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Since the ending of apartheid, the state, political parties, civil society and ordinary people in South Africa have attempted to deal with the traumatic legacies of the past to engender a common sense of nationhood. This paper examines this process of dealing with the past through the theoretical lens of post-colonialism, focusing, in particular, on attempts to establish historical truth and collective memory for black women, who have often been most marginalised by colonialism and apartheid and excluded from dominant accounts of history. It argues that if black women are denied a presence and agency in the construction of collective memory, their belonging and citizenship is consequently mediated in the process of nation building. It considers how exclusionary and discriminating patterns are reproduced through attempts to construct national memory-archives, focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It then explores the measures being taken to create a more inclusive process of restoring collective memory. In particular, it discusses the importance and possibilities of creating a postcolonial archive, where the voices and texts of historically marginalised people can be incorporated into national projects of remembering and notions of belonging. The paper focuses specifically on recent attempts to archive black women's pictorial and written testimony in a memory cloths programme. It concludes that representations of the past by women are a valuable tool in tracing the ways in which the legacy of their belonging and social standing shapes their contemporary citizenship. The radical potential of postcolonial archives lies in the fact that they can work against more sanitised representations of contemporary South Africa and towards the requirements for social justice (especially for black women) that are embodied within, but were arguably not met by, the TRC and broader nation building processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Railways played a crucial role in building the modern South African nation during the early decades of the Twentieth Century. After 1910, the SAR&H became not only the white state's primary means of building the economic independence of the newly-formed Union, but also its sole agency for promoting tourism, settlement and investment. The many thousands of images of the South African landscape it commissioned and distributed at home and abroad in various formats and contexts were a key to this promotion. The synergistic relationship that developed between this photographic array and the transformation of the lived space by the SAR&H's lines and services helped construct an imaginary geography of emergent nationhood. This paper explores how this joint social spatialisation by travel and landscape representation underscored the discourse of a modern, non-partisan white national identity during these politically-formative years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the symposium on historical geographies of modern southern Africa held at University of Sussex, Great Britain in April 2002. Analysis of developments in tradition of historical geographies; Effect of structuralist Marxist history on historical geography.

Proposes to examine the deployment of scientific discourse in the formation and contestation of dominant ideologies and policies in South Africa. Role of science in the making of national identities; Professionalization of scientific inquiry; Conflicts between metropolitan scientific ideas and local knowledge; Generation and dissemination of scientific ideas.

Drawing on the personal and official papers of an immigration officer, this article highlights his personality, social life, and the quotidian aspects of his work at the port. By placing the officer at the centre, instead of the usual tendency in South African historiography to focus on ethnic immigration histories, one secures broader insights into the administration of policy, such as the writing test (an exclusionary mechanism) and repatriation, which are often associated with state policies against Indians. While the article draws on examples of arrivals at the port from both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, arguing against a focus on only Indian Ocean traffic, it emphasises how arrivals from India played a role in shaping the immigration bureaucracy. While scholars have recently begun to see Cape Town as an important Indian Ocean port, this article points to settler society’s unease with what sea traffic from Bombay and Durban might bring and how Cape Town sought to establish a disconnect with the East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its subject the fact that digital archival production – of existing materials and born-digital records – has collapsed in contemporary South Africa, and it offers some arguments about why it is important to reverse this process. The current situation can be explained by the fact that digitisation has been widely described as a form of intellectual imperialism, a characterisation that echoes influential strands of postcolonial theory and South African nationalism. The reasons for this unusual understanding lie in the difficult history of the last major digitisation effort, the Mellon-funded collaboration between Aluka and the Digital Imaging Project of South Africa (DISA). The paper reconstructs that project in some detail in an effort to understand what went wrong, arguing that in place of the geopolitical explanation that many participants adopted, most of what went wrong was much more narrowly technological. Yet, the same technological issues have already been great assets to South African researchers, holding out the promise of solutions to some pressing local difficulties of digital preservation and archival assembly. The last section of the paper takes up some of the reasons why scholars need to take digital record-keeping much more seriously than they have to date – chief amongst these being the fertile possibilities of forgery and impersonation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Explores the idiosyncratic evolution of `The Citizen' newspaper and the factors that allowed it to survive and flourish in the wake of the Info Scandal. Paper's functioning since the transition; Possible scenario for the paper's future in the new South Africa.

The history of black labour at the South African gold mines has conventionally been punctuated by three great African strikes, in 1920 (often obscured by the great white mine-worker strike of 1922), 1946 and 1987. The strikes of 1920, 1946 and 1987 (as well as the great white strikes of 1913 and 1922) have all attracted considerable scholarly attention. Yet a more limited black strike in 1913 has seldom, if ever, been recalled, despite its crucial importance for formulating racial policy at the gold mines, buried as it was in the violent defeat of white miners and their cohorts. This paper takes up the challenge of understanding management and state responses to collective (black and white) mine-worker struggles during the decade from 1913 to the early 1920s and assessing outcomes for worker participants, white and black alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the South African War (1899–1902), state-makers' efforts to control 'dagga' was controversial on several fronts. But 'dagga' also proved a moving target for official classification. Was it a species of Leonotis, common around the countryside? Was it 'Indian hemp', understood by some as a habit-forming drug that debilitated wage workers and caused insanity? This paper traces dagga as a multiple object and problematic of governance in South Africa during the years before the formation of the Union of South Africa and into the early decades of the Union period. A focus on three contested boundaries of top-down knowledge-making and policy – botanical taxonomies; colonial geographies; and political-economy – demonstrates dagga's shifting ontologies across time and space. Together, these empirical snapshots combine as a case study, revealing how the legal reification of a substance as a 'drug' involved political processes that were local, dispersed and unresolved. We show how uncertainties and ambivalences about cannabis long remained productive for different brokers and gatekeepers who navigated the frontiers of competing interests. This history is important for understanding the changing politics of cannabis in South Africa, as it became legible for regulation as a 'dangerous drug' during the first half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introductory paper we review historic and contemporary development of sugar cane production across the southern Africa. We argue that the region’s sugar industry provides a useful lens through which to understand current dynamics of corporate capital and agricultural production in Africa. We identify three distinct elements of political-economic analysis: first, the operation of logics of capital investment in different settings; second, the nature of state policies and politics in different national contexts; and third, local processes of production, accumulation and livelihoods, including effects on labour and social differentiation. The paper draws on the empirical cases from seven southern African countries presented in this collection. It highlights the rapid concentration of corporate control by three South African companies over the past decade, but also a diverse set of outcomes contingent on local context. This is particularly evident in the nature of ‘outgrower’ sugar cane production which is found in all cases but constituted in different places by quite different social categories in terms of wealth and scale of production. We argue that common stereotypes of corporate investment as either ‘win–win’ or as a ‘land grab’ rarely apply. Rather, the nature and outcomes of ‘outgrower’ systems needs to be understood as a manifestation of context-specific political-economic relationships between corporate capital, national governments and a variety of local holders of capital, land and labour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the issue on topics including racial identity in South Africa, land claims by white settlers in South Africa, and forestry in South Africa.

Over the last 20 years sugar production in southern Africa has been characterised by both the geographic dispersal and the heightened concentration of (formerly) South African sugar capital. This paper argues that key variations in the contours of corporate accumulation in the region can be explained through dynamics generated by two sets of interacting variables: (i) the changing productivity of sugar manufacturing and sugar cane cultivation, and the interaction between them, and (ii) shifting terms of pricing and exchange, as governed by mercantile politics. An arithmetic model for the analysis of data is applied in the case of Illovo Sugar. It shows that high profits in Malawi are due to both favourable mercantile and productivity features; that Mozambican profits come exclusively from mercantilism; that Tanzania, Swaziland and especially Zambia owe their relative profitability to particularly high levels of productivity, and that South Africa, Illovo’s country of origin, receives low profits in both mercantile and productivity terms. These differences are rooted in value relations, which are core to understanding accumulation in sugar. The paper argues that, although the logic of sugar is somewhat unique, the approach to the analysis of accumulation adopted here has wider application. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Against a context of declining sugar output in South Africa as a whole, the sugar industry in the Nkomazi Municipality of Mpumalanga Province has increased its share of the South African market. It has achieved this over a period of significant change in ownership, with the transfer of at least 25 per cent of land growing sugar cane into black community ownership through South Africa’s land reform programme. The industry now claims that the majority of land used for sugar cane in Nkomazi is owned by the beneficiaries of land reform. This paper examines the historical and contemporary trajectories of sugar cane production in Nkomazi, focusing particularly on the changing status of production on black-owned land. Among small-scale growers, a crisis in operation and maintenance of irrigation has prompted on the one hand a process of land concentration and ‘accumulation from below’, visible in the emergence of medium-scale growers, and, on the other hand, a move by the sugar milling company to take more direct control of sugar cane growing through rental agreements with small-scale landowners. The latter draws on recent experience of ‘joint-venture’ sugar cane production on land transferred to black ‘community trusts’ under the government’s land restitution programme. The paper argues that the moves to medium- and large-scale farming are consistent with the changing livelihoods and aspirations of black South Africans since the end of apartheid, but also suggests contradictions between the emergence of black capitalist medium-scale farmers on the one hand and extension of corporate control of production on the other. While corporate agriculture offers advantages to some, in particular farm employees and a small number of black-owned contractors, it appears to offer little benefit to the majority of African ‘landowners’ while potentially blocking the further expansion of medium-scale growers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent studies have begun to sketch the history of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, providing a convincing framework for understanding the transnational nature of the movement and its significance within the emergence of a global civil society. This article expands upon this work by exploring aspects of the ideological and the moral framework around which anti-apartheid sentiment began to crystallise in Britain in the late 1950s. Drawing on archival material from Church archives in both Britain and South Africa, as well as the expansive papers of the Africa Bureau, it focuses upon the activities of the well-known 'turbulent priests' who pioneered the campaign against apartheid in Britain: Michael Scott, Trevor Huddleston and Canon John Collins. It considers their status as the heirs of nineteenth-century humanitarianism before sketching the development of a Christian critique of South African racial policies during the 1930s and 1940s. The article then outlines the emergence of Michael Scott as a pioneer of anti-apartheid protest in the late 1940s, and his role in the parallel development of an international critique of South African policy and an embryonic language of human rights. In the early part of the 1950s, anti-apartheid protest evolved within the small and fissiparous British anti-colonial lobby, as its most vocal proponents began increasingly to articulate protest against apartheid in terms of solidarity with African political aspirations. The final section of the article describes how key ideological and strategic features of anti-apartheid protest were firmly established by the end of the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1970s, white university students helped change debate about low wages in South Africa by convincing workers to base their claims for higher pay on the Poverty Datum Line (PDL), an academic measure of the cost of living for average urban households. Founding members of the Student Wages Commission reached out to workers through propaganda, overcame workers' initial suspicions, avoided infiltration by police spies and eventually convinced dockworkers to attend meetings of the Department of Labour's Wage Board. Through a complex process of translation, statistics became a means of speaking back to the state. By winning media support and persuading workers to appropriate the PDL, the Wages Commissions created a less predictable and more fluid dynamic between employers and employees in the months leading up to the landmark 1973 Durban strikes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates fertility among African women in South Africa. Variation in fertility levels is influenced by such factors as rural or urban residence, and level of education and household income. Differential fertility between women of different language groups is accounted for largely by underlying socio-economic factors. A further factor investigated by this paper is the impact of household structure on fertility in South Africa using the 1993 South Africa Living Standards and Development Study. Household structure is examined from the perspective of women. We focus on whether women live with a husband, or with relatives of their parents' generation, or with relatives of their own generation. The analysis concentrates on women aged twenty or over who are already mothers. For these women, we hypothesise that living arrangements mediate between their socio-economic and cultural characteristics and the number of children that they have borne. Living with relatives from the previous generation is found to have a negligible net impact on the lifetime fertility of mothers. However, women who live with relatives from their own generation have borne about a fifth fewer children than other women of the same age after controlling for the impact of household income, the woman's schooling, regional differentials and urban–rural residence. Women from Nguni language groups have relatively large families. While this largely reflects economic and educational disadvantage, it is also conditional on their living arrangements. Unmarried and separated mothers have about a fifth fewer children than married mothers of the same age. It is within the domestic context that the influence of other characteristics is transmuted into differences in numbers of children. Women's living arrangements have become more diverse over the past thirty years in South Africa. They both modify and mediate the effects of other factors on fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the conference entitled `Symbols of Change--Transregional and Local Practice in Southern Africa'. Underlying theme; Issues explored; Papers emerging from the conference.

This paper focuses on the ambiguous, contradictory and montaged space of Dimbaza in the former Ciskei bantustan of the Eastern Cape, figured simultaneously as homeland resettlement village, betterment rural township, decentralised industrialisation showcase, site of political banishment, international symbol of apartheid difference and as graveyard of the racially discarded, among others. Drawing on empire as the dependent space to command sovereignty, the paper considers Dimbaza in terms of South African empire. While it is suggested that as a means to re-figure the South African political, the bantustan may be read as a mark of a South African empire ‘project’, the paper is more concerned to ‘think with empire as a theoretical concept’. The paper draws on the elements of knowledge susceptible to being assembled by historical imagination – written documents, letters in the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) Collection, contemporary testimonies, and visual sources (including the important film documentary Last Grave at Dimbaza) – and which constitute or resist the native/racial/ethnic/African subject (and thus are seen to exemplify the racial spatial command of the sovereign). We assemble these in relation to seemingly antagonistic historical formulations, particularly ‘colonialism of a special type’ and the politics of exile and liberation. We propose that, rather than returning us to South African ‘empire’ as a totality, the term offers us multiple singularities that allow us to consider the imaginative formulation of the ‘empire of liberation’ as a dependent space that continues to command sovereignty within the ‘native question’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Throughout its 100-year history, the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) has evolved, being utilised as a mechanism of control by Britain and South Africa during the colonial and apartheid eras, respectively. More recently, SACU has undergone a process of increased democratisation and neo-liberal prioritisation reflecting Africa's desire to engage and compete more effectively in the world economy. Current pressures to reformulate SACU, focused on renegotiating the institutional infrastructure and the all-important Revenue Distribution Formula (RDF), reflect a subtle but significant potential change in the governance framework mediating relations between member states: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland (BLNS), and South Africa. This paper explores the nature and context of proposed changes, specifically considering levels of governance affected through past and current SACU Agreements between South Africa and the BLNS states. In particular, the paper explores the implications of replacing elements of the RDF with a proposed ‘development fund’. This discussion takes as its point of departure wider literatures of power relations created and maintained by development funding. It is argued that possibilities for intervention in the domestic affairs of the BLNS states are only increased by the move to an administered development fund, despite rhetoric that this will give increased potential for regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the mid 2000s, militant local political protests have been widespread in poor townships and shack settlements across South Africa, recalling mobilisations of a previous decade. Youth have been at the forefront of these protests, as the weight of the job and housing crisis has fallen disproportionately on those under 35. Similarly to the 1980s, this has created fears over a youth-led rebellion, with youth portrayed as militant, angry, disillusioned and available for direct action. Significantly, very little research has captured the role of youth in these urban uprisings from the perspective of youth themselves. This paper provides insight into the lives of a number of youth who participated in the 2011 protests in Zandspruit informal settlement, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Situating the protests within a larger context allows an exploration of the complex web of structural factors which motivate youth involvement, and the ways in which youth actively shape and transform their social reality. This includes an understanding of the nature of youth unemployment, the politicisation of access to resources and services, and the relationship between leaders and youth. Through an analysis of the shared grievances and frustrated aspirations of youth within a context of perverse social inequality and intense competition for power and access to resources, the motivations of youth are analysed through two key concepts: waiting and envy. This paper draws attention to the changing nature of political action among youth and the implications for broader politics and society in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a reading of changing white subjectivity in the context of South Africa's transition to republican status in the early 1960s. It explores such a theme through a reading of photographs of architectural ruins in East London that were taken by Joseph Denfield from approximately 1960 to 1965. Such an analysis is done through the lens of existing literature on this historical moment in South Africa, which highlights rapid and at times violent changes taking place nationally. What remains key in the paper is South Africa's severance of ties with the British Commonwealth and its British imperial past, which rendered the state officially more ‘Afrikaans’ in character. I argue that Denfield's photographs of ruins registered such changes by bringing into greater visibility sites that spoke to the town's British past. Through his framing, choice of subject and totalising views of sites on camera, his photographs functioned as a form of photographic persuasion that directed the viewer towards a particular temporality. These not only constructed the city's past through the lens of British settlement but reconstituted the city as ruinous under the new political dispensation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the practice of ukuthwala, a kind of abduction marriage that occurs in some rural communities in South Africa, notably in the Eastern Cape. While this issue has recently been debated in the legal sphere and in the popular media, these discussions lack grounding in the lived experience of people in communities where ukuthwala is practised. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this paper discusses ukuthwala as a contemporary practice. I show that ukuthwala is a site of negotiation over rights to gender equality in rural communities, which have long been socially stratified according to gender and generation. As such, I show that ukuthwala is a site of anxiety over changing structures of gender power and generational authority. Questions of pragmatic concern for public health in relation to ukuthwala are also raised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Academics and journalists in South Africa routinely reproduce stark oppositions between ‘radical’ social movements that embrace the spectacular revolutionary politics of the barricades, and those that work within the ‘reformist’ logic of the law, liberalism, constitutional democracy and the bureaucratic state. These strikingly different activist strategies also seem to manifest themselves as contrasts between the politics of the instant media spectacle and the patient, long-term organisational work of ‘slow activism’. At one level, the slow and patient styles of activism of South African civil society organisations such as the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), Social Justice Coalition (SJC) and Equal Education (EE) can indeed be contrasted with the spectacle of the burning barricades typically associated with ‘service delivery protests’ and the illegal wildcat strikes that spread throughout the mining and transport sectors in 2012. However, this contrast can also be misleading. By focusing on the case study of the Social Justice Coalition in Khayelitsha in Cape Town, this paper shows that, notwithstanding these apparent differences of political style and repertoire, ‘reformist’ social movements are not averse to using media-friendly spectacles of civil disobedience campaigns to highlight service delivery problems, structural inequalities and social injustices. The SJC case study is specifically concerned with how this particular organisation has drawn on a variety of activist traditions that use media campaigns and the politics of the spectacle as part of a rich repertoire of modes of mass mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is about how African American missionary Max Yergan and other African American anti-colonial activists working through the Council on African Affairs (CAA) contributed to the emergence of the struggle for South African liberation in the United States. It subsumes Yergan's arrival in South Africa in 1922 through the establishment of the Council and its initial campaigns on behalf of black South Africans. My intent is to show that the struggle for South African liberation in the United States developed from transnational contact between African Americans and black South Africans, and that the struggle began not in the United States as is most often assumed but in South Africa under the leadership of Yergan, that the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 pushed Yergan and other anti-colonial radicals more assuredly into the fight for South Africa's liberation, and that the Council on African Affairs was critical to the emergence of the struggle in the United States during this early period. It will have further served its purpose if it overturns the lingering idea that African Americans were slow to get serious about the anti-apartheid movement. To the contrary, African Americans were organised and openly protesting for the rights of black South Africans more than three decades before they had won their own civil rights and at least a decade before apartheid had been established in South Africa. Liberal whites played an important role too, especially in providing financial support for the struggle but also through their active participation. My concern is not to write them out of the history of the struggle for South Africa's liberation, but to more effectively write African Americans into it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On 25 August 1985, a crowd of a hundred people, led by the mayor of Imbali, Patrick Pakkies, and a member of the KwaZulu Legislature, Velaphi Ndlovu, demanded that the staff and students of the Federal Theological Seminary of Southern of Africa (Fedsem) leave their premises by the following Friday, allegedly because they had been instrumental in the school boycott and the street demonstrations organised the same month by the youth in protest against the Imbali Township Council. The seminary community left the area, but they won an interim interdict and came back two weeks later. It is to the history of this episode that this paper is devoted. Did the seminary constitute a threat to the authority of the Imbali Council? To some extent, the Imbali residents who accused Fedsem of being involved in the politics of the township were right. Since the time of the seminary's expropriation from the land it occupied in Alice, staff and students had multiplied the acts of defiance against the apartheid regime. Yet, with a few exceptions, none of them played an active role in the democratic movement. Clearly, the Imbali residents and their leaders overestimated their influence upon the local youth. Many of them belonged to the very churches that were sending their candidates for the ministry to Fedsem. For them, this institution was nothing other than a terrorist organisation. Chief Buthelezi, who had been supportive of the seminary during its early years, refused to discipline his supporters. The Department of Development Aid, under whose jurisdiction Fedsem fell, would have liked to close the seminary, but it never managed to prove that it represented a threat to law and order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an introduction to papers about heritage in Southern Africa that appear in this periodical.

James Thompson Bain, a Scottish-born trade unionist, became one of the most important figures in the white labour movement of early Johannesburg. His career culminated in his leadership of the 1913 general strike in that city, and his deportation by the Botha-Smuts government in the following year. The activities of the union movement led by Bain were crucial to the formation of segregated labour relations in South African industry. Bain's path to the 1913 strike ran through service in the British Army in his teens, conversion to the socialism of William Morris in Edinburgh during the 1880s and intelligence work and combat in the cause of the Boers' Transvaal Republic. The paper seeks to explore Bain's intellectual formation through an investigation of the impact that literary culture, and especially the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Morris, and Robert Blatchford, had on his politics. Carlyle's work quite inadvertently provided late nineteenth century British, and especially Scottish, labour activists with an intellectual bridge between a protestant world view and new secularist and socialist ideas. The anti-industrialism of Carlyle and Morris predisposed Bain to see the Boers' defence of their interests against the Randlords and the British government as compatible with socialist ideology. Carlyle's ideas fed into a vision of working class interests, held by Bain and many of his contemporaries, which stopped at the boundaries of Britishness, and which was therefore compatible with certain forms of colonial politics. The paper argues that the scholarship of Jonathan Rose and other historians has missed the global dimension of late nineteenth and early twentieth century British working class literary culture and the way in which its radicalism was entirely compatible with racial segregationism. The white labourism of men like Bain was not a specifically South African phenomenon, but part of the common politics of the labour movement in Britain and across its Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I take advantage of a space of interdisciplinary research that has emerged at the intersection of human and social sciences since the advent of radical revisionist scholarship in South African Studies in the 1980s. Within this space, I argue for a rethinking of the geography of cultures of migrancy. By focusing attention on rural (rather than urban) contexts of the cultures of mobility that accrue with migrancy, I argue that we can look at migrant labour as a constellation of cultural arguments in much the same way that recent scholarship has analysed media such as radio, newspapers and schooling, all of which similarly connect the 'local' with the national and the global. In particular, I look at how a gendered culture of migrancy, reflected discursively, materially and performatively, orchestrates struggles over the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a case study from North West Province, this paper examines how, and why, rural livelihoods have changed in one of the former 'homelands' over the past four decades. It focuses on the nature and extent of processes of differentiation and the resources that have been critical in such processes. It examines the major risks different kinds of people face in their efforts to construct and reconstruct livelihoods and their responses to these risks. The sources of these risks include institutions governing resource access and contract enforcement, together with labour and commodity markets. Responses have often taken the form of livelihood diversification, between activities and across space, putting a premium on access to information and social networks, as well as to the state. Others have responded to risk by clustering around a person with a regular income. Policy interventions to promote poverty reduction must combine support for the generation of livelihoods with institutional reform to reduce vulnerability to risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The documentation and analysis of the impacts of agrarian change and population displacement on the livelihoods of black South Africans under apartheid have occupied a central place in empirical research on South Africa. The country's transition to democracy and associated institutional and socio-economic transformations raise new questions about changing livelihoods in rural areas. This paper analyses processes of differentiation in Qwaqwa, Free State Province, in order to contribute to an understanding of the challenges faced by people in South Africa's former 'homelands'. The paper focuses both on the important economic, political and institutional changes that have taken place in one region of South Africa and on the particular household circumstances and social relations that affect livelihoods. Using evidence from the life histories of Qwaqwa residents, it demonstrates the complexity of livelihood diversification and ordinary people's attempts to alleviate risk and insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural development policies in South Africa changed in the 1990s. The new framework combined poverty alleviation strategies with an attempt to shift rural communities away from subsistence-oriented agriculture to more market-oriented development options. While many of those who are currently assessing the impact of these policies in rural areas have focused on the extent to which they have contributed towards the creation of 'sustainable livelihoods', relatively little attention has been given to their impact on rural social relations and identity politics. This paper seeks to fill this gap by focusing on transformations in gender relations and identity politics in one rural location in the Eastern Cape. It argues that, although the new initiatives have been unevenly implemented and have not significantly reduced poverty in this area, they have nevertheless activated new discourses around identity and development. The paper traces these changing discourses by comparing and contrasting the polarised identity politics associated with the introduction of agricultural betterment in the 1950s and the increasingly hybrid identities and strategies constructed by rural women, in particular, in response to the new development opportunities. The paper concludes by investigating the implications of these responses for gender and power relations in the village. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Payment of bridewealth or lobola[sup 1] is a significant element of marriage among the Basotho of Lesotho and the Shona of Zimbabwe. However, the functions and meanings attached to the practice are constantly changing. In order to gauge the interpretations attached to lobola by young people today, this paper analyses a series of focus group discussions conducted among senior students at two rural secondary schools. It compares the interpretations attached by the students to the practice of lobola with academic interpretations (both historical and contemporary). Among young people the meanings and functions of lobola are hotly contested, but differ markedly from those set out in the academic literature. While many students see lobola as a valued part of 'African culture', most also view it as a financial transaction that necessarily disadvantages women. The paper then seeks to explain the young people's interpretations by reference to discourses of 'equal rights' and 'culture' prevalent in secondary schools. Young people make use of these discourses in (re)negotiating the meaning of lobola, but the limitations of the discourses restrict the interpretations of lobola available to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Gluckman's essay, 'Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand' (the 'Bridge Paper' to his students), first published in 1940, came to be recognised in the postwar period as constituting a major methodological breakthrough for British social anthropology. His chief innovation was to describe in great detail the events of a single day – a 'social situation' – from which he then proceeded to abstract the sociological patterns of the wider society. In addition, the 'Bridge Paper' is also recognised as one of the most significant anthropological critiques of segregationist policy in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. This article will argue that the coexistence of methodological innovation and incisive critique of segregation was not coincidental. I will demonstrate that by using what became known as 'situational analysis' or the 'extended case method', Gluckman was able to provide a more effective critique of segregation than his mentors, A. R. RadcliffeBrown and Isaac Schapera, had done. Indeed, it also enabled him to answer effectively W. M. Macmillan's criticism of anthropology by demonstrating that anthropology's theory and method could defend the coherent vision of the 'common society' that Macmillan fought so hard in intellectual circles to advocate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Seetsele Modiri Molema's World War I stay in Glasgow during which, in addition to his medical studies, he completed a lengthy argumentative history of African southern Africans. In analysing this vital episode of Molema's life, this paper engages with one of Shula Marks's most substantial contributions to the historiography of the past three decades: the concept of ambiguity as a means of understanding the complex relationship between class and consciousness. Ambiguity characterised Molema's Glasgow experiences, and fuelled the history he wrote during this temporary exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid growth of sub-contracting in South African mines has been virtually ignored to date in the mainstream research literature on mining and migrant labour. In part, this is a result of the tunnel vision of researchers; and in part it is because of the difficulties of research and access to the mines. This paper explores the growth and implications of sub-contracting in South African gold mines since 1990. It has three main objectives. The first is to document the dimensions and trends of sub-contracting operations in the industry. Secondly, the veracity of claims about the negative impact and implications of sub-contracting on the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the working conditions of black miners is tested. Thirdly, the paper explores the perceptions of sub-contracting by workers themselves, many of whom are not, or are no longer, NUM members. Lesotho was chosen as the research field-site. A companion survey of ordinary miners in Lesotho in 1997 allows systematic comparison between regular and sub-contract workers. As this study shows, the conditions of employment under contractors are significantly worse than for regular miners. Sub-contracting has also been very damaging to the NUM. It produces new tensions within the union, between regular and sub-contract miners, and between union and ex-union members. Without a more informed understanding of what drives sub-contracting and an assessment of the real need for sub-contracting companies, it is unlikely that the NUM's attempts to regulate sub-contracting will bear fruit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways in which the formulation and implementation of strategies of soil conservation in South Africa during the period 1930–1970 were powerfully influenced by racist attitudes and by the differential political and economic position of whites and blacks within the systems of segregation and apartheid. The paper traces and compares the evolution of state intervention in pursuit of soil conservation in relation to white farmlands and African reserves with a particular emphasis on processes in the Transvaal. The forms of state intervention that emerged provoked bitter resistance in many African communities while they unintentionally supported inefficient and destructive practices amongst many white farmers. The policies took different forms, changed over time and had diverse consequences. But they did achieve an overall uniformity of outcome – they failed to live up to the expectations of conservationists. The paper seeks to demonstrate that there were problems both with excessively coercive and excessively cooperative policy approaches, which suggests that a policy framework that strikes a balance between the two extremes is likely to be more successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two inquiries into poverty in South Africa funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the first in the late 1920s to early 1930s and the second during the 1980s. When analysed together the inquiries offer insights into the dynamic relations and tensions between this American foundation, normative science and interpretations of poverty in South Africa during the twentieth century. The paper highlights the common ground as well as the profound differences between the inquiries and the national and international, political and institutional contexts within which they were conducted. It suggests that far from being deployed with confidence and certainty, underpinning both inquiries were contextual, institutional and intellectual uncertainties which were associated with particular visions of South Africa and the United States held by the Corporation and their funding recipients. Reference is made to the strategies employed to overcome these anxieties including the shifting notions of co-operative science they sought to promote, the contrasting meanings attached to the cultural technologies employed and the complex associations which they endeavoured to encourage. In offering a more nuanced interpretation of North–South relations than many contemporary analyses, the paper examines, through these strategies, the attempts made to satisfy the objectives of both the Corporation and its funding recipients in South Africa and the tensions which emerged over the locations of knowledge and institutional control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the connections between the public and the private sphere through a case study of political protests by women in Mpumalanga Township, KwaZulu-Natal. The paper begins by reflecting on the public/private dichotomy and argues that the concepts of public and private seem to suggest a rigid set of socio-spatial practices, as if particular places have fixed social relationships and boundaries. It proposes a conceptual framework which focuses on the sites where women challenge the dominant power relations, rather than a simple public/private dichotomy; this conceptualization illuminates the reformulation of gender power relations across a variety of spaces. A key theoretical argument which is explored empirically is that challenges to power relations in one space reformulate subjectivities and so impact on power relations in another site. The paper then goes on to examine how space was constructed in Mpumalanga township prior to the violence and then the way in which political violence reconstructed this space (in particular, it focuses on the schools, the streets and domestic space). The paper then moves on to examine how women, through protests of different kinds, challenged the way in which these spaces and their accompanying gendered power relations had been reconstructed by the violence. The final section of the paper examines whether and how gender relations in the household have changed as a result of these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a study of letter writing amongst migrant workers on the Witwatersrand before World War II. It moves from a consideration of the paradoxical character of literacy amongst migrant mineworkers to a discussion about the history of privacy in South Africa. The paper suggests that both the field of popular culture and the politics of democracy can be better understood by paying attention to the particular forms of letter correspondence that have developed in 20th century South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women have occupied a central place in the ideological formulations of nationalist movements. In particular, the figure of woman as mother recurs throughout the history of nationalist political mobilizations. In Afrikaner nationalism, this symbolic female identity takes the form of the volksmoeder (mother of the nation) icon, commonly assumed to describe a highly circumscribed set of women's social roles, created for women by men. The academic orthodoxy holds that middle-class Afrikaner women submitted to the volksmoeder ideology early on in the development of Afrikaner nationalism but that the working class Afrikaner women of the Garment Workers' Union (GWU) represented an enclave of resistance to dominant definitions of ethnic identity. They chose instead to ally themselves with militant, class-conscious trade unionism. This paper argues that Afrikaner women of different classes helped to shape the contours of the volksmoeder icon. Whilst middle class Afrikaner women questioned the idea that their social contribution should remain restricted to narrow familial and charitable concerns, prominent working class women laid claim to their own entitlement to the volksmoeder heritage. In doing so, the latter contributed to the popularization and reinterpretation of an ideology that was at this time seeking a wider audience. The paper argues that the incorporation of Afrikaner women into the socialist milieu of the GWU did not result in these women simply discarding the ethnic components of their identity. Rather their self-awareness as Afrikaner women with a recent rural past was grafted onto their new experience as urban factory workers. The way in which leading working class Afrikaner women articulated this potent combination of 'derived' and 'inherent' ideology cannot be excluded from the complex process whereby Afrikaner nationalism achieved success as a movement appealing to its imagined community across boundaries of class and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2015, a Whatsapp text message instructed millions of African immigrants in South Africa to go home. The message drew on xenophobia and afrophobia to criminalise African immigrants in South Africa. Broadly, immigrants are seen as breaking the law by illegally crossing a sovereign border and becoming illegal foreigners. Having entered the country without authorisation (‘papers’), these foreigners become perceived as drug dealers, traffickers of children, squatters, facilitators/exploiters of an informal economy, and thieves stealing opportunities from South Africans. This article identifies three principle techniques of criminalising immigrants: 1) immigrants being compelled to purchase immigrant documents through illicit means to stay legally in South Africa; 2) the South African Police Service conducting raids such as Operation Fiela and arresting foreigners; 3) the South African Police Service, along with the Department of Home Affairs officials, illegally detaining immigrants. Together, these techniques contribute to the criminalisation of African foreign nationals. These techniques are increasingly characteristic of governance in the global south and explain how a Whatsapp message can reverberate throughout South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Apartheid's bantustans reflected extreme forms of territorial fragmentation and (neo)colonially-derived dependency. Whilst the bantustans have been dismantled, paradoxically, the imagery of dependency which they came to symbolize has been used recently to characterize other 'nation-building' situations. In order to provide a more thorough account of the complexity of bantustan nation-building, background to its subsequent collapse and ambiguous legacy, the paper re-examines one 'independent' bantustan, namely Bophuthatswana. Unlike previous approaches, the paper links apartheid's particularities and generalities: its explicit grounding within a wider generic Eurocentric framework and especially the manner in which ideas of progress and identity were played out locally within South Africa's periphery are explored. Under the guise of 'independence', marginalized groups sought power and influence through vigorous efforts to promote a new national identity in Bophuthatswana. Bophuthatswana's shifting strategies and regional discourses, however, must be seen in conjunction with the effects of the implantation of the modern facade of a 'nation-state' and its incursion into rural and urban society. Subsequent efforts towards nation-building by this pseudo-state were based upon evolutionary imagery of Bophuthatswana as a 'less developed' peripheral territory requiring modernization and maturation. This had severe consequences for any state-led efforts to mobilize cultural identity, 'invent tradition' and to implement 'national' development in Bophuthatswana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with understanding current transformations in migrant culture and identity in South African urban areas. It approaches the topic by revisiting Philip and Iona Mayer's classic study of migrant culture and identity in the Duncan Village township of East London. The article uses the their work as the starting point from which to construct a detailed historical analysis of the tranformations in amaqaba migrant culture in the city from the 1950s to the mid-1990s. The first part of the paper attempts to show that the Mayers greatly underestimated the resilience of this cultural form in the face of far-reaching social and political change in East London. In documenting the survival of amaqaba culture well into the 1980s, it focuses not only on the external forces that shaped migrant responses to change, but also on the internal social dynamics and relations that facilitated cultural reproduction. The second part of the paper is devoted to an analysis of the decline of amaqaba culture as a rural resistance ideology in the city in the late 1980s and its reconstruction as an urban resistance ideology predicated on the defence of particular urban spaces, identities and power relations. The paper concludes by considering the significance of the analysis for the understanding of migrant identity politics in South Africa in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the urban literature in South Africa considerable attention has focused on the forced relocation and destruction of integrated communities under apartheid. The best known examples are the destruction of Sophiatown in Johannesburg, the razing of District Six in Cape Town and the annihilation of Cato Manor in Durban. In contrast, this paper focuses on the Warwick Avenue Triangle (WAT), an inner city community, and attempts to explain how one of the oldest mixed residential areas in Durban defied the apartheid state's strategies to destroy it. The paper traces the history of integrated residential development in the area and examines how slum clearance laws, the Group Areas Act and urban renewal programmes were used to try to destroy the community. Attempts by the residents to resist removal and relocation are assessed. Reconstruction and planning strategies to redevelop the area in the post-apartheid era are evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the connections between Cape Town migrants and their rural homes on the former Transkei coast, which is presented here as a hidden frontier of social change in post-apartheid South Africa. The paper explores how older migrant cultural forms, which developed in the apartheid migrant hostels and then moved to the shacklands of Hout Bay in Cape Town, have shifted their focus from away from agriculture to new forms of rural investment over the past two decades. More specifically, it investigates how new ideas about citizenship and belonging, developed in relation to the experience of shack life in the city, are finding material expression on the Transkei coastline. The article introduces concepts such as ‘displaced urbanism’ and ‘symbolic mobility’ as key terms for understanding the dynamics of post-apartheid migration, citizenship and rural life in the former homelands. It rethinks the complex relationship between the urban and the rural in South Africa through the lens of urban informal settlements. In particular, in noting the stigmatising of informal settlements and the state's failure to provide adequate urban housing in cities, it appreciates their ideological and cultural impact on the rural landscape of the former homelands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1919, a geology professor named Ernest Schwarz argued that the diversion of the Chobe and Kunene Rivers into the Kalahari was necessary to avoid catastrophic desertification, which threatened to force South African whites from the land. Despite being deemed impractical by government scientists, his proposed ‘Kalahari Redemption Scheme’ was supported by a broad spectrum of white farmers, academics, parliamentarians, and even industrialists into the 1940s. The professor's contentions about meteorology, climate change, and geological history were subject to heated debate. But what was never at issue was the notion that white South Africans had the right to divert rivers and flood land that they did not formally possess, for the benefit of white South Africa itself. The discussions around Schwarz's scheme challenge the conventional notion that there was little popular support within South Africa for South African expansion. This paper explores the origins of popular support for ‘Greater South Africa’, contrasting the hopes and fears of white farmers with the better-known territorial ambitions of Smuts and other statesmen. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 1970s have come to represent a decade of student protest within South Africa, but in writing history of this period, scholarly attention has focused primarily on pivotal events in the latter part of the decade, such as the Soweto student uprising of 1976, and the institutional history of organisations such as the South African Students' Organisation. This focus has, by necessity, neglected the contributions of non-urban, regional actors and sites of protest. It has also failed to contextualise the events of 1976 against a backdrop of student protest earlier in the decade. This article seeks to situate the role of the rural northern Transvaal in the student protests of the 1970s. It focuses on the rise of Abraham Tiro, a student at the University of the North and prominent leader in the South African Students' Organisation, and on the University of the North itself as a site of protest organisation that influenced and changed student protest across South Africa between 1971 and 1974. The paper argues that both Tiro's individual impact on national protest politics and the role of the University of the North as an incubation site for SASO greatly influenced the spread of the student movement during this period, by facilitating the conscientisation of school and university students. Through events such as Tiro's 1972 graduation speech, the Alice Declaration, and the influx of Turfloop students into high schools as teachers, the Black Consciousness brand of politicisation was effectively spread across South Africa's black student community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawn into the Communist Party's social circles through friendships during the 1940s, Mandela became increasingly interested from 1952 onwards in the party's doctrines and in the Marxist canon that informed their premises. His first encounters with Communists were at a time when the party was beginning to develop its strategic justification for aligning itself with African nationalism, a development that would prompt Communists to begin recruiting and extending their influence among the middle-class African elite. This article explores the implications of Mandela's association with South Africa's Communist left. It reviews the evidence that points to his membership of the party at the end of the 1950s. It explores the party's purpose in drawing Mandela into its embrace and considers the ways in which Mandela's political thinking and actions may have been shaped by his proximity to South African Communists between 1952 and 1962. Whether Mandela actually thought of himself at that time as a communist is open to question. Through the 1950s and later, he remained receptive to a range of political ideas and captive to none. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the Comparative National Elections Project 2004 and 2009 South African post-elections surveys, this paper argues that political discussion within interpersonal discussant networks plays a primary role in shaping political attitudes and vote choice in South Africa. The extent of partisan homogeneity or heterogeneity within discussant networks has important yet distinct implications for voting behaviour. While homogeneous discussion networks tend to encourage stronger partisan loyalties and fewer defections in vote choice, people in heterogeneous networks show less consistency in their attitudes and behaviour during elections. The analysis also shows how momentous socio-political events at the time of a particular election can change the nature of social networks, with important consequences for electoral outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Sowetan, a black readership newspaper established in the 1980s, grew to be the biggest circulation daily in South Africa in the 1990s. In the apartheid era, the Sowetan served disenfranchised urban black communities and promoted their interests in a society in which they were not democratically represented. The project was not simply oppositional to apartheid policies, but also engaged in and encouraged certain kinds of community endeavours, which it dubbed nation building. Led by its editor, Aggrey Klaaste, the newspaper engaged in an ongoing process of social re-imagining under this flag of nation building, partly through its editorial columns and partly by initiating and reporting on community projects. The Sowetan thus allowed a collective re-imagining of black public life that formed a counterweight to apartheid representations of black Africans and facilitated public engagement with questions of citizenship and nationhood long before the inception of South Africa's constitutional democracy. The story of the Sowetan illustrates the ways in which a newspaper can become an influential institution of public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]