Search

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]

The staging of an Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg in 1936 brought together people, objects and ideas from across South Africa and the Empire. This paper will explore the implications of the encounters and juxtapositions that took place there for understanding the meanings of interaction, and segregation, in South African cities at that time. The Exhibition also brings into relief many of the practices of observation and presentation that had developed around the world's fair tradition for almost a century. The paper offers an account of visitor responses to the display of the 'modern' and the 'traditional' at the Exhibition. Overall, alongside the practices of segregation and dominance played out through the exhibition as well as in the city more generally, a range of shared enthusiasms across racial and cultural divides, as well as more sympathetic responses to displays of difference, are also reported. The implications of the historical analysis for contemporary attempts to transcend divisions in South African cities are referred to, and the possibilities for exploring histories of racial and cultural interaction are signposted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hillbrow, a high-rise, inner city suburb in Johannesburg was one of the first neighbourhoods to become racially diverse in spite of the Group Areas Act of 1950. From the late 1970s, its whites-only policy started crumbling and by 1993 when the data for this study were collected, under 20 per cent of its population was white. The central questions that are addressed in this paper are: how did racial propinquity impact on race relations and interracial interaction in the neighbourhood in the early 1990s? Did it increase racism amongst residents or did it lead to its diminution? Related questions are: how were the respective racial categories and other 'races' constructed, and what traits were assigned to the various racial categories? In order to establish the extent to which an integrated, rather than a merely mixed neighbourhood emerged, this study explores the range and limits of interracial friendships and socializing. Data for the study were obtained mainly through a household survey and in-depth interviews with apartment-dwellers. The study found that racial propinquity had a mixed impact. Almost all respondents felt that racial barriers had declined, overt acts of racism were minimal, and there was evidence of signficant racial tolerance, interracial contact and mutual assistance. On the other hand, many of the residents in the face-to-face interview situation voiced racist sentiments. White residents were most likely to express racist views. Another significant finding was that racial clustering was a dominant trend. Most apartment blocks were occupied solely or mainly by one particular racial category. The neighbourhood was certainly racially diverse but not significantly integrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the anomaly in apartheid history of the ruling National Party's (NP) fielding a 'pro-gay rights' candidate in the Hillbrow constituency during the 1987 whites-only election in South Africa. The NP was aided in its Hillbrow campaign by the gay magazine Exit, which encouraged its readership to 'vote gay' in the election and published a list of candidates who were favourable to gay rights in South Africa. The Hillbrow campaign is intelligible when the intersections between race and sexuality are analysed and the discourses wielded by the NP and Exit are spatially and historically situated. The Hillbrow/Exit gay rights campaign articulated discourses about the reform of apartheid in white self-interest and conflated white minority and gay minority rights, thereby contributing to the NP's justification for apartheid. The NP candidate's defeat of the incumbent Progressive Federal Party (PFP) MP for Hillbrow, Alf Widman, was trumpeted by Exit as a powerful victory and advance for gay rights in South Africa, but the result provoked a sharp backlash among many white gay men and lesbian women who organised to openly identify with the liberation movement. The Exit/Hillbrow campaign problematises the singular assumptions that are often made about race and sexuality in apartheid South Africa, and illustrates how political, social and economic crisis can provoke reconfigurations of identities vis-a-vis the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ryan Carrier (1999), reflecting on policing in South Africa, has pointed out that there may be different types of order that are not necessarily mutually exclusive: he argues that the type of order that the state seeks to guarantee may be different from the type of order that businesses, affluent suburbs, townships and corporations wish to establish or preserve. He concludes by saying that different types of order may call for different types of policing. Whilst this idea seems interesting regarding the way communities can gain control over their direct environment, it is also quite challenging when thinking of equality in the access to security - especially in South Africa, where the idea of 'separate but equal' development has sinister overtones. In the current worldwide context of security governance and of development of community policing principles, the line between what communities are entitled to do and what they should leave to the police is very blurred, particularly so when norms regarding social order vary in space and time. Security norms to be implemented at the neighbourhood level have to be negotiated between communities and public authorities, and within communities themselves. This article, based on field study in suburbs and townships in post-apartheid Johannesburg, argues that there are different 'cultures' of policing and different conceptions of local social order embedded in different local histories and contrasting socio-economic settings. The South African state is currently attempting to homogenise security practices and to 'educate' people in a democratic policing culture. At the same time it is also firmly setting some limits (for instance by rejecting road closures and vigilantism) to the local security experiments developed in the period following the demise of apartheid. However, its current policy, supposedly designed to 'unify' the policing systems under common principles, is based on the broad encouragement of community participation in the production of security, as well as on the promotion of zero-tolerance principles. These policies actually serve to exacerbate local differentiation regarding the content and practice of policing as well as the undemocratic principles rhetorically resisted by the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Johannesburg's origins as a mining camp, the principal and general white discourse of urban segregation for Africans was not questioned. However, no blueprint existed for how to enforce urban segregation prior to the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923. Contestation over the details of how to manage African shelter in Johannesburg around the time of Union reveals that, despite powerful segregationist legislation and political consensus among the ruling white population, municipal strategies for managing African settlement were more contingent. The argument presented here is that the Council's shift in policy, from initially condoning and facilitating inner city slum yards to the subsequent vilification of the 'African slum problem' reflects in part a change in the balance of power between manufacturing and mining interests, and in part the reassertion of a popular white discourse connecting 'race' with disease, criminality and drunkenness, propagated in particular by working class ratepayers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Africa today, the cremation of the dead constitutes a major component of white South African mortuary practices. Until the 1930s however, the practice was virtually unknown among this population group, whereas by the 1940s it had become firmly rooted among a small but growing number. This article argues that white South Africans' embrace of cremation represented a virtual 're-inventing' of cremation from a set of ideas and practices primarily confined to local Hindu communities — and represented by white South Africans as barbaric, primitive and alien — to a newer set of ideas that proclaimed cremation a rational scientific solution to the problem of finding the most efficient means of disposing of the dead body. The article explores the earlier successful struggle of Johannesburg's Hindu community to win for themselves the right to cremate their dead in a crematorium of their own and points out that, in so doing, the Hindu Crematorium Committee also became the first provider of cremation services to Johannesburg's white residents. It observes, however, that the cremation of white bodies in a Hindu furnace sheds light on a hidden area of racial thought and practice in Johannesburg. For when white Johannesburgers chose to be cremated in the Hindu crematorium, the white advocates of cremation seized this moment to characterise the Hindu crematorium and the Hindu cremation process as inimical to the preservation of the dignity and sanctity of the white body and began a successful campaign for the construction of a 'Whites Only' crematorium. At the same time, however, significant sections of Johannesburg's white community remained suspicious of, or even hostile to, the cremation of the dead. This study thus explores how deeply embedded, within these concerns about the treatment of the dead body, are more profound, although often less fully articulated ideas, about the changing meanings of life and death, race and faith in twentieth-century... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban water supply, sanitation and electricity have been identified as basic needs by the post-apartheid government and the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council (GJMC). This article explores the relationship of Johannesburg's poor to the urban environment and, in particular, these three key urban services. On the basis of survey data, case studies, textual analysis and in-depth interviews with policy makers and planners, it reviews how poorer citizens were, for a long time, seen as victims under apartheid urban planning. During the rent boycotts that characterised urban struggle politics during the era of late apartheid in Johannesburg, they were often represented as villains. This perception persisted well into the post-apartheid period, where refusing to pay for services was seen as tantamount to a lack of patriotism. Today, Johannesburg's poorer citizens are increasingly being seen as fixers. The GJMC in its policy document, iGoli 2002, is committed to establishing the commercial viability of service delivery. Cost recovery is seen as important for solving the tension that exists between maintaining established service levels (in historically white areas) and extending services to new and historically under-serviced (mainly black) areas. We conclude that there are opportunities to address urban poverty, inequality and environmental management in an integrated way. However, these are predicated on the GJMC and its advisers understanding the ways in which pro-poor and social justice strategies interface with urban services and the urban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the communal policing initiatives in the western areas of Johannesburg from 1930 to 1962. Crime and policing in the 1930s; Expedients and solutions; Rise and fall of the civic guard.

Explains the policy of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa in admitting black students. Process by which the university adopted an open policy in admitting black students in the 1950s; Implementation of quotas in admitting black students driven by demands from the Nationalist Party; University policies on the issue influenced by political and social pressures.