From ‘Brother Boer’ to ‘Dirty Boers’: Colonizing the colonizers through the popular representations of the Boer in the British illustrated journal 1899–1902

Abstract

The Anglo-Boer War marks a fascinating intersection between two colonial powers and the use of the press and associated news-carrying popular cultural forms as a means of shaping public opinion and demonizing Britain’s ‘enemy’. The publication of photographs in magazines and the popular press via the halftone process was a very recent development and coincided with a propaganda campaign to denigrate the Boers as an uncivilized and brutal colonial power and to legitimize benevolent British interest in the territories. This article examines the use of the press, photographic,cinematic and dramatic cultural forms within this context, as well as the constructed colonial identity of the Boers in relation to that of the British. A key focus is the racial stereotyping and the representation of the enemy as ‘other’, a perpetual feature of a range of news-orientated texts and evidenced by the coverage

Keywords:

• Boer War
• news
• journalism
• otherness
• race
• colonialism