A destruction coming in: Bantu education as response to social crisis

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented September, 1989The imposition of Bantu Education in the 1950s has often been portrayed as the destructive action of a Nationalist government intent, for purely ideological reasons, on uprooting a successful and largely benevolent mission education system: in this view the missions were, as Edgar Brookes put it, “butchered to make an ideologist's holiday”. (1) But this approach to the issue fails to grasp the essential basis of educational restructuring in the 1950s. The educational policies of the state during this decade were above all an attempt to respond to the crisis of reproduction of the labour force, and especially its urban component, which had developed during the previous decade. I will suggest in this article that the state was particularly concerned to provide the necessary conditions of reproduction for that section of the labour force which was permanently urbanized and reliant upon a wage. As the urban population grew, social reproductive mechanisms which had operated in the 1920s and 1930s began to break down. In the 1940s the combined forces of collapsing homeland agriculture and expanding secondary industrialization, generated rapid urbanization. This placed the existing provision for urban social reproduction under enormous strain. Housing, transport, and wages were all inadequate to meet the needs of the growing urbanized working class. Squatter movements, bus boycotts and trade unionism spread rapidly, as popular initiatives which contested these arenas. In turn these fueled the emergence of a higher and more radical level of oppositional political activity, marked by the emergence of the Mandela - Tambo - Sobukwe generation of leadership in the ANC. Thus the dominant classes were faced on the one hand with levels of poverty which threatened the very physical production of their workforce, and on the other by new political threats. The National Party's policies of the 1950s were largely addressed to resolving this urban reproductive crisis

Food, authority and politics: Student riots in South African schools, 1945-1976

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented September, 198

The representation of white working class women in the construction of a reactionary Populist movement: 'Purified' Afrikaner Nationalist agitation for legislation against 'mixed' marriages 1934-1939

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 24 May, 1993In May 1938, the largely white South African electorate went to the polls. But the question which had preoccupied participants in the preceding weeks of the election was not, as one might imagine, the segregationist policies of General Hertzog's government or the economy's gradual emergence from the depths of the Great Depression. Rather, debate and agitation focused on an image of white womanhood. That image was contained in a poster distributed by the ‘Purified’ National Party (Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party) (GNP) of Daniel Francois Malan, and was a pictorial representation of the GNP's contention that Hertzog, through his ‘Fusion’ alliance with pro-British forces of General Jan Smuts to form the United Party (UP), had sold out Afrikaner political interests, in particular by adopting insufficiently aggressive racial policies

"The imperial working class makes itself 'white': white labourism in Britain, Australia and South Africa before the first World War"

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 11 October, 1999On the 1st of March, 1914, the biggest British labour demonstration of the early twentieth century flooded into London's Hyde Park in a seven mile long column. Estimates of the size of the crowd ran as high as half a million. The Socialist papers were euphoric: "Never in my long experience of Hyde Park", wrote R. B. Suthers in The Clarion (6 March 1914) "have I seen such countless multitudes pouring into its confines and gathering around the speakers and the platforms. Never have I seen so impressive a crowd, never have I seen so unanimous and earnest a mass meeting". The publication of the engineering workers' union described the gathering as "the greatest and most impressive of its kind that has ever taken place in the heart of the Empire." (ASEMJR, February 1914

Durban as a Portal of Globalization:: Mines, Railways, Docks and Steamships in the Empire of Otto Siedle’s Natal Direct Line, c. 1879–1929

Zwischen den 880er und frühen 920er Jahren hat Durban sich vom unbedeutenden Hafen der britischen Kolonie Natal zum Haupthafen des neuen südafrikanischen Staates gewandelt. Dieser Artikel untersucht die Schlüsselrolle, die Otto Siedle, der in Deutschland geborene, aber in London aufgewachsene Agent des Schifffahrtsunternehmens Natal Direct Line, in diesem Prozess gespielt hat. Durch die Entwicklung von Hafenanlagen, Kohlebergwerken und Eisenbahnen hat der Konzern bei der Umwandlung von Durban in die maritime Verbindung zwischen den wirtschaftlich wichtigen Goldminen in Witwatersrand und der Weltwirtschaft eine führende Rolle gespielt. Der Beitrag untersucht diese Veränderungen mithilfe des Konzeptes der ‚Portale der Globalisierung‘. Er findet den Begriff für die Analyse der Einbindung von Natal in globale Netzwerke hilfreich, plädiert aber gleichzeitig dafür, Portale hierarchisch zu verstehen und die Bedeutung von Imperien im Gegensatz zu Nationalstaaten im Auge zu behalten. Die Fallstudie stützt die Ansicht, dass die Rolle lokaler Siedlerkapitalisten für die Gestaltung globaler Verbindungen innerhalb des britischen Empire erheblich war und dass es deshalb ein Fehler wäre, sich bei der Analyse des Aufbaus der imperialen Wirtschaft übermäßig auf the City of London zu konzentrieren

The War on War League: A South African pacifist movement, 1914-1915

The outbreak of the First World War divided the South African Labour Party, a movement representing the country’s white working class. The party’s parliamentary delegation supported South African government’s participation in the war effort, but many leadership figures within the party and the trade unions disagreed with this stance. The dissidents formed an organization called the War on War League. In mid-1915, the anti-war activists left the party and formed the International Socialist League, a predecessor of the Communist Party of South Africa. The War on War League has conventionally been regarded as important only for its role in the eventual formation of the Communist Party. This article however contends that it needs to be understood in its own terms, as a pacifist movement, reflecting a political moment of resistance to the plunge into global war.Keywords: War on War League, South Africa, Pacifism, Anti-War Movement, First World War, Syndicalism, Internationalism, Witwatersran

In memory of Belinda Bozzoli

Thirty-six years ago, as a PhD student in the Wits Sociology Department, I was assigned to tutor students on a course taught by Belinda Bozzoli. I attended her lectures, and they were to prove one of the crucial intellectual experiences of my life. Teaching with the kind of dash, colour and flair more normally associated with the theatre than the classroom, Bozzoli provided what felt like a complete education in South African history and social science. She gave me things to think about, which have continued to shape my academic work to this day. That was the moment when I got to know one of the most extraordinary people amongst a great generation of socially and politically engaged South African academics

Industrial decentralisation, Bantustan policy, and the control of labour in South Africa

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 6 August 1984During the last two decades, industrial decentralisation and growth centre policies have been widely applied throughout the world. In this paper the authors describe a rather distinct application of those policies, namely that directed to facilitating the control of labour in South Africa. We also assess the extent to which the policies have "succeeded" and can succeed. Success cannot be judged in terms of criteria that may be used when evaluating decentralisation policies elsewhere in the world. In South Africa, such policies have been explicitly designed to further the system of apartheid and thereby the control of labour. Their success or failure lies in the extent to which they are able to do that. We have stressed how the recent emphasis on industrial decentralisation reflects the current and lasting crisis in Bantustan policy (2)

An "eventful" history of Hind Swaraj : Gandhi between the Battle of Tsushima and the Union of South Africa

On July 1, 1909, Gandhi was on board the liner Kenilworth Castle en route from Cape Town to Southampton. The prosperous Johannesburg lawyer had recently emerged as a noted figure in the politics of the British Empire, through his leadership of the satyagraha of Indian immigrants in the Transvaal. The union of the four self- governing British colonies in South Africa into a single state under white control was now under way and awaited ratification by the Westminster parliament. Gandhi’s aim was to lobby the British authorities for the protection of the interests of the immigrant Indian population within this new order. On the voyage, he spent some time talking to fellow passenger John X. Merriman, the English- born, liberal political leader of the Cape Colony, who gave him a sympathetic hearing. But Merriman was losing his battle with Afrikaner General Louis Botha to become prime minister of the new state (Lewsen 1982: 300 – 301). And Merriman’s Gladstonian worldview was in any case a thing of the past. The white men of South Africa had cut a deal among themselves to create a racially defined nation, and Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government in Westminster, feeling guilty about the suffering of the Afrikaners in the Boer War and for the most part committed to defending the empire, wanted to allow them to implement it.https://www.dukeupress.edu/Public-Culture/hb2016Sociolog