Irish settlement and identity in South Africa before 1910

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.

Murder in a quarry: violent encounters and distant intimacy on a Cape convict station

“…Introducing Irish criminals on the eastern Cape frontier, London's Morning Herald cautioned in 1849, might result in lessons taught to the amaXhosa 'tribes in the use of vitriol and broken glass'. 6 Similar attitudes around the social dangers of the Irish to the rule of law existed across the colony (McCracken 1992) and as part of trans-oceanic discourses of crime and social disorder in a port city such as Cape Town, a crossroads for ships bound for India or Australasia. Alongside former slaves, indigenous Khoisan, and black Africans from the eastern Cape, immigrants and sojourners entered the colonial fray, among them O'Brien, with many in search of economic opportunities beyond the rural poverty or urban squalor of Britain and Ireland.…”

Evading National Identity: On Translocal Irish Folk Music in Austria

“…In so doing, they avail of the relative geographical proximity of their Austrian musical home communities to the Irish authenticating centre (a flight from Vienna to Dublin takes about two-and-a-half hours), of course, always on the proviso of having sufficient economic capital at their disposal to embark upon these visits. Thus, while offering the caveat that sideways-nostalgic gazes upon Ireland appear to be rather widespread across the Irish diaspora in America (Dillane 2013), Australia (O’Shea 2013), and South Africa (McCracken 1992), where Irish-music practitioners might not have the opportunity to easily relocate physically to the music’s place of origin, my (predominantly middle-class) Austrian interlocutors frequently avail of their geographical proximity to repositories of Irishness and cultural capital. As fiddle player Nike Bielau explains:At workshops in Austria, I focus on learning ornamentation.… A lot of instrumental pieces are technically demanding, but at fast tempo, they should still sound effortless.… Part of the reason why I’m now studying Irish traditional music at the University of Limerick is the urge to visit the source of this music that I have been playing my whole life.…”

Eveline, Elsie, and the politics of paralysis: Echoes of Dubliners in Zoë Wicomb’s “Nothing Like the Wind”

“…Even though Wicomb’s texts and intertexts increasingly deal with the connection South Africa–Scotland, a discussion of a Joycean intertext in The One That Got Away may instead foreground political and aesthetical links between South Africa and Ireland. Between 1896 and 1899, several Irish activists slipped into the Transvaal Republic to fight alongside the Boers in the Second Anglo-Boer War (McCracken, 1992: 147). For them, South Africa was the only place in the English-speaking world where white nationalists were effectively fighting the British Empire (McCracken, 1992: 146).…”

“…Between 1896 and 1899, several Irish activists slipped into the Transvaal Republic to fight alongside the Boers in the Second Anglo-Boer War (McCracken, 1992: 147). For them, South Africa was the only place in the English-speaking world where white nationalists were effectively fighting the British Empire (McCracken, 1992: 146). Joyce himself was well informed on the struggle between British and Boers in South Africa, to the point that this interest is reflected in his fiction: the Irish writer makes direct reference to South African events in 11 of the 18 episodes in Ulysses (Temple-Thurston, 1990: 249).…”