The articles in this issue range from the Zambesi valley in the late sixteenth century to the townships of KwaZulu-Natal today. Despite the issue's broad historical and geographical compass, the contributors evince a common attention to the production and semantics of their sources. They do this in variously addressing how African voices were incorporated in an early Portuguese text's references to cannibalism; how the formation of white and black children was debated in the late-nineteenth century Cape and Natal; how perceptions and representations of rural landscapes and urban burial sites in South Africa have changed over time; and how idioms of rule, struggle and solidarity have been understood and engaged in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa.
The three articles in the first themed section draw on sources that depicted people and societies in peril: southeast and east African communities at the mercy of ‘Muzimba cannibals’ in the 1580s and 1590s; children of destitute whites from the 1870s to the 1890s at risk of ‘degenerating’ and thereby undermining the future of the Cape's settler order; and ‘oppressed kraal girls’ in Natal in the same era seeking to evade traditional African marriages. Eric Allina begins with a rereading of Ethiopia Oriental, a work published in 1609 and written by the Portuguese priest João dos Santos about his residence in Mozambique at the close of the preceding century. Much cited in histories of this period and region – particularly those focusing on state formation, trade, and European–African interaction – dos Santos's text also contains extensive references to cannibalism which scholars have either ignored in embarrassment or explained away as missionary myth-making or Eurocentric othering of Africans. Drawing inspiration from comparative historical and anthropological perspectives, Allina urges us ‘to take dos Santos's accounts of cannibalism more seriously’ because they embodied ‘a vernacular expression of African beliefs and ideas about political power’. What dos Santos was recording were not, as he thought, instances of literal anthropophagy, but locally idiomatic ways of representing abuses of power and wealth in a context of destabilising change.
If Allina eloquently demonstrates that, in sources like Ethiopia Oriental, apparently European pronouncements may unwittingly be significantly inflected by African concepts, Sarah Duff argues that middle-class Europeans in the late nineteenth-century Cape were only too fearful that, unless they acted urgently, rising generations of whites would succumb to the ‘backwardness’ of their ‘African’ surroundings. Duff discerns in the periodicals, official reports, and parliamentary proceedings of these decades a growing conviction that whiteness should be synonymous with respectability and ‘productive’ citizenship. Census data, however, recorded increasing numbers of white poor both in the rural interior, where white children commonly laboured on their families' farms, and in urban slums, where white children played or worked alongside black children instead of going to school or being brought up to be ‘useful’ future adults. Duff documents the measures proposed and implemented to enable the state to remove children from ‘failing’ poorer white families and place them in educational and cognate facilities that increased the likelihood that in the next generation class and race would be more closely aligned.
Meanwhile in Natal, missionaries and the state were reaching an accommodation about the future of African children's schooling. Meghan Healy shows that several sets of not readily compatible interests had to be reconciled in the process. First there were the settlers, who mainly wanted unskilled male labour. Then there was the ‘native administration’, which sought social and political stability by limiting the growth of an educated male African elite, reinforcing the patriarchal control of homestead heads over their dependants, and gradually increasing the size of the African labour market in tandem with a corresponding growth in Africans' market-supplied ‘wants’. Finally, the missionaries, while approving of the goal of increasing Africans' dependence on the market, opposed the strengthening of patriarchal authority which prevented those they termed ‘kraal girls’ from determining their own futures. Yet missionaries themselves largely prepared girls for domesticity. The outcome – a downgrading of boys' schooling and an expansion of educational opportunities for girls where African patriarchs' consent could be obtained – was indicative, Healy argues, of an enduring ‘feminisation’ of schooling among Africans in South Africa. In a case study of Inanda Seminary, Healy closely documents how the tensions between missionaries, homestead heads and colonial officials were negotiated in the period before 1910.
In the second themed section, the focus shifts from how people and their social roles have been envisaged in the past to how the uses of, and the meanings attached to, land, landscape and place have changed in South Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present. As Brett Bennett shows, ubiquitous Eucalyptus and Acacia tree species introduced from Australia, formerly an unexceptional feature of the South African landscape, and central to an extensive and valued timber and pulp industry, are now reviled as a cause of desiccation and an obstacle to the preservation and promotion of the country's indigenous flora and natural heritage for tourist purposes. Today's vehemence mirrors the extravagantly enthusiastic hopes that amateur settler planters invested in Australian tree species in the late nineteenth century. It was the failure of many introduced species, Bennett argues, that led professional foresters to undertake a decades-long research programme at experimental stations across South Africa to identify which exotic species would be best suited for commercial cultivation in different parts of the country. In a hitherto little discussed example of ‘south–south’ exchange that challenges the idea that European influences dominated South African silviculture, this research involved minutely comparing climate and other data in specific localities in Australia and South Africa to ‘fit the tree to the climate’. This careful labour, Bennett advises, ought not to be lost to posterity, for it might provide the basis for a more measured approach to tree species that are likely to remain ‘important economically’.
As exotic timber plantations were spreading across parts of the countryside in the first half of the twentieth century, coal was consolidating its ascendancy as a source of heat and power and was also significant in steel production. The Witbank area at the heart of this process was transformed from open veld and farmland to ‘industrial landscape’ – a transformation increasingly perceptible in atmospheric ash, the smell of sulphur, underground fires in abandoned mines, contaminated soil and water, and subsidence of undermined ground. However, Michal Singer argues, for many decades these costs were deemed an acceptable by-product of progress and modernity. Indeed, marketing campaigns aestheticised Witbank's pollution, portraying ‘a different kind of beauty’ in which the coal dumps dotting the landscape were ‘“naturalised” within an increasingly unnatural landscape’. An official report in the late 1940s disclosed the emerging problems, but its failure to hold the collieries liable or to question the trade-off between progress and pollution meant that the costs continued to be ‘externalised’ in the landscape and deferred to ‘[f]uture generations’. Given recent fears that acid mine drainage is critically raising the water table and threatening contamination of some of South Africa's most populous areas,Footnote1 Singer's is a timely analysis of why many of the environmental costs of the country's industrialisation are now falling due.
It is no coincidence, in light of the preceding articles, that Michelle Hay, in describing a mid-twentieth century township funeral, should note the surrounding blue gum trees, or that the minister was a coal merchant whose horse-drawn cart bore the coffin. Much as these seeming happenstances reflected wider changes whose common-sense quality at mid-century has since been questioned, so too have sites like Roodepoort West cemetery serving nearby communities uprooted by apartheid acquired new meanings. Roodepoort West was an older township whose mostly Christian members' connection to rural places of origin could be tenuous. The cemetery was thus the final resting place of many, and funeral rites reinforced a sense of communal identity. The cemetery was so central to perceptions of local belonging that a climb-down by the Roodepoort Council following location residents' protests against the prospective removal of the cemetery partly reconciled the residents to their own removal to Dobsonville. Hay shows that the Council's subsequent treatment of the cemetery – surrounding it with a high wall, levelling burial mounds and removing identifying pegs – was experienced as ‘profoundly disrespectful’ by former residents because it oppugned the site's status as a symbol of their belonging. For some, the politicisation of funerals at the Dobsonville cemetery during the struggle years, and the vandalising of new tombstones laid at Roodepoort West after apartheid, compounded their alienation. A memorial was erected on the site to make amends for the decades of disrespect to the buried and restore to their descendants a ‘connection between place and identity’. Sadly, but unsurprisingly given claims for restitution and compensation, the cemetery's elevation to a ‘heritage site’ provoked debate about who was really connected to it, raising, Hay concludes, new uncertainties among ex-residents of Roodepoort West about ‘their place in history, and in the new South Africa’.
Øyvind Eggen, opening a final section on late and post-colonial politics, explores a different dilemma of belonging. Employing Mamdani's concepts of ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’, which defined mutually exclusive ways that distinct categories of people related to the state, Eggen argues that Malawians today have become ‘simultaneously citizens and subjects’ participating in ‘parallel state’ structures – the ‘formal government’ and the chiefly hierarchy – both of which now link the local arena to the presidency. Under colonialism there was no ‘bifurcation’ of the state above the level of the District Commissioner (DC), to whom chiefs ruling African subjects were subordinate. Under Banda's one-party rule, chiefs were recognised but weakened as the party-government penetrated below the DC's level and installed ‘representatives in almost every village’. From 1994, multi-party democracy, with its rhetorical emphasis on citizens' rights, formally reduced chiefs' role, but in practice chiefs were left as the sole effective instrument of state power at the local level and their real authority increased significantly. State officials propose but chiefs dispose, and it is for this reason that the president, in seeking to harness greater executive capacity, has given certain chiefs dependent on himself ‘recognition and power above the district level of government’. In theory, then, ordinary Malawians may access two systems of rule, and Eggen's fieldwork reveals that they ‘are indeed aware of the options’ even if only ‘the most resourceful … benefit by selecting the institutions appropriate to their own interests’. In particular, it takes ‘courage to bypass’ chiefs whose powers extend to expelling ‘disobedient’ subjects from their villages.
In settler Rhodesia too, George Karekwaivanane finds, courageous Africans tested the remedial value of institutions like courts in which as ‘citizens’ they could ‘speak back’ to a state that insisted on treating them as ‘subjects’ owing unquestioning obedience to DCs and ‘tribal authorities’. Africans could pursue this course because legalism remained a mechanism of governance even under Smith's Rhodesian Front. Commenting subtly on comparative perspectives on law and state power in colonial Africa and elsewhere, Karekwaivanane eschews Mamdani's deterministic categorisations for a more dynamic model of struggle and contestation. A combination of ‘semi-citizenship with ethnic subjecthood’, he argues, may have ‘served the state's interests in that it saddled Africans with considerable duties towards the state whilst conferring on them very few rights’, but this was a ‘fragile and unstable project … constantly challenged by African demands for a different type of membership in the colonial polity’. Through detailed reconstructions of legal challenges to the authority of two DCs in the early 1970s, Karekwaivanane describes how Africans' refusal to be the ‘cultural “others”’ of the administration's imaginary denied to DCs their ‘desire for unfettered powers over Africans’ and elicited officials' fears that similar challenges could provoke ‘widespread defiance of the state’.
While Zimbabweans were contesting the settler colonial imaginary in the 1970s, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Toni Weis shows, was elaborating an ‘anti-colonial imaginary’ based on a concept of ‘solidarity’ that the East Germans distinguished from what they termed the West's ‘neocolonial’ discourse of ‘development’. Focusing on the GDR's relationship with SWAPO and the struggle for Namibian independence, and citing Mbembe's dictum that ‘narrative about Africa is always a pretext for a comment about something else’, Weis argues that ‘solidarity discourse’ benefited the GDR's image. Internationally, ‘solidarity’, especially with southern African liberation movements, helped the GDR at a time when it was seeking recognition from other states and to differentiate itself from West Germany; domestically, given ‘political and economic stagnation’, it suggested that the country was ‘on the right side of history’ and provided a safe channel for encouraging political enthusiasm – the ‘politics machine’ of the article's title. For its part, SWAPO gained the GDR's unalloyed diplomatic support, military and material assistance, and training and schooling in the GDR for its cadres and their children. Weis describes the GDR–SWAPO relationship under the rubric of ‘solidarity’ as a ‘working misunderstanding’ between parties who had much to gain from not publicly alluding to differences of interest that privately each knew existed. There was an ‘abstract’ quality about the relationship reflected in the restricted personal contact between Namibians and East Germans for whom Africans remained ‘moral constructs’. It was, Weis concludes, a ‘solidarity between peoples’ rather than ‘between people’ – a limitation strikingly exposed in xenophobic violence in the East following reunification.
South Africa's protracted transformation since apartheid has also been marked by xenophobic convulsions, but in the final article Allison Goebel focuses on the sometimes less spectacular but much more widespread and frequent manifestations of social discontent in the country's townships and informal urban settlements that have brought the poor into confrontation with the police.Footnote2 Acknowledging that South Africans ‘are certainly frustrated with local political processes, corruption and delays in promised development’, Goebel nonetheless takes issue with literature that depicts contemporary popular protest movements as ‘necessarily anti-government, anti-ANC, or even anti-neoliberal’. She argues that an understanding of the ‘micro level of everyday life’ – particularly how gender relations, women's work, and state welfare grants affect the formation and reproduction of households – is essential in explaining the composition, rhetoric, tactics and significance of grassroots protest movements. Drawing on case studies in urban KwaZulu-Natal, Goebel demonstrates that the prevalence of female-headed households in a context of mass unemployment ‘mean[s] struggles for services and livelihoods are gendered struggles’ and ‘makes social welfare a critical component of state/society relations’. Because the poor remain connected to the state in this way, she concludes, mass protest, rather than becoming potentially revolutionary, is likely to remain reformist, focusing on securing the ‘full loaf’ of citizens' rights promised in the constitution.
Notes
1 M. Kardas-Nelson, ‘Rising Water, Rising Fear: SA's Mining Legacy’, Mail and Guardian Online, 12 November 2010, available at http://mg.co.za/article/2010-11-12-rising-water-fear-sas-mining-legacy, retrieved on 19 April 2011.
2 Shocking footage showing Andries Tatane collapsing after being beaten by six policemen during a service delivery protest march by Meqheleng township residents on municipal offices in Ficksburg in April 2011 underlines the point. ‘Police Under Fire After Ficksburg Protester's Death’, Mail and Guardian Online, 18 April 2011, available at http://mg.co.za/article/2011-04-18-police-under-fire-after-ficksburg, retrieved on 21 April 2011.