History of South Africa podcast

De: Desmond Latham
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  • Resumen

  • A series that seeks to tell the story of the South Africa in some depth. Presented by experienced broadcaster/podcaster Des Latham and updated weekly, the episodes will take a listener through the various epochs that have made up the story of South Africa.
    Desmond Latham
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Ciencias Sociales Escritos y Comentarios sobre Viajes Mundial
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Episodios
  • Episode 220 - The Transvaal Civil War of 1862-1864 and Paul Kruger’s Dopping Doppers

    Episode 220 - The Transvaal Civil War of 1862-1864 and Paul Kruger’s Dopping Doppers
    Apr 27 2025
    All manner of things are going on — thanks to those folks out there who’ve been sending me notes and support, much appreciated.

    Episode 220 deals with the start of the Transvaal Civil War, and quite a bit about Paul Kruger’s early life.

    The American civil war was raging in 1862, and there’s nothing like a war to trigger innovation — if you excuse the pun. Richard Jordan Gatling patented his terrifying Gatling gun featuring multiple rotating barrels driven by a hand crank, allowing operators to unleash a relentless hailstorm of bullets—up to several hundred rounds per minute.

    Its distinctive mechanical whirr echoed across battlefields, marking a chilling shift toward modern, industrialized warfare. While undoubtedly efficient, the Gatling gun also embodied a grim reality: the age when technology would reshape combat forever had arrived.

    Just in time to cause more chaos in the already bloody American Civil War.

    What is less known these days is that there was another Civil War involving descendants of Europeans, and this was going on in South Africa. The AmaZulu had just wrapped up their own recent Civil War as you’ve heard. All manner of brutal and uncivil conduct marked this period in South African history, as neighbour turned against neighbour and the bonds of society frayed.

    The Boer Republics had been riven by conflict since the days of the Voortrekkers, but in 1862 perhaps inspired in part by the American civil War, the Boer Republics went from squabbling to skirmishing. There’s no proof that the carnage of the United States directly influenced South Africa, but there is proof that the Boers knew about it.

    Later, during the apartheid period of National Party Rule, this Transvaal Civil War was deposited in historical file 13, almost expunged, because it contradicted the prevailing political ideology where it was all the whites against all the blacks. Anything that detracted from this nationalist agenda was taboo.

    The modern architects of African nationalism, too, often reshape the past to suit their narratives, discarding inconvenient histories into their own version of "file 13."Compared to the carnage in America, where an estimated 750 000 people died, the South African version was far less bloody. A few dozen dead and wounded. A handful of skirmishes was the real effect, which took place in what is now Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the North West Province - but at the same time as the American Civil War which ran from 1861 to 1865. The Transvaal Civil War started in 1862 and ended in 1864.
    While less gory, it was emblematic of the frontier streak embedded in the first generation descendants of the Voortrekkers.
    According to the constitution of the Republic, the Hervormde Church was the state church. Its members alone were entitled to exercise any influence in public affairs. Whoever was not a member of the Hervormde Church was not a fully-qualified burgher.

    Paul Kruger belonged to the Christelljk-Gereformeerde Kerk founded recently, in 1859, by Dr. Postma, at Rustenburg. This church became known in South Africa as the Dopper, or partly Canting Church. The derivation of the word Dopper is not completely clear, but it was believed to have come from the word dop, a damper or extinguisher for putting out
    Candles.
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    22 m
  • Episode 219 - The Snarled Chronicle of John Orr, Wodehouse Blues and Mercantile Matters

    Episode 219 - The Snarled Chronicle of John Orr, Wodehouse Blues and Mercantile Matters
    Apr 20 2025
    This is episode 219 — a new Governor has sailed into Table Bay.

    Sir Philip Edmond Wodehouse, born in 1811, eldest child of Edmond Wodehouse who married his first cousin Lucy, daughter of Philip Wodehouse, uncle Philip to Sir Philip Edmond.

    How very Victorian. Queen Victoria herself, who married her first cousin Prince Albert—did allow and even encourage cousin marriage, particularly among royalty and the upper classes to consolidate power, property, and lineage.

    But it also increased the risk of birth defects by 2 percent, and if both parents carry a recessive gene mutation, their child has a 25 percent chance of expressing the disorder.

    Scientists have a well-worn phrase for this — its called inbreeding.

    Wodehouse junior entered the Ceylon Civil Service in 1828, and was installed as superintendent of British Honduras between 1851 to 1854. From there he sailed to British Guiana where he served as Governor between 1854 to 1861 — before heading to the Cape in 1862.

    It’s illuminating to touch on Sir Philip Wodehouse’s disastrous time in British Guiana. Two years after he took office in the South American country, the Angel Gabriel riots broke out.

    His implacable opponent was John Sayers Orr, whose nom de guerre was the Angel Gabriel, was half Scottish, half African. Edinburgh’s Caledonian Newspaper of the time reported that his mother Mary Ann Orr was a respectable coloured woman and married to a respectable Scot — John Orr senior.

    Young John Sayer Orr was rabidly anti-papal, hated the Pope and had an anti-Catholic obsession. He took to the Guianese streets with bullhorn in hand, whereupon the distant Glasgow Herald noted he spoke “rampant anti-papist froth and lies..”
    Between 1850 and 1851 he popped up in Boston, then New York, Bath in Maine, and Manchester in New Hampshire. In 1854 he was hustled off by police in Boston. Apart from the usual racial insults levelled at him, the Boston police report says he had more impudence than brains ..

    “…who with a three cornered hat and a cockade on his head, and old brass horn .. took advantage of the political excitement .. travelled around the city …tooting his horn … collecting crowds in the streets, delivering what he called his political lectures and passing around the hat for contributions…”

    Sounds like a modern political influencer, the bullhorn, the disinformation, the extreme rhetoric, not to mention his hat which is literally crowd sourcing.

    He was arrested at least 20 times for what was called his international harangues tour — where he’d shout confusing messages like

    “Scorn be those who rob us of our rights — purgatory for popery and the Pope — Freedom to man be he black or white — Rule Britannia…!!”
    Bizarrely, the resonances to today’s crazy politics continued, Orr was associated with the fantastically named Know Nothing Party in America. Wait to hear about this bunch, you’ll recognise bits of modern USA.

    Members of the movement were required to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about its specifics by outsiders, and that providing the group with its colloquial name.

    Before you wonder aloud what relevance all this has, let me quickly point out that the so-called Know Nothing Party had 43 representatives in Congress at the height of its power in the late 1850s.
    In 1855 this strange 19th Century character pitched up in British Guiana, and Sir Philip Wodehouse had his work cut out. Soon Orr was up to his old tricks, walking about with his bull horn, carrying a flag and a British imperial badge, followed by a group of …. Well .. followers. They were not repeating they Knew Nothing, but attacking the British establishment.
    We'll also hear about the Angel Gabriel riots. By 1862 Wodehouse who survived a public stoning in Guiana, had arrived in the Cape as Governor. Here he was to face the implacable enemies - the Westerners and the Easterners. Two parts of the Cape that did not get along.
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    19 m
  • Episode 218 - Lifestyle Update 1861 and an Ode to Landscape Motion Intensity and Physiology

    Episode 218 - Lifestyle Update 1861 and an Ode to Landscape Motion Intensity and Physiology
    Apr 13 2025
    We’re doing a little different thing today, having wondered our way through a few thousand years its time to reflect on a few things.

    How did people go about their day to day lives, and what was life really like by the mid-19th Century South Africa? This period was dominated by agriculture, it was before the discoveries of most of the valuable minerals that turned the region from a sleepy agrarian backwater into one of the most dynamic economies in the world.

    Cape Town had been the fulcrum around which all European expansion rotated, the southern tip of Africa had to be navigated by all the empires of Europe, first Portuguese, then Dutch, then English. So naturally Cape Town had developed quite a sense of self importance.

    Some vicious and malicious Joburgers claim it continues to suffer from a superiority complex today.

    All in good spirit of course.

    It was a distant port, and if a Voortrekker or AmaZulu king travelled to Cape Town overland, it was like setting sail into an insecure future. The slow wagons cruising overland from the Waterberg to Cape Town took about as long as the maritime trip from Liverpool to Cape Town — two to three months.

    Both routes - whether sea or land — were rife with danger.

    During this perilous chapter of history, seafaring was still a high risk venture. Meanwhile, those who braved the land faced their own litany of dangers — wagons toppled on treacherous trails, lions prowled the edges of camps, venomous snakes struck without warning, and bandits lurked in the shadows. The veld itself, like the capricious ocean, seemed to conspire against the traveller, offering up a relentless gauntlet of threats to navigate.

    This experience meant the journey men and women were hardy, a tough breed. Most actually walked the trip, sometimes riding their horse, but mostly leading the oxen as the wagon creaked and squeaked, rumbled and tinkled over rocky landscape.

    African migrants walked from the transOrangia and deeper, into what is now Botswana, all the way to Cape Town to work on farms. That took weeks, sometimes, months. AmaZulu kings like Shaka thought nothing of walking 300 kilometres to visit his distant homesteads, taking a fortnight to recon his land.
    Physiology was actually different — people had straighter spines at this time in world history — there were fewer eye problems, stronger limbs. But they lived shorter lives in general, medicine was a distant luxury for most.
    19th-century Southern Africans, like many pre-industrial populations globally, generally had better postural alignment and physical conditioning compared to sedentary modern denizens of the ethernet.
    Ethnographic and missionary accounts from the era—such as those by Dr. David Livingstone and Thomas Baines—frequently remark on the exceptional physical endurance of local populations. Many African societies, particularly among pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities like the San, Tswana, and Zulu, were noted for their upright posture and ease of movement over long distances.

    The strength needed to walk along the tracks and slopes of southern Africa is well known, the pursuit is replicated today with the wonderful trails around the countryside.
    But it wasn’t all milk and honey, of course.

    The fatality rate remained high until the end of the 19th Century, although in South Africa, people were generally living longer, particularly in the Cape.
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    19 m
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Fantastic and necessary!

Thank you for this informative show. I will listen until the end. I am from South Africa and I can attest to the fact that we desperately need more people that are clued up with SA's wider history, not only the recent controversial happenings.

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Longform history

I've never found anything close to this comprehensive in an audible format. Des is doing great work and has several fascinating podcasts with a similar format. If you like history, give this a go.

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Impressive

Highly recommend. An impressive and thorough deep dive by a scholarly native. Des Latham takes the listener on a journey through the geographical, cultural and political history of South Africa with just a touch of humor and philosophical thought. Latham makes it palatable for someone new to the subject and his wit breathes more life into an extensive history that might have otherwise been too dense and “text-book-ish.”

On a personal note — As an immigrant to South Africa, I really appreciate the availability of this material as well as listening to his pronunciation of people, places and things relevant to South Africa.

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Fantastic Podcast

The true spirit of this program is summed up by a quote from episode 59.

"Don't shout at me folks. This is a series that is trying to deliver direct historical blows rather than quaint emotional propaganda. Your going to hear a lot more that may make you revise what you think of as part of our past."

Thank you Mr. Latham for your dedication to the truth and willingness to impart your extensive knowledge on others.

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