The articles in this general issue demonstrate the variety of the journal’s interests: from history to politics, from the environment to the economy and beyond, they reveal how the study of southern Africa involves many scholarly disciplines and the interactions between them. From detailed, locally based studies to broader and more theoretical approaches, the contributions to this issue help to progress the understanding of concerns which anyone interested in the subcontinent will want to consider.
The opening article, on ‘the night’ as ‘a frame’ for analysing black urban experience, indicates the overall tenor of the issue: to suggest how focused, detailed research can shine a light on hitherto obscure, unfamiliar or unexamined areas of southern African experience. As Zachary Fleishman suggests in ‘“Strange things happen when the lights are low”: The South African Night in Drum’, according to apartheid ideology, black South Africans were seen as rural and cut off from urbanity and modernity, city people by day who disappeared by night. This prescribed ‘temporal order’ was however challenged by black urban residents’ participation in nighttime activities vividly depicted in the ‘much-studied, predominantly black-produced and read magazine’. As Fleishman reveals through texts and photographs, Drum ‘bypassed [apartheid] curfew legislation and restrictions on mobility’, involving its readers in ‘a transnational project of African urban modernity’.
The experiences of South African township residents have been increasingly studied in recent years; less familiar, yet equally deserving of new attention, are the experiences of Northern Rhodesian (Zambian) porters – the mtenga-tenga – who transported food for the military in the East Africa campaign of World War One. According to Mutale Mazimba in ‘African Reactions to the First World War: The Case of the Mtenga-Tenga of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia)’, despite some recognition, the experiences of the male and – notably – also female porters were transmitted to succeeding generations through communal memories now available for detailed scrutiny in local museums and archives. As a result, it has become clear that their experiences changed their relationship to the ‘traditional authorities’, the headmen and colonial officials who coerced and abused them, leading to defiance and resistance.
The complex nature of African resistance, its origins and dynamic, emerges in Martin Kalb’s ‘Centring Simon Kooper: Frontier Politics, Desert Environments and African Resistance’, which sheds ‘further light on a complex international frontier space’; a space constituted by ‘the edges of three distinct political entities – German Southwest Africa, the Cape Colony and the British Bechuanaland Protectorate’. Pursuing a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Kalb ‘centres’ his focus upon the ‘Nama hero’ |Gomxab Simon Kooper’s motives, and the nature of his resistance to the predominantly German colonising forces at the time of the Herero War, thereby revealing wider ‘imperial entanglements’ across the Kalahari desert, as well as the specific manner in which Kooper and his followers survived, crucially aided by certain ‘natural factors’ such as the melon-like tsamma fruit. As Kalb points out, their resistance emerged within specific environmental as well as historical and political contexts.
The next four articles reflect a change of focus by suggesting a variety of ways in which marginalised or under-represented groups in the region have sought recognition, justice or simply a fair deal within prevailing economic, social and political power structures. Rachel Wynberg, Sarah Ives and June Bam offer a challenging perspective upon recent attempts to find ‘a new, prescriptive way of treating trade, biodiversity and the commercial use of traditional knowledge’ through so-called ‘benefit-sharing’ agreements. ‘How Access and Benefit Sharing Entrenches Inequity: The Case of Rooibos’ demonstrates how the newly adopted ‘access and benefit sharing’ development paradigm, designed as an ‘apolitical regulatory instrument’, nonetheless paradoxically ‘further cements epistemic injustice’ by failing to grapple with or respond adequately to local, community demands, with the result that, for example, ‘small-scale coloured farmers and farmworkers’ were largely omitted from key negotiating processes. Since the rooibos agreement has been seen by the South African government, media and legal system to set a precedent for other industries based on indigenous plants, a new approach to such projects is urgently required.
Recognising the rights of workers to participate in the wealth generated by their labour is never a simple matter, as any consideration of the history of workers’ action makes clear. Laurence Stewart’s ‘Diamonds in the Rough: The ICU’s Activism on the Lichtenburg Diamond Diggings in the Western Transvaal, 1927–1931’ offers a detailed, micro-level account of the varying involvement of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union in the strike on the Lichtenburg diamond diggings of June 1928, during which 35,000 black workers downed tools. The workers were joined by recently unemployed and persecuted location residents, decisively broadening the composition and scope of the strike. However, the ICU’s activism at the time revealed tensions and division too and failed to ‘create a lasting consciousness among workers, [or] a large, loyal constituency’.
Borja García, Henk Erik Meier and Louis Moustakas’s ‘Racing to Win: Competition and Co-operation between the National Olympic Committee and Public Authorities in the Development of the Botswana Sport System’ is about the ‘institutional misfit’ between the national government and a dedicated public organisation in developing a sport system with the desired international clout. Interviews with stakeholders suggest that the complex relations between the government and non-government sectors in meeting the presumed need for a developing country to participate in high-level sport – not only the Olympic Games, but also such regional and international events as the African Youth and Commonwealth Games – inevitably brings tensions as well as benefits.
Yet, like other nations concerned with its self-image, Botswana will doubtless continue to pursue a policy of participation in the international sport system. A sense of belonging is important on the smaller, community level as well as on the national and international scale. This much is evident in Malvern Kudakwashe Marewo’s study, ‘“Rooted Back Home”: Exploring Linkages between Small-Scale Land Reform Beneficiaries and their Communal Areas of Origin in Zimbabwe’. Using ‘empirical qualitative insights’ from Zvimba in Mashonaland West, Marewo shows the value of the social, political and economic factors that maintain links between the beneficiaries of land reform on resettled small farms and their communal areas of origin. Although beneficiaries willingly left their communal areas, most wish to remain connected to their places of origin, something which tends to be overlooked in land reform debates.
The final two articles in this issue address more recent and explicitly political questions: Domingos Manuel do Rosário and Egídio Guambe’s ‘Decentralising Fraud: New Models of Electoral Manipulation during the 2019 General Elections in Mozambique’ and Robert Macdonald, Thomas Molony and Victoria Lihiru’s ‘The Reception of Covid-19 Denialist Propaganda in Tanzania’. Through analysing interviews with local actors involved in Mozambique’s 2019 legislative, presidential and provincial elections, Rosário and Guambe argue that the country’s election observation mechanisms could not prevent fraudulent practices because the dynamics of electoral manipulation had already been set in motion; and, with each round, ‘ever subtler mechanisms for producing fraud’ were normalised among ‘ever more numerous members of the regime’. Hence, what the authors call ‘democratic learning’ ‘can and does occur in reverse’, despite the appearance of a desirable ‘ongoing engagement with democratic principles’. Equally challenging was the reception of Tanzanian government propaganda during the Covid-19 crisis in June 2020, according to Macdonald et al., who show that – unsurprisingly – when their statistics proved untrue, both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ propaganda emanating from the authorities were questioned, although not by everyone. The pattern of suspicion had however been set.
The nature of development in colonial and postcolonial southern Africa has been touched on in several articles, and it is a theme continued in the book reviewed by Bryson Gwiyani Nkhoma: Gift Wasambo Kayira’s The State and Legacies of British Colonial Development in Malawi: Confronting Poverty, 1939–1983. Kayira adopts a broad, transnational approach to debates on poverty alleviation, rural empowerment and sustainable development, while not forgetting the legacies of British colonial development projects in Malawi. Broad approaches to complex questions sometimes inevitably simplify, including the ‘easy and widespread conflation of race and class’, identified by Jeremy Seekings in his review of Duncan Money and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann’s edited collection of essays on Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, 1930s–1990s. Focusing upon the final decades of white minority rule in the various territories of southern Africa between the 1930s and 1980s, the studies in Rethinking White Societies not only push us towards differentiating white populations, but also provide ‘a powerful demonstration of the potential importance of [such] comparative and transnational scholarship’.
This volume concludes with a short review essay, by Alex Lichtenstein, of Paul S. Landau’s finely detailed and closely focused account of the shift in the African National Congress from a movement devoted to non-violent reform to one committed to armed struggle, in Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries. Based on what Lichtenstein calls Landau’s ‘extraordinary research’ into oral archives and more than 250 oral history interviews, Spear reconstructs the four crucial years between the March 1960 state of emergency, the sentencing of Nelson Mandela and the rest of Umkhonto we Sizwe high command, and the movement’s commitment to armed revolt just four years later. Telling the complex narrative of the South African revolution ‘through the eyes of those who pursued it’ without offering a more retrospective and analytic account, suggests Lichtenstein, has, for all its explanatory value, inevitable limitations.
Nevertheless, as all the contributions to this issue remind us, important research on many levels continues, and continues to further a deeper comprehension of the region in all its variety and complexity, past and present.