African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/7319

For information on accessing African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers collection content please contact Peter Duncan via email : peter.duncan@wits.ac.za

Browse

Author: search.filters.author.Bonner, PhilipStart date: 1980

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "The roots of violence on the East Rand, 1980-1990"
    (1999-10-18) Bonner, Philip; Ndima, Vusi
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Division and unity in the struggle: African politics on the Witwatersrand in the 1920s
    (1992-03-09) Bonner, Philip
    Accounts of African political organisation in South Africa between the 1920s and 1950s have tended to veer between two extremes – institutional studies of national political organisations and micro studies of local struggles in which the national political organisations played an intermittent and often inconspicuous part. The politics of specific regions of the country have as a result been poorly served. We have Bradford's study of the rural organisation of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union, and Lodge's accounts of two ANC campaigns in two key urban areas - the Defiance Campaign in the Eastern Cape and the Bantu Education boycott on the East Rand – but aside from these there is a notable dearth of such middle level exercises which might help bring national political organisation and local level struggles into a closer and more meaningful relationship to one another. Among the most conspicuous gaps in the literature are studies of the politics of the Witwatersrand and Eastern Cape. These two urban areas are usually depicted as the forcing houses of black politics, but neither has attracted the attention that it might have been expected to have received. On the Witwatersrand a number of fine local studies have been produced but none gives a broader sense of the pattern and movement of political activities on the Rand. A large part of the reason has been the sheer scale of the enterprise, but enough of the pieces have now been assembled for us to begin to compose the broader picture. This paper represents the first stage of such an attempt.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Batons and bare heads: the strike at Amato Textile, February 1958
    (1983-10-03) Bonner, Philip; Lambert, Rob
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "We are digging, we are seizing huge chunks of the municipalities land" (Siyawugubha, Siyawugubha Umhlaba Ka Maspala)": Popular struggles in Benoni, 1944-1952
    (1985-10-28) Bonner, Philip
    The Second World War transformed the face of South Africa like no other era since reconstruction. Unlike reconstruction however, the war years were no period of planned state initiatives or aggressive social engineering. State policy was reactive, tentative, piecemeal. State planning was informed by no broader vision with which to regulate and direct the massive social and economic transformations underway. All this left considerable space in which the major new force to appear in the political arena - the urban proletariat – could manoeuvre. Huge gaps opened up in the cities' ramshackle and improvised structures of social control. Real opportunities presented themselves to the new working class to shape and to mould the world in which it moved. However the very abruptness of these changes which injected such uncertainty, and incoherence into official policy making circles, also imprinted itself on the character of the new urban proletariat. The newly assembled urban communities were still too fluid, too diverse, too unformed to take sustained advantage of the state's fumbling indecision. Some important gains were won, and certain policy options foreclosed. However, the struggles of the urban masses were all too often, sectional, individual and introverted, and only incidentally and indirectly shaped or subverted state policy. A political movement with the programme and the tactics to take on this role did not emerge till the early 1950's, and then largely in reaction to the massive social engineering and political repression that accompanied the implementation of grand apartheid. By then the period of maximum opportunity had already passed by. It is to this period and these struggles that this paper draws attention. It focusses on the East Rand town of Benoni which was one of the major centres of wartime industrialisation on the Rand. It represents a preliminary attempt to order some of the data already collected and to define future directions of research.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Company estate, company town: Pilgrim's Rest 1910 - 1932
    (1987-10-19) Bonner, Philip; Shapiro, K.