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The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1912-1952
... Peter Walshe, in his books Black Nationalism in South Africa: A Short History and The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa, writes that the development of African Nationalism in South Africa can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century with the influence of three main political and cultural movements (Walshe 1973(Walshe , 1987. The movements identified by Walshe are the Cape liberal tradition, Christian missionary education, and the influence of fight for the extension of civil liberties by African-Americans like Booker T Washington (Walshe 1973: 5-9;1983: 2-10). ...
... Walshe sees the turning point in political mobilisation around 1911, following several pieces of legislation that was becoming more repressive and the formation of the South African National Native Congress (SANNC) in 1912. For Walshe, the SANNC is a reaction to the growing repression of the newly elected Union government, particularly the segregation of land and the prohibition of African membership in the Dutch Reformed Church (Walshe 1987). ...
The story of conqueror South African historiography relies on the ebbs and flows of narrative clichés and tropes. The main narrative arcs relate to historiographies that frame the understanding and analysis of conqueror South Africa. These historiographies interpret history as forming part of an epistemological paradigm of conqueror South Africa: a historiography that does not question the ethical right to conquest. This article focuses on the interpretations of African Nationalism by proponents of the liberal and Marxist historiographic traditions and critiques the way in which these historiographies depict and characterise African Nationalism. This historical characterisation bears an influence in current political and social discourse in conqueror South Africa: African Nationalism is relegated to a misguided moment in history, something to be reflected upon from a distance, an irrelevant phase in the long walk to a multiracial and cosmopolitan South Africa.
... Despite the failure of political leadership, sporadic industrial and community-based action continued throughout this period and included passburning protests, demonstrations of unemployed workers, campaigns against township police raids and workers' strikes. In many instances, the ferocity of state reaction, involving violence and imprisonment, appeared to confirm the sheer impossibility of political change via conventional methods of protest (Roux 1948;Lodge 1983;Simons and Simons 1983;Walshe [1970Walshe [ ] 1987. ...
... Despite the failure of political leadership, sporadic industrial and community-based action continued throughout this period and included passburning protests, demonstrations of unemployed workers, campaigns against township police raids and workers' strikes. In many instances, the ferocity of state reaction, involving violence and imprisonment, appeared to confirm the sheer impossibility of political change via conventional methods of protest (Roux 1948;Lodge 1983;Simons and Simons 1983;Walshe [1970Walshe [ ] 1987. ...
In this article, I examine the popular satirical column “R. Roamer Esq.” written by R.R.R. Dhlomo which appeared in The Bantu World newspaper. The study seeks to reassemble the archive of African intellectual and political life by foregrounding a hidden history of print culture practices and traditions. I assert the historical importance of the newspaper column and the satirical gesture in South African letters and emphasise the significance of the modes of humour and irony as forms of political resistance. In directing attention to the rhetorical and performative aspects of South Africa’s protest history, the article expands on the political role of the African press in the aftermaths of colonialism in articulating new modes of agency, resistance and critique. In particular, Dhlomo’s satirical column is approached as a space of literary expression in which opposition to various aspects of 1930s South African society is articulated in elusive, indirect and coded ways. As such, I advocate a reading of South African literary history that goes beyond the published literary text, one which can accommodate the idiosyncratic form of the newspaper column. In this sense, the newspaper itself is re-imagined as an important site of linguistic and genre-based experimentation, invention and play.
... 47 Other ANC leaders, however, rejected any "Bantuization of native education": Blacks had to be educated "to live side by side with Europeans". 48 Both Verwoerd and Werner Eiselen, who headed the commission that laid the groundwork for the Bantu Education policy, believed in mother-tongue education as the best form of education. A Professor of Anthropology before he became a chief inspector of native education in the Transvaal, Eiselen had a great respect for the particular culture of blacks and genuine concern about the preservation of the Bantu languages. ...
The introduction of public education for blacks in 1953 and the withdrawal of state subsidies from mission schools were among the most controversial measures that the National Party (NP) government took. In introducing Bantu Education the NP government was within the broad parameters of white interests and thinking at the time. There was no strong support in either the NP or United Party (UP) for large scale state spending on black education, no real demand from employers for well-educated black workers and a general concern among whites that educated blacks would become politicised if they were unable to find appropriate work. The state’s priority in introducing Bantu education was to reduce widespread black illiteracy. While Minister of Native Affairs Hendrik Verwoerd spelled out in crude and offensive terms that blacks would not be able to perform high-level jobs in “white South Africa”, it is wrong to assume that this was based on the assumption of black intellectual inferiority. Bantu education always lagged far behind white education with respect to per capita spending and the ratio of teacher to pupils in the class room. After 1994, ANC (African National Congress) leaders criticised the introduction of Bantu education in ever more strident terms, suggesting that it should be considered as a destructive intervention. The article argues that, viewed against the state of education that existed before 1953, it can be considered as part-reform in that it brought primary education to a far greater number of black children than was the case before 1953. The extensive use of mother tongue education was contentious, but several comparative studies show that the use of such a system in at least the first seven or eight years of the child’s education is superior to other systems. The school-leaving pass rate of 83.7% for black students in 1976 is the highest pass rate to date.
... By the latter half of the nineteenth century, educated Africans started to establish civic associations, newspapers, churches, and political organisations. Some of the prominent organisations they formed in the late nineteenth century include the Native Educational Association (NEA) through which New African intellectuals such as John Tengo Jabavu, Walter Rubusana, Mpaambani Mzimba, Paul Xiniwe and William Gqoba, to mention a few, engaged in political and educational matters (Walshe 1970;Odendaal 2012). They also launched numerous newspapers including Imvo ZabaNtsundu established by Jabavu in 1884. ...
... The famous Cape liberal tradition has received much scholarly attention from historians (Butler, Elphick and Welsh 1987). Historians have emphasised its importance in providing a space in which Africans practised politics in the Union before complete disenfranchisement (Walshe 1971), in overcoming traditional ethnic divides among Africans (Johns 1972), in creating "the conditions which made industrialisation possible" (Marks and Atmore 1980, 248), and in turning Africans from external military struggle to internal political struggle (Mbeki 1992). However, as this article will demonstrate, regardless of the intent of European colonists who used the language of liberalism, many African nationalists used ideas prevalent in the Cape mission liberal tradition in innovative ways to resist oppressive government policy. ...
To help us better understand the impact of European colonisation on South African political thought, it is important to recognise the role played by both race and religion. Given the outsized role that Christian mission schools have had on South African political history, this article seeks to identify how the Cape mission liberal tradition, specifically, influenced twentieth-century South African political thought. By examining the lives and ideas of Z.K. Matthews and Govan Mbeki, this article shows how both liberal and communist strains of African nationalism present in the liberation struggle were influenced by the mission liberal tradition.
... By the latter half of the 19 th century, educated Africans started to establish civic associations, newspapers, churches, and political organisations. Some of the prominent organisations they formed in the late 19 th century include the Native Educational Association (NEA) through which New African intellectuals such as John Tengo Jabavu, Walter Rubusana, Mpambani Mzimba, Paul Xiniwe and William Gqoba, engaged in political and educational matters (Walshe 1970;Odendaal 2012). They also launched numerous newspapers including Imvo ZabaNtsundu established by Jabavu in 1884. ...
The historiography of the African nationalist movement in South Africa tends to focus on the struggle for political liberation. What
gets marginalised, often, is that early African nationalists envisioned their political mission as not only bringing about inclusive freedom, but also to establish what they called ‘the ‘New Africa’ or ‘the regeneration of Africa’. The purpose of this paper is to discuss critically the idea of Africa—the New Africa—that leading early African nationalist intellectuals such as Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Selope Thema, Selby Msimang, Anton Lembede and Herbert Dhlomo advocated. This paper explores commonalities and differences in their imaginings and idea of Africa, and demonstrates the significance that political and intellectual currents from the African diaspora had in shaping the notion of the ‘New Africa’ that they advocated. By focusing on this idea at the heart of the African nationalist political tradition, the paper challenges scholarship that often dismisses early African nationalists as conservative, influenced by their experiences in mission communities, or by an eagerness to become loyal subjects of the British Empire.
... The Indian National Congress, the party that led India's nonviolent struggles for independence under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, successfully employed nationalistic feelings and symbols to mobilize the mass people to press for independence from British colonial rule ( Sisson and Wolpert 1988 ). In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) has struggled hard to offer an alternative vision to segregation and apartheid-based social order promoted and upheld by White European rulers ( Walshe 1982 ). The ANC leaders under Nelson Mandela's leadership promoted the sense of African nationalism to establish a nonracial society but not without great sacrifices. ...
“Responsibility to protect” (R2P) emerged as a powerful moral and political norm in 2001 signaling a shift away from traditional state sovereignty to human sovereignty. North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) 2011 R2P intervention in Libya, however, created controversies giving rise to sharp differences between the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and the West over this new humanitarian norm. Major BRICS states officially support R2P to protect humans from mass atrocities but oppose military actions to implement it. This article examines the question why the BRICS states are resistant to R2P military interventions to protect humans at grave risk. In contrast to the general view that sovereignty exclusively lies at the heart of BRICS’ opposition to R2P, this article contends that, in addition to concerns for sovereignty, BRICS’ opposition to R2P military interventions is more accurately explained by the four interrelated factors of ideological rift between BRICS and the West, colonial domination of the Global South by the West, controversies over NATO's Libya episode, and the recent economic rise of the BRICS states. The article concludes that R2P, caught in the crossfires of West versus BRICS’ differing positions, portends little hope for its practical application in future.
... In a letter to Botha dated February 1914, Reverend John L. Dube made the point that segregation was not the central issue. 5 The same attitude, calling for the equitable division of land and accepting segregation, was evident in the SANNC's "Resolution Against the Natives Land etc, 1913" formulated in 1916. 6 But the African nationalist intellengentsia had not given up on the idea of British intervention altogether. ...
... New approaches to the role and history of missions emerged, which saw them essentially as agents of colonialism, preparing the way for military defeat through mental preparation (Majeke, 1952;Tabata, 1959). Political economy approaches and studies of the national elites produced by mission institutions dominant in the 1960s and 1970s (Walshe, 1970) gradually gave way during the 1980s to studies focusing on culture, identity, and resistance. New questions began to be posed that sought to understand why African communities adopted Christianity and how they adapted it to their own purposes. ...
The landscape of history of education has become transformed by approaches that up- end traditional assumptions of the vertical unidirectionality of power, policy, and discourse. These have been displaced by notions of relational comparison and crisscrossing entanglements that draw on Lefebvrian ideas of space and time. These ideas help to provide a sense of how the landscape of education can be understood as both a material and symbolic space, as apprehended, perceived, and lived space, in which social relations are constituted and constitutive of everyday realities. The history of South African education, and specifically its teacher education colleges, exemplifies how landscape can be defined and understood as such spaces. Its history can first be apprehended through different conceptual and historiographical approaches, taken over time, for understanding it. Second, the emergence of specific types of institutions, within colonial political, economic, and social frameworks that defined their physical location and unequal structure in terms of racially segregated and often gender-differentiated spaces, assists in an understanding of these as colonial remnants. The historical landscape of education remains as restructured and reconfigured spaces, in which institutions live on as much in social relations as in memory and in actual, but highly altered physical conditions. As lived spaces, third, historical landscapes of education also embodied learning spatial imaginaries, deeply ambivalent memories of formal and hidden curricula, of formative and shaping years, and as such become landscapes of memory and identity.
... This did not only mean access for all to economic and cultural opportunity; it also meant that the democracy that only whites enjoyed should be open to all. And so, from at least 1943-when the ANC, then the largest vehicle of black aspirations, released African Claims, a program of demands for change based on the Atlantic Charter (Walshe 1970(Walshe , 271-79)-through 1955, when it adopted the Freedom Charter, which achieved semi-iconic status over the ensuing decades of battle against racial rule (Vadi 2015), and on to the constitutional negotiations of the 1990s, the demand for democratic institutions was a core element of its program. This may explain why free multiparty elections, an independent judiciary, and civil liberties remain unchallenged elements of majority-ruled South Africa, which checked and ultimately defeated the state capture strategy of Zuma and his allies. ...
It is common to understand South African democracy as a familiar tale of disappointment - the presidency of Jacob Zuma, which was associated with the misuse of public money and trust, is often seen as a failure of new democratic institutions. The article rejects this view, arguing that the Zuma period showed the resilience of these institutions. South Africa's democratic flaws stem not from the failure of the new but the persistence of the old
... For instance, Walshe (1971) and Akyeampong, Gates and Steven (2012) discussed how the South African activist of the late 1800s, John Tengo Jabavu, utilized his ‗strong personality' to discourage political leaders of the Cape Province to eschew tribal sentiment and participate in the political process as recognized in the constitution. Pretorius (2009) wrote of the very influential, farsighted and impressive personality profile of the First post-apartheid South Africa in, not only making the country a ‗regional heavyweight' in global reckoning, but also in ensuring the instilling of democratic ethos in the then military-ruled Nigeria. ...
The leadership challenges in Africa manifesting in festering governance and development crisis may have its roots in patrimonialism. The coinage 'African patrimonialism' or 'neopatrimonialism' have foundered in understanding the pattern of political organisation, struggle and puzzling change translating into democratic authoritarian rule of the few, characterised by co-optation, factionalism, and clientelism, and other modes of elitist domination. This paper adopts a particularistic approach to grapple with the narrow and narrowing peculiarities that currently dominate the processes and structures of leadership crisis, which has led to dearth of good governance and development occurring in West African and Southern African Countries. The paper argues that a culture of institutionalised subjugation of the political sphere over the economic pervades in the sub-regions, leading to a norm of profoundly state-driven economy and a character of patron-clientele interactions between the state and the economy. Following independence, countries in these sub-regions for instance, had a leading sector (minerals, cocoa and petroleum), which might have significantly paved way for the development of an assertive economic class empowered enough to drive home-grown development and politically agitative middle class independent enough to foster accountable governance. However, successive governments in the countries of these sub-regions over-exploited these sectors, thus consolidating a neo-patrimonial fusion of economic and political elites in which the business class had little or no influence on the course of economic policy and in the process, further blunted the rough edges of democratic values bequeathed by the departed colonial fathers. In this paper, we examine the political trajectories of increasing predatory and ambitious forms of political monopoly in Africa and give an overview of how the ensuing inevitable governance and development crisis has contributed to its perception as a global prototype of the 'anti developmental' state. 2
... Dhlomo's column was written during a period spanning the earliest slum removal programmes and the Second World War. It was witness to the consolidation of the segregated city through the removal of 'black spots', the erosion of African political and economic rights and various protest movements against pass laws, wages and working conditions (Roux 1948;Walshe, 1970;Lodge 1983). It underwent several changes in title in the ten years of its existencefrom "What Roamer Sees About Town" to "What Roamer Hears about Town" to "R. ...
Scholarship on the literary inscription of urban space in early twentieth-century South Africa has tended to focus on Sophiatown and the writers of the 1950s ‘Drum generation’. In this reading, the idea of Johannesburg as it emerges in Drum magazine is seen to contrast sharply with earlier literary renditions of the city as a place of vice and moral decay. In this article, I draw attention to an important but little-known precursor to this emergent tradition of writing and claiming the modern city, namely journalist and writer, R.R. R. Dhlomo. As author of a moralising fable about the depredations of city life, An African Tragedy (1928), Dhlomo is conventionally positioned as one of those writers whose reading of the city would inevitably be surpassed. This perspective ignores the significance of his popular satirical column, ‘R. Roamer Esq.’ which appeared in the commercial African weekly The Bantu World over a period of ten years. Concerned in particular with the urban and peri-urban environments of late 1930s Johannesburg, the column maps out a detailed urban topography. Using the first-person perspective of an observing and observant urban street-walker/roamer, it calls attention to particular sites of engagement and encounter such as the court room, the train station and the street as well as the more intimate spaces encoding black urban marginality such as the backyard servant’s room. In this paper I consider what forms of the metropolis emerge from Roamer’s verbal mapping as well as what kinds of city figures, topographies, movements and interactions are inscribed. I argue that the column grants particular significance to the experience, interpolation and movement of the black body in segregationist-era urban space, offering a striking early reading of the racial city as both a place of constraint and a zone of inventive resistance. The article makes a further claim for the importance of African print cultures as an index of urbanity, of African newspapers as significant but overlooked sites of city inscription and black urban life, one in which the boundaries between the ‘literary’ and the ‘journalistic’ are frequently breached.
... The tone in Maxeke's voice suggests that she takes great exception to the actions of the Clique, who does not seem to have its priorities right. It is not clear for me who the members of the Clique are, but it is important to note that the culture of factions was part of the culture of a weakened ANC during the 1920s (Walshe 1987). ...
One of the most contested aspects in South Africa’s historiography has been women’s involvement in the politics of resistance. The work of feminists in the 1970s and 1980s began to question the invisibility of women’s protest and presence in South Africa’s historiography. The pass protest of 1956 was seen as the dominant narrative of women’s involvement in protests. Other forms of political involvement were erased, and women were only represented as having staged a protest march against the pass laws. However, more evidence has emerged, which challenges the forms of political involvement by women—and more importantly, more is being done to unearth the names of the women—whose works have been ignored. This article explores the writings by charlotte Maxeke and Nontsizi Mgqwetho, as they appeared in the 1920s in Umteteli waBantu. Much has been written about charlotte Maxeke as a formidable leader in the early twentieth century, who founded the Bantu Women’s League, after returning from Wilberforce University as the first black woman to get a degree. Maxeke’s hypervisibility is contrasted with Nontsizi Mgqwetho’s obscurity. Both these women wrote about the politics of their times, directing much criticism at the South African Native National congress, which was founded in 1912, which excluded women from its membership at its inception. This article argues that their writings challenge the notion of black women as silent figures, who were not involved in the politics of the early twentieth century.
... These actions resulted in over 8,577 being arrested during 1 952 and 1 953. 75 The campaign was strongest in Port Elizabeth in the Black town ship of New Brighton and in parts of Kwazulu-Natal. The membership of the ANC swelled from 7,000 to 1 00,000 nationally. ...
Is Apartheid Really Dead? Pan Africanist Working Class Cultural Critical Perspectives is an engaging and incisive book that radically challenges the widespread view that post-apartheid society is a liberated society, specifically for the Black working class and rural peasant populations. Julian Kunnie’s central contention in this book is that the post-apartheid government was the product of a serious compromise between the former ruling white-led Nationalist Party and the African National Congress, resulting in a continuation of the erstwhile system of monopoly capitalism and racial privilege, albeit revised by the presence of a burgeoning Black political and economic elite. The result of this historic compromise is the persistent subjugation and impoverishment of the Black working class by the designs of global capital as under apartheid, this time managed by a Black elite in collaboration with the powerful white capitalist establishment in South Africa. Is Apartheid Really Dead? engages in a comprehensive analysis of the South African conflict and the negotiated settlement of apartheid rule, and explores solutions to the problematic of continued Black oppression and exploitation. Rooted in a Black Consciousness philosophical framework, unlike most other works on post-apartheid South Africa, this book provides a carefully delineated history of the South African struggle from the pre-colonial era through the present. What is additionally distinctive is the author’s reference to and discussion of the Pan Africanist movement in the global struggle for Black liberation, highlighting the aftermath of the 1945 Pan African meeting in Manchester. The author analyzes the South African struggle within the context of Pan Africanism and the continent-wide movement to rid Africa of colonialism’s legacy, highlighting the neo-colonial character of much of Africa’s post-independence nations, arguing that South Africa has followed similar patterns.One of the attractive qualities of this book is that it discusses correctives to the perceived situation of neo-colonialism in South Africa, by delving into issues of gender oppression and the primacy of women’s struggle, working class exploitation and Black worker mobilization, environmental despoliation and indigenous religio-cultural responses, and educational disenfranchisement and the need for radically new structures and policies in educational transformation. Ultimately, Is Apartheid Really Dead? postulates revolutionary change as a solution, undergirded with all of the aforementioned ingredients. While anticipating and articulating a revolutionary socialist vision for post-apartheid South Africa, this book is tempered by a realistic appraisal of the dynamics of the global economy and the legacy of colonial oppression and capitalism in South Africa.
... zombies erode the basis of a conventional politics of labour and place and public interest, we would do well to keep an open mind about the pragmatic possibilities of these creatures of collective dread; about the Signed in 1956 by all the protest organizations in the so-called Congress Alliance, it made a commitment, among other things, to nationalize major industries and to mandate a heavily state-run, welfare-freighted political economy (see e.g. Walshe 1971: Lodge 1983Meli 1989;Holland 1989). 8. Robins (1998:13) makes the point cogently in noting how quick the African National Congress government was to disparage John Pilger's film, 'Apartheid Did Not Die', which provides harsh evidence of the continuing contrast between white opulence and black poverty: 'Whereas critiques of racial capitalism were once accepted as truth within the liberation movements, they are now dismissed by the new ruling class as pure polemic and/or naive utopian socialist rhetorictt. ...
At key moments in history, political understanding and action are irrevocably transformed. What makes such moments of transformation possible? This article examines the emergence of African nationalism in South Africa, following the multivocal appeal to African nationhood made by proto-nationalist leaders and intellectuals. In doing so I examine how new political imagination can reconfigure the structure of political relations and create powerful new possibilities for political organizing and action. African proto-nationalist leaders were ‘intermediary intellectuals’ who used African nationhood to speak to three different political logics of their key audiences: a ‘progressive nationhood’ to their white colonial audience, a ‘unifying nationhood’ to their missionary-educated African audience, and a ‘traditional nationhood’ to their rural African audience. African nationhood thus had a multivocal appeal which allowed proto-nationalist leaders to bring otherwise divided audiences to support a common political project. By bridging these divided communities, proto-nationalist leaders were able to combine resources and strategies from once separated domains into novel forms of political power. Transformation in political understanding was thus a critical enabler of innovation in organization and action because it built a political project where new connections between African and colonial worlds were made politically ‘thinkable’. Speaking to the scholarship on political repertoires and the sociology of anti-colonial intellectuals, this study has broader implications for the role political ideas play in political transformation.
Alfred Bitini “A. B.” Xuma was a leading African nationalist in South Africa in the 1940s. Born to a Christian peasant family at Manzana, the Transkei, Cape Colony, Xuma was educated in mission schools, led a student strike, and qualified as a teacher in 1911. Two years later, he went to the United States, where he studied at Tuskegee, the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis), Northwestern University (Evanston), and Marquette University and the Lewis Institute (Chicago). He supported himself by working as a laborer and a cleaner.
In February 1959, four months after his appointment as deputy minister, Balthazar Johannes (John) Vorster introduced the controversial Extension of University Education Bill in the House of Assembly. University apartheid had been under consideration in the National Party government for more than a decade. The 1959 bill provided for the exclusion of 'non-European' students from the existing universities and their admission to separate university colleges for the different officially designated ethnic groups. Liberals rejected the bill as a threat to academic freedom and university autonomy. The Opposition opposed the bill in all its parliamentary stages. This article analyses Vorster's performance in these debates. It was a severe test for his ability, but he demonstrated his talent as speaker and debater, confidently formulating his arguments in favour of the bill and standing his ground against the Opposition. The parliamentary newspaper reporters were impressed by his contribution to the debates. Vorster's leadership position in the National Party was strengthened. The debates provided an early stepping-stone in his political career, that launched him on his way to becoming Minister of Justice, prime minister, and state president.
How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom, Stuart Ward tells the panoramic history of the end of Britain, tracing the ways in which Britishness has been imagined, experienced, disputed and ultimately discarded across the globe since the end of the Second World War. From Indian independence, West Indian immigration and African decolonization to the Suez Crisis and the Falklands War, he uncovers the demise of Britishness as a global civic idea and its impact on communities across the globe. He also shows the consequences of this diminished 'global reach' in Britain itself, from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to resurgent Englishness and the startling success of separatist political agendas in Scotland and Wales. Untied Kingdom puts the contemporary travails of the Union for the first time in their full global perspective as part of the much larger story of the progressive rollback of Britain's imaginative frontiers.
The role of religion in political parties has been under-researched in South Africa. This study develops a novel theoretical framework for analysing political parties’ use of religion, which distinguishes between parties’ orientation towards religion (that is, religious or secular; inclusive or exclusive) across three domains: state law, the institutional rules of the party, and the informal norms that govern the actions of the party and behaviour of the party members. It uses systematic review methods to apply this framework to the scholarship on religion and political parties in South Africa. The framework and review challenge the narrative that the religious rhetoric used by the African National Congress (ANC) in the last decade has been a break with the party’s secular past. On the contrary, the ANC has historically used religious rhetoric while supporting secular legislation and party rules concurrently. The review draws attention to how the National Party (NP) exercised religion during apartheid; although it worked closely with the Dutch Reformed Church, the party pursued a religious nationalism that progressively usurped the authority to determine the boundaries of authentic religious practices. Despite the religiosity of the electorate, few parties in post-apartheid South Africa advocate religious legislation, and these parties perform poorly in elections. These findings illustrate the importance of a theoretical framework that distinguishes between political parties’ diverse uses of religion and secularism rather than their ‘essential’ orientation towards religion.
Decolonization, a word that belongs majorly to the 1960’s and perhaps one of the
most important events in the twentieth century is a historical process that can only
become comprehensible in the exact measure that the movement which gives it historical
form or content is understood. When it became apparent that the European-centered
world was no longer tenable, because of the unsettling of all empires during the Second
World War, anti-colonial nationalism surged after 1945. Drawing from the lessons in
mass politicization and mass mobilization of the 1920s and 1930s, anti-colonial
nationalists set about dismantling the European colonial order and creating a free world
of their own.
Six years after independence, Zimbabwe is viewed by its admirers as having adopted a pragmatic approach to a broad range of socialist oriented policies. A massive expansion and re-direction of services in the areas of education, health, and agricultural extension services, in addition to the creation of one of the world’s largest resettlement programs, are often cited as evidence of how the government of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe is working for socialist transformation in Zimbabwe. In addition, under Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) government, the Zimbabwean economy has been able to maintain a real expansion in production averaging near 4.6% per annum-perhaps the highest rate in Africa--while the government has reversed a tremendous balance of payments deficit.
At the onset of war in 1914, no imperialist European state, save for France, regarded its colonial Indigenous populations as a source of military manpower for a European war. Contemporary science, social biases and public opinion accepted that certain identifiable ethnic groups lacked the intelligence and integrity to fight modern war. It was also accepted that since these groups were the subjects of vast European empires, prudence warned against allowing them to fight in a European war, thus forfeiting white racial supremacy. By late 1915, however, with escalating casualties and an increasing demand for manpower, Britain specifically requested the military inclusion of Indigenous populations from its five Dominions including Canada and Australia. The elevated participation of Indigenous peoples from Canada and Australia during the First World War was the potential pivotal catalyst to accelerate their attainment of equal rights. For the first time in history, they had been summoned, in unprecedented numbers, to fight and labour on foreign fields alongside men from across the empire, and other Allied nations. For all nations, the sacrifice of the First World War was measured in blood and the staggering tally of the butcher’s bill. This was no different for the Indigenous peoples of Canada and Australia. Men and women from the far reaches of empire fought alongside their European counterparts and shared equally in the burdens of the war both on the battlefields and the Home Fronts. They voluntarily aided the British Empire in its time of need and viewed the war as a potential pivotal catalyst to accelerate their attainment of equal rights. This did not happen. In peace, their services were no longer needed, or wanted. After the war, prejudicial governmental policy in Canada and Australia continued to dominate political discourse and Indigenous veterans returned to their pre-war status as subjugated peoples, banished to the shadows and the fringes of conventional society. Most were denied veterans benefits, including the assistances of the various postwar soldier settlement programmes.
Beyond the abstract use of the term ‘patrimonialism’ and its variants appended with the prefix “neo-” or adjectives ‘modern’, ‘traditional’ or ‘developmental’, the leadership challenges in Africa manifesting in festering governance crisis have not benefitted from the deserved scholarly debate in a particularized manner. From the writings of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), in particular, his Economy and Society and his tripartite dichotomy of leadership – legal, traditional, and charismatic – to the different notions of patrimonialism, patronage or clientelism employed by notable writers like Roth (1968); Lemarchand and Legg (1972); Eisenstadt (1973), all have fallen short of explaining the functional threat to destructive politics and underdevelopment of African societies. Even the neo-liberal scholars like Le Vine’s (1980) attempt to coin ‘African patrimonialism’ have foundered in understanding the pattern of political organisation, struggle and puzzling change translating into the democratic authoritarian rule of the few, characterized by co-optation, factionalism, and clientelism, and other modes of elitist domination.
The history of South Africa's urban-based ‘struggle lawyers’ – a trajectory epitomized by Nelson Mandela – is much discussed by historians and biographers, reflecting a broader vein of historiography that celebrates anti-colonial legal activism. However, it was South Africa's ‘Native Reserves’ and Bantustans that produced the majority of African lawyers for much of the twentieth century. Indeed, two-thirds of the African justices who have sat on the post-apartheid Constitutional Court either practised or trained in the Bantustans during the apartheid era. The purpose of this article is thus to reappraise South Africa's ‘legal field’ – the complex relationship between professional formation, elite reproduction and the exercise of political power – by tracing the ambiguous role played by the Native Reserves/Bantustans in shaping the African legal profession across the twentieth century. How did African lawyers, persistently marginalized by century-long patterns of exclusion, nevertheless construct an elite profession within the confines of segregation and apartheid? How might we link the histories of the Bantustans with the better-known ‘struggle historiography’ that emphasizes the role of political and legal activism in the cities? And what are the implications of South Africa's segregated history for debates about the ‘decolonization’ of the legal profession in the post-apartheid era?
This study examines the founding of the Non-European Unity Movement, a non-racial political organisation established in the Western Cape, South Africa in 1943, and explores the first year of its existence
This article surveys the origins, development and extent of Ethiopianism (part of the African Initiated Church Movement [AIC]) in Africa which was widespread throughout Africa during the ‘high’ imperial and missionary era (1880-1920) which is the main focus of this article. However, they appear to have a number of common features – response to colonialism, imperialism and the missionary movement, the response of nationalism in the political sphere and Pan-Africanism linked to Ethiopianism in the religious sphere. This article seeks to explore these sometimes indistinguishable features, through selected examples, in a novel way as a Pan-African movement.
Bishop Petros Masango rose to prominence at St. John’s Apostolic Faith
Mission and eventually became a leader of one of the splinter groups that
resulted from the split that occurred after a long drawn out court battle with
the founder Ma Christinah Nku. This article is an exploration of his life and
teachings through the lenses of his official biographer Rev. JB Mhlongo. We
explore his childhood, marriage, conversion, calling, ministry and prophecy.
Mhlongo, in the title of the biography calls him the famous prophet. The
theme of the spirit and its influence runs through his narrative. The story of
Masango represents the failure of African Christianity to break away from
the dominant western Christian paradigm when it comes to the subordination
of women and according them equal status.
Keywords: St. John’s Apostolic Faith Mission, Bishop Petros Masango, Ma
Christinah Nku, prophet, South Africa, biography
This paper focuses on the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and the relevance of his concept of hegemony to South Africa. Gramsci's writings have a strong Italian resonance. This paper emphasises parallels as well as differences between the Italian and South African contexts to demonstrate that his theory of hegemony can be successfully applied to apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa-even though this theory was originally designed to fit the turbulent Italy of Gramsci's own time. The argument proceeds through a rigorous textual analysis of both Gramsci's pre-prison and prison writings as well as the works of various commentators on Gramsci. Through interpreting, assessing and analysing Gramsci's writings and those of commentators, it becomes evident that underpinning all of Gramsci's activities and writings on hegemony is a vision for an improved society in Italy, a proletarian state in which the masses were no longer exploited by other social classes. This paper uses this vision to reflect on past and present South African political and social landscapes, exploring in the process how Gramsci's thoughts on hegemony can be used both to illuminate the problems inherent in apartheid South Africa and to redress the growing inequities in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper contributes to the growing reputation of Gramsci's works as textbooks for promoting and achieving a better society, free from all forms of exploitation.
As South Africa contemplates another episode of public procurement legal reform, we trace the post-apartheid history of such efforts and consider critical issues moving forward. South Africa has over the last few decades followed the international trend of an expanding ‘contract state’. Public procurement is increasingly important to state operational and allocative concerns. South Africa’s public procurement regime is progressively configured into a centrally steered but decentralised organisational form. Inflected through domestic public procurement politics, however, the development of this organisational form has been truncated, with the establishment of only limited central steering capacity producing a public procurement regulatory regime which is weak, fragmented and incoherent, contributing to problems of state incapacity and corruption. In 2013 South Africa’s Minister of Finance announced a major push to reform South Africa’s contract state. The effort aims to better establish, locate and extend public procurement regulatory authority. It has begun to elaborate a centre-led, strategic and increasingly developmental procurement methodology. It is moving towards more flexibility, effectively an attempt to reduce rigidity in rules while building more robust and distributed disciplinary mechanisms, ones which take account of deficits in regulatory capacity and political will. We consider the potentials and pitfalls of these movements and suggest ways to optimise them.
DURBAN’S MCCORD HOSPITAL, this book argues, is one of the most important South African hospitals of the twentieth century. Founded ‘for the Zulu’ in 1909 by American Christian missionaries, Dr James B. McCord and Margaret Mellen McCord, for more than a century it was a centre of affordable health-care for the under privileged of many faiths, cultures and political persuasions. It initially faced, however, strong opposition from white factions in Durban and, by the 1960s was directly targeted for closure by South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd himself. McCords survived in part because apartheid forces did not understand that for several generations and for many communities, it had come to be a ‘people’s hospital’.
This is a history of McCord Hospital from the late 1800s to the 1970s. There are many stories of important firsts and milestones, but what emerges is more than simply a straightforward tale of heroism and triumph. Instead, we tell multiple stories of struggles, successes, failures, frustrations, sacrifices, and how, on occasion, difficult choices and compromises that had to be made.
This history of McCord Hospital is a window to the social, economic, political, medical, and gender history of South Africa in the twentieth century. It shows how this plucky, prudent and principled hospital provided medical services for countless South Africans. In addition, we argue that the adoption of biomedicine in this region, at or through McCords, was an important aspect in the forging of new modern ‘Zulu’ and black identities. Indeed, black South Africans themselves (whether as patients, nurses, doctors or other professionals) have been active agents, and not merely bystanders, in incorporating ‘Western medicine’ into our dynamic, medically plural society.
'n Prioriteitskonsep wat deesdae gereeld gekoppel word aan radikale sosio-ekonomiese transformasie in Suid-Afrika (SA) is die oproep om versnelde grondherverdeling. In hierdie verband is daar konsensus onder akademici en meningsvormers dat grondhervorming in SA, met 'n spesifieke fokus op herverdeling, uiters traag plaasvind, en nie noodwendig die voorheen benadeelde massas bevoordeel nie. Vanuit verskillende oorde word geargumenteer dat die regering tot op hede 'n baie gematigde benadering tot grondherverdeling gevolg het. Dit is juis hierdie gematigde benadering wat bygedra het tot die trae pas van grondherverdeling. Teen die agtergrond van oproepe om radikale sosio-ekonomiese transformasie word daar toenemend gesinspeel dat daar wegbeweeg gaan word van 'n gematigde na 'n meer radikale grondherverdelingsbenadering. Dit is dan ook die doel van hierdie artikel om die regering se gematigde benadering tot grondherverdeling in oënskou te neem en te kontrasteer met die elemente van die ontvouende meer radikale beleids- en implementeringsbenadering. Die vraag word gestel: Wat is/was die rasionaal agter die huidige gematigde regeringsbenadering tot grondherverdeling, en watter faktore en beleidselemente gaan moontlik rigtinggewend wees vir die ontvouende meer radikale benadering?
How have ancient Greece and Rome intersected with South African histories? This book canvasses architecture, literature, visual arts and historical memory. Some of the most telling manifestations of classical reception in South Africa have been indirect, for example neo-classical architecture or retellings of mythical stories. Far from being the mere handmaiden of colonialism (and later apartheid), classical antiquity has enabled challenges to the South African establishment, and provided a template for making sense of cross-cultural encounters. Though access to classical education has been limited, many South Africans, black and white, have used classical frames of reference and drawn inspiration from the ancient Greeks and Romans. While classical antiquity may seem antithetical to post-apartheid notions of heritage, it deserves to be seen in this light. Museums, historical sites and artworks, up to the present day, reveal juxtapositions in which classical themes are integrated into South African pasts.
Verhoef dispels the notion of immediate colonial superiority, by presenting evidence of mutual dependence, successful adaptation by African entrepreneurs and the co-existence of struggling metropolitan chartered companies and local entrepreneurs and middlemen. The pendulum swung between colonial state power enforcing cash crop production and business concentration and resisting local businessmen and farmers persevering on the margins of the market. Entrepreneurial survival in kinship networks in West and East Africa contrasts with the dual model of European and African business development in South Africa. Verhoef offers compelling evidence of entrepreneurial ingenuity and successful survival and growth strategies under colonial and minority governments, dispelling the notion of African business inability to compete in the capitalist market. Local banks from South Africa competed successfully with imperial institutions.
The origins of nationwide organized protest against first segregation and then apartheid in South Africa can be traced back to the founding of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) in 1912. After the Union of South Africa was established in 1910, the political rights and economic security of black people came under increasing attack. Following the defeat of the Boer Republics in the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) reconciliation with the defeated Afrikaners was achieved at the expense of black South Africans. Laws restricting African landownership and African mobility underpinned a system of racial segregation devised to compel Africans to become wage laborers on white farms or in white-owned mines and industries.
Building on existing scholarship in the field of Indian Ocean studies, this paper argues that through two major historic figures, namely John Langalibalele Dube (1871-1946) and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), the Indian Ocean and the Black Atlantic converged in Inanda (Durban), where notions of nation, nationalism, modernity and civilization were articulated and defined. In doing so, this paper offers a South African vantage point from which to understand the Indian and Atlantic Oceans' role in the intellectualization of the imperial context in South Africa, as part of a set of South-South exchanges and connections. Following a brief historical overview of 20th century Natal, the differences, parallels and interactions between Dube and Gandhi's personas and ideologies, and the influence of religion on their work, are discussed and supported through an examination of the Ohlange Institute and the Phoenix Settlement, as well as a comparative analysis of Ilanga and Indian Opinion archival material, as physical and written expressions of their respective outlook on life. Finally, this case study suggests an understanding of the emergence of African and Indian nationalism and modernity in 20th century South Africa as a transnational phenomenon.
The apartheid state deliberately encouraged linguistic diversity and actively built cultural infrastructures which impeded Anglicisation. With the end of apartheid has come de facto Anglicisation. So although South Africa has, since 1994, had 11 official languages, in reality, English is swamping the other 10 languages. Afrikaans has, in particular, come under tremendous pressure. Whereas before 1994 Afrikaans was one of two official languages, and was extensively used in government, business, the media, education and as a lingua franca; since 1994, the usage and status of Afrikaans has been rapidly declining. This paper will explore some of the reasons for this emergent Anglicisation of contemporary South Africa.
Why do united rebel fronts emerge in some insurgencies, while in other insurgencies multiple rebel groups mobilize independently to challenge the state, and often, each other? I develop a diffusion model of rebel fragmentation in which participation in rebellion spreads, completely or incompletely, through networks of civilians and dissidents. Using this theoretical framework I hypothesize that two factors jointly determine whether a rebel movement remains unified or fragments: the rebels’ investment in civilian mobilization, and the overall level of civilian grievances. The theory predicts that widely shared grievances motivate the formation of many small dissident groups willing to challenge the regime. Given the difficulty of collective action between disparate opposition actors, an emerging rebel movement will tend towards fragmentation when popular grievances are high. Yet extremely high civilian grievances can also help rebels activate broad, overlapping civilian social networks that serve to bridge together dissident groups. Mass-mobilizing rebel groups, benefiting from the participation of broad civilian networks, are most likely to forge and maintain a unified rebel front. I test this theory alongside several alternatives drawn from cross-national studies of conflict using regression analysis. The quantitative evidence lends considerable credence to the role of rebel constituencies in preventing or fomenting rebel fragmentation.
Most studies about the South African liberation struggle have focused on political and strategic concerns at the level of formal organisations and their leadership. Yet the anti-apartheid struggle also impacted on personal relationships and the social life of those who put their lives in its service. This article draws on correspondence between members of the African National Congress in exile based in Tanzania and the organisation’s chief representative in the region concerning permission, recognition and guidance on love, marriage and family-related matters in the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. It analyses how the demands of the struggle, and the difficult exile context, shaped love and family relationships and conceptions, and the ways in which individual cadres negotiated their personal lives while engaging in a political struggle as part of a collective movement. The disciplinary and parental role that the ANC in exile exercised through the bureaucratic process developed to manage these relations is also examined through the prism of the correspondence. The article argues that the governance of personal life by the ANC in exile was an integral part of nation-building and state-making – fulfilling both bureaucratic and affective functions.
General Louis Botha’s Government took office on 31 May 1910 in the sunshine of Imperial approval, and dedicated to conciliation between Briton and Boer. The ministry contained almost as many British as Dutch names. In choosing it, Botha had drawn carefully from all provinces. Because of the manoeuvrings which had preceded his own appointment and the pressure inside his own party for the spoils of office, Botha could neither abandon party lines and choose a ministry of all the talents, nor divide the nation along lines which he would probably have preferred — with Jameson and the Unionists on the government benches, and Hertzog in opposition. This was ironic, for when the electorate went to the polls in September 1910 the policies of the South African and Unionist parties were difficult to distinguish. As Thompson has noted, both stressed the idea of a single South African nation (white by implication), both professed a non-doctrinaire native policy, both wanted white but not Asian immigration, material development, and Imperial preference, and neither sought special protection for the Afrikaner. Both hoped, in effect, that the spirit of tolerance would continue to grow in an atmosphere of ethnic peace. Problems arising from the relationship between blacks and whites did not appear to cloud the scene, for all save a few discerning thinkers like Abdullah Abdurahman, Olive Schreiner and M. K. Gandhi were inclined to leave these for the broader shoulders of the future.
Comparisons between Aboriginal policy in Canada and apartheid in South Africa appear frequently in public discourse, often with claims of actual links between the two systems. This paper interrogates these supposed links, using an analysis of land policy and the pass system in each country to demonstrate the improbability of the claims of direct influences. The paper then goes on to analyze the intellectual history of these comparisons, asking why they have been, and continue to be, made by many different actors in the face of a lack of historical evidence. The paper argues that the claims have served the needs of many different groups in different ways and thus maintained a hold despite their lack of historical foundation. However, good policy must be founded on clear analysis of history, and this paper argues that it is important to de-link South Africa and Canada, and understand oppression in each context on its own terms.
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