Mager, Anne Kelk

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Mager, Anne Kelk

PERSONAL:

Education: University of Cape Town, B.A., Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Professor and writer. University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, associate professor of history.

WRITINGS:

Gender and the Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the Ciskei, 1945-1959, Heinemann (Portsmouth, NH), 1999.

SIDELIGHTS:

Anne Kelk Mager's research interests include the study of gender in the twentieth century, specifically how gender is perceived in and changes the perspective of history. Her first book, titled Gender and the Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the Ciskei, 1945-1959, takes a look at a territory of South Africa that attempted to become self-governing in the mid-twentieth century. Mager's book focuses on the years preceding this event and including the Ciskei's incorporation as a "bantustan," or region reserved for black South Africans under apartheid. In the Journal of African History, Les Switzer remarked: "Mager has succeeded in opening up a new landscape for future scholars to map in reading the history of the Ciskei region…. Gender relations are rarely mentioned in narratives of South African history, and Mager has done an outstanding job of reading these silences of the past into the record and deconstructing the problematic use of this ‘other’ in the history of the Ciskei." Africa contributor Julia Wells commented that "anyone who has ever searched for the socio-historical roots of South Africa's problems of crime and the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS will find this book enlightening…. Her [Mager's] work asks vital questions and brilliantly reminds us of what we still need to know." In a review for the English Historical Review, Jennifer Robinson wrote: "Bringing into social history a distinctive concern with spatiality and geography—a concern which the South African landscape and fractured pasts cry out for—this work carves a truly original interpretative path as it tackles some under-researched historical topics."