Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Hardcover)

Nineteenth-century Cape Town, the capital of the British Cape Colony, was conventionally regarded as a liberal oasis in an otherwise racist South Africa. Longstanding British influence was thought to mitigate the racism of the Dutch settlers and foster the development of a sophisticated and colour-blind English merchant class. Vivian Bickford-Smith interweaves political, economic and social analysis to show that the English merchant class, far from being liberal, were generally as racist as Afrikaner farmers. Theirs was, however, a peculiarly English discourse of race, mobilized around a Clean Party obsessed with sanitation and the dangers posed by un-English Capetonians in a period of rapid urbanization brought about by the discovery of diamonds and gold in the interior. This study in the social history of South Africa draws on comparative material from other colonial port towns and on relevant studies of the Victorian city to provide a valuable urban history of South Africa.