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.
Black labour and the concentration system of the South African War
Black people's part in the South African War, and also the existence of the black concentration camps, have received research attention since the 1970s. Most recently this has developed in two broad directions, one focusing on the black camps around the view that previous work "has greatly underplayed... [black people's] sufferings in the refugee camps", and the other on various African peoples and their involvement in and uses of the war, emphasising that "locality is an important factor in the way... [the war] was perceived and fought by black people...". Both have produced interesting published work. However, these two strands have developed largely separately from each other, with unintended consequences: it leaves the so-called 'burgher camps' being seen as white; and it fails fully to recognise that factors noted in different localities (increases in wage levels and in prices for agricultural produce, and increased demand for labour in a wide range of military, railway and harbour employment) were actually much wider phenomena.
A Woman's Civil War: A Diary, with Reminiscences of the War, from March 1862: Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography.
On the night of March 11, 1862, as the heavy tramp of Confederate marching troops died away in the distance - her husband's regiment among them - Cornelia Peake McDonald began her diary of events in war-torm Winchester, Virginia. MacDonald's story of the Civil War records a personal and distinctly female battle of her own - a southern women's lonely struggle in the midst of chaos to provide safety and shelter for herself and her nine children. For McDonald, history is what happens "inside the house". She relates the trauma that occurs when the safety of the home is disrupted and destroyed by the forces of war - when women and children are put out of their houses and have nowhere to go. In an introduction to McDonald's autobiography, Minrose C. Gwin stresses the importance of this diary not only for its view of the Civil War through a woman's eyes but also for its insistence that history is as much a domestic subject as an account of the public affairs of men.