UNIVERS ITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND A F R I C A N S T U D I E S I N S T I T U T E African Studies Seminar Paper to be presented in RW 4.00pm MARCH 1985 Title: The Dynamics of Rural Acumulation in South Africa: Comparative and Historical Perspectives. by: Tim Keegan No. 165 The view that the opening up of Africa by metropolitan capitalism, more particularly during the period of direct colonial rule, was bound to lead through evolutionary stages to economic development and moder- nisation, has long since fallen into scholarly disrepute. In the at- mosphere of radical pessimism that has pervaded academic perspectives on Aftica since independence, an altogether more sceptical view of the bene- ficence of Africa's integration into imperial economies has prevailed. But as is so often the case in scholarly debate, thesis and. antithesis occupy the same battle-ground, and both tend to view the world through similar lenses; What modernisation and underdevelopment theories have in common is the assumption of a single universal dynamic in the making of the modern world. Exposure to market forces is destined either to reshape Third World societies in the image of industrial Europe, or to *underdevelop' them in the interests of capital accumulation in the metropoles. In particular, underdevelopment theory tends toward an assumption of the omnipotence of metropolitan capitalism. Thus the initial premise that has shaped so much analysis of contemporary Africa is that peasants survived as a fundamental element in African economies because i t was in the interests of capital that they should be maintained - either as producers of cash crops or as exporters of labour. Such arguments are - 1 - 2. usually couched in terms of the advantages to be gained by reliance on African social systems to subsidise::capitalist profits - insofar as sub- sistence production by peasant households helped to keep both wages and 2 the cost of producing cash crops low. Such a position, however, overlooks the very limited power which colonial administrations had to re-order African societies in radically different ways.and the real potential for African resistance and African agency in shaping their own responses to colonial pressures. Underdeve- lopment, far from being a reflection of the requirements of metropolitan capitalism, can perhaps better be seen partly in terms of the inherent tenacity of African social and economic systems, and also in terms of the weakness of the colonial state in Africa and its inability to pro- pel and preside over the sorts of social upheavals that the spread of capitalist relations would have entailed. Indeed, the colonial state often proved reluctant (until late in the colonial period) to allow rural capitalism, with all its disruptive consequences, to develop too 3 far. Colonial administrators were concerned to prevent the exclusionary accumulation of resources by individuals from getting out of hand, and to inhibit precolonial political elites from taking advantage of new opportunities to extend their exploitative control over land and labour beyond a certain safe point. What needs to be stressed, then, is the failure of incorporation of peasants into more intensive market rela- tionships. The persistance of peasant economies, far from being a re- flection of profit-maximising rationality on the part of outsiders, might indeed be a major constraint :>n capital accumulation and profit-making - both internally and externally. Even in colonies of white settlement in tropical Africa, such as Kenya, settlers, for all their political influence, were never able to forge a state structure that was sufficiently subservient to their 3 interests. In Kenya a well-established and sustainable settler capitalism failed to strike root at the expense of the black peasant economy, con- trary to much conventional wisdom about the %destruction' of the pea- santry. Similarly in Southern Rhodesia, where, unlike Kenya, settlers did control the state, the black rural economy, far from precipitously 7 declining by the 1930s in the face of a rampant settler capitalism,' seems instead to have survived the worst intentions of the settlers, a and indeed has advanced markedly since the Second World War. This recent rethinking of the nature and causes of African under- development has tended to emphasise the startling uniqueness of the South African case, where mechanised white-controlled agriculture came to mono- polise internal and export produce markets during the course of the twen- tieth century, and where the areas of black peasant production were even- tually reduced to sub-subsistent labour reserves. The break-through to a generalised rural capitalism such as has occurred in South Africa imr plies a process which can usefully be described as ^primitive accumula- tion*. This refers to the accumulation and monopolisation of productive resources by some at the expense of others, and the corollative forging of a labouring class, dependent on selling its labour in order to sur- vive. The mobilisation of productive resources in the hands of indivir dual accumulators has been a feature of colonialism in various parts of Africa (cocoa and groundnut farmers in West Africa, cotton and coffee farmers in East Africa spring to mind) but nowhere outside of South Afri- ca has accumulation led to a fully capitalist agriculture generalised throughout the state. The historically problematical nature of such capitalist transformations in agriculture has often been underestimated. In the South African case, capitalist agriculture has usually been ac- cepted as an unproblematical consequence of the rise of extractive industry in a white-supremacist society. The rest of this paper seeks 4. to investigate some of the dimensions of this transition in the South Afri- can context, in the hope that examining the exceptional case might throw some light on the wider experience. In South Africa's colonial economy, enclaves of export-oriented settler production arose in different areas at various times in the pre- industrial past: firstly, in the wheat and wine farms of the south-wes- tern Cape, based on imported slave labour, from the seventeenth century onward; commercial wool and ostrich farming spread through the dry ex- panses of the eastern Cape interior, based on various forms of semi-ser- vile and migrant labour, in the mid-nineteenth century; and on the sugar plantations of the Natal lowlands, indentured Indians were employed from the 1860s, Our primary focus in this paper, however, is on the far interior Highveld, settled by extensive Boer pastoralists from the 1840s, for this was the region which spawned South Africa's industrial revolution, and which was most radically transformed by the rise of internal urban markets for agricultural produce from the late nineteenth century onward. By focusing on the Highveld, the agricultural heartland of twentieth century South Africa, we can best explore the conditions under which it was possible for a capitalist transformation of rural society to take place. Although the Boer pastoralists of the mid-nineteenth century Highveld were on the whole on the margins of the mercantile capitalist economies of the Cape and Natal colonies, they were deeply involved in trade in animal products with coastal merchants. Wool was the staple export from areas most closely tied to the colonial economy radiating from the ports. Trade was also largely based on hunting until at least the 1870s, and much later in the outer reaches of white settlement. The trade in skins in particular led to indiscriminate destruction of game. Much of the trade with interior peoples, black and white, was controlled by Boers themselves; 5. and transport riding was also an important source of capital accumula- tion on the pre-industrial Highveld, The ownership of a wagon and oxen was as important as a gun and ammunition in the accumulation of capital amongst Boers seeking to establish themselves as independent pastoralists and landowners. The Boer Republics of the Highveld established in the 1650s developed a typically colonial elite which consisted of the small English-speaking mercantile, financial and legal bourgeoisie of the scattered trading centres, as well as the wealthier of the Boer stock onwers. For all these, the accumulation of land was the major route g to status and the exercise of patronage in the Boer state. The prevalence of colonial market relations and merchant and spe- culative capital in shaping the political economy of the Republican state went hand in hand with forms of accumuld;ion amongst Boer notables in the early years which involved tributary and clientage relations with independent indigenous peoples. In areas where black chiefs had patro- nage of their own to dispense, Boer notables with control over land were able to enter alliances with African chiefs resident thereon, enabling the notables to draw off surpluses from black production in the form of tribute, tax, rent or labour service. Boer notables had access to wealth in their capacity as military commanders as well. In the absence of any full-time military or police force, much initiative in raiding African peoples lay with the elective yeldcornets and with the burgher militias. However, these pre-industrial forms of accumulation based on the exercise of patronage and military adventurism were to be displaced fairly rapidly by the economic revolution attendant on the mineral discoveries of the last three decades of the century. By the early years of the twentieth century production of grain for rising urban markets had become the pre- dominant form of rural enterprise on the Highveld. Up to the final decades of the nineteenth century, the Boers' 6. limited labour requirements for household work or herding were in large part met by servile relations with acculturated black dependants. On the Highveld, these dependants frequently had their origins in a pecu- liarly African form of slavery which involved raiding1 for or purchasing black children from African slavers, and bringing them up as household drudges. These relationships would evolve into clientship relations as 11the blacks reached adulthood. Tenant or 'squatter' labour was also known from tie earliest days; but as agricultural production developed, as the advance of white land alienation accelerated, and as colonial domination of indigenous societies strengthened, more and more black labour was provided by tenant homesteads, who moved away from the jurisdiction of the black chiefdoms and sought to enter relationships with white landholders allowing them access to land in return for a proportion of their surpluses in rent or the labour services of juniors. Thus the development of an arable agricultural economy in response to the rise of internal markets coincided with the rise of increasingly intensive and conflictual relationships between white landholders and black tenant families, relationships in which the former were by no means always dominant at first. The significance of these develop- ments will be examined more closely later. Eurocentric .perspectives have dominated interpretations of the trans- formation of rural South Africa which began in the late nineteenth cen- tury. The pervasive model which scholars have used is that of the "Prussian path*. First used by Lenin to explain one variant of capi- talist development, the analogy with east Elbian Germany was further developed by Barrington Moore in his influential comparative survey of industrialisation. In analyses of South Africa, the analogy has been found useful at different times by scholars as diverse as Stanley Trapido, Martin Legassick, M.L. Morris, Stanley Greenberg and Frederick 13 7 Cooper. The significance of the Prussian experience lies in the tran- sition to capitalism "from above'. In the paradigmatic Prussian case, the feudal aristocracy itself took charge of capitalist production, forcibly turning the serfs into labourers. The German analogy presented in this schematic way implies funda- mental continuities on two levels* Firstly, i t implies an evolutionary, internal transformation of the pre-industrial white landowning class (the "Boer Junkers' in Morris* terminology) into a class of capitalist farmers, by an autochtonous and self-generating process of accumulation. Secondly, i t implies that the rise of an industrial economy and of urban markets was directly accompanied by the emergence and intensification of labour tenancy relations between servile black tenant and dominant white landlord, which were increasingly analogous with and merging into expli- cit wage labour - what has been called 'internal proletarianisation'. The model contains the assumption that the process of *labour repres- sion* was an integral aspect of the rise of commercial agriculture. As a broad generalisation the model might seem at f irst sight to bear some superficial resemblance to what happened in South Africa over the long term. But on both counts i t obscures and misrepresents the real signi- ficance of the processes involved. Were the capitalist farmers of the Highveld in the twentieth century really direct lineal descendants of the landowners of the mid-nineteenth century? Was capital accumulation autochtonous? Did i t proceed in an evolutionary trajectory? The evidence suggests the opposite, productive capital was not generated from agricultural production itself - at least not indefinitely. The old Boer landowner and extensive pastoralist of the 1860s was more likely to be amongst the victims of the industrial revolu- tion than amongst i ts beneficiaries. The progressive farmers of the early twentieth century were more likely to be new settlers of British or colonial origins than members of the old Boer landowning class. The great bulk of new capital being invested in agricultural enterprise was imported from elsewhere ox was accumulated in non-agricultural pursuits. 1 5Many of the most capitalised farmers had alternative sources of income. Various forms of entrepreneurial activities commonly went hand in hand with capitalised farming. Many of the capitalised farmers at the end of the nineteenth century had been (or their fathers had been) espeically en- terprising- and successful full-time traders, professional transporters and hunters in earlier years, with favoured access to credit and exchange net- works. Much agrarian capital was derived from such sources. Many of the wealthier farmers in the rich arable districts of the eastern Orange Free State Republic (where capitalised arable farming emerged earlier than elsewhere) owned mills and steam threshing machines with which to service the crops of surrounding farmers. Some owned fleets of transport wagons. Some combined farming enterprises with large-scale trading and speculation 17in the produce of Easutoland as well as the Free State farms. ' Land speculation was a common form of primary enrichment. Many early land accumulators were able to make massive profits later. Many landowners had been enriched by periodic speculative booms in land in the Cape Colony as a result of the development of sheep farming from the 1840s, and more spectacularly in the intermittent ostrich feather booms in the years between 1G70 and 1914i a n? 'the related great demand for lucerne grown under irrigation. These speculative booms spread throughout the Cape midlands and into the Free State, as capital derived by landowner ship in the districts at the epicentre was invested massively in further land purchases. The amount of productive potential thus generated amongst landowners and their descendants was considerable, and the eddies were felt far and wide as young men in search of new land to settle, moved 1 R northwards. It was under circumstances such as these that the potential 9. was created for the capitalisation of farming on the Highveld. Indeed, it was a commonplace observation at the time that most progressive far- mers in a district were the late arrivals, often colonial farmers from older areas of settlement in the Cape or Natal who had cashed in on the higher land values available there and in consequence were able to invest 19 capital in improvements on newly acquired land on the Highveld. Furthermore, a number of examples can be given of industrially or commercially generated wealth being invested in farming. *Randlords like Henry Nourse, Sir Abe Bailey and Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, the Bourkes from the eastern Transvaal goldfields, the Newberrys from the Diamond Fields, and the Lewis and Marks Company, one of the earliest industrial companies to diversify in a large way beyond raining, were all involved in the deve- 20 lopment of highly capitalised farming operations on the Highveld. Names that regularly recurred amongst the prize-winners at the big agricultural shows in Johannesburg, Bloemfontein and Kimberley included such represen- tatives of finance capital as Sir George Farrar, De Beers Consolidated Mines, the Smartt Syndicate, as well as big merchant firms as D. and D.H. Fraser of Wepener, who not only had a dozen trading stations in Basutoland, but were amongst the Free State's leading sheep breeders. Amongst the capitalist farmers were those who farmed company land and who had access to corporate funds. Others combined farming with pro- 22fitable legal and auctioneering businesses. A singularly telling example of this process is provided by the mi- ning magnate Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, whose estate, BucJcland Downs, bought in 1902, was a model scientific farm. The essential nature of the enter- prise, however, is revealed by Fitzpatrick's biographer: *the property was always a cheque-book farm, into which it was constantly necessary to pour large sums of money. . .. The returns from the farming opera- tions were minimal, the costs prodigious.' Also revealing as to the nature 10. of the enterprise is the fact that the estate was used for hunting. I t was stocked with eland, wildebees and springbok, and Fitzpatrick imported 23deer from England and Scotland. J Farming for Fitzpatrick as for so many other wealthy men was an object of conspicuous consumption. Thus was the self-made capitalist entrepreneur transformed into a member of a new gentry. Here, as on much other land belonging to companies or wealthy men, hunting had been radically transformed from a major economic activity on which much rural accumulation was based, to a sport for gentlemen from Johannes- burg or Kimberley. More practical and less wealthy landowners might have preferred stocking the land with black sharecroppers rather than red deer. 4 Indeed, i t seems to have been not uncommon for the best known and most capitalised farming enterprises with access to abundant finance from non-agricultural sources to have been thoroughly uneconomic. Not only was autochtonous accumulation from rural production alone atypical if not impossible over the long term, but even where capital was readily available for investment in farming, i t s availability did not guarantee profits. Capital-intensive enterprises did not invariably pay dividends corresponding to the level of capital investment. Tom Minter, who sold his half-option on the diamondiferous farm, Rietgat, for ,?30,000 in 1898, and invested part of the proceeds in a steam plough worthj?4?000 with which he intended raising 30,000 bags of wheat a year, ended up bankrupt. In 1904 J.A. McLaren, South African agent of the steam plough, manufacturers, John Fowler and Company of Leeds, rented 2,000 acres on which he spent large sums of money over ten years to demonstrate the viability of steam ploughing under South African conditions. Nevertheless, despite high yields (40,000 bags of grain in 1910), the enterprise lost ?35,000 in a l l . Again, in 1915* Robert Seggie of Holfontein, Kroonstad, was involved in a suit against the sellers of a steam traction engine for ploughing which had been a ^complete fai lure ' . The action cost Seggie some ?2,000. ^ 26. to maintain i t s early momentum by for e.g. creating marketing monopolies and restraining African commercial ini t ia t ive. (As a recent example from a large l i terature, see Douglas Rimmer, *The Economic Imprint of Colonialism and Domestic Food Supplies in British Tropical Africa,' in Robert Botberg (ed.), Imperialism, Colonialism and Hunger: East and Central Africa, (Lexington, Mass., 1983).) Both these approaches directly contradict the global teleology represented by underdevelop- ment theory, and stress the limitations on Europe's capacity either to profit from or to develop African colonies. 5. See Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa; Pnderdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry, (London, 1980), 21-23, who asserts that the optimal inter- rests of western capitalism required the replacement of pre-existing productive relationships. Geoffrey Kay, Development and Underdevelop- ment: a Marxist Analysis, (London, 1975)> asserts from an explicitly Marxist perspective that underdevelopment is a consequence of insuffi- cient exploitation by metropolitan capital (55)? See also Bill Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, (London, 1980), who seeks to r e - surrect Harx's own view of capitalism as a progressive, revolutionary force in the colonial world. 6. As an example from what is now a considerable body of l i terature, see Gavin Kitching, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: the Making of an African Petite-Bourgeoisie, (New Haven, 1980). The older conventional wisdom is reflected in e.g. R.D. V/olff, The. Economics of Colonialism: Britain and Kenya, 1870-1930, (New Haven, 1974). 7- The image evoked in R. Palmer and ?.N. Parsons, (ed.s), The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa, (London, 1977). 8. T.0. Ranger, ^Growing from the Roots: Reflections on Peasant Research in Central and Southern Africa,' Journal of Southern African Studies, 5 (1978); John McCracken, ^Rethinking Rural Poverty,' Journal of - 11. It is perhaps ironic that Seggie had himself written some years earlier that The ox is the natural draught animal for South Africa, and, therefore, the horse, steamplough or any other in- vention will never replace it. The price that we get for our produce is too low, and the product per acre is too small, that any ploughing which costs more than from 8d to 1s per English acre would be too high, with all the other drawbacks that we have, to leave a mar- gin of profit. 25 In the light of this estimate it is significant to note that steam ploughing on the Vereeniging Estates was computed to cost some 4s per acre, even with the ready availability of coal from the nearby collieries. Sir Percy Fitz- patrick was advised by the Director of Agriculture upon enquiry that 10s 27 might be a more realistic estimate on Buckland Downs. Capital intensity under these conditions was as likely as not to undermine the profitability of the enterprise. During boom periods (such as immediately after the Anglo-Boer War), the capital base of white farming was expanding rapidly, particularly as a result of injections of capital from elsewhere as new settlers moved on- to the Highveld bringing capital with them. However, the bulk of white landholders did not have unlimited capital resources at their disposal for investment. Undercapitalisation was the normal condition for most. Yet the old Boer landowner could not simply opt out of the spread of arable farming. Drought, disease and war devastation in the 1890s and early 1900s caused a gradual slide by white landholders into indebtedness, mainly through the bonding of landed property, aggravated by the flood of specu- lative capital surging through the countryside in the wake of the gold dis- coveries on the Witwatersrand. Older productive activities were becoming less and less viable as commercial hunting disappeared, trade and transport fell under the control of a professional mercantile class and as extensive pastoralism declined in the face of fencing and the rising value of land. Moreover, the larger farms of the past were being subdivided to pay off 12. debts or restock, which tended to promote a shift to cultivation of the soil. Resident white landholders who were increasingly dependent on pro- ducing grain for the market commonly turned to sharecropping re la t ionships with black tenants, often as a supplement to the i r own e f f o r t s . As land- holders found that arable farming was becoming more and more indispensable for their survival , they became increasingly dependent on the capi ta l r e - sources and s k i l l s of black tenants. This did not always or inevitably imply expl ic i t sharecropping arrangements. But i t did usually mean use of Africans* ploughing oxen and equipment in order to get a sizeable crop in the ground. The black tenant farmer was far more able to ride the des- tructive impact of natural disaster and war-induced deprivation without contracting debt than the i r white counterparts, due to thei r extensive networks of kinship and the ethics of communality and rec iproci ty . Par from being a *quasi-feudal' re la t ionship associated with the p r e - c a p i t a l i s t p a s t , sharecropping was a product of the ear ly stages of South Africa 's 29industr ia l revolution. I t is in the context of the uncertaint ies and r i s k s involved in ca- p i t a l investmentand the unpredictable productivity of rura l resources that the prevalence of sharecropping relat ionships between white and black should be seen. Sharecropping was a compromise between whiteswho lacked suff icient capi ta l to acquire equipment and to secure an adequate labour force?and blacks with the labour resources, tools and s k i l l s to take advantage of the abundance of land which whites controlled. I t was the way in which black households without a l te rnat ive access to land and white landholders without s k i l l s or the capi ta l to cul t iva te the s o i l intensively themselves responded to the new opportunities and new pressures presented by the r i s e of internal markets and by the penetration of r u r a l areas by mercantile and speculative capi ta l .^ The extensive nature of land use and re la t ive sparsity of white settlement gave blacks a lot of leverage in the terras under which they entered productive relationships with white landlords* Sharecropping was thus also related to the relatively abundant land re- sources which characterised the interior regions of white settlement in the late nineteenth century, and the consequent weakness of the settler economy in the mobilisation of labour resources from the indigenous so- cieties. Sharecropping on the white-settled Highveld served as a transition from a relatively peripheral colonial rural economy linked into capita- list markets through the provision of animal products, to an arable hinter- land feeding rapidly growing urban markets in an industrialising economy. Sharecropping was a bridge to a more explicitly capitalist agriculture in which there was no place for black household production. But this model is only valid from the vantage point of the historian. For at the time it was not objectively determined that sharecropping .relations would eventually make way for capitalist farming. There was no inevitability about the process whereby capital was generated within the farming economy. Clearly sharecropping surpluses provided a potential base for capital accu- mulation for individual white landholders. But for many whites, black production meant no so much eapital generation as survival on the land. It was primarily state intervention which eventually was to provide the wherewithal for undercapitalised whites to launch however tenuously into capitalist farming, as we shall see below. Sharecropping relations between white and black were never regarded as legitimate in the dominant perceptions of whites. Sharecropping on the farms was largely practised outside formal civil sanctions and pres- cription. Whites were generally very reluctant to admit that they were so 'degenerate' as to rely on *kaffir farmers', and dominant populist ideology was fiercely antagonistic to any form of black economic indepen- dence. Hence the drive to suppress black sharecropping in legislation, and the drive of .various governments to pour large sums of capital into white farming. There was generally an intense desire by white farmers to establish greater control over productive activities on their land for *cultural* reasons, quite apart from any rational calculation of costs and benefits. It is not surprising to discover that public'perception often con- flicted with private behaviour. Many who condemned black tenant farming enterprise were themselves dependent in some or other degree on the skills and capital resources of black tenants. As a perceptive observer wrote in 1908: One sometimes thinks that nothing could more embar- rass the farmers individually than that very enforce- ment of the squatting laws which they are always col- lectively asking for. If the native squatter is so great an evil, how comes it that nine farmers out of ten are willing to put their land at his disposal? The rhetorical ideal of a fully capitalised agriculture was no less po* tent for being quite unattainable for most (at any rate by 1?.O8 when theae words were penned). There are no universal *laws of capital* which explain why wage re- lationships between white master and black servant have been generalised throughout the South African countryside, and why the black sharecropping peasants eventually disappeared. The nature of agricultural enterprise is such that it is questionable whether capital investment in rural pro- duction was consistently remunerative enough to justify the risks invol- ved, when compared to the advantages of leaving cultivation in the hands of a sharecropping tenantry, and given the fact that the technology and productive processes at the disposal of the white farmer were not yet substantially different from those employed by the black tenant house- hold. Indeed, it is very unlikely that rational considerations of oppor- tunity cost in a narrow economic sense had much bearing on white farmers* image of the ideal relationship between black and white. The exercise 15- of class power imposed i ts own constraints and limitations on economic decision-making1. The landed whites saw themselves as an emergent class, a class in the making; and their corporate self-perception was based fundamentally on a pre-existing sense of racial identity. The Afrikaner cultural awakening- in the late nineteenth century derived many of i ts ideas from the nationalism of nineteenth century Europe, and took fire in the Boer Republics because i t met the needs of Afrikaner *organic intellectuals* in the material circumstances of the economic revolution being wrought in their midst under the aus- pices of an alien imperial power. Embedded in Afrikaner cultural nationalism of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were newer ideas about the need to promote racial domination in all facets of economic enterprise - ideas particularly apposite to an age of scientific racism and European imperialism, but which took on a special resonance for a white settler people who themselves were victims of imperialism. The ideal of the white settler farmer con- trolling production and directing black labour was tirelessly propa- gated in the populist agitations of the day. Robert Ross has suggested that this imagery was derived from ancestral memories of the slave- based mercantile economy of the south-western Gape, whence the Boers began their long exodus into the interior from the seventeenth century 3 2 on. But we do not have to resort to atavism to explain the ideologi- cal developments of the late nineteenth century. The ideas and images which were being developed by educated Afrikaners had a more immediate provenance. Although Afrikaner agitations about the extent of land disposses- sion were clearly exaggerated, landownership was becoming an increasing- ly precarious status for many Boer farmers as mortgage and other forms of indebtedness spread. Much land was taken over by capitalist interests 18. War, which, whatever its causes might have been, swept aside the old Boer republican regimes which had proved themselves structurally inadequate to the task of modernisation and rationalisation in the new industrial era. At first , the indigenous Afrikaners were largely excluded from the bene- fits of these developments. But the fact that they quickly regained their membership of the ruling caste after the War enabled them eventually to tap and exploit the creation of new wealth. This was accomplished in large part through the mediation of the state, which in rural areas pro- moted a new generation of Afrikaners into the ranks of the capitalist far- mers, especially from the second decade of the century onward. One important and enduring intervention of the state was in the in- stitutionalised provision of loan capital, thereby providing a more sym- pathetic, flexible and reliable alternative "to resort to private capital. Land Banks were established in the ex-Republics in 1907-08, and were super- ceded by the Union Land Bank in 1912. The establishment of Land Banks (whose facilities were available to whites only) was an important water- shed, for i t marked the beginning of sustained, large-scale state finan- cing of white farming. Their establishment also coincided with the trans- fer of responsible government in the ex-Republics to local whites. The ministries which came to power in 1907-08 were dominated by men who had commanded Boer forces in the Anglo-Boer War. Thus the imperial power con- the idea of firmed not only its acceptance of / white-supremacist rural economy, but also i ts realisation that the recently conquered Boers were bound to be a major element in the state-sponsored rural capitalism that they envi- saged emerging in the future. In succeeding decades state-subsidised far- mers* cooperatives, price supports and statutory marketing monopolies greatly expanded white farmers* dependence on the state. The accumulation and eventual monopolisation of capital resources by white farmers necessarily went hand in hand with the process whereby a 16. during periods of bad climatic or economic conditions, such as the early 1880s, the late 1890s and the half dozen years after the close of the Anglo-Soer V/ar. The long -^term tendency certainly seemed at the time to be toward the gradual expropriation of the Boer economy, and the increa- sing control of land by speculative capitalists, who were not always in- clined to share populist resentment at the independent black farmers. Many absentee landowners saw black tenant production as a viable long- term option with a view to the feeding of urban markets and the filling of corporate pockets. Such factors as these lent special urgency to the drive to assert indigenous white control over productive resources on the land as the mainspring of incipient Afrikaner nationalism. The continual influx of farmers with access to capital resources on- to the Highveld provided indigenous whites with a constant model of the ideal to which they should strive. The newer settlers of British descent brought with them very definite ideas of proper class relationships in a capitalist economy, ideas which were bolstered by Lord Milner's recon- struction regime after the Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902), with i t s radical social-engineering proclivities. The ideals embodied in the initial sanguine policies of Milner's administration (both in terms of the pro- motion of capitalised white land settlement by empire loyalists at the expense of the old burgher population, and the provision of a black labouring force) left a far deeper impression than the policies themselves, which soon proved hopelessly impractical.?" It was only on the basis of constant state support, however, that a capitalised farming economy under white control eventually emerged and was maintained. As we have been, by the early twentieth century the possi- b i l i t i e s of capital accumulation by the various means available through- out the nineteenth century were becoming very limited: trade, transport, hunting, soeculation were no longer readily available options for young adventurers. It was at this point that the state took over as the main generator of productive capital for white farmers. And the preservation of a viable productive base increasingly depended on continued state supports at every stage in the processes of production and marketing" of produce. To an ever greater degree as the century progressed, the survival of white farmers (which did not necessarily mean consistent and cumulative profit-making) required access to fairly substantial funds from outside agricultural production, at least initially, and continual reliance on the state's resources as a cushion against climatic and market fluctuations. State intervention on the necessary scale required a particular set of historical circumstances. Primitive accumulation in the rural politi- cal economy was predicated upon the rise of urban industry. In South Africa, as part of the colonial periphery in the international economy of the nineteenth century, the spread and entrenchment of capitalist relations in u r b a, n centres, derived from the massive importation of finance capital to exploit the rich mineral resources of the region. The estab- lishment of heavy industry with a view to extracting raw materials for export was a necessary precondition for the capitalist transformation of the countryside. For only in an industrialising economy are markets sufficiently large and expansive to allow for the emergence of a capitalist agriculture, and only such an economy can sustain the kind of state inter- vention which is necessary for such a rural transformation. But a neces- sary precondition does not add up to a sufficient explanation. What dis- tinguished South Africa from other parts of Africa with rich mineral re- sources was that South Africa had a well-established white ruling caste, which was able to exploit the potential created by the influx of capital to forge a state system with the financial muscle and coercive power to support and sustain a far-reaching process of indigenous capital formation and social restructuring. This was especially so after the Anglo-Boer 19. black labour force was created, maintained and controlled. Equally cru- cial to the success of primitive accumulation in South Africa was the stripping of productive resources from African peasants. This exclusionary aspect of primitive accumulation - the denial of access to resources - is 35 central in the emergence of a fully capitalist agriculture. ^ However, contrary to the trajectory implicitly suggested by the German analogy, the proletarianisation of black peasants in South Africa did not proceed as a logical corollary of industrialisation and urban growth. Just as there was no direct or unproblematical line of descent between the old landowning class and the new capitalist farmers, so there was a discon- tinuity in the process whereby the relatively independent black tenant homesteads of pre-industrial times were reduced to the rural work-force of today. The one-way procession from serf to proletarian implied by the German analogy does not reflect the South African experience. Many black tenant producers were amongst the beneficiaries rather than the victims of the commercialisation of agriculture on the South African Highveld, although their success was to be short-lived. While it is true that demands for labour from black tenants rapidly intensified under the impact of growing markets, it is equally clear that the end of the nineteenth century saw a great spread and intensification of arable rent tenancy by blacks on white-owned land, particularly in sharecroppihg arrangements. This was a period of rapid accumulation of productive capital in the hands of black tenants. The decline of the black tenant farmers has generally been ascribed in the revisionist literature solely to state action. But more than s.tate power was required to take charge of the rural economy in the face of a resilient and successful black peasantry. The agencies of control, the local courts, -the police and the laws they applied were never more than marginally effective in reshaping the countryside, valuable weapons 20. though they may intermittently have been to individual white landholders. The creation of a black labour-force was not the result of a single, ir- reversible coup. Social-engineering legislation (such as the Natives Land Act of 1913 which sought to outlaw sharecropping by black tenants and en- force labour tenancy) never wrought the transformation intended by their sanguine progenitors. The creation of a labour-force required a determined and protracted expenditure of effort by white farmers in the day to day struggle to bend black tenants to their will. It also required the pe- riodical and recurrent mobilisation of racial energies in concerted drives against the independence and the productive resources of black tenants. Racial domination was not a condition but a process, constantly being un- dermined and constantly being reasserted and extended. The assertion and extension of racial domination came in cyclical waves. At times of finan- cial boom and productive expansion (such as the years 1908-13 and again in the mid-1920s) the mobilisation of white opinion and concerted action against the independent tenant farmers were at their most intense. By the second decade of the twentieth century land was becoming a scarce re- source and the threat of eviction was becoming a real weapon in landlords* hands. The extent of tenant mobility was increasingly becoming an index 37 of their vulnerability. Labour tenancy - the ubiquitous emergent labour relationship on the Highveld in the first half of the twentieth century as the white farmers gained a stranglehold on productive resources - should be seen as a solu- tion to problems of labour supervision and control in the face of black tenants' determination to maintain some kind of independent productive base. It was also consistent with some of the constraints of capital. Few farmers had the liquid capital to pay regular wages or to be able to attract labourers at short notice for specific seasonal tasks. The radi- cal unevenness of labour requirements, the long periods of minimal labour 21. input in arable farming-, the utility of women's and children's labour, as well as the utlity of black tenants' productive resources (particularly ploughing spans): all these factors made tenant household labour prefe- rable to proletarian wage labour, quite apart from the extreme difficulty of mobilising, controlling and supervising a forcibly dispossessed rural work force. Labour tenancy was thus a perfectly rational way of organi- sing labour, although many of its advantages were to wane under the im- pact of mechanisation from the 1940s onward. By mid-century the productivity of capitalist farming was being greatly increased under the auspices of a paternalistic state. Techno- logical innovation was decisively shifting agricultural production toward capital-intensive methods. The mechanisation of white farming on the back of massive state subsidisation had by the 1970s vastly extended the pro- ductive potential of the farming enterprise on the South African Highveld. These developments conclusively robbed blacks, who were denied access to state aid, of the advantages of greater relative productivity and of lower relative risk which had once enabled them to prosper as independent tenants on white-owned farms. Black productive resources and household labour became expendible to white farmers,--"-and the seasonal intensity of labour demands on the farms was substantially reduced. At the same time as the labour requirements of the arable farmer were being greatly re- duced, the mobilisation and control of a labour force were also becoming far easier, given mass unemployment and marginalisation of the surplus 39African population in resettlement areas within reserves. The 1950s, then, saw the beginnings of the end of the labour tenancy system (especially as tractors made tenants' ploughing oxen not only dis- pensible but also a nuisance) at the same time as the "black spots', many of them farms acquired in the few years prior to the prohibition of black land purchase in 1913, have been gradually expropriated by the Nationalist 22. government, signifying the final triumph of the political economy of white supremacy. However, these developments did not necessarily imply the take-off of white capitalist farming into an era of sustained profitabi- lity. Farmers' reliance on state aid did not subside. If anything it has increased. And, as the drought of the 1980s has shown, capitalist farming is just as tenuous, vulnerable and dependent on massive debt con- 40 traction today as eighty years ago. * * # * * * It is not surprising that peasants continue to be a dominant feature of the late capitalist world. Peasants make economic sense. For many reasons, capitalist farming is a tenuous enterprise at the best of times; vulnerability in the face of climatic conditions, the risks implicit in agricultural investment, the difficulties of sustained accumulation, the farmers illiquidity and reliance on credit and his tendency to indebted- ness, and the uneven and unpredictable labour requirements over the annual cycle. Peasants in Africa can (and sometimes do) withdraw partially from market production at times of adverse climatic or market conditions. They are not entirely dependent on earning a profit in order to subsist. They can withdraw into relative autarchy during drought years. Given the mu- tual support network of the lineage, kin-group or village, losses of pro- ductive resources can be made good without debilitating debt contraction. Their reliance on household labour and reciprocal work parties provides them with a flexible and reliable work force which does not require wage remuneration for i ts survival. It is small wonder that despite the not in- considerable impact of a dynamic capitalism on small-scale societies throughout Africa over a period of a century or more, most of Africa's peoples are s t i l l able successfully to defy full incorporation into market 23. relationships. What needs to be explained about the ex-colonial world is not the persistence of peasantries, but the few instances where they have "been systematically destroyed. Therein lies the special significance of South Africa's unique experience. It has often been the case, in areas as far apart as Catalonia and Ecuador, that specialised and large-scale farming, enterprise has proved more vulnerable to market conditions than peasant producers. Bad economic conditions have in various places and times heralded a resurgence of pea- sant production. Harriet Friedmann, indeed, has argued that in North American arable farming, wage-based production has waned in the face of a resurgence of family farming over the last hundred years. In western Europe, the heartland of the international capitalist economy, price sup- ports and subsidy mechanisms were necessary before the peasantry was f i - nally displaced; self-provisioning remains a priority of many farmers, and the family-worked smallholding remains the norm. In 1970 i t was es- timated that in Vest German>83.7 percent of farming units were under twenty hectares in extent; even in the United Kingdom the proportion was 52.4 percent. Furthermore, all over Europe there is evidence to suggest that farming is widely supplemented by non-farm income. Franklin est i- mated that in i960 only about half of the six and a half million people in West German agriculture gained most of their income from farming. The part-time farmer is a persistent feature of large-.-parts of Europe as he is of rural Africa. Of course, there are many examples of successful capital investment in large-scale agriculture. But clearly the %industria- lisation' of agriculture is only feasible under very specific conditions. The specific conditions under which a racially-exclusive mechanised agri- culture based on the use of black wage labour developed in South Africa, have been the focus of this paper. In contrast to most revisionist interpretations of the emergence of 24. modern South Africa, this article has sought to stress the contingent factors in the transformation of rural society. There was no consis- tent trajectory of development or inevitability either in the spread of capitalist relations in agriculture or in the assertion of white control over productive resources. The role of ideology and of self- image in providing the ongoing impetus behind the'reforming of rural society have not been inconsiderable. State intervention in the gene- ration of capital and in cushioning farmers against the recurrent destruc- tion of capital resources characteristic of agriculture, has been of de?? cisive importance. Revisionist interpretations of South African history have tended to stress industrial capitalism and its need for cheap la- bour as the central factor in the creation of the contemporary racial order. This paper has focused on the rise of white rural populism and the drive to secure a white-supremacist rurai-feconomy in the face of an agressive imperial capitalism. The drive for racial supremacy at the point of production-was more a concern of the Afrikaner petty-bour- geoisie than of the financial and mining capitalists who presided over the industrial revolution. But i t is also true that the drive for white supremacy in all facets of economic enterprise was the product of the age of industrial capitalism, rather than the product of an earlier age of frontier violence. The Boers had inherited a tradition of racial exclusivity in social and political spheres; but i t was only in the circumstances of the new industrial imperialism which seemed to threaten the expropriation of the Boer economy, that racial monopolisa- tion of productive resources became the central tenet of indigenous white struggle. And eventually this struggle was to develop into the exclusive and brutal Afrikaner nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s. 25. FOOTNOTES 1. Robert Brenner, "The Origins of C a p i t a l i s t Development: a Cri t ique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,' jfew Left Review, 104 (1977). 2. A review of t h i s l i t e r a t u r e i s to "be found in Ian Roxborough, Theories of .Underdevelopment, (London, 1979). 3 . See John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman, "Coping with the Con t rad ic t ions ; the Development of the Colonial Sta te in Kenya, 1Q95?1914,* Journal of African H i s t o r y , 20 (1979); D.M.P. McCarthy, "Organising Underde- velopment from the I n s ide : the Bureaucra t ic Economy of Tanganyika, 1918-1940,' I n t e r n a t i o n a l Journal of African H i s t o r i c a l S tud ies , 10 (1977). 4. See John Iliffe, The Emergence of African Capitalism, (London, 1983), 35-38; J. Forbes Kunro, Britain in Tropical Africa, 1880-1960: Eco- nomic .Relationships and Impact, (London, 1984)> 46. For specific in- stances in East Africa, see C.C. Vrigley, Crops and Wealth in Uganda, (Kampala, 1959)* 48-55; John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, (Cambridge, 1979). 274-86. Frederick Cooper ("Africa and the World Economy,' African Studies Review, 24 (1981) ) has interpreted the massive increase in bureaucratic attempts to control production methods and marketing in the late colonial period as a consequence of the fai- lure of the colonial administrations to get African peasants to produce cash crops of the type and in the quantities they wantedi But other scholars emphasise the extent to which "economic paternalism' under- mined the accumulation of resources amongst rural producers, by for example inhibiting too much specialisation in the growing of cash crops, which threatened to dissolve the cohesion of African productive systems. These scholars, writing from a "free market' perspective, blame interventionist policies for the failure of African entrepreneurship 27. African History, 19 (1978); Paul Mosley, The Settler Economies: Studies in the Economic History of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1900-63, (Cambridge, 196J5), ch. ;5. 9. Stanley Trapido, ^Reflections on Land, Office and Wealth in the South African Republic, 1850-1900,' in S. Marks and A. Atmore(ed.s), Eco- nomy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa, (London, 1980); T.J. Keegan, Rural Transformations in Industrialising: South Africa, (-London a'atf goharineafcarg;, forthcoming), ch. 1. The last frontier for some of the older forms of rural accumulation was to be found in the colonies of white settlement further north. Orgainsed treks across the Limpopo River were common in the 1880s and 1890s; and many Boers settled in Kenya after the turn of the century. (M.P.K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya, (London, 1968), 65-66, and 229-30J Mosley, The Settler Economies, 186.) 10. T.J. Keegan, *White Settlement and Black Subjugation on the South African Highveld; the Tlokoa Heartland in the North-Eastern Orange Free State, 1850-1914'; Peter Delius, \Abel Erasmus: Power and Profit in the. Eastern Transvaal,' both in W.J. Beinart and P. Delius, (ed.s), Putting a Plough to the Ground, (London and'Johannesburg, forthcoming), 11. Peter Delius and Stanley Trapido, ^Inboekselings and Oorlams: the Creation and Transformation of a Servile Class , ' i in B. Bozzoli (ed.), Town and Countryside in the Transvaal, (Johannesburg, 1983). 12. Stanley Trapido, ^Landlord and Tenant in a Colonial Economy: the Tranvaal, 1880-1900,' Journal of Southern African Studies, 5 (1978). 13. Earrington Moore., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, (Boston, 1966) ' Stanley Trapido, 'South Africa in a Comparative Study of Industria- l i s a t i o n , ' Journal of Development Studies, 7 (1971); Martin Legassick, 28. %South Africa: Capital Accumulation and Violence,' Economy and So- ciety, 3 (1974); M.L, Morris, *The Development of Capitalism in South African Agriculture: Class Struggle in the Countryside,' Economy and Society, 5 (1976); Stanley Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development, (Hew Haven, 1S80); Frederick Cooper, ^Peasants, Capitalists and Historians: a Review Article,* Journal of Southern African Studies, 7 (1981), 300-301. For other attempts at comparison, see Cristobal Kay, ^Comparative Development of the European Manorial System and the Latin American Hacienda System,' Journal of Peasant Studies, 2 (1974); Jonathan M. Wiener, sClass Structure and Economic Development in the American South, 1865-1955,' American Historical Review, 84 (1979). 14. David Goodman and Michael Redclift, From Peasant to Proletarian: Capitalist Development and Agrarian Transitions, (Oxford, 1981). 15* Mosley tells us that .many early agricultural sett lers in Southern Rhodesia were prospectors or alternated periods on the land with pe- riods in retailing or government employment. In Kenya, .^most'early settlers had alternative sources of income, like cutting wood for the railways. (The Settler Economies, 186). These observations prompt wider comparisons with the incomplete forms of accumulation -typical of some black rural economies in Africa. What has been called 'straddling* has been common amongst Africa's black farmers: the process whereby money earned in the wage sector is ploughed back into rural production, ( i l i f fe , The Emergence of African Capitalism, 31; Cooper, ^Africa and the World Economy', 42-44). Kitching des- cribes in detail the way in which in Kenya black rural accumulators with larger landholdings and who increasingly employed members of poorer families for wages were usually also better educated men with white collar or clerical or teaching jobs as well as trading 29. interests, and hence greater access to non-agricultural income. Si- milarly, Beinhart shows that in Pondoland, the i n i t i a l extension of rural production was made possible by and accompanied the generali- sation of labour migrancy, thus contradicting Bundy's assertion that mass labour migrancy was a function of the decline of peasant pro- duction. (Of course this process did not proceed very far in Pondo- land, which eventually was to degenerate into a labour reserve). (Kitching, Class and Economic Change, esp. 364-72; William Beiaart, The Political Economy of Pondoland, 1860-1950, (Cambridge, 1983); Colin Eundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry, (London, 1979)- ) Underdevelopment theori sts tend to see the farmer-worker primarily as subsidising the capitalist sector through rural household production, but the phenomenon can perhaps be better understood historically by looking at the dynamics of the rural eco- nomy rather than at the requirements of capital. 16. See Men of the Times: Old Colonists of the Cape Colony and the Orange River Colony, (Cape Town, 1906), 631-32; Obituary in South Africa, 20 February 1925, 331 for the case of V.B. Gradwell of Bloera- fontein d i s t r i c t . Fuller documentation of points raised here is pro- vided in Keegan, Rural Transformations, ch. 4* 17. The Newberrys provide a telling example: "jottings from the Con- quered Territory, ' 16 March 1894; "Chips from Moroka,' 15 April 1892; "Opening of the Hew Leeuw River Mills , ' 1 August 1893; *Notes from Ladybrand and Distr ic t , ' 18 August 1893, al l in The Friend, Bloem- fontein; also F.J. Harper to editor, Farmers Advocate, December 1912, 193; Bloemfontein Archives,(BAD), CS 4873/07, Director of Agricul- ture, 19 July 1907. 18. The Annual Cape Colonial Blue Eooks (magisterial reports) contain masses of evidence on booms and slumps in land transactions. 30. 19. Generally, see Standard Bank Archives, Johannesburg-, Annual Branch Inspection Reports, 20. On bourse, see Dictionary of South African Biography, vol. 3, (Pre- toria, 1977)? 659-6O; Men of the Times: Pioneers of the Transvaal and Glimpses of South Africa, (Johannesburg, 1905), 28-29; BAD, NAB 861/07, J.B. G-eaye , 27 August 1907. On Bailey's act ivi t ies see *Free State: Our Production P o s s i b i l i t i e s , ' Friend, 20 January 1911; and Eric.-Rosenthal, Other Men's r4illions, (Cape Town, n . d . ) , 178. On Lewis and Marks' farming enterprises, see Dictionary of South African Biography, vol. 1, (Pretoria, 1968), 515-18; *A Great Property,' Farmer's Advocate, October 1907, 85-90. On the Bourke's estate, see BAD, DA 1915/2/09, G.H. Daw, 24 June 1909. 21. E.g. the African Farms Ltd. had sixty farms being worked by white managers or tenants in 1908. The company's goal was to make i t s farms *self-supporting' and *if possible' profitable. To this end the company not only provided capital but i t gathered and indexed *every kind of information which promises to eliminate the element of chance', thus echoing the kind of entrepreneurial role in promo- ting scientific agriculture evident in the act ivi t ies of other large landlords on the Kighveld, such as the Duke of Westminster. (*Far- mers of Orangia,' April 1908; "African Farms Ltd. , ' June 1908, both in Farmer's Advocate; %0ur Weekly Gauserie," Farmer's Weekly, 10 July 1918, 2099.) 22. E.g. see *Mr. S.G. Vilonel at De Rust,' Farmer's Advocate, March 1908, 371-73. 23. A.P. Cartwright, The First South African: the Life and Times of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, (Cape Town, 1971), 119-20. 24. S. Trapido, ^Poachers,Proletarians and Gentry in the Early Twentieth Century Transvaal,' unpublished paper, University of the V.'itwaters- rand, African Studies Seminar, March 1984. 25. xAnother Diamond Mine,' 20 Kay 1898; xMrt. Winter's Steam Plough,' 20 Kay 1898, both in The Friend; G. Baumann and E. Bright, The Lost Republic: the Biography of a Land Surveyor, (London, 1940), 141-52; Stanley Trapido, "A History of Tenant Production on the Vereeniging Estates, 1896-1920,' in Beinart and Delius, (ed.s), Putting a Plough to the Ground; Standard Bank Archives, Inspection Reports, Kroonstad, 26. R. Seggie to editor, Friend, 22 February 1912. 27. BAD, DA 1997/1/O9. P- Fitzpatrick, 14 June 1909. Cl*. the experience of Lord Delamere, Kenya's leading capitalist farmer, who soon dis- covered that his traction engine was not nearly so satisfactory as *Boer methods' of ploughing. (Nosley, The Settler Economies, 187). In a situation of *cheap labour, dear capital and high risk', the use of outdated or improvised equipment and labour-intensive methods were highly appropriate, asserts .Mosley. 28. See Keegan, Rural Transformations, ch. 3; also idem, *The Share- cropping Economy on the South African Highveld,' in T.J. ByreB, fed.). Sharecropping; and Sharecroppers, (London, 1983). 29. The spread of sharecropping in non-European parts of the world not uncommonly accompanied or followed integration into international markets. Sharecropping is entirely compatible with rural capitalism and is often found in economies in which market production is gene- ralised and predominant. See the several contributions in Byres, Sharecropping and Sharecroppers. 30. The notion that the provider of land can be the economically weaker participant in the sharecropping- agreement might seem strange to observers of sharecropping elsewhere in the world. The *seigneurial* stereotype of sharecropping, derived from the image of the Euro- pean, Latin American or Asian great estate, where a wealthy, exploi- tative landholder typically controls a large, impoverished tenantry^ 32. is clearly not applicable to the South African case. It has often been assumed that sharecropping did and does not exist in Africa, because of the obvious absence of the seigneurial pattern. However, recent research has shown that share contracts in fact exist fairly widely in Africa and in such cases seem to be relatively equitable relationships between households by means of which scarce resources are-combined in an efficient manner in order to ensure mutual sur- vival and expanded production. Sharecropping can also be a means whereby resources are transferred within kin groups or between generations. (A.F. Robertson, *0n Sharecropping,' Man, 15 (1980); idem, *Abusa: the Structural History of an Economic Contract,' Journal of Development Studies, 18 (1982).) Share-contracting is widely practised in parts of southern Africa today, and in these contexts i t seems to be a means of ensuring the survival of the household economy in areas which have been reduced to sources of supply of migrants to service the industrial economy of *white' South Africa. There;.is l i t t l e class differentiation in such rela- tionships, which seem by and large to be determined by cyclical, generational factors. (Colin Murray, Families Divided; the Impact of Migrant Labour in Lesotho, (Cambridge, 1981), 75-85.) 31. Editorial, Friend, 4 February 1908; also E.R. Grobler before Natives Land Commission, UG 22-1916, 81. 32. R. Ross, 'The First Two Centuries of Colonial Agriculture in the Cape Colony: a Historiographical Review,' in Beinart and Delius, Putting a Plough to the Ground. 33. Shula marks and Stanley Trapido, *Lord Milner and the South African State, ' History Workshop Journal, 9 (1980). 34. See Francis Wilson, ^Farming, 1866-1966,' in Monica Wilson and Leonard M. Thompson, (ed.s), Oxford History of South Africa, vol. 2, (London, 33. 1971)? By 1934 white farmers d e b t s a - m o u n t e d to 300 million p o u n d s s t e r l i n g . (UG 16-1934, Report of the "ommission to Inquire into Cooperation and Agricul- tural Credit, 1932-34, 153-54). 35. Cooper, ^Africa and the World Economy^8,Amongst those who were excluded in the process were, of course, many whites, including very large numbers of the old Boer population, ex-landowners as well as those who had never owned land. But the *poor whites' of the twentieth century were not on their way to becoming a rural proletariat , unlike the black tenants. They were gradually absorbed in the urban areas, where they were provided with protected employ- ment. See Robert H. Davies, Capital, State and White Labour in South Africa, 1900-60: an Historical Materialist Analysis of Class Formation and Class Relations, (Brighton, 1979). 36. This is no longer a novel observation of course: see Bundys The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry. 37- The points made in this paragraph are greatly elaborated in T. Kee- gan, "Crisis and Catharsis in the Development of Capitalism in South African Agriculture,' African Affairs, (forthcoming). 38. See Alan Richards ,N The Political Economy of Gutw.irtschaft: a Comparative Study of East Elbian Germany, Egypt and Chile,* Comparative Studies in Society and History* 21 (1979) for compara- tive perspectives on labour tenancy emphasising i t s u t i l i t y in s i - tuations of incomplete control over labour. 39. On these developments see essays by Debbie Budlender and Mike, de Klerk in South African Research Service, South African Review, 2 (Johannes- burg, 1984). 40. By 1983 farmers' debts amounted to 5*777 million rands (RP 30-1984, Department of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1982-83,^ 3. ) 34. 41. Goodman and Redclift, From Peasant to Proletarian, 13* 42. 'World Market, State and Family Farm: Social Basis of Household Production in the Era of Wage Labour,* Comparative Studies in So- ciety and History, 20 (1978). 43. Goodman and Redclift, From Peasant to Proletarian, 16-18. 44. S.H. Franklin, Rural Societies, (London, 197i)f 12-37. Franklin noted, *The majority of holdings in Western Europe are uneconomic and with no prospect of becoming viable * (p. 22). See also idem, 'The European Peasantry, (London, 1969), 36; and R. Gasson, Part-Time Farming, (Wye, 1978). 45. See Martin Legassick, %The Frontier Tradition in South African His- toriography,' in Marks and Atraore, Economy and Society in Pre-Indus- t r i a l South Africa.