No abstract

Although there has been a continuous Irish presence at the Cape of Good Hope since the late eighteenth century, the chroniclers of the Irish diaspora have until the late 1980s ignored the continent of Africa. This was in part because relatively few Irish migrants ventured to Africa, but it is also the consequence of two other factors. The vast majority of Irish immigrants to Africa in the nineteenth century went to South Africa, a region which, with some exceptions, has been academically isolated for a generation. Then within South Africa there is much still to be learnt about the nature of English-speaking society in the region. While the meticulous analysis of black and Afrikaner history and society, and of related economic history, has dominated South African historiography for some two decades, professional academics have too often left the field of South African English-speaking studies to the amateur historian and the antiquarian. Thus what in Canada or Australia would be regarded as mainline historical research has in South Africa been sidelined in the name of historical relevancy. In fact an analysis of Irish settlement in southern Africa fills an important gap in the general survey of Irish emigration to the empire and reveals a pattern of Irish settlement very different from other regions of Irish migration.

L'Irlandais-Australien Arthur Lynch travaillait comme journaliste à Paris lorsqu'éclata la guerre des Boers (1899-1902). Cet article retrace son voyage à la République du Transvaal, sa brève mais néanmoins dramatique expérience comme chef d'un commando irlandais, son arrestation ultérieure en Angleterre et son procès pour haute trahison. L'article apporte de nombreuses précisions récoltées dans des archives des commandos récemment découvertes ainsi que dans les souvenirs français de Lynch peu connus.

In the 1850s Robert William Plant collected plants and other natural specimens in what is now KwaZulu-Natal. This one-time Englishman compiled a dictionary for gardeners before emigrating to Natal in 1850. There he worked as the agent for Samuel Stevens, the London dealer in 'curiosities of natural history'. Though Plant collected mainly plants, he also sent consignments of beetles, butterflies, bird skins and shells back to Britain. He published the first scientific paper on Zululand and was requested by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to write the first Flora natalensis. It was while collecting for this never-to-be-completed treatise that Plant contracted malaria in Maputaland. He died in St Lucia in 1858 and in doing so became South Africa's martyr to botany. What emerges from this study is a picture of the difficulties faced by plant hunters in mid-19th-century South Africa, the sort of plants they collected and the necessity for them sometimes to diversify into other natural history products to survive.

This paper looks at the fate of an Anglo-Irish officer in the British army during the AngloBoer War (1899-1902. Having noted the extent to which the Irish were represented in the British army, the paper tracks the career of Major-General Sir John Ardagh, director of British Military Intelligence during the greatest of Britain's imperial wars. The paper examines the way in which the British establishment used Ardagh as a scapegoat for the early reverses in the war, and how the later disclosure of evidence vindicated Ardagh, but effectively ended his career.Keywords: Irish soldiers, Military Intelligence, Anglo-Boer War. -boer (1899-1902 Résumé Cet article interroge le sort d'un officier anglo-irlandais dans l'armée britannique lors de la guerre anglo