Abstract:
A number of sources documenting the varied sexual relations between British
soldiers and Boer women are assessed in terms of the traditional historical
methodology of empirical evidence and logical inference. On this basis, the
facticity of most of these sources is accepted, while two are discounted by virtue
of provenance and internal evidence.
Next two further sources that are not amenable to this methodology are
interpreted using the postmodern deconstructive rejection of history as an
epistemology and Alun Munslow’s speculative expressionist history. However,
these anti-empirical strategies are ideologically determined and therefore
ethically questionable and the resultant relativity vitiates the historian’s craft. On
this basis, the historical status of these sources is rejected.
