Thula Simpson
Biographic Data
| ID | 77824 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thula Simpson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thula |
| FAMILY NAME | Simpson |
| SIGNATURE | SIMPSON T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pretoria |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5992-3948 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 47 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Efficiency of Moral Character
This paper reconsiders how intrinsic motives that support trustworthiness should be modelled within economic theory, contributing to a methodologically pluralist business ethics. We re-examine the principal–agent problem, exposing a hidden assumption in the classic Jensen and Meckling (1976) solution. By introducing a lying cost—reflecting the agent’s concern for honesty—we reveal their model as a limiting case and distinguish between opportunist…
The Wars of Liberation in Southern Africa, 1961–1994
The scholarship on Africa’s decolonization has tended to focus on the “Wind of Change” of the 1950s and 1960s. Much less attention has been paid to the subsequent, armed phase, which commenced after the initial stage stalled due to the obduracy of the “Unholy Alliance” of Rhodesia, South Africa, and the Portuguese Empire. In addition to postcolonial Africa’s North-South divide, the wars of decolonization were shaped by other geopolitical schisms,…
A call for transdisciplinary trust research in the artificial intelligence era
Trust is a cornerstone and enabler of human civilization, determining the very nature of how people interact with each other. The swift integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into daily life poses grand societal challenges and necessitates a reevaluation of trust. Our bibliometric literature review calls for scientists and stakeholders to cross traditional academic boundaries to address emerging and evolving societal challenges arising from …
An Encroaching Sea
Planetary pictures
How should historians of environmental and climate sciences respond to the Earth's move from the blank canvas to a foreground feature of ‘big-picture’ scholarship? This article highlights three crucial themes for histories of science in the Anthropocene: categories of scale and methods of scaling, the relationship between history of science and the disciplines it historicizes, and the entanglement of environmental damage and environmental knowled…
Beyond Frontiers
George Curzon’s 1907 Romanes lecture, delivered soon after his tenure as Viceroy of India, articulated a vision of geopolitical order at a moment of British imperial decline. Curzon, however, argued that he lived at a historical zenith of frontier competition characterised by British India’s land power and complex frontiers. He invoked ancient precedents to assert the inevitability of modern imperial expansion, obscuring the specific geopolitical…
The consequences of the Cold War for the ANC
For What It’s Worth
South Africa, 1994 + 30
In this wide-ranging conversation, six scholars of South Africa detail threads of continuity and change in the historiographies, popular memories, archives, research agendas, methodologies, and within the South African academy and historical professional since the end of formal apartheid in 1994
Find the river
Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead…
Making margins visible
Imperialism, colonialism, and climate change science
Historical studies of the influence of imperialism and colonialism on climate science have yet to be brought together into a critical synthesis. This advanced review offers a critical overview of the key themes of this literature with the primary intention of enabling historians and other scholars to recognize, specify, and acknowledge the roles of imperial and colonial processes in shaping scientific framings of climate. Following a brief overvi…
Climate, cartography, and the life and death of the ‘natural region’ in British geography
During the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, Oxford-based Scottish geographer Andrew Herbertson constructed a framework for comprehending and categorising climate and its interrelations: natural regions. Along with a large circle of students and collaborators, Herbertson promoted natural regions as the conceptual keystone for geographical teaching and research. This article shows how natural regions theory conceived of climate as an o…
History of South Africa
South Africa was born in war, has been cursed by crises and ruptures, and today stands on a precipice once again. This book explores the country's tumultuous journey from the finale of the Second Anglo-Boer War, to 2021. Drawing on sources including diaries, letters, oral testimony, and diplomatic reports, Thula Simpson follows the South African people through the battles, elections, resistance, strikes, insurrections, massacres, financial crashe…
Remembering Jeremy Gale Silvester
Jeremy Silvester died on 5 July 2021, aged 58, following a struggle with Covid-19. In the 1980s, while a doctoral student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, he was also a member of the London-based Namibia Support Committee. In 1994, he completed his Ph.D. on the history of land dispossession and labour recruitment in southern Namibia under South African colonialism. He subsequently became an academic at the University of Namibia in t…
Reflections on Lockdown’
On 27 March 2020, South Africa officially entered a 21-day lockdown to limit the spread of the COVID-19 disease, which had first been detected in China towards the end of the previous year. There was much talk at the time about the public health and economic implications of the restrictions, which aimed to limit human contact to ‘essentials’. It was clear that the lockdown would have important short-, medium- and possibly even long-term consequen…
The Frontier in British India
Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of colonial India during the nineteenth century. Through critical interventions in a wide range of theoretical and historiographical fields, he speaks to historians of empire and science, anthropologists, and geographers alike. The Frontier in British India provides the first connected and comparative analysi…
Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future
Reviewed by: Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India by Tobias Wolffhardt Thomas Simpson Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India By Tobias Wolffhardt, trans. Jane Rafferty. New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2018. The expansive collections, writings, and images that Colin Mackenzie (1754—1821) …
Forgetting like a State in Colonial North-East India
What if governing and "seeing" like a state is actually about forgetting and misdirecting as much as it is about accumulating and communicating? In the colonial north-east during the early nineteenth century, governing and knowing peoples and spaces relied not on flows of knowledge, but on intermittent and selective adaptations of previously formulated information. This was not simply a product of unintended shortcomings, but resulted from delibe…
Rhodesia to Zimbabwe
This Special Issue is based on papers presented at a colloquium hosted by the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies at the University of Pretoria on 27–28 June 2018. Organised by Professor
Mandela's Army
This article focuses on Nelson Mandela’s tenure as the first commander-in-chief of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). It emphasises his objectives for MK as reflected in the archive of diaries, notebooks and reports that he produced at the time. It also looks at the effectiveness of his work as Commander by exploring how the army he built fared in its insurgency against the state. The article emphasises the seriousness of purpose of Mandela and colleagues, …
Science Without Frontiers
The title of Robert Fox’s brief and deftly written book is not only a statement of its object of inquiry—scientific internationalism before and after the First World War—but also a declaration of the author’s optimistic adherence to ‘the goal of knowledge open to all’ (p. 111). The latter element is only explicit in the introduction and epilogue, but substantially informs the analysis in between: a tone of celebration pervades the first chapter’s…
Modern Mountains From the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene
Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance, and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through…
Nelson Mandela and the Genesis of the ANC’s Armed Struggle
Was Nelson Mandela a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) at the time that he formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK)? Was he dishonest in not revealing that he established MK at the SACP’s behest? Did the African National Congress (ANC) ever grant Mandela the authority to launch an armed struggle? And, in leading the turn to violence, did Mandela strive to marginalise ANC president-general Albert Luthuli? These are the questions that have ma…
Rethinking ‘Apartheid’s Golden Age’
Rethinking 'Apartheid's Golden Age': South Africa, c1966–1979." South African Historical Journal, 69(2), pp. 151–152
Bordering and Frontier-Making in Nineteenth-Century British India
From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansion to assume the approximate geographical extent it retained until its demise in 1947. It confronted at its north-eastern and north-western outskirts seemingly intractable mountains, deserts, and jungles inhabited by apparently stateless ‘tribal’ peoples. In its various attempts to comprehend and deal with these human and material complexities, the col…
Clean out of the map
During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significance for surveyors in colonial India. These regions were understood to provide the most stringent tests for the men, instruments, and techniques that collectively constituted spatial data and representations. In many instances, however, the severity of the challenges that India's frontiers afforded stretched practices in the field and in the survey off…
Modern Mountains From the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene
Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance, and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through…
The Bay and the Ocean’
South African political refugees first began arriving in Swaziland in significant numbers in the late 1950s. In the mid-1960s the ANC tried to recruit these refugees to engage in operational activities but with little success. After Swazi independence in 1968 the kingdom's rulers were too scared of South African retaliation to provide active support for the ANC's armed struggle. Meanwhile ANC members in Swaziland were cut off from ANC structures …
Imperialism, colonialism, and climate change science
Historical studies of the influence of imperialism and colonialism on climate science have yet to be brought together into a critical synthesis. This advanced review offers a critical overview of the key themes of this literature with the primary intention of enabling historians and other scholars to recognize, specify, and acknowledge the roles of imperial and colonial processes in shaping scientific framings of climate. Following a brief overvi…
Umkhonto we Sizwe, We are Waiting for You’
This article discusses the ANC's relationship with the youth-led township rebellion of the mid 1980s which has not received adequate attention in the existing literature on South African resistance politics. The argument made is that while the ANC lacked a physical presence in the townships and was thus unable to organise the uprisings, the appeal of its confrontational policies – and above all its armed struggle – meant it was accorded the mantl…
Find the river
Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead…
Mandela's Army
This article focuses on Nelson Mandela’s tenure as the first commander-in-chief of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). It emphasises his objectives for MK as reflected in the archive of diaries, notebooks and reports that he produced at the time. It also looks at the effectiveness of his work as Commander by exploring how the army he built fared in its insurgency against the state. The article emphasises the seriousness of purpose of Mandela and colleagues, …
Military Combat Work
This article describes the African National Congress (ANC) underground in South Africa in the years immediately \npreceding the 1976 Soweto uprising, and it makes three main contributions to the existing literature on the topic. \nThe first is primarily descriptive, and involves providing greater detail than has hitherto been offered on the \nANC’s clandestine organisational presence in neighbouring Swaziland, Mozambique and Tanzania that facilit…
The making (and remaking) of a revolutionary plan
After the African National Congress’ (ANC’s) political and military structures within South Africa were destroyed by police repression in the mid‐1960s, there was a hiatus of a decade before the movement could contemplate resuming military operations within South Africa. By the mid‐1970s, the ANC found that the events that made this resumption possible also severely constrained its scope for action. While Mozambican independence gave the ANC a co…
South Africa, 1994 + 30
In this wide-ranging conversation, six scholars of South Africa detail threads of continuity and change in the historiographies, popular memories, archives, research agendas, methodologies, and within the South African academy and historical professional since the end of formal apartheid in 1994
New Histories of the Andaman Islands
Main Machinery
Having completed their training in Military Combat Work (MCW) in the Eastern Bloc by the early months of 1976, the first of the new generation of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) recruits were prepared for infiltration into South Africa by the mid-year. This article tells the story of the first unit to be deployed into South Africa in the new phase of the African National Congress's (ANC) armed struggle. It details some of the challenges they faced impleme…
Toyi-Toyi-ing to Freedom
This article focuses on the twelve-month period between August 1989 and August 1990 which \nproved to be the final year of the African National Congress’s (ANC) armed struggle against \nthe South African government. This period is interesting because it dramatised the central \nparadox that existed throughout the ANC’s armed struggle, namely its material weakness that \nwas belied by its immense symbolic strength. In August 1989, the ANC’s propos…
The Police Academy
Th-Century Consort
The Bay and the Ocean’
South African political refugees first began arriving in Swaziland in significant numbers in the late 1950s. In the mid-1960s the ANC tried to recruit these refugees to engage in operational activities but with little success. After Swazi independence in 1968 the kingdom's rulers were too scared of South African retaliation to provide active support for the ANC's armed struggle. Meanwhile ANC members in Swaziland were cut off from ANC structures …
Umkhonto we Sizwe, We are Waiting for You’
This article discusses the ANC's relationship with the youth-led township rebellion of the mid 1980s which has not received adequate attention in the existing literature on South African resistance politics. The argument made is that while the ANC lacked a physical presence in the townships and was thus unable to organise the uprisings, the appeal of its confrontational policies – and above all its armed struggle – meant it was accorded the mantl…
Toyi-Toyi-ing to Freedom
This article focuses on the twelve-month period between August 1989 and August 1990 which \nproved to be the final year of the African National Congress’s (ANC) armed struggle against \nthe South African government. This period is interesting because it dramatised the central \nparadox that existed throughout the ANC’s armed struggle, namely its material weakness that \nwas belied by its immense symbolic strength. In August 1989, the ANC’s propos…
The making (and remaking) of a revolutionary plan
After the African National Congress’ (ANC’s) political and military structures within South Africa were destroyed by police repression in the mid‐1960s, there was a hiatus of a decade before the movement could contemplate resuming military operations within South Africa. By the mid‐1970s, the ANC found that the events that made this resumption possible also severely constrained its scope for action. While Mozambican independence gave the ANC a co…
South Africa's brave new world
The Expanding Horizons of Liberation Struggle History
Indirect Rule in South Africa
(2011). Indirect Rule in South Africa: Tradition, Modernity, and the Costuming of Political Power. African Historical Review: Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 84-86
The Cambridge History of South Africa, Volume 1, From Early Times to 1885
(2011). The Cambridge History of South Africa, Volume 1, From Early Times to 1885. African Historical Review: Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 87-89
Walking on Air
By COLLEEN MATTHEWS. Johannesburg: STE Publishers, 2006. 149 pp. ISBN 978 19198 5580 6
Changes to the South African Historical Journal
The coordinating editors of the South African Historical Journal (SAHJ) are pleased to announce that the changes to the structure of the journal's Editorial Board that were approved at the last Sou
Main Machinery
Having completed their training in Military Combat Work (MCW) in the Eastern Bloc by the early months of 1976, the first of the new generation of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) recruits were prepared for infiltration into South Africa by the mid-year. This article tells the story of the first unit to be deployed into South Africa in the new phase of the African National Congress's (ANC) armed struggle. It details some of the challenges they faced impleme…
Military Combat Work
This article describes the African National Congress (ANC) underground in South Africa in the years immediately \npreceding the 1976 Soweto uprising, and it makes three main contributions to the existing literature on the topic. \nThe first is primarily descriptive, and involves providing greater detail than has hitherto been offered on the \nANC’s clandestine organisational presence in neighbouring Swaziland, Mozambique and Tanzania that facilit…
Foot Soldier for Freedom
The Struggle for the Eastern Cape 1800–1854
(2012). The Struggle for the Eastern Cape 1800–1854: Subjugation and the Roots of South African Democracy. African Historical Review: Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 173-174
The Unlikely Secret Agent
White Chiefs, Black Lords
Red in the Rainbow
Young Mandela
The Anatomy of a South African Genocide
(2012). The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples. African Historical Review: Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 169-172
Nelson Mandela
The Origins of Non-Racialism
The Making of an MK Cadre
The Making of an MK Cadre. By WONGA WELILE BOTTOMAN. Pretoria: LiNc, 2010. vii + 200 pp. ISBN 1 39780 62044 346 3. In his ‘making’ as an MK cadre, the crucial formative experiences that guided Wong
The ANC at 100
Political science (41 works) · History (37 works) · History (30 works) · Law (26 works) · Sociology (23 works) · South African History and Culture (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (18 works) · Geography (15 works) · Legal Issues in South Africa (12 works)