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The purpose of this paper is to examine how the actions of the accounting profession, the state, universities, and academics have inhibited the development of South African accounting research.

A multiple history approach using traditional archival material and oral history is used.

Since the late nineteenth-century, a network of human and non-human actors has ensured that accounting education in South Africa retained a technical focus. By prescribing and detailing the accounting syllabuses required for university accreditation, the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) and its predecessors exercise direct control over accounting education. As a result, little appetite exists for a discipline based on academic enquiry or engagement with international scholars. While the SAICA claims to support accounting research, this support is conditional on its meeting the professional body’s particular view of scholarship.

The limitations associated with this research are that it focusses on one particular professional body in one jurisdiction. The South African situation provides a cautionary tale of how universities, particularly those in developing countries, should take care not to abdicate their responsibilities for the setting of syllabi or course content to professional bodies. Accounting academics, particularly those in a developing country currently experiencing major social, political, and economic problems, are in a prime position to engage in research that will benefit society as a whole.

Although actor network theory has been used in accounting research and in particular to explain accounting knowledge creation, the use of this particular theoretical lens to examine the construction of professional knowledge is limited. This study draws on Callon’s (1986) four moments to explain how various human actors including the accounting profession, the state, universities, and accounting academics, along with non-human actors such as accreditation, regulation, and transformation, have brought about South African academic disengagement with the discipline.

There exists no detailed account of the 40 Australian women teachers employed within the “concentration camps” established by British forces in the Orange River and Transvaal colonies during the Boer War. The purpose of this paper is to critically respond to this dearth in historiography.

A large corpus of newspaper accounts represents the richest, most accessible and relatively idiosyncratic source of data concerning this contingent of women. The research paper therefore interprets concomitant print-based media reports of the period as a resource for educational and historiographical data.

Towards the end of the Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902) a total of 40 Australian female teachers – four from Queensland, six from South Australia, 14 from Victoria and 16 from New South Wales – successfully answered the imperial call conscripting educators for schools within “concentration camps” established by British forces in the Orange River and Transvaal colonies. Women’s exclusive participation in this initiative, while ostensibly to teach the Boer children detained within these camps, also exerted an influential effect on the popular consciousness in reimagining cultural ideals about female teachers’ professionalism in ideological terms.

One limitation of the study relates to the dearth in official records about Australian women teachers in concentration camps given that; not only are Boer War-related records generally difficult to source; but also that even the existent data is incomplete with many chapters missing completely from record. Therefore, while the data about these women is far from complete, the account in terms of newspaper reports relies on the existent accounts of them typically in cases where their school and community observe their contributions to this military campaign and thus credit them with media publicity.

The paper’s originality lies in recovering the involvement of a previously underrepresented contingent of Australian women teachers while simultaneously offering a primary reading of the ideological work this involvement played in influencing the political narrative of Australia’s educational involvement in the Boer War.

THE completion of the sixth volume of the Library World may not be a very important or remarkable occurrence in the annals of journalism, but when one considers the meagre and spasmodic support which is generally accorded to professional magazines, it may be allowable for us to indulge in a little self‐congratulation on having lived so long, on little more than the minimum encouragement usually bestowed on literary ventures connected with librarianship. For some reason, which it is very difficult to understand, librarians will not buy their own professional literature, whether offered as books or magazines. An author may reckon on a possible circle of purchasers ranging between 200 and 300 in England, and perhaps thirty in the United States, for any library book which is not more than 5/‐ or 10/‐ in price; and an editor may be certain of a constituency, perhaps, double those numbers, if his journal is not too dull and overpowering. But this is practically the limit of encouragement which anyone can expect for non‐official library publications. The Colonies, the United States, and all the European countries are collectively hardly worth counting in any estimate of possible supporters of an English literary venture in librarianship, and what is even more discouraging, only a few British libraries, and hardly any library assistants or committee‐men, ever buy professional books of any kind. In these circumstances we may be allowed a little pardonable jubilation at having survived at all under such adverse circumstances.

WITH the sentiments expressed in Mr. Doubleday's excellent paper in the February number almost every librarian will be in substantial agreement. First, it is wholesome for the welfare of Public Libraries that the subject should not be tabooed; librarians ought to be continually obsessed and worried by it, and should exercise their minds chiefly, not in framing apologies for their prodigious issues of fiction, but in finding a drastic remedy. That these excessive issues are “an abuse of the privileges offered by Public Libraries” and a principal reason for the bad odour in which the institution stands in the minds of many thinking people; that the expense of furnishing “leisured or semi‐leisured people” with this kind of luxury is an injustice to the most worthy class of readers; and that the feeble expedients hitherto adopted to lessen the evil have had no real success, are propositions that command well‐nigh unanimous consent. But is Mr. Doubleday conclusive enough? Does he state in a sufficiently clear and positive manner what is the alternative policy?

THE recruitment, training and payment of librarians are matters of import, not only to the youngest entrant into this work, but also to established librarians and to the public. Although training was initiated forty years ago by the then chief librarians of libraries, it has in recent years become a very intimate concern of library assistants and of parents and others in charge of young folk who are considering librarianship as their possible career. After thirty years of experiment, with minor changes, the Library Association syllabus has now been completely remodelled. We have also reached a stage when we can consider to some extent, although not adequately, the effect upon the profession of our whole‐time library school of university rank. The various phases of the work must therefore be of great interest to every reader of The Library World; and this is sufficient justification for the special attention which the subject receives in this number. The first question must always be the economic and human one. Is the profession sufficiently large, and of enough importance, to justify parents in allowing lads or girls, who have gone through a secondary or even university training, to devote themselves to the somewhat protracted study which is prescribed for the work? Then, again, is the training now placed before the would‐be aspirant to library work a wise training? Is it too special, too technical, too scholarly; indeed, is the library authority, whoever and wherever it may be, asking too much for what most people regard as the very simple work of managing and distributing and exploiting books?

GUEST editor of this South African issue of THE LIBRARY WORLD is Hendrik M. Robinson, Director of Library Services, Transvaal Provincial Administration, Pretoria.

A royal charter of incorporation imposing public benefit/social responsibilities established the privately owned British South Africa Company (BSAC), in return for power to exploit a huge territory using low-cost local labour. This study explores the dual principal–agent problem of how the BSAC used annual report narratives to report on its conflicting economic responsibilities to investors versus its public benefit charter responsibilities to the British Crown.

Having digitised the dataset, the research analyses narratives from 29 BSAC annual reports spanning a continuous 35-year royal charter period, using computer-aided keyword content analysis to identify economic-orientated versus public benefit-orientated annual report narratives. The research analyses how the annual report narratives shifted according to four key contextual periods by reference to the changing influence of private investors versus the British Crown.

There are two key findings. First, economic primacy. At no point do public benefit disclosures outweigh economic disclosures. Second, the BSAC's meso-corporate context and macro-social/political context can explain patterns in public benefit disclosures. The motivation for producing public benefit information is not altruism. Rather, commercial interests motivate disclosure. The BSAC used its annual reports to sustain what proved ultimately unsustainable – royal charter-style colonialism.

This accounting history study contributes to an understanding of corporate narrative reporting using one of the earliest known cases of such analysis and shows how accounting plays a central role in facilitating a company in sustaining its interests. This 100-year lookback may be a portend of the future for modern-day annual report corporate social responsibility narratives in, say, mining and oil and gas company corporate reports, especially if these natural resources run out.

The Report of the Inter‐departmental Committee on the Libraries of the Union of South Africa of 1937 resembled closely in substance and in spirit the Report on New Zealand libraries of Munn and Barr in 1934, and that of Munn and Pitt on Australian libraries in 1935, a resemblance arising no doubt from a similarity of historical circumstances within the three dominions: new countries with small populations; the institution, to meet the needs of small reading circles in scattered areas, of libraries like those of nineteenth‐century England; the preoccupation of the peoples with the more immediate demands of living and with the exploitation of natural resources. These old institutions have tended to linger, being private or semi‐private, less susceptible to change and becoming more and more anachronistic, less able to play the part expected of a modern library, while the new have developed slowly and only here and there as yet will they bear comparison with the best in the older countries. These reports of the thirties witness the fact that the majority of public libraries were ‘subscription’ libraries of nineteenth‐century pattern, small in size and lacking in quality of stock; that the largest municipal libraries and the university libraries were insufficiently stocked, the chief strength reposing in the national libraries. And the reasons: lack of money or, more truthfully, the withholding of money needed for library and bibliographical purposes, itself the outcome partly of public and official apathy and procrastination, and partly of ignorance of the advantages derivable from modern library and bibliographical services; the paucity of trained staff to teach and by practical example to spread ideas and increase understanding; in the case of Australia and South Africa, the vastness of the territory to be covered and the sparsity, of settlement involving intricate organization and considerable costs, and in South Africa the existence of two European racial groups and consequent bilingualism which often call for parallel collections. A decade has, of course, elapsed since Munn and Pitt wrote that ‘most Australians have had no contact with a progressive and complete library system and know nothing of its functions and facilities’ and since the South African committee reported that ‘in library development the Union of South Africa lags behind the rest of the civilised world’; and much has been accomplished in the meantime, but the South African condemnation is still broadly justified, though there are individual libraries to which it does not apply.

The substitution of an imitation of some kind for the article actually asked for or desired by the purchaser is a particularly mean form of deception which is practised nowadays to an almost incredible extent. It is astonishing and mournful that so many persons should be concerned in the deliberate initiation, fostering, and carrying on of so shameful a system, and that others are to be found who in speech and print seem willing to lend to it either their countenance or condonation. One must suppose that there exists a form of moral obliquity or distortion—at first accentuated and ultimately rendered incurable by the acquirement and contemplation of illegitimate gains—which makes the sufferer incapable of grasping the fact that the proceedings in question are utterly degrading and iniquitous. However this may be, the circumstances are such that a strong endeavour ought to be made to get the public to appreciate them, and to expose and, as far as may be possible, to punish those who are guilty, at any rate of the worst types of fraudulent dealing referred to. The Daily Mail and, in a lesser but important degree, the Daily News, have rendered excellent service by directing attention to the matter. The articles which have been published up to the present in these newspapers have been reprinted in pamphlet form under the title of “ The Fraud of the Label,” and a study of this brief but telling exposé may be strongly recommended to all and sundry. A most appropriate quotation from Sir WALTER SCOTT'S “Kenilworth ” appears on the title page: “ Some … plainly admitted they had never seen it; others denied that such a drug existed … and most of them attempted to satisfy their customer by producing some substitute … which, they maintained, possessed in a superior degree the self‐same qualities.”

This paper aims to discuss the notion of resilience in the context of the Basotho of Lesotho who managed prospering as a nation in the era of uncertainty during the “VUCA” world of the nineteenth-century southern Africa.

Using historical data from leadership and organizational behaviour perspectives, the theoretical context of the paper is established to inform discussion on the resilience of the Basotho during the “VUCA” world of the nineteenth-century southern Africa.

The paper has established that the notion of resilience was synonymous to Basotho’s way of life and livelihood during the “VUCA” world of the nineteenth-century southern Africa. The paper has also established that resilience became the key quality of Basotho as they continued prospering as a nation in the era of uncertainty during the “VUCA” world of the nineteenth-century southern Africa.

From both leadership and organizational behaviour perspectives, the paper uses mainly historical data that are considered to be most relevant, valid and reliable to inform discussions on the notion of resilience as it relates to the Basotho as a nation during the “VUCA” world of the nineteenth-century southern Africa.