Africana Library

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Start date: 1980End date: 1989

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    The Mfecane: Beginning the inquest
    (1988-09-12) Wright, John; Cobbing, Julian
    In 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.
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    Support or control: The children of the Garment Workers' Union, 1939-1948
    (1985-03) Witz, Leslie
    Various 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).
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    A Review of the second Carnegie Commission of enquiry into poverty in South Africa
    (1985-07-29) Wilson, Francis
    What 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.
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    Strike action and self-help associations: Protest and culture of African workers after World War I, Zimbabwe
    (1987-08-26) Yoshikuni, Tsuneo
    The 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.
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    Politics, ideology, and the invention of the 'Nguni'
    (1983-06-14) Wright, John
    The word 'Nguni' is today commonly used by academics as a collective term for the black peoples who historically have inhabited the eastern regions of southern Africa from Swaziland through Zululand, Natal, the Transkei and the Ciskei to the eastern Cape. These peoples are conventionally distinguished by language and culture from the Thonga peoples of the coastlands further to the north, and the Sotho peoples of the interior plateau to the west and north-west. Use of Nguni in this extended sense is now so well entrenched in the literature on southern African ethnography, linguistics, and history as probably to make the term irremovable, but, from a historical perspective, it is important to note that it is only within the last half-century that this usage has become current. Previously, the peoples now designated as Nguni had been variously labelled as Zulu, or Xhosa, or Kaffirs, or Zulu-Kaffirs, while Nguni itself had been a non-literary term used by the black peoples of south-east Africa in a number of more restricted senses. Nowhere among these peoples was Nguni used in a generic sense. The purpose of this paper is to trace the historical process by which the modern literary usage of Nguni became established. It is divided into three parts. In the first, the various historically known meanings of Nguni are identified. In the second, an explanation is suggested as to why specifically one of these meanings was appropriated by academics from the 1930s onward. In the third, an explanation is put forward as to how and why this particular meaning had developed in the first place.
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    Political mythology and the making of Natal's Mfecane
    (1988-09) Wright, John
    Over 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.
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    Straddling realities: The urban foundation and social change in contemporary South Africa
    (1982-05) Wilkinson, Peter
    Until perhaps as recently as a year ago, it would have been tempting to construct a 'radical' critique of the Urban Foundation (UF) around the apparent compatibility of the organization's programme with the objectives of the 'Total Strategy' formulated by the government of P.W. Botha. Indeed, elements of such an analysis remain central to the argument that will be advanced here. But since the events of the past year have exposed the deep-seated antipathy of an important section of the government's electoral base towards any attempt at 'meaningful reform', the inadequacy of a critique which simply continues to assert the UF's complicity in 'Total Strategy' must be confronted. After the recent much-heralded 'report back' conference between Botha and leading businessmen fizzled out inconclusively in Cape Town, it would be merely naive to attempt to maintain the notion of an unpvoblematic partnership of 'state' and 'capital' in a joint project aimed at co-opting the black 'middle classes' under the guise of implementing an essentially hollow reform strategy. What I shall be trying to do in this article, therefore, is to shift the analysis of the UFVs role in contemporary South Africa beyond the terms of this now somewhat unproductive polemic. I propose to approach the problem in two stages. In the first place, I want to locate the UF within the framework of the present (November 1981) conjuncture in South Africa by tracing, briefly and somewhat schematically, certain developments bearing on the role of the Foundation during the nearly five years that have elapsed since it was initially set up in December 1976. Secondly, I shall argue that these developments have left the UF in a position in which it is poised between the reality in which it first took shape and the reality of the present, and I shall explore some of the dimensions of the critical strategic choice with which I believe it is now faced. Throughout, in order to keep the length of this article within acceptable limits and to avoid unnecessary references to matters that have received extensive coverage in the press, I will assume a degree of broad familiarity on the part of readers with the more general aims and activities of the UF.
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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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    Kimberley's closed compounds: a model for Southern African compounds
    (1982-09-13) Turrell, Rob
    While it is by now conventional wisdom that the compound 'provided the framework for the total exploitation of ... black workers', (1) it has often been assumed by historians that the late nineteenth century closed compounds at Kimberley provided a superior material and social environment to their imitators on the Rand and in Southern Rhodesia (2). This assumption has been based on diamond mine owners' claims to have created an attractive social microcosm in their compounds, in which African workers were forced to spend their non-working lives for the duration of a contract. Moreover, the mine owners argued that it was these model social welfare compounds that compensated for a worker's loss of freedom. And it was a measure of the validity of their claim, they continued, that the mines never went short of labour and thus did not need to resort to labour recruitment, (3). This view of model diamond compounds in the 1880s and 1890s is a mine owner's myth. In the areas of accommodation, diet and health care, early Kimberley compounds were not markedly superior to the standards found in early Rand and Southern Rhodesian compounds. Van Onselen has compared conditions in these latter two mining regions and shown that, of the two, Rhodesian compounds were worse.
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    The re-emergence of political unionism in contemporary South Africa?
    (1987-03) Webster, E.; Lambert, Rob
    The 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....