows of the narrative. They are often enigmatic persons of unknown origin and barely known identity, but who equally often suggest that their role in frontier history could have been - and sometimes was - an important one .

The affections of a man of feeling in the midst of the wilderness: François Le Vaillant on the South African frontier Travels into the Interior of Africa via the Cape of Good Hope, François Le Vaillant

Concluding his Introduction to the first volume of this welcome new translation of Le Vaillant's Travels, Ian Glenn declares: ''Le Vaillant is much more our contemporary than Schreiner or many later writers seem to be'' (lxiii). Earlier Glenn sums up the double disadvantage that has for decades militated against the proper recognition of Le Vaillant's importance in our literary traditions: ''Right-wing settler ideology disqualifies Le Vaillant as meddling creole Frenchman, or presents him [.. .] as simple adventurer and naturalist, while a later generation of anti-colonialist discourse critics is happy to present him in the right-wing's simplified, politically censored version [Glenn is referring particularly to the Library of Parliament's edition de luxe of 1973] to prove that there was only one mode of colonial Africanist discourse'' (lix) - a mode only and obviously Eurocentric to the core

“Two loves I have, of comfort and despair”: The drama and architecture of Shakespeare’s sonnets

This essay was delivered as the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa in Grahamstown in 2017. It argues that Shakespeare’s predisposition to recognise and develop the dramatic moment turned his initial interest in the normally static and contemplative sonnet into the components of something more like an oratorio of dramatic variations in sonnet form. The author focuses on four sonnets (18, 30, 116, 129) that stake out the thematic and structural range of the whole sequence, and discusses how the poet explores the compositional and indeed architectonic possibilities inherent in the principles and procedures of pursuing ‘variations on a theme’. The sonnets can thus be understood as an ambitious proto-baroque diptych, the two halves of which were to present an elaborate allegory of love versus lust, trust versus deceit, and innocence versus experience

The affections of a man of feeling in the midst of the wilderness: François Le Vaillant on the South African frontier Travels into the Interior of Africa via the Cape of Good Hope, François Le Vaillant

Concluding his Introduction to the first volume of this welcome new translation of Le Vaillant's Travels, Ian Glenn declares: ''Le Vaillant is much more our contemporary than Schreiner or many later writers seem to be'' (lxiii). Earlier Glenn sums up the double disadvantage that has for decades militated against the proper recognition of Le Vaillant's importance in our literary traditions: ''Right-wing settler ideology disqualifies Le Vaillant as meddling creole Frenchman, or presents him [.. .] as simple adventurer and naturalist, while a later generation of anti-colonialist discourse critics is happy to present him in the right-wing's simplified, politically censored version [Glenn is referring particularly to the Library of Parliament's edition de luxe of 1973] to prove that there was only one mode of colonial Africanist discourse'' (lix) - a mode only and obviously Eurocentric to the core

Misfits in the margins transgression and transformation on the (South) African frontier

The story of the European encounter with Africa includes many liminal characters who mostly play little part in the larger sweep of events but everywhere suggest alternative scenarios that might have developed, or at least discordant readings of what did actually happen. They range from the Khoi interpreter Coree, who was taken to England in 1614, to a group of London women sent to Sierra Leone in the 1790s to marry local slave traders, or from various Cape avatars of Shakespeare's Caliban to several picturesque originals for Defoe's African eccentrics; from early African articulants of African independence and dignity, such as the Prince Naimbanna of Sierra Leone, to many intriguing individuals (both African and European) who emerge from the records of Portuguese shipwrecks along the southern African coast and the sixteenth-century Portuguese penetration of south-east Africa. Nor is the story short on the occasional African Queen and Sable Venus who not only enliven events but at times impact significantly on the developing politics of colonialism

What literature? : inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University

Inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes UniversityRhodes University Libraries (Digitisation

Seamus Heaney in Grahamstown tribute

Seamus Heaney, internationally celebrated poet of Ireland and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1995, died in Dublin on Friday 30 August 2013, aged 74. He and his wife Marie paid a memorable visit to South Africa in 2002 and what follows is a short account of the occasion