Editorial

This double issue, which includes a Part-Special Issue, ranges widely across the regions and disciplines showcased in JSAS. The Part-Special Issue focuses on ‘Histories of Protest in East London and the Eastern Cape’, with a particular focus on the events of what has come to be known as Bloody Sunday, 9 November 1952. That day saw police shoot scores of black people over several hours, and the deaths of two white people, one of them an Irish nun, killed in crowd retaliation. The Part-Special Issue originated in the conference of the Southern African Historical Society held in East London in June 2022, where several papers addressed the protests that took place in that city 70 years before and Mignonne Breier launched her award-winning book which uncovered South Africa’s ‘secret’ massacre.¹ Her introduction discusses the articles which follow, identifying their main themes and their links, written by Leslie Bank, Hlengiwe Ndlovu, Mignonne Breier, Katie Carline and one by William Beinart and Colin Bundy.

The other 11 articles bear directly upon six of the countries in the region (Botswana, Mozambique, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Rwanda, South Africa and Tanzania) while two of them are also partly located in what are today Namibia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. The latter two articles, by Lieneke de Visser and Lazlo Passemiers, respectively, both deal with aspects of liberation movements operating in the demanding context of exile. De Visser explores in close detail the deaths of four senior African National Congress and Umkhonto we Sizwe operatives who disappeared during what was intended to be a clandestine return to South Africa from Zambia, but whose precise fates remained uncertain. Using oral histories and the National Archives of Namibia, she has identified the circumstances of their demise in the Eastern Caprivi, led by a local fisherman (paid for his act) into a police ambush. Passemiers traces the efforts of the Mozambique Revolutionary Committee (Coremo), Mozambique’s second-largest liberation movement, to win the support of the Congolese government in Kinshasa and to enter an alliance with the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA). Passemiers argues that the bulk of scholarship on lusophone liberation movements has been on the so-called ‘authentic’ movements, which received Organisation of African Unity (OAU) recognition ‘and were generally backed by the Soviet Union’. He locates his study among others which explore how ‘inauthentic’ liberation movements ‘navigated the complex regional, continental and international political arena’.

These two articles derive from and feed into a major development within the history of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid liberation struggles in southern Africa: work which emphasises the transnational dynamics of liberation struggles – ideological, organisational, military and strategic – and how these both complicate and illuminate existing narratives.² In addition to their subject matter, both articles reflect a central trend in the scholarship on transnational struggles in the way that they combine oral sources (particularly important as the decades slip by) with archival sources, including some available only relatively recently.

A second cluster comprises three articles which deal with different aspects of agriculture and rural life in the region. Erik Green and Mark Nyandoro ask why average African farming households in Native Purchase Areas (NPAs) were more successful, with higher yields and productivity, than average farming households in communal areas known during the colonial period as ‘native reserves’. In 1931, the Land Apportionment Act formalised the segregated division of land between black and white rural populations; but it also allowed a minority of wealthier Africans to buy land in NPAs and to enjoy private property rights. Despite the rarity of such provisions in colonial times, the performance of this group of farmers has received limited academic investigation. Green and Nyandoro challenge the assumption in mainstream economics that private property rights were straightforwardly responsible for better performance. Instead, they argue that changes in property rights led to shifts in labour relations. NPA households invested considerably more working time in farming, using non-family labour. NPA farmers were able to attract various forms of non-family labour: their farms were worked by wage labourers, sharecroppers and labour tenants.

Joshua Bell and Sally Matthews ask whether certification by Fairtrade International (FTI) for South African wine producers guarantees social upgrading for the workers on their farms. They locate their study within a literature critical of the operation of the Fairtrade label, finding that Fairtrade labelling elsewhere in the world at best ‘yields ambiguous results’. Producers certified by FTI are ‘able to sell their products at a higher market price, with a portion of that sale price being allocated towards a Fairtrade premium which is intended to improve worker wages and conditions’. Bell and Matthews point out that the decision in 2003 to extend certification to commercial wine farmers in South Africa was controversial given the history of exploitation and oppression on the country’s wine farms. The article is based upon research undertaken on five Fairtrade wine farms and reports on interviews with 30 men and women – who identified themselves as ‘coloured’ – who worked on these farms. Their conclusions are arguably both predictable and depressing. Precarious employment and labour casualisation undercut living standards; particularly during the harvest season, work is arduous and incurs inadequately treated health issues; workers’ dependency on their employers to provide and maintain decent living conditions ‘remains painfully reminiscent of South Africa’s historical legacy of oppression on farms’. Workers’ accounts of their experiences indicate that individuals are often dismissed for arbitrary reasons. The practices alleged by those interviewed clearly fall far short of the social upgrading (regular employment, workers’ rights and social protection) intended as a consequence of FTI certification. In several respects, this article complements a recent critical account in JSAS of the failure of so-called access and benefit sharing schemes, taking rooibos as a case study.³

The third article in this cluster deals not with the lived realities of agricultural production and farm labour but with an essentially ideological view of rural enterprise and the virtues of rural identity. Phuthego Phuthego Molosiwa examines the striking extent to which, in its first decade of independence, Botswana’s national policy and popular discourse propounded a nation of farmers comprised of masculine, rural citizens. Between independence in 1966 and 1976, President Seretse Khama, in particular, lent his authority to the valorisation of the virtues of farm life, in an attempt to stem processes of urbanisation and its perceived dangers. ‘Botswana is and must remain a nation of farmers’, declared Khama in 1970: ‘[w]e are constantly telling our people that Botswana’s hopes of general prosperity rest on the development of agriculture and animal husbandry’. An idealised version of rural enterprise and masculine hard work was interlaced with an anti-urban rhetoric designed to encourage Batswana men to return to the land. The government-owned magazine Kutlwano became a national platform for this strain of political and cultural discourse, promoting rural lifestyles ‘as the source of the nation’s and Batswana men’s gendered and cultural identities’. Molosiwa demonstrates convincingly that popular discourse, political rhetoric and state policy were yoked together in the project of constructing an ideal rural masculine citizenship to ward off the growth of towns and cities and circular migratory patterns – even while urbanisation contributed significantly to the country’s impressive economic growth. He concludes that ‘very few men today constitute that ideal social class of masculine farmer citizens that formed the benchmark of success during the 1960s and 1970s’.

There follow six articles on topics so disparate as to defeat any attempt at clustering, ranging as they do across the development of tennis in the Cape Colony, attempts to understand and control ‘dagga’ in South Africa, Chinese counterfeit goods in Botswana, gender quotas in Tanzanian political parties, public order policing in South Africa, and Rwanda’s military counterterrorism in Mozambique. They are presented in roughly the chronological order of their subject matter.

An interesting development within South African historical scholarship has been a surge of publications on the history of sport – as evidenced in JSAS, which since 2015 has published ten articles on aspects of the history of organised sport, compared with four in its first 40 years! These are now joined by Francois Cleophas’s lively account of the origins and early history of tennis in the 19th century Cape Colony. Tennis has not yet received anything like the attention paid to the history of cricket, rugby and football in South Africa (although the exception to this generalisation is the recent publication of Saleem Badat’s book on the tour to play in European tournaments of six young players selected by the non-racial Southern African Lawn Tennis Union).⁴ Lawn tennis – as opposed to the much older real tennis, played in an indoors court – was only established as a game in England in the 1860s and 1870s, and its formal rules drawn up in 1875. Yet it is remarkable how rapidly the game took hold and then spread in the Colony. By the 1880s, Cleophas narrates, ‘tennis had become part of the local industry of Cape colonial society’, essentially a middle-class anglophone pursuit. Prime Minister John X. Merriman asserted in 1885 that ‘[w]herever Englishmen made their home, tennis was played with vigour’. The game flourished in elite private schools, in newly formed clubs and in courts built in the gardens of Cape Town’s wealthier citizens. Girls were taught to play at the All Saints School in Wynberg, a southern suburb of the city, and the earliest known photograph of tennis in the Cape is of that school’s players in 1876. The courts built in luxurious suburban homes allowed women to play the game in privacy. Cleophas concludes by pointing out the scope for future work on the history of tennis in South Africa to examine the game played by Africans at mission schools ‘and by Afrikaner communities in rural villages’.

Thembisa Waetjen and Perside Ndandu trace the history of cannabis – dagga – during the years before the formation of the Union of South Africa and the early decades of the Union period. They explore dagga’s ‘ontological journeys’: how it was named and understood, used and perceived by different communities, and ultimately how it became an object of governance. After the South African War, Cape colonial doctors, politicians and farmers initiated controls over the plant. The consumption of dagga took on new meanings across new political frontiers as employers and administrators fretted about the effects of smoking dagga. Waetjen and Ndandu use two influential texts to illustrate racialised anxieties about dagga’s threats to morality, health and public order. Dr. C.J.G. Bourhill wrote a thesis in 1910 on dagga smoking ‘among the Native Races of South Africa’ and its resultant evils; he was particularly concerned by the drug’s consequences in the urban workspace but regarded it as a relatively benign habit among rural ‘tribal’ peoples. Just over a decade later, the Secretary of Public Heath, J.A. Mitchell, published a pamphlet (subsequently distributed internationally by the League of Nations) identifying various social, economic and moral degradations consequent upon dagga smoking, with effects of interracial mixing and race degeneration. Like Bourhill, Mitchell believed that the use of cannabis by rural, traditional African communities was less harmful; but that it became a dangerous pollutant in multiracial urban spaces. Dagga was re-defined as a dangerous drug, and its use prohibited by law in 1922. Dagga was now subject to the ‘central authority of the Union state and its police, customs officials, magistrates and gaols’. Finally, the authors describe a shifting compromise between the state and the gold-mining industry – its closed compounds regarded as zones of exception – over the importation and use of the drug by migrant workers.

The consumption and circulation of very different kinds of commodities – clothes, shoes, cell phones, tools and electronics – is the subject of Yanyin Zi’s article on Chinese counterfeits and their implications for the Botswanan economy. Counterfeit is defined as ‘tangible goods that infringe trademarks, design rights or patents’, in defiance of intellectual property rights. Zi outlines the intriguing history of counterfeit production in China, stretching back to the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912). Essentially this is the story of how under successive Qing governments a ‘copy culture’ transformed the importation of unprocessed material from foreign countries to cultivate a domestic industry and eventually to fuel its own export trade. In the late 19th century, consumer demand for cheap alternatives to expensive European items spurred Chinese manufacturers to offer similar but cheaper items. The contemporary version of the ‘copy culture’ took off in Botswana in the early 21st century. By 2013, approximately 1,000 ‘China shops’ were spread across the country, in cities and rural towns. These served as a ladder for Chinese merchants to scale their businesses from retail to wholesale, and then to manufacturing – which, Zi argues, met local market needs, helped develop Batswana traders and even incubated domestic manufacturing. For years, Botswana’s national and local governments were willing to overlook counterfeit trading, provided that Chinese merchants paid taxes and employed local people. The journey from ‘caca’ and ‘fong kong’ (local nicknames for Chinese counterfeit goods) to ‘made in Botswana’ items has shaped Botswana’s trading and industrial environment. Botswana’s fluid policy demonstrates that Chinese businesses can be led to benefit the local economy. The mechanism of counterfeiting, Zi concludes, can be a catalyst in promoting globalisation and local development.

Victoria Lihiru provides a detailed examination of the efficacy of voluntary gender quotas in fast-tracking the participation of women in Tanzania to positions of political power. Despite arguments against the use of gender quotas, she notes, a robust body of evidence points to their utility in countering the institutionalised inequalities between men and women. Since the reintroduction of multiparty democracy in 1992, there has been growing pressure for institutions, including political parties, to adopt affirmative action to offset persistent biases and discrimination against women’s participation in the political arena. The national constitution of 1977 and the 1985 Elections Act were amended in 2002, including the creation of a Special Seats provision, reserving 15 per cent of seats in the National Assembly and 25 per cent of seats in local councils for women. Lihiru focuses on the constitutions of the CCM, Tanzania’s longest-serving ruling party, and the main opposition party, CHADEMA, in order to assess their commitment to advancing women’s representation in leadership positions and candidate lists. Lihiru demonstrates that while women continue to be loyal party members, supporters, mobilisers and voters they remain under-represented in parties’ decision-making positions, organs and candidate lists. She criticises Tanzania’s First Past the Post electoral system for its assumption that men and women enjoy equal status and acceptance by political parties and the electorate, as the system fails to mitigate specific challenges facing women engaged in political life. Both the CCM and CHADEMA justify their unwillingness to adopt voluntary gender quotas for leadership and candidacy positions on legal grounds, and because of the special seats system. Although the two parties’ constitutions recognise women’s rights to representation as enshrined in international conventions and national legislation, ‘such commitments largely start and end with the establishment in each party of women’s wings’.

Moving far away from formal structures, processes, constitutions and elections, Gary Kynoch’s article focuses on unruly contestations between protesting citizens and police. The police officers whose experiences and views are at the heart of his study are members of Public Order Police (POP) units, ‘arguably the most contentious and visible aspect of South African policing’. Kynoch uses interviews with 43 serving POP officers at four units (in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg) ranging in rank from constable to colonel. In 2016 Jane Duncan wrote that ‘South Africa has truly become a country defined by its protests’ and there is substantial literature on the causes, content and character of popular protest.⁵ Kynoch’s research complements this body of work by shifting the focus from the actions and motivations of protestors to those who are charged with policing the ‘protest nation’.

Kynoch charts the significant changes in how the state has handled protests since the end of apartheid, away from paramilitary units that willingly accepted the lethal use of force, to public order units which were downsized and for whom crowd management was a secondary function, to the recasting of the POP since 2014 as 50 dedicated units, prioritising ‘crowd management’ over ‘crowd control’. Most of the police in the lower ranks of the POP live in the underserviced and economically marginalised communities often at the forefront of protests. Kynoch’s interviewees speak passionately about the impact of poor delivery service and their identification with the views of the protestors. POP members feel deep frustration at the perceived failure by all levels of government to address communities’ concerns. While they do not regard all protests as legitimate, POP units see defusing protests through dialogue and negotiation as a priority. It seems inevitable that POP units will be under increasing pressure in the immediate future – but Kynoch argues that they are not just the strong arm of the state. They also act as facilitators and mediators, playing ‘a critical role in a multifaceted protest landscape’; they are ‘a by-product of an incendiary political, economic and social polity’.

In the final article, Ralph Shield explores the impact of Rwanda’s military intervention in the northern Mozambique province of Cabo Delgado, the site since 2017 of deadly attacks by jihadist insurgents known locally as Al-Shabaab. From the outset, the Mozambican armed forces and police struggled to halt the rising tide of violence and in 2019 and 2020 the government in Maputo turned to foreign mercenaries for help. Russia’s ‘infamous Wagner Group intervened’ for a few months and was succeeded by the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), a South African private military company. Wagner and DAG both relied heavily on superior equipment and technology and committed only modest numbers of soldiers. By contrast, when Rwanda acceded to Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi’s government’s appeal for assistance, it committed 1,000 personnel from the country’s Defence Force and National Police to the task, organised as a light mechanised infantry battalion.

The Rwandan campaign in Cabo Delgado province began in July 2021 and its impact was rapid and effective. Operational victories degraded the military capabilities of its jihadist opponents, restored state authority over key towns and reduced the insurgency to a weaker and more dispersed threat. Rwanda’s ‘fundamentally competent land force’, rather than high-tech weaponry or air mobility, was at the heart of its campaign. Rwandan soldiers and police exhibited high combat motivation, strong discipline and superior close-fight skills. Shield relates this military prowess directly to a broader post-genocide state-building process in Rwanda: ‘[t]o a considerable extent, the construction of super-ethnic nationalism … channelling of war-time traumas, and narratives of broader social direction and cohesion have been erected around the army’. Shield memorably compares the Rwandan army – ‘the face and foundation of the … post-genocide reconstruction programme’ – with Mozambique’s armed forces, the FADM, ‘an orphan-force afterthought to Frelimo’s strategy of rule’.

The issue concludes with four book reviews. The first of these links to the Part-Special Issue: Jeff Peires discusses Mignonne Breier’s Bloody Sunday: The Nun, the Defiance Campaign and South Africa’s Secret Massacre. Jacob Dlamini reviews The Scientific Imagination in South Africa: 1700 to the Present by William Beinart and Saul Dubow; Euan Nisbet considers Geoffrey Bond’s autobiography How Drowned Was My Valley: Exploring the Zambezi before Lake Kariba, and Jean Comaroff reviews An Ethnography of Faith: Personal Conception of Religiosity in the Soutpansberg in South Africa in the Early 20th Century by Caroline Jeannerat.

Notes

1 M. Breier, Bloody Sunday: The Nun, the Defiance Campaign and South Africa’s Secret Massacre (Cape Town, Tafelberg, 2021).

2 Notably in this journal: see for example the special issues ‘Southern Africa Beyond the West: The Transnational Connections of Southern African Liberation Movements’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43, 1 (2017) and ‘Liberation Beyond the Nation: Interactions, Cultural Productions and Legacies’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 46, 5 (2020).

3 R. Wynberg, S. Ives and J. Bam, ‘How Access and Benefit Sharing Entrenches Inequity: The Case of Rooibos’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 49, 4 (2023), pp. 589–610.

4 S. Badat, Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice: The First Non-Racial International Tennis Tour, 1971 (Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2023).

5 J. Duncan, Protest Nation: The Right to Protest in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016), p. 1.