Justin Pearce
@justinpearce.bsky.social
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Justin-Pearce-5 Historian of 20th century Southern Africa especially Angola Senior lecturer, Stellenbosch Uni @stellhistory.bsky.social Senior editor, Journal of Southern African Studies @jsas-journal.bsky.social Vegan
Interesting retake on the famous Anna Karenina aphorism. 'Unhappy families tend to spin conflicting narratives, and there would probably be no literature without them.' www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern
Her vitally urgent translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey strip away the “tarnish of centuries.”
newyorker.com
The fact that there is nothing about RW Johnson on Bluesky and lots on Twitter tells you quite a lot about the difference between 'liberal' as understood in SA and in USA. (Even funnier, 'RW Johnson' in bsky search brings up skeets with RW meaning 'right wing' + various Johnsons including Boris.)
📢 New Article! Do extractive mega-projects create development or deepen inequality? Mattioli compares mining in Tete & LNG development in Cabo Delgado, showing how communities experienced dispossession, organised resistance & challenged extractivist development www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Best conference ever? #Zimbabwe & Zimbabweans have such a central place in Southern African historiography that having #SAHS in Harare was a necessary acknowledgement of that. Wonderful finally to meet so many people, mostly Zimbabwean, whom I've worked with virtually but never met in person. 1/5
Justin Pearce@justinpearce.bsky.social · last mo.Only in Zimbabwe do you see trees this colour. In Harare with the rest of the delegation from Stellenbosch to #SAHS2026
Only in Zimbabwe do you see trees this colour. In Harare with the rest of the delegation from Stellenbosch to #SAHS2026
Having just returned to the Democratic Republic of Xenophobia after a wonderful few days in which I was warmly welcomed as a South African in Zimbabwe, it was particularly galling to see this.
GroundUp News@groundup.org.za · last mo.Hundreds of people waiting outside the Zimbabwean Consulate in Cape Town faced a cold night on Saturday. Read groundup.org.za/article/zimb... by Matthew Hirsch
Only in Zimbabwe do you see trees this colour. In Harare with the rest of the delegation from Stellenbosch to #SAHS2026
Hope Czechs appreciate being the new lodestar of Pan Africanism but I doubt it. A country that has foresworn its past of socialist anticolonial solidarity and snuggles in the embrace of Fortress Europe. But hey, are we any better?
Justin Pearce@justinpearce.bsky.social · 2mo agoSorrowful to see Africans supporting Czechia against South Africa today but can totally understand why.
Sorrowful to see Africans supporting Czechia against South Africa today but can totally understand why.
Is your child up at 9pm arguing about tram networks with the entire staff of the FT and some tedious Americans who are not familiar with the concept of a joke? This report make shock you.
David Higham@oldtrotter.bsky.social · 2mo agoEverything's a conspiracy
Our Special Issue of @jsas-journal.bsky.social 'Liberation Armies' Imagined Futures in Southern Africa' is now out. We focus on military institutions formed by liberation struggles & remade in independent states as sites of political, social & cultural production. www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjss20/5...
Journal of Southern African Studies
Liberation Armies' Imagined Futures in South Africa. Volume 51, Issue 6 of Journal of Southern African Studies
tandfonline.com
My vanishingly few South African followers will share my amusement here. Naughty Helen.
Connections Puzzle #1081 🟩🟨🟪🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨🟨🟨🟨 First guess had four different colours. Thereafter a reverse rainbow.
Even cynical I was starting to be moved by the love-fest around Jason Vanporppal. Then I learnt that his two Ugandan companions were denied entry to South Africa. Apparently we suspend our xenophobia for those who bear first-world passports and are not too dark of complexion.
To the small Venn diagram of people who follow both South African & UK politics - is anyone else seeing an uncanny resemblance between Wes Streeting & Geordin Hill-Lewis?
This describes the UK prime minister as 'a man without convictions'. So of course anyone my age is now going to hear 'Starmer Starmer Starmer Starmer Starmer chameleon...' www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Britain’s visceral dislike of Keir Starmer illuminates a problem for his successor | Samuel Earle
There are many good reasons to not like the prime minister. But ours is an age in which hatred is a remarkably popular currency – leaders need a strategy for countering it, says author Samuel Earle
theguardian.com
Allowing myself a moment of nostalgia for the 2010s internet. Doge Weather (and everything Doge). Feminist Ryan Gosling. Strindberg and Helium. What do you miss?
Read the new #OA article by João Vicente Melo on the early colonial elites of #Luanda. #CentralAfrica #AtlanticWorld #Angola #Portugal #Eurafricans #microhistory cup.org/4naBY4L
Exactly a decade after my last contribution to @currenthistory1.bsky.social, I have a new article on how both the habits of ruling parties & the possibilities for opposition in #Angola & #Mozambique are constrained by history 50 years after independence. (Paywalled: I can share a copy on request.)
Current History@currenthistory1.bsky.social · 3mo agoOur annual Africa issue is out! With Patrick Desplat on Madagascar’s Gen Z uprising, @moseskhisa.bsky.social on Uganda’s autocratic drift, Basile Ndjio on LGBT+ exclusion in Cameroon, @justinpearce.bsky.social on 50 years of strife in Angola and Mozambique… online.ucpress.edu/currenthisto...
In a country where just three years ago we were getting by with six hours of power outages a day. On a planet that we have all but roasted to death already. We do not need data centres. www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026...
New data centres set to swallow 34% of Cape Town’s current electricity supply
Four new major data centres are set to gobble up the equivalent of 34% of current electricity supply in Cape Town and unknown volumes of cooling water, raising questions about the sustainability of po...
dailymaverick.co.za
📢 New Article! What happens when liberation movements fight in someone else’s war? @justinpearce.bsky.social examines MK’s time in Angola, showing how tensions with FAPLA & competing political visions shaped their alliance and contributed to the 1983–84 mutiny. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
In much of the UK press the analysis of central & eastern European politics goes no further than 'pro-Soviet' = bad guys / 'pro-Western' = good guys. Listen out for the sound of heads exploding. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...
JD Vance claims US is not interfering in Hungary election
US vice-president says on visit to Budapest ‘we had to show’ support for Viktor Orbán, as opposition leads polls
theguardian.com
New article connects Angolan & South African Cold War historiographies, examining the incompatible views of malcontent MPLA & ANC troops who fought on the same side during ANC exile in Angola, particularly on the question of whether UNITA were compatriots or foes. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
‘In my territory you have to do something’: MK, FAPLA and the War against UNITA
Camps in Angola were crucial training grounds for the South African liberation army Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) from the late 1970s and through the 1980s, a period when the Angolan state army, FAPLA (Po...
tandfonline.com
I may just have coined a new derogatory political epithet, 'thinktanky'. Cf 'thinktanks on their lawn'.
Justin Pearce@justinpearce.bsky.social · 4mo agoLate 80s / early 90s there was enthusiasm among a certain thinktanky kind of white South African for a future canton based democracy. Cantons would be highly devolved & bore more than a passing resemblance to bantustans & group areas. One proponent was the Federal Party, later merged into the DA.
Bluesky this weekend has been full of supposedly left-wing Americans celebrating someone for having willingly fought in an imperialist war.
