The Pedagogy of Porter: The Origins of the Reformatory in the Cape Colony, 1882–1910 (original) (raw)
Related papers
1990
Was 1948 a turning point in the relation between agrarian capital and the state? Indeed-according to the notoriously impermanent maps that many historians have drawn. But stop, look back, look left, and look back again-and the crossroads of apartheid may disappear. Consider the usual story. From the 1920s, there was a growing farm labour shortage. But the Native Affairs Department (NAO) adhered to its ethic of paternalistic protection, and argued that a solution was 'above all dependent on farmers' preparedness to offer higher wages'. It would not aid agriculturists 'if this entailed artificially cheapening the price of labour'. 1 During the urban booms of the 1930s and 1940s, labour tenants fled in droves to towns. Among the farmers worst affected were those in the Transvaal, where labour tenancy was 'the only form' of acquiring workers in the early 1930s. 2 Landlords not only demanded tighter influx control and labour bureaux: in 1945 the South African Agricultural Union (SAAU) also urged a permanent separation of urban and rural workforces, preventing full time farm workers from moving to town. But the state reflected the interests of mining and manufacturing capital, and the proposals fell on deaf ears. Indeed, the NAD continued to advise improved working conditions, and to divert black labour to industry. Due partly to the state's 'reluctance' to become 'the pivot of forced labour measures', Transvaal agriculturists deserted the United Party (UP) in the May 1948 elections. 3 Almost immediately, the repressive apartheid regime began supporting capitalist landlords. In 1949 legislation was amended to 'permit groups of farmers to recruit' labour; a crucial bill establishing labour bureaux was drafted in consultation with the SAAU, which was afforded a 'privileged hearing' in the NAD. 4 Influx control was not only tightened: from 1954 'petty offenders' were also hijacked to farms. 5 The apartheid state 'sought primarily to secure a stable labour supply for agriculture' by implementing the SAAU's proposals-and by the late 1950s, apartheid had succeeded. Hence the 'coming to power of the Nationalist party...marked a turning point in the class struggle in the countryside.' 7 Although this story chimes agreeably with opposition to the apartheid state, it is also economical with the truth. Some dates are dubious; numerous facts are fantasies; many premises are perverse. But the silences are as disturbing as the sophisms. By focusing on the Transvaal, this account attempts to address some of the problems of too much politics chasing too little data. First, a regional economic system shaped the consciousness of farmers and the contours of state intervention. Subcontinental labour mobilization was 'perhaps the single most important feature of the early industrialization of South Africa', and landlords were all too aware that when 'the Native... is exploiting the farmer', 'the only way to counteract this is to import labour.' 8 Cries of 'labour shortage' in the 1930s culminated not in requests for influx control-debt was far more potent than passes in tying workers to farms-but in demands for apparatchiks' aid in procuring black immigrants. 9 State
Early colonial administrators relied primarily on indirect rule and “customary law” to govern Africans in segregated reserves by appropriating chiefs and propping up patriarchal power in rural families. But, by the early twentieth century, colonists’ demands for African labour had led to the growth of an urban African population living in “slums” near European cities, outside the controls of indirect rule. Administrators believed that “detribalization” and the deterioration of the patriarchal family had rendered this population dangerously liminal, neither properly “traditional” nor yet entirely “modern”. Fearing that social anomie would give rise to political unrest, the state embarked on a mammoth project to forcibly relocate slum residents into planned townships, where they could be “civilized” for the purposes of control. The planners assigned to this project sought to remake the African family in the modern, nuclear mould, believing that this new order would facilitate utopian docility. But, in the process of trying to create a fully proletarianized, egalitarian population, planners inadvertently helped generate the conditions for the national democratic revolution that developed in the townships in the 1980s, which eventually led to the demise of apartheid.
Contributions in Black Studies, 1992
Hundreds of miles south were the gold-bearing reefsofJohannesburg; hundreds of miles north, the rich copper mines. These the two lodestars of the great central plateau, these the magnets which drew men, white and black; drew money from the world's counting houses; concentrated streets, shops, gardens; attracted riches and misery-particularly misery. Doris Lessing, Eldorado. T illS PAPER AMOUNfS toaseriesofdiscursive reflections onwhyindustrial capitalism has assumed the shape that it did in southern Africa-and in South Africa particularly-during the twogenerationsbeforethecommencement of struggles for politicalindependence in Africa.It is far fromthelast wordon thesubject.However, it triestodrawattentiontoanhistoriographical problemwhichhasremained undeservedly submerged in recent works: the relationship between the labor process-what Marx often referred to as the "hidden abode" of industrial capitalism-and the social reproductionof the industrialworkforce.' I start with several prepackaged assumptions: 1) that with the close of the First World War and the global recession of 1921-22 the colonial possessionsof southern Africa were brought increasingly into a regional economic system; 2) that for several generationstheeconomicand politicalfortunesof the moreperipheral of thesesocieties such as Mozambique, Bechuanaland or Nyasaland were tied to the major centers of industrial production (South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and the mining and refining zones of Northern Rhodesia and Katanga Province, Belgian Congo) as sources of
Cape Town at the advent of the mineral revolution (c. 1875): economic activity and social structure
1987
Cape Town In 1875 was the capital of Britain's Cape Colony. Located on the Cape Peninsula, by the • shores of Table Bay, 1 this small town of 33 000 people was contained within a natural amphitheatre of approximately six and a half square miles formed and dominated by Table Mountain and Signal Hill. In the sixteenth century the Table Bay area, relatively flat and well watered, had been a place of barter between the Peninsula's Kholsan inhabitants and crews of ships passing between Europe and 2 the East Indies. In establishing a settlement at the Bay in 1652 the directors of the Dutch East India Company were primarily 3 concerned, it would seem, to maintain the status quo ante. The settlers' and Khoisan's failure to achieve this aim has been well documented and led to the inexorable growth of a Dutch colony at the Cape, complete with imported slaves as well as subjugated 4 Khoisan. In this process the settlement in Table Valley, Cape Town, continued to serve first and foremost as a trading centre between land and sea; between hinterland and port, port and passing ships. The extent of such trade underpinned the economic and demographic fortunes of the town. Demographic expansion in turn increased opportunities for retail trade and manufacture for local consumption. But the town's economy also drew nourishment from Cape Town's further roles as administrative capital and military headquarters, and the concomitant expenditure. Such nourishment, and indeed the extent of exchange, remained meagre before the nineteenth century, meagre while the Cape Colony was 5 under the control of the monopolistic D.E.I.C. Under the British the Cape was for the first time, brought within the ambit of a powerful industrialising economy. The British had both the inclination and the ability to change the nature and capacity of colonial production, with the consequent implications for the accumulation of capital and urbanisation in her new colony. Khoisan labour, under the Dutch reduced to serf status, was liberated, mobilised and made responsive to market forces by 1828. Slavery was abolished in 1834 and the ex-slave apprentices 6 freed four years later. Yet for economic growth, for the growth of Cape Town and other places of exchange to take place, there needed to be more than a transformation in conditions of production at the Cape. The Cape had still to find the product or products that the world market required. One such product seemed, by the 1840's, to be wool. The rapid rise of British demand for wool took place between 1840 and 1870. With it came a rise in the price of that commodity. Cape merchants and farmers responded by concentrating their attention 7 on the possibilitis of maximising this new source of profit. One problem, from Cape Town's point of view, was that Port Elizabeth and East London, founded by the British, had developed as rivals in competing for expanding agricultural output. Geographical determinism should have ensured that Cape Town was eclipsed as the Midlands and Eastern Cape became the heartlands of wool production, the logical hinterlands of the other two ports. Indeed logic seemed to be winning the day as Port Elizabeth's exports, chiefly wool, took premier position over 8 those of any other Cape port in 1854. Despite this challenge Cape Town retained its commercial pre-eminence in the late nineteenth century. This was partly made possible by the town's function as seat of government. This put Cape Town's mercantile elite [organised since 1822 in a commercial exchange], at something of an advantage when competing for the favours of the colonial state. Representative government, granted in 1S63, accentuated the advantage by giving the Western Cape, and thus Cape Town, a majority in the legislature. Competition between East London and Port Elizabeth merchants only led to their greater mutual inability to counter dominant Western interests, a factor still very much alive after responsible government in 1872 had effectively diffused a simple East versus West divide. So it was Cape Town that secured government money, in part gleaned from Port Elizabeth's enlarged custom, to build a proper harbour between I860 and 1870 and continued to attract large sums on further Improvements until the severe depression of the 9 1900's. With Cape Town remaining the first potential Cape port of call for ships on their way from Europe, such expenditure and such facilities gave the economy of the town a sound foundation in the late nineteenth century as this potential was realised. But continued government money, and the continued economic well
The History of Migrant Labor in South Africa (1800–2014)
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History
A pervasive system of migrant labor played a fundamental part in shaping the past and present of South Africa’s economy and society and has left indelible marks on the wider region. South Africa was long infamous for its entrenched system of racial discrimination. But it is also unique in the extent to which urbanization, industrialization, and rural transformation have been molded by migrant labor. Migrancy and racism fed off each other for over a century, shaping the lives and deaths of millions of people.