Southern Journal for Contemporary History

Fourie, Ruhan. Christian Nationalism and Anticommunism in Twentieth Century South Africa. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2024. ISBN: 9781003413257.

Augusta Dell’Omo — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

As a historian of the American and South African far-right, I eagerly picked up Ruhan Fourie’s monograph, Christian Nationalism and Anticommunism in Twentieth Century South Africa. Fourie’s investigation of the significant role of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in the anticommunist imaginings of Afrikaners is timely for those interested in the contemporary rise of global white populism. As scholars call for greater intellectual engagement with “Christian Nationalism,” Fourie’s work is essential reading, as the concept of “Christian Nationalism” remains dominated by American analyses. Fourie offers critical explanatory power to the DRC’s post-2000s debates around “liberalism,” which he grounds in the “echoes” of the [anticommunist] past (p. 209).

Roos, Neil. Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society: Social Histories of Accommodation. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781776148905

Ruhan Fourie — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

In 2015, I, then a history honours student, attended a department seminar by Professor Neil Roos. With the Fallist movement and calls for decolonisation hitting South African university campuses, his appeal for new avenues of investigation into the everyday life of white South Africans under apartheid struck a chord, not only academically but personally. Growing up as a white South African who was semi-born free in a lower middle-class household, I knew all too well how ordinary whites remember apartheid in a new dispensation. Stability and normalcy are often lauded in white speak of the past. The euphemistic “good old days” of apartheid were fondly remembered as stable and normal. Ordinary.

Badat, Saleem. Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice: The first non-racial international tennis tour, 1971. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781869145149

Sebastian Potgieter — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Saleem Badat’s Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice: The first non-racial international tennis tour, 1971, tells the stories of Jasmat and Hiralal Dhiraj, Alwyn Solomon, Oscar Woodman, Hoosen Bobat and Cavan Bergman, who undertook apartheid South Africa’s first (and only) non-racial international tennis tour in 1971. Nicknamed the ‘Dhiraj Squad’ after Jasmat Dhiraj, arguably amongst the preeminent South African tennis players of the time, the squad represented the non-racial Southern Africa Lawn Tennis Union (SnALTU); an affiliate of the non-racial South African Council on Sport (SACOS), widely regarded as the sporting-wing of the anti-apartheid movement.