Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa, 1890-1899

Reconsiderations in Southern African History

by Charles van Onselen

For two decades before a railway system linked southern Africa’s principal cities in the mid-1890’s, the world’s richest supplies of diamonds and gold were transported by coach and horses to distant ports for export. For Irish soldiers based at Fort Napier, Pietermaritzburg, the temptation of this fabulous wealth proved irresistible: they deserted by the score and, as members of the ciminal ‘Irish Brigade’, embarked on a spree of bank, safe and highway robberies.

Masked Raiders follows the wild exploits of legendary brigands like the McKeone brothers and ‘One Armed Jack’ McLoughlin, who ravaged the subcontinent, from the mining towns of Barberton, Kimberley and Johannesburg, to the borders of Basotholand, Bechuanaland, Mozambique and Rhodesia. With tales of heists, safe-cracking, illegal gold dealings, prison breaks and hidden roadside treasure, the book reveals the potency of the highveld’s ‘criminal heroes’. Startling insights also reveal how the hidden grammar of brigandage informed political actions of the day, such as the Jameson Raid, and how the movement of bandits across the interior helped shape the borders of what was to become modern South Africa.

Genres: History, South Africa, Southern Africa, Nonfiction

264 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2010

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]

Van Onselen never disappoints. In the gripping account of Irish bandits in Southern Africa in the late 19th century, Van Onselen does what he does best: he brings the insights of social history to life with the artful prose of a narrative historian.
For this reader/reviewer, one of the many things that stuck me was how the current scourge of illegal mining and outright theft of gold has a deep vein of history that reaches straight back to the South African mining industry's origin story. The exploitative migrant labour system was itself in many ways a criminal enterprise and gold has long been a magnet to criminals of various stripes.
Van Onselen speculates that Sinn Fein founder Arthur Griffith may have funded his journalistic endeavours from the proceeds of gold amalgam stolen while he was working on the mines of the Witwatersrand.
Van Onselen also uses the prism of Irish banditry to cast new light on the Jameson Raid of 1895.
"... instead of viewing it as an attempted coup d'état led by a mine owner with imperialist ambitions, we see it as but a bungled bandit raid orchestrated by an adventurous frontiersman?"
"The criminal, the unemployed and the workers showed the capitalists the way; the miner owners were the followers, not the leaders, of popular discontent."
This study also examines how rural traditions confronted a rapidly industrialising economy in a multi-racial setting and explores the myths and reality of the social bandit as hero, drawing on the insights of the great EJ Hobsbawm.
The transition from the "horse economy" to the iron one of the railway forms the backdrop, and is an interesting perspective at a time when animal history has become an exciting arm of historiography.
A fine example of the historian's craft.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but I didn't think it was as good as his previous books