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.

Disease and design in twentieth-century South Africa: exploring the consequences of the 1918–19 Spanish Flu pandemic through contributions of émigré Dutch architects

The architectural history of healthcare in South Africa remains greatly understudied, as do the consequences of the 1918–19 Spanish Flu, which ravaged its population. Yet that pandemic had great consequences for South African society, spatial planning and the development of healthcare, of which the latter two were still in their infancy at the time. This article explores the link between disease and design in South Africa through the presentation of the histories of selected hospitals, maternity homes, orphanages and a special care school designed by émigré Dutch architects from the 1920s to the 1970s. It is the product of desktop and archival research, site visits and interviews undertaken in both South Africa and the Netherlands. It outlines the disparity of care that was provided for different groups and is a first attempt to identify healthcare ideas transposed into the subcontinent fuelled by the tragic experiences of the Spanish Flu pandemic. Due to this health crisis, communities – structured in terms of language, faith and race – attempted to develop their own facilities for the care of their own. Where communities had no means of their own, charitable organisations tried to fill the void. Over the course of the twentieth century, public healthcare was centralised, but many of the community and charitable institutions persist. By chance or choice, émigré Dutch architects made a disproportionately large contribution to the development of healthcare facilities in South Africa, not only in the number and range of facilities they designed, but also by introducing contemporary ideas into South African healthcare design.

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

As part of society, journalists and editors can play and often have played, in country after country, over different periods, crucial roles outside the columns of the newspapers or media platforms they work for. They can further causes, support campaigns, oppose the official and social establishments of the day. If and when they do that, they cannot but carry something of the stature of their profession on their shoulders, to the benefit perhaps of that role and to the augmentation of their public personalities. Albert Cartwright (1868–1956) had worked in a number of newspapers in South Africa in the turbulent period around the Second Boer War and later, opposing the ruling order in some crucial respects, beyond the call of ‘editorial’ duty. As a friend of General J. C. Smuts, South Africa’s most powerful politician and of M. K. Gandhi, who was pitted in a steadily escalating struggle against the Smuts regime, Cartwright as the then editor of The Transvaal Leader mediated between the General and his Indian opponent during the gutsy barrister’s first incarceration (1908). This led to a thawing of the relations between the Boer and the Indian and the forming of a patently conflicted yet elusively cordial equation between them, which eventually helped in the reaching of the famous ‘Agreement’ (1914) on the Indians’ grievances in that country. I intend to explore that role played by Cartwright both to describe his character and personality and also to draw attention to the fact that freedom’s battles have been not un-often, fought and in some of their ‘theatres’, won, by individuals from the world of the Press who have worked, almost unseen, from the wings with the ‘pen’ goading the process. Editor as mediator? Now what is that about? Editors helm newspapers and journals, they write editorials, sometimes fight their proprietors for their autonomy and more often capitulate to the owner’s control. They come thereby to be admired and respected or neither admired nor respected. They resist political authority and pay a price for that, or they ‘fall in line’ and pay a higher price in terms of credibility. But mediation? How does that become part of an editor’s role? It can and does, because public life, as life itself, is not all black and white. There are areas which can be called a blend of both and are like black and white photographs and films are quite grey and misty, something that makes the films of Satyajit Ray, for instance, ring so true. And editors, who are not in politics but are situated on its rims, while not being players themselves are yet so close to the action that happens around them as to be indistinguishable from its voltage. They can find themselves sought for or seeking clarifications, being offered or offering suggestions. It is in them to exacerbate or alleviate tensions, encourage or discourage policy and programmes and indeed, action including belligerence. While doing so they become mediators within themselves as well, mediating between their inner voice and prudence, the first impelling them to intervene and the second recoiling from overt action. That is the most difficult of the mediations they are called upon to attempt. The ‘loci’ of this essay is South Africa and the role of the press in that country during the turn of the nineteenth century when war and brutality overwhelmed that part of the African continent. Two striking Africans appeared in the word of journalism there at the time. The first was John Tengo Jabavu (1859–1921) of the Eastern Cape who as a teacher began to write articles for some South African newspapers in English and after apprenticing himself to a printer, by 1884, founded his own newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu (‘Black Opinion’). This appeared in Xhosa, a brave and pioneering venture. Jabavu found himself at the intersection of liberal ideas in the Cape’s South African Party and the repressive policies of Cecil Rhodes’s ‘Progressives’. The second was John Langalibalele Dube (1871–1946) of the Natal, an essayist, educator and articulate politician who with his wife Nokutela founded the first Zulu/English newspaper Ilanga lase Natal (The Sun of Natal) in 1903. Deeply influenced by Booker T. Washington whose work he knew at the first hand as a student in the USA, Dube wrote for and spoke to a mixed audience in South Africa, wanting to combine western education and mores with local customs and traditions. Journalism, editorship and interventions by people of the eminence of Jabavu and Dube who belong to the place is important and impressive and impactful. But when the person concerned is an ‘outsider’, such a role gets invested with an additional stamp—that of a somewhat lonesome individuality. This is what happened with two of Jabavu’s and Dube’s contemporaries, M. K. Gandhi (1869–1948) who founded and ran Indian Opinion from Durban and Phoenix in 1904, mainly on the issues facing the Indian South African community, and the British-born subject of Victorian Britain, and essentially a visiting Briton, Albert Cartwright (1868–1956).

Twentieth-Century South African Women’s Memoir as Historiography

ABSTRACT While historians of twentieth-century South Africa have made use of women’s memoirs as an archive, this article argues that these memoirs can also be regarded as historiography. In Ruth First’s 117 Days (1965), Ellen Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman (1985), and Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South African Autobiography by Emma Mashinini (1989), authors critique and reconstitute narratives of the South African past, told through the lives of politically engaged women. They present versions of South African history that not only act as a corrective to the apartheid state-sanctioned narrative of South African history as white supremacist triumph, but also probe the limits of the histories narrated by liberation movements.

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.

Technologies of Visibility

The success of skin lighteners as a cosmetic practice arose out of an accident of industrial history—in the 1930s tannery workers in Chicago experienced temporary depigmentation of the skin due to gloves that including the chemical compound MBH (monobenzyl ether of hydroquinone). Dermatologists quickly realized the potential of compounds derived from MBH within depigmentation treatments that corrected freckles or sought to lighten a person's entire complexion. Lynn M. Thomas includes this history in her most recent book, Beneath the Surface, an expansive and rigorously researched monograph that takes as its central subject skin lightening as an aesthetic, political, racial, and commercial practice. Her book demonstrates that practices of skin lightening have moved across geographic locations and cultural frontiers, attracting diverse and shifting groups of people (20); yet Thomas predominantly focuses on how and why Black South African women used skin lightening products. Through tracing how skin lightening intersects with racialized inequalities, consumer politics, and antiapartheid political activism, Thomas demonstrates that the use of skin lighteners has simultaneously challenged and entrenched racial and gender hierarchies in both South Africa and the wider world throughout the twentieth century. Thomas does not merely argue that skin lightening is a dangerous or racially coded practice, but she instead focuses on what makes skin lightening so pervasive and persistent throughout time, thus unraveling the dynamic historical layers “beneath the surface” of skin lightening.Beneath the Surface specifically understands skin lightening as a “technology of visibility” by which consumers “render[ed] themselves legible” in a world that was deeply circumscribed by harsh gendered and racialized hierarchies (20). Skin lightening therefore expressed individual agency as much as constraint—Black women sought to improve their social standing through skin lightening even as ostensible social improvements were entangled with hierarchical ideas about race, color, and gender that ultimately framed their oppression. Ultimately, Thomas's book compels readers to subject the persistence and practice of skin lightening to closer scrutiny—not to condemn the practice, per se, but to understand the long-standing interests and investments in such technologies; she demonstrates how appearances “were both an affective and political matter” that simultaneously challenged and entrenched racial and gender hierarchies (71). At times, readers may crave a more firm or argumentative thesis, but Thomas's multilayered approach offers a more diffuse and persuasive account of skin lightening's meanings.Although situated most powerfully as a history of twentieth-century South Africa, Thomas's geographic and temporal scopes are capacious. She decenters the overdetermined significances of colonialist epistemologies by focusing attention on precolonial southern African skin-care routines, and to the meanings of skin color within the linguistic worlds of Indigenous languages such as isiZulu, Sesotho, Setswana, and isiXhosa that predated European colonial rule. Here, she draws heavily from archaeological and anthropological evidence to observe how southern African bodily practices centered on smearing and brightening the skin with materials such as red ochre (imbola) powder and specularite. Brightness and lightness were associated with gendered and generational beauty ideals in southern Africa that subsequently became entangled with colonial practices introduced by settlers. By the early twentieth century, long-standing precolonial aesthetics of brightness intermixed with new technologies of visibility in colonial and segregationist contexts, where the “racialization of respectability” increasingly shaped the politics of personal appearance (37) and the “minute distinctions in physical appearance could open or foreclose social opportunities” (46).Thomas's analysis expands outward from South Africa to appreciate a larger, transnational discourse surrounding the “modern girl,” with her latter chapters delving into the rise of skin lightening as a billion-dollar global history. In these chapters she demonstrates how beauty and racial respectability shifted with the influx of commercial products and cultural ideas between South Africa and the United States. The fourth chapter, for instance, persuasively analyses the emotionally fraught connection between lightness and beauty within transnational Black consumer markets and media during the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing from Roland Marchand's concept of “social fantasy”—that advertisements reveal aspirational sentiments beyond concrete lived experience—Thomas argues many Black women in South Africa participated in the fantasy of modern consumer citizenship by purchasing lightening agents and powders. The ubiquity of skin lightening advertisements in Black South African magazines such as Zonk! and Drum, where skin lightening companies sponsored beauty pageants while highlighting the role of lightening in winners’ cosmetic praxes, iconized pageant winners as symbols of Black national pride, progress, and modernity. However, as debates over beauty, respectability, and authenticity shifted, these models increasingly faced criticism for championing a certain kind of superficial whiteness. In an important counterpoint to discourses of lightening, Thomas's last chapter analyzes the cultural shifts that occurred when Black Consciousness Movement activists and medical professionals succeeded in pushing the late apartheid government to ban skin lighteners.The story of skin lighteners in South Africa is tied to the history of apartheid, the rise of consumer capitalism, and the growth of antiracist politics in all of its affective and sometimes contradictory dimensions. Thus, Thomas's history documents the shifting cultural and political landscape in South Africa while remaining mindful of individuals’ subjectivities and personal agencies. Thomas is careful not to rely solely on print culture within the archive, but grounds her analysis in the oral histories of women who used skin lighteners. These voices include nursing students Joyce Molefe and Notumato Tyeku, who used skin lighteners in the 1960s to attract admiration when returning home from college, and Leticia Vaphi, who worked at a trading store in Langa and shared a similar desire to attract attention from strangers who noticed her beautiful skin as she walked outside. Looking good “was crucial to being satisfied with oneself” and “achieving respectability in a racialized world” (71). By creating space for the voices of women themselves, Thomas is able to attend to the complexity of Black politics, skin lightening, and women's own efforts to navigate and subvert existing hierarchies.Social and cultural history remains at the forefront of Thomas's work. She engages theory only sparingly. This decision expands the book's appeal well beyond academia, but it also leaves unanswered foundational questions regarding her theoretical understandings of both transnationality and sexuality. Thomas defines her geographic methodology as “connective comparison,” or an attention “to developments in multiple places” and how they are “linked and when they diverge” (12). However, only brief references are made to the history of skin lighteners in the Indian Ocean world, East Africa, or West Africa. Instead, she contributes to the dominant historiographic narrative by focusing on the transatlantic diaspora. Other missed opportunities occur in her assessment of social policing of women's bodies, and skin lightening practices among men. In the former case she highlights how men refuted the idea of the “modern girl,” yet rarely discusses how women policed each other's behavior. Her analysis of sexuality stops there. Did beauty cosmetics play a role in the history of sexuality in South Africa? Or are they limited to conversations over sexualization? Further, Thomas mentions only briefly that men used skin lighteners in South Africa, but she never fully fleshes out this phenomenon. Why did they use skin lighteners? Who were these men? Perhaps her social and cultural history is confined by her commitment to the “modern woman.”Still, Beneath the Surface is a commendable book, positioning skin lightening within a nuanced matrix of bodily practices, desires, experiences, contexts, and conflicts. Her deep historiographical attentiveness to a complex history eschews looking to African history only for “simple origin stories or stark narratives of oppression versus resistance” (236). Rather, Thomas offers a “layered history” that ultimately recognizes “composite meanings and unexpected conjunctures” (236). She successfully demonstrates how and why scholars need to embrace both subtlety and surprise in the past, making room for “less predictable” and “more liberatory” futures (236). Thomas's work is thus a novel contribution to both African history and gender studies. As the first monograph on skin lighteners in South Africa, and the first study of the history of opposition to skin lighteners, Beneath the Surface is a triumph on many levels.

‘Then … Horror! Horror!': Laughter, Terror and Rebellion in the Unpublished Plays of H.I.E. Dhlomo

ABSTRACT The New African poet, playwright, and intellectual H.I.E. Dhlomo is often cited as one of twentieth-century South Africa’s most important cultural figures. In contrast to his celebrated theoretical writings, however, Dhlomo’s actual literary work tends to receive mixed reviews from scholars. This paper seeks to reassess Dhlomo’s much-maligned use of Romantic and Gothic tropes by focusing on two of his lesser-known plays: Men and Women and The Expert. These plays, which date from towards the end of Dhlomo’s playwriting career, have never been published, yet reveal a great deal about both the nature of his literary project and the conditions of Black cultural production in segregation-era South Africa. Indeed, I argue that these plays engage in some of the most radical social critiques found anywhere in pre-apartheid South African drama, and, furthermore that the melodramatic and incongruous elements of these works are essential to their intended impact. Having experienced segregation-era South African society as an unfolding nightmare, for H.I.E. Dhlomo laughter and horror were intimately related. Ultimately, I contend that Dhlomo’s linkage of laughter to the supernatural and the Gothic marks an important moment in South African history, illustrating powerfully the dashed hopes and aspirations of the New African generation within the context of tightening white philanthropic control.

Stop! Go! What Can We Learn About Family Planning From Birth Timing in Settler South Africa, 1835-1950?

We revisit the discussion on family limitation through stopping and spacing behavior before and during the fertility transition with a sample of 12,800 settler women's birth histories in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. Using cure models that allow us to separate those who stop childbearing from those who continue, we find no evidence of parity-specific spacing before the transition. We do find evidence of non-parity-based birth postponement before the transition. Increased stopping and parity-independent postponement characterized the beginning of the fertility transition, with increased parity-specific spacing following later in the transition phase.

Sytuacja polityczno-gospodarcza w Republice Południowej Afryki i jej wpływ na imigrację

Migration processes have accompanied man since the dawn of time. In the case of migration currents to South Africa after World War II, there are several factors influencing the decisions to migrate. There were several waves of migration, depending on the changing in the second half of the Twentieth century South Africa’s economic and political situation. To properly present the issue of migration to South Africa, both from Poland and other countries of the world, it is first necessary to focus on the events that enabled the development of a policy of racial segregation. Then focus on economic development during this period that determined the successive waves of migrants. The last, crucial element is focusing on emigrants and the reasons for their emigration. In the case of the Polish diaspora in South Africa, many people decided to leave Poland due to the political system that was in the communist period; they wanted to give their children a better start in life or simply wanted to develop professionally, which was not possible at that time in the country. The aim of this article is to present the political, economic, demographic and social factors that influenced migration to South Africa.

Journalism and the Black Short Story in English in Twentieth-Century South Africa: From R. R. R. Dhlomo to Miriam Tlali

In the present article I seek to discuss, following a diachronic approach, the close-knit relationship that can be found between journalistic discourse and the genre of the short story in Anglophone South African literature over a time span of fifty years, between the late Twenties and the Eighties. In particular, I intend to explore this genre negotiation by close reading selected short stories and/or newspaper articles by four non-white South African writers: R. R. R. Dhlomo, Can Themba, Alex La Guma, and Miriam Tlali. The intersections between the two different genres and discourses in these hybrid texts can be identified at the level of both content and form. A close reading of selected short stories and/or articles may call for a revaluation of this “South African New Journalism” as a creative experimentation that challenges conventional generic categorisations.

Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park by Jacob S. T. Dlamini

Reviewed by: Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park by Jacob S. T. Dlamini Stefan Norgaard Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park. Jacob S. T. Dlamini. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2020. Pp. ix+330, color illustrations, endnotes. $80.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8214-2408-7. $29.56, paperback, ISBN 978-0-8214-2408-7. Kruger National Park (KNP) is the crown jewel of South Africa's national parks system and one of the largest national parks by area in the [End Page 84] world. KNP, Jacob S. T. Dlamini convincingly argues, is also a space that enlivens the contradictions and hidden stories of South African history, from colonialism to the present day. A key theme of Safari Nation is one that is echoed in other works by Dlamini, including Native Nostalgia and The Terrorist Album: for Black subjects, colonial and apartheid South Africa was "an arena of negotiation" (98), hardly fixed by the dualisms and neat categories as imposed by white rulers. In Safari Nation Dlamini traces the cracks in these supposed fixities: he follows the experiences, for example, of elite Black travelers and those granted "exemptions" to move freely in the colonial era; well-off subjects of former South African Bantustans who were able to visit KNP as if citizens of other countries; local-community neighbors still involved in disputes with the park into the twenty-first century; and multiracial groups of schoolchildren at the end of apartheid who visited the park together from urban cities. Tactics of accommodation and resistance help show how there is no one history of KNP, nor one Black experience of twentieth-century South Africa. Dlamini provided an engaging social history of KNP centering these many Black experiences. Scholars writing on South African Black livelihoods, he argues, too often foreground a narrative frame of dispossession. Dlamini does not shy away from discussing dispossession: he traces the story of Swazi chief Lugedlana Ngomane and the forced relocation of the Ngomane peoples, first in 1902 to accommodate reserve animals, and again in 1954 for a railway line to Mozambique. Yet in Safari Nation Dlamini transcends one-dimensional discussions of displacement, writing: "Scholars' focus on these narratives has blinded us to dimensions of the black experience of protected areas defined not by dispossession but by possession, not by hostility but by ambivalence—if not appropriation" (16). Accordingly, we might situate Safari Nation alongside other critical South African histories: Rueedi's (2021) work on the Vaal uprising, Phillips's (2018) articles on social class formation in Lebowa, and Nieftagodien's (2014) work reframing the Soweto uprising. Dlamini's discussion of Black presence in KNP reveals an extensive history of Black South Africans (and Mozambiquans) with many overlapping and conflicting relations to the park. KNP, after all, was fixed and bounded as a "state within a state" (21) but in practice has long functioned as a fluid zone of movement across regions and among peoples. This history engages those indigenous to the area, those traveling [End Page 85] great lengths and with great personal risk to visit the park, and those employed as domestic servants with the park, and as rangers tasked with overseeing it. The book is not structured chronologically but rather thematically, engaging poaching, migrant labor, and Black tourism (part I, chapters 1–4), and Black mobility, local-community engagements, and struggles and contestations with the park across history (part II, chapters 5–8). Dlamini also lays bare the "incoherence" of colonial and apartheid rule, with overlapping bureaucracies like the National Parks Board, the Native Affairs Department, and the Witwatersrand Native Labor Association (Wanela), each with distinct motivations and incentives toward KNP. Dlamini's engagement with former South African Bantustans and in particular the Gazankulu Bantustan abutting KNP is a strong point of the book. Dlamini combines an accessible overall framing of the homelands system with in-depth research that sheds new light on tourism, development, and ecological management as interests for Bantustans' governments. One of these former Bantustan leaders, Hudson Ntsanwisi of Gazankulu, was a conservationist thinking critically about political ecology and stewardship between KNP and Bantustans, and their overlapping ecological systems. Much as Dlamini explores how Bantustans...

‘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.

“I am berated as a Communist because I sometimes wear a red tie”: Not Forgetting the Awkward Afrikaner, Dr Petronella “Nell” van Heerden

This article explores the shifts in (in)visibility of one of the few “leftist” female Afrikaner public intellectuals in twentieth-century South Africa. The Afrikaner nationalist embrace of Dr. Petronella “Nell” van Heerden (1887–1975), the country’s first woman gynecologist, soon turned into marginalization, showing the limits of colonial white dissidence.

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.

Twentieth-Century South Africa: a developmental history by Bill Freund

Twentieth-Century South Africa: a developmental history by Bill Freund

“What’s past is prologue”: an historical overview of judicial review in South Africa – part 2

This contribution explores the historical origins and development of judicial review in South Africa, as an indication of shifts in relations between – and of the relative legal and political powers of – the three branches of state. It also provides bibliographical details of sources chronicling these historical processes. The first part focused mainly on constitutional review, namely the power of the law courts to test the validity of statutes against constitutional criteria. This second part analyses the historical development of administrative law, especially the common-law evolution of judicial review of the decision-making processes of organs of state, and how that process unfolded reciprocally with political shifts in twentieth-century South Africa. There is also a synopsis of the introduction of administrative law as a discrete subject in South African law schools. Finally, this contribution briefly explores historical aspects of the role of interpretation of statutes in the context of administrative law, and briefly touches on special statutory review as distinct from common-law review.

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.

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...