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In 1995, South Africa’s Constitutional Court banned judicial corporal punishment of juveniles and soon thereafter legislation ended it for adults as well, marking an end to a practice that had been...

After the Soweto Uprising and the murder of Steve Biko, activists in South Africa and the United States created the South African Education Program (SAEP) in 1979 to bring black South African students to the US for university education to prepare them for leadership in post-apartheid South Africa, bringing over 1,500 students by 1995. Some of these students were activists in South Africa; others encountered the liberation movements for the first time at the orientation in the US. Many of them contributed, along with other South Africans, to the divestment movement on US campuses. SAEP students also gained intellectual confidence from their US studies, with alumni now playing prominent roles in transforming post-apartheid South African society. While this program did not directly contradict the Reagan policy of Constructive Engagement with apartheid South Africa, it enabled personal liberation and activism that contributed to ending apartheid. The SAEP provided a space for American universities to contribu...

This article examines three incidents in the history of early colonial Natal in which colonial forces under Secretary for Native Affairs Theophilus Shepstone attacked subject chiefs, deposed them and seized their herds. These incidents, which presaged the later conflict with Langalibalele, constituted in local African terms ‘eating up’, a practice whereby a chief confiscated the property of a subject convicted of conspiring against him through witchcraft. Close examination of these incidents shows how the early colonial state's rule over African subjects was inevitably imbued with African understandings of power and authority.

African historiography looks to Theophilus Shepstone as the architect of a ‘system’ that presaged twentieth-century styles of indirect rule in Africa. But Shepstone’s ideas did not develop in a vacuum or emerge as a ready-made blueprint. This article examines how his methods developed in the interplay among various colonial and African allies and rivals, all operating in the context of rapidly changing local and imperial environments in the 1840s and 1850s. It focuses on his 1854 proposal to lead a substantial portion of Natal’s Africans to a new promised land where he would rule. The proposal reflects Shepstone’s origins as a child of frontier missionaries and protege of an imperial officer. The article argues that Shepstone’s ideas at this stage of his career emerged from a fusion of state and missionary versions of the civilising mission. Sir T. Shepstone was to all intents and purposes exactly like a native chieftain. He behaved like one; witness the having a snuff-box bearer. (John Kumalo2) The propo...

Much has been written of the drawing of the Africans of Natal into the white settler economy. The destructive effects, however, of that process on the African homestead economy in the reserves, on privately-owned land and on mission stations is analyzed in this text. This book, concerning dispossession and disintegration, is topical in view of the current importance of the landownership question.