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.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0021853700027328

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

Young children learn best when taught through their mother tongue. This commonsense principle has been supported by decades of research on bilingual education for children who don't speak the dominant language. The research has also shown that there are positive effects on children’s cognitive development if they are encouraged to become strong bilinguals. For Indigenous communities, bilingual education has been highly valued not only because it helps children maintain Indigenous languages, but also because it provides an honoured place for Indigenous languages in the curriculum and an honoured place for Indigenous teachers. However, in the Northern Territory bilingual education has been a controversial issue since its inception in the 1970s. In part this is due to the failure of policy-makers to recognise that children who are monolingual in a language other than English need explicit teaching of the English language, by trained English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers, before they can learn through English as the medium of instruction. Consequently, there has been much political debate on the issue and frequent moves against bilingual education. At the end of 2008 the Northern Territory Government, supported by the Commonwealth Government, all but closed bilingual education in remote Indigenous schools by determining that the language of instruction for the first four hours of school must be English. This decision could spell the death of the remaining endangered Indigenous languages in Australia. Yet it was taken without apparent regard for the evidence from research on how monolingual children learn a second language, or on the positive value of bilingual education, or the language rights of Indigenous peoples, or the evidence from schools which had abandoned bilingual education. This paper argues that the policy gap revealed by this event should be filled by a national commitment to serious consideration of evidence, and recognition of Indigenous language rights. Through national and international evidence this discussion paper outlines the cognitive, societal and education benefits of bilingual education for children whose first language is not English. It is anticipated that this paper will stimulate political discussion on using evidence-based research to improve education for Australia’s Indigenous children.

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Gaps in Australia's indigenous language policy: dismantling bilingual education in the Northern Territory

FOUNDATIONS OF THE COLONIAL EXPORT ECONOMY The economic changes that took place in Africa in the period under review have been summarised in terms of varied implication, as the economic revolution, the second stage of Africa's involvement in the world economy, the intensification of dependent peripheral capitalism, the completion of the open economy, or simply as the cuffing of Africans into the modern world. The concrete fact, however, from which these descriptions take off in different directions is not itself in much dispute. Between 1905–9 and 1935–9, exports from African countries between the Sahara and the Limpopo increased by about five times in value and by nearly as much in volume; import values rose by some three-and-a-half times, import volumes between two-and-a-half and three times. Total trade thus grew in real terms at an annual average rate of a little over 3 per cent. At first sight this is hardly a momentous expansion. For even though it was nearly double the rate of growth of world trade taken as a whole, it started from such low levels that the global impact was hardly perceptible, and was not of primary significance for the economies of the colonial powers themselves; before the Second World War, trade with sub-Saharan Africa (South Africa still excluded) never accounted for a twentieth part of the United Kingdom's exchanges. So inconspicuous, indeed, were the short-term and even the mediumterm commercial gains accruing from the European conquest of tropical Africa that many metropolitan observers, unaware that the investment was a long-term pre-emption, have concluded either that it was a mistake or that it must have been undertaken for reasons that were not commercial.

The Colonial Moment in Africa: Aspects of economic history

In 1913, Africa as a whole accounted for about 7 per cent and 10 per cent respectively of the external trade of Britain and France. By and large, the overriding concern of the colonial powers was to prevent their colonial possessions becoming financial burdens to the metropolis. In France, a colonial ministry had been created in 1894, but its responsibilities in Africa were confined to West Africa, Equatorial Africa, French Somaliland and Madagascar. The economic depression of the 1930s was a new stimulus to reappraise imperial attitudes to Africa. The trend towards imperial protection in economic policy accelerated the growth of trade between Africa and the metropolitan powers. This was most marked in France: Africa's share of her external trade rose from about one-tenth in the 1920s to over one-fifth by 1935. The involvement of rural Africa in the operations of capitalist enterprise was a major theme of social research in the 1930s.

The imperial mind

African cross-currents

F. S. Malan's role, and the influence of the Cape ‘liberal’ tradition in the post-Union era, have been seriously under-estimated. As Minister of Mines and Industries and effective Minister of Native Affairs, Malan was responsible for the passage of a comprehensive system of labour legislation between 1913 and 1924, linked to a new initiative in ‘native policy’ in urban areas. The limitations of such an initiative must, however, not be lost sight of, for in the last analysis few of the Cape ‘liberals’ would have been prepared to face the full social and economic, let alone the political implications of a multi-racial society, and Malan was no exception. His initiative can best be seen as differing in tone rather than in substance from the politics of his colleagues. In his defence of the Cape franchise, Malan sought to defend African citizenship rights within a limited ‘political’ context. It was only during the brief period after 1918 that he attempted a settlement of race and industrial problems, but even then, as a Cape ‘liberal’, he never challenged the basis of the status quo in South Africa. Yet it is still true to say that he was ousted from party politics in the Union after 1924 largely because he persistently adhered to a different political tradition to that held by those who led both the SAP and the National Party.

F. S. Malan, the Cape Liberal Tratition, and South African Politics 1908–1924

shows, suggests that collaboration between the state and the mining industry should not, in changing circumstances and other areas, be taken for granted. The susceptibility of the various states involved to conflicting class pressures, and even wider international or metropolitan interests, suggests that the ability of the mining industry to control continuously the process of proletarianization through these means or any other might be more questionable than Perrings suggests. Other problems originate in the nature of the task that the author originally set for himself. In his Introduction, Perrings justifies his concentration on the 'objective basis of proletarianization' on the grounds that the problem has not received adequate attention. Further, that it is a 'necessary preliminary to a study of the instruments of class consciousness' (p. 4). Despite problems with the role of the state, the need for an understanding of the material basis of proletarianization in the context of control over markets required by industrial capital is well demonstrated. Indeed, the current historiography demands such a critical appraisal. Yet can an understanding of the process of class formation, the avowed aim of the book, be satisfactorily completed without considering the impact of class consciousness upon class experience ? The historic process of class formation elsewhere suggests that it is in the complex and dynamic interaction between the objective economic conditions experienced by the workforce and their interpretation of those experiences that a fuller understanding of that process can be found. In Central Africa this is, in the nature of the evidence, particularly difficult, as Perrings observes, but other historians have shown that it is not impossible. By deliberately excluding this aspect from the book, Perrings has therefore truncated his study of the ' manner of class formation' in a way reminiscent of studies whose concentration is in the other direction. Not that this is to decry the whole aim of the book, for attention needed to be refocused on the material basis of class formation. It is rather to point out that there is a sense in which there is a gap between aim and result. The fact that this study raises some of the most intractable and intriguing problems of Marxist historiography is, of course, to acknowledge its importance. This, and its other many merits, will ensure it a central place in future discussions of the area that it covers.

Education for Apartheid - Education in South Africa: Vol II, 1923–1975 . By E. G. Malherbe. Cape Town: Juta, 1977. Pp. xxx + 783. R15.00. - Year of Fire, Year of Ash. The Soweto Revolt: Roots of a Revolution? By Baruch Hirson. London: Zed Press, 1979. Pp. x + 348. £12.95 (£3.95 paperback).

Peter Kallaway

Papers

F. S. Malan, the Cape Liberal Tratition, and South African Politics 1908–1924

Education for Apartheid - Education in South Africa: Vol II, 1923–1975 . By E. G. Malherbe. Cape Town: Juta, 1977. Pp. xxx + 783. R15.00. - Year of Fire, Year of Ash. The Soweto Revolt: Roots of a Revolution? By Baruch Hirson. London: Zed Press, 1979. Pp. x + 348. £12.95 (£3.95 paperback).