Jingoes 
R.W. Johnson
- The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War by Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw
This book begins with real passion as Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw lash into those historians who they believe have made unwarranted assumptions about the links between Britain and South Africa: to wit, that Britain fought the Boer War to get its hands on the gold and that economic considerations remained the motivating force in its difficult relationship with South Africa thereafter. Early on, they single out their adversaries as, pre-eminently, Shula Marks, Geoff Berridge and Jack Spence. ‘For some scholars, no doubt, archival work is logistically too difficult or temperamentally uncongenial. Such must survive by their theorising, and hope to invent a concept which catches on. But history is too important to be left to the stay-at-home theorisers.’
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R.W. Johnson, an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, lives in Cape Town, where he is completing a book on South Africa since the advent of democracy.
Other articles by this contributor:
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
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