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.
Cultural Entrepreneurs, Proto-Nationalism and Women's Testimony Writings: From the South African War to 1940
Women cultural entrepreneurs were busy in promoting the development of proto-nationalism in South Africa in the aftermath of the 1899–1902 South African War. The work of some key cultural entrepreneurs who solicited and published women's testimonies about the wartime concentration camps instituted by the British military provides the focus of discussion. Boer testimonies were presented as factual ‘I-witness’ statements; they also followed a proto-nationalist line and were published and distributed in women's nationalist networks, playing an important part in everyday forms of state formation from 1902 to 1940. During this period, the making of Afrikaner ethnic identity was symbiotic with the making of proto-nationalism and then nationalism with cultural politics mapping closely on to state formation. Within this, women's role as cultural entrepreneurs and political brokers was crucial, with the centrality of the concentration camp deaths within a mythologised ‘history of Afrikanerdom’ resulting from their activities rather than being provided by masculine nationalism.
The War in Twentieth-Century Afrikaner Consciousness
This chapter aims to provide an interpretative overview of Afrikaans’ versions of the war as these emerged as part of a wider process of ethnic mobilization, and to demonstrate how the changing symbolic function of the war in Afrikaner nationalist consciousness meshed with broader socio-economic and political developments.