Parallel Narratives? Photographs in Boer Women’s Wartime Testimonies
Discussion here draws on our wider joint research about women’s testimonies of the concentration camps of the 1899-1902 South African War.1 Our research has focused, amongst other things, on a network of women cultural entrepreneurs whose activities in ‘working up’ Boer women’s testimonies as ‘the facts’ played an important part in the politics of Afrikaner proto-nationalism until the late 1930s. The research shows that these Boer women’s testimonial narratives, while presented as entirely factual, cannot be classed straightforwardly as either fact or fiction, but instead inhabit an ‘in-between’ area, with their factual claims – claims which may but sometimes may not be ‘true facts’ – often supported by what Eakin (1985) calls fictive devices.
Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps
Few photographs have become as well known as those taken by British and American army photographers during the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in what was then the German Reich in 1945. Wagons full of corpses in Dachau; half-dead and sick survivors in the small camp at Buchenwald; hundreds of dead bodies lined up in front of the ruined buildings at Nordhausen; open mass graves at Bergen-Belsen. The American writer Susan Sontag remembered her first encounter with this photographic inventory of ultimate horror as “negative epiphany,” “the prototypically modern revelation.” Ever since then it seemed plausible to her to divide her life into two parts: into the time before she saw those photographs at the age of twelve and the time after. Since they were taken and first published, these pictures have been reprinted countless times, and one receives the impression that the same photographs have been reproduced over and over again (although the archives contain numerous frames that are very little known to this day). The photographs of the liberation have long become part of the Western countries’ collective visual memory. They mostly impress themselves on our sentiments and conjure up a threatening, mute and nameless sense of “once upon a time.” Then as now they set off strong emotional reactions, of shock and terror, of compassion as well as rejection. Usually the pictures are accepted as straightforward and unambiguous reality, not as a specific photographic rendering of that reality open to analysis. More
‘A Strange Thing is Memory’: Emily Hobhouse, Memory Work, Moral Life and the ‘Concentration System’
Extracted from text ... *. I am grateful to Jennifer Hobhouse Balme and Ena Jansen for comments on an earlier version 
of this article, Jan Coetzee and Andr? Wessels for communications about background matters, 
Helen Dampier for sharing the archive work that underpins it, and Lynda Gilfillan and Sue Wise 
for discussion of the ethical issues involved. My thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of this 
journal for useful suggestions for revision. 
1. Free State Archives Depot, Bloemfontein (hereafter FSAD), Steyn Collection, A156: 1/1/11, 
Emily Hobhouse (hereafter EH) to Rachel Isabella Steyn (hereafter RIS), 29 Mar. 1925. Her 
emphasis. 
2. Emily Hobhouse (1860-1926) ..