Nomboniso Gasa Remembers Jeff Guy

In a country and a world, where rigorous and principled academics are in short supply, the passing of Jeff Guy is a major blow. Despite the often repeated description of Jeff Guy as cantankerous, I never experienced or witnessed this side of him. I had limited interactions with Jeff. The man I met and often broke bread and chewed a curd with, was generous, tender, sensitive, astute, punctilious, open minded and incredibly funny.

Jeff Guy was a historian. He was also a Marxist. He was not dogmatic. His Marxism did not interfere with his academic precision (despite what his detractors said). This ability to be ideologically positioned and still maintain academic rigour fascinated me greatly.

Farewell to Jeff Guy, an extraordinary SA historian

Colin Bundy, Mail & Guardian

OBITUARY

Jeff Guy (1940 – 2014)

The historian Jeff Guy died on December 15, at Heathrow Airport, waiting to board a flight to return to his home in Durban. It was, writes a friend, “a very Jeff way to go – struck down in the stride of life, no doubt grumbling about long queues or poor service, but distracted by a new idea or line of inquiry”.

He had been in England for a few weeks, where he gave a lecture at a conference marking the bicentenary of the birth of Bishop John Colenso.  Several who saw him during the trip have remarked on his evident zest for life and intellectual vigour.

Mwelela Cele's Obituary for Jeff Guy

For Prof Jeff Guy

I received the news of Professor Jeff Guy’s passing while I was at another fountain of knowledge, the National English Literary Museum (NELM) in Grahamstown, doing work-related research about writers and poets of the Black Consciousness era, focusing specifically on those that left us this year, namely Mbulelo Mzamane, Mafika Gwala and Chris Van Wyk.

Book Launch: Jeff Guy's Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal

Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal: African Autonomy and Settler Colonialism in the Making of Traditional Authority is an account of the life of Theophilus Shepstone, Secretary for Native Affairs in the Colony of Natal from 1846 to 1876 and an examination of the nature of the concept of traditional authority in South Africa today.

Speakers: Keith Breckenridge and Jeff Guy

Tuesday, 1st October 2013 at  6pm in the WiSER Seminar Room, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus, Wits University

Refreshments will be served.  Please RSVP: Najibha.Deshmukh@wits.ac.za

A chief rules by people power

by Jeff Guy, Mail & Guardian

A central concept of precolonial society provides a key to the way forward in a modern democracy, writes Professor Jeff Guy.

The Traditional Courts Bill is now being debated with gratifying intensity by concerned South Africans. Those who support it argue that by recognising affordable, familiar legal processes in rural areas it brings African beliefs and practices within the bounds of the Constitution.

The Maphumulo Uprising: War, Law And Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion

by Jeff Guy

The Maphumulo Uprising: War, Law and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2005. ISBN 978-1-86914-048-9.

Reviewed by Bradley Skelcher (College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Delaware State University)

Published on H-SAfrica (August, 2007)

Shortly after his release from prison in February 1990, Nelson Mandela delivered a speech in Durban about apartheid in Natal. In the speech, he made reference to a protest against a poll tax in 1906 called the Bhambatha Rebellion. "The Zulu people, led by Chief Bhambatha [kaMancinza], refused to bow their proud heads and a powerful spirit of resistance developed, which, like the battle of Isandlwana, inspired generations of South Africans."[1]