African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

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Start date: 1990Subject: search.filters.subject.South Africa. Race relations

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    Black consciousness on trial: The BPC/SASO trial, 1974-1976
    (1990-08) Lobban, Michael
    On 25 September 1974, the South African Students' Organisation and the Black People's Convention held two rallies to celebrate independence in Mozambique. Within two weeks, 29 black consciousness leaders were in detention, as the state prepared for a major trial of the black consciousness movement which would see nine leaders of BFC and SASO facing conspiracy charges under the terrorism act. The state sought to put on trial the actions and ideas of the movement since its foundation, in order to portray it as a revolutionary movement led by self-conscious conspirators. In the state’s view, the black consciousness movement sought to go one stage further than the ANC or PAC had. If they had failed, it was because they had reverted to guerrilla movements without preparing the people for mass revolution: it was this that black consciousness would build. The state thus charged the accused with a conspiracy to bring about revolutionary change and/or the promotion of racial hostility. A second count charged seven of them with organizing the rallies with intent to promote racial hostility. These two counts were mutually reinforcing: the rallies were the confrontational fruition of the conspiracy; the conspiracy explained what the rallies were all about. The conspiracy was to be found primarily in the rhetoric of the organisations, its publications calling on even children to "talk, eat, live, cry and play the struggle for liberation," its language talking of ‘infiltration’. The conspiracy was to be inferred from the "cumulative effects" of the actions and words of the groups, seen "in conjunction with the nature and activities of the organisations."
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    The origins of multiracialism
    (1990-4-30) Everatt, David
    Resistance politics in the 1950s was dominated by the Congress Alliance, made up of the African National Congress [ANC], the South African Indian Congress [SAIC], the Coloured People’s Congress [CPC] and the white South African Congress of Democrats [SACOD]. The Alliance mobilized people of all races against apartheid in a manner previously unseen in South African history. The internal politics of the resistance movement, however, was dominated by wide-ranging and bitter disputes over the form that racial co-operation should take. That dispute centred on the multiracial nature of the Congress Alliance - that is, an alliance of separate Congresses comprising members of a single ethnic group, coordinated at regional and national levels.
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    We can run, but we can't hide: The need for psychological explanation in social history
    (2000-04-17) Dagut, Simon
    There have been many occasions in my experience when the explanatory techniques normally used by social historians have seemed inadequate to deal with some particular process or event. No doubt this happens to every historian, but I sometimes suspect that the social world of British colonialism in nineteenth century South Africa - my particular interest - provides these moments more often than some other areas. This feeling is, no doubt, largely the result of not knowing as much about the peculiarities of other places and times, but I do think it is at least arguable that colonial encounters created more extraordinarily odd situations than many other social environments. In past work, have taken two approaches to these kinds of explanatory challenges. In the case of really bizarre material, I have simply avoided discussing it in writing and have rationalised my omissions on the grounds that this sort of thing is too atypical to be helpful in building up a broad general picture of British settlers' attitudes and experiences. In the case of more frequently occurring oddities, I have attempted to argue that they were the result of the construction of settlers' attitudes by the prevalent discourses concerning class identity and colonialism, which combined to create so great a social distance between settlers and African people that what would otherwise have seemed socially impossible became everyday and natural. Although I do, in general, stand by this analysis, I have increasingly come to feel that it needs to be supplemented. Firstly, really peculiar circumstances deserve some time in the historical spotlight by way of an adjunct to those which an historian has decided were 'normal'. Extreme cases can be very useful in revealing the limits of the normal. Secondly, explaining even the 'normal' seems to me to require the use of psychological terms and techniques, however much historians may wish that this weren't the case.
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    Domestic racial interaction in later nineteenth century
    (1996-02-26) Dagut, Simon
    This paper is primarily concerned with the ways in which white men and women - mainly the latter - interacted with their African, coloured and Indian domestic servants in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its second concern is to argue that the study of this (and related) topics is of considerable, importance in the causation of the oppressive forms which South African states and social orders have taken. The topic of this paper is situated at the intersection of two areas which have been largely neglected in South African historiography. While the attitudes and experiences of "ordinary" African people in nineteenth and twentieth century South Africa have received considerable (and distinguished) attention in the last twenty years, comparatively little "history from below" has been written about whites, whether "Boer" or "Briton." Equally, while nineteenth century European, American and British empire domestic service has been fairly extensively examined, this is a relatively neglected area of South African historiography.
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    Customary law and the government of Africans in South Africa in the transition to a unitary state
    (1998-05-25) Costa, Anthony
    'The way in which white has governed black in South Africa during approximately the past century', formed the focus of Edgar Brookes's History of Native Policy published in 1924.' Over the years, colonialism, segregation and apartheid have served as alternative labels for 'native policy', purported answers to the question 'What is the appropriate manner in which to govern Africans?' Responses to this question, and the particular role of customary law, form the subject of this paper, and its argument that by the end of the nineteenth century, the ground had been laid, in the Cape and Natal, for the recognition of African forms of government, including customary law, a development which may be located in the philosophies of indirect rule and liberalism. Africans were to be governed by 'traditional' structures, while the imperatives of progress were heeded by providing for the development of individuals.
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    Black power, white press; literacy, newspapers, and the transformation of township political culture
    (1993-05-10) Charney, Craig
    Black political mobilization in South Africa has largely been explained by factors which are either structural or external to the communities involved: falling wages and employment, the contradictions of school and township administration, and anticolonial wars on the country's borders. Social and political movements, leaders, and processes within black communities have received short shrift. The political consciousness of different sections of black society has frequently been neglected or read off from class positions. The institutions, organizations, and discourses which shape them have been ignored or treated as tools of the status quo. In particular, the movement which did the most to initiate the black political renaissance, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), has been written off as a "group of petit bourgeois intellectuals" without links to the masses. Yet the resulting accounts have failed to adequately explain the forms and gaps of the re-emergence of mass resistance over the past two decades or to predict or periodize the development of national political life