African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

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Author: search.filters.author.Hyslop, Jonathan

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    Industrial decentralisation, Bantustan policy, and the control of labour in South Africa
    (1984-08-06) Tomlinson, Richard; Hyslop, Jonathan
    During the last two decades, industrial decentralisation and growth centre policies have been widely applied throughout the world. In this paper the authors describe a rather distinct application of those policies, namely that directed to facilitating the control of labour in South Africa. We also assess the extent to which the policies have "succeeded" and can succeed. Success cannot be judged in terms of criteria that may be used when evaluating decentralisation policies elsewhere in the world. In South Africa, such policies have been explicitly designed to further the system of apartheid and thereby the control of labour. Their success or failure lies in the extent to which they are able to do that. We have stressed how the recent emphasis on industrial decentralisation reflects the current and lasting crisis in Bantustan policy (2).
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    The representation of white working class women in the construction of a reactionary Populist movement: 'Purified' Afrikaner Nationalist agitation for legislation against 'mixed' marriages 1934-1939
    (1993-05-24) Hyslop, Jonathan
    In May 1938, the largely white South African electorate went to the polls. But the question which had preoccupied participants in the preceding weeks of the election was not, as one might imagine, the segregationist policies of General Hertzog's government or the economy's gradual emergence from the depths of the Great Depression. Rather, debate and agitation focused on an image of white womanhood. That image was contained in a poster distributed by the ‘Purified’ National Party (Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party) (GNP) of Daniel Francois Malan, and was a pictorial representation of the GNP's contention that Hertzog, through his ‘Fusion’ alliance with pro-British forces of General Jan Smuts to form the United Party (UP), had sold out Afrikaner political interests, in particular by adopting insufficiently aggressive racial policies.
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    "The imperial working class makes itself 'white': white labourism in Britain, Australia and South Africa before the first World War"
    (1999-10-11) Hyslop, Jonathan
    On the 1st of March, 1914, the biggest British labour demonstration of the early twentieth century flooded into London's Hyde Park in a seven mile long column. Estimates of the size of the crowd ran as high as half a million. The Socialist papers were euphoric: "Never in my long experience of Hyde Park", wrote R. B. Suthers in The Clarion (6 March 1914) "have I seen such countless multitudes pouring into its confines and gathering around the speakers and the platforms. Never have I seen so impressive a crowd, never have I seen so unanimous and earnest a mass meeting". The publication of the engineering workers' union described the gathering as "the greatest and most impressive of its kind that has ever taken place in the heart of the Empire." (ASEMJR, February 1914)
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    A destruction coming in: Bantu education as response to social crisis
    (1989-09) Hyslop, Jonathan
    The imposition of Bantu Education in the 1950s has often been portrayed as the destructive action of a Nationalist government intent, for purely ideological reasons, on uprooting a successful and largely benevolent mission education system: in this view the missions were, as Edgar Brookes put it, “butchered to make an ideologist's holiday”. (1) But this approach to the issue fails to grasp the essential basis of educational restructuring in the 1950s. The educational policies of the state during this decade were above all an attempt to respond to the crisis of reproduction of the labour force, and especially its urban component, which had developed during the previous decade. I will suggest in this article that the state was particularly concerned to provide the necessary conditions of reproduction for that section of the labour force which was permanently urbanized and reliant upon a wage. As the urban population grew, social reproductive mechanisms which had operated in the 1920s and 1930s began to break down. In the 1940s the combined forces of collapsing homeland agriculture and expanding secondary industrialization, generated rapid urbanization. This placed the existing provision for urban social reproduction under enormous strain. Housing, transport, and wages were all inadequate to meet the needs of the growing urbanized working class. Squatter movements, bus boycotts and trade unionism spread rapidly, as popular initiatives which contested these arenas. In turn these fueled the emergence of a higher and more radical level of oppositional political activity, marked by the emergence of the Mandela - Tambo - Sobukwe generation of leadership in the ANC. Thus the dominant classes were faced on the one hand with levels of poverty which threatened the very physical production of their workforce, and on the other by new political threats. The National Party's policies of the 1950s were largely addressed to resolving this urban reproductive crisis.