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Start date: 1980End date: 1981

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 27
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    Indexes to Debates of the House of Assembly (Hansard)
    (Cape Town Government Printers, 1981) South Africa Parliament, House of Assembly
    South Africa Parliament House of Assembly. Debates of the House of Assembly (Hansard). Debates of Standing Committees.
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    Indexes to Debates of the House of Assembly (Hansard)
    (Cape Town Government Printers, 1981) South Africa Parliament, House of Assembly
    South Africa Parliament House of Assembly. Debates of the House of Assembly (Hansard). Debates of Standing Committees.
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    Indexes to Debates of the House of Assembly (Hansard)
    (Cape Town Government Printers, 1980) South Africa Parliament, House of Assembly
    South Africa Parliament House of Assembly. 0 Debates of the House of Assembly (Hansard). Debates of Standing Committees.
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    Indexes to Debates of the House of Assembly (Hansard)
    (Cape Town Government Printer, 1981) South Africa Parliament
    Debates of the House of Assembly (Hansard). South Africa Parliament House of Assembly. Debates of Standing Committees. South Africa Politics and government.
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    A place to live : The resolution of the African housing crisis in Johannesburg, 1944-1954
    (1981-07-27) Wilkinson, Peter
    In March 1944, the African township of Orlando near Johannesburg witnessed the first of a wave of squatter movements which was to sweep across the Witwatersrand during the next three or four years. The movements were, for the most part, a desperate response to the apparent inability or reluctance of the authorities to tackle the massive backlog in housing provision which had developed, in the major industrial centres as African workers and their families flooded in to meet the expanding labour demand brought about by the wartime economic boom. Although South Africa had already experienced phases of rapid urbanization during earlier periods (notably the First World War), the magnitude of the problem which now confronted the state's housing apparatus was unprecedented and soon took on the dimensions of a full-blown crisis as decisive action to remedy the situation failed to materialize. By the beginning of 1955, however, not quite eleven years after the squatters had first thrust themselves into the official consciousness, an editorial in Bantu - the periodical published by the Department of Native Affairs to disseminate its 'viewpoint' amongst the African population - could claim: The solution of the Bantu housing problem has now reached a stage which we can call the end of the beginning. Improved houses are being completed every day. During the next ten years hundreds of thousands of Bantu will be properly housed for the first time (2). This paper is an attempt to move towards an explanation of how this 'solution' of the 'Bantu housing problem' was finally achieved and, more specifically, of how the foundations of what we now know as Soweto came to be laid. It focuses on the resolution of certain strategic issues linked to the provision of African housing and on the establishment of the particular legislative and institutional framework within which the concrete practices that were to generate the form of the 'modern' township were brought into play. In coming to terms with the mass of detailed and often confusing empirical material on which the paper is based, I have tried to avoid the danger of remaining trapped at the level of merely descriptive narrative by explicitly situating the evolution of African housing policy within the political and economic context on which, I would argue, it was always predicated. In this respect, I have found what I consider to be a useful point of entry into the labyrinth of 'facts' in Manuel Castells' conceptualisation of 'urban planning' as the theoretical field of state intervention in the 'urban', where the latter "refers not only to a spatial form, but expresses the social organization of the processes of reproduction".
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    Class struggle in the foundary: Deskilling and the transition from manufacture to machinofacture among iron moulders in South Africa
    (1980-09-15) Webster, E.
    This paper is a preliminary attempt to locate the process of deskilling of iron moulders in foundries in South Africa between 1896 and 1950 within an analysis of the labour process. It is an attempt to engage in a debate with Braverman's impressive account of the capitalist labour process through a specific study.
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    Disorganising the unorganised: The 'Black Flood' and the Registered Metal Union responses, Part I, the 1960s, of South African 'development'
    (1981-05) Sitas, A.
    This paper arises out of a combination of two factors: firstly, it is out of a dissatisfaction with a reality presented to us of late by a number of articles and more voluminous affairs like books about the role of white-skinned people in the racial division of labour, and through that, South African society as a whole. Secondly, out of a feeling that the ever-recurrent debate about 'inter-racial solidarity' and the South African working classes has been spirited away by some theoretical formulations that like the best of imported machinery started producing a mass of realities that obfuscate rather than clarify real issues that the labour movement is facing at present. (2) Unlike Demag machinery though, the results of the former, produced a reality that in most cases does not exist. These two factors will increasingly become clear as the narrative unfords and need not detain us here. What needs to detain us here though is the plot of the ensuing argument. In the first two parts of this paper, the story of the shifts in the T.U.C.S.A. as concerns African unionisation and their affiliation, disaffiliation acrobatics that characterised much of the 1960s is told. It finally traces two divergent responses vis-a-vis the registered union movement. The one, spearheaded by what have been called 'craft-diluted' unions, the other by 'industrial unions'. The third part, concerns an exploration of the material complexities that characterise the 'craft-diluted' unions with a specific focus on the actual transformations in the metal industry in South Africa throughout the 1960s. The fourth part looks at the unions themselves and how they respond to their new-found reality, not at the point of leadership but rather at the actions and passivities of their respective ranks and files. The fifth part analyses what has been discussed so far in the light of the current debates about the class determination of the white wage-earning classes. The paper closes with the 1972 T.U.C.S.A. Conference and the clear polarisation/accommodatiorithat exists in strategy between registered unions: a year before Potgieter's Zulus took to the streets, their rags barely covering their bottoms but for completely different reasons than he gives or to use Nelson's bad metaphor, the year his Black-worker-Christ resurrects himself despite the washing of the hands of Pontius Pilate (read; colonial administrator; read: registered union movement).(3) The second part, or the second paper, at the moment in preparation, will be tracing the process to the present.
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    Agricultural production in the African reserves of South Africa, 1918-1969
    (1980-03) Simkins, C.E.W.
    Among scholars who would disagree on the interpretation of many aspects of South African society there appears to be a considerable measure of consensus on the course of agricultural production in the reserves during the twentieth century. Thus M. Wilson writes: 'From one (peasant) community after another, however, there is evidence of a fall in productivity after a period of early prosperity. The tale is one of increasing pressure of population on deteriorating land, and the fall was not only in productivity per head, but in the total crop produced ... The date at which the decline began varied with the area ... in the Ciskei, it began before the end of the nineteenth century; in the Transkei it was conspicuous after 1930 ... Crops were shrinking owing to erosion and the fall in fertility. Between 1921 and 1930, 640 million pounds of mealies were produced by Africans, and between 1931 and 1939, this fell to 490 million pounds ...2 And Wolpe has a parallel passage: 'By the 1920s attention was already being drawn to the deterioration of the situation in the African areas and in 1932 the Native Economic Commission Report (1930-2) commented at length on the extremely low productivity of farming on the Reserves, on the increasing malnutrition and on the real danger of the irreversible destruction of the land through soil erosion. Every subsequent Government Commission dealing with the Reserves reiterated these points and drew attention to the decline in output.Report No. 9 of the Social and Economic Planning Council (1946) showed, for example, the decline in production of the staple crops - maize and kaffircorn - during the period 1934 to 1939. Thus maize production dropped from 3.7 million bags in 1934 to 1.2 million in 1936 and then rose slowly to 3.0 million in 1939. Kaffircorn likewise declined from 1.2 million bags in 1934 to 0.5 million in 1936, rising to 0.7 million in 1939. The above-mentioned reports and numerous other studies bear witness to the everincreasing total and irredeemable destruction, through soil erosion, of vast tracts of land, to the decline of production and to the impoverishment of the people ...'3 The purpose of this study is to submit Wilson's and Wolpe's propositions about agricultural production to critical scrutiny and to offer a fuller, more systematic account of its evolution from 1918 to 1969. The temporal limits of the study were determined by the following factors: (i) 1918 was the first year in which a Union Agricultural Census was taken; these Censuses are crucial sources for the analysis which follows: (ii) this study implicitly assumes that agriculture is virtually the only form of economic activity within the reserves. During the late sixties the reserve economies started to undergo substantial restructuring and this assumption cease, to hold.
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    Making out in the 'City of Gold': The coffee cart traders of Johannesburg
    (1980-06-17) Rogerson, Chris
    The economic, political and social hub of Southern Africa is Johannesburg, which is by far the most affluent city on the African continent. The history of this city is traditionally recorded as that of the rise of the Randlords, the growth of the mine-shafts and the transformation of raw mining camp to latterday metropolis. This picture represents, however, only one part of the story of the 'City of Gold'. The other side of Johannesburg's opulence is to be found in the life-histories and modes of existence of the people residing in the sprawling Black townships that today comprise Soweto. It is a part of their story, which constitutes the 'popular' or 'working class' history of Egoli, that is examined here. In particular, attention centres on the day-to-day struggles for survival by Blacks amid the same circumstances of poverty, unemployment and oppression that sparked in 1976 the uprising amongst the school children of Soweto.
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    Shortages of skilled labour power and capital reconstruction in South Africa
    (1981-10-12) Meth, Charles
    The purpose of this article is twofold. Firstly, it seeks to evaluate the claims of those who argue that skill shortages are a significant force for change in South Africa. Secondly, it attempts to develop a critical analysis of an article by a Marxist writer, who somewhat surprisingly places 'skill shortages' well upstage in a recent article which examined the restructuring of capital in South Africa. The topic of skill shortages is a hardy perennial on the local scene, the more so because the race question tends to obscure the nature of class warfare here. According to a host of commentators, eliminating the colour bar will release a seriously binding constraint on the 'economy' and open the way to a period of unparalleled capital accumulation. Statistics on skill shortages produced to support this claim share one important characteristic and that is their almost universal unreliability. Given the conditions in this country, it is obvious that whether or not there really exists a skill shortage, a persistent belief that there is such a thing, particularly a belief that such shortages are widespread, is likely ultimately to have important political consequences.