Neil Roos - Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961
Here you can read online Neil Roos - Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961 full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2018, publisher: Routledge, genre: Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Springbok was a term used to describe the 200,000 white South African men who volunteered to serve during the Second World War. Volunteers developed bonds of comradeship, and rites of passage were expressed in the idiom of the front. Without exception, volunteers nurtured hopes for some form of post-war social justice. Neil Roos provides a fresh approach in considering comradeship and social justice ethnographically, as a way of focusing on ordinary Springboks expectations and experiences during and after the war. As troops were demobilized, the contradictions of social justice in a colonial society were exposed. The majority of white veterans used the memory of service to stake their claim as white men who had served their country, and to negotiate a better position for themselves within the context of segregated colonial society. However, social justice amongst white veterans did not necessarily assume a racist character. A small group of radical white veterans invoked their war experience and traditions of anti-fascism to challenge the very precepts of racialized South African society. These veterans featured in the struggle against apartheid during the 1950s, and were especially prominent in the shift towards armed resistance to apartheid in 1961. Drawing heavily on the testimony of veterans, the book includes previously unreferenced documentary and visual material on the history of white servicemen, including official responses such as military intelligence reports on the political mood of serving soldiers, as well as material produced by veterans organisations, such as the Springbok Legion, the War Veterans Torch Commando and the Memorable Order of Tin Hats (MOTH). Roos offers a new framework for examining the social, cultural and political history of whites (and whiteness) in South Africa. The book will appeal to those interested in the elaboration of apartheid society and the types of acceptance and resistance that it engendered, and will also co
Neil Roos: author's other books
Who wrote Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Cliff Roberson
Neil Thompson
Rachael Morlock
Stuart Greaves
Patrizia Longo
Gerry Mooney
Janet L. Finn
David Johnston
Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961 — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Ordinary Springboks
To Dick
First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing
Reissued 2018 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Neil Roos 2005
Neil Roos has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 2005000170
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.
Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.
ISBN 13: 978-0-815-39097-8 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-351-15204-4 (ebk)
Contents
Guide
I spent my childhood from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s in a small milling village on the Natal South Coast sugar belt. My father, a veteran of the Second World War, worked for the sugar company as a clerk. While his war service earned him some respect from other whites in the village, and his participation in the Comrades marathon during the 1950s some awe, he was also the subject of mild condescension as the poorest white in the Company.
As a youngster, it was my fathers war service that interested me. All the white men of his age in the village were veterans. Although I cannot recall any of them ever having told a story of their experience in battle, the war and memory of service were central to their identity. While most came from fairly poor backgrounds, they experienced vastly different fortunes after the war. Nonetheless, in the armed forces, a type of comradeship developed, where the rite of passage was expressed in the idiom of the front. I was fascinated by the bonds between the veterans, and the rituals of the closed society that my father and his comrades entered every Thursday night when they met in the local Boy Scout hall.
Like other white children in the village, I was not allowed to play with the railway children, white Afrikaners, and I grew up with a fierce dislike for Afrikaners. I shared my mothers interest in politics, and remember, from the early 1970s, her heaping scorn on the National Party and Afrikaners more generally for their unreasonable racial politics. This is not to suggest that my social world was in any way anti-racist, or even inclined towards liberalism. It was a fortress of racial folklore as, in Fanons words, we overdetermined Africans from without: none of this common wisdom was politically or morally problematic to me at the time, or cast in the abstract form racist. I developed an awareness of the destructive power of Afrikaner ethnic supremacy long before I understood much about the burden of white supremacy.
As a white boy, I was registered for conscription in 1980, and called up a year later as I completed High School. Registering for a university degree, I managed to defer my conscription. However, I heard all about national service in the South African Defence Force (SADF) from friends, casual acquaintances, and people I hardly even knew. Indeed, what was immediately apparent about this cohort of conscripts, as opposed to the Second World War volunteers, was the way in which some endlessly boasted about their exploits in the SADF. Tales of killing terrorists as well as acts of aggression against civilians were elaborated with nauseating pride and glee. Other conscripts were dismayed at the ways in which the SADFs campaign of terror was glorified and put it down to the brutalizing effects of teenagers being brainwashed by Afrikaner instructors in the Permanent Force of the SADF. At the time, I ascribed to this view.
The low level civil war in South Africa intensified through the 1980s, and it became difficult to sustain the argument that the racial violence displayed by the SADF and other security forces was a particularly Afrikaner social pathology. To a greater or lesser extent, English-speaking whites in my village and in Durban, where I studied, began to demonstrate increasing levels of despair, paranoia and anger, all of which were highly racialized.
As a post-graduate student in history at the University of Natal, I wanted to study the structures of apartheid. It is difficult to account with any measure of precision for my growing academic interest, although as George Tindall wrote of his experiences as a young man in the American South, growing up in a deeply racialized society was enough to develop an interest in matters of race. However at that stage, in the mid-1980s, I lacked the analytic and empirical focus necessary to conceive a viable research project.
Then, in 19861 attended the launch rally of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) at Curries Fountain. An elderly African man handed me a flyer for the South African Communist Party (SACP), then still banned and underground. He was of a similar age to my father, and may even have been a Second World War veteran. The contrasting ways in which this unknown old communist and my father saw the world helped to frame the central analytic question for my doctoral thesis and subsequently for book: why did some South African men choose class consciousness while others, also exploited, chose race consciousness and saw their own interests as not dissimilar to those of their bosses? What was the nature of the bonds that joined white men together? These questions eventually enabled my intellectual and political interest in white racism to converge with my longer-term fascination with the history of white ex-servicemen.
Following Roediger, the autobiographical detail has been included because the themes for this project derived not only from conscious reflection, but also my own formative experience as the product of racist social engineering and the son of a white veteran. In particular, these experiences have concentrated my attention on the pervasiveness of race in South Africa, and its role in defining not only how whites like my father look at blacks, but also how they look at themselves.
Between 1990 and about 1997, the project lay dormant for all sorts of reasons. My introduction, in about 1998, to the American literature on race provided the necessary spark to re-ignite the project. Using the conceptual lens afforded by post-colonial race theory, I was able to consider the racism, not of a class or an ethnic group, but of a society. It has allowed me to understand, in Dan Carters words, how family, friends and neighbors, normally decent and compassionate people, could become cruel when facing challenges to the racialized and racist order in which they lived.
My biggest debt is to my wife, Jennifer Seif, who provided the intellectual and emotional support necessary to sustain a long project. In her own right she is a formidable scholar who has guided me through the theoretical literature on culture, hegemony and whiteness, and has read and commented critically on multiple drafts of this work. Thanks to my friend and doctoral supervisor Tim Clynick who encouraged my interest in writing a radical social and cultural history of ordinary white people. Thanks also to Jean and John Comaroff (University of Chicago) and Lewis Gordon (Brown University) who have led me through a range of theoretical perspectives on race, modernity and radical history. Sandra Walker brought an acute editorial eye to the manuscript, and Busi Alant, Archie Dick, Jonathan Jansen and Charles van Onselen (University of Pretoria) have all read sections. Their comments are much appreciated. All errors, inconsistencies and misunderstandings, though, remain solely mine. Heidi May, Pete Coles and Ashgate have been at all times supportive and professional.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961»
Look at similar books to Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Cliff Roberson
Neil Thompson
Rachael Morlock
Stuart Greaves
Patrizia Longo
Gerry Mooney
Janet L. Finn
David Johnston
Reviews about «Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961»
Discussion, reviews of the book Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961 and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.