The Voulet-Chanoine Mission left Dakar on the coast of French West Africa in the late summer of 1898. They were heading for the Central African region of Lake Chad, with the aim of establishing effective borders between the French and British empires while “pacifying” a notoriously belligerant region. However, the mission descended into a horrific catalogue of colonial violence and cruelty that eerily prefigures fictional accounts of the “scramble for Africa” such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which originally published as a three-part series in 1899. When the story reached Paris in 1899 a second mission was sent out to investigate, culminating in a dramatic shoot-out when the two mission met in the July of that year. Below is a short extract from Bertrand Taithe’s new book on the subject, The Killer Trail: A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa.

In the end, their tracks became clearer. Burnt villages signalled the progress of their journey. Occasionally, hanging bodies marked the entrances of villages while corpses littered the places they had visited. In the first few settlements beyond the uncertain borders of French Soudan the corpses had been arranged in shallow mass graves, a long dark blood stain hinting how the bodies had been dragged to their burial ground. Later on the corpses lay where they fell. To Colonel Klobb and his small squad of native troops of the French in West Africa, the so-called tirailleurs, it became obvious that the men they were looking for had lost their ways in every conceivable manner.

On 25 April 1899, Arsène Klobb had been sent after a much larger military ‘mission’ or ‘colonne’ led by two men: Captains Voulet and Chanoine, whose fates were so entwined that they have become almost a twin entity sharing a common tragedy: Voulet–Chanoine. These men were the kind of colonial figures known for their daring and initiative, the nationalists lionized. Indeed only a few years earlier they had been welcomed back in Paris as heroes. From heroes these men became villains, worse still, a national embarrassment. There had been early signs that the mission they led would encounter ‘difficulties’. When Klobb had received Voulet in Timbuktu, in November 1898 he had confided to his diaries: ‘Voulet is coming to me tomorrow. I am anxious, it seems to me that he is venturing into something he does not know. A conversation with him should tell me if that is the case.’ While driving his small group hard on Voulet’s track, Klobb noted in increasingly telegraphic style the evidence of destruction he encountered. On 5 July he wrote:

I am starting to be exhausted—I am still running. I am on the 5th longitude East and I still have not reached anything. It’s true that the expedition is a year ahead of me. I am in a village where I eat what has not been torched. Voulet burns everything—exactly. I do not encounter many difficulties: the inhabitants are terrorised by Voulet’s passing through, they run away when they see me coming; when they see the tirailleurs the bows and arrows fall from their hands.

On the 6th of the same month, on reaching Tibiri, ‘huge village with many gaps; entirely burnt. The dry moat is 4.5 metres deep to the tip of the wall. Women hanged.’

Klobb had received orders from the governor of the military colony of French Soudan, Colonel de Trentinian, who led from the city of Kayes a huge and ill-controlled territory which would cover most of today’s Burkina Faso, Mali, and (as Voulet’s advance furthered its borders to the east) the south of Niger. De Trentinian was acting on orders received through two telegrams sent from Paris. The first stated that a mission should be sent to catch up with the army of Captains Voulet and Chanoine to investigate the news leaked in the daily newspaper Le Matin. The second, sent three days later, ordered that both Voulet and Chanoine should be arrested and held accountable for their crimes:

Recent massacre Sansané Haoussa, 15 women and children—execution tirailleur—number of exhausted porters refusing march would have been beheaded then six massacres to obtain new porters—Tirailleurs alleged to have to bring hands to captains to show orders were executed—Captain Chanoine alleged to have put on sticks heads of inhabitants found in villages which would have been burnt twelve kilometres around—I hope the allegations are unfounded—if against all probability these abominable crimes are proven Voulet and Chanoine cannot continue to lead mission without a great shame for France . . . send from Say superior and subaltern officers join mission.

The minister of colonies’ telegram contained a summary of the allegations published in the Parisian press. These were leaked from the correspondence of a Lieutenant Péteau, dismissed a few weeks earlier by Voulet.

Some of the accusations seemed so extreme that officers on the ground such as Klobb were originally unconvinced. It is only gradually, the official version reveals, that he came to accept that something might be grievously wrong. According to his second in command, Lt. OctaveMeynier, Arsène Klobb was convinced, when, upon entering Birnin Konni, he saw little girls hanging from the low branches of the trees and over a thousand corpses rotting in the sun. For Klobb the decision to arrest Voulet seemed justified and in a letter to the rear, he noted, ‘I confess I find it hard to believe that French officers could have ordered such horror. I will do what I can to prevent a scandal but I will send Voulet and Chanoine back if I can.’ The mission had to continue but it had to change. Something had gone wrong east of the colonial border of French Soudan.

Andrew Scull is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego.  His newest book, Hysteria: The Biography, is a volume in our series Biographies of Disease which we will be looking at for the next few week (read previous posts in this series here).  Each volume in the series tells the story of a disease in its historical and cultural context – the varying attitudes of society to its sufferers, the growing understanding of its causes, and the changing approaches to its treatment. In the excerpt below Scull looks at the spectacle hysteria patients provided, specifically the displays by Jean-Martin Charcot.

It was Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93), the august Professor of Pathological Anatomy and later of Diseases of the Nervous System of the Paris Medical Faculty, the leading international neurologist of the nineteenth century, who made hysteria a spectacle and a circus.  It was a scandalous circus that attracted the attention of  tout Paris, one that regularly featured scantily clad women disporting themselves in unmistakably erotic cataleptic poses, or writhing and moaning in ways that mimicked orgasms on a public stage, before an understandably rapt audience – an audience soon drawn not just from the highest ranks of French society, but also from those attracted to Paris by news of these extraordinary Leçons du Mardi.  The photographs of these occasions, captured in carefully staged arrangements before the supposedly objective lens of the camera and thus transmuted into indelible visual representations for a vastly greater virtual audience, have survived for later generations to inspect, and have become iconic images of a disorder seen as at once sexual and feminine.

Yet Charcot thought of himself, and was acknowledged by his contemporaries, to be no nineteenth-century Mesmer, no marginal charlatan catering to depraved appetites (among patients and audience alike), but on the contrary a sober scientists, a man of genius, one of the leading contributors to the newly emerging science of the brain.  His accomplishments first in internal medicine and then as a neurologist were legion, and had brought him czars and princes, great merchants and bankers, as his clients, in the process making him a very rich man.  And, while his most famous patients were women, he personally insisted…that hysteria was not solely a female malady, but, on the contrary, could be diagnosed and detected among the male of the species.  Hysteria was, he confidently declared, a disorder of the nervous system, not of the female reproductive organs.  It was, moreover, as real and as somatic a disease as any of the other neurological catastrophes he had earlier elucidated….

…Charcot had his favorites, those who returned time and again to put on multiple, often increasingly elaborate, performances.  None was more famous than Blanche Wittman, the queen of hysterics, a performer who luxuriated in her role.  Perhaps the most famous single image of a hysterical patient is an 1887 painting by André Brouillet that captures Charcot presenting Blanche, his pet hysteric, to members of his neurological service.  She swoons over the outstretched arm of his assistant, Joseph Babinski, her pelvis thrust forward, her breasts barely covered by her blouse and pointing suggestively toward the professor, her head twisted to the side and her face contorted in what looks like the throes of orgasm.  (Freud kept a copy of this painting, which dates from 1887, in his study in Vienna, and again in London.)

Wittman was admitted to the Salpêtrière in 1878, and remained there for some sixteen years, performing on command.  After her discharge, she became Marie Curie’s laboratory assistant, and eventually was poisoned by the radium she was working with. In consequence, both legs and her left arm had to be amputated…

The Iconographies, the collections of photographs of the performers who made up the circus, circulated widely and disseminated the Charcotian vision of hysteria to an audience who could only virtually witness the Parisian scene.  They did much to fix the image of hysteria in the public mind, and perhaps to spread suggestively what purported to be neutral, naturalistic recording of a neuropathic disorder.  The photograph (at least before the age of digital manipulation) carried the illusion of providing the truth, a direct and unmediated portrait or even a mirror of nature, the instantaneous representation of what passed before the lens of the camera.  But the limitations of lighting, and the technical requirements of picture-taking with wet collodion plates, or even the later silver gelatino-bromide coating, made for long exposures, sometimes as long as twenty minutes per plate.  Perhaps appropriately, given that Charcot’s posthumous critics…viewed his clinical demonstrations as fraudulent, the “objective” photographs that recorded the pathologies were themselves necessarily staged, posed, and manufactured constructions whose status as “facts” is as slippery as the live demonstrations they purport to record.

Charcot was not alone in exploiting his patients, in treating them as so many specimens rather than as suffering human beings.  The disdain and the callousness were a feature of the whole clinico-pathological tradition, something that American medical students visiting Paris for instruction viewed with dismay as early as the 1830s.  As feminist historians focused their attentions on hysteria as a female complaint, and perhaps the product, as some them speculated, of an inchoate, inarticulate protest against the roles in which Victorian women were imprisoned, Charcot’s serial exploitations of these poor creatures, his willingness to expose them repeatedly to the prurient gaze of his audience at whatever cost to their emotional well-being drew fierce criticism and reproof.  But those same moral failings were visible to Charcot’s contemporaries, and were the subject of bitter commentary, even from the literary figures such as Tolstoy and de Maupassant.  A Madame Renooz, in the pages of the Revue scientifique des femmes, protested about his “sort of vivisection of women under the pretext of studying a disease for which he knows neither the cause nor the treatment.”…

…And yet Charcot, as the feminist historian Elaine Showalter acknowledges, cannot be easily typecast as a crude misogynist, for he adopted liberal positions by the standards of his time on women’s rights, and his students and externs included women training for the medical profession.  Moreover, one of Charcot’s more striking departures from the conventional wisdom of his time had been his insistence that hysteria was not just a female disease…

Jake Kraft received a MSc in Anthropology at Oxford in 2004 and just finished up a JD/MBA at Stanford. Having recently visited South Africa, one of Jake’s college buddies (and my dear friend) suggested Jake contribute to our “Place of the Year” campaign, to which he kindly agreed. In the following piece Jake sheds light on South Africa’s exorbitant population loss since the mid 90s by consulting three natives who chose to leave. Be sure to check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.

South Africa exports many goods which the world consumes and which enrich South Africa. Other countries buy South Africa’s metals and minerals, agricultural products, machinery, and wine, sending their own goods and cash in return. But in the last fifteen years, South Africa’s greatest export has traded at great profit to importing nations and at great expense to the exporter. Since the mid-1990s, more than one million South Africans, including more than a fifth of the white population, has emigrated abroad. Many of these are South Africa’s most educated citizens; most have no plans to return.

Last winter I visited South Africa and enjoyed tremendous natural scenery, wildlife, bustling cities and towns, food, and cultural traditions. South Africa is wonderful for a tourist, but life as a resident is more complicated.

I made the trip to visit three South African friends whom I had met in the United States. This opportunity to see them and learn about their home was special not only because I would be guided by locals, but also because it would be my last chance: all three had decided to leave the country and settle elsewhere.

My first stop was in the Eastern Cape, to visit my friend the journalist. A wiry white English South African, he had been lucky to study at top boarding schools and attend an excellent private university where he had become a collegiate champion in kayaking. In addition to inimitable charm, he has a great deal of compassion, and as a journalist wrote stories highlighting the plight of AIDS victims and AIDS orphans. He unearthed local corruption, and developed an encyclopedic knowledge of South African history and culture, as well as a seemingly endless number of friends who would greet us wherever we went.

He now lives in London. South Africa has limited opportunities for an enthusiastic journalist to grow in his career, especially as traditional media models fall apart and journalism becomes intertwined with the internet. He would love to go back if he could, but he doesn’t know how or when South Africa will have professional opportunities in which he can flourish.

From the Eastern Cape I traveled to Johannesburg, where I met my friend the entrepreneur. Chinese South African, he had grown up in a posh area on the North side of the city, attending excellent schools and University in the United States. His family lived in mansion straight out of Beverly Hills, including swimming pool and pool house, magnificent rooms for living and entertaining, and a garage full of sleek Mercedes. The local malls and restaurants were equivalent to anything I’d seen in the United States and we spent a very civilized afternoon eating scones and playing croquet with friends at the local club.

My friend now lives in China. Besides its luxury, his family home in South Africa is surrounded by 15 foot walls, which are topped with electrified barbed wire. The outer doors of the house are fortified with steel bars and must be unlocked with a key from the inside or outside in order to enter or leave. An enormous guard dog barks at any movement. Security guards with sub-machine guns patrol his neighborhood. Even so, not long ago, perpetrators managed to poison the dog and hop over the walls from a nearby telephone pole, catching his mother as she was exiting the pool house, and holding her and the rest of the family at gun point as they robbed the home. The family survived, but the incident was uncommon only in that sense. Every house in the neighborhood has this kind of security, and violent robbery is a daily risk. As he pursues his ventures, my friend would prefer that his success won him some other life.

My last trip was to the Free State town of Ladybrand, a small farming hamlet not far from the Drakensberg Mountains and the Lesotho border. Here I met my third friend, the broad shouldered and sandy-haired son of an Afrikaner farmer. He had grown up chasing cattle thieves on horseback, swimming in river dividing South Africa and Lesotho, and dreaming of playing rugby for the Springboks. He never spoke English until he traveled to Cape Town for his University degree, where he gave up rugby and excelled at actuarial studies. After finishing University, he landed himself a job with a prestigious international consultancy, where he was whisked around Africa, working at the great mining projects and factories of the continent. Once he had a taste of the outside world, he wanted more, and sponsored by his company, he came to the United States to finish his education. When he did, he decided to stay in San Francisco. There is opportunity in South Africa, he believes, but why take the risk with so much government corruption and physical violence. As a South African, he did not feel wanted in America, but as a businessman, he did not he feel wanted by South Africa.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen more beautiful sunsets, eaten better steaks or had more outdoor fun than I did in South Africa. But I left the country feeling discouraged. If my three friends are in any way representative of the million plus who have left or are leaving, how can the South Africa expect to win its fight against AIDS, improve its government and civic life, or bring its education and economic opportunities not only to the lucky few born into them, but also to the millions born into extreme poverty? How can the country find a way to keep its educated and passionate young citizens, or a way to bring them back? What should be the priority? The rule of law? Economic opportunities? Security?

Jancis Robison, wine connoisseur and editor of  The Oxford Companion to Wine, Third Edition, recently revealed the drawbacks of South Africa’s stringent wine standards: because South African wine law mandates that 100 % of the grapes must be grown in the appellation (geographic location) specified on the bottle, consumers usually have no idea exactly where their wine is from. According to Robinson this is a shame given that there are more than 80 appellations in South African wine country; terroir clearly shapes how a wine tastes and this law precludes wine drinkers from learning anything about “the Cape’s wonderfully varied geography.” But on the plus side, the average quality of wine being exported from South Africa has improved immensely.

In continuation of our “Place of the Year” celebration, I offer you some quick facts on the growing South African wine industry from The Oxford Companion to Wine, Third Edition. After successfully gleaning two or three talking points for your next tasting or wine/cheese mashup, be sure to check out other “Place of the Year” contributions here.

Beginner
You have a case of “Two Buck Chuck” in your kitchen. Wine falls in two categories: white and red.

• South Africa has only 1.5% of the world’s vineyards, but it is one of the world’s top ten wine producers.
• The winelands are widely dispersed throughout the Western and Northern Cape, some 700km/420 miles from north to south and 500 km across, strung between the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
• Just as Europe and America people are drinking less, but better, South Africa has shifted away from a beer-and-spirit-only consumption pattern. This coupled with a tenfold increase in exports between 1993 and 2003 has shifted the focus to quality not quantity for South African vine-growers.

Intermediate
You have been a member of the Wall Street Journal wine club (WSJwine) for over a year now. When out for drinks you are confident in returning a glass to the bar because “it has turned.”

• The father of the South African wine industry was 33-year-old-Dutch surgeon Jan van Riebeeck, sent to establish a market garden to reduce the risks of scurvy on the long sea passage between Europe and the Indies. In 1652, seven years after sailing into Table Bay, he recorded: ‘Today, praise be to God, wine was pressed for the first time from Cape grapes.’
• The Benguela current from Antarctica makes the Cape cooler than its altitude may suggest, which means many new vineyard areas south towards Agulhas as well as on the west coast offer the prospect of a long, slow ripening seasoning.
• White varieties constitute by far the majority of Cape vineyeards. Chenin Blanc, known sometimes as Steen, has for long been the dominant grape variety in South Africa.

Advanced
“Education and Work” on your Facebook profile includes “seasoned viticulturist.” If you are a devout Catholic you steer clear of the chalice—even on religious holidays. And you have this commited to memory.

• Controlled malolactic fermentation, reduced dependence on flavour-stripping filtration and stabilization processes, as well as new canopy management strategies and increasing vine densities have all played a role in the increase of wine quality.
• The definition of ‘dry’ in relation to South African wines sold on the domestic market has recently been changed: the maximum residual sugar content is now 5 g/l rather than 4 g/l/.
• Pinotage, the Cape’s own crossing of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut, is becoming increasingly popular and was the single most planted new red vine variety in 1996 (Chardonnay was the white) although it still represented only 6.7 per cent of the nation’s vines in 2004.

For more than 30 years of his life Albie Sachs lived as both lawyer and outlaw in an apartheid South Africa—working through the law in the public sphere, and against the law in the underground. As a result, he was detained in solitary confinement, tortured by sleep deprivation, and eventually blown up by a car bomb which cost him his right arm and the sight of an eye. Later he returned to play an important part in drafting South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution, and was appointed by Nelson Mandela to be a member of the country’s first Constitutional Court. As Sachs wrapped up his 15 year term this fall, Oxford published his book The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. Below Sachs tells us why people all over the world visit the South African Constitutional Court every year.

Following his post is an excerpt from the opening of The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law which features artist Judith Mason. She explains the inspiration behind her Blue Dress, one of the art pieces acquired by Albie Sachs for the South African Constitutional Court gallery and the image on the cover of his book. To learn the full story behind Mason’s Blue Dress collection go here. And for more first hand perspective on South African culture and history, be sure to check out all of our Place of the Year contributions.

Justice Albie Sachs on the Constitutional Court Gallery

I recently had the great pleasure of visiting the new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in Parliament Square. Its site is wonderful, and the rather unprepossessing building it occupies has been artfully adapted to give it a friendly, functional and stylish character. The one feature that I thought worked badly, however, was the presence in strategic places on the walls of large oil portraits of dead white, male dignitaries who had occupied the building in the past. One day I will be a dead, white male judge myself, nothing wrong with that in itself. But if it is the only imagery you see, the story is one of unjust exclusion, at odds with the very notion of doing justice to all without favour or prejudice. And even those less afflicted with political correctness than myself would recognise that apart from one elegant Gainsborough portrait, the pictures represent rather gloomy dead souls haunting a building in which the evolving wisdom of the ages is intended to resolve the problems of today in a clear, transparent and convincing way. I couldn’t help comparing the paintings with those that hang in the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, from which I have just stepped down as a judge after my fifteen year appointment came to an end. And this reflection made me realise what a remarkable place South Africa is to be in these days.

In particular I thought of the image of the Blue Dress in our Court. The Court was the first major new building of the post-apartheid era, constructed in the heart of the Old Fort Prison where both Gandhi and Mandela had been imprisoned. Thousands of visitors from all over the country and the world, visit the Court each year, not only to watch justice being done, but to journey through a remarkable building filled with extraordinarily rich and soulful artwork. And always, visitors pause for some minutes, and sometimes cry, when they see the Blue Dress.

The work on the cover of this book commemorates the courage of Phila Ndwandwe and Harald Sefola whose deaths during the Struggle were described to the Truth and Reconciliation Commision by their killers.

Phila Ndwandwe was shot by the security police after being kept naked for weeks in an attempt to make her inform on her comrades. She preserved her dignity by making panties of of a blue plastic bag. This garment was found wrapped around her pelvis when she was exhumed. ‘She simply would not talk’, one of the policeman involved in her death testified. ‘God…she was brave.’

…I wept when I heard Phila’s story, saying to myself, ‘I wish I could make you a dress.’ Acting on this childlike response, I collected discarded blue plastic bags that I sewed into a dress. On its skirt I painted this letter:

Sister, a plastic bag may not be the whole armour of God, but you were wrestling with flesh and blood, and against powers, against the rulers of darkness, against spiritual wickedness in sordid places. Your weapons were your silence and a piece of rubbish. Finding that bag and wearing it until you were disinterred is such a frugal, common-sensical, house-wifey thing to do, an ordinary act…At some level you shamed your captors, and they did not compound their abuse by stripping you a second time. Yet they killed you. We only know your story because a sniggering man remembered how brave you were. Memorials to your courage are everywhere; they blow about in the streets and drift on the tide and cling to thorn-bushes. This dress is made from some of them. Hamba kahle. Umkhonto.

Peter McDonald was the first to investigate the newly opened archives of South Africa’s apartheid censorship bureaucracy in 1999. The process wasn’t easy—evidence was everywhere. Some materials had been deposited in the State Archives in Cape Town, some in Pretoria, others appeared to be missing, and the rest were still with the post-apartheid Film and Publication Board (FPB). As McDonald sorted the pieces startling discoveries were made, which he eventually recounted in his book The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences. In the following reflection McDonald reveals the poignant questions that drove him to discover the truth behind apartheid censorship in South Africa. You can check out more contributions to our “Place of the Year” week here.

For most of my professional life I have been thinking about the idea of culture as it has been shaped and reshaped over the past two hundred years, and about the processes and perils of literary guardianship, especially in the complex, intercultural world that emerged in the course of the long twentieth century. The last thing I ever imagined was that the archives of the apartheid censorship bureaucracy in South Africa would provide me with an astonishingly rich, if also disturbing, set of materials with which to address these sometimes abstruse questions.

After all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that censors are the enemies of culture. They are the hateful guardians of the law; the nightmarish state-sanctioned adversaries who have, for one reason or another, taken it upon themselves to keep modern writers and their readers in check; and, besides, they hardly warrant close study by literary scholars, since they are censorious bureaucrats whose vocabulary is limited to a simple yes or no.

This, at least, is how I always thought about censors in general and about the apartheid censors in particular. Whenever the topic was raised when I was a child attempting to grow up in the South Africa of the 1960s and 1970s, it would not take long before someone would recount a story about the censors once banning Black Beauty, Anna Sewell’s strange late Victorian horse memoir. Like many others, I thought this said everything I needed to know about the barbarous stupidity of the system. When I looked into the newly opened archives of the censorship bureaucracy in the late 1990s, and saw some of the secret censors’ reports for the first time and discovered who wrote them, I realized that I had a major problem on my hands and a huge topic for a book.

I expected to see reports signed by ex-policemen, security agents, retired military types, and the like, but what I found was that the overwhelming majority were written by literary academics, writers and esteemed university professors. That was surprising enough. Digging a little deeper into the history of the system, I discovered that a particularly influential group of these seemingly miscast figures actually saw themselves as the guardians of literature, and, more bizarrely, as defenders of a particular idea of the ‘Republic of Letters’. What on earth were they doing there? And what sense was I to make of the fact that, as the archives revealed, repression and the arts were so deeply entangled in apartheid South Africa?

The labyrinthine archival trail, which extended from South Africa to the UK, the US, Norway, Holland, East Germany and elsewhere, soon led me to a host of other, more specific but not less improbable questions. Why were works by a number of leading black writers, including Mafika Gwala, Njabulo Ndebele, Es’kia Mphahlele, and Mongane Serote, passed by the censors? Why were the eminent Afrikaans writers Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach and Etienne Leroux let through in the 1960s and then banned a decade later? Why were no literary works in South Africa’s nine African languages ever suppressed? Why were the supposedly most obscene bits from Wilbur Smith’s debut When the Lion Feeds published in South Africa’s largest circulation Sunday newspaper soon after the novel was banned in 1965? Why were the censors so enthusiastic about Indaba My Children, Credo Mutwa’s ethnographic collection of tribal lore? Why did the South African branch of PEN have such a troubled history? Why did J. M. Coetzee apply to be a censor? And why was Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses hastily banned in 1988 and why is it still illegal for South African booksellers to display it today?

Again, somewhat to my surprise, pursuing the answers to these questions led me to reflect not just on a future in which apartheid, and apartheid thinking (which was not limited to South Africa), has no place, but on the power of words in the world and on the demands of our intercultural present.

(By the way, I found no evidence to support the Black Beauty anecdote, though I did establish that South African customs officials once found a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book hidden in an edition of Anna Sewell’s equine autobiography, which they promptly impounded.)

Still have some unfinished after-school business from the 90s? Was it your dream to be this kid? Do the words “Do it, Rockapella!” elicit an involuntary fist pump? Take a stab at redemption with the “Place of the Year” challenge—created in conjunction with our friends at DK Publishing. The rules are simple and would make Carmen Sandiego seem like child’s play if it weren’t already:

1. Answer the ten questions below.
2. Submit answers to publicity.us@oup.com by November 27, 2009.

Gumshoes with all ten correct answers (the equivalent of 1,000,000 ACME crime bucks) will then be placed in a raffle for prizes which include: Atlas of the World 16th edition, South Africa: DK Eyewitness Travel Guide, The Rough Guide to South Africa 5, and Top 10 Cape Town & the Winelands. Winners will be announced November 30, 2009.

One entry per contestant. All cheaters will immediately lose all crime bucks and be subject to the wrath of the Chief.

Questions:

1. South Africa has how many official languages?
a.3
b.11
c. 2
d.6
e.14

2. South Africa has a nickname, what is it?
a. The Rainbow Nation
b. The Divided Nation
c. New Africa
d. The Continent’s Capital
e. The Second Africa

3. True or False: South Africa is roughly 3 times the size of Texas.

4. How many capital cities does South Africa have?
a. 1
b. 4
c. 3
d. None
e. 5

5. South Africa has coastlines on which two major bodies of water?
a. The Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans
b. The Indian and the Atlantic Oceans
c. The Pacific and the Southern Ocean
d. The Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean
e. The Southern Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea

6. Who, or what, are “The Big Five”?
a. A group of influential political Afrikaner leaders
b. The five major African tribes found in South Africa
c. The five symptoms of malaria
d. The nickname for five of Africa’s greatest wild animals
e. The five driest months of the year

7. South Africa’s population has increased by 5 million people in the last year. What is the current population of South Africa?
a.48,783,000
b. 40,491,000
c. 21,129,000
d. 52,476,000
e. 40,218,000

8. True or False: South Africa has more people infected with the HIV virus than any other country.

9. Who was elected president of South Africa in 2009?
a. Thabo Mbeki
b. Nelson Mandela
c. Frederik Willem de Klerk
d. Jacob Zuma
e. Kgalema Motlanthe

10. Ke Nako. Celebrate Africa’s Humanity is the official slogan for the South Africa Fifa 2010 World Cup. What does Ke Nako mean?
a. A time to make friends
b. It’s time
c. Let friendship shine
d. Be a good sport
e. Let’s be friends

Now that you are done, be sure to check out more “Place of the Year” posts here.

Iris Berger is professor of Professor of History, Africana Studies, and Women’s Studies at the University at Albany and author of Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980 and South Africa in World History. For many years, she was involved in anti-apartheid organizations in Upstate New York. In the following piece she recalls how sports have played a vital role in South African politics. You can check out other “Place of the Year” contributions here.

I had never paid much attention to rugby. My only previous encounter with the game occurred on September 22, 1981 when I joined 1,000 other demonstrators who marched in a downpour from the New York State Capitol to a stadium on the edge of Albany to protest the match between the Springboks and the local rugby team. As Pete Seeger led us in singing “Wimoweh,” the virtually all-white South African team trounced the Eastern All-Stars 41-0. Threats of violence had prompted Governor Hugh Carey to cancel the game and an explosion at the headquarters of the Eastern Rugby Union seemed to confirm his fears. But the United States Court of Appeals ruled that cancellation would be an abridgement of freedom of speech.

This brief immersion in the politics of professional sports left me unprepared for the events of June 24, 1995 when I arrived in Cape Town in mid-morning, groggy from the twenty-four journey from Albany. A year earlier apartheid had ended and Nelson Mandela was elected President in the country’s first democratic elections. Determined to fight my jet lag and adjust to local time, I walked from my quaint guest house at the foot of Table Mountain to the bustling Main Road and caught a cramped mini-van taxi to the city center. Getting off at the train station, I was mystified by the quiet. Only the Zimbabwean women street vendors, displaying soapstone sculptures and crocheted sweaters, broke the silence. When I ventured a few blocks to a small café for lunch, I found the crowds I’d been expecting – but they were all huddled in front of the television set intent on following a rugby game between South Africa and New Zealand, cheering boisterously when the local team scored. The scene was repeated at my next stop – the Bo Kaap Museum in the former Muslim quarter of the city, now furnished as a nineteenth-century house.

Only when I returned to the guest house in mid-afternoon and found everyone there glued to the screen did I finally realize that I had unwittingly stumbled onto an historic event. Just as the anti-apartheid movement had enlisted the national passion for rugby in the interests of liberation, Mandela saw that hosting the World Cup might offer an opportunity for a symbolic reconciliation between the black-dominated government and the white minority, now ousted from its exclusive hold on power. This time I joined the group to witness – and celebrate – the victory of a new South Africa and see to Mandela walk onto the field in his team’s bright green cap and uniform, his shirt bearing the number of the team’s white captain.

Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s new film dramatizing these events will no doubt resurrect memories of the country’s ecstatic response in 1995, when South Africans were still celebrating the country’s transformation from a bastion of racism to a “rainbow nation.” But fifteen years later, life sometimes seems more complicated, even on the playing fields. The recent furor over the gender identity of the South African running champion Caster Semenya, which provoked heated controversy both internationally and in South Africa, mirrors the issues now confronting a nation struggling to overcome a legacy of poverty and unemployment, and to face the more recent challenge of HIV/AIDs. It’s an open question of whether, in this more difficult context, the current President Jacob Zuma will be able to use the World Cup soccer championship in 2010 to reinvent the country’s image and to renew people’s commitment to a shared national identity.

Author Richard Rathbone first went to South Africa as the Students’ Visiting Lecturer Fund nominee at Cape Town University in 1976 and returned as Visiting Lecturer to the University of the Witwatersrand in 1979 and then as visiting professor to the universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand in 1998. He has authored, co-authored and edited ten books on African history including African History: A Very Short Introduction. In the following piece Rathbone reveals where South Africa’s true beauty lies and why it is deserves to be “Place of the Year.” You can check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.

South Africa has been my place of the year on a regular basis since we first got to know each other in 1976. It wasn’t quite love at first sight; rainy winter days in Cape Town spent in chilly rooms with inadequate heating aren’t exactly romantic. But like many who think they are in love, I noticed South Africa’s looks first and learnt to enjoy its company afterwards. If you start, as I did, at the Cape, you first catch your breath by that jagged seascape dominated by Table Mountain and the last land before the South Pole. And at Cape Point I saw my first baboons, and my first sea eagles soaring over the meeting of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, the meeting of hot and cold, ying and yang. But I saw all of it first during apartheid and all that beauty was deformed by very visible cruelties of the system which was older than apartheid. The beaches are scattered with the relics of ship-wrecks and the tragedies of lost lives. Piles of seashells are all that is left to memorialise the old hunter-gatherers, the strandloopers, whose beaches these once were, years before whites started building mile on mile of ugly but expensive beachfront apartments. And the most spectacular view of Table Mountain, that from Blauberg Strand, the Blue Mountain Beach, is spoilt by the grim history of Robben Island inescapably there at the edge of the famous view, a leper colony before it was escape- proof prison. In turn the majestic sweep of Hout Bay was deformed by the fish-canning factory whose sad labourers’ drawn faces betrayed harsh working conditions and poor nutrition.

Further along the coast and then inland are the beautiful winelands, glorious valleys over-shadowed by intimidating mountains. Here again beauty is bittersweet for this world once depended upon slavery and until very recently upon the labour of the descendants of those slaves whose pay was partly taken in alcohol which damaged their and their children’s health. The country’s national flower, the protea, catches the contradictions being both shamelessly pretty while being incredibly hard, irresistible and repellent. I had fallen in love with a tart, a very pretty tart, but a tart with stony heart.

But I learnt fast that the real beauty was and is still to be found less in its scenery and more in its people. In the apartheid years I was thrilled. Inspired by, and even jealous of, the commitment and courage of so many people, black and white, Afrikaaner and African. The cruelty of it all was so obvious; housing in which decent people would refuse to house a dog, the in-your-face insult of “whites only” signage and the ultimate negation of humanity, the idea that people of colour were somehow non-whites, somehow less than human in the eyes of the country’s rulers. The sheer awfulness of that all provoked something more wonderful than cowed, sullen victim-hood. Instead defiance and resistance were suffused with a warm and inclusive humanity. Although it was a state which killed, tortured and incarcerated innumerable people, it and its supporters were made absurd as well as cruel and weakened by the sting of satire, of cartoons, of performances both formal and informal. What often appeared to be obsequious behaviour was frequently audacious and thinly concealed piss-taking at the expense of thoughtless whites. It was and is a sceptical society, a society which refused dictation. And that underlying refusal to internalise the brutal and unintelligent messages of apartheid but instead to imagine and then work for a world without it has informed all that is good about today’s South Africa. So much of that is bound up in the remarkable personality of Nelson Mandela.

Of course South Africa isn’t perfect; all countries that survive revolutions, and the end of apartheid was a revolution, are bound to be imperfect because revolutions are violent affairs which generate all sorts of collateral damage, psychological as well as material. But the real reason why South Africa must be my place of the year is that despite all the many temptations to break with the idea of “a rainbow nation”, the vast majority of South Africa’s continue to subscribe to warmth and humanity, and to reconciliation.

I dare you to watch the trailer for this December’s Invictus—the story of how a newly elected Nelson Mandela used the 1995 Rugby World Cup to bring his people together—without feeling slight heart palpitation. Particularly in a scene where we see Mandela speaking with a political confidante:

“This rugby, it’s a political calculation,” she says.

“It is a human calculation,” responds Mandela.

Sounds like one awfully loaded conversation about rugby, but if there’s anything history, cinema, and Nike commercials have taught us, it’s that the game ultimately represents something much bigger than itself. From taking a stand (1980 Moscow Games boycott) and breaking social barriers (Jackie Robinson, Dara Torres) to beating odds (Nancy Kerrigan, Lance Armstrong) and growing up (Mighty Ducks 1, 2, and 3), sports are often the metaphors and inspiration of our lives. Which leads us to our big announcement… as it moves to the forefront of the global sports arena once more, we are excited to announce South Africa as Oxford’s “Place of the Year.” The 2010 World Cup—arguably the most important international event the country will host since officially becoming a post-apartheid, democratic nation only 15 years ago—signifies further transformation, quantifiable in millions of dollars worth of new infrastructure.

How much new infrastructure?

According to FIFA, contributions from the South African government total (in rands “R”):

Stadium and precinct development: R9.8 billion
Transport: R13.6 billion
Broadcast and telecommunications: R300 million
Event operations: R684 million
Safety and security: R1.3 billion
Event volunteer training: R25 million
Ports of entry infrastructure: R3. 5 billion
Immigration support: R630 million
Communications, hosting, legacy and culture: R504 million

Which translates to…

According to consulting firm Grant Thornton, which drew up the financial impact report for South Africa’s World Cup bid committee:

R55.7 billion to the South African economy
415,400 jobs
R19.3 billion in tax income to the government

The World Cup has received mixed reviews however: Economy boost or money suck? Increase in jobs or class divider? International prestige or embarrassment? Whatever pole you stand on, the fact is that South Africa has the world’s attention, making it a worthy 2009 “Place of the Year.”

Coming Up…

This week we are both excited and proud to share a range of perspectives in celebration of “Place of the Year.” The stories told will express a dichotomy of beauty and tragedy, and we hope give you a better, if not more personal, idea of a country that has largely influenced the world’s headlines, history class lessons, books, and films. To get things started I leave you with some handy facts straight from our Atlas of the World gazetteer:

Population: 48,783,000
Capital(s): Cape Town (Legislative); Pretoria/Tshwane (Administrative), Bloemfontein (Judiciary)
Government: Multiparty Republic
Ethnic Groups: Black 76%, White 13%, Colored 9%, Asian 2%
Languages: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu (all official)
Religions: Christianity 68%, Islam 2%, Hinduism 1%
Currency: Rand=100 cents
Most valuable activities: mining and manufacturing
President: Jacob Zuma (elected in 2009)

*As the week proceeds you will be able to check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.