Search

The British press, public and parliament are not generally thought to have played a significant role in the process of Britain’s decolonisation in Africa. Neither do most studies of the broad British metropolitan experience foreground the importance of African nationalism. This article begins to challenge both of these views by providing an assessment of the significance of the British press’s rather sensational treatment of an incident of late-colonial violence in the context of an African demonstration in Blantyre, Nyasaland, in 1960. African activists exploited the British press presence in Blantyre as a means of advancing the nationalist cause and fighting the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. British correspondents responded positively for a variety of ideological, political, personal, situational and institutional reasons. In addition, by 1960, the British press recognised the strength of African nationalism in the context of African violence and agitation across that continent in preceding months and years. Its critical articles, which interlocked with British parliamentary proceedings and specific sets of historical concerns, had important effects among two core readerships: sections of the white settler communities of the Federation, and the British Government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The African Union is emerging as a prominent actor in election assistance and observation. Considering the continued centrality of the electoral process to democracy-building efforts in Africa, African continental and regional organisations are increasingly monitoring elections and taking the lead in election observation processes across the continent. This paper contributes to the African agency literature by showing how agency is operationalised and implemented through international election observation. Focusing on Malawi's recent electoral history (2004–2020), this paper argues that the African Union is institutionalising its election observation protocols and challenging the dominant position of western international actors, through enacting the role and agency of continental and regional actors. It critically assesses the African Union's ability to undertake these efforts and how it has addressed elections, and the politics surrounding them. [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]

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]

The years between 1986 and 1990 encompass an important, yet often overlooked, period in the development of democratic thought in the African National Congress (ANC). Following the end of apartheid in 1990 and the unbanning of the liberation movement, a process commenced to negotiate a political settlement and draft a new constitution for a democratic South Africa. It was during the latter half of the 1980s, however, that the ANC began formally to develop and codify its own vision of a democratic state. Through examination of historical documents and discussions, and a series of interviews, this article examines this development and codification between 1986 and 1990, through the work of the ANC’s Constitution Committee. It identifies that this period signified some important shifts in the ANC’s thinking, moving it away from the Marxist-inspired revolutionary discourse of its past, toward the formal acceptance of some key liberal democratic principles, including a multi-party future and the protection of individual rights. The work of the Constitution Committee, however, appears to have largely taken place in intellectual isolation from the broader movement. As such, while ANC cadres were guided by revolutionary theory, and activists on the ground waged a struggle of ‘people’s power’ for a radical form of democracy, the Constitution Committee was moderating its radical language, formalising a vision for a future state shaped less by past traditions and increasingly by constitutionalism and rights.11 Open-ended interviews with former activists and members of the ANC were conducted by the author. Questions centred on the movement’s understanding of democracy and a democratic state historically. [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]

While the employment of child labour in the Cape Colony under slavery is well known, the same cannot be said for the post-emancipation period, despite the hinge masters and servants ordinance of 1841 governing the new free labour market legitimating employment of two categories of child labour: those indentured by their parents, and ‘destitute children’ indentured by the state. Both groups left paper trails. That of destitute children is easier to follow because they had to advertised in the press, but a few scattered sets of contracts of ‘indenture of apprenticeship by parents’ (IAP) survive in the archives of the colonial magistrates. The article offers a close reading of the destitute children advertisements and IAP contract archive for one such magistracy: that of Colesberg in the Great Karoo in the second half of the 19th century. It traces patterns in the aggregate demography, form and features of the more than 250 IAP contracts signed in the magistracy over this period to demonstrate the gendered nature of child indenture, its relation to and dampening effect on adult wage rates, and its contributions to reproducing proletarian households in the commercialising pastoral economy of the Great Karoo. In so doing, it troubles two prevailing assumptions about the post-emancipation Cape labour market: that settler employers dictated the terms of exchange through coercion, and that the proletarian household was a haven from such exploitation. It detects evidence for both the patrimonial exchange and parental exploitation of proletarian children. Finally, the article offers a corrective to the scholarship on the invention of colonial childhood in the final quarter of the 19th century, based exclusively on the white middle-class experience of the south-western Cape, by suggesting that post-emancipation black childhood was without formal education or indolent adolescence, but rather an apprenticeship in labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the implications of the border on the control of East Coast Fever in colonial Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The outbreak of the disease in Rhodesia in 1901 caused much anxiety among Portuguese veterinary officials, who were concerned that the disease could cross the border into their territory and destroy their livestock industry. Resultant efforts to control this and other livestock diseases in these colonies were often accompanied by racial application of veterinary policies which benefited Europeans at the expense of Africans. East Coast Fever, together with the 1896–97 Rinderpest epidemic, thus contributed immensely to the development of veterinary science, the burgeoning functions of the colonial state, and the relations between state and subject in rural areas. Hence, through an examination of English and Portuguese colonial documents, this paper argues that the existence of East Coast Fever in Zimbabwe, and the impossibility of sealing the border to prevent cattle mobility, raised alarm, and contributed to the expansion of veterinary services in central Mozambique. This article contributes to debates on the significance of borders in shaping historical processes, but complicates border studies by demonstrating that the border was powerful not because it was restrictive but because it was porous. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Chinese investment in Africa has captured the interest of both academia and the wider policy world, with some postulating that Chinese firms have the potential to bring about a structural transformation of the continent. Some scholars have even gone as far as to claim that Africa may be turned into the 'next factory of the world'. By focusing on spillover effects – arguably the most sought-after of foreign direct investment effects – this article seeks to challenge such celebratory assumptions. Drawing on over 80 interviews with Zambian institutions and Chinese firms, supplemented by surveys carried out in these firms, we provide empirical evidence showing that Chinese investment brings little in terms of linkage formation and spillover effects, and those rare linkages that do exist relate to low-technology inputs that offer little hope for long-awaited industrial upgrading. Rather than blaming Chinese investors, however, we turn our attention to the question of institutional capacity, arguing that Zambia has largely failed when it comes to building adequate local supply capacity. This leads us to conclude that the chances of Chinese investment leading to structural transformation are limited and that this will remain the case unless industrial policy plays a more transformative role in fostering linkages and facilitating spillovers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings a fresh perspective to colonial encounter in the north-eastern Cape frontier through the story of Gungubele, chief of a senior Thembu clan living in the southern part of the Tambookie location. Queenstown and the Tambookie location were established as twin colonial projects at the end of the seventh frontier war. While the location evolved as a prototype experiment in peasant agriculture and freehold tenure, the white town provided a locus for settler colonial commerce and magisterial control over the district that encompassed the Tambookie location. Both projects were creations of frontier conflict, and tensions simmered. Boers coveted the land granted to Africans in the district, and residents of Queenstown struggled to align their dependence on indigenous people with their desire to distance themselves from them. African inhabitants of the Tambookie location chafed at their confinement in a tiny corner of the vast territory from which they had been routed. In 1856–67, the episode known as the Great Cattle Killing shifted economic power relations and created a new dependence on the white colonists. Making use of this vulnerability in the mid 1860s, colonial authorities attempted to relocate Africans further away from Queenstown in order to free up land for further colonial settlement. When this strategy failed, they fell back on the hope of drawing Africans into settler capitalist development, and began tinkering with the system of land tenure, imposing taxes and appointing compliant headmen. Tensions exploded in 1877, when the Queenstown magistracy clashed with Gungubele, setting in motion the final tragic showdown between the colonists and the Tambookie location. The moment came to define the hardening character of settler colonialism on the north-eastern frontier and inexorably altered relations both within African society and between colonist and colonised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tambookie, the San name for abaThembu, was adopted by the British for the area north of the eastern Cape colonial boundary in the 1820s. By the 1830s, all those who lived in this liminal zone had become snared in the trap of conquest – none perhaps as inexorably as Maphasa, chief of the amaTshatshu, a Thembu clan. Unstable colonial policy and successive failed attempts to control the Tambookie frontier between 1830 and 1850 buffeted Maphasa. After the eighth frontier war, the British singled out his people serving on them a proclamation that sought to destroy their political power and group identity. In an effort to understand the position of Maphasa and the destruction of his people, this article explores the making of the Tambookie frontier and discusses the chief's vulnerability in his relations with the Moravian missionaries, the Thembu paramount and the British. The story of Maphasa amplifies the history of the north eastern frontier and raises questions for the crisis in African authority in the mid-nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various published reports within the issue, including one by Delius that explores the experiences of captives in African history, one by Fry that examines the Fingo people and one by Makgala that discusses interactions between the British and the Tswana people.

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.

The agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) has been touted as an important pillar and driver for economic growth, industrialisation and sustainable development in Africa. Among its expected key benefits is the promise to increase the level of intra-African trade by eliminating import duties and other tariffs among member countries, in addition to general trade expansion. However, unlocking the AfCFTA's full potential will largely depend on how the continent is able to restructure its exports, which are poorly diversified and remain highly dependent on primary commodities. Moreover, intra-African trade remains dominated by a few big regional players. To this end, there have been growing fears that the AfCFTA's anticipated gains, and associated losses, are likely to accrue unevenly. Countries with large productive capacities in manufacturing or stronger supply capacities in non-manufactured products may reap more rewards than weaker landlocked and smaller economies, particularly the least developed countries (LDCs). These concerns have led to a number of countries, including Malawi, pushing for special and differential treatment in the implementation of the AfCFTA's provisions on the elimination of import duties and other tariffs. Many LDCs, including Malawi, rely heavily on international trade taxes as a source of government revenue. There is a legitimate concern that such economies are likely to be left grappling with the negative effects of tariff cuts in the form of substantial fiscal revenue loss. This article explores the potential impact of the AfCFTA on LDCs, with a focus on Malawi. It reviews Malawi's intra-African trade position in terms of its export potential and examines the likely impact that the AfCFTA agreement would have on the country's fiscal revenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the dynamics of land ownership under land-reform policy, indigeneity and nature management under neoliberal capitalism in Southern Africa. Topics discussed include the plans of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to accelerate land reform policy for the benefits of the Black Africans, the role of land and nature in the life of Indigenous peoples, and the growth of neoliberal capitalism throughout the region and its impact on the issue of equality among these tribes.

British governments connived with Rhodesian settlers to transform their 'protected' Central African wards into junior 'partners' of whites in an attempt to solve a series of Africa-wide problems that threatened sustainable colonial rule. Multiracial 'partnership' was a ruse to divert African self-rule initiatives and to concoct a compromise that would preserve white dominance. The genesis of the federation movement in central Africa is well-known, but not the precise invention of 'partnership'. Without 'partnership' there would have been no Federation and, conceivably, different triumphs of African nationalism. This article examines the intellectual odyssey that resulted in the articulation of the idea of multiracial 'partnership'; the role of the Colonial Office, governors, particular churchmen and the Capricorn Africa Society in promoting 'partnership'; how cynicism and sleight of hand came to dominate the official imperial debate over African rights; the profound rejection of these initiatives by Africans; the immediate and lasting consequences in Central Africa of 'partnership'; and what the failed foisting of 'partnership' upon wards of the Crown tells us about the underlying ethics of colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, historical research on the pre-colonial period in the area between the Zambezi and Limpopo has almost ground to a standstill. A number of seminal works on the economic and social history of the area appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, each of which were underpinned by the documentary legacy of the Portuguese presence in the region from the beginning of the 16th century. Since the 1990s, it has been archaeologists that have taken up the mantle of post-1500 history, but the corpora of documentary material available is now seldom used systematically or to any great length. This article revisits the use and availability of historical documents for the study of African society in this region prior to 1840, specifically by presenting a newly constructed database of c.1,140 published and unpublished documents of relevance to African society, economy and the environment. The need for this database is first set into context by a critical overview of two of the major historiographies in pre-colonial economic and social history in this region - those of the relationships between trade and politics and drought and food production - from which a series of common problems are identified. The database is then introduced, together with an analysis of its chronological and spatial coverage and a discussion of the availability and accessibility of the documents. The article concludes by pointing to some potential future directions for a revival of pre-colonial economic and social history in south-east Africa north of the Limpopo, to which renewed interrogation of the wider range of documentary material collated here can contribute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars writing on the alcohol industry in Rhodesia have generally viewed beer drinking in urban areas as a social phenomenon. This has led them to overlook links between beer drinking and politics, yet, in the 1960s and 1970s, politics and beer drinking were intricately linked. This article examines the intersection between nationalism and alcohol drinking in Salisbury, Rhodesia. This approach not only bridges studies on African nationalism and the alcohol industry, but also allows us to examine one aspect of Zimbabwean nationalism that has not yet been examined: shebeens as hubs of African nationalism. More broadly, this approach also allows us to examine the contribution of urban dwellers to the liberation struggle, a subject that has hitherto received little scholarly attention. Using primarily Salisbury Council documents and interviews with contemporaries, the article argues that the 1960s and 1970s municipal beer outlets boycott campaigns not only reduced the profitability of the state-run beer halls, but also spurred the growth of the shebeen industry, as political activists appropriated some shebeens, turning them into political institutions. These shebeens became sites where political activists met not only to drink, but also to evade state surveillance, to disseminate information and to appeal for, and collect, financial and material support that went towards supporting freedom fighters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stimulus for this article arises from a comparison between missionary collecting in two of the earliest mission fields established by the London Missionary Society (LMS): the Pacific (1797), and southern Africa (1799). As the location to which a large number of Polynesian ‘idols’ were sent following conversion to Christianity, the LMS museum (1814-1910) has gained an important place in Pacific historiography, but the same cannot be said for southern Africa. This article explores the significance of the LMS museum as a site of deposition for material that originated in missionary encounters and exchanges in southern Africa during the first third of the 19th century. It highlights the museum’s potential to provide a source of material evidence that complements not only the texts associated with the documentary archive, but also the material remains associated with the former mission site, the usual foci for historical and archaeological engagements. Particular attention is given to material associated with John Campbell (1766-1840) and Robert Moffat (1795-1883), who travelled extensively in the region and subsequently published accounts of their journeys. Re-situating particular museum artefacts within the specific circumstances of these missionary encounters enables them to stand, not as exemplars of African cultural practices prior to European contact, but rather as forms of evidence that chart historical transformations in material culture across the southern African contact zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the 19th-century South African landscape, a ‘mission’ may have comprised anything from a single building on the outskirts of an African village to a full-blown complex containing church and educational facilities, houses belonging to missionaries and their converts and industrial operations such as a forge, wainwright’s workshop and mill. Drawing on archaeological, documentary and pictorial sources, I explore the development of the Berlin Mission Society station of Botshabelo in Mpumalanga, South Africa. Established as a ‘place of refuge’ in 1865, it grew over time to become an important religious, economic and educational centre. In both the 19th and 20th centuries, its fortunes waxed and waned in concert with broader shifts in the South African social and political landscape. This article presents a reconstruction of the site’s chronology and highlights future research directions of the Botshabelo Mission Station Archaeological Project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Tengo Jabavu's Imvo Zabantsundu is recognised as the first black periodical in South Africa. As with many of his generation of mission-educated intellectuals, Jabavu's endeavours in print culture were set against a milieu of intensified conquest and the struggle for colonial belonging. Imvo Zabantsundu has generally been regarded as a purveyor of the aspirations of colonial modernity among the black intelligentsia. In this article, I trace the making of Imvo Zabantsundu to the project of imperial liberalism. I argue that Jabavu and his peers were black Victorians who took their status as imperial subjects as a condition of possibility for their engagements with the colonial order. An encounter with Imvo Zabantsundu therefore means thinking through empire as both a political geography and a structure of feeling. In so doing, I suggest that we seriously consider imperial citizenship as a category through which to mark the making of the black intelligentsia and tune our senses to the long histories of liberalism that informed colonial belonging and its attendant contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a committed anti-apartheid publisher like Ravan Press in the 1970s and 1980s, the selection of authors was usually based on political or ideological grounds as well as the quality of their writing. As a result, Ravan was harassed and subjected to censorship. But to what extent did Ravan's social position and capital inform the author-publisher relationship? One relatively well-known case is that of Miriam Tlali, described as 'the first black woman to publish a novel in South Africa'. Tlali's account of her relationship with Ravan has been described in very negative terms. However, her account changed over time and is not supported by other evidence. Based on archival sources and interviews, this article will explore the relationship between Tlali and Ravan Press, raising questions of the politics and power dynamics of literary publishing in the apartheid period. The article also raises questions about the methods used to write literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With few exceptions, the study of intellectual traditions in South Africa generally ignores their material traces. The embodiment of ideas and languages in books, pamphlets, newspapers and other media does, however, matter. An analysis of the inventories and catalogues of private book collections, subscription libraries and book sales, of minutes of a reading society, and of newspaper articles and advertisements reveals that Enlightenment authors were not unknown at the Cape in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This article explains how their works were collected, circulated and read, unearthing the material traces of Enlightenment ideas, so that it becomes possible to source some of the Enlightenment print culture origins of Cape liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of this essay is taken from the 1975 Penguin African Library revised edition of Antony Martin's 'Minding Their Own Business: Zambia's Struggle against Western Control'. This article exploits archival evidence to highlight Penguin's distinctive attitudes to and practices within the southern African market, particularly, but not exclusively, the major market of South Africa. The Penguin African Library itself contained not only many volumes on South Africa, but also pioneering works on Portuguese decolonisation, the Rhodesian question, and on South-West Africa. This article adopts the framework of a three-phase development in the motivation behind publishing for Africa: tutelage, radicalism and marketisation. The first of these phases is represented by the Penguin (Pelican) West African (later simply African) Series; while the later Penguin African Library illustrates the radicalism of what was then the editorial standpoint. These African Library mass-market paperbacks had a double intent: to inform western readers about a region which, from the early 1960s, dominated international headlines, and to reflect back to increasing numbers of self-aware and educated Africans aspects of the region hidden from them or about which they wished to know more. The degree of opposition to and compromise with colonial and apartheid regimes forms the subject of discussion, as do the reactions in the UK to continuing operations in the region, particularly after the expulsion of South Africa from the Commonwealth in 1961, the adoption of UN Resolution 1761 in 1962, and the growth of the Anti-Apartheid Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Penguin faced not just the commercial challenge of possibly losing an important export market but also the ethical dilemma posed by a belief in the transformational power of knowledge through the availability of good books at reasonable prices. The article concludes with a discussion of the resolution of that challenge and dilemma subsequent to the takeover of Penguin by Longmans in 1970, and the onset of the final phase of marketisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the formation of reading publics, the impact of reading cultures and print culture in Southern Africa.

In Mthunzini district, KwaZulu, the apartheid system of Bantu Authorities (BA), created by the Bantu Authorities Act No. 68 of 1951 and enhanced by the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act No. 46 of 1959, played a decisive role in forced removals. Each removal involved Commissioners and traditional rulers in this collaborative system responsible for the implementation of separate development. It is generally accepted that the system of Bantu Authorities was the mechanism that gave apartheid control in the rural areas, and, with the required listing of homeland citizenship on reference books, indirect control in the urban areas. Except for the studies of Ivan Evans and Robert McIntosh, which engage with the bureaucracy of the Department of Bantu Administration and Development, scant literature exists on the administrative aspects of the system of Bantu Authorities, although there have been studies of the system’s effect on the supply of labour. To fill this gap, this article seeks to explore the system of Bantu Authorities through its role in removals in Mthunzini district, KwaZulu, during the period 1959–1976. In so doing, the study examines the department charged with administering control in the ‘Native’ reserves, and the Bantu Authorities system it established. Additionally, the article responds to the call by the 1983 Surplus People Project Report for additional research into the rationale behind the location and timing of individual forced removals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how Portuguese leaders created historical representations celebrating Portuguese settlement as the supposed beginning of Angolan history. Accounts of Angolan history presented to the Angolan public in the 1930s–1950s deliberately represented Africans as heathens to be conquered and converted, with their presence often serving as an exuberant, exotic backdrop to Portuguese dignitaries. This cultural form of imperialism made use of both traditional and newer forms of commemoration to reinforce the image of benevolent colonialism. After Angolan nationalists launched a war for independence in 1961, Portugal’s colonial narrative shifted to emphasise the creation of a multiracial, modernising Angola. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article returns to the question of ‘resource curse’ and the powers of local parliaments to harness resource exploitation to meet national development agendas. The study is inspired by direct experiences with the Zimbabwean and Ugandan parliaments. It examines the dilemmas and uncertainties that confront dysfunctional states, and states with weak governance institutions, in governing newly discovered natural resources effectively. It focuses on the experiences of parliament in Uganda after the discovery of commercially viable oil deposits in the Albertine Graben region and in Zimbabwe following the discovery of diamonds in Chiadzwa, both in 2006. In both countries, parliament has frantically tried to carve out space for national dialogue on, and transparent mechanisms for, the governance and control of the natural resources. Yet, in both cases, we describe an opaque terrain, where gross corrupt deals and underhand transactions can be processed without regulation. Parliament has tried, but failed, to play a critical role in oil and diamond governance. We conclude that the ‘resource curse’ is more a reflection of a governance deficit than a resource abundance crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In earlier work, we saw the making of social categories in the Zulu kingdom under Shaka, particularly those of‘amantungwa’and‘amalala’, as an example of the development of embryonic ethnic groups. In the present article, we move on from our previous discussion in a number of ways. We reconsider the category of‘amalala’, pushing back further against the categories of ethnicity that previously dominated socio-political analysis of pre-Shaka chiefdoms. For reasons that we argue out in the article, we now question the notion that groups of this kind were ‘ethnic’ in character. Rather, they constituted socio-political categories with identities that were moulded under specific historical circumstances from pre-existing notions about relationships between different ‘layerings’ of people in society. We go on to consider case-studies of political differentiation and social categorisation that took place in the KwaZulu-Natal region before the reign of Shaka. In making our arguments, we move away decisively from an approach that sees texts like those in theJames Stuart Archive, one of our main sources of evidence, as bodies of recorded ‘oral traditions’. For our part, we see them as the products of conversations on the past between Stuart and his interlocutors that were rooted in particular moments of political life in what is now the KwaZulu-Natal area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We conclude with reflections on how understanding the ways in which groups were categorised in the era before the establishment of colonial rule has been obscured by the later entanglement of indigenous political ideas with imported discourses on tribe and ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates on decolonisation of the curriculum at South African universities have yet to cause much of a ripple in South African historiography, despite a wide range of conceptualisations that would benefit from revision. One of these is the concept of the frontier. Notions of a frontier derived directly and indirectly from the writings of Frederick Jackson Turner have dominated the writing of the history of South Africa’s Eastern Cape for almost three-quarters of a century. Illuminating as these various interpretations have been, they have obscured the fundamental issues of how contemporaries used the concept, how it reflected their worldviews and how this influenced colonial society. Examining the evolution of perceptions of boundaries and frontiers in colonial discourse suggests that the emergence of racial attitudes towards the Xhosa was intricately connected to the manner in which the military and colonial officials perceived ‘the frontier’. Uncritical use of the term in modern histories perpetuates the ‘othering’ of indigenous people. The absence of discussion of how pre-colonial people and the colonised conceived of boundaries and frontiers further exacerbates the imbalance in the historiography of liminal spaces in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Durban and its harbour, the article discusses the importation of different kinds of transnational bonded labour into Natal in the last half of the 19th century, and examines the ways in which Southern African and Indian Ocean histories were intertwined in the processes that built the colonial state. The institution of the Protector of Indian Immigrants is highlighted as a central ingredient in state building, which served to give legitimacy in regulating the supply of labour. The early history of the Protector’s work in the 1870s is given special attention as regards the introduction into Natal of freed slaves from the Indian Ocean coast, of indentured labourers from India, and of ‘Amatonga’ migrant workers from Mozambique. An 1877 murder case is discussed, which led to the forced resignation of a Protector, as it threatened to undermine the respectability of the institution. The article shows the continuities that existed between forms of servitude from slavery and forced labour through the recruitment of ‘liberated Africans’ and indentured Indians to more recent types of migrant and voluntary wage labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1780s, French merchants developed a systemic trade in slaves to and around the Cape of Good Hope. But a decade later the trade passed into the hands of a cosmopolitan group of merchants at Mozambique. These men developed various strategies as a way of raising the funds needed to acquire, outfit and insure slave ships. They particularly built up trade links with agents and partners in several ports of the western Indian Ocean and the south Atlantic. This article concentrates on the organisation and operation of the slave trade at Mozambique Island in the decade around 1800. It is particularly concerned to examine the role in this trade on the part of merchants at the Cape, who serviced slave ships and bought their human merchandise, and who mounted their own expeditions in search of slaves. It ends by suggesting ways in which new directions in the trade, following its piecemeal abolition, and the growing dominance of Brazil, contributed to long-term developments in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article charts the tropes through which the Cape-as-port is rendered across five and a half centuries: Sea-Mountain, Cape of Storms and Cape of Good Hope. These tropes coalesce and draw apart in the monstrous manifestation of the promontory and its tempests that takes the shape of the epic figure of Adamastor. They are found to encode an ambivalent orientation between African and maritime, and Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, and are suggestive of a formative worlding of the local literary scene from offshore. The article proceeds to propose that the intersecting portal comprising the Cape – at the seam of the world-system and the boundary of Africa – provides an entry point into current debates on world literature, and invites modes of reading that are simultaneously close and distant, local and global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the electoral performance of the African National Congress (ANC) to argue that there is evidence of a two-fold movement. On the one hand the ANC is weakening as a national organization, and on the other the ANC is strengthening as a regional party based in KwaZulu-Natal. This article explores the significance of these developments for democracy in South Africa today and, more importantly, for the integrity of the South African nation. The article argues that the ANC has historically been the main mover of an inclusive (‘cosmopolitan’) vision of South Africa. As it weakens and metamorphoses, what will happen to its commitment to this brand of African nationalism? Furthermore, are the conditions of a South African nation sufficiently in place that the future of the country as a national community is secure, even as the ANC’s commitment to such a vision weakens? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article assesses the potential of civil society in the region of southern Africa to act as a catalyst for transformation towards broader inclusivity and a people-centred approach to regional integration and socio-economic development. This is done through an empirical case study which focuses on four regional civil society organisations (CSOs), namely the Council of NGOs (CNGO) of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Southern African Trade Union Co-ordination Council (SATUCC), the Economic Justice Network (EJN) of the Fellowship of Christian Councils in Southern Africa (FOCCISA), and the Southern African People's Solidarity Network (SAPSN). We found that the organisations are constrained by a lack of financial autonomy, and dependency on donor funding. Capacity is further hampered because the CSOs are managed by a small number of professional activists. Moreover, the organisations' representativeness and legitimacy among the regional populace is limited. There are also important ideological and strategic differences between them, and a lack of effective (strategic) co-ordination has so far inhibited the creation of a broader, transformative regional civil society alliance. Yet we could also identify an awareness of the necessity to strengthen organisational capacity, to increase popular support and to enhance collaboration, using a strategy that combines the technocratic development of an alternative regionalism and meaningfully incorporates social movements and grassroots initiatives. Furthermore, there is evidence that regional civil society plays an increasingly important role in articulating popular contestation to neoliberal modes of governance in southern Africa, as well as in linking localised, nationalised and regionalised struggles in the region. Finally, the dynamics of regional civil society investigated here show that regionalism is anything but a ‘states only’ domain. Civil society regionalisation constitutes a crucial feature of the southern African region. Regional civil society as a force for transformation is constrained and must overcome some serious challenges, yet it remains a possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1969, Portugal and South Africa signed an agreement that enabled the apartheid regime effectively to extend its tentacles of empire over the proposed dam at Cahora Bassa. Located in the heart of central Mozambique, far from the South African frontier, the dam became a security project masked as a development initiative. Cahora Bassa, including the massive lake behind the dam, rather than becoming the multi-purpose dam originally envisaged by Portuguese planners, was transformed into a strategic security project designed to blunt the advance into southern Mozambique of the liberation movement the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) and, by extension, its ally the African National Congress (ANC). In this way, the colonial regime and its apartheid ally hoped to prevent attacks against Mozambique's major colonial urban areas of Beira and Lourenço Marques. From Pretoria's perspective, it was preferable to fight the ANC in central Mozambique rather than along the Limpopo river – southern Mozambique's frontier with South Africa. The hydro-electric project at Cahora Bassa also ensured South Africa's energy security. The 1969 agreement guaranteed that 82 per cent of the electricity generated there would be exported to South Africa at well below the world price. This article examines the vital role played by South African interests in financing, constructing, and defending the dam site at Songo, which resulted in the dam's deterritorialisation and allowed South Africa to incorporate Cahora Bassa as an outpost of empire. It also explores the ways in which Pretoria held the dam hostage after Mozambique became independent, as part of a broader process of destabilising its socialist neighbour to the north. Even after the dismantling of the apartheid regime in 1994, the new ANC-led government resisted efforts to abrogate the colonial agreement, and Songo remained a foreign enclave. Although Mozambique regained sovereignty over the dam site in 2007, even today, most of the electricity generated by Cahora Bassa is exported to South Africa, at a price that remains a state secret. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses three aspects of air power in South Africa during the period between the two world wars, each one intermeshing with debates about what kind of political and social space the Union could claim for itself beyond its borders on the continent. First, during the First World War and in its immediate aftermath the advance of air power raised the question of how the tense relations between Afrikaners and English speakers would be influenced by this new technology. Second, aviation offered new methods of control of the African majority and other recalcitrant groups. Third, the progress in aviation technology, compounded by the international tensions in the 1930s and European armed intervention in East Africa, alerted white South Africans to the perils of their diminished geographical isolation at the southern tip of the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article proposes two features without which social science research work in the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA – Centre for African Studies) at Eduardo Mondlane University during the period 1976–86 cannot be fully grasped. First, the conflicting, ambiguous and productive interactions between the Mozambican state's attempts to construct socialism, and the strategies of the South African ‘empire’ in trying to build a hegemonic bloc in the region, particularly in its radical form of maintaining an economic and military destabilisation policy in Mozambique. Second, the conflicting, ambiguous and productive interactions between the CEA the Mozambican state, and among CEA researchers, over their research interests, research priorities and primary political loyalties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This case study of a fish market near the border of Namibia and Zambia examines how economic and environmental changes have affected the marketing channels associated with fishery in southern Africa. We monitored the volume and origin of fish entering the market in Katima Mulilo, Namibia, between 2007 and 2012, and conducted semi-structured interviews with fish committee members and market vendors. Prior to 2010, the market for fish had a simple commodity chain, involving local producers and consumers. Since then, a nearby lake has refilled, providing a new source of fish. The market has expanded and diversified, with large volumes of fish now being sent to consumers in urban centres in Zambia and even to the Democratic Republic of Congo. We consider the sustainability of the fishery in relation to expansion and re-alignment of the marketing channel and the degree to which intra-regional trade in fish promotes or hampers food security and sustainable use of the resource. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines training and deployment of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadres in the late 1970s at Novo Catengue, the largest African National Congress (ANC) military training camp in Angola. This camp occupies an important space in the polarised literature on the liberation struggle. Sympathetic struggle histories identify Novo Catengue as a model camp, which demonstrated the ANC's ability to incorporate, train, and deploy a new generation of cadres, while critical histories of the struggle portray Novo Catengue as an example of the expansion of SACP control over the ANC. A unique set of diaries kept by Jack Simons, head of political education at Novo Catengue, allow for an alternative reading of the history of this camp, one that transcends the competing narratives of the armed struggle through a detailed documentation of everyday life. When read for details about training and deployment, a much more complex picture of relations within the camp emerges. Arguments over the training programme reflected continuing uncertainties about the purpose of MK and the strategic direction of the armed struggle; indiscriminate recruitment left a sizeable residual population of cadres who were unsuitable for deployment or further training; and disputes over the training programme sublimated contests between Cuban staff, ANC leaders and the male rank-and-file over sexual access to female cadres. Given the centrality of Novo Catengue in diametrically opposed histories of the armed struggle, this alternative vision of everyday life there allows us to question many of the assumptions based on earlier interpretations of its significance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is not about a specific country or political party; it is about the process by which young men – some already established freedom fighters, others wanting to join the struggle – manage to cross borders and go on to another country to be mobilised or trained to infiltrate the country from which they came. At the district headquarters in Francistown, Botswana, the interaction of seasoned cadres, students, and Special Branch interrogators constituted a middle ground for a few years, a space of interaction between states and liberation movements that was reinforced by the illegal status of Rhodesia. During interrogations at Francistown, ideas about guerrilla struggle and who should participate in it were exchanged, mediated and established. These ideas did not have a one-to-one correlation with events in the guerrilla struggle; they developed over time and in fits and starts, as young men seeking to go on to Zambia for guerrilla training honed their stories, and Special Branch interrogators drew on their experience to decide which claims were legitimate and which were not. A close examination of the processes and procedures in the middle ground of Francistown adds another dimension to the history of national liberation movements in the region: it shows the mechanics of border crossing, who can cross, who can stay, and who can be sent on for guerrilla training. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Researchers have described President Chiluba's political victory in 1991 and his subsequent Christian Nation declaration as the outcome of the rise of Charismatic Christianity in Zambia. While appreciating the resurgent attention to the role of religion in Zambian politics, we are concerned about recent generalising interpretations of the significance of Pentecostalism in Zambia's public domain. Should it be the dominant analytical lens through which to view Zambia's recent past, as suggested by many scholars? By presenting the findings of an in-depth, longitudinal study of Pentecostalism in Bauleni, a high-density township in Lusaka, we question accounts that aspire to all-encompassing explanations but lack empirical backing. Pentecostalism – with due respect to its exponential growth in the last two decades – has elbowed out neither the historical mission churches nor other forms of Christian expression, and the Pentecostal landscape itself is plural, sending out different signals to the social and political world. This article considers the implications of the changing face of Christianity and politics in Zambia within their unique historical trajectory and their current complex forms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Urban poverty in southern Africa is a multi-dimensional issue comprising both deeply rooted historical factors expressed in the built environments of cities and contemporary factors related to ongoing political and economic changes. The tension between states and street vendors throughout southern Africa is part of a perennial struggle for the use of urban space. For many low-income urban people, vending provides crucial resources, both in terms of household income and the distribution of basic goods through informal networks. This article focuses on the consequences for urban food security of street vendor evictions in Blantyre in 2006, under Operation Dongosolo. Dongosolo reshaped the geographies of where people could buy food and where they could earn a living. It re-established the primacy of formal-sector businesses and middle-class lifestyles, which served both contingent political purposes and long-standing expectations of what urban space should look like. I elaborate on three factors that led to Dongosolo: problems with the decentralisation process and the implementation of local democratic institutions; the formation of the Democratic People's Party (DPP) as the governing party and the associated shift in patronage networks; and the cultural attitude that the poor do not belong in the city. Close reading of the causal factors and consequences of Dongosolo for the urban poor demonstrates the structural nature of urban poverty in Malawi, which is embedded in local debates over the purpose of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period between Union in 1910 and the inception of apartheid in 1948 was an important stage in building a South African nation and national identity. In the context of racial segregation, this South African nation and national identity was white: ‘Boer and Brit’, to be more precise. Film was an important component of building English–Afrikaner national identity and unity. Black people in general and Africans in particular stood outside this nation-building project, on and off screen. In fact, cinema for Africans positioned them in such a way that their exclusion from any putative South African ‘nation’ seemed a ‘reasonable’ decision. Through the widespread and effective control of cinematic production, exhibition and censorship, Africans were framed simultaneously as visually unsophisticated, mischievous and criminal, and therefore unable to assume the role of responsible citizens of a modern nation. State control of all three aspects of cinema was never fully centralised; instead it was widely dispersed throughout the various provinces and state departments which exercised a degree of autonomy in the granting or withholding of exhibition licences to private operators. It is precisely this decentralisation and dispersion, however, that made control so much more effective, because the ideological framing of Africans as criminally credulous audiences remained a consistently shared vision among the key players in the state and among the white citizenry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Power-sharing has become a common strategy to resolve political conflicts in Africa. However, it has rarely survived for very long, and much of the scholarship on power-sharing remains largely negative. Yet Zanzibar's power-sharing approach, adopted in 2010, points to a more positive democratic possibility. We explore the background to this development, note some of the issues behind the move to power-sharing, and look briefly at its implementation following the 2010 elections. We argue that Zanzibar's power-sharing strategy appears to have ended the zero-sum nature of Zanzibari politics, ushering in a more consensus-based approach reminiscent of Julius Nyerere's concept of ujamaa. For Nyerere ujamaa was a specifically African alternative to the institutionalised oppositional politics of western liberal democracy. We conclude that Zanzibar's experiment in power-sharing demonstrates that a multi-party political system need not be structured according to a two-party oppositional model in order to achieve stable and functional democratic government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

African migrants played a crucial role in the early history of Southern Rhodesia. A number of them were already literate and had converted to Christianity before they came to Southern Rhodesia. For example, a number of the members of the Basotho1 community in Victoria and Ndanga District had worked with missionaries of the Dutch Reformed Church, Berlin Missionary Society and the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS) and had acquired a level of education before they settled in the country. They had also adopted the plough, and were among the first Africans to own land on a freehold basis. As a result of this, colonial administrators often viewed them as progressive or ‘more advanced natives’ as compared to the indigenous Africans. This article seeks to show how, after helping Rev. A.A. Louw in establishing Morgenster Mission in Victoria District and spreading Christianity in the surrounding areas, Basotho evangelists settled and established themselves in the area. It analyses how these Basotho were incorporated into the colonial capitalist system and also why colonial administrators viewed them as ‘progressive Africans’. It also analyses the centrality of land, Christianity and the ideology of being ‘progressive Africans’ in the community's strategies for entitlement and prosperity in Southern Rhodesia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

African Mirror, the South African-produced and world's longest running commercial newsreel, was a regular item in cinema programmes and on other exhibition circuits in South Africa from its inception in 1913. The importance of cinema newsreel has been recognised for its role as propaganda during wartime and its presence in everyday life, reaching wide audiences with representations of national and public events. The digitisation of Movietone, Pathé and other well-known newsreels has enabled scholars to access archive material and has generated detailed histories of newsreels' impact in the public realm. This article extends this analysis toAfrican Mirror. The archive of the South African newsreel constitutes a substantial body of film, produced weekly over 70 years. Its operations extended across southern and eastern Africa, as well as North Africa during the Second World War. It was screened on cinema circuits to mainly white, but also Indian and ‘coloured’ South African audiences, the latter a category which incorporated some African audiences, and its footage was supplied to newsreels such as Pathé. This article highlights the similarity ofAfrican Mirrorto other newsreels and argues that it played an important role in promoting ‘South Africanism’ in the first decades of Union. Providing an overview of its coverage of South African events, it details the conditions of production, distribution and exhibition ofAfrican Mirror, and describes how it became established as part of the cinema-going experience in South Africa between 1913 and 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the establishment and development of the tripartite University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (UBLS), attempting to explain why it failed and the timing of that failure. I argue that the root causes lay in the nature of the Royal Charter that established it, its evolving governance system and disagreements about its direction of development. Issues such as racial conflict and the renewal of the vice chancellor's contract, which some observers have used to explain the break-up of the institution, were intended to conceal the real areas of conflict. This article places the discussion within the broader comparative context of higher education in the immediate post-independence period and concludes that the UBLS failed because of the strong insular nationalism of the BLS countries (i.e., Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland) combined with the absence of a spirit of regionalism similar to that found elsewhere in newly independent regions such as the Caribbean and the South Pacific. It thus provides a discussion of the necessary conditions for successful multi-country partnerships then and now, as well as problems to be avoided. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]