The Janus face of rural class formation: an economic and political history of traders in Qwaqwa, 1960-1985.

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Structure and experience in the Making of Apartheid, 6-10 February, 1990. This paper is an expanded version of a chapter in my thesis entitled "Traders and Taximen in Qwaqwa: A Study of Class Formation in a South African 'Homeland'" submitted for a Master's degree in Social Anthropology at UCT in August 1987.It is my aim in this paper to trace the slow re-emergence of class differentiation in Witsieshoek after the rebellion of 1950 and to the consider the implications of this process for political struggles waged in Qwaqwa during the contemporary phase of 'homeland self-government'. The paper focuses centrally on the emergence of a commercial petty bourgeoisie in the Qwaqwa since the 1960 and its changing political profile over the past two decades. In developing this analysis I focus mainly on licensed retail traders in Qwaqwa. My discussion proceeds in three parts. The first part deals with the period 1960 to 1974 and is dominated by an investigation of the activities of the Bantu Investment Corporation (BIC) in Qwaqwa. The second section of the paper concentrates on the period 1974-1980, a phase of mass population relocation and rapid economic differentiation. It concentrates on the unfolding of political struggle between the homeland political elite and the emergent commercial petty bourgeoisie. In the final section of the paper I focus on changing economic opportunities for African traders in the early 1980s as they are brought under the wing of the Qwaqwa Development Corporation and the Mopeli government. The paper concludes on a comparative note by addressing similarities and difference in the changing political strategies of traders in Qwaqwa in the face of economic centralisation with those of storekeepers and artisans in ninetenth century Europe

Beyond the Bovine Mystique: entrepreneurship, class and identity in QwaQwa

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented September, 199

Untangling the Lion's Tale: Violent masculinity and the ethics of biography in the 'Curious' case of the apartheid-era policeman Donald Card

Donald Card (1928–) is a former policeman in South Africa who became the subject of international media attention on 21 September 2004. In a highly publicised and symbolic ceremony of reconciliation inaugurating the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory Project, he handed back to Mandela two notebooks containing 78 hitherto unknown letters written by Mandela on Robben Island. A starkly contrasting image of Card as a torturer had, however, come to light during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in the Eastern Cape in 1996 and 1997. This article begins by making a case for a direct connection between these two events. We argue that the sanitised version of his life history in recent scholarship traces back to his own attempts to defend his reputation from these allegations of torture and that the Mandela notebooks served both to obscure these allegations and provide Card with a respectable, even heroic, biography. We then present our alternative version of his life history. Drawing on Robert Morrell’s periodisation of masculinities in southern Africa, we read the story of Card’s life in early–mid-twentieth century South Africa in terms of changing masculine identities, each strongly associated with violence: first the ‘oppositional’ masculinity of a child growing up in an abusive patriarchal Irish settler family, second the ‘settler’ masculinity of an athletic teenager at a white school in the former Transkei, and third his ‘hegemonic’ white South African masculine identity defined in opposition to emergent black masculinities into which he was initiated as a young adult during four months of intensive training at a police college in Pretoria. It is in this context, along with extensive new independently acquired oral and documentary evidence of his human rights abuses in East London in the 1950s and the early 1960s, that we situate the TRC testimonies about Card’s torture between 1962 and 1964.Department of HE and Training approved lis

Traders and taximen in Qwaqwa : a study of class formation in a South African homeland

Bibliography: pages 229-245.This thesis is centred around the experiences of traders and taximen in Qwaqwa, the smallest of South Africa's 'homelands'. It aims to investigate the extent to which small-scale entrepreneurs of various kinds can be seen to be participating in processes of class formation within the homeland. The focus adopted directs attention away from the issue of poverty which has dominated rural research over the past decade. The thesis also seeks to contribute to existing studies of class formation in the homelands, which address the problem from the perspective of 'state' and 'capital'. This study seeks to broaden this focus through a historical analysis of social processes at the local-level. It argues that traders and taximen in Qwaqwa cannot simply be regarded as the recipients of state initiatives, but are agents in forging their own opportunities and relationships

Development Studies Working Paper, no. 69

East London is a minor coastal city with a fragile economy based largely on the food, motor and textile manufacturing sectors. Between 1945 and 1960 the economy of the city grew rapidly registering annual growth rates in excess of 10%. This growth was based on secondary industrialization in the manufacturing sector. However, since the inauguration of the homeland policy which wedged East London between two impoverished, self- governing homeland states, Transkei and Ciskei, the economy of the city has fared less well. Low annual growth rates were recorded throughout the 1970s and 1980s despite efforts by the Apartheid government to shore up the local economy by offering attractive industrial decentralization incentives in the region. The fragility of the city is not only based on its regional location, but on the absence of mineral and power sources and its distance from major metropolitan markets. Being situated in one of the poorest provinces in the country, East London's growth has always been limited by a weak local consumer market (Swilling 1987: 140). While the economic prospects for the city have recently improved with the dismantling of the homeland system and the centralization of the Eastern Cape's regional government in nearby capital of Bisho (30 minutes’ drive from East London), the city is still badly in need of major economic investment to cater for its rapidly growing population. During the past decade, there has been a massive transfer of population from rural to urban areas in the Eastern Cape generally. This occurred as a result of a softening of homeland borders in the mid-1980s, the removal of the influx control laws in 1986, as well as the deterioration of agricultural prospects in a region gripped by a crippling drought throughout the 1980s. These factors have ensured that East London became the tar-get of a sustained wave of rural-urban immigration. Dozens of new informal settlements have sprung up all over the city during the past five years, while the established townships within the city limits have become hopelessly overcrowded. The research for this project was conducted in East London's most congested township, Duncan Village. In 1995, it had a population of approximately 100 000 people. Between 1964 and 1979, Duncan Village was the target of massive forced removals.Digitised by Rhodes University Library on behalf of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER

Development Studies Working Paper, no. 64

In recent years the number of people living in informal or 'squatter' settlements in South Africa has mushroomed and virtually every small town or city has one or more squatter settlements associated with it, often next door to the formal residential areas. Using field data collected from 1993 in two informal settlements in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa this study examines, firstly, the ways in which men and women in these communities organise their lives in their households and in the wider society. Secondly, it assesses the physical environment of informal settlements where there is a lack of service infrastructure, especially water, sewerage facilities, refuse removal and roads. Also, it was assumed that the presence of large numbers of people in an informal settlement has a deleterious effect on natural resources like the soil, wood, vegetation and water and that this may have a significant contribution to environmental pollution and degradation. This aspect was also examined.Digitised by Rhodes University Library on behalf of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER

Research report series, no. 2

Today, the west bank of the Buffalo River is a well-established industrial area. At the centre of this industrial complex is the Mercedes Benz South Africa production plant. Yet, over 40 years ago on the production site of this world reknowned motor manufacturer there was a small urban location which housed approximately 7000 African and Coloured residents. The village was known as Nongqongqo. According to Tankard (1990) it was the “original village and first official location of East London” and served primarily as a source of labour for workshops, transport and packing concerns in the East London harbour. The village, which was also known as the West Bank Location, was a stable and peaceful community that accommodated an ethnically mixed community of Xhosa, Fingoes (Mfengu), Pondos, Zulus, Sothos and so-called Coloured people. In 1965, the tranquillity of everyday life in this seaside village came to a rude and abrupt end when government bulldozers and trucks moved in to demolish the village. The inhabitants were forcibly resettled on the east bank of the Buffalo River and in the fledgling township of Mdantsane in the Ciskei. The removals were undertaken in accordance with the terms of the Bantu Administration Act No. 25 of 1945, Population Registration Act of 1950 and Group Areas Act of 1952 (cf. Booysen, 1995). The aim of this report is to investigate the social and historical circumstances that surrounded the destruction of this once vibrant seaside village. This report forms part of a process through which approximately 1400 original residents of Nongqongqo are seeking restitution for losses they incurred during this removal in terms of the Restitution of Land Rights Act of 1994. This report seeks to contribute to this process by contextualising the Nongqongqo removal within an historical understanding of the management of black urbanization in East London and by investigating the specific social, economic and political circumstances that led to the deproclamation of this location. However, in order to understand the impact of the removals, the article also attempts to reconstruct from oral and documentary sources a profile of the West Bank community in the years preceding the removal. Although the historical material on West Bank is sketchy, we have managed to assemble data that allows us to build up a fairly comprehensive socio-economic profile and residential arrangements in this community in 1955. This exercise in historical reconstruction, we believe, is essential for a meaningful assessment of the significance of the removals for those involved. In the final part of the article we begin to assess and aggregate the emotional, social and economic costs of the removals for the people of Nongqongqo.Digitised by Rhodes University Library on behalf of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER

Development Studies Working Paper, no. 70

The main aim of this research project is to explore the nature and extent of the informal business sector in Duncan Village and to consider what actions and interventions might stimulate growth and development in this sector. In order to achieve this objective we have organised this report around five main themes: the socio-economic context, a profile of small business operators, supply and marketing strategies, finance and training programmes, and community involvement.Digitised by Rhodes University Library on behalf of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER

The political economy machinery: toward a critical anthropology of development as a contested capitalist practice

This article discusses anthropology’s current mainstream understandings of development and offers a historical materialist alternative. According to these, development was and is either a discourse-backed anti-politics machine that strengthens the power of postcolonial governments or a category of practice, a universal that generates frictions when it clashes with local historical–cultural formations. The approach proposed here reintegrates the analysis of development into the anthropological analysis of capitalism’s uneven and contested histories and practices. A reassessment of World Bank reporting on Lesotho and an analysis of the Bank’s impact on the wider policies of development in postcolonial Mauritius, one of the twentieth century’s preeminent success stories of capitalist development, underlines that development is best understood as a political economy machinery that maintains and amends contested capitalist practices in an encounter with earlier global, national, and local historical–cultural formations