"We are digging, we are seizing huge chunks of the municipalities land" (Siyawugubha, Siyawugubha Umhlaba Ka Maspala)": Popular struggles in Benoni, 1944-1952

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 28 October, 1985The Second World War transformed the face of South Africa like no other era since reconstruction. Unlike reconstruction however, the war years were no period of planned state initiatives or aggressive social engineering. State policy was reactive, tentative, piecemeal. State planning was informed by no broader vision with which to regulate and direct the massive social and economic transformations underway. All this left considerable space in which the major new force to appear in the political arena - the urban proletariat – could manoeuvre. Huge gaps opened up in the cities' ramshackle and improvised structures of social control. Real opportunities presented themselves to the new working class to shape and to mould the world in which it moved. However the very abruptness of these changes which injected such uncertainty, and incoherence into official policy making circles, also imprinted itself on the character of the new urban proletariat. The newly assembled urban communities were still too fluid, too diverse, too unformed to take sustained advantage of the state's fumbling indecision. Some important gains were won, and certain policy options foreclosed. However, the struggles of the urban masses were all too often, sectional, individual and introverted, and only incidentally and indirectly shaped or subverted state policy. A political movement with the programme and the tactics to take on this role did not emerge till the early 1950's, and then largely in reaction to the massive social engineering and political repression that accompanied the implementation of grand apartheid. By then the period of maximum opportunity had already passed by. It is to this period and these struggles that this paper draws attention. It focusses on the East Rand town of Benoni which was one of the major centres of wartime industrialisation on the Rand. It represents a preliminary attempt to order some of the data already collected and to define future directions of research

Classes, the mode of production and the State in pre-colonial Swaziland

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 13 September, 1976. Not to be quoted without the authors permission.In this paper I seek to do three related things; to identify the dominant mode of production in the Swazi social formation and other possible subsidiary modes; to establish the existence or otherwise of classes in Swazi society; and to elucidate the development of the Swazi state. Before I start however I should like to make two disclaimers. Firstly I make no pretence at theoretical rigour and have merely used the concepts employed in this paper to illuminate my material. Secondly the questions raised by such concepts are not easily answered by the data I have at my disposal. Swazi tradition I do not doubt will help to give answers to those questions, but first it will be necessary for those questions to be posed. This I did not do during my own fieldwork in Swaziland, and for that reason much of my paper will have a provisional ring. Nevertheless, despite these limitations I feel justified in venturing into this field. Swazi society does not as far as I can see fit into recent categorisations of pre-capitalist modes of production and its study may help in developing those categories further. At the same time the questions raised by this mode of analysis undoubtedly turn the spotlight on neglected areas of Swazi society and even if only partially or provisionally answered must help our understanding of how that society works. For that reason I make no apologies at undertaking such an analysis and merely ask that it be taken as much as a programme for research as the fruits of a completed project

The Transvaal Native Congress 1917-1920: The radicalisation of the Black Petty bourgeoisie on the Rand

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 10 March, 198

Division and unity in the struggle: African politics on the Witwatersrand in the 1920s

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 9 March, 1992. Not to be quoted without the author's permission.Accounts of African political organisation in South Africa between the 1920s and 1950s have tended to veer between two extremes – institutional studies of national political organisations and micro studies of local struggles in which the national political organisations played an intermittent and often inconspicuous part. The politics of specific regions of the country have as a result been poorly served. We have Bradford's study of the rural organisation of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union, and Lodge's accounts of two ANC campaigns in two key urban areas - the Defiance Campaign in the Eastern Cape and the Bantu Education boycott on the East Rand – but aside from these there is a notable dearth of such middle level exercises which might help bring national political organisation and local level struggles into a closer and more meaningful relationship to one another. Among the most conspicuous gaps in the literature are studies of the politics of the Witwatersrand and Eastern Cape. These two urban areas are usually depicted as the forcing houses of black politics, but neither has attracted the attention that it might have been expected to have received. On the Witwatersrand a number of fine local studies have been produced but none gives a broader sense of the pattern and movement of political activities on the Rand. A large part of the reason has been the sheer scale of the enterprise, but enough of the pieces have now been assembled for us to begin to compose the broader picture. This paper represents the first stage of such an attempt

The rise, consolidation and disintegration of Dlamini power in Swaziland between 1820 and 1889 : a study in the relationship of foreign affairs to internal political development

The Swazi kingdom grew out of the pressures associated with competition for trade and for the rich resources of Shiselweni. While centred on this area it acquired some of its characteristic features - notably a regimental system, and the dominance of a Dlamini aristocracy. Around 1815 the Swazi came under pressure from the South, and were forced to colonise the land lying north of the Lusutfu. Here they remained for some years a nation under arms, as they plundered local peoples, and were themselves swept about by the currents of the Mfecane. In time a more settled administration emerged, as the aristocracy spread out from the royal centres at Ezulwini, and this process accelerated under Mswati as he subdued recalcitrant chiefdoms, and restructured the regiments. Consequently, by the time Mswati died in 1865, Dlamini power was sufficiently entrenched for there to be no serious disturbance, and for a regency to function smoothly for the following decade. Externally the dominant influence was the Zulu, who continually threatened the kingdom's stability. The Swazi were forced by these attacks to look for allies in the Boers, and to make several territorial cessions from 1846. Nevertheless, the relations they established were not markedly unequal, since the Republic were dependent on the Swazi in various ways. Consequently, the Swazi were able to take charge of the lowveld in the north, and by the 1860s reached the pinnacle of their power. The consolidation of the South African Republic following the British annexation, and the discovery of gold, meant that this freedom was gradually lost, and in the 1880s pressure mounted on Swaziland itself. The clearest index of this lies in the country's conquest by concessions, which eventually so eroded the social fabric of the country that a pretext was given for the Republic and Britain to intervene

Batons and bare heads: the strike at Amato Textile, February 1958

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 3 October, 198

Company estate, company town: Pilgrim's Rest 1910 - 1932

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 19 October, 198

"The roots of violence on the East Rand, 1980-1990"

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 18 October, 199

'Desirable or undesirable Sotho Women? Liquor, prostitution and the migration of Sotho women to the Rand, 1920-1945

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented May, 198

Assessment of the Use of CAL to Replace Remedial Biochemical Calculation Tutorials

A number of students at the early stages of our courses have problems with the correct use of units and basic concentration calculations. These problems are easily addressed by remedial tutorials. A PC Computer Assisted Learning (PCCAL) package from Bath University (UK) on "Basic calculations" was loaded onto the Erasmus Darwin network. The programs were used initially with a small group of second year part-time Bachelor of Science Biomedical students (11 students) to assess if the package could replace previously used remedial tutorial time. The part-time students received one introductory tutorial on how to access the programs and their content. In addition, they also undertook a short pre-program test. For the following three weeks the students used the PCCAL program in the Erasmus Darwin computer resource room (ED290) in place of the remedial tutorial. At the end of the tutorial sessions the students were again subjected to a short post-program test and a verbal feedback session. All the students showed an improved score on the test taken after using the computer programs. In the verbal feed back session the students enjoyed the fact that they could work at their own pace on the packages and that the material got progressively harder. It was decided to test the programs' effectiveness with a larger group of students and to link the assessment of the packages to a pre- and post-computer session multiple-choice question (MCQ) test