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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 Support or control: The children of the Garment Workers' Union, 1939-1948(1985-03) Witz, LeslieVarious historians have pointed out that during the first three decades of the twentieth century both capital and the state incorporated white wage earners in South Africa into institutionalised structures (1). The white workers lost all their militancy, developed a racist hierarchical division of labour, became entrapped in the hegemony of bourgeois politics and their trade unions slipped into the morass of bureaucracy. White workers, however, were not simply trapped by the state and capital. Incorporation was a process which took over twenty years or more to accomplish and was determined by specific conditions facing white workers and trade unions, in particular on the Witwatersrand, during this period. White workers rather eased themselves into a trap, lowered the gate, bolted it and threw away the key (2). There is one group of white workers which, it is maintained, managed to resist this incorporation: the clothing workers on the Witwatersrand in the 1930s and 40s. These workers were Afrikaner women who were active members of the Garment Workers' Union (GWU), a trade union which, it is claimed, under the leadership of Solly Sachs (its general secretary from 1928 to 1952), displayed a high degree of militancy, established internal democratic structures, assumed an independent political role and firmly committed itself to non-racialism (3). Perhaps the most important claim made on behalf of the union is the last for it has been used to justify many a theoretical position in the South African political arena. Solly Sachs himself used it to criticise the Communist Party's almost exclusive concern with black workers (4). Basil Davidson, writing in the New Statesman in 1950, wrote that the nonracialism in the Garment Workers' Union represented the hope that Afrikaners would forego their racialism and that black and white could co-operate in a future free South Africa (5). More recently Fine, de Clercq and Innes used the GWU's commitment to non-racialism as an example of how workers need not simply become incorporated into racial structures if trade unions registered under government sponsored legislation (6). All these assertions are based on an unquestioning acceptance of the Garment Workers' Union's official version of its stance towards black workers in the industry. The GWU always maintained that it welcomed blacks into its organisation, supported their struggles and through this assistance black workers acquired substantial benefits such as higher wages and shorter working hours (7). This paper will attempt to examine this rendition critically, looking particularly at the period 1939 to 1948, a time when black workers started entering the clothing industry on the Witwatersrand in significant numbers. However, we must first briefly survey the period 1929 to 1938 for in those years the roots of the GWU's policies towards black workers in the clothing industry were implanted (8).Item A Review of the second Carnegie Commission of enquiry into poverty in South Africa(1985-07-29) Wilson, FrancisWhat follows is the barest outline of some of the major issues emerging from the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development. I intend to flesh out these bones in the seminar in the hope of provoking critical discussion. This seminar will focus on poverty and the processes of impoverishment in Southern Africa, and on the second Carnegie Inquiry, which has been going on over the past five years. Background, and introduction: Purpose of the Inquiry is not just to document poverty, but to engage in policy-oriented research: research to assist the society to develop strategies to move away from poverty.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 The writer as storyteller?(1988-03-07) Vaughan, MichaelIn recent times, new schools of literary theory have appeared in South Africa. First came the materialists to challenge the liberal hegemony, and then the structuralists, who, in some of the later versions of theory, see the materialists themselves as too much wedded to liberalism and humanism. And then there is also Njabulo Ndebele, who seems to be something of a phenomenon in himself. Perhaps this is because he is African, not white. Literary theory in South Africa is, of course, largely monopolised by white academics, and this has no doubt, some consequences for the character of th resultant theory. It is noticeable, for example, with perhaps few exceptions, that materialist and structuralist theorists in South Africa derive their conceptual apparatus from the West, intact and ready-formed. All that remains is to apply it, as well as may be, to the local material. In other words, such local theorists art in an essentially pupilage relationship to the theorists of the West, who are vastly more sophisticated, inventive and original. Indeed, it could be said that the real theoretical work is being done in the West, and only imitated here, in a muffled sort of way. This is not said with the intention of deriding the efforts of local academics who attempt to grapple with and apply materialist and structuralist theories. I am, after all, one of those involved! There seems to be no other way, and this way does offer a certain scope. Imitation is never simply repetition, and perhaps this imitation is never, in any case, simply imitation. If local critical theory is derivative, this is a reflection on the nature of the relationship between South Africa and the West, on the nature of the South African education system, and on the separation of the upper reaches of the education system from the major realities of South African life. The separation of academic life from social life makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to be conceptually productive. All this is by way prelude to some consideration of the distinctiveness of Ndebele's contribution to literary theory in South Africa.....Item Race and class in the South African countryside: Cultural osmosis and social relations in the sharecropping economy of the south-western Transvaal, 1900-1950(1988-08) Van Onselen, Charles'Race relations' in the South African countryside have never made for a particularly pretty picture. Several recent studies, including, for example, a finely etched portrait of the notorious Abel Erasmus have served to remind us that the birth pangs of commercial agriculture in the Transvaal during the late 19th century were characterised by considerable violence between white landowners and black tenants (1). Nor did matters improve significantly over the half century that followed. In the course of an exceptionally sensitive study of black protest on the land during the late twenties it is suggested that: ' . . .fists, whips and guns were central in maintaining master-servant relationships on farms' (2). And, while writing what was the classic work of its genre in the mid-thirties, I.D. MacCrone was moved to comment on 'cases of violent physical treatment which are such a feature of the relations between white and black in country districts' (3).Item Work and control in a citrus packhouse: Zebediela Estate, 1926-1953(1987-03) Van Niekerk, AndreaAn earlier paper discussed the social origins of white women workers at Zebediela. These women were young, Afrikaans-speaking, and came largely from small farms in the Northern Transvaal (1). Their social characteristics - age, gender, 'culture' - profoundly shaped the experience of work at Zebediela. It is on this experience that this paper focuses. The paper decribes the labour process in the Zebediela packhouse, concentrating specifically on control and stabilisation of labour. It examines changes in the nature of work as production increased and the availability of young white women workers declined. These two processes intensified labour in the packhouse, and transformed management's strategies of control.