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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | The War of Abraham Esau 1899-1901: Martyrdom, Myth and Folk Memory in Calvinia, South Africa |
Author: | Nasson, Bill |
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. |