A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo

Abstract

clarify many of the Dutch terms and place names Graham uses), maps and a bibliography. The editors’ comprehensive “Introduction” provides detailed bibliographic details about the author, and contextualizes the issues of race, gender and “education that was fundamental to colonial rule” in Africa (xxv). Graham’s work is an important addition to writing by colonial women who were vocal and active during the war, and who used the plight of the Boer women to advance their careers and foreground their own feminist agendas. These women included Flora Shaw, the first colonial editor of The Times in London; Millicent Fawcett, a British aristocrat and advocate for women’s rights, who equated the Boer women’s incarceration with necessary British military policy; Emily Hobhouse, who collected stories from (mainly middle-class) Boer women to raise sympathy for their living conditions; and Florence Randal of Ottawa, another Canadian teacher, who published monthly columns of her time in South Africa in the Ottawa Journal. The research on these women is a testament to the important recuperative historical work taking place, recovering often overlooked women’s narratives in imperial histories, to reveal the ambiguities of their benevolent work for Empire and their complicity in the spread of hegemonic whiteness at the dawn of the twentieth century.