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Author: search.filters.author.Mabin, AlanStart date: 1943

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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Strikes in the Cape Colony, 1854-1899
    (1983-05) Mabin, Alan
    Prior to the eighteen fifties, southern Africa was almost totally devoid of the elements of a modern capitalist economy. But it was in that decade that some of the familiar features of capitalism began to show themselves in the Cape Colony. The beginnings of industrial copper mining in Namaqualand, coupled with speculation and the cycle of boom and bust provide examples. The decade of the fifties also seems to have brought the first instance of that classic form of struggle in capitalist society: a strike by wage-workers. Much of the historical literature leaves the impression that the era of industrial capitalism in southern Africa commenced with the mining of gold on the Witwatersrand. The roots of this development in the Kimberley diamond mines seldom receive more than passing recognition. The progress of accumulation, and the struggles between workers and employers in the rest of the Cape Colony before (or, for that matter, after) 1899 have received almost no attention. Gottshalk's note on the 'earliest known strikes by black workers' and Purkis' thesis on railways stand alone in detailing some of the strikes which marked the extension of wage labour in the Cape in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was also the unfulfilled hope of John Smalberger to write an article on early strikes, and materials in his papers deposited posthumously in the library at the University of Cape Town provide valuable pointers on the subject. Smalberger seems to have been under the impression that the earliest strikes were conducted by black workers. Yet, the first recorded strike — that of the Cape Town boatmen in 1854 - was a strike of all the port's boat workers: one cannot distinguish in the records between black and white. As the division of labour became more complex and the nature of workplace struggles more varied, the separation of black and white workers developed. Particularly from the 1870s onward, strikes reflected this separation. But strikes can also be seen as part of the process of shaping these divisions. Different issues of class, race and sex overlapped and intersected in these early South African workers' actions. This article outlines the history of the (known) strikes in the Cape Colony from 1854 to 1899. The intention is to demonstrate the extent to which workers have found it necessary to resort to strike action throughout the history of wage labour in southern Africa, and to point to the ways in which complex social processes were reflected, reproduced and created in these workplace struggles. In order to situate the material which follows, the first sections survey the economic context of the Cape Colony, 1850 to 1899. The geographical limits of the study are determined by the area brought under the sway of a single state — the Cape colonial state — in the period before the Anglo-Boer War brought the states of South Africa into a far closer relationship than the economic development of capitalism alone had done.
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    Reconstructing South Africa's cities 1900-2000: A prospectus (or, a cautionary tale)
    (1992-05-18) Mabin, Alan; Smit, Dan
    If the title of this paper appears a trifle ambitious, readers may rest assured that the authors recognise the possibility that so broad a sweep as a survey of a century - including, not least, some thoughts on a decade of that century which still lies in the future - may unsettle an audience more accustomed to better focused and more compressed topics. Nevertheless, the paper is offered to the African Studies seminar as one of the first fruits, wizened though it may be, of a project which has long struggled to yield products of any kind. The reasons for this slowness may become apparent in the concluding sections. The intention of this paper is to outline the account which our research has led us to form, and thereby to gain some response from within and beyond the seminar on the viability, suitability and acceptability of our present conception of our work. The burden of the present weighs heavily upon the account to follow, for the inspiration of the project of which it represents a partial fruit lies largely in the present fervour of reconstructionist thinking which surrounds and permeates South African society today. The story to be told here may be captured almost entirely in the following six sentences. During each period of extreme stress and turmoil in our past ninety years, the idea of reconstruction has loomed large. A primary tool of reconstructing society has equally been presumed, by many parties, to lie in urban planning. As less turbulent times return, governments have attempted to reshape the society, and more particularly the cities, by developing new institutions, laws, visions, systems, personnel and plans. In each major case, however, the programmes of progenitors of such ideas have been overtaken by the accession to power of new regimes - at government or merely planning system level - which have coopted the new institutions, etc., to their own programmes; or they have, less spectacularly, faded away as the complexities of government overwhelm initially exciting but idealistic visions. At present, urban planning is being wheeled out, dusted off and reformulated as a primary instrument of remaking South Africa, much as it has been several times before. The paper sympathises with these moves, but sounds a cautionary note in the midst of the prevailing enthusiasm for a fourth great reconstruction of our cities.
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    Recession and its aftermath: The Cape Colony in the eighteen eighties
    (1984-08-27) Mabin, Alan
    The urban and industrial transformation of South Africa is commonly considered to have begun with the discoveries of diamonds in 1867 and of gold in 1886. Among the components of that transformation were the reorientations on two occasions of the economies of the coastal colonies of the Cape and Natal towards 'emerging economic centres of gravity1 at Kimberley and Johannesburg. The diversion to the interior of capital investment in the late nineteenth century has been paralleled by the focus of much late twentieth century historiography, which has - with exceptions - been concerned more with events after than before the opening of the Witwatersrand gold fields, and which has seldom explored the economic conditions prevailing in the coastal colonies prior to that moment. It seems to be taken for granted that the mineral 'discoveries' should have been followed by so unusual a reorientation of the pre-existing geography: not once,' but twice: first to the diamond fields, then to the Transvaal. The geological occurrence or geographical location of minerals substitutes for explanation of movements of money, people and materials. Yet as Atmore and Marks hinted, following a theme suggested by Blainey, minerals were discovered 'by no means entirely accidentally' at particular moments in the sixties and the eighties.The timing and the geography of the economic expansions of which mineral discoveries and evelopment formed a part are subjects which both history and historical geography have left uncharted. This paper is concerned with the economic conditions prevailing in the Cape Colony in the early eighties, immediately prior to the opening of the Witwatersrand mines. Its first section charts the course of recession from 1881 to 1886. The remainder of the paper considers the consequences of the depression in the Cape Colony and its association with certain other factors in South African development at the time. Its last two sections analyse the various forces, arising before and during the recession, which both encouraged and opposed northward expansion from the Cape Colony.
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    Labour tenancy and the land clearances at Pilgrims Rest
    (1985-06) Mabin, Alan
    Towards the end of August 1951, the manager of Transvaal Gold Mining Estates (TGME) wrote to Rand Mines asking for advice on a 'very embarrassing matter'. The problem he faced was one of difficulty in obtaining continued permission for African tenants to reside on his company's farms in the Pilgrims Rest district. Unless it was possible to continue to obtain such permission, he wrote, 'the effect on the native labour force, both as regards quantity and quality, may be serious and grow progressively worse'. Thus commenced a struggle over the occupation and use of the land which endured for more than two decades, and ended with the final expulsion of the people in 1972. As in so many other land clearances, most people from the farms ultimately found themselves in squalid circumstances, deprived of access to farmland and excluded from the benefits of agricultural progress. As in forced relocation elsewhere in South Africa, legal provisions, courts and the power of the state were all beyond the control of the people affected. But whatever its outcome, the story of the people of these farms is by no means simply one of the 'apartheid state' bulldozing its hapless victims into an inevitable submission. This complex conflict variously pitted the company, the state and the people on the farms against one another, with variations of texture in the actions of various parties and subtle divisions within the state and the company as well as the farm communities.
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