The Violence of Work: Revisiting South Africa’s ‘Labour Question’ Through Precarity and Anti-Blackness

Abstract

A normative association of waged work with ideas of dignity and personal responsibility was central to the elaboration of the ‘labour question’ by the institutions of white rule in early 20th-century South Africa. Colonial work ethic sustained representations of the ‘native’ as a productive agent for whom promises of progress and modernisation (deriving from economic interdependence) contrasted with the deepening of political subjugation and racialised despotism. The respectability that was putatively linked to working for wages served to define the ‘native’ in opposition to what the white state perceived as a more threatening blackness, averse to wage labour and incompatible with the country’s colonial situation. Nascent African nationalism articulated its claims (albeit with significant ambiguities), against the background of such ideational oppositions. Ideals of productive Africans as virtuous subjects of the white-ruled polity simultaneously disguised and underpinned modalities of structural violence. These consisted in the institutional and coercive definition of wage labour as a quintessentially precarious experience for black workers. Conceptions of native work ethic became the stake in political conflicts. They cast blackness as an antagonistic other, often associated with images of indolence and work avoidance, the silencing of which has been a recurring theme in 20th-century South African politics.

Notes

¹ My account of Zuma’s remarks and reactions to them is based on R. Poplak, ‘If I Were a Dictator: Zuma’s “I Have a Dream” Speech’, Daily Maverick, 25 March 2015, available at http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2015-03-25-if-i-were-a-dictator-zumas-i-have-a-dream-speech/#.VRwgkOHJXBZ, retrieved 1 April 2015. Quotes from Zuma’s speech correspond to the report of it posted on the website of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (www.sabc.co.za).

² African National Congress, ‘The Core Values of the RDP’, discussion document for the 50th national conference, Mafikeng, 16–20 December 1997.

³ F. Barchiesi, Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2011).

⁴ The classical example remains P. Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa, third edition (London, Pluto Press, 2014).

⁵ See T. Lodge, ‘Neo-Patrimonial Politics in the ANC’, African Affairs, 113, 450 (2014), pp. 1–23.

⁶ Of the vast historiographical literature on the matter, I cite, as an important recent example, only J. Higginson, Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900–1948 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014).

⁷ Here I am following the typological categories of settler colonialism in L. Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).

⁸ For the connections between labour and racial ideologies, see B. Magubane, The Making of a Racist State: British Imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875–1910 (Trenton, Africa World Press, 1996).

⁹ The concept of structural violence, in circulation for several decades to describe modalities of institutionalised oppression, has recently known a renewed popularity thanks to studies, often influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, or postcolonial theories, on how poor and precarious populations are rendered superfluous in a neoliberal order. For my definition, I am mostly referring to A. Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham, Duke University Press, 2012) and P. Farmer, ‘An Anthropology of Structural Violence’, Current Anthropology, 45, 3 (2004), pp. 305–17.

¹⁰ F. Wilderson, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Durham, Duke University Press, 2010). See also J. Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

¹¹ A useful overview of the growing salience of racialised demarcations in South Africa, as it shifted from Afrikaner settlement to the orbit of the globally hegemonic British empire, is in M. Legassick and R. Ross, ‘From Slave Economy to Settler Capitalism: The Cape Colony and Its Extensions, 1800–1854’, in C. Hamilton, B. Mbenga, and R. Ross (eds), Cambridge History of South Africa, Volume I: From Early Times to 1885 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 253–318.

¹² C. Elkins, ‘Race, Citizenship, and Governance: Settler Tyranny and the End of Empire’, in C. Elkins and S. Pedersen (eds), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (London, Routledge, 2005), pp. 203–22. I am convinced of the historical usefulness of Elkins’s notion of ‘settler tyranny’ in South Africa also in light of the ambiguities, contradictions, and ultimate collapse of British imperial humanitarianism, and the consequent consolidation of a more overtly racialist white settler polity, as documented in D. Denoon, A Grand Illusion: The Failure of Imperial Policy in the Transvaal Colony During the Period of Reconstruction, 1900–1905 (London, Longman, 1973) and D. Torrance, The Strange Death of the Liberal Empire: Lord Selborne in South Africa (Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996).

¹³ A key reference for such ideological and terminological distinctions remains B. Bozzoli, The Political Nature of a Ruling Class: Capital and Ideology in South Africa, 1890–1933 (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). See also A. Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990).

¹⁴ M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 28.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ G. Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London, Bloomsbury, 2011).

¹⁷ R. Munck, ‘The Precariat: A View from the South’, Third World Quarterly, 34, 5 (2013), pp. 747–62. Munck follows here Rosa Luxemburg’s reassessment of Marx’s notion of ‘primitive accumulation’.

¹⁸ See P. Limb, The ANC’s Early Years: Nation, Class and Place in South Africa Before 1940 (Pretoria, UNISA Press, 2010).

¹⁹ I have examined this issue at length in F. Barchiesi, ‘Imagining the Patriotic Worker: The Idea of “Decent Work” in the ANC’s Political Discourse’, in A. Lissoni, J. Soske, N. Erlank, N. Nieftagodien, and O. Badsha (eds), One Hundred Years of the ANC: Liberation Histories and Democracy Today (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2012), pp. 111–35. See also D. Goodhew, ‘Working-Class Respectability: The Example of the Western Areas of Johannesburg, 1930–1955’, Journal of African History, 41, 2 (2000), pp. 241–66.

²⁰ See A. Odendaal, Vukani Bantu! The Beginnings of Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 (Cape Town, David Philip, 1984).

²¹ See R. Koselleck ‘Begriffsgeschichte and Social History’, in Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York, Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 75–92.

²² C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002); D.L. Eudell, The Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean and the US South (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002); R. Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London, Verso, 2011).

²³ Useful general discussions are in F. Cooper, T. Holt and R. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2000), I. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, Duke University Press, 2005), and D. Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (London, Verso, 2011). A recent attempt to make these debates bear on South African history is in E. Maloka, Friends of the Natives: The Inconvenient Past of South African Liberalism (Durban, Third Millennium, 2014).

²⁴ T. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 215.

²⁵ Bozzoli, The Political Nature, p. 57.

²⁶ Research in this regard has in fact demonstrated such elements of white official discourse not to be limited to the exercises of the purportedly modernising post-war British imperial bureaucracy, as in the 1904 report of the Transvaal Labour Commission, with its pioneering use of systematic statistical information. In fact, the 1871 African Labour Commission under the Boer administration of the South African Republic demonstrated similar concerns with political economy as a rational way of organising productivity and human resources. See J.S. Bergh and F. Morton, ‘To Make Them Serve …’: The 1871 Transvaal Commission on African Labour (Pretoria, Protea, 2003).

²⁷ See Z. Magubane, Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004).

²⁸ See S. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, Oxford University Press, 1997), and C. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham, Duke University Press, 2010).

²⁹ T. Nyongo, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 18.

³⁰ A useful summary of that historiographical debate is in P. Maylam, South Africa’s Racial Past: The History and Historiography of Racism, Segregation, and Apartheid (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001).

³¹ See also A. Cobley, Class and Consciousness: The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924 to 1950 (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1990).

³² Limb, The ANC’s Early Years.

³³ See D. Hindson, Pass Controls and the Urban African Proletariat (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1987).

³⁴ For a later and dramatic manifestation of the logics here described, see L. Platzky and C. Walker, The Surplus People: Forced Removals in South Africa (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1985).

³⁵ Gupta, Red Tape.

³⁶ E. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, Duke University Press, 2011).

³⁷ Wilderson, Red, White and Black.

³⁸ P. Douglass and F. Wilderson, ‘The Violence of Presence: Metaphysics in a Blackened World’, The Black Scholar, 43, 4, p. 119.

³⁹ K. von Holdt, ‘The Violence of Order, Orders of Violence: Between Fanon and Bourdieu’, Current Sociology, 61, 2 (2012), pp. 112–31.

⁴⁰ With very few exceptions, South African labour historiography has systematically neglected black critique of working-class identities, or even refusal of waged work as a permanent condition. For one such exception, see P. Harries, Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c.1860–1910 (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 1994). The triumph of trade unionism in the 1970s and 1980s validated for many a linear view of historical change heralded by the development and organisation of the African working class. What was cast, often stereotypically, as ‘resistance to proletarianisation’ fell thus by the wayside as a manifestation of pre-modern backwardness when not traditionalist atavism. As examples of this mainstream scholarship, see P. Alexander, Workers, War, and the Origins of Apartheid (Oxford, James Currey, 2000), T.D. Moodie, Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994), G. Seidman, Manufacturing Militance: Workers’ Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970–1985 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994).

⁴¹ J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, ‘Criminal Justice, Cultural Justice: The Limits of Liberalism and the Pragmatics of Difference in the New South Africa’, American Ethnologist, 31, 2 (2004), p.192.

⁴² E. Povinelli, ‘Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 30 (2001), pp. 319–34.

⁴³ D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 17.

⁴⁴ F. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996).

⁴⁵ Cited in F. Verschoyle, Cecil Rhodes: His Political Life and Speeches, 1881–1900 (London, Chapman and Hall, 1900), p. 390.

⁴⁶ Denoon, A Grand Illusion.

⁴⁷ National Archives (Pretoria), TAB, SNA, Vol. 11, Ref. 442/01, ff. 38–60, Milner to Chamberlain, December 6, 1901, 42. All references in this paragraph to Milner’s positions are based on this document.

⁴⁸ Report of the Transvaal Labour Commission. Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence, February 1904, National Archives (Pretoria), TAB, Ampt Pubs, Vol. 46, Ref. CD1897, 90.

⁴⁹ See C. Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012).

⁵⁰ Report of the Transvaal Labour Commission, para. 1835.

⁵¹ Ibid., para. 1825.

⁵² The relationships between indebtedness, precarity, and violence at work have recently become a major topic of debate, especially after scholarly exposés of the role of predatory lending in igniting tragic developments such as the 2012 ‘Marikana massacre’. For a brilliant example of scholarship on the matter, see D. James, Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2014).

⁵³ Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity, p. 41.

⁵⁴ Different facets of these processes have been explored, in various periods and economic sectors, in Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity, B. Bozzoli, Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900–1983 (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1991), and J. Guy and M. Thabane, ‘The Ma-Rashea: A Participant’s Perspective’, in B. Bozzoli (ed.), Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1987), pp. 436–56. African opposition to proletarianisation remained a significant social dynamics well after the time period here covered. Deborah Posel has powerfully documented how the refusal by township youth to enter waged jobs defied the strategies of labour control of the apartheid state, in D. Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991).

⁵⁵ While examples of these cognitive and linguistic modalities are provided in the next paragraph, I discuss at length the deprecation of ‘unruly’ blackness for purposes of social and political control by African notables, in F. Barchiesi, ‘The Trouble with “We”: Affiliation, Political Economy and the Counterhistory of Nonracialism’, in J. Soske and S. Walsh (eds), Ties That Bind: Race and the Politics of Friendship in South Africa (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2016).

⁵⁶ J.L. Dube, ‘The Industrial Organisation of the Native People’, in Report of the National European–Bantu Conference, Cape Town, 6–9 February 1929 (Alice, Lovedale Institution Press, 1929), pp. 145–46.

⁵⁷ P. Landau, ‘“Johannesburg in Flames”: The 1918 Shilling Campaign, Abantu-Batho and Early African Nationalism in South Africa’, in P. Limb (ed.), The People’s Paper: A Centenary History and Anthology of Abantu-Batho (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2012), pp. 255–81.

⁵⁸ A.B. Xuma, ‘Bridging the Gap Between White and Black in South Africa’, address at the Conference of European and Bantu Christian Student Associations, Ft. Hare, 27 June–30 July 1930, available at http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/bridging-gap-between-white-and-black-south-africa-address-dr-b-xuma-conference-european-and-, retrieved 13 July 2014.

⁵⁹ See A.W.G. Champion, The Truth About the ICU (Durban, African Workers’ Club, 1927).

⁶⁰ H.D. Tyamzashe, ‘Why Have You Educated Me?’, The Christian Express, 610 (1921), p. 146.

⁶¹ Department of Historical Papers, University of the Witwatersrand, Records of the Joint Councils, AD1433, Ac.3.3.11, ‘The Establishment of Joint Councils and a Federal Council’, by R.V. Selope Thema, Conference on Native Affairs, Johannesburg, 30 October–1 November 1924.

⁶² Z.K. Matthews, ‘The Educational Needs of the Bantu’, in Some Aspects of the Native Question: Selected Addresses Delivered at the Fifth National European–Bantu Conference, Bloemfontein, 5–7 July 1933 (Johannesburg, South African Institute of Race Relations, 1933).

⁶³ A classic example is F. Cooper, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987).