Background
Charles van Onselen was born on August 14, 1944 in Boksburg, Gauteng, South Africa. His father was a police detective.
Rhodes University, Drosty Rd, Grahamstown, 6139, South Africa
Charles van Onselen attended Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa between 1962 and 1964, and received from it his Bachelor of Science in Psychology. In 1965 he earned his University Education Diploma (U.E.D.) from Rhodes University.
2014
Charles van Onselen talks about some of the plot in his Showdown at the Red Lion book, on March 11, 2014.
2017
Lynnwood Rd, Hatfield, Pretoria, 0002, South Africa
Professor Van Onselen delivering his acceptance speech to the Human Sciences Research Council.
2017
Lynnwood Rd, Hatfield, Pretoria, 0002, South Africa
Professor van Onselen Awarded with 2nd Annual HSRC Medal in Pretoria.
Rhodes University, Drosty Rd, Grahamstown, 6139, South Africa
Charles van Onselen attended Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa between 1962 and 1964, and received from it his Bachelor of Science in Psychology. In 1965 he earned his University Education Diploma (U.E.D.) from Rhodes University.
1 Jan Smuts Ave, Johannesburg, 2000, South Africa
Charles van Onselen attended the University of Witwatersrand in 1969-1970 and received his Bachelor of Arts (with honors), majoring in Political Science in the field of Comparative African Government.
62 Woodstock Rd, Oxford OX2 6JF, UK
Van Onselen attended St. Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1972-1974 and earned his Ph.D. in 1974.
(Recounts the life of an African sharecropper who struggle...)
Recounts the life of an African sharecropper who struggled to support his family in a world arranged to enrich whites and impoverish Blacks
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080909603X/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(Masked Raiders follows the wild exploits of legendary bri...)
Masked Raiders follows the wild exploits of legendary brigands like the McKeone brothers and ‘One-Armed Jack’ McLaughlin, who ravaged the subcontinent, from the mining towns of Barberton, Kimberley and Johannesburg to the borders of Basotholand, Bechuanaland, Mozambique and Rhodesia.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1770220801/?tag=2022091-20
2010
educator historian researcher author
Charles van Onselen was born on August 14, 1944 in Boksburg, Gauteng, South Africa. His father was a police detective.
Charles van Onselen attended Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa between 1962 and 1964, and received from it his Bachelor of Science in Psychology. In 1965 he earned his University Education Diploma (U.E.D.) from Rhodes University.
Charles van Onselen then attended the University of Witwatersrand in 1969-1970 and received his Bachelor of Arts (with honors), majoring in Political Science in the field of Comparative African Government.
Van Onselen attended St. Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1972-1974 and earned his Ph.D. in 1974. His doctoral thesis was "African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900-1933", supervised by Dr. S. Trapido, a university lecturer.
Charles van Onselen was a junior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London and then became a research officer at the International Labour Office, Geneva, Switzerland.
From 1976 to 1979 he was a Ford Foundation research fellow at the Centre for International and Area Studies, University of London. Charles van Onselen was a visiting fellow at Yale University, New Haven, in fall, 1978.
Charles van Onselen was formerly employed at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he had headed the Institute of Advanced Social Research since 1979. He has also worked as an ore-setter in the Free State goldfields.
One of his most notable published works is "The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985" (Oxford: James Currey, 1996). The book was described as a 'detailed and compelling history of the effect of South Africa's Land Laws on one man and his family'.
He is also well known in academic circles for his two-volume pioneering social and economic history of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century "Witwatersrand: New Babylon New Nineveh: Everyday life on the Witwatersand 1886-1914". Van Onselen wrote "Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of 'Nongoloza' Mathebula, 1867-1948" (Ravan Press, 1984). The story of Nongoloza has further repercussions in the South African prison gang legends as described in the excellent "The Number" by Jonny Steinberg.
His work "The Fox and the Flies" is published by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Random House. "The Fox and the Flies" provides a social, political, and economic history of the Trans-Atlantic underworld from about 1890 until 1918, the year Joseph Silver was executed by the Austro-Hungarian military. The book tracks the life of Joseph Silver, whom van Onselen speculates could have been Jack the Ripper.
His most recent work is "Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa 1880-1899" (Cape Town, 2010).
Charles van Onselen now resides in Johannesburg. He is currently a research professor of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria since 1999.
(Masked Raiders follows the wild exploits of legendary bri...)
2010(Recounts the life of an African sharecropper who struggle...)
1996Charles van Onselen is a well-known critic of Afrikaner nationalism.
Professor van Onselen is currently examining ways in which Irish and other working class males - shaped in Manchester at the height of the Industrial Revolution, in the mid-19th century - came to extend their criminal networks into the Indian Ocean basin in the 1880s and 1890s. As marginalized adult men, these Mancunians pursued the unfolding mining frontiers of Australasia and southern Africa, assuming some of the characteristics attributed to "social bandits". He hopes to illustrate some of the underlying social dynamics linking the northern and southern industrial revolutions by way of an illustrative biography.
In 1998 Charles van Onselen was elected a member of the Royal Society of South Africa and, in 2012, invited to be the inaugural Oppenheimer Fellow in the W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Studies at Harvard University.