Colonial South Africa Research Articles

The borders of race in colonial South Africa: the Kat River Settlement, 1829-1856

This book provides a detailed narrative of the Kat River Settlement in the Eastern Cape of South Africa during the nineteenth century. The settlement was created by the British to use the Khoekhoe as a living barrier between the Cape Colony and the amaXhosa. It was fought over with some regularity, however, and finally broken up after some of the Khoekhoe joined the amaXhosa in their war against the colony. Nevertheless, in the time that the settlement existed, the Khoekhoe both created a fertile landscape in the valley and developed a political theology of great importance for the evolution of South Africa. They were also the subjects of - and participants in - the major debates leading to the introduction of a liberal constitution for the Cape in 1853. The history of the settlement is thus crucial in understanding the development of both colonial racism and the creation of the colony's non-racial democracy.

The Wages of Migrancy: Homestead Dynamics, Income Earning, and Colonial Law in Zululand, South Africa

This article examines a court case in colonial South Africa at the turn of the 20th century. The plaintiff, Ugudhla, was a newly-wed residing in his paternal homestead. He wrangled with the defendant, his polygamous father, chief Matshana kaMondisa, over lineage property and marital prospects. Ugudhla, a migrant labourer from Nkandla, Zululand, felt entitled to decide family matters because his wages from the Transvaal mines had helped the household of his mother to pay government taxes and buy needed provisions during great scarcity. Ugudhla had acquired his wealth in the burgeoning mineral revolution. His income symbolised a different route to traditional power for men who valued wage earning as both a necessity and a choice in the nascent industrial era. The family tensions arising from migrancy caused disruption, including legal contests initiated by migrants who petitioned their magistrate to ‘emancipate’ them from their father's control. As upsetting as these court cases were they did not deter motivated members of a homestead from obtaining employment that buoyed domestic security and, crucially, enhanced personal options to fulfil their dream of ukwakha umuzi, building one's own homestead. Fuelled by discretionary spending, this ‘monetised’ dream had alienated Matshana from Ugudhla. Indeed, their rift would reveal how assertive migrants drew on opportunities of custom, capitalism and colonialism to pursue a life of accumulation and mobility that extended beyond mere survival.

Isaiah Shembe’s Prophetic Uhlanga: The Worldview of the Nazareth Baptist Church in Colonial South Africa

Isaiah Shembe’s Prophetic Uhlanga: The Worldview of the Nazareth Baptist Church in Colonial South Africa

Universalising Aspirations: Community and Social Service in the Ismaʻili Imagination in Twentieth-Century South Asia and East Africa

AbstractTaking the example of the Ismaʻilis in colonial South Asia and East Africa, this article examines some aspects of the complexities involved in the identity formation of communities seeking gradual redefinitions in a deterritorialised global context, reformulating notions of community membership in the process. The Ismaʻili case illustrates an intertwined history of the development of community identity, and a language of social service that became the hallmark of the community under a religious leadership that virtually redefined its position through a vigorous and increasing emphasis on the idiom of social commitment. At one level, this thrust marks a passage from the translocal to the global context, intelligible in terms of the conceptual rubric of global assemblages. At another level, the article also seeks to evaluate the nature of the community's diasporic experience in Africa. It suggests that the ideational framework and praxis of social service — and in more recent times grander developmental endeavours addressing the needs of both Ismaʻilis and non-Ismaʻilis across the world — both reflect, and are mutually constitutive of, more fundamental experiments with identity and repositioning of religious authority that the Ismaʻilis first witnessed in colonial South Asia and East Africa. This article is thus an effort to retrieve some of the continuities and ruptures in the historical process.

Spaces of Scandinavian Encounters in Colonial South Africa: Reconfiguring Colonial Discourses

Spaces of Scandinavian Encounters in Colonial South Africa: Reconfiguring Colonial Discourses

New Settler Colonial Histories at the Edges of Empire: “Asiatics,” settlers, and law in colonial South Africa

The history of Indians in colonial South Africa betrays a long history of settlement, from at least the mid-seventeenth century, regulated by inter-imperial spaces of negotiation, first via the regulation of religion and custom in the 1795–1814 period and then via the regulation of mobile laborers a century later in the high era of legal intervention from 1885–1914. During the latter period, Indians were still categorized as “Asiatic,” even though many Indians began to identify as Indians in the context of political protest against discrimination. In this essay, I argue that a history of law governing “Asiatics” in colonial South Africa reveals important processes of settler colonialism in the British Empire that situate Indians as settlers in a complex landscape of power. Because of their ever-increasing settlements and attachments to land, legal regimes sought to control their movement and residence. Through a brief review of early Indian migration into the Cape region from the mid-seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century assumption of power by the British Empire, I discuss how Indians, though still categorized in a blanket “Asiatic” category by the colonial state, as in previous time periods, were increasingly monitored and controlled because of their expanding settlements from 1885 to 1914. Such a process shows how Indians of South Africa fit into contemporary frameworks of settler colonialism, particularly those developed by Lorenzo Veracini, and the concept of an “exogenous others,” or settlers who were blocked from indigenization in the process of empire. If extended into larger histories of “settler colonies” in the British Empire, such a new vantage point will allow histories of the British Empire that transcend narrow strictures of race, ethnicity, or community.

Global context, local objects, and cultural frontiers: unsettling South Africa's national history in four moves

Contested cultural spaces characteristic of colonial South Africa persisted through the twentieth century. Material evidence of cross-cultural encounters in South Africa reveals the long-term viability and productive elasticity of the concept of frontier as a space of cross-cultural encounter. An analysis of four objects that date from the eighteenth to the twentieth century demonstrates the significance of African and Asian agency, even in settler-focused historical narratives. This approach also establishes points of comparison that challenge exceptionalist readings of South Africa?s national history.

The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa by Michael Mahoney, and: The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902–1994 by Edward Cavanagh (review)

Reviewed by: The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa by Michael Mahoney, and: The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902–1994 by Edward Cavanagh T.J. Tallie The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa By Michael Mahoney. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2012. The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902–1994 By Edward Cavanagh. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Identities are incredibly contingent, particularly those crafted in the midst of colonial domination, as most historians of the colonial experience would be quick to affirm. Two recent publications in South African history provide both an understanding of the incredibly localized nature of colonial identity formation, with an eye to the larger politics of settler colonialism. Michael Mahoney’s The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa is an ambitious yet careful study of the development of an overarching Zulu ethnic identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing from an extensive variety of government records, personal correspondence, and ethnographic archives, Mahoney constructs a survey of the colonial period in Natal and neighboring polity of Zululand that closely investigates the different pressures that shaped forms of tribal or inter-ethnic allegiance. For Mahoney, Africans who lived within colonial Natal in the years prior to the Anglo-Zulu War profoundly resisted identification with “Zuluness,” instead associating themselves with chieftaincies that had existed prior to the far-reaching conquests of Shaka, the first paramount Zulu ruler. Such a move found ready support with a colonial administration committed to governing on the cheap, particularly under the administration of Theophilus Shepstone, Natal’s long-serving Secretary of Native Affairs, who advocated for colonial rule that rested upon a maintained system of Indigenous governance. Mahoney argues that prior to the outbreak of war in 1879, Natal’s African population believed that their immediate interests lay not in an ethnic identification that required the recognition of a supreme and still very independent Zulu monarch north of the colony. Indeed, he asserts that the identification with local chiefdoms resulted from being situated between a colonial state “too weak to hate” and a Zulu king “too strong to love” (82). It was only after the Anglo-Zulu War that Natal’s African population, linked through a shared antipathy to rising settler power and strengthened through experiences such as those shared by young men on the goldfields of the Witwatersrand, began to look to a greatly reduced Zulu monarchy as a relatively powerless figure upon which they could project complex ideas of nationalist identification. For Mahoney, this process of new ethnic affiliation became most visible with the widespread identification of rebellious Africans with the Zulu monarch Dinizulu in 1906, over a quarter century after the defeat of the Zulu monarchy. Mahoney’s careful, detailed work is at its most effective when he examines the profound disidentification of Natal’s African population with the Zulu kingdom to the north; as he argues, “the Zulu ethnic identity of virtually the entire African population of Natal was itself not a given; it had to be established” (5). Thus begins a richly layered and source-rich description of the awkward negotiation of Africans between colonial rule and a larger Zulu identity. Likewise, by placing the focus of his study firmly in Natal, and not Zululand proper, Mahoney allows for a greater understanding of the complexities of identity formation within a (settler) colonial polity. The profound ambivalences of Africans within Natal with regard to both the Natal government and the Zulu kingdom reveal the limits of a settler state in compelling its Indigenous inhabitants and the nuanced ways in which those colonial subjects worked to articulate themselves on terms most amenable to them. Mahoney’s boldest offerings are also perhaps his most tenuous; in examining the process of African ethnic identification in colonial Natal, he offers productive challenges to the notion of colonial hegemony, particularly as it has been understood in both South African historiography and within larger British colonial history writing. For Mahoney, Zulu ethnic identification arose as a possible choice (which he terms a “moral economy”) in the midst...

The Other Zulus: The Spread of Zulu Ethnicity in Colonial South Africa, by Michael R. Mahoney

The Other Zulus: The Spread of Zulu Ethnicity in Colonial South Africa, by Michael R. Mahoney. Politics, History and Culture series. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2012. xv, 293 pp. $89.95 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper). In this work Michael Mahoney asks a deceptively simple question. How did so many Africans come to identify as Zulu, the single largest ethnic group in South Africa today, when so few did in the early colonial era? His answer, in this elegantly written and at times combative work, is that Africans in the British colony of Natal chose a common Zulu identity in the colonial era that they had not previously shared. Zulu ethnicity became both a means of resistance, but also a way to heal internal divisions that made them vulnerable to colonial rule. He bookends this study with two moments of violence that are well-mined by historians. In 1879 the British Empire went to war against the Zulu nation. With their substantial military advantage the English, based out of Natal, eventually emerged victorious, but not before the Zulu army badly bloodied them at Isandlwana and cemented a reputation as warriors that persists to this day. Mahoney finds it remarkable, and he is right, that many Natal Africans joined the British in this effort, volunteering their services against the Zulu state. How quickly, Mahoney notes, this turned. In 1906, twenty-seven years later, Africans in Natal, pushed to extremes by an increasingly oppressive settler government, claimed a united Zuluness and broke into a rebellion that was swiftly and brutally repressed. Colonial troops killed thousands of Africans, imprisoned and flogged thousands more, and the entire affair led to a series of laws that provided a foundation for apartheid. Why, Mahoney asks, were Africans initially willing to fight for the British, but within a generation had switched their allegiance to the very Zulu identity they had gone to war against. To answer this, Mahoney argues that the Zulu kingdom failed to integrate the many peoples it conquered during its birth in the early 1800s under Shaka, their first monarch. This was in part because the Zulu ruling class arrogated to itself many of the traditional powers long held by local headmen and chiefs. Worse, the Zulu state exacerbated natural divisions by employing excessive violence in the face of resistance to their actions. When the British established a colony in 1834 across the Tugela River in the neighbouring land of Natal, many African peoples took advantage of the opportunity and fled Zulu control. One of these was the Qwabe chiefdom, which settled just across the Tugela within sight and under constant threat from the Zulu state, and it is to their transformation that Mahoney pays particular attention. The book is at its strongest when Mahoney focuses on the Qwabe, something he does to varying degrees in every chapter. Tradition has it that the Qwabe and Zulu chiefdoms were born when two brothers feuded over their inheritance. Both emerged as independent chiefdoms reliant upon a long tradition of patriarchal lineages loosely bound together under the leadership of individual chiefs. …

Indentured “coolie” labours in South Africa: the Indian and Chinese schemes in comparative perspective

In twenty-first century South Africa, the Indian and Chinese populations are both classified as minority groups. However, in British colonial South Africa of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, these two communities comprised key components in the burgeoning agricultural and mining sectors, respectively. This article particularly revisits this period to compare the two systems introduced to import and indenture 1,52,184 Indians into the Colony of Natal between 1860 and 1911 and 63,695 Chinese into the Transvaal Colony between 1904 and 1910. While these two labour schemes did not serve a similar sector and were not directly coterminous, it will be shown that a comparison of their differing features shows how the one predicated the other. Moreover, it will be argued that the disparity between the two schemes partly contributes to an explanation of the different places these two diasporic “Asian” communities ultimately occupied in later South African history.

Sex-specific foraging behaviour and a field sexing technique for Endangered African penguins

Sexual differences in at-sea behaviour of seabirds often derive from size dimorphism and may lead to both resource partitioning and diverging threats between the sexes. Spheniscids are among the least dimorphic of the seabird families and are the most threatened. In many instances, diet differs between the sexes in penguins, but few studies have compared their forag- ing behaviour, partly because of the difficulty of identifying sexes in the field. We derived a dis- criminant function analysis that predicts the sex of African penguins Spheniscus demersus with >90% confidence, using only beak length and depth. We also deployed GPS-time-depth recorders on male and female penguins breeding on 2 of their largest colonies in South Africa over 2 con- secutive breeding seasons and compared their at-sea behaviour. Foraging effort (time spent at sea, distance covered) showed greater variance with clutch mass and between years and colonies than between sexes. However, although maximum diving capabilities were similar, males dived deeper and longer on average than females. Females compensated by increasing their diving fre- quency, which resulted in similar volumes of water being explored, and foraged over larger forag- ing areas. There was also some spatial separation between sexes, although foraging range overlap differed markedly (35 to 83%) between years and islands, presumably reflecting prey availability and the need to minimise between-sex competition. The results suggest potential niche partition- ing between the sexes in African penguins, but could also be a passive consequence of sexual dimorphism driven primarily by sexual selection. Female behaviour may make them more at risk from predation or oiling events, highlighting the possibility of sex-dependent vulnerability in this Endangered species.

Three Tales of Theal: Biography, History and Ethnography on the Eastern Frontier

The three narrative strands that inform this essay - the life-story of George McCall Theal, the history of colonialism in South Africa which he wrote, and the Xhosa folktale - are, to a large extent, incongruent with each other, and their interweaving produces an ungainly, sometimes ambivalent overarching narrative. The narrative nevertheless hangs together, perhaps as much because of its gaps and contradictions, as by dint of its points of contiguity. In postcolonial terms, Theal's influential historical and ethnographic texts can be seen to [employ] a system of representation, a regime of truth that is structurally similar to realism (Bhabha 1994, 71), but their dissonances point to their contrivance - and that is the point of departure for this study.

The other Zulus: the spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa

In 1879, the British colony of Natal invaded the neighboring Zulu kingdom. Large numbers of Natal Africans fought with the British against the Zulus, enabling the British to claim victory and, ultimately, to annex the Zulu kingdom. Less than thirty years later, in 1906, many of those same Natal Africans, and their descendants, rebelled against the British in the name of the Zulu king. In The Other Zulus , a thorough history of Zulu ethnicity during the colonial period, Michael R. Mahoney shows that the lower classes of Natal, rather than its elites, initiated the transformation in ethnic self-identification, and they did so for multiple reasons. The resentment that Natal Africans felt toward the Zulu king diminished as his power was curtailed by the British. The most negative consequences of colonialism may have taken several decades to affect the daily lives of most Africans. Natal Africans are likely to have experienced the oppression of British rule more immediately and intensely in 1906 than they had in 1879. Meanwhile, labor migration to the gold mines of Johannesburg politicized the young men of Natal. Mahoney's fine-grained local history shows that these young migrants constructed and claimed a new Zulu identity, both to challenge the patriarchal authority of African chiefs and to fight colonial rule.

Social Engineering and Revolutionary Consciousness: Domestic Transformations in Colonial South Africa

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.

Not Yet Uhuru: The Unfinished Revolution in Africa

In Kwandiwe Kondlo’s In the Twilight of the Revolution (2009), which examines the role of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) of Azania in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle as the backdrop, this article surveys the momentum of social revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa during the decolonization era that started in the mid-20th century and ended with South Africa’s transition to a multi-racial democracy in 1994. It argues that the failure of the African elite to achieve a genuine independence from both colonial rule and South Africa’s apartheid system is largely because of inconsistent nationalist ideologies and the detachment of the African elite from the popular struggles of the people, which could have resulted in the revolutionary overthrow of the colonial state and the dawn of more progressive and autonomous states all across Black Africa. It concludes that this failure led to the continuing instability of the post-colonial states across Africa and, in South Africa, to the achievement of a particular form of multi-racial democracy with very little or no change to the real politics of apartheid and Boer domination.

Philip Glass's Satyagraha: Para-Colonial Para-Opera

Resisting both Orientalist and post-colonial readings in its universalizing message, Satyagraha enacts the historical story of Gandhi's early activist years in South Africa through a ritualized form of staged drama. Deliberately misaligning stage action and its untranslated Sanskrit libretto text, this intercultural work that we call a ‘para-opera’ aims to counter the musical and dramatic expectations of Western operatic audiences. Similarly, in its oblique relationship to both imperial India and to actual colonialism in South Africa, it can be called para-colonial: nearby, related, alongside the colonial. As para-colonial para-opera, however, it speaks movingly across political and generic boundaries – not despite or against them.

Philip Glass's Satyagraha : Para-Colonial Para-Opera

Resisting both Orientalist and post-colonial readings in its universalizing message, Satyagraha enacts the historical story of Gandhi's early activist years in South Africa through a ritualized form of staged drama. Deliberately misaligning stage action and its untranslated Sanskrit libretto text, this intercultural work that we call a 'para-opera' aims to counter the musical and dramatic expectations of Western operatic audiences. Similarly, in its oblique relationship to both imperial India and to actual colonialism in South Africa, it can be called para-colonial: nearby, related, alongside the colonial. As para-colonial para-opera, however, it speaks movingly across political and generic boundaries - not despite or against them.

Paper, Pen, and Print: The Transformation of the Kai Tahu Knowledge Order

Knowledge has become a central problematic in recent work on cross-cultural encounters and the processes of empire building. In an array of contexts—from Spanish America to colonial South Africa, from Ireland to occupied Egypt, the American West to British India—anthropologists and historians have highlighted the ways in which “colonial knowledge” facilitated trade, the extraction of rent and taxes, conversion, and outright conquest. This scholarship has demonstrated how these new forms of understanding produced on imperial frontiers facilitated the actual extension of sovereignty and the consolidation of colonial authority: for Tzvetan Todorov, Bernard Cohn, and Nicholas Dirks alike, colonialism was a “conquest of knowledge.” Scholarship on empire building in the Americas has placed special emphasis on the place of literacy in the dynamics of conquest. Walter Mignolo in particular has argued that European understandings of the power of literacy encouraged Spaniards in the New World to discount the value of indigenous graphic systems and disparage Mesoamerican languages as untruthful, unreliable, and products of the Devil. For Mignolo, the dark side of the new knowledge orders born out of the Renaissance was a new interweaving of literacy, knowledge, and colonization in a new cultural order he dubs “coloniality.” In the North American literature, too, literacy has been seen as a crucial element in imperial intrusion and conquest. James Axtell, for example, has argued “The conquest of America was in part a victory of paper and print over memory and voice. The victors wrote their way to the New World and inscribed themselves on its maps.”

‘A man's game’: Cricket, war and masculinity, South Africa, 1899–1902

As practitioners of the imperial sport of the Victorian age, cricketers rallied whenever war descended upon England and its colonies. The South African War of 1899–1902 was no different. Adding to existing work on cricket's imperial development within South Africa, this study marks a significant contribution to research on the link between masculinity, war and sport during the Victorian era. A concept emerging from the English public schools of the mid- to late nineteenth century, the masculine ethos of sport and military honour had reached colonial South Africa by the outbreak of war in 1899. In its analysis of cricket and masculinity, this essay examines the events surrounding the war in South Africa and provides an example of the distinct relationship that existed between the military and the masculinity of sport and its organisation during this era.

Sugar and Gold: Indentured Indian and Chinese Labour in South Africa

This article proposes to compare the Indian and Chinese indentured labour systems introduced into colonial South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1860 and 1911 the Colony of Natal imported 152 184 Indians to work primarily on the sugar plantations, and between 1904 and 1910 the Transvaal Colony reverted to the importation of 63 695 Chinese to work exclusively on the gold mines. While both the Indian and Chinese labour schemes have received considerable academic attention in their own right, relatively little work has been done in terms of a comparative dimension. This may partly be ascribed to the inherent differences between the two schemes, despite the fact that the British authorities orchestrated both. It will be shown that to a large extent the experiences of the Indian labour system informed and determined the nature of the Chinese scheme. It will however be argued that the impact of the one upon the other went far beyond the legal parameters of the indenture contracts and regulations, having ramifications which swept across the broader societal domain and which impacted on the very different place and perception of these two minorities in subsequent South African history.