Browsing by Author "Van Heyningen, Elizabeth"

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    A tool for modernisation? The Boer concentration camps of the South African war 1900-1902
    (2010) Van Heyningen, Elizabeth
    While not denying the tragedy of the high mortality of people in the concentration camps in the South African War of 1899–1902, this article suggests that, for Lord Milner and the British Colonial Office, the camps became a means of introducing the rural society of the Boers to the facilities of modern life. To some extent they became, in effect, part of Milner’s project for ‘civilising’ and assimilating the Boers into British colonial society. The high mortality rate was finally contained through the introduction of a modern public health system, including the use of statistics and the employment of qualified doctors and nurses. Young Boer women working in the camp hospitals as nurse aids were trained as ‘probationers’ and classes in infant and child care were offered to the Boer mothers. In addition, the need for adequate water supplies and effective sanitation meant that an infrastructure was established in the camps that familiarised the Boers with modern sanitary routines and left a legacy of more substantial services for the Transvaal and Orange Free State villages.
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    The politics of water supply: the history of Cape Town's water supply 1840-1920
    (1991) Grant, Duncan; Van Heyningen, Elizabeth
    This dissertation examines the development of Cape Town's water supply between 1840 and 1920. The thesis examines the effect that the augmentation water supply had on municipal politics and the development of the municipality of Cape Town. It is argued that the high cost of water supply, arising out of Cape Town's geographic situation, had a major impact on its municipal government. In the nineteenth century the dominant class was divided between merchants who wanted water and the rentier classes who had to pay for it. In the subsequent political struggle for control of the municipality, the working class, which supported the rentier class were alienated. As a result, they resisted municipal improvement, delaying a solution to the water problem until the twentieth century. Chapter One examines the period from 1840 to 1900 where water supply was related to attempts to bring about municipal and sanitation reform. While this succeeded, by the late 1890's ratepayers reacted against excessive municipal spending, ultimately to the detriment of planned water schemes in the hinterland. Chapter Two argues that in the period between 1900 and 1910 businessmen attempted to link water supply to the unification of the municipalities of the Cape Peninsula. This resulted in a struggle between the city and the suburbs for over the control of the water resources of the hinterland. Chapter Three examines municipal unification in 1913 and the repercussions it had for water supply. The focus falls on a municipal referendum in 1917 in which the class divisions of half a century were a factor in the choice of a hinterland water scheme. The dissertation concludes that water is important for explaining class divisions in municipal politics. It is suggested that the impact of water on municipal history is not unique, but in Cape Town's experience it was prolonged and intense. A further conclusion is that it affected the process of municipal unification between 1902 and 1913, shaping the form of the modern city. A wide range of sources were used including municipal archive material and government reports and commissions. Newspapers and cartoons have been used extensively as they were instruments in the struggle for reform. Comparisons are drawn with the experience of overseas cities in an attempt to provide a coherent model for understanding the place of water supply in urban history. The dissertation represents an attempt to provide a better understanding of Cape Town's history during this period and therefore relates municipal history to wider political, economic and social changes taking place. It also complements recent histories on sanitation, race and municipal politics which fall in this period.
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    Public health and society in Cape Town, 1880-1910
    (1989) Van Heyningen, Elizabeth; Davey, Arthur
    This thesis is a contribution to the social history of medicine and to urban history. It attempts to examine the impact of public health reform on Cape Town society between 1880 and 1910. Accepting the argument that the control of disease is one of the means by which a dominant establishment may assert its authority and impose its ideology in a society, it contends that ideas about the organisation of society were transmitted from metropolitan Britain to the Cape Colony partly through the implementation of public health reform but that such notions became modified in the process. It concludes that health reform was one means by which imperial control was maintained in South Africa and a segregated society was implemented. The "sanitation syndrome" was more than a metaphor. It was a powerful agency for change because it was deeply embedded in the consciousness of Victorian society and provided a scientific rationalisation for the separation of the races and the assertion of white, British, dominance. Topics include the creation of a medical profession at the Cape; the effect of health panics caused by the smallpox epidemic of 1882 and the plague epidemic of 1901 on social relations in the city; the impact of the closure of the cemeteries and the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Acts on different communities in the city; the creation of bureaucracies in local and central government; and mortality in the early twentieth century.