From Dolly Gray to Sarie Marais: The Boer War in Popular Memory

During the twentieth century, popular opinion about the Boer War underwent a fascinating and telling metamorphosis From Dolly Gray to Sarie Marais gives recognition to a largely unacknowledged but substantial body of popular historical writing over a period of one hundred years that reflects hopes, fears, perceptions and prejudices and memories of ordinary people: popular memory in fiction. The writing about the Boer War in the popular press and fiction provides vivid insights into what ordinary people thought and felt (or were supposed to have thought or felt) about the Anglo-Boer conflict. But more than that, popular culture often gives vivid and interesting insights into the contemporary concerns of writers and their readers of a particular era. In this respect it often maps interesting historical and ideological changes in the South African experience from imperialism through union to the Apartheid era.