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9780821426982 Academic Inspection Copy

Morafe

Person, Family, and Nation in Colonial Bechuanaland, 1880s-1950s
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In Morafe, Khumisho Moguerane has written a luminous exploration of two generations of the prominent Molema family. They were "border people" who straddled what would become present-day South Africa and Botswana. The book begins in the 1880s at the frontier of the new British territories of Bechuanaland (North West and Northern Cape provinces) and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana), where the political boundary between these two territories was negligible and where skin color did not yet necessarily connect with a particular social or political status or affect economic opportunity. Morafe ends in the 1950s, when the political boundary mattered profoundly, dividing two very different colonial dispensations of racial ordering and classification, and two separate traditions of nationalist politics. With this landmark publication, Moguerane reveals that "the nation" is less "out there," in public institutions and political struggles, and more "in here," in the everyday drama of personal and ordinary lives.
Khumisho Moguerane is a historian of European empire in southern Africa and a researcher at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is interested in everyday practice and the vernacular concepts that mediate it. Her analysis is an interdisciplinary endeavor, exploring how moral worlds shape the apprehension of self in everyday life to affect political identity.
"A magnificent achievement that changes much of what we think we know about southern African history." - Isabel Hofmeyr, author of Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House "Morafe is scholarly and fine-grained, yet written with brio and flair . . . there is nothing else like it!" - Paul S. Landau, author of Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries "This book is not only about the Molemas, or the history of Botswana and South Africa; it is also about the ways in which we become human and the stories we tell ourselves about that humanity, to prevent it from unravelling." - Tara Weinberg Kronos: Southern African Histories
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