BOOK REVIEW: Historian finds nugget of gold in dig for truth behind Jameson Raid
Charles van Onselen, research professor at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, spends much of his time obsessing. "A few of the better ‘answers’ to my book-writing problems have come to me during the wee hours of morning — long after tired listeners have left the building and History and Insomnia are left to dance away what is left of the night," he says. The author of seven previous works, he is a pre-eminent authority on the social history of the Witwatersrand at about the time of the discovery of gold in the late 19th century. His fixation has paid off in his new book, The Cowboy Capitalist. During a recent academic fellowship at Harvard, he stumbled upon a reference to a "vigilance committee" in San Francisco during the 1850s California gold rush and remembered reading of a committee of that name in Johannesburg in 1895. Unsatisfied with the apparent coincidence, he pondered other possible connections between the American and Transvaal fr...
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