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Rykie van Reenen, Emily Hobhouse Boer War Letters (Human and Rousseau, Cape Town, 1999), 580 pp., 8120, ISBN-07981-3928-5.
Emily Hobhouse ( 1860-1926) has not suffered the usual fate of sacred cows - to be worshipped as long as she yields and then to be butchered. She remains a heroine with no detractors and few contextualised analyses. In fact, she was in danger of being swallowed up by her own legend. This anthology of letters saves her from mythography and returns her to a mortal, and therefore more interesting, form.
Rykie Van Reenen began her first book on Hobhouse, a biography Heldin uit die Vreemde (first published in 1970, re-released in 1999) with a question: This Emily Hobhouse, who was she? This book allows Hobhouse herself to answer. She noted that `the greater part of [her life] has been spent in silence ... [Her] pen was her tongue' (p. 7). And she speaks to us of her own decision, after 35 quiet years living at home with her parents, to see for herself what conditions in the concentration camps were like and her quest to try to ameliorate those conditions. The letters describe her civilian experience of the war in South Africa and her role in the broken former Boer republics after the war, as she tried to set up home industries for Afrikaners to facilitate rehabilitation and reconciliation. It is a timely re-release of the book for South Africa: the letters depict a nation rent apart with political factions, and struggling to rebuild itself after an unnecessary war.
At the appeal of her...