Promiscuous Method: The Historiographical Effects of the Search for the Rural Origins of the Urban Working Class in South Africa

Abstract

Class in contemporary South Africa is undergoing an identity crisis. The demographic decline of the industrial working class, and the terrible predicament of the unemployed, especially in the countryside, lends support to the argument that we should, as Geoff Eley and Keith Neald have recently suggested in the pages of this journal, reconsider the class-centered theory that has dominated social history since the early 1970s. This paper examines the recent labor history of the coastal center of Durban, the urban epicenter of the contemporary disease and subsistence crisis in South Africa. Three distinct, ethnically defined, working-class groups have made the journey to this city from Zululand, Mozambique and India. And the histories of each of these groups suggest that class-centered histories in South Africa have been methodologically promiscuous, considering themes, problems and narratives that have no obvious connection to the industrial lives of the working class. The wide-ranging scope of South African labor history and its tremendous explanatory power in fields far from the industrial workplace follow directly from the effort to explore the rural roots of the working class. In following the paths that migrant workers have used to come to the city, historians have strayed into fields of social life—sex, marriage, identity, desire, witchcraft, nationalism—that have much greater significance today than the old working-class politics. Yet these studies never lose sight of the real powers of local, regional and imperial states and the capitalist institutions that harnessed them. The study of class has been recast in South Africa by the search for rural culture. Class may not be the most useful tool for understanding South Africa today, but it has proved extremely powerful as a means of understanding how we got here.