‘GOD HAS TAKEN POWER FROM WHITE MEN THROUGHOUT THE WORLD’

EARLY on the morning of 5 September 1906, at a small asbestos mine in the northern Cape, six African workers entered the tent of their white foreman and his family. They assaulted the sleepers with stones, knobkerries, the leg of a chair and an ox-yoke. The foreman, Dirk Mans, died of his injuries eighteen hours later, while his son, Jan, who had been sleeping in another tent, ran away. Dirk Mans's wife also had a narrow escape. She woke up when a blow narrowly missed the head of her three-year-old child, who was sleeping in her bed. Both could flee in the general mêlée. Another victim, the well digger, William Swanepoel, was bludgeoned to death so ferociously that his skull ‘was entirely knocked out of shape [and] separated in halves’. The perpetrators tried to kill more whites, but dispersed in the ensuing confusion. The six men were tracked down by the police after several days. The Griqualand West Supreme Court in Kimberley sentenced four of the culprits to death; they were hanged in March 1907.

The ringleader of the Hopefield gang, Hendrik Bekeer, told the policeman who had followed his tracks for several days, that ‘he was glad to be caught, although he knew that his life would be at an end’. He could hardly wait to tell the prison warder that the group had planned to kill all whites in South Africa. In court, the eloquent Bekeer explained:

I admit that I am guilty. I, Hendrik Bikier [sic], laid hands on these two souls. I have a craving in my heart which must be made known to everyone. I admit that I am a worker of God. I confess to the Court and all the white people that I am placed here by the Lord, and that I do his will. … The time when the whites had the upper hand is past. This is for Africa alone, but God has taken power from white men throughout the world.

This article examines the role of trade unions and of the Kebele – the most local urban administrative structures of the Ethiopian state – in the making of the Red Terror, a period of unprecedented political violence that closely followed the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. Drawing on a broad range of new source materials – from labour union files to oral histories and East German State Security archives – this article shows how the Red Terror was in large part the product of synergies between diverse groups and actors within these structures, and how it was rooted in histories, motives, and collaborations that have scarcely been considered in the historiography of revolutionary Ethiopia. In turn, the Red Terror radically reshaped both trade unions and Kebele administrations, affording Ethiopian state actors an unprecedented means of control over civil society and urban residents.

ON the morning of 12 January 1904, shooting started in Okahandja, a small town in German South West Africa, present-day Namibia. When the Herero–German war finally ended four years later, Herero society, as it had existed prior to 1904, had been completely destroyed. In the genocidal war which developed, the Herero were either killed in battle, lynched, shot or beaten to death upon capture, or driven to death in the waterless wastes that make up much of Namibia. Within Namibia, the surviving Herero were deprived of their chiefs, prohibited from owing land and cattle, and prevented from practising their own religion. Herero survivors, the majority of whom were women and children, were incarcerated in prison camps and put to work as forced labourers for the German military and settlers.

Over the years there have been a fair number of works dealing with the causes and effects of the Herero–German war of 1904–8. It has been argued that the loss of land, water, cattle and liberty, coupled with the activities of unscrupulous traders and German colonial officials, steered the Herero into launching a carefully planned, countrywide insurrection against German colonial rule. In brief, ‘in 1904, the Herero, feeling the cumulative and bitter effects of colonial rule in South West Africa, took advantage of the withdrawal of German troops from central Hereroland…and revolted’.

Most histories of East Africa's precolonial interior only give cursory attention to Islam, especially in histories of present-day west-central Tanzania and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Most converts to Islam in this context are usually viewed as ‘nominal’ Muslims. This article, by contrast, builds on recent scholarship on other regions and time periods that questions the conceptual validity of the ‘nominal’ Muslim. New converts necessarily questioned their social relationships, ways of living, and ritual practices through the act of conversion. On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, new converts were observable through the act of circumcision, dietary restrictions, abidance by some of Islam's core tenets, and the adoption and adaptation of certain phenomena from East Africa's Indian Ocean coast and islands. Interior populations’ conversion to Islam was bound up with broader coast-interior material, cultural, and religious exchanges.

Czechoslovak ‘people's democracy’ supplied a model for the development of a South African notion of a ‘national democratic’ revolution as well as providing key skills and resources. Czechoslovak support for this project in the 1960s and 1970s was both a source of confidence and fragility for South African Communists, boosting morale but confirming their subordinate status in their partnership with African nationalism. Drawing upon Czech archival materials as well as memoirs and interviews, this paper explores encounters and connections between South African Communists and the Czechs against the backdrop of the broader strategic concerns that shaped Soviet and Eastern European support for South African liberatory politics.

This article argues that rural South African women's importance as spiritual actors in the period from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries stemmed from their ability to embrace hybrid spiritual identities that corresponded closely to the lived reality of African rural life, and that by embracing those identities, women expanded their roles as social healers. Professing a belief in Christianity did not prevent individuals from practicing as diviners, nor did it prevent Christians from consulting diviners to determine the causes of death or misfortune. Similarly, young women who converted to Christianity often maintained close ties to non-Christian families and bridged spiritual lives on the mission stations with life in their families. Over this time period, women became cultural mediators who borrowed, adopted, and combined spiritual beliefs to provide more complete answers to problems faced by rural African families in South Africa.

JOHN FAGE and I met first in Cambridge in 1948 as graduate students at Cambridge University, each researching on topics in the history of the colonial period in Africa. Thereafter our ways parted. He became the first full-time history teacher at the recently founded University College of the Gold Coast. I went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where my initial duty was to investigate what could be recovered of the pre-colonial history of East Africa that might be brought within the scope of academic study. We met next in 1952, when a London publisher suggested that we might join in writing a History of Africa in two volumes designed for the academic market. Following this initiative, we spent a fortnight of that summer, together with our wives and children, at my house in Buckinghamshire to discuss the possibilities, and this proved to be the beginning of a close professional collaboration which was to last for more than thirty-five years.