Labour, capital and the state in the St. Helena Bay fisheries c.1856 - c.1956

This thesis deals with the history of the St Helena Bay inshore fisheries, 1856-1956. Fishing has long been neglected by social and economic historians and the myths propagated by company and popular writers still hold sway. The thesis challenges these by situating commercial fishing at St Helena Bay in the context of changing regional, national and international economies and showing how it was shaped and conditioned by the struggle for ownership of the marine resource between labour and capital, mediated by the state. The thesis is organised chronologically into three epochs. In each the focus moves from macro to micro, tracing the processes of class formation, capital accumulation and state intervention. The first epoch (c.1856-c.1914) examines the merchant fisheries, the second (c.1914-c.1939) the crayfish canning industry and the third ( c.1939-c.195) secondary industrialisation. It is argued that the common property nature of the marine resource and non-identity between labour and production time in fishing created obstacles to capitalist production, discouraging investment and allowing petty-commodity production to flourish. The latter mediated the vagaries of production through a share system of co-adventuring which enabled owners to avoid paying a fixed wage. This system's impact on the nature and consciousness of fishing labour is examined as is its vulnerability to capture by other capitals through insecure land tenure and credit. Fishing capital, in both its merchant and productive guises was dependent on articulation with petty-commodity production to provide it with commodities or raw material and bear the cost of reproducing labour. Articulation was hampered at St Helena Bay both by the persistence of merchant capital and the rent and labour interests of Sandveld agriculture. The origins and effect of this situation on the fisheries is detailed and discussed, highlighting the importance of agricultural capital's political influence with the colonial and provincial state in blocking or subverting the development of productive capital. The advent of the interventionist central state in the 1930s undermined merchant and farmer dominance of the fisheries and cleared the way for the articulation of petty-commodity primary production with secondary industry during and after the Second World War. This articulation was facilitated by the central state restricting access to the marine · resource and investing heavily in marine research and infrastructure to roll-back the natural constraints on fishing and create the conditions for the establishment of a stable capitalist production regime

More in the breach than observance: crayfish, conservation & capitalism c.1890-c.1939

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 26 October 1992An emerging environmental history in South Africa has so far focused exclusively on terrestrial environments and their human-resource interactions (land, game, forests) (1). In so doing it has also been heavily influenced by the revisionist and social history of the past two decades and careful to locate environmental issues in the broader social, economic and political context-of an emerging capitalism in Southern Africa. No attempt has yet been made, however, to extend the scope of this endeavour to encompass the marine resource and recent environmental literature on the subject still evidences a strong present-mindedness which strongly detracts from its analysis (2). The marine environment is innately hostile to capitalism, except in its petty or merchant forms, by virtue of its common property status and susceptibility to a range of "natural factors" which disrupt production (3). For productive capitalism to succeed in such a hostile environment, it needs to be able to limit the effects of both these factors on accumulation in order to justify investment. In South Africa this was achieved after 1945 through large-scale central state intervention, assuming ownership of the resource and conferring de facto private property rights on private exploiters and lessening the effect of "natural factors" on production through the provision of infrastructure and marine research (4). Prior to this, capital's successful exploitation of the marine resource was fundamentally dependent on untrammelled access, relying on the sure abundance of the latter to compensate for the detractions of non-ownership and the vagaries of weather and resource. These constraints also made marine resources a low development priority alongside mining and agriculture and saw them relegated to the realm of the regional maritime state which was too weak exercise effective ownership, confer ownership rights on capital or mediate the effects of natural factors on production. The Cape colonial etate concentrated its efforts on developing deep sea trawling, but after 1910 the provincial state confined itself to the "preservation" of fish and game

Maintaining Order over Chaos : A study of the ba and baw concepts in the Predynastic Period, Early Dynastic Period, and Old Kingdom

Among the corpus of ancient Egyptian religious terminology, bA and bAw stand out as two of the oldest, most wide-spread, and enduringly used terms. From the 1st Dynasty until the very end of ancient Egyptian history, these terms were utilized in a wide variety of contexts, including divine, royal, and non-royal names, titles, and epithets, didactic literature, and mortuary, administrative, temple, and royal propagandistic texts. However, despite their prominence and significance in the ancient Egyptian textual record, the function and meaning of these terms are still imperfectly understood, as evidenced by the multiple and varying translations within the Egyptological literature. A major issue which has contributed to this state of research is the fact that the origins, early function, and original meaning of bA and bAw have not been comprehensively investigated. This thesis is a study of the earliest material pertaining to the terms bA and bAw from the Late Predynastic Period to the end of the Old Kingdom. The material analyzed includes Late Predynastic art in which the stork (Saddlebill stork, signs G29 & G30) later used as a hieroglyph for bA and bAw appears, as well as a large corpus of Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom texts (1st-6th Dynasty names, titles, and epithets; the Pyramid Texts, and two 6th Dynasty non-royal texts). Through a chronological study of this iconography and of these texts, it was demonstrated that (a) the original ideas and principles encompassed within the terms bA and bAw are apparent in Late Predynastic Saddlebill stork images, (b) that the terms bA and bAw originally functioned to express divine and royal ideology and that their use in the earliest royal mortuary texts was an extension of this function, and (c) that these terms essentially signified, reinforced, and perpetuated the fundamental ancient Egyptian doctrine of Order over Chaos or mAat vs. isft

A reconstruction of the Cape (South African) fur seal harvest 1653 - 1899 and the comparison with the 20th-century harvest

The Cape fur seal was an abundant resource in southern Africa, when first discovered by itinerant sailing vessels in the late 16th century. Seals were slaughtered indiscriminately by the sailors for skins, meat and oil for three centuries from around 1600 to 1899. Government controls over the sealing industry were first introduced as late as 1893, by which time at least 23 seal colonies had become extinct and the seal population had been significantly reduced. This paper reconstructs the historical seal harvest from the time of arrival of the first settlers in 1652 up to 1899. These data are then compared with modern harvest data from 1900 to 2000, illustrating the marked increase in the harvest from about 1950, and the concomitant recovery of the seal population to a level of around 1.5-2 million animals

Historicising perceptions and the national management framework for invasive alien plants in South Africa

Abstract: This article offers a historical framework for understanding changes to human perceptions and efforts to manage invasive alien plants and weeds in South Africa from the mid-nineteenth century until the present. The article argues that South African legislation and policy for managing invasive alien plants and weeds has historically been limited because people have held contradictory values about plants, many private land owners have lacked resources and have not been compelled to follow government legislation, and because policy has reflected the interests of a small group of farmers or scientific experts who have had limited influence on most private land owners and traditional land users. Successful control efforts often relied on technical expertise that was applied controversially or could be implemented on government land without extensive public consultation or social conflict. The creation of a national framework for invasive alien plants through the Working for Water Programme in 1995 and National Environmental Management of Biodiversity Act (no. 10) of 2004 (NEMBA) has increased public awareness, but the Programme and NEMBA remain limited by many of the same institutional and social constraints that experts and institutions faced in the past. In conclusion, the article draws on history to provide insights to contemporary challenges

The efficacy of a slow-release albendazole capsule against <i>Haemonchus contortus</i> with known resistance to albendazole

Controlled-release albendazole capsules (CRCs) are currently registered for use in Australia and New Zealand as anthelmintic treatment in sheep. However, reports on the efficacy of such products on resistant parasite populations are sometimes controversial. This is the first study to report on the efficacy of such products under South African field conditions in sheep harbouring a population of Haemonchus contortus with known multiple anthelmintic resistance, including to albendazole. Treatment groups were comprised of CRC-treated and single dose albendazole-treated sheep, as well as negative controls. Groups were compared by using faecal egg count reduction tests, FAMACHA© anaemia scoring, conception rates and comparative weight gains over three and a half months. Based on a comparison of faecal egg counts, no advantage could be found using CRCs. Moreover, the use of the product actually decreased weight gain when compared with the control group animals

The relationship between personality preference and career anchors amongst police officers within the Western Cape

Magister Artium - MAThe objective of this study was to determine whether a relationship exists between the personality preference and career anchors of police officers. The idea that personality relates meaningfully to the kinds of careers people choose and how they perform in these careers, has a long history in career psychology.South Afric