Race and class in the South African countryside: Cultural osmosis and social relations in the sharecropping economy of the south-western Transvaal, 1900-1950

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented August 1988'Race relations' in the South African countryside have never made for a particularly pretty picture. Several recent studies, including, for example, a finely etched portrait of the notorious Abel Erasmus have served to remind us that the birth pangs of commercial agriculture in the Transvaal during the late 19th century were characterised by considerable violence between white landowners and black tenants (1). Nor did matters improve significantly over the half century that followed. In the course of an exceptionally sensitive study of black protest on the land during the late twenties it is suggested that: ' . . .fists, whips and guns were central in maintaining master-servant relationships on farms' (2). And, while writing what was the classic work of its genre in the mid-thirties, I.D. MacCrone was moved to comment on 'cases of violent physical treatment which are such a feature of the relations between white and black in country districts' (3)

Social and economic underpinnings of paternalism and violence on the maize farms of the south-western Transvaal, 1900-1950

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented May 1991For the better part of five hundred years southern Africa has been witness to an epic struggle as a small invading minority of European origin, enjoying all the advantages of military might, literacy and access to superior technology, sought to conquer, dispossess, render subservient and then control members of the indigenous majority. This centuries-long struggle for mastery of the sub-continent has - as members of both the out-going and in-coming nationalists never cease to remind us - been marked by great hardship, endless blood-letting and countless corpses. And, as the white minority now silently laments its possible political eclipse by a black majority, it is perhaps an appropriate moment to reflect on how, during the course of this long and violent struggle, it failed to transform its physical strength into moral legitimacy. For, as Rousseau once observed in a different context but at a not dissimilar moment; 'The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty (1)

Shades of empire: police photography in German South-West Africa

This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body—physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground.International Bibliography of Social Science

Jewish police informers in the Atlantic world, 1880-1914

The great migration from the tsarist empire, sparked by the assassination of Alexander II, in 1881, saw two to three million east European Jews re-settling in the great cities of the Atlantic world before the First World War. Often discriminated against in labour markets, and socially marginalized in new environments, Russo-Polish males either persisted in, or resorted to, organized crime centred on the illicit sale of alcohol, professional gambling, and prostitution to survive. Atlantic states, however, were reluctant to employ Jews as uniformed police or detectives in their fight against syndicated crime. In order to overcome the challenge of ethnicized crime, law-enforcement agencies, like nineteenth-century tsarist administrations before them, employed informers. Jewish informers who, unbeknown to police handlers, were sometimes also psychopaths in an era before the condition was clinically identified, were used to infiltrate underworld structures. By nature, informing offered a short-term, unstable, existence fraught with unintended consequences for police and spies alike – thereby encouraging extraordinary geographical mobility amongst informers. Orthodox histories of law-enforcement agencies tend to focus on structural changes in police forces but a re-examination of the role of informers in organized crime should allow for the development of more subtle insights into the evolution of policing as a dynamic, interactive, social process