New Brighton, Port Elizabeth c1903-1953 : a history of an urban African community

Bibliography: pages 266-283.This thesis explores the history of New Brighton in the context of Port Elizabeth's political economy. This port city was essentially an entrepôt until primary industrialisation commenced after the First World War. Jobs in the footwear and motor assembly plants were the preserve of unskilled white (Afrikaans-speaking) workers recently arrived from the city's hinterland. A relatively stable African population grew in the absence of influx controls, and provided a large pool of unskilled labour. A fairly large Coloured population made it more difficult for Africans to acquire employment and skills. With the spurt in industrial growth from the mid- 1940s, Africans were increasingly employed in the manufacturing sector. But the majority of the African workforce still performed unskilled work at or below the minimum wage. Port Elizabeth's African population was amongst the most fully proletarianised but the poorest in the country. The changing labour needs of Port Elizabeth's employers meant that the powerful commercial-cum- industrial lobby sought to influence the City Council to ignore influx control measures introduced in the 1930s. Instead, routine control of New Brighton residents was dependent on a 'location strategy' which included the issue of registration cards as the key to obtaining houses and beer brewing privileges. The Advisory Board provided a channel for patronage dispensed by the Superintendent and a means of co-opting prominent residents and their supporters. The usual litany of social ills such as grinding poverty, overcrowding and breakdown of family structures led to the growth of a subculture of violence amongst some of the youth from the late 1940s. This fed into the simmering discontent caused by the Council's insistence on rent increases and the heightened political expectations caused by the defiance campaign, which irrupted 'in the 1952 riots. Meanwhile, a realignment of political forces in the local state had changed the balance of power in favour of those groups which advocated a tighter rein on labour regulation and the political activities of local Africans. Pressure from this source and the central state in the aftermath of the riots, was more telling than that of the 'liberal' lobby and business interests on the PECC. The combination of state repression and the Council's hastily introduced curbs on political activities reduced the likelihood of ANC-led resistance to the imposition of passes. In 1953 the Council finally jettisoned its 'liberalism' and introduced influx control measures and labour registration. It applied the full force of the law against New Brighton residents whose reputation for being a law-abiding community had served to vindicate the Council's 'progressive' policies towards Africans in the first place

Coming to terms with the "Border War" in post-apartheid South Africa

If you are a white, male South African between the ages of about 35 and 60 it is very likely that you donned the nutria brown uniform of the South African Defence Force (SADF). Between 1967 and 1994 approximately 300 000 young white males were conscripted by the SADF. As far as most of these conscripts were concerned, there was no option other than heeding the call-up and performing national service or diensplig. Failure to do so meant harsh penalties. The alternatives were to object on conscientious (actually religious) grounds and face a six year jail sentence, or flee the country. And the obligation did not end with national service as conscripts were assigned to citizen force or commando units that were liable for periodical call-ups for camps that might have included deployment in the “operational areas” from 1974 or tours of duty in the black townships from 1984. Those - like myself - belonging to this national service generation were part-time soldiers for much of their adult lives. Most served willingly, some with patriotic fervour. Others did so reluctantly and with little enthusiasm

De La Rey rides (yet) again : Afrikaner identity politics and nostalgia in post-apartheid South Africa

In 2006 a relatively unknown South African artist with the stage name Bok van Blerk released his debut album called “De la Rey”. The album included a music video of the title track that calls upon the legendary Boer War general to save the volk (people) from the wantonly destructive strategies of the British imperial forces: the scorched earth policy and the subsequent internment of women and children in concentration camps. The British justified such extreme – some would say ‘genocidal’ – strategies so as to prevent non-combatants from supporting the irregular Boer soldiers. Although he did not believe that the war could be won on account of the overwhelming odds that the Boer forces faced, De la Rey still fought to the bitter end. Needless to say, he was on the losing side

The New Brighton Advisory Board, c. 1923-1952: its legitimacy and legacy.

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Structure and Experience in the Making of Apartheid, 6-10 February, 1990The historical significance of advisory boards has been downplayed because of their contradictory role in urban African politics. Until the 1940s, the system of Advisory Boards was dominated by the 'most reactionary elements' of the African petty bourgeoisie. This paper contends that, despite the purely consultative functions of the Boards, participation in Advisory Board politics was an important channel of mobilisation in urban African communities until at least the Second World War. Thereafter their legitimacy of was questioned. This paper also studies the New Brighton Advisory Board with particular reference to the question of the Board's legitimacy and its relationship with the local authority in the period between 1923 and 1952. It also evaluates the Board as a locus of activity concerned with wider socio-political issues

The battle for Cassinga : conflicting narratives and contested meanings

Nearly thirty years ago the name Cassinga (or Kassinga) came to the attention of the world. At the time the name evoked a range of responses, from outrage to grief to the celebration of military bravado. It still does so. And Cassinga will continue to elicit such responses as long as participants and witnesses are alive and the events remain part of living memory. Obviously perpetrators and survivors remember the events of 4 May 1978 differently. Memory is, after all, selective. The recollections of participants and witnesses are framed by personal and political agendas. This much is abundantly clear from the conflicting accounts of Cassinga that appear in the media and literature, especially the exchanges that take place between parties with a stake in how the events are remembered. Thus a report headlined “Battle of Cassinga still rages” published on the 29th anniversary suggested that the events are still shrouded in controversy and that there is no agreement about what transpired in the southern Angolan town. The title of this paper reflects my concern with the battle for rather than of Cassinga. The choice of preposition is intended to signify the ongoing contestation over the meaning of Cassinga

The Vocabulary of the Vietnam War: South African invocations of an analogy and its associated lessons

The Vocabulary of the Vietnam War: South African invocations of an analogy and its associated lesson

SADF soldiers’ silences: institutional, consensual and strategic

This article treats silence as a collective phenomenon. Silence can be proscribed and enforced, socially conditioned and sanctioned, or voluntarily embraced. All forms were evident in the case of soldiers who served in the South African Defence Force (SADF). First, they acquiesced to an institutional silence imposed upon them regarding their role in waging a war in Angola/Namibia, as well as suppressing the struggle against apartheid. Secondly, SADF veterans were complicit in a self-imposed and consensual silence about human rights abuses following the country’s  democratisation. This was partly enabled by a ‘pact of forgetting’ struck by the political elites and leaderships of the statutory and non-statutory forces. Finally, SADF veterans have employed silence as a strategy of control; they have invoked their experiential knowledge of the ‘Border War’ to assert their authority to tell the ‘truth’, thereby constructing a narrative of the conflict that remains largely unchallenged in the public domain. Consciously or unconsciously, SADF soldiers contributed to the public construction of silence following the violence of the apartheid wars

Port Elizabeth History: A Select Annotated Bibliography

When I commenced my work on aspects of Port Elizabeth’s history in the late 1980s, there was no body of scholarly literature on which to draw. Since thena number of significant publications, both periodical articles and books, as well as theses have appeared, and something of a corpus of works on the city now exists. It seems appropriate to take stock of the current state of Port Elizabeth’s historiography by compiling a bibliography

[Post] Colonial Histories: Trauma, Memory and Reconciliation in the Context of the Angolan Civil War

In 2007, a former South African Defence Force (SADF) paratrooper, Marius van Niekerk, embarked on a journey to confront his shameful memories relating to his role in the Angolan Civil War. From Sweden (where he had gone into exile), Van Niekerk returned to Angola, where he had been deployed during the mid-1980s, and recruited three other veterans of the war to join his party: Patrick Johannes, who had been coerced to fight for the Popular Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola (FAPLA); Samuel Machado Amaru, who was forcefully enlisted by the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA); and Mario Mahonga, who had fought for the Portuguese colonial army before he was recruited by the SADF to fight against the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) regime. Van Niekerk had been conscripted at the age of seventeen, and the others had been coerced into their respective militias at more tender ages. It is not clear how the three Angolans were induced to participate in the project, whose objectives they evidently did not share