Three Wise Monkeys – Charles Van Onselen

Condition : Very Good.
First Edition, Jonathan Ball Publishers, March 2023, Large-format Paperback Box-set. ISBN 9781776192502. AS NEW.

In some settings, such as Ireland, contiguous Catholic and Protestant states are often not conducive to good relations or neighbourliness. In colonial and imperial southern Africa, formal inter-state arrangements took place at the expense of a third party – subjected African peoples.

Three Wise Monkeys explores some of the contradictions, silences and oversights, and working misunderstandings that arise when an emerging Anglophone, Protestant, industrial and urbanising state – South Africa – develops side by side with Mozambique – a Lusophone, Catholic, commercial, rural colony.

In three volumes, Charles van Onselen examines the intertwined relations between South Africa and Portugal’s chronically weak east coast colony, as expressed through the migrant labour system, the tourist trade, the rise and fall of LM Radio and the extraordinary tale of the Lourenço Marques Lottery. These areas constituted zones of cross-cultural, transnational interaction that both states were reluctant to acknowledge formally, choosing instead to ‘see no evil, speak no evil and hear no evil’ for much of the 20th century.

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.

The volumes are:
Volume 1: The Makings Of An African Economic Tragedy – Mozambique, circa 1500-1960
Volume 2: Through The Turnstiles Of The Mind – White South Africans and the Freedoms Of Mozambique, circa 194-1975
Volume 3: The Quest For Wealth Without Work – The Lourenco Marques Lottery, Protestant Panics and the South African White Working Classes , circa 1890-1965

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