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In much of southern Africa, migrancy has for generations been incorporated into the livelihoods systems of millions of rural families. The regional dimensions vary but, particularly where there was very inequitable division of land between racial groups during the era of white minority regimes, the dependence of rural households on migrants' remittances is fundamental to their survival. From a structural perspective, the impact of such migration has often been characterised as creating worker-peasants and farmerhousewives. The impact of these patterns on agricultural productivity and the environment is frequently deemed to be very negative, from a variety of theoretical and policy perspectives. Because the patterns are predicated on migrants retaining rights to rural land in rural areas, arguments are often made that migrants should lose their land rights, thereby being forced to choose either to be 'committed farmers' or 'permanent urbanites'. This paper argues that such views are frequently based on development narratives about the problems caused for agriculture by migrancy which ignore, or misunderstand crucial aspects of the relationship between migrants and the land. This paper attempts to analyse these narratives, and to offer an alternative perspective on the issue, drawing on empirical research in Zimbabwe and literature on migrants and agriculture in various African countries. To some extent, concerns about migrants and their links to the land derive from particular scholastic traditions associated with social science approaches to the study of the southern African region. The literature on rural-urban migration and rural-urban linkages in the form of land holdings for most of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, for a variety of reasons, is much less likely to view migrants' attachment to their land as problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, on the institutional, ideological, and intellectual politics of producing historical and social science knowledge in Africa, was prepared as the keynote address for the Conference on 'Historical and Social Science Research in Malawi: Problems and Prospects' held in Zomba in June 2000 from which the papers in this special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies are drawn. It is reproduced here in the format in which it was presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the political aftershocks of September 11, powerful interests in the United States and Britain have proposed the development of national systems of biometric identification and registration. For much of the last century, South Africans have lived with such a biometric order, and in recent years the democratic state has begun to invest in a massive scheme of digital biometrics for the delivery of benefits and the elimination of fraud. This HANIS system has been preceded by a massive project of digital biometric grant delivery that affects millions of people throughout the country. These systems are changing the nature of the state, and the relationship between private individuals and the commercial domain. For the countries considering a move from the decentralised order of paper-based identification to the new world of digital biometrics, there is much to be learned from a close study of contemporary South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to compare two major African cities in terms of the development and breakdown of racial segregation. There is a deliberate attempt to understand Durban through a comparative look at Abidjan, a port city of roughly equivalent size. The chief features of Durban's historical development are reviewed before the article turns to an equivalent examination of Abidjan's history. Abidjan, like Durban, was subjected to colonial policies that emphasised racial segregation in a way that blended with international ideas about the modern city. The actual process that unfolded historically was, however, in some significant respects different and the moulding of segregation less successful. After independence, a conception of functional (but not racial) segregation was dominant in Abidjan but it broke down due to economic and social forces from the 1970s. As a result, Abidjan became a less segregated city, with lessons perhaps for its richer South African counterpart. However, current trends suggest elements of convergence in urban society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the critiques of the Mfecane in African history. Julian Cobbing's assertion that Mfecane was in origin a colonial myth to conceal white wrong-doing and justify land expropriation; Exploitation of the concept of Mfecane to justify aspects of apartheid; Wars and upheavals; Slave trade; Slave raiding and trading.

This article examines assumptions about the provision of support for children and young people in child-headed households in sub-Saharan Africa. The South African example is used to assess appropriate family- and community-based support and assistance. The South African Children's Act proposes that child-headed households should be supported by an adult mentor, who will act in the children and young people's best interests. However, qualitative research among child-headed households in Port Elizabeth shows that so-called 'adult support' mostly does not contribute to children and young people's well-being. Children and young people often are not consulted about care arrangements, are not taken seriously, or are even worse off after adult interventions, resulting in many having a sense of powerlessness over their situation. An emphasis on access to social grants increases the potential for abuse of these youngsters. The study reveals the value of taking generational constructions into account in assessing current practice and developing more appropriate support arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2007 was the 'Year of Luthuli' in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Throughout the year, events commemorating the 1967 death of the former President-General of the ANC celebrated his life and contribution to the liberation of South Africa. A year later, during the presidential succession battle various politicians paid tribute to Luthuli, positioning themselves as heirs to his political and moral legacy. Celebrated as a 'founding father' of South Africa's modern democratic state, who had led the ANC during some of the most dramatic events in its history and as Africa's first Nobel Peace Prize winner, Luthuli's name conjures awe and respect. Unsurprisingly, Luthuli has been assigned a prominent place in the process of nationalist myth making. This article is inspired by Michel Rolph Trouillot's, Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History (1995) and highlights the contrast between the present lionisation of Luthuli as a nationalist founding figure and the effective silencing of his stance on the shift to violence soon after the launch of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in December 1961. I argue that a silence in the archives is not primarily a result of poor health or the banning orders imposed on Luthuli, but rather of his embarrassingly persistent espousal of non-violent methods that led to his marginalisation as a leader of the ANC in the early 1960s. An examination of Luthuli's columns in the Golden City Post reveals that he argued against a turn to violence before and after the ANC's decision to prepare for the armed struggle and MK's launch. Luthuli's continued public advocacy of only non-violent methods discomfited many of his contemporaries. Consequently, his ability to lead the liberation movement was compromised and diminished significantly from 1961 until his death six years later. Narratives by former MK operatives affirm Luthuli's prescience regarding the strategic ineffectiveness of violence. Finally, the article demonstrates the inaccuracy of the self-justifying portrayals of Luthuli as a supporter of the armed struggle by both nationalist historians and politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zimbabwean musicians have continued to struggle to earn a living and respect decades after ushering the country's independence in song and dance in 1980. What they perceived as the root of their problem - an obstinate neo-colonial cultural disposition deeply etched at the heart of the national ethos - is the subject of this article. Employing the currency of cultural nationalism, the musicians indicted the independence state's failure to appreciate the cultural and economic importance of the country's music. Similarly, they decried what they saw as a wider crisis of national consciousness among Zimbabweans, of which their own predicament as musicians was only one symptom. Thus, this article is a narrative history of Zimbabwean popular musicians and their engagement with the cultural complexities underlying postcolonial identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Tukontology' is an approach to studying the process of creolisation (termed 'hybridity' or 'partnerships' by other scholars) that is grounded in the findings of Science Studies generally and Actor-Network-Theory in particular. A musical metaphor, based on the Barbadian triune Tuk Band orchestra, is used to help elaborate how encounters between groups can be studied symmetrically without resorting to the knowledge of any hegemonic group as a privileged resource for explaining other groups. In the tukontological orchestra, the Penny Whistle represents creativity; the Kettle Drum serves as ways of knowing; and the Boom Drum composes ontologies. In this article, the approach is used to describe the report of an trial that occurred in the slave-courts of Jamaica in 1824. The testimony of the trial provides an excellent text for understanding an encounter between the force of African obeah and English forces. It is argued that the English court as an auditorium - with its forces of science, medicine, and law arrayed against a single accused African and his force - was able to isolate and weaken obeah, a force that was ordinarily held in awe by Africans in their own communities and by some English outside of the court. The article also explains why it was inevitable, though not inherently truthful, that the court would view the work involving obeah as irrational, and in the end deem the African sage, referred to as an 'old warlock' by The Times, to be fraudulent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information concerning the history of healing, as well as the past and present medical practices in Africa. The author infers that African healing is the subject of a dynamic and comparatively new interdisciplinary literature in African studies. The author adds that traditional medicine earned wide scholarly interest in the 1960s and 1970s with development medical anthropology and the World Health Organisation's Alma Ata Declaration of 1978, which supported the consolidation of traditional medicine to the health services of developing countries.

The social pension was introduced in South Africa in 1928, but eligibility was extended to African South Africans in 1944 and to African Namibians only in 1973. Botswana introduced its own social pension scheme in 1996, and Lesotho followed as recently as 2004. Initially conceived as a welfarist programme to provide social assistance to 'poor whites', South Africa's social pension was later exploited for a complex combination of political objectives, including the control of African urbanisation and maintenance of rural labour reserves (Bantustans) in South Africa, and 'winning hearts and minds' during South Africa's occupation of Namibia. Since the accession to power of the ANC and SWAPO governments in the early 1990s, equity concerns and antipoverty objectives have dominated. Racially discriminatory payment levels were declared unconstitutional and have been eradicated in both countries. While concerns have been raised about the fiscal sustainability of the social pension, its future as a social welfare programme in southern Africa and elsewhere depends mainly on political commitment from governments and taxpayers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nyika National Park, which spreads across northern Malawi into Zambia, is conventionally depicted as a 'natural museum', one of the last remaining untouched natural habitats in Africa. As this article demonstrates, however, from the late nineteenth century onwards the Nyika has been represented in a variety of different and often clashing forms involving local inhabitants (the Phoka) and European missionaries, explorers and administrators. From the late 1940s, a major influence shaping representations of the Nyika was Laurens van der Post, whose best-selling book, Venture to the Interior, provided a powerful image of the uncontaminated character of both the plateau and the Phoka people. At the same time, in his hitherto unpublished report on the Nyika, van der Post emphasised the potential of the plateau for European stock breeders and the inherently destructive nature of Phoka herders, gatherers and agriculturalists. The last section of the article focuses on the working out of van der Post's contradictory vision between the 1950s and the 1990s - the eventual rejection of the commercial model exemplified by the Colonial Development Corporation's ambitious schemes for a huge forestry plantation, the creation of a national park, yet also the expulsion of thousands of Phoka people from the plateau and the surrounding valleys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the struggle of various actors over the use of representations of the past to aid the development of communities in central southern Africa. It addresses the contradictions, contestations and dilemmas involved in this process through a case study of the Kuomboka, a heritage festival held annually in the heart of the Upper Zambezi Valley. Hosted by the Lozi peoples of western Zambia, the festival utilises Lozi history and heritage and is viewed as a strong symbol of identification not only for people who consider themselves Lozi but also for Zambians in general and other Africans. Significantly, Kuomboka is also a festival visited by very few non-Africans. I will argue that the struggle to extract contemporary value out of this manifestation of Lozi heritage is fought on three levels - first, over contested versions of the past; second, over the uses of heritage; and, finally, over ownership of heritage and the implications of this ownership for the distribution of the benefits of heritage development. The intensity of the struggle, which is fought across divisions of class and ethnicity, also highlights the competition over scarce resources that exists in a region suffering economic underdevelopment and social disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Failed states in Africa are not a uniquely postcolonial phenomenon: The colonial government in Nyasaland started and ended as a failed state. Although effective in guarding Britain's global interests against her imperial rivals, the Nyasaland government could not be relied upon as a trustworthy ally of any social class within the country. The government failed to provide essential services, particularly roads, with dire consequences for both the peasant economy and European enterprises. Without a reliable road network, transport companies came to depend on the vagaries of the weather and the availability of villagers to carry goods on their heads. Transporters competed with planters and other European enterprises for cheap labour, instituting a costly freight regime that discouraged planters from raising bulky, low-value food crops. Thus, to feed their workers, all European enterprises – farmers, missionaries, traders, transport companies and the government – turned to peasant-grown food. Responding to these demands without the benefit of new agricultural technologies that could have raised productivity, peasants sold the food that their families needed and began to experience new forms of hunger. The food deficits forced the same European planters who assaulted the peasant economy as a system of labour usage to realise the need to preserve it as a system of food supply. Such was the nature of the colonial regime in Nyasaland that stimulating and undermining the peasant option did not form two separate processes, occupying two distinct phases. In Nyasaland, the inefficient transport system, like the estate sector, simultaneously both strengthened and weakened peasant production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Indian–African encounters in the province of Natal, South Africa through the lens of African therapeutics. By examining the historical antecedents of African therapeutics in this area, I demonstrate that what is considered ‘African’ or ‘indigenous’ knowledge is rather an amalgam of many cultural and political influences. Such polyculturalism resulted from the encounters of working-class Indian and African communities, as well as the rise of Indian healers and shop owners of African medicine, leading to the appropriation of each other's ailments, remedies and healers. These encounters combined with the pressure of biomedical scrutiny to help define and shape what is today considered ‘traditional’ African therapeutics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of an ostensibly surprising coalition of interests around the notion of Transboundary Natural Resource Management (TBNRM) in Southern Africa. Deep green 'bioregionalists', conservation biologists and neo-liberal development advocates have found common cause in espousing the re-establishment of ecological integrity across 'artificial' frontiers and administrative boundaries. TBNRM has effects far beyond the realms of biodiversity protection and 'natural resource management'. It is bound up with regional debates on national sovereignty, land reform and poverty alleviation. This article explores the ideological, political and economic rationales for TBNRM with particular reference to Zimbabwe's involvement in the flagship Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park initiative, spanning Zimbabwe, South Africa and Mozambique. It investigates the competing agendas, and points of conflict surrounding the initiative at global, national and local levels, and explores the potential impact on agrarian livelihoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores an unusual child murder committed by a woman in Bushmanland in 1910. Mietje Bontnaal, a nineteen-year-old domestic servant, murdered Flora Ortman, the seven-year-old daughter of a shepherd. It was a domestic murder that exposed tensions amongst servants in a patriarchal farm household. The article examines the trial record and the subsequent mercy procedure. While the Judge found her guilty, he recommended her to mercy. The Minister of Justice disagreed and recommended that she hang. The Governor-General agreed with the Judge and he commuted her sentence to life imprisonment. It was extremely unusual for a woman to be executed in the Cape at this time. The murder itself raises questions of sex, violence and moral order. While the motive for the crime was irrelevant to the court's finding of guilt, it was an important factor in granting her mercy. In conclusion the article speculates about her motive, central to which was the fact that she was a slave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the changing meanings attributed to African appropriation of European dress on nineteenth-century Transvaal Lutheran mission stations. The narrative focuses on both local church dynamics and the wider colonial context in which missionaries and converts positioned themselves socially, economically and culturally. The religious significance of changing attitudes towards European garb is also explored. More spectacular disputes over clothing occurred in areas where economic and social tensions were high. Most frequently, however, Africans used dress as a social marker and an attempted means of colonial assimilation rather than as a demonstration of social and political opposition. In this sense, Lutheranism in the Transvaal developed as an apolitical religion, providing cultural forms of expression rather than the means to enter the sphere of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on recent re-interpretations of literacy that see it as a socially-embedded process rather than a neutral skill, this article examines how a group of Swiss missionaries spread a set of Protestant reading practices and texts in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury south-east Africa. I argue that their experience at home led them to view literacy as a revolutionary tool for the transformation of society. I then look at the different contexts in which Africans adopted the skills of literacy, and the different meanings with which they imbued the practice. The fourth section ties these ways of reading to the interpretation of texts and local networks of power. The final part examines literacy as a sign and source of power employed by a new class of national politicians. Here, I draw parallels between the missionaries' objectives in pursuing literacy and those of the mass literacy campaigns organised by Frelimo in Mozambique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines articles on social and health aspects in Africa. Impact of modernity on African scholars; Rejection of social experiences valued by African people; Decline of the Zambian Copperbelt.

Focuses on the decline of human fertility in the region of southern Africa. Value of children in the cultural context of the area; Uncertainty on the fertility trends in other countries of the region; Association of infant and child mortality rates to the reproductive decision making.

The South West African Native Labour Association (SWANLA) has received much attention by scholars of Namibia as the primary source of exploitation that eventually led to the rise of the independence movement led by SWAPO. Little attention has been given to SWANLA's predecessors, the Southern Labour Organisation (SLO) and the Northern Labour Organisation (NLO), which recruited and administered contract labour during the inter-war years. These two organizations played a fundamental role in breaking down traditional African societies in Namibia, and in creating a wage-labour economy in the southwest African territory. This study uses archival documents from the SLO and the NLO to reveal how the contract labour system was institutionalized in Namibia after World War One. This analysis confirms the centrality of the diamond industry for explaining the nature of contract labour, and much of Namibian politics itself, during the twentieth century in Namibia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the significance of land struggles in Facazisse in the Magude District of Mozambique based on a gendered cultural and historical perspective. Reliance on women's explanations of the meaning of changes in local land administration during the colonial and postcolonial periods; Implications of the changes for rural women.

Presents an exploration into the reading of African identity names which reveals the shifting meanings of ethnic naming over time and the nature of definition of ethnic identity. Case of Merina of central Madagascar; Merina identity as an historical product of the early 19th century and the identity, was at origin, a political consciousness that later became ethnicized.

Proposes a strategy of development for southern Africa which features regional economic integration. Failure of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank stabilization and structural adjustment programs to achieve their goals; Potential for agricultural trade among countries of the region.

Traces the image of Africa as the dark continent through sources such as the bible, medieval travel fiction and legends of fabulous wealth. Structure of myths about Africa; Justification of colonialism through the discovery of Great Zimbabwe; Hollywood portrayal of Africa's past.

Discusses Ossewabrandwag (OB), an Afrikaner nationalist mass movement comprising nearly all social strata of the Afrikaner population. Lack of a clear-cut political program; Emphasis on republican and nationalist outlook; Development into a fascist organization.

Focuses on the opposition against Africa's rehabilitation measures between the period of 1945-1955. Emergence of a popular and radical nationalism; Weakness of the social structure of the working class; Dependent industrialization; Appeal of the Secretary for Native Affairs to the Ciskeian Bunga to get fenced; Contempt for collaborating headsmen.