In edited extracts from his book ‘Great Deaths’, Dr John Wolffe, Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at the Open University, describes the demonstrations of public grief and mourning following the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901.
Published in Review, July-December 2000.
In his lifetime, Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870–1950) was not only widely recognised as an exceptional scholar, soldier and scientist, but was also South Africa’s outstanding white statesman. For all his international achievements, however, he was incapable of anything but the rankest opportunism in relation to South Africa’s racial problems. In her Raleigh Lecture delivered on 2 November 2000, Professor Shula Marks FBA addressed this contradiction, ascribing his liberal internationalism at least in part to the influence of a group of remarkable radical and feminist women. In this extract, she considers the roots of Smuts’s powerful racial fears.