‘Kafir Time’: Preindustrial Temporal Concepts and Labour Discipline in Nineteenth Century Colonial Natal (original) (raw)
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2019
This thesis addresses the 19th century sequence of Kerkplaats, a farm in the central Karoo, Northern Cape, South Africa. Over this period different colonialisms of varying power and effect were introduced. The first was to local Khoe, San and Griqua communities in the form of one of the first London Missionary Society stations in the early 19th century. A second phase between 1830 and 1860 was to sheep farmers of German, Dutch and mixed descent, who absorbed and moulded the increasing impacts of British influence and materiality into older worlds of cultural resilience and practice. From 1860, a third phase saw a flood of mass produced British goods enter the region, similar to other colonial contexts around the world. Amount, availability and choice changed significantly and provided the material substrate in which rural stock farmers re-expressed themselves within the growing stature of Empire. It is suggested that for some rural farmers, expressive cultural practice worked to underpin increased affluence brought by merino sheep farming for global markets. Through this sequence different expressions of identity, domesticity, and economic scale are assessed through a close reading of documentary and archaeological evidence. While the material opportunities through the 19th century are the result of global processes, how this material is understood has to consider local context. It is suggested that material expression and identity change is most dramatic from the middle of the 19th century, when patterns of consumption reflect the globalisation of British production.
Power and Resistance: Indentured Labour In Colonial Natal, 1860-1911
2012
Just over 150,000 indentured Indians arrived in Natal between 1860 and 1911 to work on the colony's sugar plantations. They contracted to work for five years. There was a rigid work schedule, particularly when the cane was harvested and it was necessary to cut and refine it speedily. While the contract contained certain safeguards, indentured workers were habitually subjected to contractual abuses. The plantation was structured around power, starting with the employer at the apex and extending to Sirdars, and workers were kept in check through draconian laws that viewed contractual offenses as criminal acts and sanctioned legal action against Indians for 'laziness' and desertion. Why, then, were there so few major upheavals? Are we read this as an example of 'false consciousness?' Why did Indians continue to indenture? In examining these issues, this paper keeps in mind that the system was not timeless. There were important structural changes over time as the sugar industry consolidated into large plantations which resulted in the concentration of the workforce. While there were considerable changes over time, this paper, drawing on recent feminist literature, examine some of the ways in which the indentured resisted their indenture bearing in mind that the odds were stacked against open resistance for ranged against the indentured were the despotic power of bosses, overseers, and sirdars, and a legal system that was often in the control of those with direct links to settlers. The indentured mostly sought indirect ways of subverting the system which was not always obvious and did not overtly challenge the power of employers. This may not have overthrown authority at the workplace but it did allow them to mitigate the worst effects of indenture. This paper also suggests that resistance should not be viewed separately from accommodation. Some Indians had a direct stake in the system, while others aimed only to survive indenture and make a new life in Natal. We must recognize that most of the indentured did not live in a state of constant resistance.
White workers and white working-class politics have been neglected in the historiography of South Africa during the second half of the twentieth century. This article seeks to extricate white workers from this historiographical neglect and fracture homogenizing representations of white, specifically Afrikaner, experiences of democratization. It does so by reintroducing class to a debate dominated by race. Employing a discursive analysis sensitive to issues of class, it shows that white workers were confronted with democratizing change and disempowerment more than a decade before the end of apartheid and suggests that class politics continue to inform white responses in post-apartheid South Africa. In this way, it argues for a historical, discursive approach to uncovering the power dynamics of class and the complex intersection of working-class and racial identities in the late twentieth century.
Abstract A normative association of waged work with ideas of dignity and personal responsibility was central to the elaboration of the ‘labour question’ by the institutions of white rule in early 20th-century South Africa. Colonial work ethic sustained representations of the ‘native’ as a productive agent for whom promises of progress and modernisation (deriving from economic interdependence) contrasted with the deepening of political subjugation and racialised despotism. The respectability that was putatively linked to working for wages served to define the ‘native’ in opposition to what the white state perceived as a more threatening blackness, averse to wage labour and incompatible with the country’s colonial situation. Nascent African nationalism articulated its claims (albeit with significant ambiguities), against the background of such ideational oppositions. Ideals of productive Africans as virtuous subjects of the white-ruled polity simultaneously disguised and underpinned modalities of structural violence. These consisted in the institutional and coercive definition of wage labour as a quintessentially precarious experience for black workers. Conceptions of native work ethic became the stake in political conflicts. They cast blackness as an antagonistic other, often associated with images of indolence and work avoidance, the silencing of which has been a recurring theme in 20th-century South African politics.
There is a lacuna in the scholarship on child labor in Africa in general and the Cape Colony in particular between the abolition of slavery in the 1830s and the start of state regulation of childhood around the turn of the twentieth century. This is not for want of sources. Historians of the Cape colony have traditionally mined the criminal records to divine relations of production in the postemancipation countryside, which they have unsurprisingly characterized as marred by high levels of violence between settlers and black labor. There is a danger in the reliance on the criminal records of (mis)taking the exception for the rule or of doing history ''backward.'' The records generated by the implementation of the Masters and Servants Acts offer a much needed corrective to the criminal record, documenting as they do the everyday relations of production in the postemancipation colonial Cape countryside rather than the exceptional moments of breakdown. Read for their aggregate trends, they provide a rich and illuminating source on ordinary child employment practices and suggest the fashioning of post-emancipation rural black childhood as manual labor. The surviving archives of two Great Karoo magistracies, Beaufort West and Colesberg, contain the indenture contracts of more than 550 children over the half century after 1856, two-thirds of whom were indentured by their own families and the other third by magistrates acting in loco parentis for either ''destitute children'' or ''juvenile offenders.''