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Item Debates of Parliament (Hansard)(Cape Town Government Printers, 1989) South Africa Parliament, House of AssemblySouth Africa Parliament. Debates of Parliament (Hansard). South Africa Politics and government.Item Indexes to Debate of Parliament (Hansard)(Cape Town Government Printers, 1989) South Africa ParliamentSouth Africa Parliament. Debates of Parliament (Hansard). South Africa Politics and government.Item Indexes to Debates of the House of Assembly (Hansard)(Cape Town Government Printers, 1987) South Africa Parliament, House of AssemblySouth Africa. Parliament. House of Assembly. Debates of the House of Assembly (Hansard). Debates of Standing Committees.Item Indexes to Debates of the House of Assembly (Hansard)(Cape Town Government Printers, 1987) South Africa Parliament, House of AssemblySouth Africa Parliament House of Assembly. Debates of the House of Assembly (Hansard). Debates of Standing Committees.Item The Mfecane: Beginning the inquest(1988-09-12) Wright, John; Cobbing, JulianIn this paper I elaborate on the argument that 'the mfecane' is a pivotal component of a 'liberal', settler, apartheid-skeletal form a new analysis. The main assertion of mfecane propaganda is that a 'Zulu-centric' revolution produced an extensive depopulation which explains in historiographical sequence: the flight of peoples into the 'liberation' of the European economy, the land division of 1913, and, since the 1950s, the configuration of the Bantustans. In reply, it is shown that the sub-continental destabilisations and transformations within black societies sprang from the synchronous and converging impact of European penetration at Delagoa Bay, the Cape, north of the Orange, and Natal. In order to disguise what had occurred the whites erased themselves from their own impact, and retrospectively inserted Shaka and other victims of the process as initiators in situations where they were absent. The chronology is lengthened far beyond the (in this context) irrelevant reign of the Zulu monarch. Particular attention is paid to the sequences of this extended chronology and to the cross-interactions between the sectors of the white advance. It is not the intention to minimise change internal to black societies, but rather to make a call for this to be researched in its proper context. The huge gaps in our knowledge revealed by this approach ensure that this task is a formidable one.Item Strike action and self-help associations: Protest and culture of African workers after World War I, Zimbabwe(1987-08-26) Yoshikuni, TsuneoThe years immediately following the armistice of the First World War witnessed the rapid growth of labour movements throughout the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, despite the region's relative weakness of capitalist penetration, the period was punctuated by stirrings of industrial discontent among African workers, apart from a contemporary spate of strikes by European workers in settler-dominated southern Africa. The places affected ranged from Freetown to Cape Town, from Lagos to Lourenco Marques, from Nairobi to Johannesburg and many other industrial centres. Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, was no exception. In the period from 1918 to 1921 African workers are known to have mounted several work stoppages in major towns, railways, mines, etc. throughout the colony. None of these disputes was more than a 'skirmish', lasting only a short while, but together they constituted a militant strike movement or movements. The first part of this essay is an attempt to describe this upsurge of labour protest. The protest on such a scale was perhaps the earliest of its kind in the colony's history and much of it has so far remained in obscurity; as such, it deserves to be accounted in detail. The image of the African worker that can be obtained from the first part is, insofar as its concern is restricted to the protest scenes, inescapably a very much simplified and abridged one: he is to be depicted as a man rationally and milltantly responding to economic realities of an industrial society. In order to probe more deeply into the character of the African worker, the labour protest of 1918-21 needs to be placed on a wider historical canvass. For this purpose, the second part of this essay addresses itself to a case study of the Tonga or Zambesi municipal workers in Salisbury (Harare) who staged a strike in August 1919. Its emphasis is upon penetrating the interior of the world which African migrants created in the face of everyday problems—a world, made of intimate human ties, where people found natural and effective forms of self-protection and self-assertion in the industrial situation.Item Political mythology and the making of Natal's Mfecane(1988-09) Wright, JohnOver the last twenty years or so the concept of the mfecane has come to be deeply rooted as a notion round which much of the history of southern Africa in the first half of the 19th century is written. As generally used, the term refers to a series of wars and migrations which are supposed to have been sparked off by the emergence of the Zulu kingdom In the late 1810s, and then to have swirled across most of the eastern half of the sub-continent. In the view of many historians, these upheavals were the direct cause of the profound changes in the political map of southern Africa which took place in the 1820s and 1830s, changes which in turn were of the greatest significance in shaping the nature of black-white interaction in southern Africa for the rest of the century (1). In a series of so far unpublished papers written since 1983, Julian Cobbing has formulated a radical and sweeping critique of the notion that the mfecane actually happened (2). While not denying that the history of African societies in the earlier 19th century was marked by numerous violent conflicts, he rejects the particular significance which white writers since at least the mid-19th century have attached to them. He empasizes that they were a continuation of conflicts which had begun long before the 1810s, conflicts whose primary cause was not the expansion of the Zulu kingdom but the onslaught which Dutch and British settlers and imperialists at the Cape and, to a lesser extent, Portuguese slavers at Delagoa bay were making on neighbouring African societies in their unrelenting attempts to seize control of land and labour-power. The upheavals of the times had not one but several epicentres.Item The re-emergence of political unionism in contemporary South Africa?(1987-03) Webster, E.; Lambert, RobThe racially based South African state has always served to buttress severe forms of labour exploitation. It has been, historically and in contemporary struggles, a cardinal force shaping the form, character and goals of the progressive, non-racial, trade union movement. This is not to imply that the state was, and is, a determining force in this regard. Such theorization would deemphasize the dimension of leadership and the potential choices that emerge within tactical and strategic debates. Our own approach in attempting to assess the direction and potential of contemporary trade unionism in South Africa, would be to assert the critical importance of these tactical and strategic debates. We would argue that fundamental differences in the perceptions of the trade union role exist, differences that have divided the trade union movement since unions first emerged in nineteenth-century Europe....Item A cake of soap: The Volksmoeder ideology and the Afrikaner women's campaign for the vote(1988-03-23) Vincent, L.The 1920s witnessed a great volume of activity associated with the women's suffrage campaign in South Africa. Existing women's organisations added the demand for the vote to their programmes and new organisations were formed with suffrage as their exclusive goal. This campaign is usually associated with the English-speaking women of the country. Cherryl Walker, for example, in her article on "The Women's Suffrage Movement" asserts that "its leaders were not rural or Afrikaner, but characteristically middle-class, urban and English-speaking". Walker sees Afrikaner women as firmly under the sway of the patriarchal ideology of the Dutch Reformed Church and "content to exercise their power indirectly, without questioning the principle of male hegemony" (1). Lou-Marie Kruger, in her study of the magazine, Die Boerevrou, finds that the issue of female suffrage was hardly ever discussed in Die Boerevrou and concludes from this that Afrikaner women played no part in the campaign (2). Marijke du Toit's work on the Afrikaner Christelike Vroue Vereniging (the Afrikaner Christian Women's Association) comes to a similar conclusion. She argues that sporadic reports of militant suffragette action in Britain made little impact in South Africa and that, for the most part, Afrikaner women agreed that "unbiblical suffragettes" threatened domestic life (3). This paper challenges the perception of the suffrage campaign as a movement of Englishspeaking, middle-class, urban women. It argues that Afrikaner women played a significant role in what was referred to at the time as one of the most controversial issues ever to have been dealt with in the South African Legislative Assembly. Leading Afrikaner women campaigned vociferously for their own enfranchisement. In order to do so, they had to challenge existing Afrikaner nationalist ideas about the proper role of women in society. As the title of the paper suggests, Afrikaner women employed the language of home-making and motherhood as a means of conferring legitimacy on their campaign for citizenship. The title is taken from an article which appeared in the suffrage magazine, The Flashlight in July 1930. In this article, Mrs M. Moldenhauer described the newly-won suffrage as "a cake of soap" which women would use to "clean up the dirty places of the country, and lighten darkness wherever it is possible" (4).Item Orthodoxy and counter-orthodoxy in the Bethanie anti-levy riot of 1940(1989-03) Venable, HowardOne of the central events in the history of the Bakwena-ba-Magopa community, (1) according to its members, is the civil strife of 1940, and especially the riot on Sunday night, the 21st of July 1940 in the village of Bethanie. People living in that village today frequently refer to the period as Bethanie's "civil war," a term which emphasizes that the dispute was profoundly inward-looking, local and devisive, as well as violent. Even today, when most of the leading actors in the drama are dead, the people of Bethanie are quite reluctant to talk openly about those events.