Recent debates on decolonisation of the curriculum at South African universities have yet to cause much of a ripple in South African historiography, despite a wide range of conceptualisations that would benefit from revision. One of these is the concept of the frontier. Notions of a frontier derived directly and indirectly from the writings of Frederick Jackson Tur...

The emergence of scientific racism and the taking of heads and skulls in the nineteenth-century colonial wars in Southern Africa have received limited attention from historians. Closer examination of head-taking in colonial wars fought in the western parts of Xhosaland and the Cape Colony suggests that the rise of scientific racism alone does not explain the comple...