Faculty of Humanities
School of Basic Social Sciences
Department of Historical and Heritage Studies
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
The War Diary of Johanna Brandt, is an edited and annotated source publication by Dr Jackie Grobler. Johanna Brandt (née Van Warmelo) lived in Pretoria in the South African Republic (Transvaal) throughout the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, and kept a day-to-day diary for most of this time. Since her family was well-connected, she met with and wrote about literally hundreds of people with whom she had interaction in this period. In 1901 she spent almost three months in the concentration camp in Irene where she worked as a voluntary nurse. She daily met scores of concentration camp inmates and experienced in an intimate way their woes and suffering. After her return to the family home in Sunnyside, where she lived with her mother, the two ladies became involved in a spy ring of the Boers. At that time she fell in love over the mail and became engaged to Louis Brandt, who lived in the Netherlands, and whom she eventually married after the war. She wrote about both her activities in the spy ring and about her love affair in two additional diaries which she called her secret diary and her love diary. In the writing she reveals her innermost thoughts on the events she witnessed and the ravages of war. Towards the end of the war the impact of the trauma became too much for her and she left Pretoria for the Netherlands without witnessing the final defeat of her people. The War Diary of Johanna Brandt contains all three diaries. None have been published before. After an introduction containing biographical information on Johanna Brandt, Grobler thoroughly annotated the diary itself. This is done by means of footnotes that contain information on the individuals whom the diarist refers to, events that she witnessed or heard about, places mentioned in the text and evidence on these people and occurrences. The researcher had to consult a massive number and variety of sources, including books, articles, newspaper reports, archival records and web pages to gather information on often obscure individuals such as concentration camp victims and Boer spies. The end result is that an invaluable source especially on social aspects of the Anglo Boer War is made available and accessible to subject specialists in history, including military, gender and social historians as well as to the informed public. The publication makes a significant contribution to South African historiography.
Contact person: Dr JEH Grobler.
The project brought together a dozen historians and anthropologists from Africa, Europe, and the United States for a workshop at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Leipzig from 5-6 January 2007. The aim was to exchange research experience on the role of religion in the shaping of gender identities in trans-cultural encounters. Case studies from all over the African continent were presented, although the workshop eventually had a strong Southern African focus. The practical outcome was to work towards a special edition of the German academic journal Comparativ. This volume, which has been edited by workshop-convener Prof Adam Jones, will appear in the first half of 2008 and will include seven articles. With the research findings to be published in the special volume of Comparativ, the participants hope to challenge the tendency in existing scholarship to write about places of worship without taking into consideration the different meanings they have for men and women. The articles illustrate that assumptions about men and women’s “place in the church” cannot be separated from perceptions about their “place in the home” and their “place in the world”. Papers focusing on British Anglican, German Lutheran and Nazareth Baptist (Shembe) case studies concurred that Christian women in South Africa from both the missionary and the independent church traditions struggle for recognition in the church history determining the identity of their church communities. The omission of the role of powerful women from the histories that churches tell about themselves, is characteristic of a broad tendency of male domination in African Independent Churches as well as denominations with former missionary links. Women do, however, respond to such silencing, asserting themselves in positions customarily allocated to men and even resourcefully creating new roles for themselves. The workshop and the forthcoming publication provided an opportunity to write this female action into the historical record. In this regard the project strongly linked up with the continual focus in the training programmes and research seminars of the University of Pretoria Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies on the significant links between religion, gender and power. With a focus on the configuration and reconfiguration of religious spaces, new perspective was obtained on the effect of female religious activity in the wider social and political sphere. In twentieth-century South Africa it created one of a very few spaces in which at least some women could meet across racial divides.
Contact person: Prof L Kriel.
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