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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The War of Abraham Esau 1899-1901: Martyrdom, Myth and Folk Memory in Calvinia, South Africa
Author:Nasson, BillISNI
Year:1988
Periodical:African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society
Volume:87
Issue:347
Period:April
Pages:239-265
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:Blacks
Anglo-Boer wars
biographies (form)
History and Exploration
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
About person:Abraham Esau (1884-1901)
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/722402
Abstract:The story of Abraham Esau constitutes part of a wider historical consciousness of the South African War (1899-1902), one in which the experiences and traditions of subordinated black people drawn into the struggle are fully acknowledged. For locked up in the drama of Esau's experience of resistance, incarceration and execution are realities of extreme crisis and conflict that are central to an understanding of the ways in which a war between British imperialism and Boer republicanism turned with abrupt force into a desperate, undeclared civil war between rural whites and rural blacks. This paper traces the formative moment of history of Abraham Esau through a reconstruction based both on rural Namaqualand folk memories and on conventional written sources. It is not just a reconstruction of a sequence of events 'as they actually happened' but a consideration of how qualities of martyrdom, myth and legend have come to cluster around a man who became a civilian victim of a distant South African War. Notes, ref.
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