African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

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Start date: 1990End date: 1999

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    "If we can't call it the mfecane, then what can we call it?": Moving the debate forward
    (1994-08-29) Wright, John
    The mfecane as fetish: In the last six years a major controversy has blown up among historians of southern Africa about the historical reality or otherwise of the phenomenon commonly known as the mfecane (1). Since it was first popularized by John Omer-Cooper in his book The Zulu Aftermath, published in 1966,(2) the term has become widely used as a designation for the wars and migrations which took place among African communities across much of the eastern half of southern Africa in the 1820s and 1830s. For more than a century before Omer-Cooper wrote, these upheavals had been labelled by writers as 'the wars of Shaka' or 'the Zulu wars'; today the view remains deeply entrenched among historians and public alike that the conflicts of the period were touched off by the explosive expansion of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka. In a chain reaction of violence, so the story of the mfecane goes, warring groups carried death and destruction from the Zululand region southwards into Natal and the eastern Cape, westward onto the highveld, and northwards to the Limpopo river and beyond. The violence came to an end only when most of the communities which had managed to survive the supposed chaos of the times had been amalgamated into a number of large defensive states under powerful kings.
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    An evaluation of the IMF mission document on economic policies for a new South Africa
    (1992-08-03) Zarenda, Harry
    In January 1992, an IMF occasional paper entitled "Economic Policies for a New South Africa " (IMF 1992) was issued. As stated in the Preface, the study was intended as a contribution to the debate regarding the appropriate economic policies to be pursued in a new South Africa, The authors of the study have drawn heavily on the work of the IMF 1991 Article IV Consultation Mission to South Africa, but insist that the opinions expressed in the paper are their own, rather than those of the South African authorities or of the IMF. Nevertheless, the central message is in total conformity with the broad economic philosophy of the Fund. The purpose of this paper is to criticize the policy emphasis and major conclusions of the IMF occasional paper and, by so doing, to add a new perspective to the dialogue concerning an economic policy agenda for South Africa's transition to democracy.
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    Auxilary instruments of labor: The homogenization of diversity in the discourse of ethnicity
    (1993-05-03) Wilmsen, Edwin N.
    In the creation of an image of national unity successful political states employ their power of cultural hegemony to facilitate the continual renewal of forms of involuntary ascription, such as ethnicity, that can coexist with a national consciousness without apparent contradiction precisely because they are cultural, that is ascribed, and therefore appear both natural and national from the perspective of individuals. Continued tacit acceptance of imposed ethnic terms for current political discourse (e.g., in Eastern Europe, Islamic Asia, southern Africa, USA minorities) reaffirms the established status of these terms as the most readily available avenue for collective self-identification and action. "So long as social practice continues to be pursued as if ethnicity did hold the key to the structures of inequality, the protectionism of the dominant and the responses of the dominated alike serve to reproduce an ethnically ordered world" (Comaroff 1987:xxx). It is particularly important to stress this at a time' when a philosophy of primordial ethnicity is being widely reasserted as a form of neo-racism to justify new or continued suppression of dispossessed ethnic groups. In this paper, I will analyze processes of ethnicization, identity construction, and class formation in Botswana. In ethnicity and tribalism are conflated (e.g., Vail 1989). But tribes, as Vail's authors make abundently clear, are a product of colonial engagement; they are essentially administrative constructs. On the other hand, ethnicity as a central logic emerged out of conflicts engendered in competition for favored positions among these tribal constructs. The emergent ethnicities were formulated out of an amalgam of preexisting indigenous and inserted colonial partitive ideologies. A dominant class - in colonial Africa, this was often an ascendent 'tribal' aristocracy - defined and determined the terms of subordinate class competition which is the seedbed of ethnicizing processes.
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    Transforming labour tenants: A critique of the Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act of 1996
    (1996-09-30) Williams, Gavin
    In 1996, Parliament approved the Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act of 1996 despite vocal opposition to some of its key provisions from the Natal and South African white agricultural unions (1). The objectives of the Act are twofold: To provide for security of tenure of labour tenants and those persons occupying or using land as a result of their association with labour tenants; and to provide for the acquisition of land and rights in land by labour tenants;... It sought to protect the rights of labour tenants to existing rural livelihoods and to create new ways for them to acquire land for smallholder farming. Labour tenancy contracts embody a range of obligations and expectations, implicit as well as explicit, on the part of the owner of the land, their tenants and the members of the tenants' families on whom the burden of providing labour has often fallen. Contracts vary in their terms from farm to farm, and from district to district, and have changed significantly over time. Labour tenancy arrangements have different meanings for the parties involved. What for the farmer is a way to secure a supply of labour is for the tenant a means of acquiring land and keeping cattle. Attempts to transform labour tenants into wage workers, or to restrict their access to grazing or the number of cattle they may keep, have been a repeated source of bitter contention. The rights of landowners to use their property as they choose and to decide who may have access to it, and on what terms, conflict with the claims of workers, tenants, and their families to a place to live and to land to grow crops and graze animals.
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    Cars out of place : Vampires, technology, and labor in East and Central Africa
    (1993-08-16) White, Luise
    This essay is about things that never happened. The African vampires discussed here are not the undead, but men and occasionally women specifically employed--as firemen in East Africa and game rangers in Central Africa--to capture Africans and extract their blood. Such vampires were said to exist throughout much of East and Central Africa; they were a specifically colonial phenomena and were first noted in the late 'teens and early 1920s. In the colonial versions of these stories, most vampires were black men supervised on the job by white men, but in postcolonial versions who works for whom has become unclear. Although it seems plausible that these stories originated in botched medical procedures done in too great haste during World War I, establishing their source does not account for their meaning thirty years later, or their power, or the passion with which they were retold and withheld. Stories in which colonial employees drained Africans of their blood may reveal more than the vivid imagination of their narrators; they disclose the concerns and anxieties of people at a specific time and place.
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    Capitalists, peasants and land in Africa: A comparative perspective
    (1991-08) Williams, Gavin
    The paper compares the development of various forms of capitalist and peasant agriculture and state policies towards them in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania during the coloniao and post-colonial periods. At first sight, our four African examples appear to exemplify distinct patterns of historical transformation: one capitalist (South Africa) and two peasant, one (Nigeria) in a 'capitalist' and one (Tanzania) in a 'socialist' context, and an anmalous fourth version, combining capitalist and peasant forms. However, wage labour and family labour are found in agricultural production in all the countries studied, and labour-, share- and rent tenancies are important in several. These different forms of labour are combined in single enterprises, both on capitalist and peasant farms, and in the strategies adopted by individuals and households to provide for their needs. Similarly, governments of very different political persuasions have often adopted similar policies to control, regulate and 'develop' rural people. Our four examples do not display clearly divergent directions, but they are also not obviously converging on some common destination. In particular, they are not all undergoing the passage from peasant to capitalist, or even to socialist, agriculture. In some cases, the direction of change may be quite the reverse.
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    More in the breach than observance: crayfish, conservation & capitalism c.1890-c.1939
    (1992-08-26) Van Sittert, Lance
    An emerging environmental history in South Africa has so far focused exclusively on terrestrial environments and their human-resource interactions (land, game, forests) (1). In so doing it has also been heavily influenced by the revisionist and social history of the past two decades and careful to locate environmental issues in the broader social, economic and political context-of an emerging capitalism in Southern Africa. No attempt has yet been made, however, to extend the scope of this endeavour to encompass the marine resource and recent environmental literature on the subject still evidences a strong present-mindedness which strongly detracts from its analysis (2). The marine environment is innately hostile to capitalism, except in its petty or merchant forms, by virtue of its common property status and susceptibility to a range of "natural factors" which disrupt production (3). For productive capitalism to succeed in such a hostile environment, it needs to be able to limit the effects of both these factors on accumulation in order to justify investment. In South Africa this was achieved after 1945 through large-scale central state intervention, assuming ownership of the resource and conferring de facto private property rights on private exploiters and lessening the effect of "natural factors" on production through the provision of infrastructure and marine research (4). Prior to this, capital's successful exploitation of the marine resource was fundamentally dependent on untrammelled access, relying on the sure abundance of the latter to compensate for the detractions of non-ownership and the vagaries of weather and resource. These constraints also made marine resources a low development priority alongside mining and agriculture and saw them relegated to the realm of the regional maritime state which was too weak exercise effective ownership, confer ownership rights on capital or mediate the effects of natural factors on production. The Cape colonial etate concentrated its efforts on developing deep sea trawling, but after 1910 the provincial state confined itself to the "preservation" of fish and game.
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    Abortion: Some insights into power and patriarchy
    (1995-03-20) Walker, Liz
    As in the rest of the world, abortion in South Africa, is a pressing social proble (2). It is also an issue about which we know and understand very little, in part because the question of abortion has received limited attention in both the popular and academic literature in this country (3). The issue of abortion in South Africa has generally been kept silent. Two reasons can be cited for this. Firstly, the availability and accessibility of abortion have been determined by the medical profession and the State, both historically dominated by white men (4). Secondly, political and women's organisations in South Africa have been both divided and silent on the issue. Reproductive politics has assumed little political profile. Abortion, and indeed "fighting for a woman's right to choose, was not like being part of any other political cause, [because] the issue is not 'malestream' politics" (5). The fight against apartheid has assumed a far greater significance than reproductive politics (6).
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    Prologue to capitalism, free enterprise and black entrepreneurship: A comparative history of black business in the United States and South Africa
    (1995-08-02) Walker, Juliet E. K.
    The agency of blacks in forging their own economic liberation through entrepreneurship and business enterprise has been generally ignored in the historical literature. In this two-part paper, my purpose is a comparative recovery of the history of black business in the United States and South Africa. Part One, "a new problematic," establishes "categories of comparison" and a contextual and methodological frame for the study of black business in these two countries. Part Two, "in search of a usable past," urges deconstruction of the Eurocentric focus that shapes current assessments of South African and American black economic activity within the context of a fourphase chronological overview in which selected topics in the comparative history of black business in these two countries are presented for analysis. Presentism propels this study, a response to the emergence of the New South Africa and the deteriorating economic position African Americans, much the same as comparative studies in the United States and South Africa in the 1980s represented intellectual responses to black American activism in the 1960s and the rising tide of opposition to apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s.
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    From the politics of resistance to the politics of reconstruction: The union and 'ungovernability' in the workplace
    (1997-09-22) Von Holdt, K.
    South Africa has undergone momentous change over the past decade. The trade union movement in the shape of COSATU has played a central role in that change. During the late 1980s it became the most organised and visible component of the internal mass democratic movement. After 1990 it became the major alliance partner of the unbanned ANC. On the one hand COSATU was an important advocate and organiser of the mass mobilisation campaigns which kept up the momentum of national political negotiations. It was the originator of the Reconstruction and Development Programme [RDP], later taken up by the ANC as the core of its election and governmental programme. COSATU also provided much of the organisation and the personnel for the ANC election campaign in 1994. At the same time the trade unions were trying to develop new policies and new strategies appropriate to the new conditions of a democratic - or democratising - society. The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa [NUMSA] was at the forefront of developing such policies, focusing on reform of human resource policies and institutions, and on industrial strategy. These developments have been characterised by labour movement analysts as a shift from 'social movement unionism' to 'strategic unionism' founded on a strategy of 'radical reform', (see Joffe et al, 1992; Von Holdt, 1992b; Von Holdt and Webster, 1992)