Early Twentieth-century South Africa Research Articles

Reinterpreting the Historical Memory of the Black Peril in South Africa

Abstract This article employs a critical Black Atlantic frame to re-examine, re-evaluate and reinterpret the historical memory of the Black Peril in South Africa. It exposes the Black Peril as a wide-ranging racist discourse that demonised Black men as potential rapists of white women. This racist narrative was vehemently expressed in early twentieth-century South Africa. A key finding of this work is that the Black Peril was a highly successful racist campaign because it not only led to the criminalisation of interracial sex between Black men and white women but was also used to justify racist laws that had far-reaching effects on social relations in the broader society – eventually yielding a white supremacist state (apartheid) – which proceeded to use the Black Peril discourse to mobilise an aggressive racialisation process for both whites and Blacks.

Editor as Mediator: A Profile of Albert Cartwright in Early Twentieth Century South Africa

Editor as Mediator: A Profile of Albert Cartwright in Early Twentieth Century South Africa

A “Poor Man's Pleasure”: The Cinema House and Its Publics in Twentieth Century South Africa

ABSTRACT What do cinema houses have to tell us about the experience of collective leisure in early twentieth-century South Africa? This article considers how the cinema house points to unprecedented social conditions that allowed the emergence of new publics. Drawing on scholarship on the development of cinema in South Africa, the article considers how the historical transformations through which the cinema has passed since the 1910s suggest attempts to domesticate the space of projection of the cinema as well as the formation of new cinema audiences. Diverging from readings of the cinema in South Africa that focus on film, the article considers how the cinema house is inscribed in this scholarship as an evocative cipher of incipient publics and as a metaphor for the containment of a new public sphere during the periods of segregation and Apartheid. While today the cinema house no longer occupies the place it once did, the paper concludes with a reflection on recent recreations of the space of the cinema in two South African art installations. The restaging of these cinemas offers a way into the making of a collective space and the kinds of distinct publics they forged.

‘Dear Mrs Brown’: social purity, sex education and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in early twentieth-century South Africa

ABSTRACT The South African Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was a significant source of sex education for white youth in particular, and encouraged adults to equip their children with the information that would prepare them for marriage and parenthood. This article argues that while much of the WCTU’s interest in sex education was informed by eugenic anxieties about the health of the new Union of South Africa, the organization’s archive can also be read for evidence of mothers’ reasons for seeking sex education. It suggests there was a heightened demand for sex education in the 1910s–1930s that was driven, in part, by women’s desire to prepare their daughters for adulthood in a rapidly changing society. Analysis of the WCTU’s promotional periodical The White Ribbon (including the rhetoric used by its leadership) is complemented here by an examination of local branch committee minutes and by a quantitative and qualitative study of the educational materials that the organization distributed across South Africa.

Transatlantic Knowledge: Race Relations, Social Science and Native Education in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

ABSTRACT In this paper I trace knowledge flows between South Africa and the United States in the early twentieth century. I analyse these flows as parts within a broader white supremacist political project and technology of power. Focusing on the early Union period from the 1910s to the 1930s, I explore links, networks and exchanges within and across imperial and colonial spaces that spanned the Atlantic. These include institutional, financial, intellectual and personal relationships and networks between philanthropic institutions, race relations ‘experts’ and social scientists. In particular, I focus on the South African Institute of Race Relations’ role in importing education models from the American South and shaping narratives around ‘native education’ in South Africa. In this case, positivist science functioned to instil and root a racial order. I argue that attending to the circulation and entanglement of ideas between these global spheres offers new insight into the genealogy of anthropological and social scientific knowledge during the historical conjuncture of the Union period.

Reading and roaming the racial city: R. R. R. Dhlomo and <i>The Bantu World</i>

Scholarship on the literary inscription of urban space in early twentiethcentury 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 the 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 in which the boundaries between the ‘literary’ and the ‘journalistic’ are frequently breached.Keywords: R. R. R. Dhlomo, The Bantu World, city literature, satire, African print cultures, African literature, South African literature, spatiality

The appearance of the book: towards a history of the reading lives and worlds of black South African readers

This paper elucidates the material, spatial, social and infrastructural contexts of reading in early twentieth century South Africa. It adds to a growing body of work on reading practices and patterns of book consumption by drawing attention to the neglected question of the “where of reading” – the physical contexts and settings of reading and the ways in which the organisation of space and the allocation of resources impacted on particular reading experiences and habits. The article also takes up a related set of questions pertaining to the access of books, the nature of specific reading encounters, the social relations that developed in these contexts and the reading practices that ensued. It focuses in detail on the contexts of reading which developed around the various “Non-European” reading initiatives and advances the concepts of the “poor library” and “fugitive reading” in order to describe both the rudimentary and improvisational nature of black reading spaces at this time and the various practices of tactical, opportunistic and itinerant reading which arose in response. Finally, it draws attention to the sociable, convivial and inherently public nature of black reading encounters and highlights a pervasive practice of mediated reading in which book interests were shared and encouraged.Keywords: History of reading and reading practices, geographies of reading, “Non-European Library” initiatives in South Africa, early twentieth-century South Africa

A ‘Great Deal of Discrimination is Necessary in Administering the Law’: Frontier Guards and Migration Control in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

This article provides a corrective to recent scholarship surrounding modern migration control, which has emphasised the shared origins of the legal systems created to control migration in the us, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The article demonstrates that the implementation of migration controls in British colonies was arbitrary. It uses the personal papers of Clarence Wilfred Cousins, the Chief Immigration Officer in the Cape, then South Africa (1905–1922), to demonstrate the role of frontier guards in shaping migration experiences. The article highlights the uses and limitations of using ‘ritual’ to understand migration control and how border spaces are experienced.

Minna Keene: a neglected pioneer

Born in Germany in 1861, Minna Keene lived in Cape Town during a prolific phase of her photographic career. Whilst at the Cape (1903-1913), she achieved international acclaim as a pictorialist photographer. Her photographs of South African subject matter were shown at exhibitions across the world. She was quick to recognise opportunities to translate her photographic success into financial profit and was one of very few women to operate a photographic studio in early-twentieth century South Africa. Keene actively circulated reproductions of her photographs as self-published postcards and in popular publications. Through these interventions, she made a substantial contribution to popular visual culture at the Cape and was celebrated by local and international audiences. Despite her pioneering status, she has been overlooked in the existing literature on South African photography, and, although she has received limited attention in Euro-American histories of photography, much remains unknown about her life and work, especially in relation to her time in Cape Town. Drawing on multisited research, I present a biographical account of Keene which analyses the ambivalent gender politics in her photographs as well as her uncritical adoption of colonial categories of race.

Talking about the Weather: Settler Vernaculars and Climate Anxieties in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

AbstractThis article reconstructs popular ideas about climate and climate change among early twentieth-century white southern Africans. The environmental history literature on South Africa and othe...

Transnational governmentality and the ‘poor white’ in early twentieth century South Africa

This paper reexamines the anxiety over poor whites that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, positing the ‘poor white problem’ as a distinctively transnational phenomenon, concerned with the spectre of a racial degeneracy and decline that respected no national borders. Focusing specifically on the Carnegie commission's 1932 report into the condition of poor whites in South Africa, this paper considers transnational theories of racial decline and the transnational team of experts put together to investigate the causes of ‘poor whiteism’ and to offer solutions to the problem. The Carnegie commission is presented as a form of transnational governmentality, directed at the management of poor whites wherever they were found. Entirely consistently, however, poor whiteism was put forward as the product of different circumstances in different places, to be met with contrasting remedies. The cause was constructed as hookworm in the United States, for instance, and in South Africa as malaria. The Carnegie report's findings are thus transnational both in their racial and biopolitical framing, and in their specifics.

The “bit-less” corpse or mannequin manqué: South African Great War poetic embodiment 1914-1918

ABSTRACTIn this article, I discuss South African Great War1 poetry within a psychoanalytical, postcolonial and poststructuralist framework. This body of poems has never been analysed and reveals the embodiment of blackness, whiteness, masculinity, colonialism and empire during the early twentieth-century South Africa. Essentially, it is the poetry that rhythmically murmurs about the relationship between life and death, object and abject, as well as suffering and loss in the nascent Union of South Africa. The war poets could only through concrete language “re-member(ed)” (Christie 2007: 237) or “mannequin” the decomposing corpse, the abject leftover thing of war experience. This was done bit by bit through words in order to flesh out the decomposing corpse: Kristeva's “word flesh” (Harrington 1998: 141). It was a “chance with meaning” (141) that had to be taken, but it was a leap of faith into the void of naming that is fear itself: words remain unstable euphemistic metaphors of unbecoming (Kristeva 1982). This very act by the war poets to dress the abject in metaphors and metonyms of wholeness reveals the loss inherent in wartime experience.

People of Adam: Divine Healing and Racial Cosmopolitanism in the Early Twentieth-Century Transvaal, South Africa

AbstractThis article analyses the intersection between cosmopolitanism and racist ideologies in the faith healing practices of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. Originally from Illinois, USA, this organization was the period's most influential divine healing group. Black and white members, under the leadership of the charismatic John Alexander Dowie, eschewed medical assistance and proclaimed God's power to heal physical affliction. In affirming the deity's capacity to remake human bodies, church members also insisted that God could refashion biological race into a capacious spiritual ethnicity: a global human race they referred to as the “Adamic” race. Zionist universalist teachings were adopted by dispossessed and newly urbanized Boer ex-farmers in Johannesburg, Transvaal, before spreading to the soldiers of the British regiments recently arrived to fight the Boer states in the war of 1899–1902. Zionism equipped these estranged white “races” with a vocabulary to articulate political reconciliation and a precarious unity. But divine healing was most enthusiastically received among the Transvaal's rural Africans. Amidst the period's hardening segregation, Africans seized upon divine healing's innovative racial teachings, but both Boers and Africans found disappointment amid Zion's cosmopolitan promises. Boers were marginalized within the new racial regimes of the Edwardian empire in South Africa, and white South Africans had always been ambivalent about divine healing's incorporations of black Africans into a unitary race. This early history of Zionism in the Transvaal reveals the constriction of cosmopolitan aspirations amidst fast-narrowing horizons of race, nation, and empire in early twentieth-century South Africa.

Recuperating Indian masculinity: Mohandas Gandhi, war and the Indian diaspora in South Africa (1899–1914)

This article examines Mohandas Gandhi’s writing on Indian masculinity in early twentieth-century South Africa which was a period of his life that was seminal for his political career. The author explores how, in the context of being removed from many personal and professional constraints that he encountered in India, Gandhi fashioned prescriptions that would transform the emasculated, effete and cowardly Indian man constructed by colonial discourses in nineteenth-century British India. Building on the scholarly literature pertaining to Gandhian bodily ascesis, I argue that Gandhi held the belief that Indian men would be able to face the hazards of anticolonial satyagraha once their masculinity had been restored, for which various practices of military training were indispensable. I suggest that Gandhi attempted to catalyse somatic and moral reform by encouraging South African Indian men to serve in the British army during the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) and the Zulu Rebellion (1906). I explain how Gandhi viewed military service as a transformative disciplinary experience that would afford Indian men with the ability to endure physical duress, bodily strength and, lastly, knowledge in the use of arms. I illustrate how military service ultimately generated a masculine Indian subject, according to Gandhi, one who possessed mastery over his bodily senses, moral fortitude and fearlessness.

Patriot and Prophet: John Dube's 1936 Biography of the South African Churchman Isaiah Shembe

In 1936, Zulu patriot, John Dube, wrote a biography of local Natal prophet, Isaiah Shembe. Dube's biography – ‘UShembe’ – contained multiple authorial voices. Partly written by Dube, material was also contributed by Shembe and his followers. This collaborative literary method illuminates how rival theories of civic virtue interacted in early twentieth-century South Africa.

Chiefs or Modern Bureaucrats? Managing Black Police in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

Early twentieth-century South Africa was a composite society—“part settler state and part African colony … includ[ing] diverse recently conquered African polities as well as a divided white population.” Mining industrialization and British imperialism, particularly after the discovery of substantial gold deposits and the founding of Johannesburg in 1886, put pressure on southern African peoples and states to function as an integrated labor market, and on their leaders to submit to an overarching political authority. These developmental and administrative rationalizing forces were given greater scope in the years following the South African War of 1899 to 1902, especially in the defeated Boer republics of the interior. Renamed the Transvaal and Orange River Colonies, these territories were initially under the direct rule of British High Commissioner Alfred Milner. They took the lead in a process of state-building that continued well beyond their political amalgamation with the coastal colonies of the Cape and Natal to form the Union of South Africa in 1910. It has been argued that this institutional reconstruction left South Africa with “a modern civil service, with controls and an information-gathering capacity sophisticated enough to … make the competence, helpfulness, and honesty of individual state officials relatively less crucial.”

Legal Liberalism, Statutory Despotism and State Power in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

This article is about the attempts by pre- and post-Union (1910) South African governments to create effective sedition laws, partly directly to curb specific political opponents, but also to license and focus state intelligence-gathering activities. Supreme Court judges' adherence to a rule-of-law formalism in a succession of court cases both hindered and encouraged these attempts. I am particularly interested in how the courts' imposition of more rigorous standards of performance in the production of evidence eventually exceeded the state's bureaucratic capability and undermined officials' confidence in the instrumental value of the rule of law, leading administrators to enact legislation to suppress their political adversaries without reference to the courts. The judges' stance in this history was not one of progressive or sudden capitulation to the lawmakers' and executive's will, as is sometimes argued, but notably consistent throughout.

Fables of death: Law, race and representations of African mine workers in Umteteli Wa Bantu in the 1920s

This article is an attempt to understand the relationship between racist regimes and the representational strategies that went into the insertion of black bodies into specified economies of labour in early twentieth century South Africa. I take as my primary focus the cartoon narratives depicting African mine workers in the newspaper Umteteli Wa Bantu in the 1920s. The pictorial narratives constructed by the cartoons are instructive for they indicate an instance in which the transformation of the black body into a moral sign was tied to the larger terrain of the political economy.

The demise of Norwegian linguistic identity in early twentieth-century South Africa

Die afsterwe van Noorweegse linguistiese identiteit in vroeg-twintigste-eeuse Suid-Afrika: Gedurende die laaste kwart van die negentiende eeu het Noorweegse immigrante talle klein, maarsigbare gemeenskappies in verskeie dele van Suid-Afrika gevorm, veral in Durban, aan die Witwatersrand en in Kaapstad. Baie van hierdie nuwe aankomelinge het broederlike verenigings gestig, by kerke saamgekom en kultuurverenigings gestig. In die eerste helfte van die twintigste eeu het hulle kenmerkende etnisiteit, veral hulle gebruik van Noorweegs, afgeneem, ten spyte van pogings om daardie element van hulle kulturele identiteit te behou. Dit word aangevoer dat die primêre faktor in die ondergang van hulle etniese kultuur die afname in immigrasie van Noorweë was en die gevolglike tekort van 'n aansienlike aantal mense om die kulturele instellings te handhaaf. Die klem val op die mislukking van die handhawing van die Noorweegse taal. Keywords: assimilasie, tweetaligheid, etnisiteit, taal, Noorweegs, Noorweë, SkandinawieseSouth Africa Journal of Cultural History Vol. 21 (2) 2007: pp. 184-197

Peter Abrahams'sMine Boy: A Study of Colonial Diseases in South Africa

Disease, most often imagined in the past as an external invasion of bacteria or viruses, can also be imagined as dis-ease, a set of political, economic, and social imbalances that disturb the well-being of people's lives. Today, these imbalances would be termed psychological and psychosomatic diseases, but in a colonial arena, such as early twentieth-century South Africa, these forms of disease were inadvertently perpetuated and ignored. In addition, certain somatic diseases, such as tuberculosis, introduced into South Africa by the Europeans, had unforeseen and often fatal effects on the health of the natives. Tuberculosis, especially, became a peculiarly raced disease. Peter Abrahams fictionally recreates this area of colonial history in his 1946 novel, Mine Boy, which presents us with characters who negotiate the uncertain and often tragic terrain of colonial introduced and induced diseases. In particular, characters confront and deal, as best they can, with somatic, psychological, and psychosomatic diseases in ways that highlight the racist society of colonial South Africa.