This book has been long in the making. It began as a South African pendant to the works on Central Africa produced by Giacomo Macola, Iva Peša, and Pierre Kalenga, and others within the programme “From Muskets to Nokias: Technology, Consumption and Social Change in Central Africa from Pre-Colonial Times to the Present” funded by the Nederlands Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (nwo), to whom I am most grateful. The first draft of much of the work was written in Autumn 2010, when I spent a term as a Visiting Overseas Scholar at St. John’s College, Cambridge. I would like to thank the (late) Master and the Fellows of the College, in particular my sponsor, John Iliffe, for their hospitality, which made my stay both enjoyable and productive. For an ex-undergraduate and research student at the college, it did, on occasion, make me want to rewrite L.P. Hartley’s famous first sentence of The Go-Between as “The Present is another country: they do things differently there.”
In the early stages of this book, various versions of my ideas did the rounds as seminar papers presented at the Cambridge World History Seminar, Brown University, the London campus of Notre Dame University, and the Universities of Pretoria and Cape Town. I would like to thank the participants on these occasions for their valuable comments. Further, for various reasons, the manuscript has been seen by fewer people than would often be the case. Nevertheless, I would like to thank Anne Mager, Lynn Thomas, Jan-Bart Gewald, and Harry Wels for their extensive and constructive comments on various stages of the manuscript. I would also like to thank numerous librarians and archivists, and in particular the management and staff of the South African Audience Research Foundation for access to their material.
Above all, I want to thank Janneke Jansen for so many things, but in this context above all for the drive required to persuade me that I should take the final steps necessary to complete what I had begun.