The edge of the periphery: situating the ≠Khomani San of the Southern Kalahari in the political economy of Southern Africa

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in African Identities on 14/04/16, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14725843.2016.1154813In this article, we situate the Southern Kalahari San within the political economy of Southern Africa and within the world system. Here we draw on and critique modernization theory as a model of explanation for the lack of development found locally. In the Southern Kalahari, the ≠Khomani San won a massive land claim that should have empowered and enabled local development. Yet they remain largely impoverished, while seeking out a meaningful life on the edge of the capitalist world system. Within states, contradictions remain as local diversity continues to be reproduced and modernity itself is reproduced as local diversity. The research is premised on empirical fieldwork conducted in the Southern Kalahari in 2013 and supported by a series of earlier field research over the previous five years. The San of the Southern Kalahari are not resisting modernity but drawing on aspects of it selectively for their own vision of meaningful development

Contextualising Apartheid at the End of Empire: Repression, ‘Development’ and the Bantustans

This article examines the global dynamics of late colonialism and how these informed South African apartheid. More specifically, it locates the programmes of mass relocation and bantustan ‘self-government’ that characterised apartheid after 1959 in relation to three key dimensions. Firstly, the article explores the global circulation of idioms of ‘development’ and trusteeship in the first half of the twentieth century and its significance in shaping segregationist policy; secondly, it situates bantustan ‘selfgovernment’ in relation to the history of decolonisation and the partitions and federations that emerged as late colonial solutions; and, thirdly, it locates the tightening of rural village planning in the bantustans after 1960 in relation to the elaboration of anti-colonial liberation struggles, repressive southern African settler politics and the Cold War. It argues that, far from developing policies that were at odds with the global ‘wind of change’, South African apartheid during the 1960s and 1970s reflected much that was characteristic about late colonial strategy