Editorial

There are some strong recurring themes in this unusually rich issue, which cross over the sections into which they have been organised. There is also plenty of sex, violence, and politics, not to mention witchcraft, diamonds, football and popular music, making this one of our more racy issues. Added to this are contributions that revisit and build upon more established JSAS themes, such as struggles for liberation across the region, and the politics of race, gender, generation, class and, interestingly caste, in colonial literature, in popular and political culture, and in the forging of labour practices and urban communities. Most of the articles focus on South Africa, but there are also three important contributions from Zimbabwe, one on Botswana, and a review article on recent scholarship on Namibia's genocide. Furthermore, many of the South African articles raise important discussions that are salient and relevant across the region. All of this makes for an exceptionally dynamic and diverse collection, reflecting the diversity and dynamism of the region's social, cultural and political life and history.

The issue opens with an article by Bonthuys exploring the ‘moral panic’ that emerged in South Africa before the 2010 World Cup, about an anticipated increase in demands for commercial sex, and fears that this would lead to a dramatic rise in sex trafficking to accompany the event. This article not only contributes to an already burgeoning body of literature on the South African world cup – which will be joined by another article appearing in a future issue of JSAS – it also reflects a recent resurgence in academic work exploring ‘moral panics’ across the region.1 Bonthuys argues that despite various efforts to use the context of these media-stoked fears, to argue for the legalisation of sex work and increased protection for sex workers, exaggerated claims about the numbers of women and even children who would be trafficked, ‘often instead provide justification for the harassment and punishment of sex workers’. In the end the anticipated fears did not materialise, but the ‘preoccupation with trafficking and child sexual abuse’ did distract attention from the ‘factors [that] create and sustain the conditions which force women to resort to sex work’, such as the ‘commercial interests’ and wider societal ‘beliefs about sexuality’ which ‘uphold women's economic dependence on men and the routine exploitation of women's sexuality’.

A different mixture of gender issues and sport appears in the article in the following section – Masculinity, Violence and Virtue in South Africa. Carton and Morrell deploy an historical analysis of stick fighting – once a favourite pastime of Zulu herd boys in the pastures – to critique and substantially nuance ‘ingrained conceptions of Zulu masculinity’. Acknowledging that ‘academic scrutiny of the mfecane has [already] exposed the limits of power and cruelty in Shaka's kingdom’, their starting point is the observation that this wider critique has often fallen short of undermining stereotypes of violent Zulu masculinity, in which ‘formative practices such as stick fighting’ continue to be seen as ‘a primordial conduit for the patriarchal aggression fuelling South Africa's high rates of violence’.

With an historical approach that transverses the political upheavals of the nineteenth century and the industrialisation and urbanisation of the twentieth century, Carton and Morrell argue that contrary to the common stereotypes about male Zulu aggressiveness, ‘stick fighting long adhered to rules of competition that privileged rhetoric, honour and self defence’. During the turbulent transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘virtues of physical restraint’ they suggest, ‘imbued Zulu masculinity with an ethos of self control that sustained family homesteads buffeted by royal Zulu fratricide, colonial land appropriation and the dislocating effects of labour migrancy’. Drawing insight from Connell's notion of ‘plural masculinities’ and John Illiffe's influential work on honour – particularly his distinction between ‘heroic’ and ‘household’ honour – they argue that stick fighting was one of the means by which young Zulu men were instilled with plural masculinities that both celebrated the heroic ‘bravery of warriors’ and combined quotidian qualities of ‘patience, sobriety, wisdom’ with ‘duty to kin and cohort’.2 These ‘honourable behaviours’ and the related attributes of discipline and respect were essential to the maintenance of generational hierarchies, even as the restrictions they imposed sometimes became the source of generational tensions and disquiet. While they acknowledge that ‘martial play was integral to stick fighting’, Carton and Morrell describe how more often ‘the stick served as a signifier of generational deference and homestead security’ and ‘only under certain fleeting circumstances did it symbolise something martial’. Furthermore they conclude that the ‘evidence indicates that from the beginning of the nineteenth century the sporadic sparring sessions of herd boys conditioned them to labour – as opposed to battle – for patriarch, chief and king; and later during white rule to work as “farm boys”, “dock boys”, “house boys”, “mine boys” and “police boys”’. They are rightly surprised that ‘with such emasculating paths to maturity entrenched by settler power in the twentieth century’ pervading stereotypes continue to present Zulu men as ‘preternatural warriors’. Perhaps even more startling is their speculation about the future of stick fighting. With the increasing commodification of culture and community as heritage tourism, and with a continuing lack of job opportunities in industry and manufacturing, a sport enjoyed by Zulu youth that once inscribed and expressed notions of restraint, discipline and respect, might for some become ‘secure employment as a “mock” warrior’ in the hospitality industry.

It does seem an oddity of the current conglomeration of trends in historiography, commemoration and heritage across the region, that while such deeply problematic stereotypes of male Zulu preponderance to violence continue to appear ever more celebrated, and commercially viable, other much more violent and undeniably devastating histories of colonial and apartheid-era violence sometimes seem sanitise-able into symbols of reconciliation, particularly in the aftermath of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And yet, in other contexts, as witnessed in Kössler's review article (this issue) on recent scholarship on the 1904 German genocide in Namibia, such legacies of real, terrible violence continue to be the subject of contested claims for compensation and reparation, as well as intense debates about the nature of different European colonialisms, in which some protagonists make equally problematic assertions about, for example, the genocidal ‘outflow of long-lasting traits in German culture’. Similar kinds of essentialism can also feature in cruder manifestations of the highly politicised and polarising ‘historiographies’ of nationalist struggle re-appearing across some parts of the region, such as the ‘patriotic history’ that Ranger identified in Zimbabwe.3

This provides a link to the articles in the third section of this issue – Regional Struggles for Liberation. Brown's article focuses on the Viva FRELIMO rallies that were organised in Durban and the University of the North by the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) and the Black People's Convention in 1974, two years before the Soweto Uprising of 1976, which is too often taken as the moment when South Africa's anti-apartheid movement turned to mass public protest. Engaging with a recent resurgence of academic writing on the Black Consciousness movements of the early- and mid-1970s, Brown suggests that too little attention has been paid to the significance of these rallies, which he argues ‘provided students and activists in the Black Consciousness movement with the opportunity to experiment with new forms of protest and confrontation’ well before the 1976 Uprising. The importance of these rallies as the training grounds of future protests has been underemphasised both by the overwhelming significance that has been attributed to their dramatic aftermath – the protests ‘had an immediate galvanising effect on the state’ and in the ‘subsequent period of state oppression’ most of activist leaders were detained, imprisoned or placed under banning orders, and in 1977 both organisations were banned – and by a recent tendency to focus on the ideologies and ‘intellectual production of Black Consciousness’. Emphasising the importance of studying the ‘possibilities of protest, judged in the light of a specific set of contexts – and contingencies – rather than in the light of the organisations’ ambitious rhetoric', Brown argues that Black Consciousness politics at this time developed not ‘purely as the result of intellectual or ideological considerations but rather … in response to encounters with contingent public circumstances’.

Therefore the strategies of public protest and violent confrontation that came to dominate South Africa's urban landscapes after 1976 had their origin, in part at least, in the ‘processes of experimentation’ that had marked the pro-Frelimo rallies of two years earlier. An interesting detail that emerges here is the escalating role played by public statements and press reports about FRELIMO's success in Mozambique, and about a fabled visit to Durban by FRELIMO representatives. Although this visit never materialised, the much advertised prospect of FRELIMO representatives linking with Black Consciousness activists and addressing protests in South Africa inspired both the subsequent rallies, but also ‘inflamed white public opinion’ and caused panic, thereby animating the nature of the state's violent and repressive responses. Other interesting details presented by Brown about these rallies link to other articles in this issue. For example, in the major trial that followed the rallies, senior police officers justified their violent response to the rallies by describing the activists' threatening behaviour, including the singing of protest songs such as Shosholoza (the subject of Jensen's article discussed below), the raising of ‘clenched fists in the Black Power salute’, finger-gestures, and dancing – which one police officer believed ‘were the kind used in Zulu dances’.

If Brown's analysis points not only to the practical and situational dimensions of early experimental public protests, but also the growing significance of regional liberation struggles for the development of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s, then Morapedi's contribution here considers Botswana's role in Zimbabwe's liberation struggle during the same period. Morapedi shows how the Botswana government found itself in an increasingly difficult position in the 1960s and 1970s as the Zimbabwean struggle for liberation intensified. Seeking to ‘follow a policy of diplomacy in resolving conflicts between the minority regimes’ of South Africa and Rhodesia and the liberation movements, it both ‘opposed the use of Botswana as a base from which political violence could be employed against neighbouring states’ and, at the same time, ‘opposed regimes that denied their citizens basic human rights’. Not surprisingly this two-sided policy ‘created numerous tensions and contradictions of policy’. While Botswana sought to offer ‘political sanctuary to “genuine” refugees from Zimbabwe’, it also found itself ‘at loggerheads with the liberation movements, ZANU and ZAPU, over the nature and activities of the movements’ representatives in the country', while it was also ‘trying not to offend its powerful neighbour who, in turn, proceeded to attack her in the belief that Botswana harboured “terrorists”’. It is clear this disadvantaged the Zimbabwean liberation movements tremendously, as Rhodesian security agents were able to operate extensively within Botswana, and ‘moreover, the policy invited a number of armed incursions from Rhodesia and South Africa’. Botswana even deported ‘undesirable’ Zimbabweans, which ‘jeopardised their lives and created frustration and despair among freedom fighters and the leaders of liberation movements’. Botswana's ambivalent policy also caused it problems with its northern neighbour, although, as Wilfred Mhanda's recent biography makes clear, Zambia's own involvement in Zimbabwe's liberation struggle, and especially its fractious nationalist politics, could also be deeply problematic.4 This untenable situation could not last and despite its early opposition to armed struggle in the years immediately after its independence in 1966, this position ‘progressively shifted after 1968 from one emphasising ‘rational persuasion’ to one that accepted the use of force in settling the Rhodesian conflict’. In the end, Morapedi suggests, ‘all sides did the best they could in the circumstances but no satisfactory solution to these tensions was found until the issue was closed by the Lancaster House agreement of 1979’.

The two articles in the following section, by Jensen and Mate, continue with a political focus, but set their sights on the nature of political culture, cultural politics and generational struggle, in South Africa and Zimbabwe respectively. The song Shosholoza that was sung during the pro-Frelimo rallies, and many others since, is used by Jensen as the hook upon which to hang his nuanced exploration of the different ‘strands’ that constitute political culture in South Africa today. In the post-apartheid era Shosholoza has become a symbol ‘of a new South Africa that excels in sports, and has efficient state-run services, benevolent health interventions, and cultural diversity’. But Jensen tells of another more malign use of the term and song. Drawing on rich fieldwork in the former homeland of KaNgwane, Jensen explores how Shosholoza was the term used to refer in 1986 to a group of ‘so-called comrades’ who ‘burnt (mostly) elderly people to death after accusing them of killing fellow, far away, migrant workers, through occult means’. Jensen employs these different uses of the song to unpack what he delineates as two, mutually imbricated and animating, ‘strands’ or ‘impulses’ – the ‘secular’ and the ‘occult’ – which have long co-existed in South African political culture. The ‘secular’ strand is best represented by the ANC's long-standing commitment to social justice, equality and non-racial nationalism; shared ‘secular’, ‘modern’, ‘rational’ imperatives that have dominated the political scene, in which different branches of African nationalism defined themselves and their politics against the repressive apartheid state, and which persisted ‘despite dissimilarities, disjunctions and ideological reformulations echoing the political changes of the twentieth century’. By contrast, the ‘occult’ strand, and the use of violence in ‘localised attempts to undo evil as bodily destruction’, has remained ‘relegated to obscurity and the realm of the strange’.

Using two examples from the ‘homeland’ village in Nkomas – of the ‘witch burnings’ of 1986, and of the 2003 driving out of a successful farmer ‘suspected of getting rich by killing his kin and neighbours and turning them into half-living nocturnal creatures or zombies, to work his field’ – Jensen argues that both cases drew ‘their sustenance from the intimate but reconfiguring relations between gender, generation and proletarianisation’. In the first case, the appalling working conditions and frequent deaths in the mines set the context whereby witchcraft accusations had ‘the ability to render global forces intelligible by linking them to the sphere of the intimate’. In the second case, the context was one where ‘death is still rampant but exploitation of bodies has changed radically’. With few finding employment in the mines today, but with social inequalities prevailing amidst an AIDs epidemic that is killing thousands, for many ‘it is still the rural élites that use the life blood of the poor to enrich themselves further’, and ‘both in the mid-1980s and ten years …after apartheid's demise, this warrants political responses centred on the eradication of evil rather then the injustices evoked by secular politics’. Jensen's central argument is therefore that ‘it is fruitful to look at gendered generational conflicts and proletarianisation as they have played out … throughout the last century, in order to explore the relationality between the secular and the occult in the making of political culture in South Africa’. These two ‘strands’ then are not really separable, they are mutually constitutive, as indeed Butler's notion of ‘relationality’ implies.5 Furthermore, ‘divorcing the occult from the understanding of what is real politics, is ultimately a political act constitutive of the political culture, which itself warrants analysis’. In this way any perceived ‘differences’ between the ‘strands’ or impulses that drive political culture in South Africa, reflect less the existence of a profound alterity – say between ‘secular’ and ‘occult’ understandings of politics – and more, as Florence Bernault has put it in relation to body fetishism in colonial equatorial Africa, politically and historically situated strategies for organising difference, in which everyone is complicit in different ways.6

If gendered generational conflicts are central to the ‘occult’ politics that Jensen explores, then they are also a crucial feature of the cultural politics of popular music in Zimbabwe that forms the heart of Mate's contribution to this issue. Exploring the rapid emergence since 2000 of a new genre of popular music in Zimbabwe known as ‘urban grooves’, Mate's article turns on a central absurdity that in many ways is characteristic, perhaps, of the changing nature of popular politics in Zimbabwe in the last decade. ‘Urban grooves’ emerged, in part, as a specifically political project closely aligned with ZANU(PF)'s reimagined ‘cultural nationalism’ of the ‘third Chimurenga’, a subject which has begun to receive attention recently.7 Its rapid success grew upon a ‘75 per cent local content’ policy instituted, controversially, by presidential decree in 2001, which ‘envisaged an anti-imperialist popular culture through the use of vernacular languages and local media products’. Mate describes how, ‘as broadcasters scrambled for local products’, young urban musicians used the possibilities afforded by this new policy, alongside other incentives offered by the ruling party ‘to capture hearts and minds’ of disaffected and unemployed urban youth, to establish themselves as new successful artists. Yet despite this important governmental support, within only a few years urban grooves songs were being banned from the airwaves, ‘on the grounds of their unsavoury lyrics’.

Using detailed and rich analysis of the lyrics of the ‘urban grooves’ songs that were banned, which often included highly innovative and explicit re-renderings of normal Shona linguistic structures of societal propriety and respect, Mate shows how these young artists used ‘street language not ordinarily accessible to adults, to deliver incisive critique of adult sexual excesses’. In making this argument she demonstrates not only how youth were able to expose ‘the dissonances between assumptions about Zimbabwean culture in official discourses, and the lived experiences observed by youth’, but also the limits of ZANU(PF)'s more populist efforts to co-opt potentially disruptive unemployed and disaffected youth – the so-called ‘born-free’ generation. At a time when other ruling party policies ‘sought to “re-educate”, discipline, indoctrinate and control youth to appreciate selective strands of Zimbabwean nationalist history’, such as through the coercion widely evident in the National Youth Service camps, these government sponsored artists delivered, in un-anticipated ways, un-nerving ‘challenges to gerontocracy’ and ‘profound and critical social commentaries upon the changing contradictions of gendered, generational structures of authority’. Youth music, Mate demonstrates, can indeed be ‘usefully explored as a rich source of meanings about changing gender and sexual subjectivities and experiences in Zimbabwe over the last decade’, and in ways that ZANU(PF)'s populist politicians had clearly not foreseen.

Mate's focus on linguistic innovation in Zimbabwe is a strong link to the first of the two articles in the next section, which both explore, in different ways, the first three or four years of the diamond rush in Chiadzwa, in the east of Zimbabwe, near Mutare. Soon after the presence of ngoda (diamonds) in the Marange and Chiadzwa was announced, a flood of artisanal miners, traders, and others arrived in what became known for some as ngodaland. Nyota and Sibanda take as their focus ‘the new linguistic terms and expressions that rapidly developed among this new transient community of illegal miners … to describe their activities, experiences and interactions’. They show that as the artisanal miners ‘were “digging for diamonds”, they were also “wielding new words”’. Using the notions of ‘anti-languages’ and ‘anti-structure’, Nyota and Sibanda explore ‘how Chiadzwa became a highly contested but hugely creative space in which a rich new “vocabulary” was forged, that reflected the vagaries and complexities of life in the midst of a diamond rush’, while Zimbabwe's political and economic crisis deteriorated profoundly in the rest of the country.

The magweja (artisanal miners), gwejeline (female artisanal miner), gwejana (child artisanal miner) and gwejembere (elderly artisanal miner), set up sindalos (syndicates) with mabuyer (traders), and lived together kumabase (at base camps), for security against the bablyons, magombiro and the gumha-gumha (police, thieves and swindlers), seeking to extort, bribe or steal their magoda. As if the social context was not fraught enough, the gunners (diggers) of any syndicate faced dangers from collapsing tonera (tunnels) as they followed diamond bhande (seams), or were displaced from dhips (deep pits) by rival magweja. Following the death of a gunner in a collapsed tonera, a not infrequent occurrence, magweja might celebrate because ‘such deaths were sometimes interpreted as a kind of kuchekeresa; a form of human sacrifice … often associated with … witchcraft … believed to ensure future wealth and success’. Thereafter, as Nyota and Sibanda also discuss, the process of skating (sieving) the mutaka (wet soil) to retrieve diamonds, and then the transactions that followed with sometimes swindling or stingy mabuyer, could be easily as fraught as the digging that preceded it. The ‘anti-language’ that Nyota and Sibanda describe is indeed ‘vivid and rich’ and ‘gives a fascinating sense of the socio-economic make-up … and political economy in which they operated’. Furthermore, although there was sometimes a ‘comity of communitas’ forged ‘within the anti-structure’ of these ‘new forms of social relationships and organisation’, as ‘Turner predicted, old social structures and hierarchies were also re-affirmed’. But most of all Nyota and Sibanda's article illustrates ‘the high levels of creativity and tenacity with which Zimbabweans engaged with the opportunities presented to them’ in the context of Zimbabwe's wider economic despair, until of course the ‘ZANU(PF)-aligned military violently asserted its control over the diamond fields’ at the end of 2008 and early 2009.

Nyamunda and Mukwambo's article is very much a companion to Nyota and Sibanda's contribution. They too focus on the development of mining and trading at Chiadzwa in the period between 2006 and 2009, but their purpose is to unpack the complexity of different interests and actors, and the ambiguous roles played by different branches of the state ‘in the early dynamics of diamond exploitation’. Setting their article more firmly than Nyota and Sibanda do, in the context of Zimbabwe's worsening economic and political crisis, and the internal displacements this has caused, as well as the rise of what Jones has called the ‘kukiyakiya’ economy,8 Nyamunda and Mukwambo's article highlights, in particular, ‘the fragmentary nature of the state’, and the shifting strategies and legitimising discourses of different vested interests. While early on the heads of statutory mining corporations, local ZANU(PF) politicians seeking re-election, and even the provincial governor ‘encouraged free mining for all inhabitants of Marange and surrounding areas’, later this policy shifted profoundly, culminating in the extremely violent expulsions of artisanal miners and diamond traders by soldiers in early 2009, in Operation Hakudzokwi, during which hundreds of people were killed.

Both the early tolerance of informal miners and later their expulsion were justified using discourses of ‘indigenisation’ and ‘black empowerment’. Initially this was framed in terms of local benefits for Marange's population, and related to local rumours that narrated the discovery of diamonds ‘in term of miraculous, ancestral or divine intervention’; stories that ‘were encouraged rather than dismissed by state officials, politicians and the media’. One such account tells of ‘a certain Chiadzwa villager [who] received a vision from his ancestors about “the gift of the diamonds” that was to provide a reprieve for local inhabitants from the harsh economic challenges’. In November 2006 ‘traditional leaders’ and a spirit medium even managed to stall plans to seal off the diamond fields. But later on ‘other elements within the state argued that the diamonds were a national resource that should be exploited by formal mining operations, insisting that the “free for all” claim was a cover for big politicians who sought to secretly exploit the diamonds by hiding behind artisanal activities while reaping huge benefits’. Here the indigenisation discourse ‘had shifted to favour order and formal enterprise in mineral exploitation. To enforce this new idea of order, violence was seen as necessary to expel the “illegal” elements that had rooted themselves in Chiadzwa’. Although local groups initially ‘evolved coping strategies in their efforts to continue benefiting from the resource’, and some magweja resisted removal so that ‘running battles’ between police and miners were reported in the press, ultimately the consequences of this shifting strategy were profound. As Nyamunda and Mukwambo put it, ‘On the 1^st of January 2009, scores of people who had been driven out of Chiadzwa could be seen walking … over 70 km into Mutare’. Ironically, the ‘shift to militarisation in Chiadzwa coincided at national level with the shift towards establishing the Unity government’ that was announced a month later. Quite possibly, senior ZANU(PF) interests wanted to secure control of the fields before the new government was formed, echoing more recent events around newly discovered gold deposits in Kwekwe.9 What also remains unclear is the role played by De Beers (which had been prospecting in the area with a licence for a number of years) both before and after the presence of diamonds in the area had been announced. It is likely, however, that although the diverse and transient community of magweja that sprang up around Chiadzwa has now, for the most part, been dispersed, the new vocabularies that they forged will remain testimony to the creativity and tenacity of Zimbabweans in moments of opportunity and adversity.

One of the interesting details regarding the situation at Chiadzwa that Nyota and Sibanda discuss is the way in which particular syndicates took on names and attributes related to where they came from; so there was a syndicate of ‘former small-scale gold-miners’ or ‘makorokoza’ from the Midlands, known as maShurugwi, and who were renowned for their particular ruthlessness. Other syndicates took on the names of townships like Mbare or Mufakose, from where their members came. There was even a group from Great Zimbabwe University who were named in a similar manner. This linking of identity, occupation and origins to the small-scale, and here informal, organisation of work and labour at the diamond fields, connects their article to the next two articles in the issue, collected under a section entitled Labour and Community in Cape Town. The first of these articles, by Dhupelia Mesthrie, focuses on Gujarati shoemakers in Cape Town. Writing against, or beyond a historiography of Indian South Africans that has tended to centre on Natal and the Witwatersrand, and ‘this historiography's neglect of caste’, she uses ‘the narratives of those engaged in making, repairing or selling shoes’ as a means of understanding ‘caste as occupation’, throughout twentieth century Cape Town.

Particularly interesting is her account of how ‘caste organisation’ enabled an economic and social mobility that Gujarati women found ‘empowering’, allowing them to move beyond ‘domesticity’. Beyond merely enabling a new kind of social mobility however, Mesthrie reports that there was often ‘pride by the males in what these women achieved’ and indeed sometimes ‘the trained woman shoemaker became as steeped in the love of the craft as the male’. The shoemaker's economy was family centred, however one crucial dimension of the social mobility this caste occupation afforded in South Africa, was increased access to education. Perceived as low class, ‘Mochis’ in particular ‘saw education as a sign of progress’, as was the ‘acquisition of property’. As they sought to ‘uplift themselves’, some re-styled themselves as ‘Kshatriyas’ and ‘sought to locate warrior ancestors and lineages’, even as they tried to reconstitute themselves ‘as part of a new South African citizenry’, and gain ‘acceptance as equals amongst whites’. Educated, third generation, Mochi youth ‘for whom caste had less emotional resonance’, entered the wider economy, and challenged their elders to transform ‘their caste-based body’. There were simmering tensions in the 1970s and the relocation to the ‘Rylands’ area of Cape Town was accompanied by ‘a greater growth of Mochi consciousness’ as caste divisions became an increasing source of disquiet. However, the ‘late years of the twentieth century saw an easing of tensions amongst the Gujarati Hundu organisations’, as renewed efforts were made to organise not along caste distinctions, but as Hindus. The stories that Mesthrie discusses to unpack this history of caste, occupation and community in Cape Town, richly ‘reveals their narrators’ multifaceted and historically layered identities as Mochis, Gujarati Hindus, Capetonians … as Indians … and, finally, as South Africans'.

If the history that Mesthrie's nuanced article discusses can be loosely read as a movement towards a more homogeneous, and less internally differentiated kind of unity amongst Indian South Africans, then the story that Millstein and Jordhus-Lier tell of the casualisation ‘from below’ of labour practices and local civil society dynamics in the Delft suburb of Cape Town, suggests that very different kinds of processes have begun to take shape in wake of apartheid's demise. It is not a very comfortable story, but nevertheless perhaps a predictable one, to do with the growing ‘NGO-ification’ of a previously vibrant and politically active civil society. It traces how non-government organisations, businesses and some municipal sectors have been involved in an institutionalisation of the use of casual labour, and the political effects this has had on urban communities at a very local level. Their analysis shows how, in their words, ‘tensions between interventions for poverty alleviation and local democratic reforms play out as questions of representation and participation’. This casualisation of labour was instituted in ‘many parts of the municipality’, and in development projects, but was also crucially legitimised by community-based organisations (CBOs). Because CBOs were ‘concerned with local participation and development, they grasped political opportunities to make claims upon local government and access vital resources’. In so doing they encouraged the institutionalisation of causal labour practices ‘from below’, which ‘territorialised notions of entitlements and rights, leading to a simultaneous shift towards fragmentation and territorialisation of interests’. In other words, CBO involvement ‘intensified local struggles over resources’ and created ‘new insider-outsider dynamics’ which threatened ‘to fragment historical forms of class based solidarity’. These results both challenged political aims of the ‘integration of an urban landscape deeply divided by class and race’ and ‘might unintentionally contribute to the depoliticisation of participation’ as ‘new labour practices become “locked” in a localised approach’ – or indeed a localist approach – ‘in ways that impede broader mobilsation across identities and places’. In many ways then, this is a story that defies both the history of civil society involvement in the anti-apartheid movements, and the growing ‘unity’ one might read in Mesthrie's account of the Gujarati shoemakers, thereby illustrating something of the diversity and complexity of labour, politics and community across different urban areas in Cape Town.

The two articles in the next section share a literary focus. The first, by Jones, looks at ‘representations of street movement in Peter Abrahamss's novel Mine Boy (1946) in order to think through the novel's ideological tensions and their relation to urban space’. It links to the articles in the previous section by its urban and labour focus on pre-apartheid Johannesburg. But most of all, Jones argues, this is a novel about black movements through, and in part constitutive of, the city, despite the fact that the experiences of its protagonist, Xuma, ‘are shaped by the racist restrictions and segregations of colonial capital’. Noting that other scholars have identified both Marxist and liberal humanist influences in Abrahamss's novel, Jones is determined to read both these impulses in the book as ‘an intervention in the formation of black urbanism in segregationist South Africa’. In her effort to move beyond interpretations that have emphasised how ‘Abrahamss's vision of Johannesburg stresses the estranging and dehumanising experience of being black in a South African city’, Jones is remarkably effective in revealing his ‘efforts to make the metropole habitable for black people’. Above all else it is Jones's focus on movement in Mine Boy which makes her analysis so powerful. As she puts it, in the novel it is movement which ‘announces Xuma's identity as urban and as his self-conception shifts, so the spaces of the city are delineated not by white industry or leisure but by black labour, black relationships and black ways of living’. It is through movement, therefore, that Abrahamss wrote ‘blacks into the cityscape’, and ‘offers counterstatement to official discourses that regulated and elided black urbanisms’. One can imagine that pro-apartheid protagonists might have reviled as abhorrent ‘the expression of black modernities’ encapsulated by the black movements of Abrahams's novel. No doubt they might also have loathed Abrahams's efforts to ‘confirm black identities within the paradigm of universal humanity’ which Jones's analysis so clearly reveals. However much ‘Abrahams's attempted synthesis of Marxism and liberal humanism generates a somewhat awkward politics’, Jones concludes that the value of Mine Boy ‘resides in a vision of the urban that contests the discriminations of colonial Johannesburg and gestures towards new and inclusive formations of public space’.

The penultimate article in this issue, Anderson's discussion of ‘errant satire’ and ‘historical gainsaying’ in A.G. Bain's poem ‘Kaatje Kekkelbek’, not only takes us to another time, to the nasty and brutish colonial frontier of the 1830s, but also to the repellent reactionism of colonists and explorers against ‘the humanitarianian ascendency’ prevalent after ‘the proclamation of Ordinance 50’ in 1828, and particularly the inquiry the followed the gruesome killing of Hintsa in 1835. Unpicking the satire embedded in Bain's foundational, if unpleasant, ‘doggeral squib’ which surprisingly still ‘lies to the front of anthologies of English and Afrikaans poetry’, Anderson warns against a confusion of the ‘subject of the poem here – the Khoi woman, Kaatje – with its object, or target’, which was the growing humanitarianism of the time. His purpose is to expose the historical context of the poem's satire, and its grotesque representations of ‘Hottentots’, deployed for the purposes of defending the most gruesome of colonist attitudes and violence. And in so doing, he ably shows how ‘bringing the text and history into their proper and properly muddled proximity’ can be a productive exercise for both historian and literary scholar. An interesting picture also emerges of A.G. Bain himself; ‘farmer-to-be’, explorer, saddle maker, geologist, writer, poet and military officer, but also clearly a man aggrieved at the loss of his farm, which had been returned to the Xhosa in the ‘Retrocession’ of 1836. For Anderson the precedent for this poem lies, partly perhaps, in the personal grievances of a disgruntled colonial settler/explorer, but also wider, ‘in the pages and voices of the frontier, the court reports, the oaths on the street and the minutes of meetings in the Kat river settlement’. In Bain's own words, ‘one of the central occupations of the settler's “gay and rambling” life was “Whigs abusing”, and that’, we are told ‘is what “Kaatje Kekkelbek” set out to do’. Far from being ‘gay and rambling’, the impression a reader now is left with, is that this was, to say the least, an unpleasant time. But Anderson succeeds in showing that it was also a formative one. It was, he tells us, ‘a very textual decade’.

If the colonial frontier in South Africa in the 1830s was both hugely cruel and formative (at least in a literary sense), then the ‘genocide perpetrated by German colonial troops against Ovaherero and Nama’ nearly a century later, cannot be adequately described in such terms. Yet the question about whether this dreadful episode was determinative or reflective of a ‘specifically German historical trajectory’ (the ‘sonderweg’), that culminated in, or was otherwise linked to, the Holocaust 40 years later, is one that has clearly pre-occupied a burgeoning body of literature on Namibia's genocide, and also in and on Germany itself. In the last article of this issue, Kössler reviews two books that ‘stand for important strands of these exchanges and debates’, and offers a critical glance at the broader issues at stake. He does come down on one side, arguing that if too much weight is placed upon the notion of a specific German trajectory ‘from “Windhoek” to “Auschwitz”’, then ‘the overall question of colonialism is easily lost sight of’. Instead, situating the genocide ‘within the overall context of colonialism and modernity’ can avoid ‘the drawbacks of such provincialism’ but also, importantly, evade ‘falling into the traps of apologetics by pointing to the crimes of others’. The stakes are clearly very high here for all concerned; from the descendents of genocide victims demanding apology and reparation, to the lawyers-come-historians who represent them in courts and/or in books, in Namibia, Germany and elsewhere. Being mindful of the broader colonial context ‘does not need to obliterate the specific traits of events’, because this genocide doubtlessly, and horrifically, ‘stands out in the annals of European colonialism’. But, he concludes, such ‘a research agenda … seems still in its initial stages’, and ‘more comparative perspectives on colonial regimes’ are still needed. Kössler's discussion illustrates some of the difficulties involved in doing history and historiography on legacies of violence, an issue that, for all the particularities of Namibia's past, and Germany's own exceptionalisms, resonates and rebounds in different forms across the region and beyond.

Notes

¹ For other recent literature on the 2010 World Cup see, for example, the Special Issue of Soccer and Society, 11, 3 (2010), entitled ‘South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid and Beyond’, and the Special Issue of Third World Quarterly, entitled ‘Mainstreaming Sport into International Development Studies’, 32, 3 (2011). A forthcoming issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies (JSAS) will include an article by Shaheed Tayob – ‘The 2010 World Cup as a Case Study of Millennial Capitalism in Practice’. For more on moral panics across the region, see for example, I. Niehaus, ‘Maternal Incest as Moral Panic: Envisioning Futures without Fathers in the South African Lowveld’, JSAS, 36, 4 (December 2010), pp. 833–50; and P. Kaarsholm, ‘Moral Panic and Cultural Mobilisation: Responses to Transition, Crime and HIV/AIDS in KwaZulu-Natal’, Development and Change, 36, 1 (January 2005), pp. 133–56.

² R.W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Palo Alto, CA, Stanford University Press, 1987); J. Illiffe, Honour in African History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005).

³ T. Ranger, ‘Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe’, JSAS, 30, 2 (June 2004).

⁴ W. Mhanda, Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter (Harare, Weaver Press, 2011).

⁵ J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London, Verso, 2004), pp. 22–24.

⁶ See F. Bernault, ‘Body, Power and Sacrifice in Equatorial Africa’, Journal of African History, 47 (2006), pp. 207–39.

⁷ See, for example, S.J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and W. Willems, ‘Making Sense of Cultural Nationalism and the Politics of Commemoration under the Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe’, JSAS, 35, 4 (2009).

⁸ J.L. Jones “‘Nothing is Straight in Zimbabwe”: The Rise of the Kukiya-kiya Economy 2000–2008’, JSAS, 36, 2 (June 2010), pp. 285–300.

⁹ See for example, swradio.com , ‘ZANU PF claim they ‘own’ Kwekwe gold deposits’, 9 January 2012, available at http://www.swradioafrica.com/2012/01/09/zanu-pf-claim-they-own-kwekwe-gold-deposits/, accessed on 27 January 2012; Newsday, ‘Kwekwe Gold Rush: Police Respond’, 27 January 2012.