11/05/2026
Our next department seminar
Litigating Evidence of Frontier Violence: Libel Law and Public Men in Colonial South Africa and New Zealand
Chris Holdridge (North-West University)
This paper focuses on bodies of evidence in two libel trials in the British Empire. In 1879, Attorney-General Thomas Upington sued the Cape Argus, which alleged he undermined justice around the Koegas massacres of Korana and San men, women, and children when he moved two murder trials from the Cape Supreme Court to the Circuit Court, Victoria West. Both juries acquitted the white murder accused, while surviving ‘prisoner-of-war’ women and children were controversially apprenticed as domestic and farm labourers. In Bryce v Rusden (1886) before the Queen’s Bench, London, former Minister of Native Affairs John Bryce sued historian George Rusden over passages in his History of New Zealand (1883) that he murdered Māori women and young boys when serving in 1868 during Titokowaru’s War. Rusden’s publisher Chapman & Hall withdrew the book from circulation before the trial. Both trials found for the plaintiff: a mere £5 damages for Upington; and £5,000 for Bryce, which was financially ruinous for Rusden. Confined within national historiographies, historians rarely position such libel cases within imperial questions of press censorship, and global and local circulation of information, secret or published, including the selection and silences around what information mattered. As causes célèbres, they reveal how public opinion and Victorian jurisprudence articulated truth and justice through affect (manly reputation and humanitarian concern) and colonial power through the rule of law. As libel trials balanced fair comment and public benefit with the right to reputation, courts examined the truth of published accusations against public men. This included extensive evidence not only in official blue-books, but also witness depositions from settlers, Māori, Korana, and San; anonymous private letters by whistleblowers including missionaries, former governors, court interpreters, and judges, including the unmasking of whistleblower identity; and, remarkably, human remains of Indigenous victims. When read together, these libel trials not only reveal how public men used nineteenth-century law to shape colonial societies, but are also archives of colonial violence relevant to present conversations around truth, justice, and colonial pasts.
Time: May 12, 2026 04:00 PM Harare, Pretoria
Venue: History Department Common Room, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park Campus
Or, Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/92647069201
For the paper write to sjwsparks @ uj.ac.za
