Celebratory Launch of ‘History Matters: Special Issue for William Beinart’, Journal of Southern African Studies

South Africa Discussion Group

With drinks reception

This launch marks the publication of ‘History Matters: Special Issue for William Beinart’, Journal of Southern African Studies (JSAS), which celebrates Beinart’s contributions to southern African studies, and marks his enduring influence on new generations of scholars and scholarship in the field. The Special Issue’s inclusion in this fiftieth volume of JSAS is a fitting tribute; William has been closely involved in JSAS since the publication in 1979 of his first article, ‘Joyini inkomo: Cattle advances and the origins of migrancy from Pondoland’. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Board as an Editor and was part of an editorial cohort in the 1980s that sought to expand the focus and reach of the journal. The breadth of William’s intellectual influence is reflected in the contributions to this Special Issue. All of the articles are drawn from among his former doctoral students who attended a JSAS-supported Festschrift symposium held in William’s honour at the University of Oxford in July 2023. The articles range in focus from environmental and animal histories to histories of peace and violent contestations within South Africa’s transition period, histories of local governance, contemporary histories of health, and histories of education before, during and after apartheid. They detail stories of migration and mobility amidst the terrain of South Africa’s Eastern Cape, a landscape which William has written about so extensively, and also draw into view the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereening region (now Gauteng Province), KwaZulu-Natal, the colonial Cape and Western Cape, and the Okavango Delta in Botswana. The wide-ranging geographic, temporal and thematic scope of the studies displayed in this Special Issue aptly attests to William’s keen abilities to supervise and inspire early career researchers who, in turn, have begun to shape and define new directions in the scholarship on the region.

The launch will include brief remarks on the Special Issue from William Beinart (Oxford), co-editors Rebekah Lee (Oxford) and Anne Heffernan (Durham), and Colin Bundy (Oxford).

A drinks reception will follow.