Maynard W. Swanson

Bio: Maynard W. Swanson is an academic researcher from Miami University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Urbanization & Africana studies. The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 9 publications receiving 737 citations. Previous affiliations of Maynard W. Swanson include Yale University.

The sanitation syndrome: Bubonic plague and urban native policy in the Cape colony, 1900-1909.

Abstract: Infectious disease and concepts of public health, operating as societal metaphors, seem to have exercised a powerful influence on the origins and development of urban segregation in South Africa. Between 1900 and 1904 bubonic plague, threatening major centres, occasioned the mass removal of African urban populations to hastily established locations at the instigation of medical authorities and other government officials under the emergency provisions of the public health laws. Inchoate urban policy, under tentative consideration since the 1890s as economic development and social change began to stimulate black urban migration, was precipitated by this episode into specific legislation and permanent administration. Cape Town and Port Elizabeth were the two foci of this development in the Cape Colony, where the government locations at Ndabeni and New Brighton exemplify the process. These moves and the effort to consolidate them were to a large degree frustrated by practical administrative, legal, economic and human factors which have characterized the anomalies and contradictions of urban location policy ever since. A black ‘middle class’ resisted the loss of property rights and clung to aspirations of economic and social mobility or legal independence. Especially at Port Elizabeth, where independent peri-urban settlements proliferated, white officials and politicians laboured in an administrative and legal quagmire. White employers and black migrants proved only marginally amenable to location concepts modelled on the principles of quarantine. But ‘the sanitation syndrome’, equating black urban settlement, labour and living conditions with threats to public health and security, became fixed in the official mind, buttressed a desire to achieve positive social controls, and confirmed or rationalized white race prejudice with a popular imagery of medical menace. These issues of urban social order would be repeated again in connexion with such dire events as the 1918 influenza epidemic as the foundations of Union-wide policy and law were laid during and after World War I.

Urban Origins of Separate Development

Abstract: MAYNARD W. SWANSON is an Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. This article comprises with minor changes the tcxt of a paper given to the African Studies Association at Indiana University in October 1966. One view of the genesis of separate development, in relation to the urban areas of South Africa, is that it sprang to life in the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, under the stimulus of industrial expansion caused by World War I. This Act, much amended as time went on, became one of lhc foundation stones upon which the formal structure of apartheid was built. Tie basic idea of the Act has sometimes been ascribed to the Report of the Transvaal Local Gover nment Commission (the Stallard Commission) in 1922, which said that the towns are the white I11aI1’S peculiar creation while natives, being naturally alien to that environment, might only enter the towns temporarily to serve the white man. Ellen Hellmann follows this approach in an article on ’The Application of the Concept of Separate Development to Urban Areas in the Union of South Africa’,’ and suggests also that formerly, before the Union of 1910, little official attention was paid to Africans in the towns. Nor were the European citizens supposed to be much concerned with urban African concentrations, while local native administration was conducted as an exercise in

The sanitation syndrome: Bubonic plague and urban native policy in the Cape colony, 1900-1909.

Abstract: Infectious disease and concepts of public health, operating as societal metaphors, seem to have exercised a powerful influence on the origins and development of urban segregation in South Africa. Between 1900 and 1904 bubonic plague, threatening major centres, occasioned the mass removal of African urban populations to hastily established locations at the instigation of medical authorities and other government officials under the emergency provisions of the public health laws. Inchoate urban policy, under tentative consideration since the 1890s as economic development and social change began to stimulate black urban migration, was precipitated by this episode into specific legislation and permanent administration. Cape Town and Port Elizabeth were the two foci of this development in the Cape Colony, where the government locations at Ndabeni and New Brighton exemplify the process. These moves and the effort to consolidate them were to a large degree frustrated by practical administrative, legal, economic and human factors which have characterized the anomalies and contradictions of urban location policy ever since. A black ‘middle class’ resisted the loss of property rights and clung to aspirations of economic and social mobility or legal independence. Especially at Port Elizabeth, where independent peri-urban settlements proliferated, white officials and politicians laboured in an administrative and legal quagmire. White employers and black migrants proved only marginally amenable to location concepts modelled on the principles of quarantine. But ‘the sanitation syndrome’, equating black urban settlement, labour and living conditions with threats to public health and security, became fixed in the official mind, buttressed a desire to achieve positive social controls, and confirmed or rationalized white race prejudice with a popular imagery of medical menace. These issues of urban social order would be repeated again in connexion with such dire events as the 1918 influenza epidemic as the foundations of Union-wide policy and law were laid during and after World War I.

Climatic Change and Rural-Urban Migration: The Case of Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: We investigate the role that climatic change has played in the pattern of urbanization in sub-Saharan African countries compared to the rest of the developing world. To this end we assemble a cross-country panel data set that allows us to estimate the determinants of urbanization. The results of our econometric analysis suggest that climatic change, as proxied by rainfall, has acted to change urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa but not elsewhere in the developing world. Moreover, this link has become stronger since decolonization, which is likely due to the often simultaneous lifting of legislation prohibiting the free internal movement of native Africans.

Another Politics of Life is Possible

Abstract: Although it is usually assumed that in Michel Foucault’s work biopolitics is a politics which has life for its object, a closer analysis of the courses he gave at the College de France on this topic, as well as of the other seminars and papers of this period, shows that he took a quite different direction, restricting it to the regulation of population. The aim of this article is to return to the origins of the concept and to confront the issue of life as such. This implies four shifts with respect to Foucault’s theory: (1) Politics is not only about the rules of the game of governing, but also about its stakes. (2) More than the power over life, contemporary societies are characterized by the legitimacy they attach to life. (3) Rather than a normalizing process, the intervention in lives is a production of inequalities. (4) The politics of life, then, is not only a question of governmentality and technologies, but also of meaning and values. The discussion is grounded on a series of empirical investigati...

African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice

Abstract: * Acknowledgments * Introduction * 1. What if the Postmetropolis is Lusaka? * 2. Postcolonial Cities * 3. (I)n(f)ormal Cities * 4. Governing Africa's Cities * 5. Wounded City * 6. Cosmopolitan Cities * Conclusion * References * Index