Showing papers in "Journal of Southern African Studies in 1990"

Rural-urban linkages in contemporary Harare: why migrants need their land.

Abstract: Prior to independence in 1980 the urbanisation of Zimbabwe's African population occurred under a restrictive regime which prevented many urban workers from obtaining rights to remain permanently in urban areas. As a result many families had no choice but to maintain their links with the overcrowded rural areas, to which they would eventually have to return. Once restrictions were lifted it was to be expected that migration patterns would alter. Surveys conducted amongst post‐independence migrants in Harare's high‐density areas found that many changes had occurred, and in particular there had been a shift towards longer‐term migration. Many families now accompany the household head for at least part of the year. Nevertheless, only a minority of migrants planned to remain permanently in town. There was a strong perception that the maintenance of rural links was essential as economic security for the eventualities of old age and unemployment when urban expenses could not be covered. There is, however, pressu...

Mobile workers, modernist narratives: a critique of the historiography of transition on the Zambian copperbelt[part one]

Abstract: Questions of labour migration and circulation of population between urban and rural areas in Zambia have usually been described according to a grand modernist narrative charting the progressive, stage‐wise emergence of a stable, settled urban working class. In this over‐arching, progressive narrative, changes in the nature of migration and urbanisation over the years have been described in terms of a transition through which a ‘classic migrant labour system’ featuring short‐term migration by lone, male, rurally‐based migrants gradually gave way to a ‘permanently urbanised’, ‘fully proletarianised’, settled urban working class. This paper argues that this conceptualisation obscures our understanding of the complex relations urban workers have maintained with rural areas over the years, and stands in the way of the task of coming to terms with developments in Zambia over the last fifteen years, which have no place in the progressive narrative and its scheme of phases. The critical re‐examination of issues o...

Black and white: The ‘perils of sex’ in colonial Zimbabwe

Abstract: ’Black peril’, incidents of alleged sexual violence by black men against white women, was at times a fully hysterical obsession amongst the white population of colonial Zimbabwe. Fear of ‘black peril’ spawned a wide range of legislation, including the prohibition of sexual relations between white women and black men. In addition, dozens of blacks were executed, both legally and extra‐legaily, for supposed ‘black peril’ violations. Yet for the most part, ‘black peril was a manufactured phenomenon, with the number of such cases being extremely small. In contrast, ‘white peril’, or sexual abuse of black women by white men, was far more frequent. These incidents rarely appear in either contemporary newspaper reports or colonial history. However, on many occasions white women and black men protested against the ignoring of the ‘white peril’. Despite these protestations there was never any law passed to prohibit white men from having sexual relations with black women. The main reason for the differing official ...

Women and wages: gender and the control of income in farm and bantustan households

Abstract: The argument of this article is based on a close comparison of two Bantustan areas in South Africa: the Matatiele district in the Transkei and Qwaqwa in the Orange Free State. Such comparisons are rarely, if ever, attempted, but we contend that they are potentially very useful in illuminating the complexities of social relationships in South Africa's rural periphery. In this article we concentrate on gender relationships. All the Bantustans share certain characteristics that impinge on the nature of gender relationships. Most significant are the overwhelming dependence of households on income derived from remittances, and the fact that migrant‐contract employment opportunities are mainly restricted to men. But Bantustan areas also differ with regard to the availability of residual productive resources (such as arable and pasture land), their residents’ past involvement in wage‐labour and experiences of forced relocation, and in the forms of material differentiation amongst residents. This article explores...

Negotiated spaces and contested terrain: men, women, and the law in colonial Zimbabwe, 1890–1939

Abstract: During the early years of European occupation in Southern Rhodesia, people on the margins of African society took advantage of the erosion of indigenous authority structures. Women, in particular, challenged male control over their mobility, sexuality, and productive and reproductive capacities. Initially, a degree of female ‘emancipation’ was encouraged by European missionaries and the colonial state, who considered such customs as child‐pledging, forced marriage, and polygamy to be ‘repugnant’ to European concepts of morality. During the first three decades of colonial rule, legislation was enacted that outlawed child marriages, set limitations on bridewealth, and prohibited the marriage of women without their consent. The resulting crisis of authority in the rural areas, foreshadowing the possibility of a total breakdown in law and order, forced state officials to reconsider their earlier policies. By the 1920s, a backlash against female emancipation was well under way, intensifying under the pressures...

The Sophiatown writers of the fifties: the unreal reality of their World

Abstract: Attempts to capture the zest for life and what Geertz called 'a thick description'l of Sophiatown's gargantuan reality have eluded even its most faithful disciples. Mattera has claimed that 'nobody can write the real story of Sophiatown'.2 Sophiatown was a juvenile delinquent in a city also of tender years. The mineral explosion on the Witwatersrand from 1886 hurled it into an era of industrial capitalism, and the world economy. From nothing Johannesburg sprang from the near desert, 6,000 feet above sea level, with gold as its sole rationale, and a texture of life like that of an overgrown mining camp. In this context Sophiatown in the Fifties offered unprecedented possibilities for blacks to choose and invent their society from the novel distractions of urban life, and was what Raban calls 'soft' and open to a variety of interpretations, dreams, commitments, and methods of survival.3 The Sophiatown of this era was a pressure cooker of societal potential and contradictions, and provided a 'moment' in which a collective dream emerged of a black urban culture that might have been. However, the essence of Sophiatown as place and community was a solid element in an otherwise 'soft' city, and lives on as a symbol in South African history. The co-existence of an emergent black urban culture and the National Party's intent to destroy such a phenomenon, moulded both the significance and tragedy of Sophiatown. The literature that surrounds it is less a series of individual works than a composite picture of a world, in which both Sophiatown and the writers symbolised the vitality, novelty, and precariousness of the new black urban generation. Johannesburg is an example of what Berman, in the context of St Petersburg's role in nineteenth-century Russia, describes as 'the modernism of underdevelopment'.4 The modernism of St Petersburg and Johannesburg was twisted, gnarled,

Apartheid and the political imagination in Black South African Theatre

Abstract: (1990). Apartheid and the political imagination in Black South African Theatre. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 16, Performance and Popular Culture, pp. 229-245.

'Playing Soldiers': The Truppenspieler Movement Among the Herero of Namibia, 1915 to ca. 1945

Abstract: In 1904 Herero pastoralists in Namibia suffered a devastating defeat by German colonial forces. Of the 20 per cent who survived, a sizable number fled to neighbouring Botswana. Subsequent German policies completely dispossessed the Herero of all land and cattle. Conquest by Union troops in 1915 ushered in a brief period of more lenient colonial rule, which once again permitted the Herero to acquire and own cattle. Increased mobility also made it possible for widely dispersed members of the tribe to congregate on their ancestral lands. The space thus created enabled the Herero to reaffirm their customs and traditions in attempts to reestablish themselves as a pastoral community. In this context the Truppenspieler movement with its military structure, loosely modelled on that of the German colonial army, provided an organisational form. The movement was organised into regiments coinciding with administrative districts. Each regiment had its own officers. Regular drilling exercises served to bring together p...

'The Cows of Nongoloza': Youth, Crime and Amalaita Gangs in Durban, 1900-1936

Abstract: Forms of youth organisation and culture which emerged amongst African migrants in towns during the first decades of the century remain obscure. Based on oral and archival sources, this article attempts to disaggregate, periodise and construct an understanding of those forms of cultural organisation which came to be known as amalaita. In Durban the amalaita emerged in the wake of the massive social dislocation experienced by African societies in Natal and Zululand in the late nineteenth century. It is argued that they were first and foremost migrant youth organisations whose members adapted a repertoire of Zulu rural cultural practices and forms of self‐organisation to cope with new conditions of life in town. This is an interpretation supported by oral testimonies although even within popular memory itself the meaning of the term is sometimes extended to include relatively discrete forms of adult migrant and even criminal association, for reasons which the article explains. Although the amalaita cannot be...

Towards popular theatre in South Africa

Abstract: (1990). Towards popular theatre in South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 16, Performance and Popular Culture, pp. 208-228.

Migrancy, crime and faction fighting: the role of the Isitshozi in the development of ethnic organisations in the compounds

Abstract: During the Twenties the prison‐compound complex that had spawned Jan Note's Ninevite gang produced another organisation that structured crime amongst the migrant population on the Rand. The Isitshozi exemplified organised African crime on the Rand during the Thirties. The gang began as an organisation of Mpondo migrant workers that existed either within or on the edge of the compounds. By the end of the Thirties the Isitshozi had begun to move out of the compounds into the nearby urban communities. The two centres of its organisation —the compounds and the prisons —had, from the beginning, infused different types of members into the gang. Young Mpondo migrants were recruited in the compounds where the gang was strong and hardened urban criminals entered the gang through the prison network. By 1940 the gang's interaction with the urban African communities along the Rand had exposed it to the growing number of marginalised urban youths. This combination, of organisation and marginalised membership, produced...

Mental Colonisation or Catharsis? Theatre, democracy and cultural struggle from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe

Abstract: (1990). Mental Colonisation or Catharsis? Theatre, democracy and cultural struggle from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 16, Performance and Popular Culture, pp. 246-275.

A question of ethnicity: Ndzundza Ndebele in a Lebowa village

Abstract: The insights of such authors as Mitchell, Barth and Cohen can be usefully applied to understanding the occurrence of ethnicity in small‐scale communities within the context of the South African system of ethnic homelands. In this paper, deep‐seated divisions between Pedi and Ndebele in a village in the Pedi Homeland of Lebowa are examined. While it is undoubtedly true that these can be understood only in the light of the constraints on resources and political power imposed from above through state policy, account must also be taken of local‐level processes. Recent historical events, and the contemporary setting, have led the people concerned — particularly the Ndebele — to constitute themselves as ethnic groups in order to try to secure their hold over crucial economic and political resources.

Reform, repression and resistance in South Africa: a case study of Alexandra township, 1979–1989

Abstract: This article is a case study of reform policy and popular opposition in Alexandra, a black township in the heart of Johannesburg and Sandton's wealthiest white suburbs. First, it examines the popular response to reformist policy in the early 1980s and the transformation to ‘people's power’. ‘People's power’ was informed by an insurrectionary strategy which gave rise to hasty organisation and was based on a limited conception of state power. The demise of ‘people's power’, it is suggested, was not solely due to a clamp‐down on popular organisation by the state. Second, the nature of current reform policy and the way in which it differs from the earlier reform package is discussed. Urbanisation policy, Regional Service Councils and Joint Management Centres are complementary aspects of the new urban reform strategy. It is argued that the current era of repression in the late Eighties was a period of managing reform policy within a new ideological and institutional framework rather than a desperate resort to ...

The Zulu Petit Bourgeoisie and Zulu Nationalism in the 1920's: Origins of Inkatha

Abstract: In her 1978 article entitled 'Natal, the Zulu Royal Family and the Ideology of Segregation', Shula Marks first drew attention to the links that developed during the 1920s between the Natal African petit bourgeoisie and the Zulu royal family, which were in part reflected in the early Inkatha organisation. She has recently extended her analysis of the class alliances and conflicts of the period through considering, in three essays published in book form in 1986, the political roles of the Zulu king, Solomon kaDinuzulu, ANC founder and leader of Natal's conservative Christian African elite, John Dube, and Natal's most influential trade union activist, George Champion. The political conflicts so characteristic of Natal today are thus shown to have had a long history, and so too have the South African state's moves to control Natal through political alliances with the province's conservative Zulu nationalists.' In amplification of Shula Marks' work, and drawing on my 1985 study of Zulu royal and nationalist politics during the 1920s, my concern in this present paper is to focus specifically on those historical developments and events that led to the formation of the first Inkatha, and to draw these together in a coherent account of Inkatha's origins in the early 1920s. In doing so, this paper brings to light new evidence germane to the story. Most important, perhaps, it discloses the influence of the petit bourgeois community in Northern Natal's Vryheid district, the role of the 1924 radical 'coup' in the hitherto conservative Natal Native Congress, and the contribution of American-origined ideas of black consciousness. Because Inkatha soon became the political mouthpiece of the 'Zulu nation', this paper also has a broader function: it sheds

Region Formation under Crisis Conditions: South vs Southern Africa in the Interwar Period*

Abstract: In recent years considerable attention has been paid in Africa to the promotion of economic growth through regional economic associations. Yet little scholarship exists on the historical formation of southern Africa as an existing ‘region’. This essay explores this subject by analysing conflicts between local political actors over regional economic relationships in the first half of this century. Examining the period as a whole reveals a critical transition during the interwar period. If at the beginning of the century southern Africa was marked by relatively free flows of commodities, labour and capital, by the late 1930s this situation was dramatically transformed. South Africa had become an industrialising power, while the free trade zone so assiduously cultivated by colonial and settler power in the previous half century had been shattered. At the same time, strongly interdependent and inherently unequal relationships emerged across the economic landscape of southern Africa for the first time. Several...

Marotholi Travelling Theatre: towards and alternative perspective of development

Abstract: My concern in this account is with theatre rather than drama, and I think it is important for us to clarify the distinction from the onset. 'Theatre' here refers to the production and communication of meaning in the performance itself, in other words a transaction or negotiation of meaning in a performer-spectator situation. 'Drama' on the other hand, refers to the literature on which performances are sometimes based, the mode of fiction designed along certain dramatic conventions for stage representation. The kind of theatre I am concerned with here is development theatre, in particular the Lesotho group known as the Marotholi Travelling Theatre. The initial stage of any development activity is communication, and throughout the life of the activity communication continues. Without the essential social interaction through messages between 'development agents' and the people, the socalled beneficiaries of development actions, we cannot in any meaningful way talk of development. When we examine various development projects in Lesotho we find that in many cases communication is top-down. In other words, planners from outside the community decide what is good for the community and impose projects without finding out from the 'beneficiaries' what their needs are. More often than not such projects fail to realise their objectives because people lack the motivation to participate in the projects of which they feel they are not part. In our tours of the villages we have in fact discovered that the general attitude is that the responsibility for failure or success of such projects rests with the 'government' (by which it is meant any development agency be it government or non-governmental). People feel that things are being done for them, and it is up to the 'benefactors' to see to it that they succeed. They see themselves as mere recipients an attitude which reinforces dependency. For communication to be complete and effective it must be two-way instead of a top-down, one-way flow of information. However, for communication to be twoway it must take place among community members themselves. The need for a democratic vehicle to facilitate dialogue at community level gave birth to the use of

Trends in Zimbabwean Theatre since 1980

Abstract: At independence in 1980, Zimbabwe's black majority govemment adopted a policy of reconciliation as a strategy of transfoiming black-white relations which for over ninety years had been characterised by relations of stark inequality. The effect of the policy of reconciliation was further enhanced by the formation of a government of national unity which included in its cabinet some members of the white minority regime. Theatre in Zimbabwe since 1980 has, in the main, been a response to these policies of reconciliation, non-racial development and socialism. Thus an analysis of Zimbabwean theatre is in many ways an assessment of the successes and obstacles in the development of a non-racial and socialist culture in Zimbabwe. Since 1980 a number of trends in Zimbabwean theatre have developed. The first trend is that of theatre that had its roots in the liberation struggle in guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia and inside the country's liberated zones. This is the theatre used by combatants to articulate the people's role and aspirations in waging a war of liberation. It was used to effectively tell the story of colonial occupation and the revolutionary history of the people's resistance since 1896. In the liberated zones inside the country, an all-night song-dance-political rally called Pun1gwe became the medium for the dramatisation of the people's struggle (Chinlur eniga) and the inevitable defeat of colonialism in Zimbabwe. This dynamic use of the diverse and popular forms of indigenous performing arts, for instance traditional dance, ritual dances, poetic recitation, chants, slogans, songs and story-telling enabled the combatants to mobilize the peasants to articulate their opposition to the settler white minority regime, and to consolidate the peasants solidarity with the liberation struggle despite the punitive strikes by the forces of the Smith regime. The Pungwe enabled the combatants to concretise the ideology of socialism as an instrument of transferring political and economic power to the indigenous people of Zimbabwe. In some ways, the new artistic experience forged largely in the guerrilla camps was not fully exploited once the war had ended. At independence, theatre artists who had been involved in the use of theatre as a revolutionary tool for articulating both the experience and the ideological dynamics of the liberation struggle returned home from Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, Europe, America and many African countries. Those who had been pioneers of this radical and innovative theatre were, upon their return home, either appointed to senior government positions or

Simultaneous revolutions: the Zimbabwean case

Abstract: The state of Zimbabwe's political economy seems to indicate that a potential Marxist revolution lost its fire somewhere along the line and dissolved into contradiction‐riddled reformism under the ZANU (PF) government. This article argues that Zimbabwe's post‐independence contradictions are grounded in at least four simultaneous revolutions which took place in the years following World War II. Two of the revolutions were of a type which, borrowing from Antonio Gramsci, can be termed ‘passive’, and the remaining two resembled ‘anti‐passive’ and ‘council’ revolutions. Each unfolded separately but simultaneously and each brought tangible but partial transformations of consciousness, state, economy, and class structure which linger into the present and which defy easy characterisation as the results of ‘a’ failed revolution. The article treats the theoretical characteristics of simultaneous revolutions first and then details their application to the Zimbabwean case.

Wits as an ‘open’ university 1939–1959: black admissions to the university of the Witwatersrand

Abstract: In 1959 the Nationalist government, after a decade of power, finally secured the passage through parliament of legislation to impose apartheid structures on South Africa's university system. The country's two previously ‘open universities‘, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits) and the University of Cape Town (UCT), were now largely ‘closed’ to black applicants. This paper examines the process by which Wits became an ‘open university’ in the first instance, with particular emphasis on the significance of World War II for the opening of the medical school, but it also demonstrates that the university's doors were never much more than half open to blacks. Certain faculties and departments, most prominently Dentistry, never admitted black students, and in 1953–4 the university appeared to wish to appease the Nationalist government by instituting a quota system for black admissions to its medical school. In the formal social and sporting spheres, official university policy was one of applyi...

Traditions of Poetry in Natal

Abstract: We have been facing a 'brilliant chaos' of words, for the last few years have been tremendous for poetry in Natal. But we have also been reeling from collisions between two poetic traditions a scripted and an oral one. And both traditions have been colliding in the context of political and labour initiatives in the area. The two primordial poles of the 'oral' and the 'written' stand opposite each other drenched in prejudice: after all, a hundred years of work in plantations, in sugarmills, on the docks and inside factories have torn the traditions apart leaving but little room for interaction. For example, Lawrence Zondi, the most 'natural' and 'oral' of contemporary labour poets one of the most rooted political and labour leaders in the Midlands, the area's oral historian and intellectual pours scorn on all those 'Englishmen' in his orations: those black scribes who have been distanced from the people.1 For example, Alfred Qabula, another labour poet, also orates against education that emasculates traditions. He insists that he only praises 'rough hands that hold the plough' in his work.2 On the other hand, our educated scribe shrinks away from the vernacular noises of oral poets, responding against something 'tribal', something 'apartheid-induced', something that is narrower than a wholesome national spirit. What both traditions are in danger of missing is that they share an 'unconscious surplus' of creative energy. I shall proceed in the pages that follow to offer a more conscious assessment. And, I will venture later a further argument: that unless these territories are understood, we cannot even begin discussing the strength of 'people's poetry' in Natal and its own internal criteria of excellence. The fate of oral as against scripted creators was separated, parcelled and dispatched down different emotive paths. The former followed ordinary people from the countryside to their hostels and compounds; from there, to the townships and back. It followed the trials of the Zulu Royal House, of the chiefship system, of

Patronage, the State and Ideology in Zambian Theatre

Abstract: (1990). Patronage, the state and ideology in Zambian Theatre. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 16, Performance and Popular Culture, pp. 290-306.

Agricultural credit policy, bureaucratic decision‐making and the subordination of rural women in the development process: some observations on the Kawinga project, Malawi

Abstract: This paper identifies the nature of interactions between the bureaucracy and smallholder farmers in Malawi. It proposes that the role of women must be explained within the context of the processes of social economic differentiation that characterise the rural economy. The paper outlines the policies and bureaucratic practises that consolidate the dominance of the bureaucracy, and the subordination of rural women in the Malawian development process. Its conclusion is that the smallholder development strategy that puts emphasis on commercialisation of agriculture, combined with decision making processes which are centralised in the bureaucracy, serve to reproduce and perpetuate historical forms of social differentiation which are the basis of the women's subordination.

Apartheid and Economic Growth: Craft Unions, Capital and the State in the South African Building Industry, 1945-1975

Abstract: During the 1940s, when the craft unions were still able to control the standards of their trades, and the training and employment of skilled labour, they exhibited a militant style of trade union organisation that had little need for state support. However, dramatic shifts in the nature of the labour market coupled with aggressive state policies that undermined mixed unionism, began to erode the basis of craft union strategies of exclusion during the 1950s. The fragmentation of the skilled trades and the undercutting of skilled white wages by predominantly African labour was accelerated by the economic boom of the 1960s. Consequently, over the years the craft unions became progressively more dependent upon the state to enforce the exclusion of cheap labour on a racial basis. Ironically, as the craft unions became more dependent upon the apartheid policies of the state, these very policies were being jettisoned by the state which was under pressure to ensure the provision of housing for the urbanising Afri...

Theatre for development in Zimbabwe: an Urban Project

Abstract: (1990). Theatre for development in Zimbabwe: an Urban Project. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 16, Performance and Popular Culture, pp. 340-351.

Mapantsula: cinema, crime and politics on the Witwatersrand

Abstract: (1990). Mapantsula: cinema, crime and politics on the Witwatersrand. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 751-760.

Interview with Gcina Mhlope

Abstract: (1990). Interview with Gcina Mhlope. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 16, Performance and Popular Culture, pp. 328-335.

The demise of the world revolutionary process: Soviet‐Angolan relations under Gorbachev

Abstract: Ironically, Brezhnev's observation still holds true today. However, the transformative power of the international communist movement has resulted not from its consolidation, as Brezhnev surmised, but from its disintegration. The 'world revolutionary process' predicted by Marx, initiated by Lenin, and promoted for seventy years by the Soviet Union has come to an abrupt halt. Whether temporary or permanent, its present demise has created one of the most fluid historical moments of the twentieth century. This paper seeks to assess the impact of this world-wide phenomenon on southern Africa by analyzing one of its dimensions — Soviet relations with Angola. The paper addresses two central questions. To what extent have Soviet conceptual and organizational changes in foreign policy affected Soviet policy towards Angola? How has this new Soviet policy influenced developments in Angola and southern Africa more generally? The analysis is divided into four sections. The first section outlines recent 'restructuring' within and between those institutions which formulate and execute Soviet foreign policy towards Angola. The second section describes and explains the conceptual and concrete changes in Soviet foreign policy regarding states of socialist orientation which affect Angola. The third section discusses another revised concept in Soviet foreign policy — 'new thinking' about regional security — and its impact on Soviet-Angolan relations. The final section concludes with an

M. K. Gandhi: some experiments with truth

Abstract: Gandhiists, scholarly and otherwise, have consistently manipulated ‘the Mahatma image’ in accounting for M.K. Gandhi's role as a social and political ‘revolutionary’ and as the founder of ‘non‐violent resistance’. Uncritically assuming a consistent, virtually uninterrupted continuity between Mahatma Gandhi at the height of his career in India and M.K. Gandhi's career as a social and political reformer in Natal and the Transvaal (1893–1914), Gandhiists have systematically suppressed evidence which problematises their historiographical practice and ‘the Mahatma image’. In this paper I argue that Gandhi's practices in South Africa, particularly those resulting from his editorship of Indian Opinion, were often discontinuous with and even contradictory to the soothing fiction of ‘the Mahatma image’, but were at the same time significant factors in the genealogy of Satyagraha.