Category: South Africa
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Scans of ZAPU’s ‘Zimbabwe Review’ (1974-78)
During the war of national liberation in Zimbabwe, there were two main organisations that led the struggle. One was Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), which was supported by China and North Korea. The other was Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), which was supported by the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc and…
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South African progressives and the Suez Crisis of 1956
On 29 October, 1956, the Suez Crisis began with an Israeli attack upon Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, with the UK and France intervening the subsequent days to ‘protect’ the Suez Canal. Many historians have viewed these actions as the last major ‘roll of the dice’ for the British and French governments hoping to stem the decolonisation…
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London Recruits: Please help fund doco on ‘secret war against Apartheid’
This is an appeal to help raise money to fund the completion of this documentary on the British activists who travelled to South Africa in the late 1960s to undertake secret missions to help the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. Here’s a message from the film makers: New documentary feature London…
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Communism, anti-racism and the ‘imperialist war’ phase in South Africa, USA and Australia, 1939-41
With the anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War this week, this post is an extract from a paper that I am writing on the Communist Parties in South Africa, the United States and Australia and their agitation for black soldiers to join the war effort after the Soviet Union joined the Allies…
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Policing Communism Across the British Empire: A Transnational Study
This is a revised (yet shortened) version of the conference paper I gave last week at the XXIV Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for European History. I am currently knocking it into shape for submission as a journal article, so any feedback, comments or questions is most welcome. If you’re interested in reading the…
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Is it just me or is this extract anti-semitic? A 1943 report on the Communist Party of South Africa
I previously posted this on Facebook, but thought I’d post it here as well… This is an extract from a report on the Communist Party of South Africa by the British High Commissioner in Pretoria during the Second World War, Lord Harlech (or William Ormsby-Gore), to the Colonial Office in London (April 1943): It is…
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Tory anti-communism in the early 1950s
In the early years of the Cold War, many saw communism as a very real and present threat to British society and the maintenance of the British Empire. The consolidation of the Eastern Bloc, the successful revolution in China, the Malayan Emergency and the Korean War heightened fears that a communist revolution could soon occur…
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We’re all off to Newcastle: The AAEH 2015 Conference
Coming around every two years, the Australasian Association of European History conference is being held in Newcastle (Australia) in July and by all accounts, it is one of the funnest conferences to attend for historians in the field (see Brett Holman’s reports from 2013 and 2011). Like many others, I will be making my way…
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Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa in the Far Right Popular Imagination
In the aftermath of the mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, it has emerged that the killer had been photographed in clothing bearing the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. While a lot has been written on this in the last two days, I thought I would post this on how these regimes (and…
New Historical Express 