African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

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Start date: 1970End date: 1979

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 84
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    Political parties in Botswana: Some observations
    (1973-02) Wiseman, John A.
    Perhaps I could begin by stressing the tentative nature of the paper which I shall be presenting to this seminar. In the main this is due to the inadequacy of source material, relating to Botswana, available in Britain. The country is small (in terms of population) and poor, a situation which does not encourage the generation of much in the way of primary material, especially outside the governmental sector. With one or two exceptions the secondary material concerning Botswana seems to be based on the promise that the most important factor concerning the country is its relationship with the rest of Southern Africa. Thus it is regarded as a rather small pawn in the wider struggle with usually little more than a cursory glance at its internal politics. I am at the moment planning a trip to Botswana for the purposes of field work later in the year, but for the present I acknowledge that there are serious gaps in the paper I shall put before you. In most cases I shall attempt to point to the omissions myself. In spite of this I believe that the paper may be of interest, not only to those few who have a particular interest in Botswana, but to the much wider number who accept that the study of new states is of vital relevance to our understanding of politics. This account rejects the notion of any "single explanation" of the party system in Botswana: it rejects single variable determinism or even dominancy as a core explanatory factor. Thus it regards as simplistic any attempt to use one variable (e.g. tribe, class, region etc.) as a sensible method of understanding the nature of political parties or their interactions, analytically positioned as "party system". What is more, this account argues that the same method cannot be used to explain all the parties, even after allowance has been made for different content variables.
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    The rise of Afrikanerdom as an immanent critique of Marx's Theory of Social Class
    (1975-08) Moodie, Dunbar
    For Marx, social classes are groups which arise in the course of the division of labour. Based on developments in the forces of production, class formation leads to inevitable conflict, as a result of which one class comes to dominate all others. Class is thus an identifiable historical actuality; an objective phenomenon, rooted in the relations of production. This is what Marx calls "class-in-itself". However precise its actuality in the relations of production, however, the reality of a class-in-itself is obscured by false consciousness. It must achieve true consciousness to become a "class-for-itself".
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    Women and squatting: A Winterfeld case study
    (1979-05-21) Yawitch, Joanne
    This paper is an examination of the political economy of Black women in South Africa in terms of a case-study of women in Winterveld. As such it deals with three issues, each of which is vast. These are: (1) Women; (2) Winterveld; (3) The nature of the South African economy at present. Given the confines of a paper such as this it is obviously impossible to deal with all three in full detail. There is thus much in the analysis that will only be referred to in passing and much that is implicit in it will hopefully be explained during discussion.
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    Stay-aways and the black working class since the second World War : The evaluation of a strategy
    (1979-04) Webster, E.C.
    There is a widespread belief, among some who hope for change in South Africa, that if only all Blacks withdrew their labour, the whole structure of South Africa would collapse. It is a subject which has received little academic attention. It is my intention in this paper to examine this notion in three parts.. In Part I a brief history of stay-aways between 1950 and 1961 will be given. In Part II its reemergence in Soweto will be examined. In Part III the limitations of the stay-away as a tactic of working-class action will be discussed and contrasted with the more wide-spread plantbased action of the 1970s. (This is not meant to imply that limitations do not exist in plant-based action.) The Namibian general strike of 1971-2 is excluded from this analysis as its relative degree of "success" demonstrates the uniqueness of that situation - viz. the existence of a reasonably self-sufficient rural base to which striking workers could withdraw. Yet even in Namibia workers could ultimately, says Moorsom, not escape the major contradiction in their strategy "that although access to peasant resources considerably expanded their power to prolong resistance, they could no longer, as a matter of inescapable necessity, opt out of wage-labour indefinitely - the platform of the strike committee embodied a tacit acknowledgement of the irrevocable necessity of wage-labour."
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    From Tram Shed to Assembly Hall: Solomon Plaatje, De Beers, and the Lyndhurst Road Native Institute in Kimberley, 1918-1919
    (1977-11) Willan, Brian
    Little scholarly attention has been devoted to an analysis of the historical evolution of class differentiation amongst Africans in twentieth century South Africa, or to the ideological forms that accompanied this. Such work as has been done in related fields has been concerned not so much to investigate such connections as to trace the "rise of nationalism", a term that in fact provides the title for Peter Walshe's history of the African National Congress, in itself indicative of the extent to which it forms part of that genre of writing inspired by Africa's "independence decade", many of whose assumptions it shares (2). In Walshe's book, the extent to which "nationalism" expressed fundamentally class-based aspirations and attitudes has been obscured. More direct expressions of class interest (which did not necessarily assume a "nationalist" guise) have been neglected; and African political though: and action is - as a consequence of an uncritical acceptance of the stated aims of organizations like the ANC - characterized as "unrealistic", "naive", "inappropriate" and, in terms of these stated aims, as having "failed". The ideological element - taking ideology as constituting a set of beliefs and ideas that serve to explain or rationalize the interests of particular groups or classes as the general interest - is largely absent from the analysis.
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    A profile of unregistered union members in Durban
    (1978-09) Webster, E.C.
    The role and potential of trade unions among African workers has moved over the last five years from a peripheral to a central issue in industrial relations in S.A. Government attitudes have changed from a determination to exclude African trade unions by promoting an alternat. in-plant committee structure, to the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry into Labour Legislation with a clear indication on the part of the Chairman that trade unionism is a right for all workers (1). Some employer associations have chanqed from outriaht hostility to support in principle for the right of African workers to negotiate on the same basis as non-Africans (2). Although the antagonism or indifference of the registered trade union movement continues, the decision of TUCSA in 1973 to allow African trade unions to affiliate, signals a growing awareness among the more far-sighted registered trade union leadership that the future of the trade union movement lies with Coloured and African workers (3). The growing internationalization of industrial relations in S.A. through the publication of employers "codes of conduct" as a response to the increasing pressure on foreign investors to withdraw, is further evidence of this change (4).
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    The 1949 Durban 'Riots' - a case-study in race and class
    (1974-08) Webster, E.C.
    This paper was written as a response to the somewhat abstract discussions that sometimes take place in university seminars on the relative weight of class, race and ethnicity in explaining human behaviour. It rests on the assumption that conceptual clarification has limited value, unless conceptual analysis is followed by a concrete historical or sociological analysis of a particular social situation. The Durban 'riots' of 1949 was chosen as a case-study because it has been widely used by 'separate development theorists' as an example of the inevitability of conflict between the races, without any attempt being made to relate this conflict to the political economy. This paper is an attempt to develop a theoretical franework that recognizes the embryonic and partial nature of class formation in a 'plural society' through the notion of class 'suppression', but nonetheless attempts to derive a meaningful frame of reference for explaining a class based act. In Part 1 I will introduce the theoretical framework. Part II, III and IV is an attempt to give a portrait of the participants in the riot, analysing their composition, motives and how activity was generated among them. Here a note of caution needs to be introduced. I am still at a tentative stage in my research in two crucial areas; firstly, on the 'consciousness' of the participants I have to date only had access to written material such as newspapers and reports. These sources are a partial perspective - this includes in particular, the official Government Inquiry into the riots. Hopefully I will have a fuller picture when I have extended my data-gathering to interviews of participants. Secondly, I realise that in a crucial area of my argument among the African traders I am still at an early stage of research. Part V tries to place the conflict in a wider perspective of the social structure.
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    Afrikaner nationalism, white politics and political change in South Africa
    (1974-03) Van Zyl Slabbert, H.
    By political change is meant a change in the constitution of groups and individuals who effectively control political decision-making in South Africa, The size and diversity of such groups and number of individuals can either decrease, - in which case there is an increase in authoritarianism, - or increase, - in which case there is a move towards a decentralization or diffusion of political control. A clear distinction must in this case be made between interest groups, socio-economic and demographic processes, external or internal to South Africa, that exert direct or indirect influenoe on the taking of political decisions and the groups and individuals who effectively control and are responsible for such decisions. This is simply another way of stating that more often than not there is a discrepancy between the pressures for change and the decisions taken to cope with such pressures..... This paper would like to emphasize the strategic significance of Afrikaner Nationalists in relation to the problem of political change in South Africa. As a group they control effective political decision-making within White politics and therefore within South Africa in general...
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    Milner and the mind of imperialism
    (1979-02-26) Van Helten, Jean Jacques
    Capitalist development in Southern Africa, particularly in Kimberley and on the Rand, was very much the result of the penetration of British and foreign capital as well ac the rapid growth of commercial interests. The continued expansion of the mining industry, with its huge amounts of initial capital outlay, particularly after 1893 when the deep levels came into operation, depended upon the state of the capital markets of Europe: speculative booms in "kaffir" shares not only lined the pockets of investors but also provided new working capital, for little capital was raised by the issue of debentures, (l).
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    Ethnicity, language and national unity: The case of Malawi
    (1978-09) Vail, Leroy
    In late 1976, in the Mkuyu detention camp, outside Malawi's old colonial capital, Zomba, there were detained fifty-five university graduates. Forty-five were from the Northern Region (4). Between 1975 and 1976 many senior administrators and lecturers at the University of Malawi were detained. Over 90 per cent were from the Northern Region. In early 1976 sixteen people employed at the vital National Statistical Office were detained. All were from the Northern Region (5). Children from northern Malawi now being enrolled in school are being entered by their parents as non-Northern in origin and with new surnames. As a growing manifestation of a deepening 'Chewa' ethnic awareness, anti-Northern policies are common in Malawi today, destroying rapidly the remaining shreds of the national feeling inspired by the movement against the Central African Federation in the late 1950s and early 1960s and bring into question continued political stability once President Kamuzu Banda, already in his late seventies, passes from the scene.