THROUGH THE TURNSTILES OF THE MIND - Volume 2/Three Wise Monkeys

by Charles van Onselen

Three Wise Monkeys presents a startling new way of viewing the entangled, often hidden, economic, political and social dynamics that informed the rise of 20th-century South Africa, often at the expense of neighbouring Mozambique. It is history that transcends state boundaries to take the reader into previously uncharted domains of the recent past. This 3-volume work was published as a box set but is also available as individual volumes. Volume 2, 'Through the Turnstiles of the Mind', explores Catholic Mozambique's role in the leisure economy of Protestant South Africa, as a place where bachelor miners and Randlords alike could project their fantasies of subtropical exotica, whether in the raucous bars and brothels of the port or in the development of the upmarket Polana Hotel and the vision of segregated 'tourist zones' for increasingly race-conscious Rand holidaymakers. Mozambique's liminal place in the leisure and entertainment universe was nowhere better represented than in the rise and eventual fall of Lourenço Marques Radio. For decades, LM Radio beamed the hit songs of the day, and a certain vision of post-war modernity, to white South Africans increasingly in thrall to the stifling rule of Calvinist churches, the National Party and the Broederbond-dominated SABC. The eventual triumph of the SABC in muzzling LM Radio was a foretaste of the administrative and police state that came to imprison South African minds during the 1960s and 1970s.

202 pages, Paperback

Published March 28, 2023

About the author

Charles van Onselen was educated at the Universities of Rhodes and Oxford. He has written extensively on 19th and 20th century South Africa. In 1983, his work on the social and economic history of the Witwatersrand won the Trevor Reese Memorial Prize for outstanding achievement in Commonwealth and Imperial history.

He is a well-known critic of Afrikaner nationalism whose earlier works include Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1914 and The Small Matter of a Horse: the Life of Nongoloza Mathebula, 1869-1948 and New Babylon, New Nineveh. In 1995, his biography of the life and times of Kas Maine, a black sharecropper, The Seed is Mine, won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction.

In 2012 he was Research Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria.

Reviews

[Ed Stoddard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply superb. Stay tuned for my review in the Daily Maverick ... And here it is:
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/artic...