The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from the Witwatersrand Mines, 1902-1955

This seminal book reveals how black labor was exploited in twentieth-century South Africa, the human costs of which are still largely hidden from history. It was the people of southern Mozambique, bent double beneath the historical loads of forced labor and slavery, then sold off en masse as contracted laborers, who paid the highest price for South African gold. An iniquitous intercolonial agreement for the exploitation of ultra-cheap black labor was only made possible through nightly use of the steam locomotive on the transnational railway linking Johannesburg and Lourenço Marques. These night trains left deep scars in the urban and rural cultures of black communities, whether in the form of popular songs or a belief in nocturnal witches' trains that captured and conveyed zombie workers to the region's most unpopular places of employment.\nBy tracing the journeys undertaken by black migrants, Charles van Onselen powerfully reconstructs how racial thinking, expressed logistically, reflected the evolving systems of segregation and apartheid. On the night trains, the last stop was always hell.

Business & Money

Van Onselen,Charles

Industries

Oxford University Press

At the end of the nineteenth century European pimps and 'white slavers' established a hugely successful global market for commercial sex and for three turbulent decades before the First World War, Joseph Silver was central to this hidden world of betrayal, intrigue, lust and sexual slavery. Burglar, gun-runner and trafficker in women on four continents, Silver was a disturbed adolescent, youthful predator and adult misogynist whose notoriety was captured in the most confidential correspondence of a dozen countries in the western world. But what those in charge of law-enforcement agencies kept to themselves was how their officers had attempted to use Silver as an informer to infiltrate syndicates, only to have him outwit them as he moved in the dangerous space between police and prostitutes.In this brilliant study, Charles van Onselen situates the private life of one man amidst the demi-monde of the Atlantic world and casts a brilliant light on the most infamous serial killer of all time - Jack the Ripper.

The Fox and the flies: The world of Joseph silver, Racketeer and Psychopath

Biographies & Memoirs

True Crime

Walker Co

Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 116-1914: New Babylon

Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd

In this book Charles van Onselen sets out to portray some of the human consequences of the profound economic and political changes that transformed South Africa in the period between the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand and the outbreak of the First World War. Unlike many of the writers who have looked at this period, his primary concern is not with those who benefitted most from these changes, but with other groups of people, black and white, whose lives and experiences have hitherto been neglected, or at best misunderstood.\nStudies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand consists of two volumes of thematically linked essays. In the first of these, New Babylon, van Onselen writes about the liquor sellers, the prostitutes and cab-drivers, and introduces the volumes with an essay that sets the experiences of all these groups within the wider political and economic context which shaped the course of their lives. In volume 2, New Nineveh, he is concerned with the domestic servants who serviced the needs of the white middle class; the Afrikaner workers struggling to maintain their livelihoods in a hostile environment; and the men who made up the ‘Regiment of the Hills’, the Witwatersrand’s black lumpenproletarian army.\nVan Onselen’s book tells the story of how the ruling classes gradually came to assert their control over the subordinate classes on the Witwatersrand and to exercise a powerful influence over where they lived, how they spent their non-working hours, how domestic labour was allocated, and how they were to endure periods of unemployment. Sensitive to the wider structures of society as much as to the often harsh reality of daily life for the underprivileged and dispossessed, these two volumes at the same time chronicle – with imagination and insight – the struggles of groups of people seeking to find a place of dignity and security within a capitalist world over which they had little control.

Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914, Vol. 1: New Babylon

Longman Pub. Group

Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 116-1914: New Nineveh

Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914: New Nineveh

Longman

A masterwork of historical reconstruction―the life and times of an arch criminal who may well have been Jack the Ripper.
During the three turbulent decades before World War I, Joseph Silver became the greatest criminal of his time, perfecting his skills as a burglar, gun runner, jewel thief, and ultimately trafficker in prostitution and female slavery across four continents. He was notorious even among his competitors at a time when such business was rampant on both sides of the Atlantic, and he covered his tracks with extraordinary skill. 
A chance encounter with Silver's career in South Africa set Charles van Onselen on a twenty five-year obsession: a journey to reconstruct the shadowy life and times of―in some ways to match wits with―a devious master criminal. From Russian Poland in the 1860s, where Silver was born Joseph Lis, to London in the 1880s, turn-of-the-century New York, Argentina, and Africa, van Onselen recaptures the dangerous demimonde of the Atlantic world. Silver's notoriety was found among the most confidential correspondence of a dozen countries; what those in law enforcement kept to themselves, however, was how their officers had attempted to use Silver as an informer to infiltrate syndicates built on vice, only to have him outwit them as he moved in the risky space between police and prostitutes.
Such is the meticulousness of van Onselen's research that The Fox and the Flies is as rich in history as it is in the detail and drama of Silver's career, as layer after layer of his life and times are revealed. And it has an extraordinary pay-off, for van Onselen contends that Joseph Silver's darkest secret of all lay in London in the autumn of 1888 when, before he embarked on his legendary life of crime, he was, indeed, Jack the Ripper.

The Fox and the Flies: The Secret Life of a Grotesque Master Criminal

Historical

Walker Books

Winner of the Sunday Times (South Africa) Alan Paton Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Herskovitz Award from the African Studies Association. 'The seed is mine. The ploughshares are mine. The span of oxen is mine. Everything is mine. Only the land is their's.'--Kas Maine A bold and innovative social history, The Seed Is Mine concerns the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa. After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbors, employers, friends, and family--a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication--Charles van Onselen has re-created the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart. Winner of The Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Herskovitz Award from the African Studies Association "The seed is mine. The ploughshares are mine. The span of oxen is mine. Everything is mine. Only the land is theirs."—Kas Maine A bold and innovative social history, The Seed Is Mine concerns the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa. After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbors, employers, friends, and family—a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication—Charles van Onselen has recreated the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart. "If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography . . . proves the point."—Carmel Schrire, The Boston Globe "An epic . . . [that] tells of the loss of human potential generated by a politics that surrendered generosity and openness to self-interest and bigotry. It reveals the way an ordinary man can survive with dignity in such a world."—Vincent Crapanzano, The New York Times Book Review "A magnificent book [with] implications beyond its modest claims . . . This remarkable story compels foreboding but also kindles hope, for it shows the extraordinary courage of 'ordinary' men under severe difficulties."—Eugene Genovese, Emory University "[Van Onselen] teases out the subtleties of the paternalistic relationships between rural whites and blacks which gave rise to real friendships but also to much betrayal, anger, and humiliation . . . It is a monumental masterpiece of research, and a poetic evocation of the human spirit to survive . . . "—Linda Ensor, Business Day (South Africa)

The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894-1985

Hill and Wang

A thoughtful portrait of Kas Maine, an African farmer, healer, and tribal patriarch, describes life for disenfranchised blacks under South African apartheid and the effects of tribal custom and tradition on his life.

The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Hill & Wang Pub

The Jameson Raid was a pivotal moment in the history of South Africa, linking events from the Anglo-Boer War to the declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910. For more than a century, the failed revolution has been interpreted through the lens of British imperialism, with responsibility laid at the feet of Cecil Rhodes. Yet, the raid was less a serious attempt to overthrow a Boer government than a wild adventure with transnational roots in American filibustering. In The Cowboy Capitalist, renowned South African historian Charles van Onselen challenges a historiography of over 120 years, locating the raid in American rather than British history and forcing us to rethink the histories of at least three nations. Through a close look at the little-remembered figure of John Hays Hammond, a confidant of both Rhodes and Jameson, he discovers the American Old West on the South African Highveld. This radical reinterpretation challenges the commonly held belief that the Jameson Raid was quintessentially British and, in doing so, drives splinters into our understanding of events as far forward as South Africa’s critical 1948 general election, with which the foundations of Grand Apartheid were laid.

The Cowboy Capitalist: John Hays Hammond, the American West, and the Jameson Raid in South Africa (Reconsiderations in Southern African History)

History

Africa

University of Virginia Press

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Books by Van Onselen,Charles