Paul S Landau
Biographic Data
| ID | 172033 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul S Landau |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul S |
| FAMILY NAME | Landau |
| SIGNATURE | LANDAU P S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, College Park |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 76 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Introduction: A Few Guideposts
The Modern Political and the Sacred (1950s–1970s)
African Church Authority (1911–1924)
Vanguard Debates (ca 1890)
A National Anthem: Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika, translated (1890s–1950)
War in Zimbabwe (1970s)
Photographic Presentations of Struggle (1966)
Organizing in Popular Lexicons in South Africa (1910s–1930s)
Visualizing Empire in Africa: Postage Stamps and Stationery Letterheads as Sites of Affiliation and Subversion
Before the website and the text emoji, the postage stamp and the letterhead adorned written communications. The expansion of the post created a system in which the British Empire (like other states and empires), through these forms, was lent visual presence. Here, an historian and an archaeologist investigate the tableaux of this mundane imperial optic. Increasing literate agency, commerce, and tourism placed stamps and printed letterheads throug…
The Illumination of Christ in the Kalahari Desert
Towards the end of the year 1920 the Kanye Church had completed its preparations to send me to visit the Churches at Lehututu. That place lies in the Kalahari Desert about 300 miles West of Kanye and just beyond what is known as “The Thirst Belt”. It was arranged that one of the Kanye Elders named Peco, who had been there on several occasions, should accompany me, also the Rev. T[sibalala] S. Maalane, Native Minister of Moshupa.
Everyday Communists in South Africa's Liberation Struggle: The Lives of Ivan and Lesley Schermbrucker
Alan Kirkaldy has written a lively account of the careers of two Communist activists in twentieth-century Eastern Cape, South Africa: the labor organizers and movement fund-raisers Ivan and Lesley Schermbrucker. He was granted full access to the family and incorporated a partial manuscript biography of Ivan by Lesley. An experienced historian, Kirkaldy has crafted a tribute with depth and genuine surprises.Black African workers organized by the C…
Revolution, narrative, and the detail: A response
Lorena Rizzo. Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa: Shades of Empire
In Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa, Lorena Rizzo tells us in her introduction that the beauty and enigma of photographs in collections in South Africa held out the promise of writing a different kind of history of South Africa. What kind of history? How is Photography and History organized? It was to be an exploration of how one could narrate history on the basis of historical photographs, but this path was abandoned, and in t…
Joel Cabrita. The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement
With The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement, Joel Cabrita has written a largely successful, interconnected history of a sort of Christianity called Zion, a transnational movement that has bequeathed southern Africa millions of adherents. On Johannesburg’s green strips, on Sunday mornings Zion-style groups still gather, sing, and baptize newer members by immersion in a muddy Jukskei creek.…
The work of representing the exiled revolutionaries
Stephen Davis here begins the difficult work of re-evaluating the post-1962 anti-apartheid fight. He is not the first to complain of the leaden paradigm depicting heroes and stages of struggle, cul
The M-Plan: Mandela's Struggle to Reorient the African National Congress
This is an account of Mandela’s strategy and actions in 1961 and 1962, organising and reorienting the African National Congress (ANC). Based largely on oral memoirs and interviews, including state witness depositions, the article argues that Mandela's plans were thwarted. After the government declared the ANC illegal, Mandela helped to supervise the programme called the M-Plan, in order to lay the groundwork for mass participation in an anticipat…
Gendered silences in Nelson Mandela's and Ruth First's struggle auto/biographies
Two trajectories of two individuals in the fight against apartheid are juxtaposed; two narratives with a diachronic relationship put in train. In both Nelson Mandela's and Ruth First's cases, the expected and self-written arcs of the individuals are disrupted by (our noticing) a neglected or written-out aspect of their lives. In both cases, the new or eclipsed information is gendered in an awkwardly askew way. They both underline the unsettled na…
Michael Goebel. Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism .Gary Wilder. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World
Journal Article Michael Goebel. Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism.Gary Wilder. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Get access Michael Goebel. Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism. (Global and International History.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, Pp. xiii, 344. $120.00. Gary Wilder. Freedom Time: Negritude, D…
Controlled by Communists? (Re)Assessing the ANC in its Exilic Decades
Some other recent books mentioned in this essay:One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today. Edited by ARIANA LISSONI, JON SOSKE, NATASHA ERLANK, NOOR NIEFTAGODIEN, and OMAR B
Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa
PAUL S. LANDAUUniversity of Maryland; Fellow, University of Johannesburg© 2013 Paul S. Landau
Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History
The ANC, MK, and ‘The Turn to Violence’ (1960–1962)
Why did the African National Congress (ANC) appear to embrace violence in 1961? Can one say it did so? Was the Communist Party responsible behind the scenes? What did the ‘turn to violence’ mean? With a plethora of new sources and reminiscences emerging, one can begin to craft a set of answers. Communists as Communists did not determine the timing of the ANC's embrace of MK (Umkhonto we-Sizwe, ‘Spear of the Nation’). The ANC was a large member-ba…
Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948
Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 offers an inclusive vision of South Africa's past. Drawing largely from original sources, Paul Landau presents a history of the politics of the country's people, from the time of their early settlements in the elevated heartlands, through the colonial era, to the dawn of Apartheid. A practical tradition of mobilization, alliance, and amalgamation persisted, mutated, and occasionally vanis…
Jack the Ripper in South Africa? Charles van Onselen's The Fox and the Flies
The Fox and the Flies is supplied with the context not only of Charles van Onselen's oeuvre, devoted to labourers and peasants and members of the marginalised underclass, but of work on prostitution and ‘white slavery’ in South Africa and elsewhere in the world. The ‘Fox’, Joseph Silver, an international criminal and white-slavery trafficker, may possibly have been – as Van Onselen strongly suggests in this book – Jack the Ripper, the London seri…
Honour as a Positive Value: A U-turn in Spirit from The African Poor
Extracted from text ... 149 HONOUR IN AFRICAN HISTORY Honour as a Positive Value: A U-turn in Spirit from The African Poor PAUL LANDAU University of Maryland Most historians of Africa, if not of South Africa, are familiar with John Iliffe's publications. Beginning with East Africa and specifically Tanganyika, his domain soon enlarged to include the continent as a whole (with one return to East Africa, via the history of medicine). Iliffe is a lum…
"Religion" and Christian Conversionin African History: A New Model
This article reviews recent scholarship on African religion and argues that, while much has been accomplished, historians have inherited a problematic view of the processes that they have investigated. They have unknowingly adopted evangelical ideas, in the form of written words and concepts that they wrongly assume have maintained consistent meanings down through the decades. Because missionaries' translations have been taken in this way as accu…
Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa
When Rain Falls: Rainmaking and Community in a Tswana Village, c. 1870 to Recent Times
Les cultures vivrieres des populations Tswana souffrent d'une pluie insufisante et erratique. Cet article propose une approche de la ceremonie des faiseurs de pluie en tant que technique ecologique en l'etudiant dans un contexte historique local, celui du village de Lerala dans les collines Tswapong du Botswana. Par l'etude du discours des faiseurs de pluie et du discours des chretiens, l'A. met en evidence les variations qu'a subit cette pratiqu…
Hegemony and History in Jean and John L. Comaroff'sof Revelation and Revolution
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The ANC, MK, and ‘The Turn to Violence’ (1960–1962)
Why did the African National Congress (ANC) appear to embrace violence in 1961? Can one say it did so? Was the Communist Party responsible behind the scenes? What did the ‘turn to violence’ mean? With a plethora of new sources and reminiscences emerging, one can begin to craft a set of answers. Communists as Communists did not determine the timing of the ANC's embrace of MK (Umkhonto we-Sizwe, ‘Spear of the Nation’). The ANC was a large member-ba…
Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith
Southern Africans configured missionaries as medical, bodily practitioners because of the meaning of ritual specialization in southern Africa. At the same time, ‘practicing medicine’ often meant minor surgery to missionaries, who lagged behind Europe's medical advances at the turn of the century. Whereas southern Africans located their well-being in the nexus of person and community, missionaries' surgery attacked this nexus. Surgery implied, and…
Preacher, chief and prophetess: MorutiSeakgano in the Ngwato Kingdom, East-central Botswana
A fruitful way to deal with religious change in southern Africa as elsewhere, is to seek the shifting articulation between people's behaviour, their changing material circumstances, and their categories of meaning. History clearly has much to contribute here. I focus on the life of a MoTswana Christian preacher, Moruti Seakgano Ncaga, and on two contests over the scope of his authority in and around the Ngwato Kingdom. This specific profile illum…
Gendered silences in Nelson Mandela's and Ruth First's struggle auto/biographies
Two trajectories of two individuals in the fight against apartheid are juxtaposed; two narratives with a diachronic relationship put in train. In both Nelson Mandela's and Ruth First's cases, the expected and self-written arcs of the individuals are disrupted by (our noticing) a neglected or written-out aspect of their lives. In both cases, the new or eclipsed information is gendered in an awkwardly askew way. They both underline the unsettled na…
Controlled by Communists? (Re)Assessing the ANC in its Exilic Decades
Some other recent books mentioned in this essay:One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today. Edited by ARIANA LISSONI, JON SOSKE, NATASHA ERLANK, NOOR NIEFTAGODIEN, and OMAR B
Dividing the Commons: Politics, Policy, and Culture in Botswana
Preacher, chief and prophetess: MorutiSeakgano in the Ngwato Kingdom, East-central Botswana
A fruitful way to deal with religious change in southern Africa as elsewhere, is to seek the shifting articulation between people's behaviour, their changing material circumstances, and their categories of meaning. History clearly has much to contribute here. I focus on the life of a MoTswana Christian preacher, Moruti Seakgano Ncaga, and on two contests over the scope of his authority in and around the Ngwato Kingdom. This specific profile illum…
When Rain Falls: Rainmaking and Community in a Tswana Village, c. 1870 to Recent Times
Les cultures vivrieres des populations Tswana souffrent d'une pluie insufisante et erratique. Cet article propose une approche de la ceremonie des faiseurs de pluie en tant que technique ecologique en l'etudiant dans un contexte historique local, celui du village de Lerala dans les collines Tswapong du Botswana. Par l'etude du discours des faiseurs de pluie et du discours des chretiens, l'A. met en evidence les variations qu'a subit cette pratiqu…
The Illumination of Christ in the Kalahari Desert
Research Article| January 01 1994 The Illumination of Christ in the Kalahari Desert Paul Landau Paul Landau Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1994) 45: 26–40. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928601 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Sit…
Women like Meat: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju/'hoan
PART I Sapience and survival: The Ju/'hoansi and their folklore Folklore and foraging Oral systems of communication. PART II Ju/'hoan expressive life: Tradition and creativity in Ju/'hoan religion and folklore Understanding Ju/'hoan tales Selected tales and analysis Technology and metaphor
Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith
Southern Africans configured missionaries as medical, bodily practitioners because of the meaning of ritual specialization in southern Africa. At the same time, ‘practicing medicine’ often meant minor surgery to missionaries, who lagged behind Europe's medical advances at the turn of the century. Whereas southern Africans located their well-being in the nexus of person and community, missionaries' surgery attacked this nexus. Surgery implied, and…
Dividing the Commons: Politics, Policy, and Culture in Botswana
"Religion" and Christian Conversionin African History: A New Model
This article reviews recent scholarship on African religion and argues that, while much has been accomplished, historians have inherited a problematic view of the processes that they have investigated. They have unknowingly adopted evangelical ideas, in the form of written words and concepts that they wrongly assume have maintained consistent meanings down through the decades. Because missionaries' translations have been taken in this way as accu…
The Spirit of God, Pigs and Demons: The 'Samuelites' of Southern Africa
THE SPIRIT OF GOD, PIGS AND DEMONS: THE 'SAMUELITES' OF SOUTHERN AFRICA' BY PAUL S. LANDAU (Yale University) Popular modes of historical understanding in Africa are increasingly of interest to academic historians. They may be genealogies, cosmologies, royal and cultic traditions, state charters, praise poetry, migrants' and farmworkers' songs, church traditions, children's stories, rumour or gos- sip. They have no universal shape, nor do they giv…
Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business
The London Missionary Society in Southern Africa, 1799-1999: Historical Essays in Celebration of the Bicentenary of the LMS in Southern Africa
Compiled to mark the bicentenary of the London Missionary Society in Southern Africa, this volume provides an assessment of the work and legacy of the Society, which played a critical role in the politics and societies of the subcontinent and whose leading figure like David Livingstone, Robert Moffat, and John Philip were major historical actors in their day. Contributors include John de Gruchy, Christopher Saunders, Steve de Gruchy, Andrew Ross,…
Hegemony and History in Jean and John L. Comaroff'sof Revelation and Revolution
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
"Hegemony and History in Jean and John L. Comaroff's "Of Revelation and Revolution
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
An Amazing Distance: Pictures and People in Africa
This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about figurative images of Africa and visual mimesis of Africans. The chapters examine visual images as they were deployed in their contexts of apprehension and compares African iconographies and readings with European ones. The chapters analyze colonist and folk arts, including advertising, street cartooning, and photography. They demonstrate that images change depending on w…
Empires of the Visual: Photography and Colonial Administration in Africa
This chapter examines the role of photography in colonial administration in Africa. It explains that image was the medium for colonialism's representational encounter with Africans. It argues that the idea that Western photographs objectified colonized peoples in Africa is correct and that photographs, like perspectival paintings before them, can just as easily be said to have objectified observers. It contends that the traffic in images under co…
Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa
The Return of Sara Baartman
Return of Sara Baartman. Film by Zola Maseko. New York: First Run Icarus Films, 2003. 53 min., color. $248 purchase, $75.00 rental. Zola Maseko's film focuses on people who engineered return of Sara Baartman's physical remains from Paris to South Africa for burial. In life Baartman was the hottentot Venus in London and Paris in 1800s and 1810s, a famous exhibit. She died young, in France, and French pickled her vagina, and stored her bones in a b…
Honour as a Positive Value: A U-turn in Spirit from The African Poor
Extracted from text ... 149 HONOUR IN AFRICAN HISTORY Honour as a Positive Value: A U-turn in Spirit from The African Poor PAUL LANDAU University of Maryland Most historians of Africa, if not of South Africa, are familiar with John Iliffe's publications. Beginning with East Africa and specifically Tanganyika, his domain soon enlarged to include the continent as a whole (with one return to East Africa, via the history of medicine). Iliffe is a lum…
Jack the Ripper in South Africa? Charles van Onselen's The Fox and the Flies
The Fox and the Flies is supplied with the context not only of Charles van Onselen's oeuvre, devoted to labourers and peasants and members of the marginalised underclass, but of work on prostitution and ‘white slavery’ in South Africa and elsewhere in the world. The ‘Fox’, Joseph Silver, an international criminal and white-slavery trafficker, may possibly have been – as Van Onselen strongly suggests in this book – Jack the Ripper, the London seri…
Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948
Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 offers an inclusive vision of South Africa's past. Drawing largely from original sources, Paul Landau presents a history of the politics of the country's people, from the time of their early settlements in the elevated heartlands, through the colonial era, to the dawn of Apartheid. A practical tradition of mobilization, alliance, and amalgamation persisted, mutated, and occasionally vanis…
The ANC, MK, and ‘The Turn to Violence’ (1960–1962)
Why did the African National Congress (ANC) appear to embrace violence in 1961? Can one say it did so? Was the Communist Party responsible behind the scenes? What did the ‘turn to violence’ mean? With a plethora of new sources and reminiscences emerging, one can begin to craft a set of answers. Communists as Communists did not determine the timing of the ANC's embrace of MK (Umkhonto we-Sizwe, ‘Spear of the Nation’). The ANC was a large member-ba…
Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History
Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa
PAUL S. LANDAUUniversity of Maryland; Fellow, University of Johannesburg© 2013 Paul S. Landau
Controlled by Communists? (Re)Assessing the ANC in its Exilic Decades
Some other recent books mentioned in this essay:One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today. Edited by ARIANA LISSONI, JON SOSKE, NATASHA ERLANK, NOOR NIEFTAGODIEN, and OMAR B
Michael Goebel. Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism .Gary Wilder. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World
Journal Article Michael Goebel. Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism.Gary Wilder. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Get access Michael Goebel. Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism. (Global and International History.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, Pp. xiii, 344. $120.00. Gary Wilder. Freedom Time: Negritude, D…
Joel Cabrita. The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement
With The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement, Joel Cabrita has written a largely successful, interconnected history of a sort of Christianity called Zion, a transnational movement that has bequeathed southern Africa millions of adherents. On Johannesburg’s green strips, on Sunday mornings Zion-style groups still gather, sing, and baptize newer members by immersion in a muddy Jukskei creek.…
History (28 works) · Political science (17 works) · Sociology (15 works) · South African History and Culture (14 works) · Archaeology (12 works) · Art (12 works) · History (12 works) · Law (12 works) · African history and culture studies (11 works) · Politics (10 works)