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Company Picnic Estimated Costs

Rosa King

MGT-312

Saint Leo University

Introduction:

To calculate the total estimated cost of the whole Picnic, we need to look at the start of the Picnic till the end of the Picnic. And consider every small detail to estimate the cost of the Picnic accurately. The estimated cost of the project depends on the total number of employees who are coming to the Picnic. The more participants, the more it will cost. 

Work Package Estimate:

It includes the estimated cost of safety preparation, games and activities, employee voting, and party gifts.

Safety preparation: safety preparation includes water, bug spray, sunblock, body wipes, and trash bags. Water is the most important element, and it should be bought in good quantity because after the sports activities the participants will need a good amount of water and the estimated cost of water will be 500 dollars. Bug spray is the need of the time as the Picnic will be held at the lake in a forest where there will be a huge quantity of bugs, so bug spray should be bought in bulk quantity, and the estimated cost will be 600 dollars. Sunblock cream is also important, and the estimated cost of the sunblock will be 700 dollars. Body wipes will cost around 300 dollars/ As there will be around 350 participants so, there will be a good amount of trash, and to collect that trash, we need around 30 trash bags which will cost us around 30 dollars. 

Games and activities: For games and activities for both adults and kids we need some equipment and for adults' water sports equipment will be needed which will cost around 5000 dollars, and for kid's games activities of football and stickball the sports equipment will cost around 1000 dollars.

Food: After the employees vote on food items, the cooking equipment and material we need are dishes, Bar BQ, and sauces with vegetables and fruits as well as cookies for kids, and the whole food section of the Picnic will cost around 30000 dollars. 

Party gifts: After the Picnic finishes the management has decided to give its employees some part gifts and the gift will cost around 7000 dollars. 

Estimates for Supplies or Materials: 

The estimated cost for all the supplies and materials for 350 employees who are participating in the picnic events can go up to 70,000, including all the food and all the food items bought by the management, including party gifts.

Estimates for Vendors and Procurement activity:

All the procurement activities are done by the staff hired for the Picnic, and vendors are needed to provide the equipment for activities. The total estimated cost for the vendors and procurement activities will be around 20,000 dollars.

Estimated for Risk or Unknown activities:

The estimated cost for risk should be between 5000 dollars to 10000 dollars as an emergency event can happen because a lot of employees are involved in this Picnic, and the management should make an emergency fund to pay for any risk. The risk of injury or breaking down of any equipment is medium to high, so the estimated cost for risk should be high, and the good estimate will be 10000 dollars. 

The six faded letters are all that remain, and few people notice them. I would never have seen them if a friend hadn’t pointed them out to me while we walked through New Orleans’s French Quarter. I certainly wouldn’t have realized their significance.

On Chartres Street, above a beautifully arched doorway, is a curious and enigmatic inscription: “CHANGE.” Now part of the facade of the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel, the letters mark the onetime site of the St. Louis Hotel & Exchange, where, under the building’s famed rotunda, enslaved people were once sold.

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The onetime site of New Orleans’s St. Louis Hotel & Exchange, where enslaved people were once sold.

All human landscapes are embedded with cultural meaning. And since we rarely consider our constructions as evidence of our priorities, beliefs and behaviors, the testimonies our landscapes offer are more honest than many of the things we intentionally present.

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Our built environment, in other words, is a kind of societal autobiography, writ large.

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The old Greyhound bus station in Jackson, Miss. The station was the site of many arrests in 1961, when Freedom Riders rode interstate buses into the segregated South.

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The E. F. Young Jr. Hotel in Meridian, Miss. The hotel, owned and operated by Mr. Young, provided lodging for Black travelers who were excluded from other hotels during the Jim Crow era.

Several years ago, I began to photographically document vestiges of racism, oppression and segregation in America’s built and natural environments — lingering traces that were hidden in plain sight behind a veil of banality.

Some of the sites I found were unmarked, overlooked and largely forgotten: bricked-over “Colored” entrances to movie theaters, or walls built inside restaurants to separate nonwhite customers. Other photographs capture the Black institutions that arose in response to racial segregation: a Negro league stadium in Michigan, a hotel for Black travelers in Mississippi. And a handful of the photographs depict the sites where Black people were attacked, killed or abducted — some marked and widely known, some not.

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I called the project Ghosts of Segregation.

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On Jan. 3, 1966, Sammy Younge Jr., a 21-year-old Black college student, was murdered for trying to use this bathroom — then reserved for white customers — at a service station in Tuskegee, Ala.

The small side window at Edd’s Drive-In, for example, a restaurant in Pascagoula, Miss., appears to be a drive-up. It was actually a segregated window used in the Jim Crow-era to serve Black customers.

The locked black double doors aside Seattle’s Moore Theatre might be mistaken for a service entrance. In fact, this was once the “Colored” entrance used by nonwhite moviegoers to access the theater’s second balcony.

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At far right, the onetime “Colored” window at Edd’s Drive-In, in Pascagoula, Miss.

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A onetime “Colored” restroom in Tylertown, Miss.

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The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., which was bombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan on September 15, 1963, killing four girls and injuring many others.

These sites surround us, but finding and verifying them requires months of due diligence.

Many of the places I’ve photographed were found after conducting research online, in person and on location. I have reached out to scholars, historians and ordinary people who might share their insights, experiences and suggestions. Local libraries and museums often guide me to forgotten places. Historical preservation websites and publications such as The Oxford American, The Clarion-Ledger and many other news sources add immeasurably to my understanding.

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Formerly a Tastee-Freez, this site in Meadville, Miss., was the last place Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee were seen alive. The two Black men, both 19, were abducted by Ku Klux Klan members, tortured and drowned in the Mississippi River in 1964.

In 2018, I was perusing the website for the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project, which led me to a theater company site that mentioned the Moore Theatre’s segregated entrance. Another site, historylink.org, helped confirm the nature of the door and identify its precise location. Google Street View allowed me to get a sense of its relatively current state.

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Read more about this series, The World Through a Lens:

Letting Their Cameras Transport You

With some of the finest photojournalists as your guide, The World Through a Lens series offers immersive escapes.

Aug. 3, 2020

The very existence of the door shocked me. I had walked past it countless times over the 40 years I’ve lived in Seattle, never giving it a thought. It wasn’t until the summer of 2020 that the tragic nature of this obscure door resonated with the sobering reminder on the marquee.

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The onetime “Colored” entrance to Moore Theatre in Seattle.

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The bricked-over “Colored” entrance at the Hattiesburg Saenger Theater, in Hattiesburg, Miss.

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At left, the onetime segregated entrance to the Ellis Theatre in Philadelphia, Miss.

After being tipped off by a contributor to a website called Preservation in Mississippi, I verified the history of the window at Edd’s Drive-In with the manager, Becky Hasty, who told me that the owners had retained it as a reminder of the past. “If we don’t remember where we’ve been,” she said, “we might get lost again.”

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Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa. The auditorium was the site of the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, Gov. George C. Wallace’s infamous attempt to block the entry of two Black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, and stop the desegregation of Alabama’s educational system.

Slavery is often referred to as America’s “original sin.” Its demons still haunt us in the form of segregated housing, education, health care, employment. Through these photographs, I’m trying to preserve the physical evidence of that sin — because, when the telling traces are erased, the lessons risk being lost.

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Hamtramck Stadium, a Negro league baseball stadium, in Hamtramck, Mich.

Many of the locations I’ve documented have already disappeared. The painted sign for Clark’s Cafe in Huntington, Ore., which trumpeted “ALL WHITE HELP,” was destroyed shortly after I photographed it. The Houston Negro Hospital School of Nursing has since been demolished.

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A sign for Clark’s Cafe in Huntington, Ore., trumpeted “ALL WHITE HELP.” The building was damaged in a fire in 2019, and the wall has since been destroyed.

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Inside the Victoria Colored School, in Victoria, Texas.

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Medgar Evers’ house in Jackson, Miss., where Mr. Evers was assassinated after exiting his car in 1963.

I often wonder: Does such erasure remedy the inequalities and relieve the suffering caused by systemic racism? Or does it facilitate denial and obfuscation?

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Dunbar Hospital, Detroit’s first hospital for Black residents.

A technical note on the images themselves: Each picture in this series is composed of hundreds of separate overlapping photographs, which I later merge together. The technique, commonly referred to as “stitching,” allows me to produce highly detailed and immersive prints.

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The exposures are made from a single vantage point with a camera mounted on a panoramic head, atop a stationary tripod. The structural integrity of the scene is of paramount importance, since the photographs are meant to be precise documentation of erasable evidence. If you were to stand beside me and photograph the scene with your smartphone, our pictures would look similar, though mine would contain greater detail and more nuanced light.

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A “segregation wall,” built to separate customers of color, at the Templin Saloon in Gonzales, Texas. The wall was left standing to remind patrons of the saloon’s history.

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The Ellis Theatre in Cleveland, Miss. The door on the left was the segregated entrance to the “Colored” balcony. The door on the right was the entrance to the “Colored” restroom.

These photographs are less about the places themselves and more about the people who once populated them. My goal is to heighten awareness, motivate action and spark an honest conversation about the legacy of racial injustice in America.

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This two-level metal stairway at the Paramount Theatre in Clarksdale, Miss., offered access to the “Colored” sections of the balconies.

The photographs are also a testament to the endurance of the racial inequalities that have plagued American society, projected backward and forward in time.

The deaths this year of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, among many other Black Americans, prompted a long-overdue national reckoning, spurring one of the largest movements in U.S. history.

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And these pictures prove that if you look carefully enough, you’ll find that the evidence of the structures of segregation — and the marks of white supremacy — still surrounds us, embedded in the landscape of our day-to-day lives.

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Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in Money, Miss., where, in 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was accused of whistling at a white woman. He was later kidnapped, tortured, lynched and dumped in the Tallahatchie River.

Richard Frishman is a photographer based near Seattle. You can follow his work on Instagram .

Junct ion

THE S O U T H E R N L A N D S C A P E of 1880 bore the signs of the preceding twenty years. Symmetrical rows of slave cabins had been knocked into a jumble of tenant shacks. Fields grew wild because it did not pay to farm them. Children came upon bones and rusting weapons when they played in the woods. Former slaveowners and their sons decided which tenants would farm the best land and which tenants would have to move on. Confederate veterans at the court house or the general store bore empty sleeves and blank stares. Black people bitterly recalled the broken promises of land from the Yankees and broken promises of help from their former masters and mistresses. Everyone labored under the bur- dens of the depression that had hobbled the 1870s. Men talked of the bloodshed that had brought Reconstruction to an end a few years before.

Signs of a new South appeared as well, shoved up against the signs of the old. At every crossroad, it seemed, merchants put up stores of precut lumber. Hundreds of new towns proudly displayed raw red brick buildings and at least a block or two of wooden sidewalks. Investors began to put money into sawmills, textile factories, and coal mines. Young people of both races set out for places where they could make a better living. Railroads connected the landscape, cut- ting into clay banks, running across long sandy and swampy stretches, winding their way through wet mountain forests. Enthusiastic young editors talked of a "New South."

Shifting borders surrounded this South. Southern accents echoed into Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio; Northerners moved across the Kentucky and Arkansas lines; immigrants came to Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi; Southern farmers pro- duced for Northern markets up the coastline or across the river. Despite these porous boundaries, it seemed clear to most people that the South included the eleven states of the former Confederacy, that Kentucky was a Southern state in spite of its Civil War experience, and that the Southern mountains harbored a

CHAPTER ONE

3 Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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4 The Promise of the New South

Bringing cotton to market in Dalton, Georgia, 1900. (Duke University Library)

distinct, but distinctly Southern, region. West Texas and the southern tip of Florida, by contrast, seemed empty and disconnected from the South's history of slavery and war.'

Soil, rivers, and climate determined whether counties would flourish or de- cline, whether railroads and manufacturing would arrive, whether people would come or leave. New technologies and techniques offered sudden hope to areas that had been passed over for centuries, while districts that had long been at the center of the South's political and economic power lapsed into decay. Southern- ers abandoned old homes and took up new ones within the region, well aware of the different possibilities a hundred miles could make.

Vast plains stretched all along the South's coast from Virginia to Texas, from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. Tall pines, slow rivers, and swamps domi- nated the landscape. Above the falls on the rivers, the Piedmont's rolling hills and quick waters promised healthy agriculture and vibrant manufacturing. North of the Piedmont, the mountains and valleys of the Blue Ridge, the Cumberlands, and the Alleghenies enfolded a complex landscape of swelling peaks, narrow hollows, and fertile valleys; the Ozarks of Arkansas, far away from the other highlands, resembled them in most respects. The central plateau of Kentucky and Tennessee claimed farms good for livestock but unsuited for cotton.

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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The subregions of the New South.

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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6 The Promise of the New South

Number of black persons in 1870 and in 1910.

To the south of the Piedmont, a dark, narrow crescent called the Black Belt cut across from South Carolina up through Mississippi. The home of the ante- bellum South's more lucrative plantations, the Black Belt declined in the New South. The Mississippi River bisected the South from the tip of Kentucky, down between Arkansas and Tennessee, between Louisiana and Mississippi to the port of New Orleans. Rich soil and good transportation along the river's shores beckoned farmers of both races to build levees and clear the heavy growth of hardwoods. Sparsely settled rolling uplands covered much of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, offering cheap lands for enterprising farmers to grow cotton. Southerners converged on the Western prairies at the frontier of the South; by the turn of the century the district has a high proportion of its land in cotton.2

Great disparities marked the nine subregions of the New South. Both coastal plains contained thousands of square miles of sparsely populated land, while the rural districts of the Piedmont and central plateau seemed crowded. Black South- erners made up over two-thirds of the people in the Black Belt but accounted for only about a tenth of those in the mountains and on the Western Prairies. New settlers of both races rushed to the Atlantic and Gulf plains, the mountains, and the prairies, while blacks shunned the Piedmont and the central plateau and whites turned away from the Black Belt and the river counties. Thousands of new farms grew up along the southern and western edges of the region even as tenancy en- tangled the older districts.

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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Junction 1

Quickly evolving systems of commerce heightened differences among places and people even as the systems tied them together. Although railroads, stores, and towns came into sudden prominence throughout the South, each place had its own local chronology. Any given year would find some places in a buoyant mood as a railroad approached or a new mill opened, while others, bypassed by the machinery of the new order, fell into decline. The arrival of a railroad could trigger many consequences: rapid population growth or population decline, a more diversified economy or greater specialization, the growth of a city or the death of small towns.3

Only a few events in the New South temporarily focused people on concerns beyond their localities. Political changes provided major landmarks that defined the period. The New South era began in the mid- and late 1870s when the bira- cial and reformist experiment of Reconstruction ended and the conservative white Democrats took power throughout the Southern states. Then, in the early 1890s, the largest political revolt in American history, Populism, redrew the political boundaries of the South and the nation. Business cycles, too, created common experiences across the South. The 1880s saw town and industrial growth in the South but steady economic pressure on farmers. The 1890s began with a terrible depression that lasted through half the decade, followed by a decade of relative prosperity. Within these broad patterns, the people of the New South lived lives of great variation and contrast.

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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8 The Promise of the New South

Under Reconstruction, Republicans had hoped to form an alliance that would include influential whites as well as former slaves. Some party leaders stressed land redistribution while others emphasized the vote; some called for federal aid to education and others demanded civil rights. For a while, the party managed to hold together its alliance of former slaves, former Unionists, and former Northerners, all dedicated to economic prosperity and equal rights for all South- erners. But the difficulty of binding together a coalition across lines of race and class constantly wore at the Republicans in the South; voters and leaders began to defect in the face of enticement, animosity, violence, and defeat. The North- ern wing of the party turned away from their Southern compatriots as it became clear that Reconstruction was unpopular in the North and unlikely to succeed in the South without protection and aid from outside.4

Conservative Democrats "redeemed" one state after another, as the Demo- crats called it, driving Republican governments from power. Conservative gov- ernments opposed to Reconstruction took over in Virginia in 1869, in North Carolina in 1870, and in Georgia in 1871. Democrats regained dominance in Texas in 1873, in Alabama and Arkansas in 1874, and in South Carolina and Mississippi in 1876. Reconstruction's final gasp came in 1877, when Congress declared victory for the Democrats in contested elections in Louisiana and Flor- ida.5

Redemption did not descend in a sudden rush of Democratic glory, but arrived slowly, tentatively, awkwardly. Some counties remained in Republican hands long after Democrats won neighboring counties, years after their state govern- ment came under Democratic control. Some conservative Democrats compro- mised with their opponents, reaching out for black voters, trying to pull oppo- sition leaders into their ranks, offering appeals to Republican businessmen. In other counties, the Redeemers took power through brute force, intimidating and assaulting Republican officeholders and voters with random violence and the aid of the Ku Klux Klan.6

Many of the Redeemer Democrats bore impressive pedigrees and could claim distinguished service in the Confederacy. John Brown Gordon of Georgia, L. Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi, and Wade Hampton of South Carolina embodied the Dem- ocratic ideal of the citizen soldier determined to reclaim his homeland from in- terlopers. In counties and states across the South white veterans with education and property stepped forward to seize the power they considered rightfully theirs. Under Democratic rule, they promised, political bloodshed would cease, race relations would calm, the economy would flourish, and honor in government would prevail.7

The Democratic Redeemers defined themselves, in large part, by what they were not. Unlike the Republicans, the Redeemers were not interested in a bi- racial coalition. The Democrats would not seriously consider black needs, would not invert the racial hierarchy by allowing blacks to hold offices for which whites longed. Unlike the Republicans, too, the Redeemers would not use the state government as an active agent of change. Democrats scoffed not only at Repub- lican support for railroads and other business, but also at Republican initiatives in schools, orphanages, prisons, and asylums. Democrats assured landowning

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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Junction 9

farmers that the party would roll back taxes. The Democrats saw themselves as the proponents of common sense, honesty, and caution where the Republicans offered foolishness, corruption, and impetuosity. The Democrats explained away their own violence and fraud, both of which soon dwarfed that of Reconstruc- tion, as fighting fire with fire. Democratic policies encouraged economic growth not through active aid, as the Republicans had done, but through low taxes on railroads and on farmland, with few restrictions on business and few demands on government. Democrats realized, as had the Republicans, that railroads were the key to economic growth in the last half of the nineteenth century.8

Watched over by friendly Democratic regimes, railroad companies worked fe- verishly in the New South. From the end of Reconstruction to the end of the century the South built railroads faster than the nation as a whole. Different lines raced from one subregion to another, competing for key territories; by 1890, nine of every ten Southerners lived in a railroad county. The construction of a railroad touched people all up and down the track. "From New Orleans to Me- ridian was a beehive of activity. Literally thousands of people were employed," a Mississippian recalled. "The women and children were busy producing vege- table crops, chickens, eggs, milk and butter and the men were butchering and delivering fresh meat and other supplies to the men working on the railroad. For the first time there was a big market for what people could raise in this area." Other farmers worked to cut crossties from their land. "I believe the people as a general thing are in better circumstances now than they have been in several years," Joe Vick wrote from Texas back to his aunt in Virginia; "one cause of it I reacon is because there is a Rail Road building right through this neighbor- hood and nearly every body has got afew dollars out of it."9

The railroad crews lived in rough camps. "We have not as orderly a set of men as may be imagined on the work," a young man wrote to his parents with considerable understatement. "They all carry pistols and yesterday there were three men shot in one camp." But the money was good. "Monday was pay day amongst the railroad workmen between here and Eureka," an Arkansas paper noted, "and several thousand dollars were passed into the hands of the labor- ers."10

Charley White, a young section hand on a Texas railroad, discovered the dangers of mixing ready money with the bawdy life of the railroad camp. Along with his compatriots, White visited "Miss Minnie's," a whorehouse along the line. He found "too much going on. Killing folks, and beating up, and slashing with knives." The attractions were considerable, though: "There was lots of women there. All kinds. Some old, some young, some half-naked, some dressed nice—just any type you wanted. "X)ne beckoned Charley to her room, but White was scared. The brother of one of the hands who had been loitering around the bunkhouse was "half eat up" with syphilis, terrible sores covering his entire body. "Some of the other men had it too, but they wasn't as bad off as he was." White decided to settle down: he met a nice young woman, "quit the railroad and got me a job working at a sawmill." n

Working on a train was dangerous. The record of accidents on one small line Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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10 The Promise of the New South

Railroads in 1870 and in 1890.

for one year gives some idea of the damage the railroad could inflict: "hand crushed, collision, killed, collision, foot struck, hip hurt, struck by #24, leg run over while switching and injury resulted in death, cut on head, finger cracked, thumb cracked and finger broken, struck by bridge and killed, leg broken, fall from train sustaining injuries resulting in death, found injured by side of road, run over and killed, skull fractured, death resulted, son of Rev. J. W. Miller killed, shoulder blade broken, run into No. 7 on middle track, hand crushed, negro boy run over and head cut off, leg run over necessitating amputation, wreck caused by broken wheel, killed." Yet the railroad was surrounded by an aura of glamour throughout the New South era. "All that they had said was true, and much more. People were crowded and seemed to be excited," the son of a poor farmer recalled of his first trip to the "Big Terminal" in Atlanta. "Hundreds of people, many of them hurrying, were pushing against each other, pages were yelling names, a big Negro was calling stations for departing trains; train bells ringing, steam escaping with strange and frightening sounds. . . . The strange lights, the queer smell of things, and the soft, heavenly feel of the velvet that covered the seats on the train, held us older children spellbound."12

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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Junction 11

Towns that finally saw the railroad reach them could barely contain themselves. A small town in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas exulted: "Harrison Is a Rail- road Town At Last. The Construction Train Laid Yesterday the Steel Which Puts us in Touch With the World," proclaimed the headline of the local paper. The editor reported that two thousand people thronged the streets, cannons boomed, flags waved. The ice company expanded its electrical capacity, the town fathers ordered the bandstand painted, local merchants began a new iron and stone building, the Bradshaw Saloon received new fixtures, and the hotel even put in bathrooms.13

In places lucky enough to have a railroad, the station often became the most prominent feature of the landscape. Opelousas, Louisiana, got passenger service, and "the landing place of the road is crowded every evening by the people of the town. No one ever thinks of taking a walk in any other direction from that leading to the railroad tracks." The editor of the local paper thought he could discern "a very great change" in the town's citizens. "They are rapidly casting aside their old rustic country ways and are becoming metropolitan-like in ap- pearance and deportment."14

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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12 The Promise of the New South

Fat Nancy Trestle Disaster in Orange County, Virginia, 1888. (University of Virginia Special Collections)

When the railroads found themselves and their passengers inconvenienced by the old-fashioned way of keeping time—every town in the country basing its own calculations on the passing of the sun and the turning of local clocks—it became clear that time would have to be made uniform if the ever-growing rail system was to operate efficiently and safely. In 1883 railroads took it upon them- selves to divide the country into four time zones, and the railroad became the arbiter of time as of so much else in the nation and in the South. "We consulted the clock [only] when we had to catch a train, the clock's strongest ally in clamping down on the human race and holding it in a fixed and rigid rhythm," a South Carolina man recalled. Yet there was no guarantee the trains could always adhere to their own standard. As residents of many hamlets and villages on the smaller lines in the South discovered, the train "was seldom there when the schedule said it would be, but occasionally it was, and they were amazed and angry when they missed it." The train, everyone came to realize, lived according to a schedule that suited the system, the mechanism. The locomotive passed through nearly a thousand Southern counties but it belonged to none of them.15

Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s Southern railroad companies experi- mented with ways to accommodate themselves to the different widths of track between North and South; some used cars with especially wide wheels that could operate on either the North's narrow gauge or the South's three-inch wider gauge,

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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some used cars with adjustable axles, some used hoists to lift car bodies while the trucks underneath were changed. All these methods proved cumbersome and expensive, and so in 1885 the major railroads agreed to standardize nearly 13,000 miles of track of eccentric gauge, the great bulk of which lay in the South. The move was all made on one day: Sunday, May 30, 1886. Frantic work crews shoved thousands of miles of rail three inches closer together on that day. The integration and improvement never ceased: steel replaced iron, spur lines reached into ever more remote areas, new companies pushed aside those who got in the way of the system.16

While some general stores had grown up at junctions on Southern railroads in the 1850s, the clientele and impact of those stores had remained small. Slaves could buy nothing, and small farmers, who spent most of their energy producing for their household or local market, had little currency and little need for credit. Most of the things small farmers could not import or make themselves—shoes, harnesses, plows, hinges, nails—were crafted by local artisans, slave and free. Farm women usually made their families' clothes, sometimes with store-bought gingham, but more often with homespun; slave women and mistresses did the same work for plantation slaves. Infrequent purchases from local stores usually involved staples such as salt, molasses, and coffee. Planters, whose business depended on trade in international commodity and financial markets, often dealt with factors in New York or London. The factor made purchases abroad on behalf of their clients and shipped goods directly to the plantation.17

The situation changed after emancipation with the rapid emergence of country stores in the late 1860s and early 1870s. National laws written during the Civil War put most banks in the North and left stores to dispense the vast majority of credit in the Southern countryside. With cash scarce, Southern legislators created lien laws that allowed the use of unplanted crops as collateral for loans to get cotton and corn into the ground. Because the few Southern banks had little in- centive to lend either to small farmers or to rural stores, stores operated on credit dispensed by wholesalers, who in turn obtained credit from manufacturers or town banks. The stores increasingly stood at the center of the rural economy.18

Stores sped the reorientation of plantation-belt economic life. Many freedpeo- ple, at the demand of their landlords, concentrated on growing cotton and aban- doned their gardens; they turned to stores for everything they needed. Other freedpeople, working for wages and having some say over how they would spend their money, also turned to the store, eagerly purchasing symbols of their inde- pendence. Many planters used plantation stores to wring extra profit from their tenants, marking up goods substantially and doling out credit to keep tenants on the farm throughout the season. Independent merchants established stores as well, though, competing for the business of the freedpeople and white farmers. Both planters and merchants took a lien on the unplanted crop of their customers as security for the loan of goods and supplies. The lien proved a powerful political and economic weapon for those who wielded it. In legislative and court battles throughout the 1870s, planters and merchants scrambled for control over the crop liens of small farmers. In some localities, planters and merchants made compro-

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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14 The Promise of the New South

mises that allowed both to do business, sometimes working together; in others, merchants decided there might be less competition in regions without powerful landlords. They left for the upcountry.19

Upcountry merchants had already begun establishing stores of their own. Farms outside plantation areas had been growing more cash crops even before the Civil War, as railroads proliferated and as high cotton prices beckoned. The war had temporarily halted cotton sales but they accelerated in the decade after Appo- mattox. In the first years after the war, pent-up world demand raised the price of cotton. Northern manufacturers and commission houses sent agents to drum up business in the South; they met eager clients behind the counters. Hundreds of new upcountry stores emerged to loan money, market crops, and make profits from the rapidly spreading cotton economy.20

"Have you all felt the affects of the low price of cotton," a son wrote his father fifteen years into the post-Reconstruction South. "It nearly ruined us. I did not get my house build. The farmers are very blue here. But getting ready to plant cotton again." Another farmer admitted that "I am holding my cotton, and it is still going down. I do not know what to do, but I guess I will sail in the same old channel." From Texas one farmer wrote of himself and his fellow sufferers: "I am afraid the Farmers will run the price of Cotton down to 4 cents again next fall."21

Asked how it was that Southern farmers fell into this cycle of futility, J. Pope Brown, a cotton farmer himself, answered the question impatiently: "That was by necessity, almost. You can not go into all of that. We were poor, had nothing to go on, had no collateral, and we just had to plant the crop that would bring money right away. We did not have time to wait." In the immediate postwar years farmers could count on cotton when they could count on nothing else; it was easily grown by a farm family, nonperishable, in demand, seemingly prof- itable, and easy to get credit for. The fertilizer brought by the railroads extended the growing season in the upcountry and reduced the risks of growing cotton in places beyond the plantation areas. By the 1880s, cotton production had spread to thousands of new farms, into the upcountry of Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina as well as onto the Texas and Arkansas frontier. Through all the twists and turns of Southern politics, through all the fluctuations of the volatile Amer- ican economy, Southerners of both races grew more cotton.22

The farmers who pondered the problem of low cotton prices faced certain insurmountable facts throughout the New South era. "There is one thing I want to impress upon you," a farmer testifying before a federal commission studying the problem insisted. "Cotton is the thing to get credit on in this country. Ten acres of cotton will give you more credit than 50 acres of corn. . . . You can always sell cotton. You leave home with a wagon load of cotton and you will go home that night with money in your pocket; you load up your wagon with wheat or corn and come here with 100 bushels, and I doubt some days whether you could sell it." As a Texas newspaper pointed out, cotton "is practically a sure crop. There is never a total failure even under very unfavorable circum- stances." Unlike grain or vegetables, cotton would always be worth something.

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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Cotton required no expensive machinery, no elaborate ditching or irrigation, no vast labor force, no arcane knowledge. From the viewpoint of the individual farmer, especially one with little capital to risk in experimenting with some new crop, cotton made sense.23

Precisely because more farmers became adept at raising more cotton at the same time as countries on the other side of the world greatly increased their production, the South grew far too much of the commodity for the region's own good. One farmer explained the cruel cycle. "When the fellow would come up at the end of the year with six short bales of cotton and a mule, the cotton farmer would say to him. 'Why did you not make more cotton? Here is a man that got ten bales.' He went back home and put in to make ten bales, and at the end of the year he had ten bales, and when he came to the farmer the latter said, 'Why did you not make more? Here is a man that made twelve bales, and here is another who made fifteen bales.' " After the farmer had struggled to make as much cotton as he could, he suddenly heard a new set of directions. " 'You fool, you have made too much; you have overdone the thing.' And he was doing what they told him to do all the time. We got in that fix and we did not know what to do. I was one of those fellows."24

This farmer, along with many thousands like him, "went on the idea if a man could make two bales of cotton where one grew before he was a benefactor." A good farmer had always been one who could make the land yield more. "The trouble about it was we started out making it at 20 cents, and then it went to 15, and then to 10, and when we learned to make it at 10 it went to 8, and when we thought we had learned to make it at 8 it went to 6, and when we had learned how to make it at 6 it went to 4."

After sharecropping and preaching for years, Charley White and his wife Lucille got a chance to buy 27 acres in Texas for $350. "The house wasn't much more than a shack," White recalled, but his wife never complained and the children were too young to care. "Lucille and me always had worked hard, both of us. We hadn't ever minded work. But looked like when we got some land that belonged to us it just set us on fire. We didn't seems to get half as tired, or if we did we didn't notice it. One day when we was cleaning up a field Lucille said, 'You know, Charley, even the rocks look pretty.' " The ambition that drove Charley and Lucille White drove many blacks in the New South.25

The cashbook of Daniel Trotter, a black farmer from Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, showed how a black family pieced together enough for a farm. In 1899, his wife sold eggs, one or two dozen at a time, earning $5.30; she also contributed $7.80 from her sewing of dresses and jeans. The family sold four pigs and made $70.22 picking cotton. Meanwhile, Trotter made even more "cash money" by "fixing miller machinery," "fixing water clock," "bell clock," and guns. Some of this money the family spent on such things as stockings, mattress, paint, coats, onion sets, "arsh potatoes," "wrighting paper," stamps, "bluin," "sweet oil," sardines, pills, black pepper, a round file, bread, candy, shot, and ginger snaps, revealing that they enjoyed a standard of life above that of most black farmers. By the end of the year Trotter noted that his family's savings

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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16 The Promise of the New South

totaled $175 in "Green Back" and $33 in silver. In 1900, the Trotters bought a "plantation" for an undisclosed sum.26

This was just part of the story, though, for Trotter also left a brief account of his farming life before the good year of 1899:

I married in Sep 25/1885 I work for Chaplin by month 1 1/2 year . . . I move onto H. T. Churman in 1887. I Live to Churman 4 years and made crop I moove to Mr. J. H. C. Cosgrove in 91 made 2 crops own Halves and Made 2 Crop with him Renting all together I Live to J. H. C. Cosgrove 4 years I moove to Mr. M. F. Atkins in 97 I Live with Mr. Atkins One year and Rent I moove to Mr. J. C. keyser in 98 I rented J. C. Keyser whole Place for 3 years.

Trotter recorded his labor and his accounting in a little booklet put out by a patent medicine company. As if to mock his ambition, a cartoon opposite his meticulous figures showed a familiar scene from the advertising of the day: a well-dressed white man looks down at a black child and says, "My, what a nice fat little boy!" and the child replies, "Golly, boss, that ain't no fat; dat's nuffin but M. A. Simmons' Liver Medicine. We can't git along widout in dis coun- try."27

While white landowners, especially absentee landowners, might sell remote or poor lands to blacks, prospective black landowners faced a disheartening situa- tion with regard to land in the Black Belt. "We air in veary bad condishion here," F. M. Gilmore, a black man from Arkansas, wrote the African Coloni- zation Society. "Land Lords has got us Bound To Do Just as they Say or git off of his Land, and we air Compeled to Do so. . . . and they say it is not entend from the begaining for a Dam negro to have. But, a small peace of Land in the South, an it is only 6 feet by 4 wide 4 ft deep." A black man, according to the whites Gilmore dealt with, "has no bisness with money by no means whatever, an ef He git Corn bread and fat meet and $12.00 . . .per year that is A plenty for ever head of A Negro.''28

"The best sign for the Negroes of our land," a sympathetic white woman observed, "is that they are fast separating into classes, a fact to which their white fellow-citizens often fail to attach the importance it deserves." Black Southerners increasingly differed among themselves in quite self-conscious ways. "Few modern groups show a greater internal differentiation of social conditions than the Negro American, and the failure to realize this is the cause of much

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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confusion," W. E. B. DuBois pointed out. "The forward movement of a social group is not the compact march of an army, where the distance covered is prac- tically the same for all, but is rather the straggling of a crowd, where some of whom hasten, some linger, some turn back, some reach far-off goals before others even start, and yet the crowd moves on."29

Southern trains were divided into two cars, a "smoking" car for men and a "ladies" car for families and non-smoking men as well as for women. Custom had it that blacks would ride in the smoking car, but as a white women's suf- fragist from Ohio on her first visit to the South related, these cars offered only nauseating conditions: "All Southern trains run a compartment car for nigers, and men spit on floor in all cars so it is dreadful. We always go in looking for clean floor and seat—sure enough I wish I had on short skirts in such dirty cars."30

Apparently a growing number of black men and women shunned the spitting, cursing, and drinking they too often confronted in the "smoking" car. Unfor- tunately, they found a different kind of trouble when they attempted to move to better conditions. One well-dressed black man, asked by the conductor to leave the ladies' car after the train crossed the state line between Tennessee and Geor- gia, refused. Even after three young white men ordered him to move, he de- clined. The three whites assaulted him. When the conductor returned to get tick- ets, the black man sought the official's protection. The conductor told the white assailants to calm down and ordered the man whom they had beaten to go to the smoking car. "The negro's face was covered with blood," the Atlanta Consti- tution related. "His silk hat was mashed, and he was scared." He got off at the next station, many miles before his destination.31

"Self-respecting colored people would not go into the coach set apart for them" before laws forced them to do so, Mary Church Terrell recalled. In the late 1860s, her father bought a first-class ticket for himself and his young daugh- ter. Mary, five years old, enjoyed the trip until the white conductor came by while her father had stepped into the smoker. "As he pulled me roughly out of the seat, he turned to the man sitting across the aisle and said, 'Whose little nigger is that?' The man told him who my father was and advised him to let me alone. Seeing the conductor was about to remove me from the car, one of my father's white friends went into the smoker to tell him what was happening." Mary's father insisted, successfully, that their ticket entitled them to first-class accommodations. When they reached home, the girl tried to discover what she had done wrong. "I hadn't mussed my hair; it was brushed back and was per- fectly smooth. I hadn't lost either one of the two pieces of blue ribbon which tied the little braids on each side of my head. I hadn't soiled my dress a single bit. I was sitting up 'straight and proper.' " Her mother could only respond that "sometimes conductors on railroad trains were unkind and treated good little girls very badly."32

The railroad companies did not want to be bothered with policing Southern race relations and considered the division of coaches into black and white com- partments an irksome and unnecessary expense. Despite the railroad companies'

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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18 The Promise of the New South

Percent of county population in villages of fewer than 2,500 people, 1880 and 1900.

resistance, though, growing tensions about race and gender, anger at the rail- roads, and political maneuvering pushed toward the separation of the races. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, the railroads became the scenes of the first state- wide segregation laws throughout the South.33

Walter Hines Page described a North Carolina railroad village in 1877. "The railway station was then a flimsy shanty that the country merchant had himself built in payment for the railroad's stopping its one daily passenger train if it were signalled." When the train stopped, as it did two or three times a week, it discharged a single passenger or a box or barrel for the merchant; it never took anything on. "Three families of importance lived near the railway station, and the little settlement dwindled down the muddy road to a dozen Negro shanties." One Baptist church, one Methodist church, and one intermittent school consti- tuted the place's organized life.

Twenty-five years later, Page could barely recognize the muddy hamlet. "Two railroads now run by the town and you may take a sleeping car on either one and go to New York in twenty hours, whereas twenty years ago it was a journey of fifty or sixty hours with several stops and there was no sleeping car. More

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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important, "the town has mills and shops and paved streets and electric lights, a well-maintained private school and two public schools, one for whites and one for blacks. Society still divides itself into church-groups, but the violence of religious controversy is abated, especially among the men; for they now discuss the price of certain stocks in New York." Page's town was luckier than most, but its evolution was not unusual. Hundreds of places saw the same changes arrive with the same speed. "In the smart modern town, with its banks, and shops, and mills, and stores, and numerous other accessories of a nineteenth- century industrial community," another Southerner noted in 1895, "one finds it hard to recognize the sleepy medieval village of forty years ago."34

New villages emerged in every corner of the South, "buried in bends of the rivers, hidden behind mountains, perched on rises of ground beside bayous, and strung along thousand of miles of virtually impassable roads." These places, "known only to the natives, the drummers, Dun and Bradstreet, country politi- cians and postal inspectors," served as the stages where much of the history of the New South was played out. Every subregion of the South witnessed the emergence and evolution of villages, hamlets of fewer than 2,500 people.35

Villages beginning with a single store, church, or school quickly grew into Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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20 The Promise of the New South

larger settlements. The number of villages in the South doubled between 1870 and 1880, then doubled again by 1900, to over 2000 villages containing 1.2 million people. The South's larger towns and cities took off in the 1880s—the rate of urban growth nearly doubling the national average—and continued strong for generations. By 1910, more than 7 million Southerners lived in a town or city. The cities of the New South stood not as isolated islands in a vast rural sea but rather as the center of trade and ambition for dozens of smaller towns and cities. Overlapping and interlocking systems embraced virtually every village and town in the South. Influence, fashion, and capital moved down through these systems, while crops, migrants, and profits worked their way up. From their very beginning, the villages, towns, and cities of the New South worked as parts of complicated and interdependent networks.36

Even small towns brought pieces of the city deep into the rural South. "The improvements in transportation, the daily mail, the telegraph, have mobilized country life. Country people who formerly were satisfied with their weekly pa- per, who went to town annually or semiannually, in some instances not more than two or three times during a long life, can now go quickly, safely, pleas- antly, and cheaply several times a day," Harry Hammond pointed out. In town, "cheap coal, cheap lights, convenient water supply offer inducements; society and amusements draw the young: the chance to speculate, to make a sudden rise in fortunes, to get in the swim attracts others." The results were clear to see. "All these things, and many more of the same sort have acted and reacted be- tween the town and the country, and the country has become permeated with tendencies to town life and the effort to imitate."37

Southern boosters of the early 1880s told everyone who would listen that their region had entered upon the initial stages of a profound and beneficial transfor- mation. While the depression-plagued 1870s had seen only the spottiest and most halting kind of industrial development in the South, in the eighties capital, wages, and value of product all more than doubled. A host of journalists made names for themselves and their publications by justifying, cheering, defending, and aiding these starts at a new industrial South. Richard H. Edmonds of the Man- ufacturer's Record and Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal jumped on every bandwagon of Southern industrialization. Hundreds of lesser counter- parts in remote corners of the South did the same.38

The editors' own success hinged on the success of the town where their paper was published, and it became increasingly clear to everyone that towns without industry could grow only so far and so fast. "Did you ever think what a factory working two hundred hands means to a town?" a paper in Alabama's piney woods asked its readers as it implored them to grant a right of way for a railroad for one of its local enterprises. "From it one thousand people get a living. . . . This comes from nothing, and is unlike a mercantile business that sends away from a town the cost of everything they sell, leaving only the profit."39

Many Southerners detested those who were willing to purchase Northern good will and capital by renouncing the actions and beliefs of their fathers. "I ask in Heaven's name, is it essential that a southern man must eat dirt or wallow therein,

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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denounce his ancestry or ridicule their foibles, or otherwise degrade himself to prove his newborn loyalty and devotion to the new order of things?" one letter writer asked after an article by Henry Watterson urged the South to let go of the past and join the national mainstream.40

It was left to Henry Grady, the young and buoyant editor of the Atlanta Con- stitution, to construct a rationale that allowed the South to have it both ways, to be proudly Southern and yet partake of the new industrial bounty. Grady, a member of the generation that had come of age since Appomattox—he was thirty- six in 1886, when he became nationally famous—seemed to embody the South's new industrial growth and optimism. The son of a merchant, a graduate of the University of Georgia and the beneficiary of a year of postgraduate work at the University of Virginia, a correspondent for Northern papers, a champion of di- versified agriculture and the "cooperation" of the races, the attractive and per- sonable Grady rose quickly in the late seventies and early eighties. He became a privileged investor in Atlanta and a major figure in Georgia politics, giving him more than a rhetorical stake in the South and his city. He faced a difficult choice in 1886 when he got off the train in New York to make a speech before the New England Society of New York, where no Southerner had ever spoken before. Asked what he was going to say, Grady replied, "The Lord only knows. I have thought of a thousand things to say, five hundred of which if I say they will murder me when I get back home, and the other five hundred of which will get me murdered at the banquet."41

In his speech, Grady serenely exaggerated the changes that had come to the South in the preceding few years in politics, in race relations, in industrial and agricultural growth. He praised Abraham Lincoln as "the typical American" and joked that his fellow speaker William T. Sherman was "considered an able man in our parts, though some people think he is a kind of careless man about fire." But the dominant theme of his speech was that the New South had built itself out of devastation without surrendering its self-respect. "As she stands upright, full-statured and equal among the people of the earth, breathing the keen air and looking out upon the expanded horizon, she understands that her emancipation came because through the inscrutable wisdom of God her honest purpose was crossed, and her brave armies were beaten." Grady pushed his point, to make sure he was misunderstood neither by the North or the South: "The South has nothing for which to apologize. . . . The South has nothing to take back." Yet he "was glad that the omniscient God held the balance of battle in His Almighty hand and that human slavery was swept forever from American soil, the Amer- ican Union was saved from the wreck of war." The portly audience cheered through its tears, and those counting on Southern industry breathed a little eas-

In 1880, a mass of small workshops employed about three-quarters of all South- ern manufacturing wage earners. Beginning in the 1880s, however, the key Southern industries began to take shape. Over the next two decades, entrepre- neurs established factories in a broad arc through much of the Piedmont. The coastal plains stretching from Virginia into east Texas offered work at sawmills,

ier.42

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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22 The Promise of the New South

in turpentine camps, and in phosphate mines. Lumber mills employed men, too, in Arkansas, west Tennessee, and western Kentucky. People in north Alabama, north Georgia, and east Tennessee earned wages in the coal and iron fields, while people in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and southwest Virginia could look to the expanding coal mines of the mountains. Even cotton-producing re- gions witnessed the development of a newly mechanized and more highly capi- talized cotton-processing business, as 17,000 workers manned the larger cotton gins and cottonseed-oil installations in towns throughout the Black Belt and the Cotton Uplands. In each subregion, cities provided bases for foundries, car shops, and regional manufacturing firms.43

Every measure of industrial growth raced ahead in the New South, the rates of change consistently outstripping national averages. The increase in value added compared favorably with the other industrializing economies of the nineteenth century. Productivity actually grew faster in the South than it had in New En- gland during its industrial revolution fifty years earlier.44

Southerners poured enormous amounts of sweat and ambition, along with the relatively little money they had, into the products the world market would buy. They rushed to fill the only gaps in the national and international economies they could find: cheap iron, cheap cloth, cheap coal, cheap lumber, turpentine, sugar, and tobacco products. At the same time, new manufactured goods from the North and abroad flooded the South, undermining small firms who had produced for the local markets. Like other backward economies vying with established indus- trial nations, the South turned out the few products the more fortunate industrial nations or the less fortunate non-industrialized nations were willing to purchase. Like other backward economies, too, the South endured low wages, absentee ownership, and little control over national policy.45

Communities in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia watched as huge crowds of local blacks gathered at railroad stations to await transportation to the Missis- sippi Delta, the Louisiana rice or sugar fields, or the turpentine camps of the piney woods. "At the depot an interesting spectacle presented itself in the huge mass of luggage piled on the platform," a New Bern, North Carolina, newspaper reported in 1889. "Old meat boxes, various other boxes, barrels, trunks of all shapes and sizes, were piled ten feet high on the platform. The train could not accommodate all who wanted to go." "The negro exodus now amounts to a stampede," David Schenck of Greensboro wrote in his diary in January of 1890. "Nineteen passenger coaches filled to the doors, nine cars filled with baggage, 1,400 negroes, all pulled by a twelve wheeled consolidated engine. . . . I judge that between 5 and 10,000 have passed in the last fortnight, on their way to Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana."46

Observers expressed widely varying opinions about just what all this move- ment among Southern blacks foretold. Some worried. "The disposition among the colored people to migrate now is strong, and is increasing," a white South- erner wrote in 1889. "In nearly all communities there are Negroes of whom none knows the coming, or the going, or even the real names. The Negro is restive, the white apprehensive, and both are growing more and more suspicious.

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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Percent of families with a member engaged in manufacturing, 1900 (national quartiles).

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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24 The Promise of the New South

Such a status is already half hostile even before an overt act is committed." Others fumed. "Our young negro men are becoming tramps, and moving about over the country in gangs to get the most remunerative work," one white testi- fied to the Industrial Commission. Only the "older men, with families" were willing to stay at one place any length of time.47

Southern whites could not help but be aware of the black movement around them. Orra Langhorne, a white woman sympathetic to black aspiration, de- scribed a scene in Harrisonburg, Virginia: "One evening during my stay, loud shouts and hurrahs reached our ears from the railroad station . . . and on in- quiring the cause we learned that 'Shumate's' gang was passing through town." Five hundred "able-bodied colored men" gathered by a white Virginian who acted as an agent for Iowa mining companies were preparing to leave, "and this hilarious parting between them and their friends covered the heart-ache of sepa- ration." While there was no talk of the sort of exodus that struck the Carolinas, Langhorne worried that "some invisible agency . . . is gradually drawing the colored people away from the South and scattering them all over the country."48

The states of the Upper South—Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina—saw the most active working of that "invisible agency," the greatest relative loss of black natives. In those states blacks tended to move in a northerly direction, while those in the Lower South tended to move to states directly to their west. Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey received substantial numbers of black Southerners around the turn of the century; the migrants totaled about 141,000 in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Again, Orra Langhorne offered a clear-eyed portrait of this process: "A colored woman with a lively baby sat near me in the station-room and when I asked where she was going she began to tell me her simple story as if glad of someone to talk with." The young woman was from Charlottesville, but "wages were so low there colored people could not get enough to live on [and] a great many of them were going north and west. Her husband had been offered good wages in Pittsburgh and had gone a year ago; he had found plenty of work and sent for her and the baby and she was going to him." Langhorne "was sorry the young woman was going to leave Virginia," for she was "well- dressed, had good manners, could read and write, and seemed a sensible and prudent person." Such people were leaving the South by the thousands.49

So were white Southerners. In fact, many more whites than blacks fled the South. While the thirteen Southern states saw a net loss of 537,000 blacks be- tween 1880 and 1910, the loss of whites totaled 1,243,000 in those same de- cades. After 1900, when land in Texas and Louisiana became harder to get, Southern whites began to move to California and other parts of the Far West, places to which relatively few blacks had the means to go. All along, the South lost white population to every other part of the union.50

By the 1880s the planters, and especially their children, were leaving the plan- tations. "What was once the single occupation of the Southern gentleman," William P. Trent wrote in his essay, "The Dominant Forces in Southern Life," had become "the last that he would voluntarily assume." The "single occupa-

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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Junction 25

tion" of the Southern plantation mistress had disappeared as well: "The aristoc- racy begotten of slavery in the South had died a slow, hard death as far as her sons were concerned, and slower and harder as regards her daughters," D. F. St. Clair observed near the end of the century.51

Philip Alexander Bruce, himself the scion of an antebellum planting family, coolly portrayed the decay of the plantation and its dominant class. "The steady emigration of the members of the new generation" had decimated a planting class economically buffeted for decades, especially in the older Southern states of the Atlantic seaboard, Bruce wrote. "When the survivors of the large planters passed away, as there were few of their sons willing to succeed them in the old homes, the estates were sold, and the proceeds divided among the scattered children." Agriculture now offered "no career, as formerly, to energetic and ambitious young men entering into active life." The only thing that had "pre- vented a complete disruption of the large plantation system in every neighbour- hood," Bruce pointed out, was "the inability in some places to secure pur- chasers." Although ordinary whites (and, he might have added, blacks) were buying up some of the land, "a vast extent of Southern soil is temporarily laps- ing into wilderness" for want of people with money to purchase it.52

One scene haunted white observers of the South: "Most of the ancestral homes have been abandoned by their owners for a residence in the cities," a traveler to the Black Belt wrote, "the white-columned porticos of the favorite colonial ar- chitecture now mouldering in decay, the wide and once hospitable front halls resounding only to the rough banter and quarrels of negro tenants and their chil- dren." A planter from Hawkinsville, Georgia, when asked what became of white children growing up in the rural South, answered that "most of them drift away from the farm. Some go to towns and hunt jobs, and things like that. . . . If a boy has any move in him he wants something better."53

Katherine DuPre Lumpkin's father, trained as a lawyer, could not make a satisfactory living for his family in Georgia's Black Belt. When "the expanding railroad beckoned," he answered the call even though it meant immediate and frequent moves for his family. "First came a middle Georgia town farther away," his daughter recalled, after that, other Georgia towns, and finally, a move to South Carolina. Within the next ten years the Lumpkin family lived in eight different places. "The humor was not a little wry when a country place where we remained for all of two years was dubbed by the older children 'Nomads' Rest.' Being very young I thought they were saying 'No Man's,' which all but confirmed my worst fears."54

Northerners considered Southerners as lazy and inefficient in the New South as they had in the Old. Ella Harrison was disgusted when she went down to Mississippi to campaign for woman's suffrage. "What they need is more independence and thrift—some northern snap—but you've no idea how pokey—slow—every one is," she wrote her father. "The niger and white man were both lazy before the war—niger to get a rest had to idle when master was not round, and Master had to idle to maintain his dignity. Now both are helpless." The only hope for the South seemed to be for such people to finish their blighted lives and make room

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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26 The Promise of the New South

for a new generation. "When they die, and the future fellow who lives in this naturally rich land, gets 'grit,' 'gumpshun,' and 'get' into him then the natural opportunities of this part may become known." In the meantime, "death and education has much to do to redeem this south-land."55

To some white Southerners, the region faced greater danger from the triumph of Yankee values than from Southern laziness or imperiousness. A student news- paper at the University of Virginia put it bluntly: "it is very sad to see the old freedom from mean mercenary motives passing away, and instead, growing up in the breasts of our fellow Southerners, the sordid, cold blooded, commercial money idea that has always been the marked characteristic of other sections of the country." C. L. Pettigrew of North Carolina traveled out west to see for himself what the new land might hold. "You have no idea among that striving, rough and eager crowd, how I longed for the gentle form of manhood, just as brave, just as ambitious except for material things, which we have here in our best southern type," he wrote to a friend back home. Another Carolina boy, this one off at the Naval Academy, reported to his mother that he had been invited to New York for Christmas by his roommate. "I know I would have a glorious time there, as his people are very prominent there in financial circles and there- fore in social circles, since it is in the North." White Southerners wanted to enjoy the benefits of commercial prosperity and yet to feel superior to the bald economic striving of the North.56

Older whites sometimes expressed alarm at the extent to which younger Southerners had adopted the values of commerce. Henry Waring Ball of Missis- sippi observed that his young nephew had "gone to work. He asked his mother to let him help a little chum of his to deliver papers, and brought home in real triumph a nickel as the result of his first venture. He is very faithful and indus- trious at it, and says his chum will give him 25 cents a week for helping him." Such evidence of enterprise might have heartened other families, but not this one: "We laugh over it, but if it is an indication of his character, it is not a laughing matter. Few boys at 7 years would voluntarily hunt up work and be- come money makers—even at 25 cents a week. I know it would horrify either one of his grandfathers, beyond all measure, but times change, and we with them, alas!"57

Young people, on the other hand, could be perturbed by their elders' lassitude. " 'Come day, go day, God send Sunday' is more the motto of the free and go- easy life of the Boyds," S. D. Boyd, Jr., of Virginia complained in his diary. His parents and grandparents had not been "reared up to hard work. They had their slaves, their servants etc, were not accustomed to it in their youth, and hence cannot understand hard business. They take things easy, love to talk, to eat and to sleep but it does not come natural to them to come down to hard work." The Boyds were, their son observed, "a Procrastinating People . . . a people who do not feel altogether the great business importance of keeping an

. . CQ engagement.

Edwin A. Alderman recalled going to school in the wake of the war, "reciting Father Ryan's 'Conquered Banner' and the mournful threnodies of the period. I

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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remember the sad and subtle mystery of my father's face as he sat on his gallery and gazed wistfully over the world which seemed so bright and alluring to my young spirit." Alderman admired his father, who "was striving in middle life to adjust himself to a new world, whose features he could not recognize, and in which he must live and work as he had in the world gone from him forever amid the flashing of the guns." Alderman counted himself lucky: "That he crossed the perilous bridge between the eras, safely and strongly, was his best legacy to me."59

Many other boys were less fortunate, for they inherited the confusion and bitterness of their elders. James Eleazar of South Carolina was twelve years old before he discovered that the South had lost the Civil War: "And it was one of the saddest awakenings I ever had. For hours on end I had listened to Grandpa tell of whipping the lard out of the Yankees on a dozen battlefields. Despite their odds in every battle, the matchless Lee and Jackson had cut the enemy's ranks to pieces." The tales Eleazar's grandfather told, though, somehow never ex- tended all the way to Gettysburg and Appomattox. "It was when I got to that point in our history book that I discovered the bewildering fact that the South had lost that war." The boy was "depressed for days and felt that we should go back and finish the thing right."60

Veterans of the Civil War worried that their sons and grandsons would mis- understand—or worse, forget—the struggles of their elders. All around them older men could sense a growing indifference of the young to the central events in their fathers' lives. A Texas man wrote to his state representative to enlist his help in telling "the sons of Confederates and the public generally" about the Lost Cause. "I know, however, the hard and faithful pull that is necessary to ever arouse the public mind sufficiently to come together and listen quietly and gently to the quivering voice of the old ex-Confederate Soldier. It's going to be very hard to impress this generation to ever see that we were loyal to the Constitution of the U.S. and unless the old Confederates take hold and at once the truest, best, and most patriotic people on earth will be handed down to the history of our country as traitors. And the coming generation will be in a condition to believe it too." Wade Hampton reaffirmed his faith in the cause to a fellow ex-Confederate officer: "I believe now, as always, that the South was right and that belief is as strong as that in the existence of a God." Hampton was worried, though: "Like you, I must deplore the dearth of senti- ment in the South, especially among the young men and in every public utter- ance I have tried to make them true to our lost cause and to their heroic fathers."61

One older man after another mourned the broken connection. "We of the Old South," the poet Paul Hamilton Hayne of Georgia wrote to a compatriot, "have need, God knows, to stand by each other staunchly. The new Generation hardly comprehends us." A South Carolina man complained that "most of the young men are willing to turn their backs on everything that we were taught to regard as sacred." J. R. Cole of Texas admitted to his diary that he was growing old, though he was only 53 years of age. "I live over the days of my youth and tell my children of my ups and downs, but the chariot of Time never stops and gray

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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28 The Promise of the New South

hair, gray beard and wrinkles now almost conceal the young man of 1861 leav- ing College to join his brothers on the march to the field of battle."62

Sometimes, after a favorite war story failed to win the attention and respect he thought it deserved, Mel Barrett's father would lose his patience. " 'Ah,' Pa would say, 'You children simply don't understand.' And he would get up, leave the house, and go visit with Loyd Smith to whom he could talk with the assur- ance that, at least, Loyd would know about what he was talking." Other young men felt anger at the shadow the Civil War threw over their lives. "We were and are disinherited," Walter Hines Page's thinly disguised autobiographical protagonist exploded in The Southerner, "we who had no more to do with the Civil War than with the Punic Wars and no more to do with slavery than with the Inquisition, and yet we suffer the consequences of slavery and war."63

"I have met women, since we came here, capable, shrewd, and alive with en- ergy," Rebecca Harding Davis remarked with some surprise in 1887. "They manage plantations and shops; they raise stock, hold office, publish newspapers. Indeed, while Northern women have been clamoring for their rights, Southern women have found their way into more careers than they. They keep up with all the questions of the day." White women in the South often belied the stereo- types of languid Southern womanhood. They worked in many of the region's shops, farms, and businesses, often assuming control after the death of a hus- band, brother, or father. Southern women had taken over such roles in large numbers during the Civil War and its aftermath. More important, though, were the challenges and opportunities facing the new generation. A disproportionate number of women in much of the countryside, especially in the Atlantic seaboard states, meant that some would never find husbands. The decline of plantation life meant they could not follow the time-tested ways of establishing themselves. The ferment of the New South meant that many found new chances at indepen- dence.64

Young women seemed to live faster, more impetuously, than their elders. Carrie Hall wrote to her daughter with a mild warning: "Dearie, it sounds a little strange to me to hear a young lady speak of 'painting the town red.' It is not a very elegant expression." Theresa Green Perkins of Franklin, Tennessee, con- fided to her journal that her granddaughter was always on the move: "her 'set' go somewhere to dance every Friday night, at one or the other of their homes." A few weeks later Perkins "wrote this as a specimen of the way the youngsters of 13-15 are spending their holidays": her granddaughter went to a "storm party on Friday night, ditto Saturday night, church on Sunday night, a dance Monday night, a house party Tuesday evening and hay-riding that night, another storm party Wednesday night, ice cream supper Thursday night, and house party Fri- day night, and on Saturday girls were spending the night at her house." Perkins later "burned many papers that were in my old trunk," manuscripts of her own writings. "I would have prized them had my mother written them but the world moves too fast now. Children do not care for such things."65

Younger women had more serious concerns as well, though their loyalties sometimes seemed contradictory to outsiders. "It may be said of the average

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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Junction 29

woman of the South that she is satisfied with her condition," Josephine Henry noted in the Arena. The South's white women were dedicated to the traditional virtues of quiet resolve, of working their good influence within the home and church. "She loves the church and believes in her pastor. She is Pauline in her ideas and therefore loves the music of her chains. But with all this there is pervading this class a strong under-current of sentiment in the direction of larger liberty." That direction of "larger liberty" pulled many younger women along in the New South. Thousands, black and white, joined women's clubs and re- form organizations; many thousands more worked to establish their economic independence. Though women could not vote in the late nineteenth century, a Southern woman recalled, "they sat in on the speaking and were as interested as the men." It would not be long before women sought to influence politics directly.66

David Schenck was appalled by an article in the Central Presbyterian in 1889, the product of a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York. The professor "uttered more words of infidelity, in a brief sentence than I have ever read. He says that the account, in the Bible, 'of the creation, the fall of man and the deluge' is a poem, 'a simple, pure, chaste poem but only a poem.' " The full inspiration of the Bible, the professor asserted, "has been exploded in Ger- many and England and only remains in America where 'ignoramuses snort at Higher Criticism.' " Schenck admitted that his "faith was shocked and I know many a weaker Christian will find his faith trembling if not tumbling down when he reads it."67

"I appreciate the interest you take in my spiritual welfare, but really, Mamma, you are wasting time," Frank Patterson wrote. "You attribute my 'want of suc- cess' to my 'disregard for a higher power' "; Patterson assured her "if, as you seem to think, I could get my salary raised by reading the Bible and praying, I promise you I should not neglect it. As to believing it could not do that if it raised my salary a thousand fold, any more than you could have faith in praying to a stone idol, however hard you might try." Belief, he announced, is "only a matter of training and locality. If you were a Chinese mother you would proba- bly be reproaching me for my want of dependence on Josh." He maintained that he had "studied the Christian religion more, I imagine, than you ever did and it is to me nothing more than a superstition, a sweet, noble, beautiful superstition in many respects, a cruel, barbarous superstition in others." Christian mothers worried about their sons becoming infected with such ideas. "I want to ask you to pray especially for our boys, for John that he may not be led off by the new theology or whatever it is, but may ever be a sincere and an earnest Christian," Mary Manly wrote to her husband. "I do not crave wealth and honor for my children, but I do so long to have them all love and serve Jesus."68

Ministers sometimes risked discussing such matters in church. An Alabama newspaper praised a new Baptist minister because his style is "positive, urgent, convincing. There is no uncertainty hanging about his conclusions. They are orthodox, clear-cut and logical." On the other hand, members of some congre- gations believed their ministers were in over their heads. Oliver Bond described

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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30 The Promise of the New South

with disgust a sermon he heard in Bamberg, South Carolina. "Brother Elkins entered the ring tonight against 'SPECULATIVE SKEPTICISM.' It is a good thing speculative skepticism couldn't hit back, else the preacher would have been knocked out of the pulpit."69

From the 1870s on, the national literary market of the late nineteenth century pushed Southern writers. American magazines proliferated: Lipincott's, Scrib- ner's, Harper's Monthly Magazine, Atlantic Monthly. These journals made a conscious attempt to represent the entire country; even editors with strong Re- publican sentiments bent over backward to give Southern writers a place. The growing numbers of educated people in the nation created a steady and growing thirst for fresh reading material, while the lack of an international copyright law encouraged American authors to write stories rather than books. The popularity of public readings also created a natural outlet for speakers who could recreate the dialects of regions genteel audiences could only read about. Those writers who could dramatize their own stories were in special demand.70

George Washington Cable of Louisiana achieved considerable renown. Born in 1844, the son of a Virginia father who had moved to Indiana, freed his slaves, and married a New England woman, Cable grew up a devout Presbyterian in New Orleans. After serving in the Confederacy, Cable, twenty-one years old, returned home to help support his mother and siblings by working on a news- paper. To fill space in the paper, Cable wrote ninety columns on the life around him and on the literature of England and America. Cable, who had been an ardent supporter of the South during the Civil War, began in the 1870s to ques- tion the injustice and brutality he saw inflicted against blacks. In 1875, he pub- licly protested the segregation of New Orleans's public schools; rebuffed by the newspaper's editor, he saved his outrage for the fiction he began writing in his spare time during these years.71

In 1873, when Scribner's sent Edward King to report on conditions in the postwar South, King met Cable and was so impressed by conversations with the young newspaperman that he persuaded his magazine to publish several of Cable's stories. Some city residents were angered by Cable's portrayals of Creoles, white natives of Latin descent, but other readers throughout the nation recognized in Cable's stories an authentic voice of the postwar South. Editors and readers in both North and South applauded one Cable story after another, soon gathered in his popular book Old Creole Days (1879).72

Cable's conflicting feelings about the South became clearer in his novel The Grandissimes (1880), published serially in Scribner's in 1879. Depicting the years immediately after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Cable portrayed a so- ciety not unlike the South after Reconstruction, a place marked by governmental corruption, racial conflict and confusion, violence, and economic turmoil. Cable insisted, despite the pleas of his editors, on building the novel around a legend of a noble runaway slave. In that legend a towering African prince, Bras Coupe, leveled a curse on his owner's plantation. For Cable, racial guilt and anxiety, like the curse, underlay the apparently carefree society of old New Orleans. Characters negotiated across blurred lines of race and respectability, as sensitive

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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George Washington Cable and Thomas Nelson Page, from Harper's, May 1887.

men and women with one-eighth or one-quarter black ancestry struggled to find a place in a society divided by slavery, as dignified white men sought to find a way to maintain their honor, as an outsider sought to make sense of the tangle of families and secrets. Cable's novel was subtle and ambivalent, devoted to making palpable the difficult decisions faced by its characters, unflinching in its portrayal of the consequences of slavery and its aftermath: violence, insensitiv- ity, deception, lassitude, sexual immorality.73

Northern reviewers loved The Grandissimes, calling Cable "the first Southern novelist (unless we count Poe a novelist) who has made a contribution of per- manent value to American literature." William Dean Howells, the arbiter of American fiction in the Gilded Age, told Cable that the young Louisiana novelist had portrayed "a multitude of figures with a delicacy and unerring certainty of differentiation that perpetually astonished me." Southern reviews were generally favorable as well, though uncomfortable with a tone they deemed judgmental. The most forthright—indeed, ferocious—attack came in an anonymous pamphlet written by a New Orleans acquaintance of Cable's, a Creole priest. He attacked the book for Cable's "disguised puritanism, assuming the fanatical mission of radical reform and universal enlightenment," charging that the author had pros- tituted himself for "the prejudiced and inimical North." Reading the personal and bitter denunciation, Northern friends feared for Cable's safety.74

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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32 The Promise of the New South

Thomas Nelson Page broke into sudden prominence a few years after Cable, discovered by the same editor. Because of his personal history, Page seemed qualified to speak for the vanquished Virginia aristocracy. A larger Northern readership worshipful of British literature found his voice poignant and compel- ling. Page, born in 1853, recalled the antebellum years with the fondness of a young white master. Even the war years had been exciting and chivalric for the boy, as Page and his brother played at war and endured some of its privations. When his father returned to the plantation after the fall of Richmond, though, "it seemed like a funeral," Page recalled. "The boys were near the steps, and their mother stood on the portico with her forehead resting against a pillar. . . . It was a funeral—the Confederacy was dead." The young Page, scion of two of Virginia's most prominent families, was forced to tutor cousins in Kentucky to scrape together enough money for school. By 1874 he had managed to earn a law degree from the University of Virginia and went into the practice of law. He also began to write. His first published work was a poem, written in black dialect, that recalled the glorious life of the antebellum years.75

This poem, and the enormously successful stories that followed, were fanta- sies, unbridled glorifications of a lost childhood, lost innocence, and a lost civ- ilization. The plantation tradition of Southern literature emerged complete in Page's first major story, "Marse Chan," written in 1881 but not published until 1884. The story was told by an old slave who recounted the tragic story of two young white lovers on neighboring plantations, driven apart by their fathers' political differences. The hero Channing ("Marse Chan") went off to war heart- broken over the sundered engagement. His beloved, hearing that Channing had made a public defense of her father's name, sent a letter to the front proclaiming her love. Channing, wearing the letter over his heart, was killed. His fiancee died not long after, and the two were laid side by side in the graveyard. The old slave, certain that the lovers would be married in heaven, longed for their pres- ence and for the good old days before the war, when black and white, male and female, had their fixed and secure places. The aged black man's view of the world allowed the tale to be told with unchecked sentimentality. White readers, North and South, wept unashamedly. While Cable was complex and problematic even when entertaining, Page was just what editors and readers had in mind. Soon, American magazines were filled with Southern fiction that celebrated the old order with the formulaic and uncritical voice of Thomas Nelson Page.76

"A foreigner studying our current literature, without knowledge of our his- tory, and judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly conclude that the South was the seat of intellectual empire in America, and the African the chief romantic element of our population," Albion Tourgee, a Northern man turned novelist after serving as a Republican judge in North Carolina during Reconstruction, observed in 1888. "It may be noted that a few months ago every one of our great popular monthlies presented a 'Southern story' as one of its most prominent features; and during the past year nearly two-thirds of the stories and sketches furnished to newspapers by various syndicates have been of this character." Tourgee recognized the reasons for the demand: the Northern reader had ready-made images of Southern characters, and "as long as the author does

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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Junction 33

not seriously disturb these preconceptions, the Northern reader likes the Southern story because it is full of life and fire and real feeling." The Northern reader longed for such fire, "for it is getting to be quite a luxury to the novel reader to find a story in which the characters have any feeling beyond a self-conscious sensibility which seems to give them a great deal of trouble without ever ripening into motive or resulting in achievement." Fiction was one of the few Southern products that could hold its own in the national marketplace.77

Atticus G. Haygood, a prominent Methodist minister, described a scene on the Macon and Brunswick Railroad in the late 1870s, where a lumber crew rode home after delivering a raft of timber. "We saw a very black negro and a fair- haired youth drinking out of the same black-bottle. They sat promiscuously and drank, smoked, laughed, sang, whistled, and danced together. One young fellow knew the potent notes and they sang 'fa, so, la' while he beat time. . . . He sings a sort of wild tenor we used to hear at camp-meeting. . . . Perhaps we ought to be ashamed . . ., but we did enjoy their songs." Black and white Southerners continually influenced one another, every day and in every facet of life.78

Black Southerners made the railroad their own in their music. The earliest student of black folk songs discovered that guitar players prided themselves on their ability to evoke the train. "The train is made to whistle by a prolonged and consecutive striking of the strings, while the bell rings with the striking of a single string. . . . And when 'she blows for the station,' the exclamations may be heard, 'Lawd, God, she's a-runnin' now!' or, 'Sho' God railroadin'!" A lyric from a version of "John Henry," the product of black railroad construction crews in West Virginia, dramatized the pull of the wages and the prestige asso- ciated with such steady and high-paying work:

Where did you get that pretty little dress? That hat you wear so fine?

Got my dress from a railroad man, Hat from a man in the mine.

"When the blues began, the countryside was quiet," one student of the blues has written. "Loudest of the sounds to break the stillness was the roar of the steam train as it traced its way through the lowlands, leaving a smudge of smoke against the blue sky. A brief moment of excitement as it passed, a shrill whistle, dipping and wailing like a blues and it would be gone."79

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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5

The Heyday of Apartheid

The National Party retained control of government from 1948 until 1994, and the history of South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century was dominated by apartheid and the resistance it evoked. But apartheid was not static or monolithic. Each decade, broadly speaking, was marked by differences in both the content and the implementation of the policy, as well as in ways of resistance. In this chapter we shall examine these changes in the heyday of apartheid between the 1950s and the 1976 Soweto revolt.

The 1950s: constructing apartheid

During the first decade of National Party government, a barrage of legisla- tion codified and extended racial discrimination. As we have seen, much of this had precedents in segregationist laws and practices earlier in the century, but from the late 1940s the partial breakdown of segregation that had taken place during the years of the Second World War was reversed, and legislative discrimination was taken much further than before.

The cornerstone of apartheid was the division of all South Africans by race. Malan thus moved early to ensure the compartmentalization of the population. The prohibition of ‘mixed marriages’ (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) extended the existing ban on sex between whites and Africans outside marriage to prohibit all sexual contact between whites and other South Africans, including Indians and coloreds. Racial division in the future was the goal. And the Population Registration Act of the same year

The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, Fifth Edition. Nigel Worden. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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enforced the classification of people into four racial categories: white, colored, ‘Asiatic’ (Indian) and ‘Native’ (later ‘Bantu’ or African).

In subsequent years this rigid schema was extended to virtually every sphere of human activity. Residential segregation had existed in some parts of the country since the earlier part of the century, but the Group Areas Act (1950) extended the principle of separate racial residential areas on a comprehensive and compulsory basis (Mabin 1992). Its application was particularly felt in the cities, where forced removals were often justified by policies of slum clearance and coincided with modernist theories of town planning that involved massive urban restructuring (Parnell and Mabin 1995). With such justifications, Indian residents were moved out of the centre of Pretoria and Durban. Many colored inhabitants of Cape Town suburbs were relocated in segregated areas on the fringes of the city: plans for the demolition of the central District Six area had in fact been formu- lated before the Second World War (Bickford-Smith et al. 1999: 152–4). In 1954 the Natives Resettlement Act gave the state the power to override local municipalities and forcibly remove Africans to separate townships. Some of the first casualties were the African freehold areas of western Johannesburg such as Sophiatown, whose inhabitants were relocated to the new township at Soweto in 1955.

The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953) enforced social seg- regation in all public amenities, such as transport, cinemas, restaurants and sports facilities. And educational apartheid was enforced in schools (1953), technical colleges (1955) and universities (1959). African schooling was still neither free nor compulsory, as it was for whites. Certainly, educational provision for Africans before this period had been unequal and most gov- ernment schools separated white and African pupils. However, the Bantu Education Act (1953) brought all African schools under the control of the Department of Native Affairs, thus phasing out the independent mission- ary institutions which had previously led the field in African education and were viewed as breeding grounds for African independent thinking and protest. The Act imposed a uniform curriculum which stressed separate ‘Bantu culture’ and deliberately prepared students for little more than manual labor. Verwoerd, then Minister of Native Affairs, commented that many previous educators of Africans ‘misled them by showing them the green pastures of European society in which they are not allowed to graze’ (Christie and Collins 1984: 173).

White political monopoly of power was further tightened in the early 1950s. The advisory Natives Representative Council, set up in 1936, was

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abolished. The Bantu Authorities Act (1951) replaced it with government- approved chiefs in the reserves, but made no provision for the representa- tion of Africans in the towns and ‘white’ rural areas. The system of white parliamentary representation for Indians, established in 1946, was also ended. The only remaining ‘non-white’ representation in Parliament was that of coloreds in the Cape. The National Party’s electoral majority in 1948 was slender, and many marginal seats contained a number of colored voters who had largely supported the United Party and who bitterly opposed the discrimination of the Population Registration, Group Areas and Separate Amenities legislation. In 1951 the government attempted to have them removed from the voters’ roll. Such an action was only passed in Parliament with a bare majority and was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The government overcame this obstacle by rapidly appointing new senators to the upper house of Parliament who ensured the required two- thirds majority. Despite large-scale demonstrations of opposition by both coloreds and the white war veteran Torch Commando, in 1956 coloreds were registered on a separate roll and were restricted to electing four white representatives to Parliament (a system abolished in 1970). Total white monopoly of parliamentary power was thus obtained.

Colored disenfranchisement showed that the National Party was deter- mined to go to great lengths to ensure its electoral survival, although it increased its majority in the 1953 election, colored voters notwithstanding. other legislation increased government control over its non-parliamentary opponents. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) gave the Minister of Justice the power to ban any person or organization he viewed as ‘com- munist’, a broad definition which included almost all opposition to apart- heid. Powers were developed to confine people to single magisterial districts and to silence their writings and speeches, a forerunner of the security legislation of later years. And the 1953 Criminal Law Amendment Act prescribed heavy penalties for civil disobedience, a response to the organ- ized campaigns of the previous year (see pp. 108–10).

All of these white supremacist actions met with the approval of every sector of the broad Afrikaner nationalist alliance. A more controversial plank of apartheid legislation in the 1950s related to control over black labor. African urbanization and assertive labor organization had been the main feature of the breakdown of segregation in the 1940s, and Malan’s call for restrictions on African workers and firmer influx control attracted much support in 1948. During the first few years of National Party power, a number of measures attempted to put such a policy into effect. Strikes

Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.

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by Africans were made illegal in 1953, and although black trade unions were not prohibited outright, employers were not obliged to negotiate with them and many of their leaders were banned under the Suppression of Communism Act. Labor bureaux were established in 1951 under the control of the Native Affairs Department to coordinate the needs of employ- ers in particular regions and the recruitment of Africans to work in the towns, ensuring that they did not leave ‘white’ rural areas until the needs of local farmers had been met. Illegal ‘squatting’ in urban areas was pro- hibited in 1951, and in 1952 the orwellian-named Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act insisted that all Africans (including previ- ously exempted women) carry a reference book to include an employer’s signature renewed each month, authorization to be in a particular area and tax certificates. Under Section 10 of the 1955 Natives (Urban Areas) Amendment Act, rights of Africans to live in a town were confined to those who had been born there or had worked there for fifteen years or for ten years with a single employer. All others needed a permit to stay for longer than three days.

As Posel (1991) has argued, the 1955 Act demonstrated the triumph of a more pragmatic ‘practical’ approach to segregation over the ‘total’ segre- gation of men like Eiselen, who argued that all African economic activity and labor should be concentrated in the reserves (see p. 102). The needs of agricultural and urban employers for a steady supply of African labor determined government policy. Thus Africans should be permitted to move to towns if they were genuinely seeking work, and Section 10 recognized that ‘detribalized’ Africans had rights to urban residence whether or not they were employed there, thus providing a ‘labor pool’ for urban employ- ers. An example of this was Zwelitsha, near King William’s Town, which had been established in the 1940s. Inhabitants of the surrounding Ciskei reserve were initially encouraged to abandon farming and to form urban nuclear families with prescribed gender roles of male entrepreneurship and female home-making, following middle-class white norms. By the mid- 1950s such ideas were abandoned and Zwelitsha became simply a labor pool of proletarianized workers for local industry (Mager 1999: 47–67). Although pass laws were imposed, the labor bureaux were only partially successful in directing labor to where it was demanded. Employers circum- vented many of these controls when it suited them to do so.

The needs of business explain why the segregation of the 1950s remained ‘practical’, and influx control was not strictly applied. Similarly, while the government still had a rather uncertain electoral majority and no central

Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.

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control over local municipalities, it was reluctant to attempt full-scale urban removals and the implementation of ‘total’ segregation. All this was to change in the subsequent decade.

In the 1958 election the National Party obtained almost twice as many seats as its opponents. Part of this increasing parliamentary strength resulted from ploys such as the removal of the colored franchise, the incor- poration of the white (predominantly Nationalist) electorate of South- West Africa and the redrawing of constituency boundaries to favour rural areas over United Party urban strongholds. But clearly apartheid genuinely appealed to an increasing majority of the white electorate. Why was this? Many Afrikaners approved the power exerted by a party in their name and the moves to break with Britain, as marked by the abolition of rights of appeal to the Privy Council (1950) and assumption of control over the British naval base at Simonstown (1955). But it was clear by 1958 that the Nationalists was also attracting English-speaking voters away from the United Party. The latter saw its sixty-five seats held in 1948 whittled down to fifty-three, most of them going to the National Party.

Most whites supported the apparent limits to African urbanization imposed by the government and the suppression of resistance. But most significantly apartheid policies had not interrupted economic growth, and white living standards increased steadily. Farmers benefited from increased produce prices and workers from racial job reservation. Although many English-speaking manufacturers and industrialists were alienated from Afrikaner nationalist politics, they were able to maintain and expand pro- duction and enjoyed tariff protection. Gold production expanded mark- edly, with the exploitation of new fields in the Free State. Foreign investment, encouraged by cheap labor, furthered white prosperity, and there was little external criticism of apartheid policies. only at the end of the decade did this change, with international condemnation and the flight of capital after the Sharpeville shootings. By then the National Party, now led by Hendrik Verwoerd, had acquired sufficient confidence and power to ride the storm.

The 1950s: Defiance and the Freedom Charter

The 1950s saw an unprecedented upsurge of popular protest. In some ways this was a logical development from the trends seen in the 1940s, notably the doubling of the African urban population, employment in secondary industry and trade union organization. But it was given a new impetus by the imposition of apartheid laws and the social engineering of the

Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.

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Nationalist government. The intransigence of influx control (and especially the extension of passes to women), forced removals and the imposition of Bantu Education all led to resistance in the towns, drawing in both popular and middle classes. Despite the assault on union power, labor leaders organized protests around issues of low wages and price increases. Nor was resistance confined to the cities. Government intervention in reserve agri- culture and the unpopularity of measures carried out by chiefs appointed under the Bantu Authorities Act led to a number of rural protest move- ments. And the international context of decolonization elsewhere in Africa gave black political leaders hope that the construction of apartheid was a temporary aberration soon to be swept away in the wake of popular support for African nationalism.

Many of the tactics employed in this resistance, such as boycotts, staya- ways, strikes and civil disobedience, were those advocated in the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) Programme of Action of 1949 (see p. 95). In 1952 the ANC and the Communist Party jointly launched the Defiance Campaign to protest against the government’s new discriminatory legisla- tion, with the aim of mobilizing widespread defiance of unjust laws such as curfews, pass laws and segregation of amenities. over 8,000 people were arrested for defiance actions, mainly in the eastern Cape and on the Rand, and during the period of 1951–3 ANC membership grew dramatically from 7,000 to 100,000 (Lodge 1987: 310). Albert Lutuli, elected ANC President in late 1952, supported the principle of mass action in a clear break from the more conservative techniques of his predecessors. The Defiance Campaign was broken by the banning and imprisonment of many of its organizers, by legislation forbidding civil disobedience (the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1953), and by outbreaks of violence in Port Elizabeth and East London led by disaffected youth and women. But the impetus for mass campaigns was clearly established. The relocation of Sophiatown, which began in 1953, was resisted by local residents. Property owners refused to sign away their rights and, together with other tenants who would not move voluntarily, had to be forcibly relocated by the police. In 1954 the ANC called for a boycott of the new Bantu Education schools, an action that achieved considerable success initially on the Rand and in the eastern Cape. However, ANC promises of alternative informal education were only partially fulfilled, and when the government threatened to black- list teachers who supported the boycott and permanently to deny education to any children not enrolled by April of the academic year, opposition to Bantu Education collapsed.

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More sustained campaigns were carried out from 1952 by women against the carrying of passes. The Federation of South African Women, founded in 1954, linked to the ANC but drawing on other liberal support- ers, coordinated campaigns of non-registration, pass burning and petition- ing, culminating in 1956 in a mass demonstration of 26,000 women from throughout the country at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. This opposition certainly slowed down state action in extending passes to African women, but it failed to prevent it. The government began issuing passes to women in remoter rural areas, and then to the most vulnerable urban workers, such as domestic workers and nurses, the latter being threatened with dismissal if they refused to comply.

By 1959, the anti-pass campaign was over. Women’s protest turned instead to focus on police raids against shebeens (sites of illegal drinking but also township sociability), which threatened the dependence of many township women on informal beer-brewing (Mager 2010). In 1959 women in the shanty settlement of Cato Manor near Durban and in other parts of Natal picketed municipal beer halls, and in some cases attacked them and destroyed brewing equipment. Police broke up the protestors, but a boycott of beer halls followed, coordinated by the local branch of the ANC’s Women’s League. Protest by women was an important part of popular mobilization in the 1950s, but this was not so much a feminist attempt to overthrow the existing social order as opposition to state interference in the established rights and status of women. Indeed, Lodge has described some of the goals of the campaigns as ‘highly conservative . . . though no less justifiable for that’ (1983: 151). Edwards (1996) has argued that the Cato Manor attacks were in part motivated by women who were facing removal to the impoverished reserves, and who targeted local men in the beer halls who had obtained housing in the new KwaMashu township and were thus breaking local community cohesion.

other community-based actions emerged in the late 1950s. In 1957 buses were boycotted in the Rand township of Alexandra in campaigns against increased fares that invoked memories of the campaigns of 1944 (see p. 71). In the wake of this, union leaders in the newly formed South African Council of Trade Unions convinced the ANC of the need for a wider campaign around economic issues. The £1-a-day campaign of 1957– 8 called for a minimum wage and better working conditions, but its tactics of stayaway, combined in 1958 with protest against the white election of that year, met with only limited success. Police were readily able to identify those who remained at home, and dismissals for absenteeism from work

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took place. Moreover, as Feit has pointed out, the campaign was untimely. Wage levels were not noticeably lower than usual, and a number of urban workers were earning more than £1 a day (1967: 17). And the white election was of less immediate concern than day-to-day issues in the townships. Campaigns of this kind were difficult to sustain. Specific and limited targets were better supported.

Perhaps the most successful mass campaigns of the decade took place not in the towns but in the countryside. Impoverishment was increasing in the reserves, accentuated by the impact of migrant labor and overcrowd- ing. In the Transkei and Ciskei, young men were unable to obtain cattle and so establish homesteads, and instead asserted their masculinity through age cohort organizations and competitive fighting (Mager 1998). Rural conflicts around issues of impoverishment and state intervention were not new, but they rose to new heights in the late 1940s and the 1950s (Chaskalson 1988). Attempts by the government to improve reserve agriculture, by ‘bet- terment’ schemes of cattle culling and limitations on grazing were particu- larly threatening to men who controlled livestock and were fiercely resisted at a time when the sole means of survival for many homesteads was access to such land and stock (Mager 1999). Moreover, the Bantu Authorities Act made local chiefs responsible for these measures, as well as for tax collec- tion. By implementing state policies many of them forfeited local recogni- tion of their powers, and their appointment by the government further undermined their authority in such situations.

Attacks on local chiefs took place in the northern Transvaal (Soutpansberg and Sekhukhuneland) in the 1940s and again in 1958. In Witzieshoek, in the northern Free State, cattle were seized by reserve inhabitants before they could be culled, fences were torn down and clashes with the police took place. In Zeerust in the western Transvaal in 1957 chiefs appointed by the Bantu Affairs Department were deposed, and similar actions took place in both Natal and the Transkei. In Sekhukhuneland returning migrants joined local residents to form the Sebatakgomo organization, at least partially linked to the Communist Party and the ANC. They attacked chiefs who accepted the authority of the Bantu Affairs Department and their sympa- thizers (Delius 1996). In Pondoland in 1960 a major revolt took place against government chiefs and agents. Many of these uprisings used tradi- tional symbols and appeals. But they were by no means all ‘backward- looking’ peasant revolts. Links were made with urban protests especially in regions where migrants brought news of other campaigns, such as those against Bantu Education or passes for women. But in general, although they

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did succeed in stalling state interventions, rural protest movements remained parochial in impact (Lodge 1983).

Indeed, all the popular struggles of the 1950s failed to realize their potential fully in challenging the state. one of the reasons for this, much debated by historians, was the nature of the relationship between mass mobilization and the leadership of the national organizations, in particular the ANC. Was the ANC now converted from the elitist and essentially conservative body of the 1930s to a new and mass-based movement with more radical goals and heightened impact? Some writers have argued that this was indeed the case, either in coordination with the labor movement as the political base for a new class consciousness heralded by the 1946 mine workers’ strike (o’Meara 1976), or in the broader sense that the ANC acted as the vanguard party planning and sustaining all popular move- ments of the decade (Pampallis 1991: 191–211).

But other historians have pointed out the limitations of these argu- ments. Links with trade union branches were made, but the middle- class leaders of the ANC were still uneasy in a proletarian alliance and local campaigns often went beyond the calls of ANC leadership, or else were not supported at all by the organization (Lambert 1981; Fine and Davis 1991). Broader populist causes rather than class-conscious action domi- nated ANC activities. Feit (1971) goes further, arguing that ANC leader- ship was detached from any popular base, that communication and coordination of actions were at best patchy, and that many campaigns failed as a result.

For instance, in Sophiatown the ANC appeared more concerned with the rights of property owners than with the plight of the larger number of tenants or the wider issue of forced removals, and it was divided over how far to resist legal eviction orders. Leaders were also split over how far to take the school boycott and were often unaware of the extent of local com- munity support. During the Alexandra bus boycott, Congress’s acceptance of the compromise by which employers could obtain transport rebates to pass on to their employees rather than lowering fares for all was rejected by many in the community as a sell-out. And only gradually did the urban leaders of the ANC come to recognize the importance of the rural areas. Although there was some linkage with the Sekhukhuneland revolt of 1958, it was not until the uprisings in Pondoland in 1960 that they accepted the full potential of rural mobilization (Bundy 1987a). In general, the 1950s seems to have been a decade of heightened defiance, but also of lost opportunities.

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Some of these debates show as much about the political sympathies and priorities of the writers in later years as they do about the nature of political mobilization in the 1950s. Clearly, the ANC failed to mobilize and coordi- nate widespread unified protest, as much because of its limited financial and administrative resources and heightened state repression as because of the conscious alienation of its leaders from popular or working-class inter- ests. Lodge, however, has pointed out that the situation was more complex (1987). ANC leaders were not merely ‘middle-class’ professionals alienated from popular issues. With the segregationist thrust of the 1950s, African experiences were widely felt across class lines, and issues such as Bantu Education or passes for women affected everyone.

Case studies have shown that particular local circumstances need to be considered when assessing the effectiveness of campaigns and of national leadership. Thus in East London, active support was obtained for the Defiance Campaign by the dynamic local youth League, which also drew in migrants from the surrounding Ciskei reserve, but the lack of a large urban proletariat led to emphasis on communal rather than class issues in later years (Lodge 1987). By contrast, unionized textile workers in Benoni organized a number of strikes and stoppages; but organizers had difficulty in linking these up with the interests of the unemployed, who were more concerned with general survival than specific issues, and mobilized around gangs split on ethnic lines rather than labor or national organizations (Bonner and Lambert 1987). In Brakpan, stronger cross-class unity took place around issues of Bantu Education, curfews and pass laws, but these tended to be focused around locally elected councilors rather than national leaders, who failed to realize the extent of local feeling (Sapire 1989a).

The opposition movements not only faced difficulties of tactics and popular mobilization. They were also increasingly divided in terms of ide- ology. Some of these divisions were rooted in the differing organizations of the 1940s. For instance, the Non-European Unity Movement stressed the importance of tactics of boycott and non-collaboration, which had an impact on some of the defiance campaigns, particularly in the rejection of Bantu Education schools.

But its theoretical focus on the interests of the working class and its refusal to recognize race as a valid category of political organization alien- ated it from the ANC, which it believed advocated ‘pro-capitalist, anti- working class . . . bourgeois social democracy’. The Unity Movement’s strength lay in the western Cape, but although it was strong on theory,

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advocating a Trotskyist line, it never mustered the degree of numerical active support obtained by the ANC (Nasson 1990).

But there were also divisions within the ANC. The crucial issue was whether Congress should link up with other organizations opposing apart- heid, such as the radical white Congress of Democrats, or whether it should follow a strictly Africanist course, rejecting association with all non-African associations, ranging in political terms from the moderate Liberal Party to the Communist Party. Under Lutuli the former policy triumphed. In the aftermath of the Defiance Campaign, and in the face of government banning of civil disobedience, plans were made to bring together oppo- nents of apartheid in the hope that sheer numbers and force of moral argument would lead to its overthrow.

It was also felt necessary to demonstrate multiracial unity to counter charges made by the state that racial segregation was natural and desired by all. The example it frequently gave of the dangers of inter-racial contact was the violent conflicts between Africans and Indians that took place in Durban in 1949, in which 142 people were killed, over a thousand injured, and many trading stores and houses looted. In this case ethnic tension had been heightened by specific local circumstances (Webster 1977). Africans were denied trading licenses and the right to own freehold property, both of which were obtainable by Indians. Indian monopoly over commerce, transport and property ownership (many African tenants had Indian land- lords) gave an ethnic focus to economic grievances at a time of increasing prices. Moreover, the verbal assault of the state on Indians, including the argument that they had no place in South Africa and should be returned to India, encouraged some Africans in the belief that the government would approve of attacks on their property.

The 1949 Durban riots, coming at the very start of the period of National Party government, were an important weapon in claims that South Africans of different ethnicity could never co-exist peacefully. It was thus crucial for those opposing apartheid legislation to demonstrate that this was not the case. In 1953 the ANC made links with the Congress of Democrats, the Indian Congress movement and the South African Coloured People’s organization (the successor to the APo) in order to launch a National Congress of the People. Local committees collected lists of grievances and demands, which were then drafted by a central committee into the ‘Freedom Charter’. This was accepted unanimously by the 2,844 delegates who gath- ered at Kliptown near Johannesburg in June 1955, and was later endorsed by all member organizations and by the South African Communist Party.

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The government was unable to prevent such a gathering since the Congress of the People did not contravene existing laws. However, in the following year 156 of its leaders were arrested on charges of treason and ‘conspiracy to overthrow the state’, and the Congress was labeled a Communist movement. After lengthy proceedings, the state’s case was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1961, an action which played an important part in the government’s determination to rule without legal restraint (see p. 117). But the Treason Trial served to publicize the cause of the ‘Charterists’ more widely, both at home and abroad.

Charterism became the foundation of ANC ideology and the Freedom Charter remained a benchmark of opposition to apartheid into the 1990s. There has therefore been much debate about its meaning. Its clauses stressed that

South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and no govern- ment can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people . . . the rights of the people shall be the same regardless of race, color or sex

and it demanded that ‘all apartheid laws and practices shall be set aside’. It called for equal access to health, education and legal rights. Its vision of a future South Africa was thus strongly democratic and multiracial (Williams 1988). But its commitment to meaningful social and economic transforma- tion was less clear. Trade unionists were dissatisfied with its lack of refer- ence to worker control or the right to strike. It called for ‘public ownership of mines and banks’ and the re-division of land ‘amongst those who work it’, but it fell short of a clear commitment to socialism. It was adopted by the Communist Party, which by the late 1950s had come to accept that a national-democratic stage of revolution had to precede socialist transfor- mation (Hudson 1988). This was sufficient to ensure objection to the Charter by the Liberal Party, which steadfastly opposed any links with a radical strategy. But on the other hand, the Charter has been rejected by other left-wing organizations for its lack of radicalism.

But the main opposition to the Freedom Charter among the nationalist organizations in the 1950s came from the Africanists. Charterism rejected Lembede’s belief that only Africans owned South Africa (see p. 94). After his death in 1947, Africanist ideas were taken up by other younger members of the ANC, especially in the orlando branch under Potlako Leballo. Their publication, The Africanist, stressed the need for closer links with mass

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protests, and it rejected Congress alliances with organizations such as the Indian Congress and the Communist Party. It viewed the Freedom Charter as a ‘political bluff ’. In 1958 tensions between Africanists and Charterists within the ANC reached a head, and after failing to capture control of the Transvaal executive a number of Africanists formed a new organization, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), in 1959 under the presidency of Robert Sobukwe, with the slogan of ‘Africa for the Africans’.

Africanism was aided by a number of factors. It reflected the impatience of a younger generation with the liberal style of such men as Lutuli. It was part of a wider African assertiveness in this period, marked locally by increased support for the African independent churches, and more widely by the strength of African nationalism elsewhere, as shown by the 1958 Accra conference. Moreover, Africanists could point to the failure of the Charterists in achieving any success at halting the tide of discrimination, let alone driving it back (Gerhart 1978).

PAC membership numbers were lower than those of the ANC, but it captured the sense of township frustration in the late 1950s, especially on the Rand but also in the western Cape, where influx control was stringently applied and Section 10 rights strictly limited. The PAC was determined to capitalize on this advantage. In December 1959 the ANC announced a series of single-day anti-pass marches. By contrast the PAC called for a more sustained campaign, involving refusal to carry passes and mass presentation at police stations to demand arrest. This was the background to the peaceful march to the police station at Sharpeville in March 1960. Constables alarmed by the size of the crowd panicked and fired. Sixty-nine people died, many shot in the back, and 180 were wounded. A large crowd also marched from the Langa township into central Cape Town, although it disbanded without bloodshed when its leader Philip Kgosana was falsely promised an interview with the Minister of Justice.

The Sharpeville shootings marked a dramatic turning point in South Africa’s history. Strikes and stayaways followed throughout the country and the government declared a State of Emergency, detaining ANC and PAC leaders and then banning both organizations. Sharpeville revealed the failure of non-violent resistance and forced a new approach from oppo- nents of apartheid. And internationally the 1960 shootings had a major effect. Currency controls were introduced in an attempt to stem the flight of capital. Serious calls for economic sanctions against South Africa were made at the United Nations, although they were vetoed by Britain and the

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United States, who continued high levels of investment in South Africa throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Just one month before the Sharpeville shootings, the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, had addressed the South African Parliament in Cape Town. Following a tour of Africa during which he had been impressed by the power of African nationalism, he warned that the ‘winds of change’ were sweeping through the continent, and that Verwoerd’s apart- heid policies would find no support from a Britain now committed to rapid decolonization. Verwoerd had already mooted the possibility of forming a republic independent of the Commonwealth. Later that year, following heightened criticism of his policies at the Commonwealth conference, Verwoerd withdrew South Africa from the organization. The path was set for increasing isolation from the political trends elsewhere in Africa and the world at large in the decades ahead.

State control and separate development: apartheid’s ‘second phase’

After the steady consolidation of National Party electoral power in the 1950s, the following years saw the entrenchment of state control and new methods of dealing with opposition. The 1960s have therefore been labelled the years of apartheid’s second phase (Posel 1991).

International condemnation after Sharpeville was firmly rejected by Verwoerd, who turned his back on the ‘winds of change’ sweeping Africa. The police force was increased in size and the new recruits were almost entirely Afrikaners. In the face of determined opposition campaigns, the General Law Amendment Act (1963) gave police powers of detention without charge and of solitary confinement. The banning of the ANC and PAC was accompanied by increasing numbers of such detentions and ban- nings of individuals. These tactics were to be the mainstay of internal repression into the 1990s. As Wolpe (1988: 88–9) has pointed out, after Sharpeville wide-ranging arbitrary powers provided a new means of state control, circumventing judicial intervention. Repetition of the state’s defeat in the Treason Trial was not to be permitted.

The early 1960s also saw a more determined application of African urban influx control. A change of policy from that of the 1950s now led to attempts to remove rights of urban residence from all Africans, including those previously accepted under Section 10 of the Natives (Urban Areas) Amendment Act of 1955 (Posel 1991). This was caused by several factors.

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The state was alarmed by the increase in urban protest, which had reached a climax at Sharpeville. Attempts to curb the urban radicalism of the 1940s had clearly failed. Moreover, local municipalities were either unwilling or unable to control urban influx, as shown by the Durban Council’s admission during the Cato Manor upheavals of 1959 that it ‘has been defeated . . . and cannot restore its authority without the fullest co- operation and most active assistance of the government’ (Posel 1991: 237).

New voices were heard within the Afrikaner nationalist alliance. The Broederbond had actively campaigned for Verwoerd’s succession to the Party leadership in 1958, and now held a much stronger position behind the scenes of decision making. Its members, already influential in many branches of the government, infiltrated the Native (renamed Bantu) Affairs Department (BAD) and also won over the South African Agricultural Union by advocating the limitation of urban African workers. In this context the stricter segregationist ideals of the Broederbond overrode the ‘practical’ segregation of the 1950s. In the months after Sharpeville, the BAD drafted a bill advocating the ending of Section 10 rights, the fixing of regional labor quotas by the Department with no reference to employers, and the preference to be given to industries willing to relocate to areas near the reserves.

The bill was fiercely opposed by commercial and industrial employers, including the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, and the government backed down. However, in the 1960s efforts were made by the state to enforce influx control more strictly, and although Section 10 remained on the statute books, the rights of urban Africans were increasingly restricted. For instance, in 1964 the Bantu Labour Act prohibited Africans from seeking work in towns or employers from taking them on unless they were chan- neled through the state labor bureaux. Urban housing construction for black families almost came to a halt, thus causing major shortages. And in 1968 Africans were forbidden from holding freehold property in townships but were obliged to become tenants in council-owned housing.

The opposition of urban employers to total urban influx control by the state raises the question of the relationship between apartheid policy and capitalist interests. Certainly in a broad sense apartheid did not limit eco- nomic – particularly manufacturing – growth in the 1960s. Despite loss of foreign investor confidence after Sharpeville, local capital filled the gap, and the comparative calm of the 1960s saw an economic boom with increased foreign trade and industrial growth, although black wages remained low and racial disparities of wealth increased still further. This has led many to

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argue that apartheid, like segregation before it, favored capitalist growth, particularly since it ensured a continued supply of cheap labor. But as Posel has argued, ‘apartheid neither automatically nor uniformly promoted capi- talist interests’ (1984: 2). Manufacturers needed a skilled and permanent labor force, and opposed stricter influx controls and total segregation. In the 1970s the disjuncture between capitalist needs and apartheid ideology grew wider (see p. 132).

The tightening of influx control and attempts to revoke Section 10 rights were part of a broader plan of political and social engineering that was implemented under Verwoerd and his successors. This was ‘Separate Development’, a policy by which the reserves served a political rather than a purely economic purpose, as Bantustans to which African political rights were confined.

The Bantustan strategy was only gradually developed. The 1951 Bantu Authorities Act had attempted to co-opt a local elite with limited admin- istrative powers. The Tomlinson Commission, set up to enquire into the economic viability of the reserves as self-contained units on the strict seg- regationist model, reported in 1955 that this could only be achieved with massive state funding, a commitment which Verwoerd refused to accept. But increasing political pressure from Africans gave strength to the idea of locating African political rights away from the urban centers to the periph- eries, thus counteracting the nationalist goals of organizations such as the ANC and PAC. The 1959 Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act set up eight (later extended to ten) distinct ‘Bantu Homelands’ out of the existing reserves, each with a degree of self-government. Not only did this greatly extend the powers of co-opted local chiefs, but it established the principle of ethnicity as the basis of the homelands. Africans were divided up into distinct ‘nations’ based on their ‘historic homelands’. Ethnic homeland loyalty was to replace national political aspirations in a move which the state hoped would defuse calls for the moral necessity of African self- government within South Africa itself.

In 1963 the Transkei Constitution Act set up the first homeland legisla- tive assembly, significantly in the area most recently convulsed by rebellion and one where Pretoria was anxious to rid itself of the responsibility of keeping control. In 1970 homeland citizenship was imposed on all Africans throughout South Africa, and self-government was given to the other homelands in 1971. Nominal independence was given the Transkei in 1976, followed by Bophuthatswana (1977), Venda (1979) and Ciskei (1981). By this process, citizens of the ‘independent’ homelands lost their South

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African nationality, although the homelands were not recognized as inde- pendent by any other country.

Clearly, the political significance of Separate Development was more important than the economic motives of earlier segregationist policies. Economic self-sufficiency was never a viable or desired option. Verwoerd refused to permit industries to be developed within the reserves that would risk the emergence of a stable and politically dangerous proletariat. Instead, he encouraged them to set up on the borders of the home- lands, where they were removed from the urban centers of South Africa but had access to cheap migrant labor. The focus of Separate Develop- ment was ‘political independence with economic interdependence’ (Giliomee 1985).

The homelands policy had fundamental implications for modern South Africa. Firstly, it led to the forced relocation of Africans on an unprece- dented scale. The Group Areas Act produced urban removals and dispos-

Map 4 The Bantustans (Homelands) Source: J. omer-Cooper, 1987: History of Southern Africa. London: James Currey, 214. © 1987. Reprinted by permission of James Currey Publishers, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer.

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Map 5 Forced removals Source: A. J. Christopher, 1994: Atlas of apartheid. London: Routledge. Compiled from information in the regional reports of the Surplus People Project. © 1994. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK.

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session. Separate Development extended this by removing into the homelands the sizeable number of African tenants, freeholders and squat- ters who were still in ‘white’ rural areas. Many of them were no longer required on farms which had mechanized. Kas Maine, who had survived as a tenant and sharecropper since the 1920s on over fifteen white-owned farms in the Transvaal, was finally forced to move to an impoverished reserve in 1967. Even there he was not left in peace: his grazing land was expropriated by the Bophuthatswana homeland government in 1979 to be set aside as a tourist game reserve near the Sun City casino complex (Van onselen 1996). Thus the process begun in 1913 was brought to its logical conclusion. Between 1960 and 1983, an estimated 3.5 million people were relocated under Group Areas and Separate Development legislation (Platzky

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and Walker 1985: 10) (see Map 5, p. 121). During the 1960s the population of the Bantustans rose by 70%, while those of African townships actually fell (Lodge 1983: 321). Forced removals on such a massive scale were the crudest sign of state power over black lives. In most cases those relocated to homelands were consigned to barren areas far removed from employ- ment or adequate resources. For instance, between 1979 and 1986 Botshabelo (‘place of refuge’) emerged on barren land 60 kilometres away from the nearest place of employment in Bloemfontein (Murray 1992: 204). A rural dumping ground of half a million people forced out of towns and farms in ‘white South Africa’, it was declared part of the newly created Bophuthatswana homeland. Critics of apartheid labeled such actions as tantamount to genocide.

Secondly, Separate Development stimulated and entrenched ethnic divi- sions by its attempts to ‘retribalize African consciousness’ (Molteno 1977: 23). To succeed, such a policy had to be built on existing perceptions and ethnic division could not be simply imposed from above. Certainly, differ- ing historical experiences and traditions existed. yet as recent work has shown, tribal identity was not a fixed constant (Vail 1989). The experience of conquest, proletarianization and social dislocation shattered pre-colonial polities and the identities that came with them. Tribalism was remolded and consciously shaped by new forces. The linguistic and cultural tribal divisions of modern South Africa were in large part defined by outsiders in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Missionaries established written norms for Bantu languages, usually based on particular dialects of regions in which their printing presses were located. Anthropologists and historians identified distinct tribal cultures and traditions in the model of European ethnology and national histories. In the circumstances of the 1920s and 1930s, these notions found fertile ground among ‘native’ admin- istrators concerned to bolster ‘traditional culture’ and to overcome class divisions (see pp. 85–6). They also appealed to local chiefs as a means of bolstering their position, and to some middle-class African teachers and intellectuals who adopted the role of interpreters of ‘tribal tradition’. This combination of administrative and local interests in the making of new tribal identities was most apparent in Natal, where Zulu ethnicity was strengthened by an alliance of state, landowners and the black middle class (see pp. 90–1). Tribal identity was given further emphasis by the experience of migrant workers, whose ethnic roots were reinforced by their dependence on the reserves and by competition in the workplace. Even those imbued with class or wider national political consciousness meshed

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these identities with a degree of ethnic particularism (Beinart 1987). However, as Mager (1999) has shown, identities forged by migrants were masculine and strongly patriarchal to the exclusion of women’s perceptions and experience.

Thus the concept of separate ethnic identity drew on a lengthy process of created tribalism. In some cases such as Zululand or the Transkei, the argument that the Bantustans were the rightful historic home of a particu- lar ethnic group coincided with common perceptions. Elsewhere this was not so. Bophuthatswana, for instance, was a cobbled-together collection of seven widely scattered areas of land, all of them undesirable for commercial agriculture. Its historical heritage was tenuous to say the least. And even the most ardent advocate of tribalism had difficulty in justifying the exist- ence of two distinct Xhosa homelands, the Ciskei and the Transkei (Mager 1999: 112–17).

Nonetheless, a sense of homeland identity did take root, even in Bophuthatswana. This was the result of the third lasting legacy of Separate Development in modern South Africa, the creation of new classes in the homelands. In a continuation of the policy of co-opting local chiefs, the Bantustan strategy gave Bantustan administrators’ considerable wealth, patronage and power. This served the dual purpose of creating local representatives of the state with vested interests to control popular opposi- tion of the kind that had emerged in the 1950s, and of hopefully defusing critics by devolving political power to African authorities. This is not to say that homeland leaders were all absolute puppets of Pretoria. Matanzima, ruler of the Transkei, was critical of Bantu Education and of the way in which forced removals dumped people into his territory, but his general support of Separate Development earned him financial and military backing from the South African government, and also attracted allegiance from the educated elite in the rapidly growing homeland bureaucracy (Southall 1982).

In addition to bureaucrats and politicians, a class of African traders and entrepreneurs also benefited from the Bantustan strategy. As Molteno (1977) has pointed out, whereas in the early part of the century the govern- ment aimed to undermine an African middle class, by the 1960s it was trying to create one, albeit dependent on South African capital and support as a means of linking it to apartheid structures and policies. Loans and grants set up local capitalists, and many also benefited from the departure of white traders from the homelands, giving the ‘new African trading class a stake in the political order’ (Stadler 1987: 139).

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Separate Development was thus a bold attempt to break down a broad African nationalism and to replace it with tribal identities, led by new classes of collaborators. It could only be achieved with systematic and ruth- less state intervention. How far it succeeded in achieving its goal remained to be seen.

After Sharpeville: decade of quietude?

In comparison with the resistance of the 1950s and with the upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s, the 1960s appears to have been a decade in which protest against apartheid was relatively muted. The banning of resistance organizations, increased police powers of detention, and heightened state control over publications, broadcasting and all forms of dissent were clear reasons for this. And the ruthless policy of forced removals weakened the potential for urban resistance, while the Bantustans provided one outlet for the previously frustrated careers of the African middle class.

Another factor that may explain the relative quiescence of the 1960s was economic. Despite the crisis of investor confidence immediately after Sharpeville, the decade was one of unprecedented economic growth for South Africa. The gross national product grew at over 5% per annum, and average real wages increased at a steady level (Feinstein 2005: 184–8). Certainly, the benefits of this were limited primarily to the white popula- tion, and the racial disparities of wealth were enormous. yet in contrast to the periods of labor resistance and protest in the post-war years, or those that were to come in the 1970s and 1980s, levels of black unemployment in the 1960s were relatively low. overall, it appears that less than 10% of the economically active population as a whole were unemployed during the 1960s. The figure was to rise to 20 % and above in the subsequent decades (Wilson and Ramphele 1989: 84–5). Relative economic stability, as well as state oppression, explains the comparative lack of oppositional protest during the 1960s.

However, the lack of overt resistance on the scale of previous years should not be seen as a sign of acquiescence. Less visible developments were taking place which provided a crucial background to the renewal of overt protest in subsequent years.

The banning of the ANC and the PAC after Sharpeville did not lead to their eclipse, but to a necessary change of strategy. Attempts to organize stayaways and strikes were weakened by the difficulties of underground organization. At the end of 1961 armed struggle was therefore proposed as

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an alternative tactic. Some ANC leaders, including Mandela, Sisulu and other ex-youth League organizers, were determined that direct action should begin. Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) was founded as an underground guerrilla army, and a number of sabotage attacks on power stations and government installations were made over the next three years. At the same time, a small group of predominantly white radicals known as the National Committee of Liberation (later renamed the African Resistance Movement) planned a sabotage campaign and planted bombs in Cape Town and Johannesburg. And in the western Cape, where PAC support was strong, an underground movement known as Poqo (‘Pure’ or ‘Alone’ in Xhosa) emerged, with rather indiscriminate plans to provoke a general uprising by killing police, suspected informers and government agents as well as whites. Some attacks of this kind occurred in Langa township near Cape Town, and a short-lived uprising took place in the rural town of Paarl in November 1962. Poqo also worked amongst peasants in the Transkei, where it acquired a quasimillenarian character, and some attacks on col- laborating chiefs took place.

Davis and Fine (1985) have stressed that the move to armed struggle was a decision of leaders of the nationalist movements but had in fact already been affected by popular actions. Armed resistance had taken place prior to 1961–2, as in Pondoland in 1960. Hopes of mobilizing a general uprising were not fulfilled. And all of the early underground movements were broken by police arrests. Aided by the British colonial police in Basutoland who seized membership lists from the PAC office in Maseru, many PAC activists in South Africa were detained in early 1963. In July of that year the headquarters of Umkhonto at Rivonia were raided, and its leaders captured and sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island. The African Resistance Movement was infiltrated and broken up. Although the Non-European Unity Movement was not itself banned, it was unable to fill the vacuum created by the repression of the other liberation organi- zations and was split by ideological division, with some of its members leaving South Africa and others being arrested on charges of sabotage (Davies et al. 1988: 313). By 1964 leaders of the resistance movements were either in prison or had escaped to exile abroad.

Both the ANC and the PAC faced major difficulties as exiled organiza- tions in the 1960s. Although they found bases in friendly countries, the ANC in Zambia and the PAC first in Lesotho and then in Tanzania, they were isolated from developments within South Africa. It was difficult to mount infiltration campaigns into the country, given its terrain, the strength

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of the defense forces and the ring of surrounding countries allied to Pretoria. Attempts at coordinated campaigns were made between ANC cadres and Zimbabwean guerrillas and by the PAC in Swaziland, but they failed to penetrate South Africa. only with the collapse of white rule in Angola (1974), Mozambique (1975) and Zimbabwe (1979) did greater opportunities for guerrilla action emerge. Many of the rank and file members of the organizations were frustrated by inactivity in isolated and poorly equipped training camps.

Ideological and personal rifts also weakened both bodies, especially the PAC, whose goal of Africanist struggle was difficult to maintain out of its South African context. The ANC was in general more successful in obtain- ing international support, although it was still treated warily by the Western powers. Both the PAC and the ANC survived in early exile, ready to take a more active role in the later 1970s and 1980s, but during the 1960s and early 1970s their influence within South Africa was much reduced. The expectations of mass confrontation raised in the early 1960s did not materialize.

What did emerge in the later 1960s was the powerful new ideology of Black Consciousness. Although at this stage Black Consciousness was more of a philosophical movement than an active political program, it did fill some of the vacuum created by the banning of the nationalist organizations.

Black Consciousness ideas originated amongst university students. The creation of new segregated universities led to a marked increase in the number of African students after 1958. Some were particularly influenced by American developments in black theology, and formed the University Christian Movement. There was growing awareness of the ideas of black separatism which took institutional form. Many African students were frustrated by white domination of the National Union of South African Students, and in 1969 they split away to establish the all-black South African Students’ organization (SASo), under the presidency of a student from the segregated medical school at the University of Natal, Steve Biko.

Although SASo was a student organization its members encouraged blacks in other contexts to break away from white-dominated liberal organ- izations. The Black Communities Project was formed to encourage and support black self-help schemes. In 1971 representatives of these bodies set up the Black People’s Convention (BPC) to provide a political body organ- ized along Black Consciousness principles. But this failed to gain a large membership. It was limited by inadequate funding and state repression,

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and also by the reluctance of many to be involved with an overtly political movement, thus ‘vindicating the view held by Steve Biko and others that black people had first to be “liberated from fear” ’ (Buthelezi 1991: 126).

It was on such psychological grounds that Black Consciousness explained the failure of ANC and PAC tactics. Black inferiority, induced by years of oppression and of white liberal paternalism, prevented effective organiza- tion and resistance. Blacks therefore needed to acquire a social identity of their own. As Biko stated, ‘what Black Consciousness seeks to do is to produce . . . real black people who do not regard themselves as appendages to white society’ (1978: 51). Black Consciousness was thus an attitude of mind, a conscientization necessary for political activism to succeed. Although Black Consciousness advocators included supporters of both the ANC and the PAC, their political and economic program was vague. They advanced black communalism, said to be rooted in indigenous culture and based on the principle of sharing of wealth, although they also accepted the need for private property. only after the banning of Black Consciousness organizations in 1977 did its leaders advocate a more radical socialist program (Leatt et al. 1986: 105–19).

Black Consciousness drew on a number of distinct traditions. In a broad sense its emphasis on black pride and self-assertion was modelled on similar developments in the United States and the experience of the African diaspora, as well as on the ideas of such writers as Fanon and Senghor. The American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s gave a particularly strong impetus to increasing black assertiveness. In the South African context Black Consciousness followed some of the arguments of the Africanist and PAC traditions by stressing that South Africa belonged to its black people alone and by its rejection of liberalism and white-dominated organizations. However, Biko’s definition of black was more one of attitude than of eth- nicity. It included all of those oppressed by apartheid, thus extending the term to bring in ‘colored’ and Indian South Africans, but excluded those whose collaboration with apartheid structures such as the police or Bantustan administrations still defined them as ‘non-whites’. White oppo- nents of apartheid had no place in Black Consciousness organizations, but should rather conscientize their ‘racist brethren’ (Halisi 1991).

Black Consciousness also developed in the context of the international student revolt of the late 1960s, and was a distinctly generational and intel- lectual movement which did not penetrate far into working-class or peasant communities. The ANC viewed it as a useful means of arousing self- awareness but limited in its abilities to effect political action. others rejected

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its philosophy. The Unity Movement disapproved of the primacy that it gave to race over class and the ineffectiveness of ‘self-help’ organizations to change the fundamental structure of society (Alexander 1991).

The state initially believed that Black Consciousness could further its plans of Separate Development, but soon learnt otherwise. Biko rejected Bantustan collaborators and refused to countenance such organizations as Inkatha, founded by Buthelezi in 1975 and based on KwaZulu ethnicity, despite the apparent similarity of emphasis on the distinctiveness of black culture and the need for self-pride (Southall 1981). State harassment of Black Consciousness leaders grew in the 1970s, culminating in the torture and murder of Biko while under police detention in 1977 and the subse- quent banning of all Black Consciousness organizations.

yet despite these limitations, Black Consciousness ideas did find fertile ground in the circumstances of the 1970s. Like other developments in this decade of quietude, it was an important part of the renewed conflicts of subsequent years.

Towards Soweto: protest renewed

The relative calm of the period between 1963 and 1973 was underpinned by some economic improvement in the position of Africans, albeit on a limited scale. Between 1970 and 1972, for the first time, the gap between black and white wages began to narrow, partly because the mines offered slightly higher wages to attract local rather than foreign miners, but mainly because the growth of manufacturing led to a need for skilled employment which was met by black workers.

However, between 1973 and 1976 this process was brought to a halt. A drop in the gold price and heightened inflation mainly caused by an increase in the oil price introduced a period of recession. It was against this background that black protest was renewed by labor conflict. Numerous strikes took place, involving over 200,000 black workers, particularly in Durban and the rest of Natal, but also in East London and parts of the Rand. Some national trade union organization took place, but most of the strikes broke out at local factory level in response to specific grievances. This was particularly true in Natal, where the high incidence of strike action was explained by low wages, bad working conditions, and ease of com- munication between workers in different factories who commuted from the nearby KwaZulu homeland and were supported by Buthelezi (Hirson 1979: 142; Friedman 1986: 47–8). Some worker goals were achieved: higher

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wages and improved working conditions were granted, and the action of these years gave impetus to later recognition of the bargaining powers of black trade unions (see p. 133).

Some writers have argued that this increase in worker militancy explains the township revolts that began in Soweto in June 1976 (Hirson 1979). However, there were other more immediate causes of these upheavals. The early 1970s had seen a major growth in the number of Africans attending schools, although commensurate funding and equipment were lacking, and the difficulty of finding employment after school education increased during the recession of 1973–6. Tensions among school pupils was there- fore already high when a new ruling decreed that half of the curriculum in black schools was henceforth to be taught in Afrikaans. In protest 15,000 schoolchildren marched through Soweto. Police confronted the crowd, fired and killed several students. As a result attacks were made on police, administration buildings and beer halls. Class boycotts, school burnings and counter-attacks and raids by police followed. Within several days the conflict had spread to other townships on the Rand, and in the following weeks also to Cape Town and the eastern Cape. In late August and September school boycotters made successful appeals to workers to stay away from work. Further conflict was caused when police encouraged migrant hostel workers in Soweto to attack pupils who had demanded the closure of the state beer halls. By the end of the year an official (and doubtless underes- timated) figure was given of 575 dead and 2,389 wounded in the conflicts (Lodge 1983: 330).

The Cillie Commission appointed by the government had a clear expla- nation. The revolt was the work of outside ‘agitators’ and bore little relation to real township or youth grievances. But although ANC pamphlets were distributed in Soweto and elsewhere, and the exiled organization later claimed that it had played a major part in organizing the revolt, there is every sign that it was taken by surprise by the events of 1976–7. The deten- tions and bannings that followed led many township youth to flee from South Africa and join ANC and PAC camps outside the country, but it was only then that active involvement in the nationalist organizations could take place.

The student leaders of Soweto were much more influenced by the Black Consciousness movement, which was particularly influential amongst teachers and student groups in the early 1970s, and this was certainly pow- erfully expressed in the protests of ‘colored’ students in the western Cape in 1976 (Lodge 1983: 333). As Biko said, evidence that Black Consciousness

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was a force to be reckoned with was ‘In one word – Soweto!’ (Leatt et al. 1986: 112).

A particular psychological impetus, especially among black intellectuals, was the success of the anti-colonial movements in neighboring Mozambique and Angola in the previous year, and the defeat of South African troops who had intervened in Angola in 1975. But the Soweto uprising was not a revolutionary movement. It lacked clear organization and leadership. Despite some contact with workers, the students had no formal links with worker organizations. As some writers have stressed in this regard, the events of 1976 were a missed opportunity (Mafeje 1978).

yet, as in the case of Sharpeville, the Soweto uprising shocked both South African whites and international opinion. Many foreigners had their first clear image of South Africa formed through vivid television pictures of the Soweto shootings. The anger of a new township generation was palpable and highly threatening to the established order. This and the labor disputes of 1973–6 were reminiscent of the conflicts of the 1940s which apartheid was supposed to have resolved. Although state repression was strong and continued into the next decade, the following years also saw attempts to change the Verwoerdian model. Apartheid was beginning to falter, although this was not fully apparent until the 1980s, and it was still to take an unconscionable time to die.

Suggestions for further reading

Lodge, T. 1983: Black politics in South Africa since 1945. London: Longman; Johannesburg: Ravan.

o’Meara, D. 1996: Forty lost years: the apartheid state and the politics of the National Party, 1948–1994. Johannesburg: Ravan; Athens: ohio University Press.

Posel, D. 1991: The making of apartheid 1948–1961: conflict and compromise. oxford: Clarendon Press.

Stadler, A. 1987: The political economy of modern South Africa. London: Croom Helm; Cape Town: David Philip.

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Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History Volume 17, Number 3, Winter 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press Article Viewed | Saved to MyMUSE library

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Institutional Violence and the Law in Apartheid South Africa Natacha Filippi

Abstract

In apartheid South Africa, prisons and psychiatric hospitals played a specific role in the imposition of “law and order” on a society which shared many features with other colonial settings. By examining the di�erent dynamics relating to institutional violence, a process in which one must be wary of the ethical problems that may arise for the researcher, a clearer picture of apartheid violence and its relation to the law emerges. Prisons and psychiatric hospitals were permeable institutions which allowed for the transfer of modalities of violence, subjugation, resistance, collaboration and repression. These institutions actually functioned as magnifying glasses revealing the mechanisms of state control through the dissemination of fear in the South African society.

Studying Violence: Ethics and contemporary analyses

Violence, at first sight, seems an unexplainable phenomenon. That may well be what partly defines it, that some of its aspects are ultimately ungraspable, because of its profoundly disruptive character—of the sense of self-being, of narratives, of the boundaries of one’s body, of social structures. But violence is also a productive force, and, to some extent, a reproductive one. Studying violence brings to the fore the ethical problems linked to the positionality of the researcher and, especially in postcolonial contexts, the essential intrusiveness of his/her work. While leading interviews in South Africa with inmates, warders and former political prisoners, one paradox that bothered me hinged on understanding why, if violence could be apprehended as a mere structural and historical construct, the act of inquiring about and listening to testimonies of its occurrence was so profoundly disturbing. One of the reasons is that, when attempting to analyse it, one needs to remember that violence is above all an intimate experience of disruption, partial annihilation and power branded on a person’s body and mind, whether that person was subjected to it or responsible for it. Hence, if violence is a breaking point, and a moment of ambiguous feelings about one’s identity, then the ethical problem encountered by the researcher is linked to the fact that he/she forces the occurrence of violence to re-emerge; that he/she potentially reproduces and mirrors the violence of the past event by his/her identities (as—o�en—a White/Occidental, middle-class individual in an assumed position of knowledge); and involuntarily embodies an exterior and retrospective judgment over the lasting ambiguous feelings produced by the experience of violence.

Bearing in mind these cautions, the study of violence dynamics in closed institutions can still prove extremely relevant. In the case of apartheid South Africa, their analysis from the 1960s to the 1990s informs us on the nature of the state and the modalities of resistance developed against its repression. Prisons and psychiatric hospitals are, indeed, particularly good places to investigate the state in both its regimented and di�use aspects, a state defined as, to take up Patrick Anderson’s definition, “an assemblage of forces and drives, techniques and tactics—o�en organised as violence— performed in discrete sites and scenes.” Through the analysis of Pollsmoor Prison and Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital in the Western Cape, South Africa, from the 1960s to the 1990s, this article wishes to point out the di�erent logics underlying the historical manifestations of violence inside and around closed institutions in apartheid South Africa. Inherent to prisons and psychiatric hospitals, and especially their maximum security sections, institutional violence constituted a strategy of governance, a way to subjugate and eliminate those deemed as deviant at di�erent points in time. It also materialised a model of fear imposed on the rest of society, showing how patterns of violence crossed the walls of closed institutions.

Investigating the evolution of institutional violence inside two of apartheid’s closed institutions sheds light on the changing dynamics of control, repression, survival and resistance in apartheid South Africa. As such, this study inscribes itself in a corpus of works that have focused on, albeit at di�erent periods of time or at di�erent places, the connections between prisons, psychiatric hospitals and the South African governing body and administration. It also wishes to contribute to the broader literature on the links between colonialism, the political economy of health, psychiatry and punishment. More specifically, this work owes much to the debate on the historical links between violence, gangs, identity formation in closed spaces, sexual abuse and power dynamics. By highlighting the normative aspects of some classic works on gangs and more generally on criminal violence in South Africa, the studies involved in the debate point out the crucial role played by repressive institutions of social control such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals and the system of pass laws in shaping the historical development of patterns of violence that came to permeate many aspects of the apartheid society.

In colonial contexts like in twentieth-century South Africa, the law adjudicated and punished various forms of violence, albeit with the exception of the violence of the state. This form of violence, instead, was legitimised, performed and carried out by the same law that, turning to the “criminal” realm, sanctioned ordinary citizens through sentences of corporal punishment, imprisonment and diverse forms of social and civil death. The historical relationship between Pollsmoor Prison and Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital in the Western Cape during the second half of apartheid is shot through with such violence. This article first presents the institutional routinised violence as it prevailed in Pollsmoor and Valkenberg during apartheid before turning to the violence of “inside” survival and resistance in their specific form as mimicry. Although much more needs to be said, I chose these aspects because they bring attention to the specificity and representativeness of the violence inscribed in closed institutions. In doing so, I do not attempt to unveil universal and atemporal logics which supposedly underlie violent phenomena. On the reverse, I wish to remain close to the experience of violence, which subsumes its very nature as an event.

The research I present below is based on internal documents from Pollsmoor Prison and, to a lesser extent because of di�iculties of access, from Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital. It also gathers information from commissions of inquiry, reports from organisations of resistance, as well as personal and public papers on law, justice and psychiatry held in South African national and regional archives. Newspapers have also been consulted in order to appraise the evolution of public opinion and the emergence of voices and events in the public sphere. Finally, in order to compensate for the partiality of archives and to try to apprehend the experiences of di�erent historical actors, I have led a number of interviews with inmates, warders, former political prisoners, psychiatrists, lawyers and psychologists.

“Law and Order” Inside Pollsmoor Prison

Pollsmoor Prison is situated some 40 km south-east of Cape Town, isolated from the city by the Cape Peninsula mountain range. The plethora of laws passed by the apartheid government since its accession to power in 1948 led to such a sharp rise in incarceration rates that existing prisons in the Western Cape could not cope with the daily influx of awaiting-trial and convicted prisoners. Pollsmoor was opened in 1964 and transformed rapidly during apartheid. Indeed, the legal system created an image of a dangerous urban black population that threatened the white minority with degeneration, physical violations and violent uprisings. Pass laws, combined with penal laws on alcoholism and drug dealing, prompted an increase in arrests and prison numbers. The situation worsened in the late 1970s with the township insurrections, prompting the arrest of thousands of young Blacks under the Terrorism Act of 1967.

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As Florence Bernault has shown for other African colonies, the “African [was] largely perceived as essentially criminal, as the descendant of a degenerated race who [could] eventually get out of the vitiated gangue of subaltern society thanks to contact with European law.” In apartheid South Africa, such “contact” could take place at any level of one’s public or private life, as the law strove to regulate a variety of simple social acts relating to, among others, freedom of speech, interracial sex (under the Immorality Act of 1957, itself an extension of the Immorality Act of 1927), freedom of movement, as restricted by the pass laws, or the production of alcohol by “non-Whites.” Any deviance, be it perceived as social, political or mental, could easily lead to extensive periods of awaiting- trial incarceration, detention without trial, prison sentences, psychiatric admissions or, in cases where the perceived violence of the o�enders was deemed beyond any possible rehabilitation and seemed to require an exemplary sentence, the death penalty.

It is in this context that Pollsmoor rapidly expanded from its first prison, Medium A, designed for Black inmates, to four additional prisons: Medium B, reserved for White prisoners only; the Maximum Security section; a female prison, which included a section for juveniles; and Medium C, built at the end of apartheid for minimum security prisoners. This carceral complex was characterised by chronic overcrowding, a labyrinth of corridors, communal cells where more than fi�y inmates could be crammed together and a panoply of heavy gates opened by large iron keys. Pollsmoor administration subjected the large awaiting-trial population to the same treatment that convicted prisoners received, a treatment characterised by violent disciplinary measures, economic exploitation and daily mortifications.

During the day, warders maintained order inside prison through the use of dogs, teargas and tonfas until 1996. They extensively resorted to solitary confinement and reduced diet sentences for infractions to the regulations as small as the illegal possession of a “cup of sugar.” Although throughout apartheid, the di�erent amendments to the Prison Act of 1959 progressively imposed limits to the number of days allowed for solitary confinement, practice inside prisons was hard to change, as few mechanisms of control existed to curtail the warders’ habits. Added to the o�icial censorship surrounding any event or information related to prisons, the arbitrary length of detention in isolation sections reinforced the feeling of a profound vulnerability to the violence of the disciplinary system.

The Prisons Services imposed a stringent military hierarchy articulated along racial lines on the prison personnel. White and “non-White” warders had to parade every morning in two di�erent groups and had to use distinct toilets and lockers. Black personnel got the most degrading jobs, such as night-shi� surveillance of the compound, while Coloured warders worked in the sections and senior White guards ruled over the prison from their o�ices. Each group received di�erent salaries and allowances. Subordination to this hierarchy, which most Black warders heavily resented, greatly emphasised the overall perception by the prison population that humiliation and disciplinary measures constituted normal features of everyday life in this environment. Despite the Prisons Services’ public rhetoric, violence was one of the sole principles underlying the regulations enforced on prisoners. One could either accept to give in, and gradually come to integrate it as a common characteristic of prison life, or confront it, and be submitted to increased violence.

Immediately upon admission, warders made clear to the inmate that from then onwards, “profanations” of his/her self and violent imposition of a new regulation on his/her most intimate gestures would mark the rhythm of incarcerated life. In Pollsmoor during apartheid, the extremely intrusive violence of the admission procedure reflected the forthcoming daily abuse of the sentenced life. In the female section, complaints against strip searches sometimes occurred, forcing the administration to call a doctor to check if the inmate’s hymen had not been torn during the process. On the male side, warders sometimes had to transfer prisoners to hospitals a�er strip searching them.

Once the inmate was stripped of his/her self, warders strove to assign him/her a new identity through a mechanism of categorisation, and submit him/her to a new social arrangement, based on a system of sanctions and privileges. In Pollsmoor, like in other prisons under apartheid, five apparently strict but actually fluctuating lines of categorisation divided the incarcerated population: race, gender, behaviour, status (political or common-law) and medical state (both physical and mental). In 1979, Pollsmoor administration introduced a disciplinary board—called the “X Court”—that performed a simulacrum of justice in a militarised environment where prisoners were forbidden to talk to the warders, unless spoken to. This innovation merely reinforced the dramaturgy of power prevailing in the institution and prison life remained organised through the bestowal of privileges and the distribution of punishments. The latter included, among others, forms of public flogging, being held naked, in mechanical restraints such as handcu�s, chains and leg-irons or in a straitjacket during solitary confinement, food and medicine deprivation, threats, verbal humiliations and collective beatings.

This disciplinary system, because it mostly hinged on corporal punishments, could appear as an archaic way of governance in an “autonomous microsociety.” However, in South Africa during the second half of the twentieth century, corporal punishments were hardly confined to prisons. Judges, for instance, commonly used whipping as a sentence. The division of the population into di�erent racial categories, from which derived various degrees of privileges and distinct forms of repression, formed the basis of a segregationist system that drew from other colonial patterns. Indeed, as Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao have explained:

Colonial disciplinary correction was understood to be a consequence of native inadequacy, which justified the use of almost any level of force and violence. The visceral, embodied experiences of domination and control—the immediate manifestation of colonial corporeality—were an integral part of governmental practices of codifying, categorizing, and racializing di�erence. Various corporeal technologies, and most specifically bodily violence, have acted to mark and constitute boundaries of alterity.

Pollsmoor, with its characteristic disciplinary system, could therefore be seen, rather than a “microsociety,” as a magnifying glass revealing the dynamics of state control on the outside. Like psychiatric hospitals, prisons were walled-o� margins of society that were sometimes archaic, sometimes ahead of social changes, and whose study provides an acute understanding of the links between the violence prevailing inside closed institutions and the dynamics of state control.

Violence and Subjugation in the Asylum

Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital was built in 1896. It was the first South African hospital designed to cater for mentally-ill patients only, and was exclusively reserved for Whites. In the 1910s, a new section, Uitvlugt, opened for Black and Coloured patients on the other side of one of the two rivers bordering the hospital. Valkenberg architecture reflected the will to reform psychiatric practices in the colony on the model of British asylums and to implement a racial segregation deemed necessary to foster mental healing. In the 1930s and 1940s, despite several threats by the government to close down the hospital’s decaying buildings, Valkenberg continued to be operational. Although gradual changes were implemented from the 1960s onwards, Valkenberg was renowned, up to the end of the democratic transition, for chronic overpopulation, degrading living conditions, the brutality of nurses, and the quasi-absence of therapeutic treatments. The asylum remained the epitome of an archaic colonial psychiatric ward.

In 1976, at a time of increasing state repression, Valkenberg inaugurated its new Maximum Security section, also called Ward 20. Initially designed to be part of Pollsmoor Prison, it was eventually built on the “Black side” of the hospital. Its architecture was therefore identical to that of Pollsmoor, though slightly less safety-oriented. Ward 20 housed, in overpopulated large dormitories, some of them deprived of windows, Black prisoners categorised as “psychopaths” and detainees under psychiatric observation during their trial. It also accommodated o�enders who could not stand trial and that psychiatrists had certified as State President Patients.

The dynamics guiding people’s transfers between Pollsmoor and Valkenberg were complex and varied over time. Warders rarely took into account the complaints of prisoners who actually su�ered from the brutality of prison conditions or from former experiences and required some psychiatric assistance. O�en, the only attention they received came down to sedatives administered by warders trained as nurses and advised by visiting psychiatrists. While the latter criticised the lack of facilities inside Pollsmoor where they could visit prisoners, they considered many of the prisoners’ complaints as mere malingering. For the prison administration, the ambiguous relation between the two institutions constituted a conscious strategy and was perpetuated as such. Sending the most troublesome inmates to Valkenberg Maximum Security ward helped to maintain order inside Pollsmoor. During periods of tension inside the prison, warders tended to transfer inmates who, once they arrived at the psychiatric hospital, were subjected to tests and diagnoses that did not corroborate, in the medical o�icers’ eyes, the supposed existence of mental illness. Psychiatrists hence periodically sent inmates back to Pollsmoor, participating in a singular trade of misbehaving and insubordinate prisoners. Despite occasional reluctance from forensic psychiatrists, Ward 20 resembled the psychiatric wing of the Attica prison as described by Michel Foucault: it indeed operated as “the machine of the machine, or rather the elimination of elimination, elimination in the second degree” in the “curious mechanism of circular elimination” underlying the prison system.

The gradual changes implemented from the mid-1960s onward did not have an impact on the fact that Valkenberg continued to embody the usual stigma attached to madness, and was, until the 1980s, an institution renowned for the brutality of the treatment received by Black patients. The only “medical care” considered as e�ective consisted in forced electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and neuroleptics. Moreover, according to the medical discourse of the time, Black patients were not supposed to need any anaesthetic before ECT sessions, which took place three times a week. Some psychologists, who had to go through their clinical probation in Valkenberg during the 1970s, heavily criticised the hospital’s archaic structures and methods. Patients’ committals stretched over

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long and indefinite periods of time. On the “Black side” of the asylum, and even more so on Ward 20, White nurses who had not received any psychiatric training brutally forced patients to undergo ECT treatment. In the entire hospital, nurses administered sedative antipsychotics in large doses, sometimes three times over the prescribed amount, and rapidly transformed patients into haggard figures mumbling incoherent words.

By defining and punishing the criminal deviancy of “non-Whites” through a multiplicity of racial laws restricting their movements and actions, penal and psychiatric discourses instituted all Blacks and Coloureds as potential criminals who could only be reformed with the help of the White minority. Although the scope of this article does not allow for a detailed analysis of the incarceration process implemented against White prisoners and patients, the way they were treated inside closed institutions and the adjudication over their deviancy which took place in court also reveal crucial dynamics in the disciplinarisation of White communities.49 For instance, psychiatrists alleged, during apartheid, that Whites were more prone to depression and “complex” mental illnesses than their Black counterparts. According to the same discourse, while Black crime mainly stemmed from “disculturation,” White crime found its roots in exaggerated wealth and the decline of moral values.

Although they shared many aspects, the textures of violence inherent to Pollsmoor Prison and to Valkenberg Hospital di�ered, particularly in the degree of terror and obedience produced by the administration. Even though South Africa, like other British colonies, did not witness a “great confinement” strategy in relation to mental health incarceration, the apartheid asylum still embodied, to take up Foucault’s words, “power in its naked state,” “the medically intensified reality, … the medical power-knowledge that has no other function than to be the agent of reality itself.” In Valkenberg, the medical discourse that attempted to shape every element of the inmate’s identity could destroy his/her sense of autonomous self to an even greater extent that in Pollsmoor. Ward 20 brought this domination to an extreme, as it physically and symbolically subjected the “criminal mentally-ill” to a double violence, the one of the law and of the psychiatric order. For this reason, and because of the nature of the hospital’s archives, the modalities of resistance and survival taking place inside prisons throughout apartheid le� more numerous traces in the records.

Gangs, Resistance and Mimicry: Violence as bounding and “cleansing”

Studies on South African violence have o�en either focused on the brutality of state repression and the retaliation of resistance movements, or analysed crime and gang formations as fascinating or regrettable fratricidal “subcultures.” The links and mutual feeding between these di�erent forms of violence as well as the changing impact of apartheid structural violence on the everyday life of South Africans still need further investigation. Forced removals, police and army repression, economic exploitation di�erentiated on the basis of race, as well as social and civic deprivation constituted some of the main dimensions of this structural violence. As shown by Shula Marks and Neil Andersson, the allocation of health resources, which a�ected mental hospitals, also influenced in a significant way “the totality of social and productive relations” in the apartheid society.

This structural violence had an impact on the chronic overcrowding of Pollsmoor Prison and Valkenberg Hospital. Indeed, this overcrowding did not derive only from insu�icient facilities, limited budget and a dehumanising ideology which implied that criminals and mentally-ill patients could be held in warehouse conditions. In South Africa, the rate of crime has, during the twentieth century and up to now, been extremely high. To understand the links between crime and the social conditions created by the apartheid regime, one can view crime as part of a “matrix of cultural violence which is integral to continued social inequality and racial domination.” However, one should be wary of analysing delinquency as resulting from “psycho-social stress and the destruction of the family” or from “criminal deviancy,” for this perspective can only provide an incomplete and o�en normative image of the outlaws. When looking at the structural violence of apartheid and crime, one needs to take into account broader historical dynamics of state control, mine industry, prison-compound complex and oppression characteristic of colonialism, as Charles van Onselen and Gary Kynoch have skilfully done.

Mental deviancy aside, the social and legal appearances of which are far harder to tackle, the law shaped violent social deviancy during apartheid, and increasingly so from the 1970s onwards, into three categories: political, criminal and, in between, the threatening manifestation of the swart gevaar—the “Black peril”—or the fear of the “Black mob.” On the ground, the relationships between the people involved in these categorised events were entangled and blurred, ranging from conflict to collaboration and instrumentalisation of one group by another. Nancy Scheper-Hugues collected testimonies on how young comrades engaged in the struggle against apartheid used and “politicised” skollies (gangsters) in order to, among others, retain the di�erence between “clean” political violence and criminal “brutality.” These kinds of relationships reinforced the connections between the inside and the outside of closed institutions and took a specific pattern within prisons. On the inside, the relationships among “political” and “common-law” prisoners wavered between overt hate and physical confrontation—in the case of gang members being instrumentalised by the prison administration to spy on or even torture political prisoners—and mutual help, when common-law prisoners introduced newspapers and passed messages to the outside and political prisoners shared the benefits of their privileges, particularly food packages. Interestingly, although such exchanges were nevertheless marked by a certain degree of loathing on the part of political prisoners in the male sections, female political prisoners appear to have established relationships of stronger solidarity with their common-law counterparts.

Since its opening in 1964, Pollsmoor had been renowned for the sheer violence it enclosed within its walls. Such a reputation could seem peculiar, when compared to other South African prisons such as Robben Island; Pretoria Central, where prisoners sentenced to death were hanged until 1995; or Zonderwater, also called “psycho city,” which detained “psychopaths” sentenced to life imprisonment. Pollsmoor’s reputation actually lay in the presence of the Number, a structure composed of three brother gangs, at a scale unmatched in any other jail. During apartheid, the prison administration and the leaders of the Number supervised two parallel orders that secured the balance ensuring the perpetuation of prison as a viable institution. A mythology, constructed around the historical figure of Jan Note, served as the basis for the gang’s organisation and doctrine. The three gangs that composed the Number, the 26’s, 27’s and 28’s, attained their full strength during apartheid. Members conceived their own military ranks, which they symbolically represented by tattooing their bodies. In a context where the body has become an object of power, disposable by others than oneself, this practice of tattooing in prison o�en constitutes an ultimate resort of auto-determination. In the case of the Number, tattooing involved even further meaning, as each ink symbol constituted a hint as to the rank and a�iliation of the prisoner.

The intricate rules of the system were based on di�erent—and o�en codified and illegal—systems of communication. Zackie Achmat, incarcerated in 1978 at Pollsmoor, described his entrance in a cell governed by the 28’s in the following terms:

Within minutes all the toilet bowls in the Remand Section were flushed and all the water was removed from the one in our cell. In this way, the sound was carried through the entire sewage system of the block. This system allowed prisoners to communicate with each other illegally, with a diminished threat of punishment and discovery by the warders. When we arrived the 28s had to report to the General—they had to account for the loot gained from the newly arrived prisoners.

Members also invented a parallel system of justice and a new language, called sabela. Willem Schurink, who established a detailed list of the di�erent ranks held in the “private-line” and “blood- line” of the 28’s, pointed out that the Number guaranteed the “fulfilment of physical, psychological and social needs.” In his 1989 study, he commented on the fact that “Number gangs provide camaraderie, status, protection and in the case of the 28 sexual outlets are also provided. ‘Welfare services’ also make provisions for permanent disability and retirement.” The Number’s o�icial objective was to create a united force strong enough to attack the prison system, and more broadly to challenge apartheid’s economic and racial injustice. Members defined themselves as “freedom fighters,” or “bandits,” to demonstrate that the frontier between criminal and political motives was blurred and linked to issues of ordinary governance under apartheid.

Detained in a “state of injury,” their lives akin to the slave’s “perfect figure of the shadow” as described by Achille Mbembe, the majority of Pollsmoor male inmates during apartheid reacted to the debasing brutality of the system through the violence of the Number. The procedure of admission to the gangs was shot through with violence. Following one of the entrance procedures, the inmate desiring to become a “member” had to stab a warder with a sharpened tool, undergo without a word the beating that would automatically ensue, be kept naked in an isolation cell for a minimum period of a month, where he would endure further beating from the warders, before his toughness would open for him the doors of the Number. Other such acts against the prison sta� would then punctuate his career across the ranks of the 26’s, the 27’s or the 28’s. This use of violence converges with the idea of a “cleansing force” as described by Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, one that would enable the inmate, deprived of the most basic elements that constituted his sense of being before prison, to regain some sense of control and autonomy, some sense of subjectivity, some sovereignty by doing away with the “limits of death.” But it was also a bounding force, a process of “fraternalisation” in an environment designed to isolate, to annihilate social links and to transform the prison population into a uniformed, amorphous mass defined by anomie.

There was, however, another edge to the violence of the Number, the less glorious, but as imperious for its members, flip side of the coin. The lasting power of the Number lay in several elements. Its military organisation was above all mythological and based itself upon a virtual structure, evoked and enacted each time an act of violence was decided upon. This virtuality has enabled the Number to adapt fluidly to the changing historical circumstances from its creation up to now. During apartheid, the gang played the role of an integrative force at a time when all aspects of life were segregated and in an environment governed by strategies of division. But the Number also drew its strength from its mimicry of colonial and carceral models of “law and order,” submitting its own members to a violence akin to the ones of justice and prison administration. At its very inception, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Number had copied the military hierarchy of the Boer colonial army, proclaiming the need to create a cohesive force in order to fight the economic exploitation taking place on the mine compounds. The fact that the gangs’ activities focused mainly on

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predatory attacks against miners bringing their earnings back home did not prevent the legend of an anti-colonial army of outlaws from perpetuating itself within the prison walls. Once inside, the Number added to its internal structure elements borrowed from the prison and penal systems, putting in place an elaborate system of punishment against “betrayers.” Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, such cases of violence between prisoners were increasingly brought to court. Gang members unveiled to the public the existence of this structure of brotherhood and violence, and during the trials, some judges found themselves in the classic dilemma of not knowing how to assess the acts of “soldiers” belonging to a hierarchical military organisation. For members of the Number, breaking the silence around their organisation was a necessary price to pay in an attempt to fracture the isolation surrounding daily abuses inside Pollsmoor and other prisons.

Such mimicry of the most violent features of the colonial state, however, as Homi Bhabha has thoroughly explained, did not derive from a simple lack of imagination tainted with subservience. As pointed out by Dunbar Moodie, collective violence “is seldom merely moral or symbolic, however. It is generally instrumental as well.” The Number’s violence expressed the double and changing need to establish a sense of brotherhood and a force united and disciplined enough to be able to stand up against a crushing system. On the male side, violence, which included sexual abuse, operated as one of the only means that seemed to be e�ective in this environment. Interestingly, on the women’s side occurred a mimicry of mimicry, more concerned with the dramaturgy of power attached to the Number than with the imposition of a strict military organisation. While the formation of sisterhood took other forms, violence, there too, constituted a strong asset for collective organisation.

Conclusion

In apartheid South Africa, Bantustans, townships and squatter camps were spaces highly regulated, where everyday life could not be understood without taking into account the criminalising e�ect of repressive and changing legislation. The mass incarceration resulting from the implementation of apartheid laws as well as the logics of township resistance from the mid-1970s onwards, in which an increasing number of young “comtsotsis” became involved, accounted for new connections between the confines of the prison and the world on the outside. Similarities between the institutional violence and the logics of racial categorisation carried out by the prison and police administrations echoed the links between inside and outside forms of survival. Indeed, some patterns of violence, in their repressive and resisting forms, crossed the institutions’ walls, in a process of mutual feeding, arguing for a permeability of carceral spaces. These mechanisms of translation, reflection and distortion of violent schemes between closed institutions and the outside also sustain the idea that prisons and the maximum security sections of psychiatric hospitals constituted a cornerstone in the policing of the apartheid society.

Parallelly, the case study of the Number and the violence of its methods reveals a disruption of the usual categories of “legitimate” vs. “illegitimate” violence, and politics vs. crime. It also blurs the divide between confrontational resistance on the one side, and mimicry/reappropriation of colonial schemes on the other. The “external” and “internal” violence of the Number are complex historical phenomena, that rather need to be analysed from two-sided concrete historical e�ects: the way they challenged prison rule by confronting it with a violence that threatened the law by “its mere existence outside the law”; and the extent to which, despite the supposedly secret character of the gang, its organising force was used by the warders to maintain the fragile “peace” equilibrium necessary for the perpetuation of prison order. This violence also has to be understood in the light of other strategies of adaptation and resistance developed on the male and female sides, which encompassed di�erent dynamics of identity formation and solidarity, such as the collaboration of specific gangs with warders, gender-based individual struggles, more obviously politically-tainted protests and spontaneous forms of resistance arising from specific grievances.

The expressions of resistance in Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital during apartheid answered to di�erent dynamics, linked to the pathologization of dissidence and anchored in the specific medical classifying knowledge and psychological e�ects of the apartheid regime. During the democratic transition, however, both prisoners and psychiatric patients changed the scale of their actions, giving rise to the most important institutional revolts of the country’s history. The revolts, which shook prisons and, sporadically, psychiatric hospitals from 1990 to 1995, constituted for prisoners and patients an attempt to delegitimise the former boundaries of citizenship and reintegrate the society from which they had been expelled. They brought to light the strategies linked to the occurrence of violence during apartheid, be it with regard to resistance, exploitation, population control or the gendered mimicry of colonial power.

A�er the democratic transition, despite the o�icial discourse on a deep refoundation of the South African punishment model, the implementation of the new democracy coincided with the building of a greater number of prisons and with increasing attempts at privatisation. This reinforced the idea that, as in other colonial and postcolonial settings, the production of the South African state through “discrete enactments of violence” in prison and psychiatric hospitals could be seen as answering concurrently to di�erent models of governmentality. The study of the violence of the state and of inmates’ resistance hence calls attention to the fact that elements of premodern power, of disciplinary power and, nowadays, of a regime based on “risk management,” far from being distinct models following one another in time, can be intertwined within specific historical configurations.

Natacha Filippi University of Witwatersrand

For correspondence: [email protected].

Notes 1. I would like to thank Florence Bernault, Jan-Georg Deutsch and the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History reviewers for their precious advices and comments.

2. Nancy Scheper-Hugues and Philippe Bourgois, “Introduction: Making sense of violence,” in Violence in War and Peace: An anthology, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hugues and Philippe Bourgois (London: Blackwell, 2004), 1–31.

3. Linda Alco�, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The identity crisis in feminist theory,” Signs 13/3 (1988): 405–36.

4. Jennifer Sloan and Deborah H. Drake, “Emotional Engagements: On sinking and swimming in prison research and ethnography,” Criminal Justice Matters 91/1 (2013): 24–25.

5. Alison Liebling, “Identity and Emotion in a High Security Prison,” Criminal Justice Matters 91/1 (2013): 22–23.

6. For a thorough summary of the debates around the nature of the colonial state, see John Lonsdale, “States and Social Processes in Africa: A historiographical survey,” African Studies Review 24/2–3 (1981): 139–225.

7. Patrick Anderson, “‘To Lie Down to Death for Days’: The Turkish hunger strike, 2000–2003,” Cultural Studies 18/6 (2004): 818.

8. See, in particular, Charles van Onselen, “Crime and Total Institutions in the Making of Modern South Africa: The life of ‘Nongoloza’ Mathebula, 1867–1948,” History Workshop 19 (1985): 62–81; Gary Kynoch, “Of Compounds and Cellblocks: The foundations of violence in Johannesburg, 1890s– 1950s,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37/3 (2011): 463–77; Harriet J. Deacon, The Island: A history of Robben Island, 1488–1990 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1996); Johann Louw and Sally Swartz, “An English Asylum in Africa: Space and order in Valkenberg Asylum,” History of Psychology 41 (2001): 3–23; Fran L. Buntman, Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Gail Super, “‘Like Some Rough Beast Sloughing Towards Bethlehem to Be Born’: A historical perspective on the institution of prison in South Africa, 1976–2004,” British Journal of Criminology 51 (2011): 201–21.

9. See, among others, Florence Bernault, ed., A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003); Lynette Jackson, Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and social order in colonial Zimbabwe, 1908–1968 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Richard Keller, “Madness and Colonization: Psychiatry in the British and French Empires, 1800–1962,” Journal of Social History 35/2 (2001): 295–326; Shula Marks, “The Microphysics of Power: Mental nursing in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century,” in Psychiatry and Empire, ed. Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 67–98.

10. The debate has evolved around di�erent works, including Charles van Onselen, The Small Matter of a Horse: The life of “Nongoloza” Mathebula, 1867–1948 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984); Dunbar Moodie and Vivienne Ndatshe, Going for Gold: Men, mines and migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Patrick Harries, Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant labourers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860–1910 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994); Zackie Achmat, “‘Apostles of Civilised Vice’: ‘Immoral practices’ and ‘unnatural vice’ in South African prisons and compounds, 1890–1920,” Social Dynamics 19/2 (1993): 92–110, Teresa Dirsuweit, “Carceral Spaces in South Africa: A case study of institutional power, sexuality and transgression in a women’s prison,” Geoforum 30 (1999): 71–83; and Sasha Gear, “Rules of Engagement: Structuring sex and damage in men’s prisons and beyond,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 7/3 (2005): 195–208.

11. Gary Kynoch, “Urban Violence in Colonial Africa: A case for South African exceptionalism,” Journal of Southern African Studies 34/3 (2008): 639. Detailed analyses of the texture of violence in South Africa can also be found in William Beinart, “Introduction: Political violence in Southern African historiography,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 18/3 (1992): 455–86; Don Foster, Paul Haupt and Marésa De Beer, The Theatre of Violence: Narratives of protagonists in the South African conflict (Cape Town; Oxford: HSRC Press, James Currey, 2005), and Franziska Rueedi, “‘Siyayinyova!’: Patterns of violence in the African townships of the Vaal Triangle, South Africa, 1980–86,” Africa 85/3 (2015): 395–416.

12. For reasons related to identity protection and according to the regulations of the South African Department of Correctional Services, I use fictional instead of real names for the interviewees, as some of them have requested to remain anonymous. The place where the interview was led is indicated each time, except when such information goes against the anonymity of the interviewee, in which case “Cape Town” will be used as a broad indication.

13. For a detailed analysis of the links between white fear and the colonisers’ attempts to control black bodies, see Florence Bernault, “Body, Power and Sacrifice in Equatorial Africa,” The Journal of African History 47/2 (2006): 207–39.

14. Rhodes House Library (RHL), NS13, SA, 610.5 s.3/1976 (3). G. Vilhoen, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Penal System of the Republic of South Africa (Pretoria, 1976), and William Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994): 229.

15. RHL, Anti–Apartheid Movement (AAM), MSS AAM 1813. Centre Against Apartheid, “Repression in South Africa,” 1980.

16. Florence Bernault, “De l’Afrique ouverte à l’Afrique fermée: comprendre l’histoire des réclusions continentales,” in Enfermement, Prison et Châtiments en Afrique: du 19 siècle à nos jours, ed. Florence Bernault (Paris: Karthala, 1999): 15–66.

17. During the first half of the 1960s, the country hanged 391 people, more than twice the number of o�enders executed in the United States. The Star, 17 June 1966.

18. “Prison Reply to Charges,” Cape Times, July 7, 1983.

19. A tonfa is a short wood or rubber baton with a handle, used by policemen and warders in South Africa.

20. Interview with Mr. Van Tonder, warder, Pollsmoor Medium B Prison, 27 February 2008.

21. University of Cape Town, Manuscripts and Archives (UCT, MAR), BC165. Project introduction by journalists, 1989.

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22. Interview with Mrs. Allen, wardress, Pollsmoor Women’s Prison, 31 March 2011.

23. Pollsmoor Archives (PA), S10/1. General circular, 3 September 1982.

24. Interview with Mr. Keane, warder, Pollsmoor Medium B Prison, 26 February 2008.

25. Erving Go�man, Asylums (London: Penguin, 1991 [1961]): 24.

26. For a first-hand narrative of an admission procedure at Pollsmoor in 1978, see Achmat, “‘Apostles of Civilised Vice.’”

27. PA, 1/3/6. Complaints and representations by and in respect of prisoners, exprisoners and prisons (1994).

28. Historical Papers, Witwatersrand University (HPW), AG3199. Letter from the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) to Pollsmoor, 26 August 1988.

29. For historical accounts of other prisons’ disciplinary systems under apartheid, see Buntman, Robben Island; Super, “‘Like Some Rough Beast”; Caesarina Makhoere, No Child’s Play: In prison under apartheid (London: Women’s Press, 1988).

30. Cape Town Archives Repository (CTAR), 1/WBG, 1/2/17/1/1. List of accused and verdicts, Pollsmoor X Court (1978–86).

31. Pretoria Central Archives (PCA), UOD, 2212, E326. The Penal Reform League of South Africa, The Penal Reform News, Newsletter n° 14, July 1950; PA, 1/3/2/3. Prisons Services general circular, 24 May 1988.

32. MAR, UCT, BC668. National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of O�enders (NICRO), “Corporal Punishment,” Johannesburg, 1991. For detailed statistics on flogging during the first half of apartheid, see Albie Sachs, Justice in South Africa (London: Heinemann, 1973).

33. Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce, eds., Discipline and the Other Body, Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 4.

34. On the birth of Valkenberg, see Sally Swartz, “The Black Insane in the Cape, 1891–1920,” Journal of Southern African Studies 21/3 (1995): 399–415, and Harriet Deacon, “Madness, Race and Moral Treatment: Robben Island Lunatic Asylum, Cape Colony, 1846–1890,” History of Psychiatry 7 (1996): 287–308.

35. Louw and Swartz, “An English Asylum in Africa,” 11.

36. PCA, PWD, 1705 2.6227. Letter from the Secretary for the Interior to the Department of Public Work, 19 December 1948.

37. HPW, AG3199. Report on Human Rights Violations and Alleged Malpractices in Psychiatric Institutions, November 1995.

38. MAR, BC1008. Valkenberg Hospital, Centenary Newsletter, 1891–1991, January 1991.

39. Interview with Mr. Bauer, psychiatrist, Valkenberg Hospital, 2 December 2010.

40. Chris Bateman, “Izindaba: The insanity of a criminal justice system,” South African Journal of Medicine 94/4 (2005): 208–12.

41. Interview with Mr. Dejan, former forensic psychiatrist, Cape Town, 30 November 2010.

42. PA, 1/4/2/10/1. Medical certificates sent to Pollsmoor by Valkenberg (1991–92); PA, 1/4/2/10/1. Letter from Valkenberg to Pollsmoor, 19 March 1992.

43. John K. Simon, “Michel Foucault on Attica: An interview,” Social Justice 18/3 (1991): 27.

44. Lynn S. Gillis’s Papers (LSGP). Dra� discourse of the former head of the Department of Psychiatry, 1995.

45. Interviews with Mr. Buten and Mr. Holler, researchers in psychology, University of Cape Town, 9 December 2010 and 18 November 2010.

46. HPW, AG3199. A Valkenberg patient to the LRC, 8 April 1984.

47. Peter Lambley, The Psychology of Apartheid (London: Secker & Warbug, 1980).

48. Martin Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture, 1902–1936: Fear, favour and prejudice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

49. For an analysis of such dynamics in British Burma, see Trude Jacobsen, “The Curious Case of Sherlock Hare: Race, class and mental health in British Burma,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15/3 (2014), accessed February 5, 2015, doi:10.1353/cch.2014.0051.

50. RHL, NS13, SA, 610.5 s.3/1976 (3). G. Vilhoen, Report of the Commission of Inquiry.

51. Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial power and African illness (Cambridge: Polity, 1991): 10; Michel Foucault, Le pouvoir psychiatrique: Cours au Collège de France, 1973–1974 (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).

52. Neil Andersson and Shula Marks, “The State and the Allocation of Health Resources in Southern Africa,” Social Science & Medicine 28/5 (1989): 515.

53. Shula Marks and Neil Andersson, “The Epidemiology and Culture of Violence,” in Political Violence and the Struggle, ed. Noel Chabani Manganyi and André du Toit (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990): 29–69.

54. On “psycho-social stress”, see Marks and Andersson, “The Epidemiology,” 30. For specific studies on the prevalence of gangs in the Western Cape, see Don Pinnock, The Brotherhoods: Street gangs and state control in Cape Town (Cape Town: David Philip, 1984), and Derica Lambrechts, “The Impact of Organised Crime on State Social Control: Organised criminal groups and local governance on the Cape Flats, Cape Town, South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 38/4 (2012): 787–807.

55. Van Onselen, The Small Matter of a Horse; Kynoch, “Urban Violence.”

56. Nancy Scheper-Hugues, “Specificities: Peace-time crimes,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 3/3 (1997): 471–98.

57. Moses Dlamini, Hell Hole, Robben Island (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1984).

58. Makhoere, No Child’s Play; Emma Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South African autobiography (London: Women’s Press, 1989).

59. A description of Pretoria Central’s conditions can be found in Hugh Lewin, Bandiet: Out of jail (Johannesburg: Random House South Africa, 2002).

60. Van Onselen, The Small Matter of a Horse.

61. Interview with Mr. Jacobs, warder, Pollsmoor Medium B Prison, 27 February 2008.

62. Achmat, “‘Apostles of Civilised Vice,’” 93.

63. Interview with Mr. Urbosch, prisoner, Pollsmoor Medium B Prison, 28 February 2008.

64. Willem J. Schurink, “The World of the Westlaners: An analysis of some organisational features in South African prisons,” Acta Criminologica 2/2 (1989): 65.

65. Interview with Mr. Stevens, prisoner, Pollsmoor Medium B Prison, 28 February 2008.

66. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15/1 (2003): 21. On the impact of the Number on Pollsmoor female prisoners, see Natacha Filippi, “Deviances and the Construction of a ‘Healthy Nation’ in South Africa: A study of Pollsmoor Prison and Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital, c. 1964–1994” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2014).

67. Interview with Mr. Hendricks, prisoner, Pollsmoor Medium B Prison, 28 February 2008.

68. HPW, AG3012. “Prison Gangs, Western Cape,” Confidential report by the Intelligence Coordination, 1991.

69. Jean-Paul Sartre, introduction to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1961]), 7–35; Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208–26; and George Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), as quoted in Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 16.

70. Interview with Mr. Urbosch, prisoner, Pollsmoor Medium B Prison, 28 February 2008; Go�man, Asylums, 57.

71. Thanks to Jonny Steinberg for his highly valuable conversations and advices on the mythology and structure of the Number. For a detailed account of the practices of the Number at Pollsmoor, see Jonny Steinberg, The Number: One man’s search for identity in the Cape underworld and prison gangs (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2004).

72. Van Onselen, The Small Matter of a Horse, 3.

73. Southern African Legal Information Institute (SAFLII). S. v. Masuku and others, 30 June 1985; SAFLII. S. v. Magubane en andere, 12 March 1987.

74. Interview with Mr. Bashophu, prisoner, Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison, 29 March 2011.

75. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse,” October 28 (1984), 126, reprinted in Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

76. Moodie and Ndatshe, Going for Gold, 183, quoted in Kynoch, “Urban Violence,” 641.

77. Interview with Mrs. Tillis, prisoner, Pollsmoor Female Prison, 30 March 2011.

78. The term “comtsotsis” is a combination of the two words “comrade” and “tsotsi” (gangster) and refer to gang members who got involved, in the townships during apartheid, in political activities linked to resistance movements.

79. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, I, ed. Walter Benjamin (London: Belknap Press of Havard University Press, 1999): 281.

80. Dlamini, Hell Hole, 38; PA, 1/4/2/9. Letter from a prisoner to Pollsmoor Head of Prison, 9 September 1994.

81. Because of limited space, these expressions could not be described in this article. For more information, see Filippi, “Deviances.”

82. Kelly Gillespie, “Criminal Abstractions and the Post-Apartheid Prison,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007).

83. Anderson, “‘To Lie Down to Death,” 829; Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, race, and gender in Jamaican state formation, 1780–1870 (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2004).

84. Manuela Cunha, “The Ethnography of Prisons and Penal Confinement,” Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (2014): 217–233.

Copyright © 2016 [Natacha Filippi] and The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Additional Information

ISSN 1532-5768

Launched on MUSE 2016-12-02

Open Access No

5

“Indescribable Barbarism”

The Lynching of African Americans

in the Age of Jim Crow

o n j a n u a r y 3 1 , 1 8 9 3 , a sheriff’s posse captured a black man named Henry Smith at Clow, a flag station on the Arkansas & Louisi- ana Railway in southwestern Arkansas. They arrested the fugitive for the rape and murder of Myrtle Vance, a three-year-old white child and the daughter of the sheriff in Paris, Texas. Smith, a young man with a record of mental problems, had allegedly killed the child to visit re- venge upon Sheriff Vance, who had repeatedly brutalized him. When the posse passed through Texarkana on its way back to Paris, an angry crowd awaited Smith and his captors. The leaders of the posse were able to avert a lynching, pleading with the residents of Texarkana to allow them to return the killer to the scene of his crime, where he would be brought to justice. The crowd deferred, but hundreds of people boarded the train to Paris to witness the spectacle that would surely follow. For it was understood that the posse never intended to deliver Smith to the legal authorities for trial.

Meanwhile news of Smith’s capture had attracted a gathering of roughly ten thousand people in Paris. Several men had erected a ten- foot-high scaffold furnished with a chair and a small furnace. The word justice was painted in large white letters on the front side of the scaf- fold. The “justice” administered to Henry Smith consisted of red-hot irons that Sheriff Vance and several members of his family applied to the victim’s body for almost an hour. After Smith’s torturers had poked out his eyes and burned his tongue, they doused the platform with kerosene

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and set it on fire. As soon as the flames had consumed Smith, onlookers began scavenging the ashes for whatever parts remained of the scorched body. Throughout the grisly act, observers had taken photographs, and the next day newspapers on the East Coast featured graphic eyewitness accounts of the lynching in Texas.

In her 1894 pamphlet A Red Record, the African-American anti- lynching activist Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) called the torment of Henry Smith an “indescribable barbarism” without precedent in the “history of civilization.” Unfortunately the brutality of the lynching at Paris was by no means exceptional. During the decades between the end of Recon- struction and the 1920s, “spectacle lynchings” before large crowds, often involving drawn out torture, mutilation, burning, and the dismember- ment of the victim’s body, occurred regularly in the New South. Nor did witnesses find such events indescribable; in fact they often indulged in sickening voyeurism. In April 1899, for example, a newspaper depicted the death of Sam Hose, a black farm worker from rural Georgia charged with the murder of Alfred Cranford, his white employer, and the rape of Cranford’s wife, in words that are hard to fathom: “Before the torch was applied to the pyre the negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and other portions of his anatomy. The negro pleaded pitifully for his life while the mutilation was going on, but stood the ordeal of fire with surprising fortitude. Before the body was cool it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits. . . . The negro’s heart was cut into several pieces, as was his liver. Those unable to obtain these ghastly relics directly paid fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them.”

Both contemporary opponents of lynching and historians have pon- dered the nagging question of why “ordinary Americans” who had families, went to church, held steady jobs, and otherwise claimed to be law-abiding citizens were capable of perpetrating such atrocities while showing no signs of shame or remorse. That question, however, is mis- leading. Most acts of collective violence in history, including mass mur- der, genocide, and war crimes, have been committed not by perverted aberrants but by “ordinary people” acting in perfectly good conscience because they received orders, believed in noble causes, or simply saw an opportunity to exert power over life and death with impunity. Most par- ticipants in lynch mobs viewed themselves as rendering an honorable service to justice and to the safety of their communities. Thus in order

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to understand lynching it is necessary to explore the cultural, social, eco- nomic, and political forces that sustained mob violence.

The most salient chapter in the history of lynch law in America was the lynching of African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twen- tieth centuries. According to the most conservative estimates, slightly more than 4,700 persons were lynched in the United States between the early 1880s and World War II. Seventy-three percent of all victims were blacks. In the South, where more than 80 percent of all lynchings oc- curred, black deaths were a staggering 83 percent of the total, represent- ing 3,245 fatalities.

The obvious answer to the question of why white Southerners lynched African Americans is that lynching was an instrument of racial control. By the late 1870s the “redeemers” had successfully shaken off the fetters of Reconstruction, but most white Southerners continued to be deeply troubled by the fact that they found themselves living amidst a large black population no longer restrained by the institution of slavery. The answer to their predicament was to impose a racial caste system of white supremacy, popularly known as the Jim Crow system, designed to reduce African Americans to a pariah class without meaningful rights. To this

The lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, 1893.

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end, white Southerners introduced rigid racial segregation along with “electoral reforms” such as literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise nearly all black voters.

In the last resort, however, white supremacy depended on the ability of whites to inflict violent repression on blacks with impunity. Racial vio- lence in the age of Jim Crow ran a broad gamut, from individual bullying to wholesale pogroms with dozens of black victims. The so-called race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), New Orleans (1900), and Atlanta (1906) were the most conspicuous events of this type, but many lesser-known incidents could be added. In 1920, for instance, a confron- tation in the township of Ocoee in Orange County, Florida, in which a black farmer killed two attackers in self-defense, resulted in a three-day orgy of mob violence that left scores of African Americans dead and the entire village destroyed. Thus the lynching of individuals or small groups of blacks was only one manifestation of the racist violence that pervaded life in the Jim Crow South. But lynching was highly visible and effective.

Lynchings did not have to happen every day to fill black communities with fear and horror. As with all forms of terror, the ever-present threat sent a powerful message of intimidation. Even slight transgressions of ra- cial etiquette or misunderstandings might trigger fateful consequences. When Sandy Reeves, a black youth from rural Georgia, accidentally dropped a five cent piece in front of his employer’s three-year-old daugh- ter in September 1918, he should have let the girl keep the nickel instead of wresting it back from her hands. The child ran home, frantically cry- ing that Reeves had harmed her. Her parents assumed that the young man had sexually assaulted their daughter; Reeves was lynched the fol- lowing night. His fate may appear extreme, but Southern blacks knew that such incidents could happen to them too.

Lynchers made every effort to ensure that the black community got their message. They left the bodies of their victims on display for hours, sometimes even for days, and attached signs warning that future offenders would meet the same fate. Spectacle lynchings, such as the burnings of Henry Smith or Sam Hose described earlier, were frighten- ing reminders that there were virtually no limits to what whites could do to blacks. Although only about one-tenth of all mob killings were mass spectacles, they nevertheless epitomized the meaning of lynching as racist terror staged as communal ritual. Mock trials and confessions,

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even if obtained under torture, were essential to underscore the legiti- macy of the punishment and to create the impression that the lynching was tantamount to a legal execution. Extreme cruelty like mutilation and burning satisfied the popular desire for retribution that fit the enormity of the crime. The practice of bystanders riddling dead lynch victims with bullets emphasized community approval. The public exhi- bition of body parts as trophies symbolized the triumph over a common enemy. Because the excessive violence of spectacle lynchings was rarely applied to white victims, no one could miss the point that the cruelty served the purpose of dehumanizing African Americans. Replicating a pattern that had been established during two centuries of slavery, lynchers treated blacks as inferior “brutes” who were insensitive to any but the most horrible physical pain.

But why did so many white Southerners believe they had to go to such extremes in order “to keep the Negro in his place”? After all, whites were a substantial majority of the population in most regions of the South. They held all positions of political power and owned nearly all the wealth. Certainly whites had absolute control of the criminal justice sys- tem and could make sure that blacks who were accused of crimes against whites faced severe punishment. There was also no need to use violence in order to keep the races separate. Although African Americans wanted political and civic equality, they had very little interest in social involve- ment with white people because interracial contacts only reinforced their subordinate status. At closer look it becomes clear that, in addition to in- timidating blacks, racist mob violence in the South helped restore racial solidarity among Southern whites.

During Reconstruction most white Southerners, regardless of social class, had supported the struggle against “Negro rule” by all means neces- sary. But once redemption was complete, class tensions within the white South reemerged. A key reason was the decline of cotton prices. Many small farmers went into debt, lost their farms, and became tenants or sharecroppers. The agrarian crisis sparked a powerful protest movement, known as populism, which challenged the dominance of the Southern planter and business elites. The Populists were willing to forge inter- racial alliances based on the common economic interests of lower-class whites and blacks. The ruling conservative Democrats, used to manipu- lating the black vote in their own favor, responded by waging a ruthless

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campaign for white supremacy that once again employed lynching and vigilantism as instruments of political terrorism. Lynching peaked in the early 1890s, at the height of the Populist revolt and its conservative back- lash. In the election year of 1892, at least 161 blacks were lynched, many of whom were involved in the Populist movement.

Attempts to lynch black Populists sometimes led to amazing conse- quences. In late October 1892 H. S. Doyle, an African-American Populist leader from Georgia, received threats to his life and fled to the home of Thomas Watson, the most prominent white Populist in the state. Watson immediately summoned an army of two thousand white supporters for Doyle’s protection. In the end, however, the divide-and-conquer strategy of the conservative elites succeeded in driving a wedge into the fledgling interracial alliance. The Southern Democrats first adopted key items of the Populist program, then persuaded the white majority that “the Ne- gro” was the source of all Southern troubles and had to be disfranchised, segregated, and forcibly kept in his place if tranquility was to return. As the historian C. Vann Woodward put it, the black man became “the scapegoat in the reconciliation of estranged white classes.” Indeed, some scholars have argued that the role of blacks as scapegoats goes a long way in explaining Southern lynchings, pointing out that whenever cotton prices fell, mob violence increased. Lynching, they have concluded, was most of all a way for lower-class whites to vent their economic frustration against their black competitors. The failure of interracial solidarity in the Populist movement showed that for most white Southerners race came before class. Poor whites, a disillusioned Tom Watson noted, “would joy- ously hug the chains of wretchedness rather than do any experimenting on the race question.“ For his part, Watson decided to stake his political fortunes on white supremacy. He turned into a race-baiting demagogue and a vociferous apologist of lynching.

The appeal to the joint class interests of poor whites and blacks foundered on a powerful cultural legacy that demanded conformity on racial issues from all Southern whites. The institution of slavery had accustomed whites to the ideas that blacks stood outside the ordinary law and that all whites were responsible for controlling a potentially rebellious population of outcasts. It was no coincidence that some mob killings of African Americans in the New South resembled the insur- rection scares of the antebellum days. In 1901, for example, a mob of

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two hundred white men hunted down and hanged two blacks in Boss- ier Parish, Louisiana, for allegedly slaying a local white man. The two killers, the local newspaper insinuated, had been members of a conspir- acy ring responsible for the recent murder of several whites. Hence the lynching was a “necessary precaution” to protect the white community from a black uprising.

Slavery as a legal and social institution had provided white Southern- ers with a sense of unquestionable superiority and relative safety vis-à-vis black slaves. Emancipation had not only ended human bondage but had made blacks equal citizens before the law. In the eyes of many whites, this was an insult and a threat to their own status, and they made ev- ery effort to undermine the political and civic advancement of the freed people. Nevertheless blacks in the South now struggled steadfastly to ac- quire a modicum of education and economic independence, challenging the racist dogma that they were fit only for menial agricultural labor un- der white supervision. Moreover younger African Americans who had no personal recollection of slavery refused to wear the mask of subservi- ence that their enslaved parents had been forced to adopt. Many whites were deeply disturbed by what they perceived as a new black assertive- ness. “Too many negroes,” the Atlanta Constitution warned in 1889, “are either mad or bad, and they are increasing in number.” Supposedly these “bad niggers” were responsible for the crime wave that seemed to plague the South in the late nineteenth century. Black men who tried to make a living as migrant workers faced the highest risk of incurring mob vio- lence. The notorious black “floater,” whites complained, was roaming the roads day and night, looking for an opportunity to steal and making it unsafe for women to leave home without male protection.

White supremacists concluded that the “impudence” of the first gen- eration of freeborn African Americans proved that blacks were relaps- ing into savagery, now that the civilizing institution of slavery had been unwisely abolished. In their rhetoric, white racism knew no limits. James K. Vardaman, a leading politician from Mississippi, character- ized “the Negro” as a “lazy, lying, lustful animal which no conceiv- able amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen.” Works of fiction and pseudoscientific tracts, with such titles as The Negro: a Beast or The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization, endlessly be- labored the purported racial deterioration of African Americans and

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their mortal threat to white Americans in general and white Southern- ers in particular. Freedom, the proponents of this ideology contended, had unleashed the supposedly insatiable sexual appetite of black males, driving them to rape white women at every opportunity. Thus lynch- ing was essential for the protection of white women because only the sight of instant and merciless revenge could impress potential black rapists with sufficient terror. Furthermore no true white man could resist the impulse to avenge outrages against helpless women, regard- less of legal constraints. “Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of white women,” South Carolina governor Coleman Blease boasted, “I say to hell with the Constitution.”

It is difficult to exaggerate the pervasiveness of the “Negro-as-savage- rapist” theme in debates over lynching in the age of Jim Crow. To be sure, these notions of uncontrollable black male sexuality and the need to preserve the “purity of the white race” were not new. In the late nine- teenth century, however, black-on-white rape became an obsession. The historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has called it “a kind of acceptable folk pornography,” which the white Southern press circulated with great rel- ish. Some scholars have speculated that the fascination with the black rapist mirrored the repressed sexual fantasies of white men who vicari- ously punished black men for their own secret desires. The specter of the black rapist also helped cement the patriarchical dominance of white men over their wives and daughters at a time when traditional family life on the farm was giving way to a situation of more and more white women seeking wage labor outside the home. To gain protection against the menace of rape, women had to yield to male authority and accept strict limitations of what they could do and where they could go.

The idea that white women might voluntarily agree to sexual rela- tions with black men was anathema to white men. To maintain the pretense of white racial and moral supremacy over black depravity, any sexual contact between a black man and a white woman had to be rape. For white men who discovered a female family member having a consensual affair with a black man, the obvious way to protect the honor of the family was to lynch the black “rapist.” For white women who had engaged in interracial sex, sacrificing their lovers by bringing rape charges could be a way to escape shame and ostracism. Sometimes women were left with no other choice. In her 1892 anti-lynching treatise

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Southern Horrors, Ida B. Wells reported the harrowing story of a mob in Texarkana that forced a white woman to accuse her lover of rape before the man was burned to death.

In addition to denying the possibility of consensual sex between a white woman and a black man, many white Southerners entertained paranoid notions of what constituted sexual assault. Because black men were said to be constantly lusting after white females of any age, there could be no innocuous situations. In 1917 an illiterate black man in Georgia was lynched because he had asked a little white girl to read a letter to him.

Black men occasionally did rape white women. But most certainly the wave of black-on-white rape that the apologists of lynching claimed threatened the white womanhood of the South was a racist fantasy, albeit a powerful one. Therefore anti-lynching activists worked hard to dis- credit the argument that rape was the root cause of lynching. According to various statistics they collected for the decades between the 1880s and World War II, in roughly 75 percent of all lynching cases sexual assault was not even alleged, let alone affirmed. All the same, rape dominated the public perception of lynching. Not surprisingly, Southern race baiters ignored the evidence that most lynchings had nothing to do with sex- ual crimes. Yet the rape myth also found widespread acceptance among white mainstream Americans outside the South.

Typically, Northern opinion leaders condemned lynching as unac- ceptable lawlessness. But they conceded that rape was its main cause and called upon the black community to curb sexual crime. In 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech in Little Rock, Arkansas, pontificated that “the worst enemy of the Negro race is the Negro criminal of that type . . . and every reputable colored man owes it as his first duty to himself to hunt down that criminal with all his soul and strength.” Even prominent supporters of black civil rights joined the chorus. In 1901 the influential white social reformer Jane Addams, who eight years later helped found the interracial National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), declared that she was willing “to give the Southern citizens the full benefit of their position” on the rape issue. Most academic works on lynching, either explicitly or implicitly, accepted the causal link between rape and mob violence. As late as 1933 the sociologist Arthur Raper (ironically named in this in- stance), in his study The Tragedy of Lynching, alluded to the rape myth

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when he suggested that “Negroes can contribute much to the eridica- tion of lynching, by demonstrating the ability, character, and good citi- zenship of the race.” Thus white mainstream opinion placed African Americans in a double bind by blaming lynching on black rapists and at the same time burdening the black community with the responsibil- ity for eliminating its alleged cause.

The discrepancy between the popular obsession with rape on the one hand and the claim of anti-lynching groups that charges of sexual crime played a role in only one of four lynchings requires a closer look. The available numbers on the precipitating events of lynchings provide the following picture: Charges of homicide were by far the single most im- portant trigger, accounting for 41 percent of all incidents, followed by rape and attempted rape (25.3 percent), robbery and theft (4.9 percent), felonious assault (4.3 percent), and insult to a white person (1.8 percent). More than one in five lynchings (22.7 percent) fell into the category of “other reasons.” The overriding significance of murder is not a surprise given that the Southern states in the late nineteenth century had by far the highest homicide rates in the country, exceeding those of New England by ten to thirty times. Contemporary observers blamed the high level of personal violence on the traditional Southern code of honor that led to countless violent confrontations with a fatal ending. Because many white Southerners saw their criminal justice system as weak and inefficient, they believed they had no alternative to taking the law into their own hands, either by seeking individual revenge or by meting out communal punishment. Blacks who killed whites almost invariably provoked com- munity outrage and became likely targets of mob violence.

Yet the story of black-on-white murder as a cause of lynching requires no less critical scrutiny than the rape myth. African Americans killing or assaulting whites represented but a tiny fraction of all violent crime, if only for the fact that most acts of personal violence occur among friends and family members. Still, whenever a black person committed homicide or assault against a white person—or was suspected to have done so— mob violence became highly likely regardless of whether the suspect had already been taken into custody. Given the racist prejudice of the times, blacks accused of violent crimes against white people had little chance of receiving a fair trial. In many cases public rage against the black mur- derer obscured the evidence of what had actually happened. Numerous

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blacks who were lynched for murdering a white person may have been perfectly innocent of any crime or acted in legitimate self-defense.

In 1903 a mob lynched Jennie Steers, a black domestic, for poisoning the daughter of her employer, a wealthy Louisiana planter. Whether the girl had died as a result of natural causes or a devious crime remained unclear. But the traditional fears of Southern planters that their black servants were constantly plotting to poison them made Jennie Steers an expedient scapegoat for the unexpected loss of a loved family member. Accusing an African American could also be a convenient way to cover up a crime. In 1918 James Cobb, a black man from Cordelle, Georgia, was lynched for the murder of Mrs. Simmons, a white woman, though the victim’s father suspected his son-in-law to be the real culprit. Of course Cobb’s demise precluded further investigation.

Other murder charges grew out of interracial confrontations in which blacks often acted in self-defense. In the case of Sam Hose, the black farm worker burned to death in Georgia in 1899, private investigators hired by anti-lynching groups contested the widely publicized reports that Hose had crushed Alfred Cranford’s head while the unsuspecting man was eating his supper, and then raped Mrs. Cranford. According to their findings, Hose and his boss had been arguing over the worker’s request for an advance. When Cranford grew angry and drew his pistol, Hose flung his axe at him, killing him on the spot. Sensationalist news- paper stories, however, quickly portrayed the black man as a monstrous killer and sexual predator for whom only the most gruesome torture was fitting retribution.

It is impossible to determine if Hose killed Cranford in self-defense. Obviously the opponents of lynch law had a stake in claiming that the victims of mob killings either were innocent or had acted under miti- gating circumstances. In contrast, white Southerners who cherished their own right to self-defense would not countenance the idea that blacks also had a right to protect themselves, their families, their property, and their honor against provocations from whites. Southern planters, in par- ticular, took black deference for granted and continued to assume that they had a right to discipline their “insolent” black laborers and share- croppers. Whenever blacks defied the authority of white employers or fought back, the situation was bound to escalate. In 1904 a black tenant farmer in Georgia killed his landlord in an altercation that resulted from

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the tenant insisting on his right to sell his crop to a merchant of his own choice. A mob promptly lynched the black “murderer.”

Many historians have argued that lynching in the New South served the interests of the planter class. The reliance on extralegal punishment preserved part of the unfettered personal power the planter aristocracy had enjoyed in the days of slavery. Rural elites could easily instigate mob violence against “bad niggers” but could also protect their black clients if they saw fit. In 1894 a white mob pretending to act as a posse hunting down black criminals went on a lynching spree in Brooks County, Georgia, and massacred five African Americans. When the lynchers began molesting the black tenants of Mitchell Brice, one of the leading planters in the area, Brice halted the mob by threatening retali- ation and prosecution. In addition to their traditional paternalism and the desire to maintain their personal authority, wealthy landowners oc- casionally took steps to curtail mob violence because they were afraid that their black workers would leave the area if life became intoler- able. Ironically, though lynching was an instrument of racial terror that helped sustain the status quo in favor of the old elites, the frequency of mob violence was relatively low in many of the rural black belt counties of the Deep South where wealthy landlords exerted their paternalistic rule over a majority population of poor blacks.

In contrast, small towns where African Americans comprised about one quarter of the population had the highest incidence of lynchings. As both black and white Southerners moved to urbanizing areas in search of industrial work, the competition between the races for jobs intensi- fied while anonymous interracial social encounters heightened the risk of violent clashes. As African Americans sought more personal freedom in towns and cities, whites saw the need to reassert white supremacy, insist- ing on strict racial segregation in the public sphere and on preferential treatment in the labor markets. Characteristically, lynching in Louisiana was most prevalent not in the northern rural black belt of the state but in the parishes neighboring on the city of New Orleans, which in the late nineteenth century underwent rapid industrialization and black and white in-migration.

One of the most spectacular lynchings in the urban South occurred in Waco, Texas, in the spring of 1916. In many ways this city of more than thirty thousand, including almost ten thousand African Americans,

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epitomized the vision of the modernizing New South. Waco was a major railway hub and had a thriving industrial sector, notably a bottling plant for the Dr Pepper soft drink. It boasted the tallest building in Texas, a skyscraper owned by the Amicable Life Insurance Company. Its residents enjoyed the benefits of electricity, streetcars, telephones, and public librar- ies. In fact Waco was particularly proud of its vibrant cultural and educa- tional life, calling itself the “Athens of Texas.” Not all citizens, however, appreciated the opportunities for base amusements, such as saloons and brothels, that the city also offered and that many whites associated with “Negro crime.” Under the surface of Waco’s bustling New South image, racial tensions simmered and from time to time boiled over. In 1905 a mob had lynched a black man charged with raping a white woman, hanging him from a bridge over the Brazos River. The confluence of a vigilante tradition, racism, and the ferment of brisk social change created a climate in Waco that was highly conducive to racist mob violence.

The moment arrived when on May 8, 1916, the dead body of Lucy Fryer, a fifty-three-year-old mother and immigrant from England, was discovered on the farm of her family in Robinson, a small village about eight miles outside Waco. The investigation quickly concentrated on Jesse Washington, a seventeen-year-old black youth who worked on the Fryer farm. After Sheriff Samuel Fleming arrested the teenager at his home, he brought him to the jail in Waco. At first Washington, who was illiterate and possibly mentally retarded, denied the charges, but later he confessed to having slain Lucy Fryer following an argument over his treatment of a team of mules that belonged to the Fryers. Possibly his interrogators forced a confession from the black youth, but there was nevertheless strong evidence against the suspect. His clothes were stained with blood, and he led the police to the place where he had concealed the hammer he had used to crush his victim’s head. It is thus quite likely that Washington killed Mrs. Fryer, though the black press later insinu- ated that her husband George Fryer had either committed the murder himself or incited his worker to do the job for him. It remained unclear if the black man had also raped his victim, which the Waco newspapers reported in lurid detail.

Anticipating mob action, Sheriff Fleming had the prisoner trans- ported to Dallas County for safekeeping. Predictably, as soon as news of the murder spread, a mob took control of Fleming’s jail and left only

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after learning that Washington was not there. The sheriff assured mob leaders that the culprit would be put on trial in Waco as soon as possible. Indeed, the trial commenced just one week after the murder, on May 15, before a crowd of fifteen hundred spectators who raucously voiced their opinion that no court was needed. At least the judge managed to retain a façade of due process until the jury, after deliberating for fewer than five minutes, rendered a guilty verdict. At this point the mob grabbed the defendant and began driving him toward the bridge where the 1905 lynching had been carried out. But several men insisted that burning was the appropriate method of execution and built a pyre in front of the city hall. With a mesmerized crowd of ten thousand gaping at events, the lynchers tied their victim to a chain they tossed over the branch of a tree. They then lit a fire under his feet, repeatedly pulling him up and down to prolong his suffering. Shortly before Washington died, his tormentors cut off his fingers, toes, and genitals. Finally a man on horseback dragged the corpse through the streets of Waco, followed by a throng of young boys. Some of the body parts were sold to onlookers, others ended up on display in Robinson, the scene of Washington’s crime.

Although the risk of mob violence had been evident for days before the trial, the Waco police department took no precautions to prevent the lynching. On the contrary, Sheriff Fleming, who faced reelection in the fall, ordered his men not to resist the mob and himself watched the spectacle alongside the mayor of Waco. The sheriff also allowed a local photographer to take pictures from a window of the city hall; the photo- graphs subsequently became coveted souvenir items. But the appalling image of Jesse Washington’s charred body chained to a tree, one of the most infamous visual documents of American history, also ensured that the “Waco Horror” received nationwide attention and condemnation. The lynching, commented the New York Times, brought “disgrace and humiliation” on the entire country, for in no other civilized nation “could a man be burned to death in the streets of a considerable city amid the savage exultation of its inhabitants.” The naacp sent Elizabeth Freeman, a white suffragist, to investigate the Waco affair and later published a special edition of its monthly magazine Crisis, featuring a photograph of Jesse Washington’s disfigured corpse on the cover. To make sure that white Americans took note, the organization sent copies to hundreds of newspapers and to every member of Congress.

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Facing strong criticism from around the country, the white leaders of Waco mounted the usual defense. The lynch mob had been much smaller than the estimated ten thousand, they claimed, even though the pictures left little doubt about the enormous size of the gathering. The photographs also would have made possible the identification of the mob leaders, but no one was ever prosecuted for participation in the public murder. In as much as Waco leaders talked about the ghastly incident at all, they agreed that the lynching had been the deed of madmen coming from “the lowest order of society.” Of course this was a blatant distortion of the facts. Not only had the crowd included men and women from all walks of life, but, as Freeman found, the mob leaders were solid work- ing-class and middle-class men who had every reason to believe they were acting with the full approval of Waco’s white citizenry. In this respect the “Waco Horror” of 1916 was not different from many other lynchings in the New South. As countless photographs document, neither active per- petrators nor onlookers made any effort to conceal their identity because they had no reason to fear criminal prosecution. Even when lynchers had their pictures taken with dangling and disfigured bodies, the coroners

Jesse Washington’s charred corpse after the infamous 1916 lynching in Waco, Texas

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would later declare that the victims had suffered “death at the hands of parties unknown.”

Not all lynchings were the work of mass mobs carrying out sadis- tic rituals. There were also smaller mobs, ranging from a handful of participants to perhaps two or three dozen, that acted furtively, killing their victims in remote places at night without further ado. Like mass mobs that staged spectacle lynchings, small mobs claimed to avenge crimes for which the law allegedly offered no adequate punishment. Unlike mass mobs, however, small mobs often sought secrecy because they could not be sure of widespread support from the larger commu- nity. Typically this was the case when the lynchers sought personal revenge for offenses that had not triggered much public outrage. For instance, in 1912 members of a white family in Columbus, Georgia, lynched a young black man who had accidentally shot one of their own and was later convicted of manslaughter. Apparently the local white community had been satisfied with this outcome, but no one questioned the family’s desire for harsher retribution. Lynchings by private mobs may have accounted for roughly one-third of all lynchings. They were especially common in cases when whites or blacks executed members of their own race outside the law. As demonstrations of white supremacy and communal justice, however, they were of minor importance com- pared to the spectacle lynchings by mass mobs.

Most of the participants in lynching parties were members of the white rural and urban working classes—small farmers, sharecroppers, construction workers, or saloonkeepers. Nevertheless mass mobs usu- ally included people of all social backgrounds and certainly were not confined to the proverbial “riffraff.” On the contrary, the legitimacy of popular justice depended on the involvement of “respectable citizens.” Southern newspapers often rejected lynching in the abstract but cited the presence of the “best citizens” of the community—without providing specific names—in order to justify a particular lynching. Local luminar- ies supposedly ensured order and embodied the consent of the people. In combination with the rape myth, the participation of Southern elites helped make Northern opinion receptive to the apology for extralegal ex- ecutions. In 1901 the Harvard University scientist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler published the essay “American Quality,” in which he condemned mob rule but insisted that most lynchings were carried out by “decent

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men of American, law-abiding type.” Such lynchings, Shaler suggested, were the equivalent of legal executions, not “a sign of real lawlessness, nor of a people given to savage outbursts of fury.”

Approval from elected officials lent added respectability to mobs. Southern demagogues such as James Vardaman, Tom Watson, and Coleman Blease were notorious for their defense of lynching as legiti- mate popular justice. Sometimes public officeholders even participated in lynchings. In 1911, for example, Joshua W. Ashley, a member of the South Carolina state legislature, led a mob in Anderson County that hunted down Willis Jackson, a black man accused of attacking a white child. The lynchers hanged Jackson by his feet and then riddled him with bullets. Governor Blease not only refused to prosecute the mob leaders but declared that, rather than sending the militia to protect the alleged child rapist, he would have resigned his office and come to An- derson County and led the mob himself. For public officials to take a determined stand against lynching carried the risk of alienating voters. In 1926 a Florida judge who had presided over a lynching investigation lost his bid for reelection.

As a rule the execution of popular justice was the domain of men. But if black-on-white rape was the alleged offense, women could become key players in lynchings. To begin with, women provided their men with moral support. As one of the vigilantes who set out to hunt down Jesse Washington phrased it: “When we left home tonight our wives, daugh- ters and sisters kissed us good bye and told us to do our duty, and we’re trying to do it as citizens.” Yet, far from being limited to the role of pas- sive objects of male chivalry, women participated in manifold ways. In most cases women had to report the initial crime of rape. Although false accusations were sometimes made, especially to cover up a consensual af- fair, for a Southern white woman to admit publicly that she had been sexually abused by a black man was no easy step. Even though no one was likely to question the veracity of her charges, rape, also known as “the fate worse than death,” always left a stain of shame on the victim. Moreover every white woman who accused a black man of sexual assault knew that he was doomed.

If the identity of the rapist was in doubt, identification by the victim became a centerpiece of the mock trials that often preceded the execu- tion. The defenders of lynch law insisted that the crime of rape did not

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belong in regular courts because no white woman should have to suffer the ordeal of having to confront her attacker face-to-face. Neverthe- less positive identification by the rape victim lent a legitimacy to mob executions that few dared to question. In 1885 a Georgia mob brought a suspect before a young wife and mother, repeatedly admonishing her that the man’s life depended on her word. After she had confi- dently recognized him as the culprit, the leaders suggested she choose the mode of execution. Although some men called for a burning, the woman wanted the man hanged, and got her will. Of course, most lynchers considered identification a mere formality and were perfectly satisfied if the outraged woman declared that the man they dragged before her could have been the rapist.

Some white women who joined lynch mobs inflicted physical violence on the victims voluntarily and eagerly. They cheered on others, brought ropes or fuel, ignited torches, or pumped bullets into bodies, dead or alive. The desire to take an active part in lynchings was by no means limited to women who had been raped or otherwise suffered personal injury. In 1916 an Oklahoma sheriff who prevented the lynching of two black men accused of murder testified “that there were women in the crowd and that they were no less eager for the blood of the negroes than the men.” Women too scavenged for body parts and wanted their pictures taken with the victim’s body. In mass mobs it was not uncommon to see moth- ers with their children. At the burning of the alleged black rapist Lloyd Clay in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1919, eyewitnesses observed a woman and several children pouring gasoline over the man.

Black critics of Southern lynch law condemned the participation of white women in mob violence as the epitome of depravity and hypocrisy, belying the adulation of white women as torchbearers of Christian civi- lization. Then again, most Southern white women believed in the myths and privileges of white supremacy, especially in their right to protection from sexual assault. In contrast to the antebellum era, when the wor- ship of white Southern womanhood had been confined to ladies of social standing, the white supremacist ideology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also incorporated poor white women into the “rul- ing race.” Furthermore, inflicting violence on a perceived enemy of the community could be an empowering experience for women no less than for men. In a perverse and sordid manner, the assertive roles that women

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played in lynch mobs may have mirrored the efforts of Southern women to carve out a larger degree of power and independence for themselves.

The most prominent and articulate white Southern woman defender of lynch law was Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) of Georgia. An advocate of women’s suffrage and temperance and a reform-minded supporter of the Populist movement, Felton, like her fellow Georgian Tom Watson, initially denounced lynching and backed political rights for blacks. She switched sides after many Populist candidates, including her husband, lost to the white supremacy campaign waged by Southern Democrats in 1894. Three years later Felton’s speech on the “Needs of Farmers’ Wives and Daughters,” in which she blamed white men for failing to protect their female family members from black rapists, gained national notoriety. For the most part her speech was a harsh critique of the corruption of male-dominated Southern politics. By courting the black voter on election day and befuddling him with liquor, she ex- plained, white politicians “make him think he is a man and a brother,” thus encouraging sexual assaults on white women.

Felton called for moral and educational reforms that would benefit poor rural girls and women. Yet, as long as political and moral corrup- tion exposed hapless females to shame and fear, extralegal justice must continue: “If it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravenous human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand times a week, if necessary.” White supremacist opinion leaders in the South cel- ebrated Felton as a “true southern woman” while conveniently ignoring the feminist aspects of her speech. At the same time Northern criticism prompted Felton to close ranks with Southern white men and radicalize her statements. When a Georgia mob lynched Sam Hose in April 1899, Felton commented that a mad dog being shot was “more worthy of sym- pathy.” The same year, lynching in Georgia reached its peak. Of course not all white women of the South approved of lynching, and only a small minority participated in mobs. But it was extremely diffcult for white women to speak out against racial violence. Those who did so inevitably faced reproach for betraying their race and depriving helpless and inno- cent girls of male protection.

The specter of the black rapist did not offer a plausible excuse for the lynching of black women. Mob executions of black females enjoyed much less popular support than those of men, and they occurred much

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less frequently. Still, they were not rare exceptions. Estimates vary from at least 75 to 130 African-American women who fell victim to lynch law between the 1880s and the 1920s. The use of brutal violence to discipline black women had been commonplace under slavery, regardless of the sentimental images white slaveholders held of their black “mammies.” When black women, like men, claimed freedom and independence from white control in the decades after the Civil War, they appeared increas- ingly defiant and aggressive in the eyes of Southern whites. Thus when black women were accused of especially shocking offenses, white lynch- ers insisted that they deserved the same rough justice as black men.

Most African-American women were lynched for the crime of mur- der, and many of them were killed in summary executions along with male family members. Typically such multiple killings resulted from confrontations with police officers. In 1911 Laura Nelson and her son were hanged from a bridge in Okemah, Oklahoma, because she had shot and killed a deputy sheriff who had intruded into her home. In 1918 a mob, acting as a posse, shot down the entire Cabiness family in Walker County, Texas, including the mother and one daughter. Accord- ing to an affidavit sworn by a surviving daughter, the Cabiness family was unarmed when the posse began firing. Press reports, however, de- picted them as a dangerous gang of criminals staging a deadly shoot-out with the forces of the law. In 1926 a mob seized eighteen-year-old Bertha Lowman, along with her brother Demon and her cousin Clarence Low- man, from a jail in Aiken, South Carolina, and shot them “like rats,” as one newspaper report put it. Earlier the Lowman family had killed a sheriff in self-defense.

When a black woman was lynched, the white press usually assumed her guilt and defamed her character, similar to its reporting on black male lynch victims. Even anti-lynching activists sometimes hesitated to protest mob violence against women who were known for their “bad character” and had a reputation for lewdness. When Marie Scott, a seventeen-year-old black woman living in Wagoner, Oklahoma, was charged with stabbing to death a young white man named Lemuel Pearce in March 1914, newspapers immediately concluded that she was guilty of murder. Supposedly Scott had attacked Pearce for no appar- ent reason. Hours after she had been arrested, a mob of about a hun- dred men overpowered the jailer in the middle of the night and hung

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Scott—who desperately fought for her life—from a telephone pole. When the naacp inquired into the circumstances, a local attorney in- dicated that Scott had been a resident of the “red light district.” But he refused to give the “revolting and shocking” details of Pearce’s death to the naacp’s white secretary May Childs Nerney because he would not discuss them with a lady. naacp leaders concluded that Marie Scott was a prostitute and therefore that her lynching would not arouse pub- lic sympathy. Several weeks later, however, the naacp obtained a let- ter from a black informant telling a different story. Two white men, including Lemuel Pearce, were roaming the neighborhood, the letter reported, and spotted Marie Scott alone in her room. They broke into the family’s home and raped her. Scott’s brother came to her rescue and killed Pearce with a knife. The young man then ran away and was smuggled by black sleeping-car porters to Mexico. His sister remained as the obvious murder suspect and suffered the wrath of the mob.

The lynching of four young African Americans between the ages of fifteen and twenty, two men and two women, in Shubuta, Mississippi, in December 1918 also prompted very different accounts of what had happened. Indisputably the four youngsters had killed their employer, a retired dentist and farmer named Dr. E. L. Johnston. One white Mis- sissippi newspaper related that the four had ambushed and murdered Johnston because he had discharged them from his farm. In contrast, an investigator for the naacp claimed that Johnston had sexually abused the two sisters, Alma and Maggie Howze. When Maggie Howze and Ma- jor Clark, who was working on Johnston’s farm along with his brother Andrew, disclosed their desire to marry, Johnston told the young man to leave “his woman” alone. A scuffle ensued, and Major Clark accidentally shot his employer, according to the naacp report. Although the dentist, a notorious drunkard, was not popular in the white community, a mob seized the four young blacks from jail and hanged them from a bridge across the Chickasawhay River. Reportedly the two women were visibly pregnant at the time of their deaths.

Mary Turner, the victim of one of the most brutal lynchings involv- ing a black woman, was also pregnant when she and her husband be- came caught up in what the naacp aptly called a “lynching orgy,” which occurred in Brooks and Lowndes counties, Georgia, in May 1918. The murder of Hampton Smith, a white farmer, sparked hysteria among the

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white population of the area. Within a week mobs and posses killed up to eleven African Americans believed to have been involved in the slay- ing. Among the victims was Hayes Turner, a black farm laborer who had worked for Smith. When his wife Mary announced that she would press for the prosecution of her husband’s murderers, she herself became the target of the mob. Walter White, the naacp field secretary who per- sonally investigated the events, reported that the eight-months-pregnant woman was hanged with her head downward, doused with gasoline and set on fire. While she was still alive, one of the lynchers grabbed a knife and cut the unborn infant from her womb. Another man then crushed the baby’s head with the heels of his boots. Finally the mob unloaded their guns into the dead woman’s body.

The lynching frenzy in Georgia provoked condemnation throughout the United States. As American soldiers were fighting German “Huns” to make the world safe for democracy, observers emphasized, lynching did enormous harm to the war effort. President Woodrow Wilson, who held profound sympathies for white Southern views on race, admonished his countrymen that “every mob contributes to German lies about the United States.” Southern apologists responded that German spies had caused the trouble in the first place by fomenting insurrection among the black population of southwestern Georgia. But even in the hysterical climate of World War I, few people outside the Deep South took such ridiculous excuses seriously.

In the early twentieth century many Americans came to see lynch- ing as a peculiar Southern problem. They viewed the region as painfully backward and isolated, and populated largely by semi-literate “red- necks” whose favorite pastimes were to guzzle moonshine liquor, engage in brawls, and abuse black people. In 1917 Baltimore’s acerbic journalist H. L. Mencken spurned the South as “almost as sterile, artistically, intel- lectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert.” Lynching, Mencken thought, was a “popular sport . . . because the backward culture of the region de- nied the populace more seemly recreations” such as brass bands, sym- phony orchestras, or athletic contests.

Critics of the South tended to ignore that lynchings also occurred in other parts of the country. Northern mobs, too, killed African Americans, and they targeted them for the same reasons as Southern whites. One in- cident of particular callousness occurred in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in

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August 1912, after a black man named Zachariah Walker had killed a white police officer in a saloon scuffle. While a posse was pursuing Walker, the fugitive tried to shoot himself but merely injured his jaw. The police brought him to a hospital where, the following night, a mob seized him. Although the black man desperately pleaded that he had shot the police- man in self-defense, his abductors burned him alive before a crowd of five thousand men, women, and children. In similar fashion a mass mob overpowered police headquarters in Duluth, Minnesota, in June 1920 to seize three young black men held for the alleged rape of an eighteen-year- old white woman. The lynchers then stripped their victims to their waists and hanged them from a lamppost in the city center. A newspaper from Valdosta, Georgia, the scene of the Mary Turner lynching two years ear- lier, gloatingly pointed out that the incident had taken place in a state that prided itself on “its great love for the poor friendless colored man and has criticized the Southern people for not living on terms of social equality with the blacks.”

In these episodes there were nevertheless significant differences be- tween North and South: the lynchings in Pennsylvania and Minnesota resulted in serious efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. In the Coatesville affair, officials launched a thorough investigation and were able to obtain indictments against eight men, including the police chief and his deputy, for neglecting their duty to uphold the law. Eventually a local jury acquitted all defendants. Incensed by this mockery of justice, the governor of Pennsylvania threatened to revoke the town charter of Coatesville, though he never followed through with his announcement. Prosecution in the Duluth case was more successful. The governor of Minnesota immediately dispatched the National Guard to the city, and the commanding general began a preliminary investigation. A photogra- pher who had displayed images of the lynching was charged with exhib- iting “indiscreet and obscene pictures.” Ultimately more than a dozen of the lynchers were indicted. In September 1920 a jury convicted two men for rioting and sentenced them to up to five years in prison. A juvenile defendant served time in the state reformatory. The authorities also pros- ecuted thirteen black men for their alleged involvement in the gang rape of the young white woman. But lawyers hired by the naacp obtained re- leases or acquittals for all but one of the defendants, who was sentenced to thirty years in prison but paroled in 1925. In fact there was consider-

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“indescribable barbarism” 113

able doubt that a rape had occurred at all. A medical examination was inconclusive, and suspicion surfaced that the young woman and her boy- friend may have made up the rape story to conceal a sexual liaison.

In both these cases the outcomes of the criminal prosecutions were dis- appointing. Yet they compared favorably to situations in most Southern states where lynchers had virtually nothing to fear from the authorities. When in 1918 naacp representatives called upon Mississippi governor Theodore Bilbo to take action against the lynchers of the four black youngsters in Shubuta, Bilbo responded they should “go to hell.” Because African Americans could not expect protection from law enforcement or political leadership in the South, they had to wage their own struggle against lynching. But what could people who personally encountered ra- cial violence do to fight lynching?

Despite black poverty and powerlessness, racist terror did not cow all African Americans into silence and submission. Resistance encompassed a broad spectrum of behavior ranging from gestures of defiance to armed self-defense. One conspicuous way blacks demonstrated their opposi- tion was to refuse responsibility for burying the victims. Following the Shubuta murders, local blacks reportedly declared that “the white folks lynched them and they can cut them down.” To express their protest, African Americans also boycotted the businesses of lynchers or refused to work for them. Sometimes mob violence triggered a black exodus. In the aftermath of a triple lynching in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892, the city’s black population fell by two thousand. Following the Georgia lynching spree of 1918, observers warned that the South was driving its black labor force northward. If fear or protest caused blacks to leave, lynching was perhaps one of the “push factors” in the Great Migration north that be- gan during World War I.

Blacks also found other ways to resist mob violence. These included hiding a fugitive from a mob or perhaps setting fire to the property of lynchers. Such forms of resistance were extremely dangerous because they invited instant retaliation if discovered. Clearly the most confrontational way to stand up to lynching was armed self-defense. African American leaders unanimously insisted that blacks had not only a right but a duty to fight back when attacked by a mob. “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home,” Ida B. Wells famously proclaimed, “and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

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114 popular justice

Many blacks who faced a mob put up a last-ditch fight. Perhaps the most legendary of these stands occurred in New Orleans in July 1900 af- ter Robert Charles, a black worker in his mid-thirties, had wounded a police officer in self-defense and then fled the scene. When the police, accompanied by a swelling mob of several thousand whites, found his hiding place, he barricaded himself behind a window and took aim at his pursuers with his rapid-firing rifle. In a gun battle lasting several hours, the injured fugitive supposedly killed seven whites and wounded twenty more before he was smoked out and felled by volleys from policemen and vigilantes. Enraged by the death toll Charles had exacted among his opponents, white mobs staged a major riot that claimed the lives of more than a dozen African-American residents of the Crescent City.

The incident demonstrated that armed self-defense carried a high risk of provoking massive retaliation against the larger black community. The black press nonetheless celebrated African Americans who fought back as heroes. “May his ashes rest in peace for protecting his manhood,” the Chicago Defender eulogized Tom Brooks of Sommerville, Tennessee, who in May 1915 killed two white lynchers before he was hanged.

In contrast to individual acts of valor, collective armed self-defense had a greater chance of success. In 1911 rumors in Stanford, Kentucky, indicated that whites planned to seize two African Americans from the local jail. This prompted leaders of the black community to organize an armed sentinel to guard the prisoners. When the would-be lynchers spotted the patrol, they dispersed. Twelve years earlier a similar event in Darien, Georgia, had led to what local whites perceived as a “Negro insurrection.” When a black man accused of raping a white woman was arrested, a large group of armed black men rushed to the jail for his pro- tection. Evidently deterred by the presence of the sentry, no mob showed up. But the picket remained watchful and refused to allow the sheriff to remove the prisoner, fearing he would surrender him to a lynching party. Whites became so frightened by the apparent black takeover of the town that they called in the militia. The black guards agreed to hand over the prisoner to the militia but resisted the arrest of their leaders, wounding two white men. A major confrontation was barely avoided. Eventually the alleged rapist was acquitted while twenty-three of the so-called “in- surrectionists” went to prison for “rioting.”

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Berg, Manfred. Popular Justice : A History of Lynching in America, Ivan R. Dee, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=662329. Created from insu-ebooks on 2019-04-01 08:13:21.

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“indescribable barbarism” 115

Although they often were outgunned, outmanned, and risked harsh retribution, African Americans, no less than whites, cherished the eth- ics of self-defense, honor, and vengeance. After the Shubata lynching, the Baltimore Daily Herald, a black newspaper, defended Major Clark for killing Dr. Johnston because the latter had abused two young black women. Noting correctly that African-American women lacked legal protection from white aggressors, the paper criticized the youngster only for ambushing Johnston—as the white press had reported—rather than confronting him “in an open and manly fashion” and then fighting him to the death. Such conduct would have made Clark “a martyr to the cause of Negro womanhood.”

Reared in a culture of violence, many blacks were not opposed to lynching in principle. Primarily they resented its racist thrust. Even Ida B. Wells admitted that she had condoned mob violence in reaction to rape before she became an anti-lynching campaigner. If Judge Lynch acted in an ostensibly color-blind fashion, blacks found reasons to ap- plaud his work. In 1919 a mass meeting of the black community in Lex- ington, Georgia, endorsed the action of whites who had lynched “Obe” Cox, an infamous black criminal, for assaulting and murdering a white woman. Allegedly Cox had earlier raped a black woman too.

Between the 1880s and the late 1920s roughly 150 African Americans fell victim to lynch mobs that were either racially integrated or all-black. In many ways black-on-black lynching mirrored the general trends of mob violence in the age of Jim Crow. It peaked in the 1890s and gradually declined afterward, and it was most prevalent in the states of the Deep South. Moreover nearly three-fourths of all blacks executed by mobs of their own race were accused of murder and rape. Often the crime had been of a particularly heinous nature. In 1885 a group of black vigilantes dispatched a man from Jones County, Mississippi, for murdering a black woman and her two children to whom the killer was a half-brother. He had also allegedly raped his half-sister before slaying her. Although less frequently than white mobs, black lynchers occasionally displayed ex- treme cruelty, burning their victims or throwing them into boiling water.

While the rationale of white supremacists that lynching was neces- sary because the law treated black-on-white crime too softly was patently absurd, black Southerners indeed had reason to complain about law

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Berg, Manfred. Popular Justice : A History of Lynching in America, Ivan R. Dee, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=662329. Created from insu-ebooks on 2019-04-01 08:13:21.

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116 popular justice

enforcement. The authorities not only refused to protect them against white mob violence but also cared little about black-on-black crime. Ac- cording to a late-nineteenth-century remark attributed to a Southern po- lice chief, there were three types of homicides: “If a nigger kills a white man, that’s murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that’s justifiable ho- micide. If a nigger kills a nigger, that’s one less nigger.” Punishment of- ten depended on white interests. When labor was scarce, planters were inclined to intervene on behalf of workers charged with a crime against another black person in order to keep them out of prison. Because many white men regarded black women as fair game, the white-dominated criminal justice system paid little attention to black-on-black rape. More- over if black men lynched other black men for raping black women, such acts merely confirmed for whites their view that the menace of the “black brute” had become intolerable even to his own people.

Although racial hatred obviously played no role in black-on-black lynchings, participants in black mobs shared with white supremacists some of the key beliefs in popular justice. Most important, lynchers maintained they were agents of communal self-defense necessitated by a weak system of official criminal justice. Southern racism in the age of Jim Crow radicalized these ideas by creating the specter of the black rapist. But in principle, popular justice had never been limited to the purpose of racial terror. Its adherents continued to mete out extralegal punishment to other groups as well.

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6

The Decline and Fall of Apartheid

In the course of the late 1970s and the 1980s the rigid Verwoerdian model developed during the heyday of apartheid began to break down. The National Party government experimented with a number of reforms designed to adjust apartheid to changing economic and social circum- stances, while still retaining a monopoly of political power. But the spiral of resistance and repression intensified. By the mid-1980s virtual civil war existed in many parts of the country, with the army occupying black townships and surrogate vigilante groups adding to the conflict. The state retained control with military power, detentions and increased repres- sion; but the vast majority of South Africa’s population was alienated from the state to an unprecedented degree. Meanwhile, international condemnation grew and economic sanctions began to bite. The impasse was broken only when the exiled ANC and PAC were unbanned in 1990 and the new State President, F.W. de Klerk, made a qualified commitment to meaningful change. Negotiations between the state and the newly unbanned movements, although accompanied by violent conflict and widespread suspicion of state intentions, finally led to the creation of a new democratic constitution, and the election of an ANC-led government in 1994. The collapse of apartheid and the avoidance of a prolonged racial bloodbath was one of the major success stories of the late twentieth century, although economic and social problems remained overwhelming in magnitude.

The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, Fifth Edition. Nigel Worden. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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132 ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID

‘Total strategy’

In the late 1970s a number of factors led to a change in the policy of the South African state (Moss 1980). First, highly capitalized manufacturing industry now dominated the economy, using complex technology and requiring semi-skilled permanent workers rather than unskilled migrant laborers. In these circumstances, segregation and apartheid, so crucial to the earlier development and growth of industry, were no longer appropri- ate to the needs of South African capitalism (Lipton 1988; Feinstein 2005: 188–93).

Economic change also affected the class base of support for the National Party. Afrikaner business interests were now fully integrated into the monopolistic structure of South African industry, while full-scale mecha- nization of white agriculture produced ‘check book farmers’ linked to busi- ness interests rather than struggling producers competing for a limited labor force with urban employers. The cross-class Afrikaner nationalist alliance of the 1940s and 1950s was fracturing: many English-speaking middle-class voters now supported the National Party, while Afrikaner workers and small-scale traders and farmers were marginalized. After Vorster’s resignation in 1978, following major government financial scan- dals, the new Prime Minister, P.W. Botha, introduced changes favoring business interests and widened the divisions in the traditional support base of the National Party. The split came with the formation of the right-wing Conservative Party under Andries Treurnicht in 1982, which drew many white working-class and blue-collar supporters away from the government (Gilioinee 2003: 606–7). In these circumstances, Botha was obliged to forge a new kind of strategy.

Thirdly, the labor and urban resistance of 1973–7 had caught the gov- ernment unprepared. It became apparent after Soweto that repression was not enough. Attempts were made to recapture the initiative through reform, particularly by encouraging the development of a black middle class and attempting to win over township residents from African nationalist or radical sympathies.

A final factor explaining the reforms was the unfavorable international response and the threat of sanctions in the aftermath of Soweto, as well as the change of governments in states bordering South Africa, from allied interests to potentially hostile opponents: Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe, with a similar threat in Namibia as conflict grew between South African forces and guerrilla troops of the South-West African People’s

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID 133

organization (SWAPo). In these circumstances the South African state needed to reassess its public image and its policy strategies.

The outcome was a series of developments between 1979 and 1984 which collectively formulated the policy known as ‘total strategy’. Some hint of reform had been given earlier. Prosecution for pass law offences had dropped in number after 1973 at the request of business organizations, including the Afrikaanse handelsinstituut, although the principle of African labor regulation remained intact (hindson 1987: 81). Funding for African education had also increased, although insufficiently to prevent student dissatisfaction in 1976. But ‘total strategy’ went much further. Its rationale was that South Africa was the target of a ‘total onslaught’ by revo- lutionaries from inside and outside the country, who could only be com- bated with a ‘total strategy’ that ‘combin[ed] effective security measures with reformist policies aimed at removing the grievances that revolutionar- ies could exploit’ (Swilling and Phillips 1989: 136). It also aimed to restruc- ture society in ways required by industry, thus combining the economic interests of business, the political interests of the Botha administration, and the security interests of the military and security forces: ‘an attempt to reconstitute the means of domination in terms favorable to the ruling groups’ (Swilling 1988: 5).

Formal links between the National Party and big business were estab- lished at the 1979 Carlton Conference in Johannesburg, where Botha pledged his government to support free enterprise and orderly reform. The discourse of free market enterprise was increasingly used by the state in place of overt racial domination, partly as a means of combating the per- ceived Marxist ‘onslaught’ but more importantly as a means of establishing ideological hegemony with business support (Greenberg 1987). It marked a major shift from the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the early Afrikaner nation- alist movement, and bore little relation to the intense intervention of the state in the political economy of South Africa.

Two government commission reports in 1979 proposed changes to favor stable business development. The Wiehahn report recommended that African rights to trade union membership and registration be recognized. This was done to try to prevent repetition of the wildcat strikes of the 1970s and to formalize, and so control, the labor movement. The riekert Commission advocated that white job reservation should be dismantled while influx control was still rigorously applied. In this way it maintained the division between permanent city residents and temporary outsiders. Employer demands for greater access to a permanent workforce were thus

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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134 ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID

met, although the principle of controlled African urbanization remained. The pass laws were not abolished until 1986, by which stage a combination of employer needs, the spiraling costs of the immense bureaucratic admin- istration and the belief that repeal would appease international criticism of apartheid persuaded the government finally to remove urban influx controls (Maylam 1990: 80).

The need for semi-skilled black labor was also reflected in the de Lange report on education, published in 1981 (Chisholm 1984). This called for compulsory primary education for all as well as black technical training at secondary and tertiary level. Although the recommendation of a single education authority for all races was rejected by the government, multira- cial private schools were permitted. In this, as in other aspects of ‘total strategy’ policy, the aim was to ‘intensify class differentials while reducing racial ones’ (hyslop 1988: 190). This policy was further seen in the removal of many ‘petty apartheid’ restrictions. Public amenities in large cities, such as hotels, restaurants and theatres, were no longer compulsorily segregated and many opened their doors to all – that is, all who could afford them.

Lack of political representation remained an obstacle to black accept- ance of such reform strategies. A second phase of ‘total strategy’ therefore proposed constitutional changes in an attempt to co-opt sections of the population previously excluded from government. The 1983 ‘tricameral’ constitution created separate parliamentary assemblies for white, colored and Indian Members of Parliament. Each house controlled its ‘own affairs’, such as education, health and community administration, but all other matters were still monopolized by the white house of Assembly, which retained the overall majority of seats, and the new office of State President, held by Botha, acquired wide-ranging powers.

The tricameral constitution was clearly a means of ‘sharing power without losing control’ (Murray 1987: 112). Consequently, it was boycotted by the vast majority of colored and Indian voters. Measures which the lesser houses did promote, such as the abolition of the Immorality and Mixed Marriages Acts, were already acceptable to the ‘total strategy’ policy and indicated the clear move away from the racial control of the 1950s. As with the desegregation of public amenities, they did little to challenge the exist- ing political and social order.

The tricameral constitution made no provision for African participa- tion. The principle remained that constitutional representation for Africans was confined to the homelands. however, recognition of the permanent status of some black township residents had been given in 1977 when

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID 135

Vorster introduced Community Councils to administer township affairs under the aegis of white government officials. In 1982, Botha extended this system by the Black Local Authorities Act, which gave Community Councils greater powers of administration. Elected by local residents, councilors were responsible for township administration on budgets raised by local rents and levies. Coinciding with tricameralism, this scheme hoped to create a class of willing collaborators ‘in a rather crude effort to defuse black claims to national political power through the substitution of power at grassroots level’ (Murray 1987: 123). As with the tricameral elections, town- ship Community Councils had little popular appeal.

Attempts to bolster allegiance to these policies were accompanied by a conscious effort to upgrade townships for those with permanent residence rights. The Urban Foundation, founded with business capital but sup- ported by the state, backed programs to improve housing and other facili- ties. In both townships and the rural areas the army was often deployed in community schemes in a campaign to ‘win the hearts and minds of the people’ (the WhAM policy), although this had a limited effect once the security forces began to suppress opposition (see p. 141).

The role of the army was a further important component of ‘total strat- egy’. Botha, previously the Minister of Defence, gave an important role to the armed forces within policy making as part of security against the ‘total onslaught’. The State Security Council (SSC), established in 1972 as an advisory body to the Cabinet, now gained greater powers under the new Minister of Defence, General Magnus Malan, including that of control over intelligence and security work. By 1980 it was observed that ‘in many ways [the SSC] is already an alternative Cabinet’ (Murray 1987: 40).

In addition to the WhAM campaign to stem the ‘total onslaught’ within the country, Botha attempted to defuse opposition from potentially hostile countries in the wider southern African region. his hope of creating a ‘constellation of states’ linked to South Africa by trade was foiled by the organization of the frontline states against South African influence, but the security forces then mounted a campaign of deliberate destabilization. Direct military incursions accompanied indirect support of dissident armed movements such as rENAMo in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola, while raids were made on centers which the South African state claimed housed ANC guerrillas in Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Botswana. In Namibia, South African occupation continued and a bitter guerrilla war was fought with the nationalist SWAPo (Davies and o’Meara 1984). In 1984 the results of this policy met some success with the signing

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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136 ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID

of the Nkomati non-aggression accord with Mozambique, by which the Maputo government agreed to expel ANC guerrilla camps from its territory in return for the ending of South African support for rENAMo.

‘Total strategy’ was thus as much a reformulation of apartheid as a reform. Its purpose was to maintain white political hegemony while restructuring some aspects of the social and political order to counter the threat of revolutionary opposition. This was abundantly clear to many of the state’s opponents, who resisted ‘total strategy’ with renewed energy.

Resistance and repression

‘Total strategy’ was intended to defuse protest outbreaks of the kind that had occurred in the 1970s, and to bring economic and political stability to South Africa. It had precisely the opposite effect.

The economy failed to recover the growth rates it had shown in the 1960s and early 1970s. Despite a brief recuperation between 1978 and 1980, subsequent years saw a fall in the gold price, a balance of payments crisis, and dependence on loans from the International Monetary Fund and foreign bankers. Inflation and unemployment soared in 1982, and again in 1984. The standard of living of all South Africans fell: black poverty became even more acute than ever.

These circumstances did not favor a state campaign to ‘win hearts and minds’. The recession was accompanied by heightened opposition to ‘total strategy’ policies. Many of the Botha reforms produced consequences unin- tended by the state (Friedman 1986). For instance, the relaxation of pass controls led to an unprecedented move of Africans into the cities. This was particularly evident in Cape Town, where the ending of legislated prefer- ence for colored workers gave greater possibilities for African employment. Large squatter camps grew up on the outskirts of the city, particularly at Crossroads. At first, they were ruthlessly destroyed as the dwellings of ‘illegal’ incomers by the ironically named Department of Cooperation and Development. But by 1984 the government conceded the rights of squatters to stay in the region and plans were laid for the building of a large new township at Khayelitsha. The attempt to distinguish between permanent residents and temporary outsiders was collapsing here as in many other cities.

Another unintended development was the emergence of powerful trade unions. The proper recognition of African union negotiating mechanisms led to a massive growth in membership, particularly among migrant

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID 137

workers hitherto excluded from union representation. Falling real wages and poor working conditions produced a number of strikes in the early 1980s. But action went further than local factory issues. In 1982, spurred by the death in detention of Neil Aggett, the Transvaal organizer of the Food and Canning Workers’ Union, many unions came together to organ- ize campaigns which represented broader political interests and protested against state policies. Thus in November 1984 a major stayaway was organized on the rand backed by union and community groups. Large- scale union affiliations were being formed with political allegiances. The largest was the Congress of South African Trade Unions (CoSATU), launched in 1985 and following a broadly Charterist position. The Azanian Confederation of Trade Unions (AZACTU) took a position more in tune with Black Consciousness lines, and in 1986 the United Workers’ Union of South Africa (UWUSA) was established under the aegis of the more con- servative Inkatha movement. The point was that unions were now at the forefront of the political struggle. Although there were debates within the unions over the advisability of involvement in wider populist politics, and fears that worker issues might thus be submerged, coordinated action between the federated unions and student and community organizations took place with increasing frequency from the mid-1980s. Far from taming the labor movement, the Wiehahn reforms had politicized it (Webster 1988).

The context for this was heightened popular resistance and mobilization on a scale which exceeded even that of the 1950s and 1976–7, and which took new forms and goals. In 1980 colored school students in the western Cape boycotted classes to protest against the use of army servicemen as teachers, and to demand free education for everyone and not for whites alone. Links were made with striking meat workers in Cape Town. Boycott action spread to the rand and the eastern Cape, where it meshed with demands for the ending of homeland citizenship. Although the boycotts were broken by police action by the end of the year, these episodes provided a link between the uprising of 1976–7 and the more widespread resistance of the mid-1980s.

The catalyst to this was the tricameral constitution and the Black Local Authorities Act. Both measures made it absolutely clear that the Botha government was attempting to restructure apartheid rather than to dis- mantle it, and that the African majority would continue to be permanently excluded from central government. White control would be entrenched, but the state hoped that the new system would be more acceptable both

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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locally and internationally. New oppositional organizations emerged to demonstrate the fallacy of this belief.

Early in 1983, the National Forum (NF) was established, bringing together supporters of Black Consciousness in the Azanian People’s organization (AZAPo) and the non-collaborationist tradition of the western Cape Unity Movement. Its ‘Manifesto of the Azanian People’ opposed all alliances with ruling-class parties, demanded the immediate establishment of ‘a democratic, anti-racist worker republic in Azania’, and defined the struggle for national liberation as ‘directed against the system of racial capitalism which holds the people of Azania in bondage for the benefit of the small minority of white capitalists and their allies, the white workers and the reactionary sections of the black middle class’ (Davies et al. 1988: 454).

Such a policy was a rejection of the broader populist Charterist tradi- tion, which was represented in the foundation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the same year. The UDF called for rejection of the apart- heid state, boycott of the tricameral system and acceptance of the Freedom Charter principles (see p. 115). The campaign had dramatic results: only a small percentage of colored and Indian voters cast their poll, and many others refused even to register. The tricameral system was thus denied legitimacy from the start.

Both the NF and the UDF were loosely knit confederations of commu- nity, youth and trade union organizations that had proliferated across the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s, rather than political parties. Their differences lay in their ideologies, with the NF regarding worker interests as paramount and criticizing the UDF for its ‘petty bourgeois’ leadership and its populist multi-class character. The Black Consciousness strand in NF thinking was apparent in the reluctance of some of its supporters to admit white-dominated organizations such as the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). however, those from the Unity tradition rejected any policy that recognized race. Indeed, the involvement of AZAPo members in the NF showed how the Black Consciousness movement had moved decisively towards workerist positions since the days of Biko.

The UDF acquired by far the largest number of affiliates and the highest public profile, and was only really challenged by the NF in the western Cape. The UDF drew on a wide range of local community organizations across the country, and particularly in the Transvaal and the eastern Cape. Swilling (1988) has argued that its Charterist position did not preclude working-class membership, and indeed leadership. Certainly, as protest

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID 139

developed in the course of 1984–6, the organizations affiliated to the UDF gave it an increasingly radical character, although it still lacked a clear political program and was ‘only involved in issues if the relevant affiliates sought its assistance’ (Seekings 2000: 291).

The UDF also worked more actively to recruit support to its affiliated organizations at a local level. Its campaign to obtain a million signatures for a petition against apartheid in the aftermath of the tricameral elections in 1984 failed to attain its numerical goal, partly because of police harass- ment and confiscation of signed papers, but ‘it did, for the first time, provide township activists with a vehicle for some solid door-to-door organizing’ (Swilling 1988: 101).

By 1985 this was bearing fruit in a series of local campaigns, including bus and rent boycotts, school protests and worker stayaways. Although local circumstances varied, a common focus of township resistance was the Community Councils and those councilors who accepted office and were branded as collaborators in the apartheid system. Economic pressures also undermined the position of the councils. Not only were they politically unacceptable, but their dependence on local funding and their role as col- lectors of rents and unpopular service charges made them vulnerable to protests against increases at a time of recession. Tensions were heightened by accusations of corruption and malpractice. Such issues mobilized town- ship residents of all ages and meshed with student protests and boycotts.

It was primarily resistance to increases in rent and service charges that led to a major rebellion in the townships of the Vaal triangle between September and November 1984 (Seekings 1988). Protest spread to other parts of the Transvaal, with attacks on councilors and their homes as well as government buildings, homes of police and beer halls. A number of councilors resigned under such threats to their lives, but the uprising con- tinued with student and worker protests at the fore. By 1985 township conflict had spread to the orange Free State, the eastern Cape and, finally, to Cape Town and Natal.

State repression only fuelled further opposition. on Sharpeville Day, 1985, police opened fire on a funeral procession in Uitenhage in the eastern Cape, killing twenty people in an episode that bore strong resemblance to the events twenty-five years earlier. This provoked renewed school boycotts throughout the country and clashes between township youth and police. By July the situation had reached such proportions that the government declared a State of Emergency in many regions, extending the power of arbitrary detention without trial and indemnifying the security forces

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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140 ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID

against any charge of malpractice. With a brief break in 1986, emergency regulations were extended throughout the country and remained in place until 1990.

The conflicts of 1984–6 marked a new phase in South African popular resistance. In many townships throughout the country civil government collapsed, to be replaced by alternative, unofficial organizations calling for ‘people’s power’. In many cases, as in 1976–7, the initiative was taken by youth organizations, although they drew support from a wider sector of the community than was the case previously. More effective links were made between students and workers, particularly in the Vaal triangle and in the eastern Cape. Street committees organized coordinated actions such as rent boycotts and consumer boycotts of white businesses to persuade their owners to support calls for desegregation and lessening of state oppression. Moreover, this happened in hitherto unpoliticized small towns and rural areas in platteland South Africa as much as in the large metro- politan townships. In many cases, such actions by young men were only reluctantly supported by their elders, who resented the overturning of generational authority. Certainly, the events of the mid-1980s marked an emergence into the political arena of a male youth assertiveness that had previously been expressed through gangs (Glaser 1998).

In most of these cases, local grievances led to action; during the Vaal uprising the UDF was ‘trailing behind the masses’ (Seekings 1992). It none- theless played an important part in creating an alternative national political culture that transcended local issues and gave a sense of common purpose. In this its Charterist line was crucial. In many townships the ideals of the Freedom Charter provided the focus for action and political organization. A case study of Youth Congress activists in the Alexandra township near Johannesburg shows that in practice this might not always have penetrated very deeply, although debates over populist and workerist issues and clashes with AZAPo supporters were part of the linking of local issues of rent and school boycotts with a wider national framework (Carter 1991).

A further important development was the massive increase in support for the exiled ANC, not only in its earlier regions of strength such as the eastern Cape and the Transvaal, but also in the western Cape where histori- cally its position had been weaker (Bundy 1987b). Songs of praise to Mandela and Tambo, study of ANC underground literature, ANC flags draped across coffins at the many funerals of activists killed by the security forces, and shouts of ‘Viva’ (the Lusophone rally cry used at ANC camps in Angola and Mozambique) gave visible signs of ANC resurgence within

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID 141

the townships. In this the UDF played a crucial role, replacing the predomi- nantly Black Consciousness ideology of the mid-1970s and strengthening the charterist tradition (Seekings 2000: 292). Guerrilla infiltration by Umkhonto we Sizwe members also increased, with attacks on power sta- tions and even the military headquarters of the Defence Force in Pretoria. By 1985–6 a number of delegations of South African business, student, church and trade union leaders were visiting the ANC headquarters in Lusaka (Lodge 1988). The ANC was widely recognized as the South African government-in-exile.

By late 1985, the spiral of popular resistance and state repression had reached new heights. Violence in townships was directed not only against councilors but also against suspected informers by a younger generation than previous leaders (Bonnir 2000). In some areas youth operated ‘peo- ple’s courts’ to punish breakers of the consumer boycott, and in some widely publicized cases death sentences were carried out on state collabora- tors by necklacing, that is, placing burning tires around their necks. There was a widespread but mistaken belief that the state was about to collapse. hence the slogan among boycotting students of ‘liberation before educa- tion’ (Bundy 1987b). only at the end of 1985 did the National Education Crisis Committee, formed by parent, teacher and youth bodies, change this call to one of demand for alternative ‘People’s Education’ (hyslop 1988).

Despite such challenges to the state, it was clear by 1986 that revolution was not just around the corner. Local authorities could be overthrown, but central government was more powerful. The state hit back hard. The army was deployed in the townships alongside the police from october 1984, thousands of activists were detained, and organizations such as the UDF and AZAPo were banned. running street battles took place throughout 1985–6 in many townships, but stones and burning barricades were ultimately no match for heavily armed security forces. With the aid of Emergency powers, the army and police had crushed the rebellion by 1987.

In the process a high degree of militarization had taken place. Massive amounts of the state budget went on defense, most of it deployed internally. Conscripted whites fought a civil war in the townships, white schools were infused with security force propaganda and military training, and the State Security Council played an ever-increasing role in the formation of govern- ment policy (Evans and Phillips 1988). After 1986 the National Security Management System, headed by the Minister of Defence, General Magnus Malan, set up a web of local administrative bodies under military and police command to act as ‘security controls’ (Morris and Padayachee 1988).

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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142 ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID

This did not go unopposed amongst white South Africans. The use of the military in civil action led to heightened objection by some conscripted national servicemen. The End Conscription Campaign (ECC), founded in 1983, gained wider support after the deployment of troops in townships, and although its impact was largely limited to a few liberal English speakers, it was sufficiently threatening to the state to be subject to harassment and final banning in 1988 (Nathan 1989).

The state not only intervened directly, it also encouraged reactionary vigilante action against township activists. Vigilantes emerged in 1985 to protect township councilors, police and traders, but widened their activities to include attacks on a number of anti-apartheid organization members, in both townships and the Bantustans. This was portrayed in the media as ‘black on black’ violence, but it is clear that vigilante groups received support from the police, for whom they were a convenient means of coun- tering protest. The attacks came from within communities, removing the stigma of aggression from the security forces but giving them a rationale for staying in the townships (haysom 1989).

A particularly dramatic example of vigilante action was that of the ‘Witdoeke’ (named after the white headbands with which they identified themselves), who appeared in Cape Town squatter camps. In May and June of 1986 they destroyed shacks at Crossroads and other camps, while police stood by and allegedly intervened to protect them from retaliatory action by residents. Although originating under the patronage of local councilors and self-appointed landlords, many vigilantes by the end of 1986 were formally incorporated into the security forces as ‘community guards’ and ‘kitskonstabel’ police auxiliaries (‘instant constables’).

Community conflicts sometimes reflected deeper tensions. In August 1985 violence erupted in Inanda, near Durban, which was depicted by the media as based on ethnic conflict between Indian shop and property owners and African tenants and squatters, thus evoking memories of the 1949 Durban riots (see p. 114). Certainly, ethnic division was highlighted by Inanda’s circumstances. An area of freehold property ownership since the nineteenth century, many Indians had established farms and businesses in Inanda, and some were landlords with predominantly African tenants. Increased population led to severe overcrowding and poverty by the 1980s. Tensions rose when Inanda was scheduled for incorporation into KwaZulu, with claims that rents were being increased (hughes 1987). But the conflict was also based on political competition. Vigilantes took action

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID 143

against UDF-affiliated youth in Inanda, not in support of Indian property owners but as supporters of Inkatha.

Clashes between UDF groups and Inkatha grew in intensity from the mid-1980s. Inkatha was originally established in the 1920s as a Zulu ethnic movement to stem the greater radicalism of the ICU (see p. 91). revived by Buthelezi, the Chief Minister of the KwaZulu homeland in 1975, it had grown by 1980 to be the largest African political organization in the country – although with so many others banned that was hardly a major achievement, and its membership was confined primarily to rural areas of KwaZulu.

Buthelezi trod an uneasy line. he refused independence for KwaZulu, thus seriously setting back the Bantustan strategy, initially presented himself as the internal wing of the ANC (which had supported the re-founding of Inkatha in 1975), and demanding the release of ANC leaders before con- sidering negotiation with the government. however, Buthelezi and Inkatha, rejected by Black Consciousness supporters as collaborators, and losing initiative to the ANC in the aftermath of the Soweto uprising, had by the early 1980s retreated into its Natal base. It also moved away from ANC positions by rejecting protest politics and international sanctions. For this Buthelezi won much support from liberal whites. The opposition Progressive Federal Party, for example, approved of his plans for a federal state struc- ture in which KwaZulu would play a major role. he also increasingly found favour with the government. But in doing so, he forfeited the conciliatory role that he had hoped to obtain amongst Africans throughout the country, and instead presented himself primarily as the defender of Zulu identity (Southall 1981).

Inkatha emphasized ‘the maintenance of patriarchal and hierarchical values’, which it presented as traditional aspects of Zulu political culture (McCaul 1988: 158–9). But it expanded its support outside traditional rural areas in the course of the 1980s, in response to the threat that the UDF posed to its authority. KwaZulu administrators and teachers were almost universally members, and the Inkatha Youth Brigade worked actively in KwaZulu schools. The appeal of Zulu ethnicity was used to attract workers both in Durban and on the rand to unions federated to UWUSA, estab- lished in 1986 as a rival to the UDF-oriented CoSATU.

By this time Inkatha’s split with the ANC-Charterist tradition was com- plete, and mutual recriminations between UDF and Inkatha took place. Certainly, the presence of Inkatha explained the low support that the UDF

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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144 ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID

obtained in many parts of rural Natal, although in squatter settlements and townships around Durban and Pietermaritzburg support for the rival organizations was more divided. By mid-1985 political tensions ran high, meshing with community conflicts in Inanda as well as in the Durban townships of KwaMashu and Umlazi. This was fuelled by the assassination of Victoria Mxenge, a prominent lawyer sympathetic to the UDF, and the subsequent call for a boycott and stayaway by CoSATU and UDF-affiliated youth organizations. Inkatha opposed such actions, which it regarded as a UDF-inspired recruiting drive in the contested territory of Natal town- ships, and Inkatha vigilante groups moved in.

The conflict in Natal grew in intensity when elsewhere it was suppressed. In 1987–8 civil war existed in the area around Pietermaritzburg. Long- standing rivalry between Inkatha and ANC/UDF supporters was certainly the cause of this, with attacks and counter-attacks in which the violence of Inkatha was often ignored or even encouraged by the police, while UDF activists were detained (Kentridge 1990). But the war also took place in one of the most impoverished regions of the country, and competition for scarce resources added to the problem. Complex local power and clientage relationships played a role; as Gwala (1989) has shown, some private African freeholders in areas around Pietermaritzburg resisted Inkatha to assert their independence from KwaZulu government control over their lands. Generational conflicts and the weakening of the more traditional patriarchal ties in some parts of Natal played a part in the Inkatha/UDF divide (Campbell 1992). The UDF–ANC ‘comrades’ were most often asso- ciated with new kinds of community mobilization in the townships and villages (Sitas 1992).

one thing about the Natal war was clear. It was not the ethnic clash of ‘Zulu’ versus ‘Xhosa’ as claimed by the state and the international media in its depiction of ‘black on black violence’. And increasingly, allegations of state support for Inkatha gave rise to suspicion that the government was actively encouraging vigilante action.

1987–1994: stalemate and breakthrough

The resistance of the mid-1980s destroyed utterly the ‘total strategy’ tactics of the Botha government. Tricameralism and African urban councils had been firmly rejected by the demand for ‘People’s Power’. The campaign to win hearts and minds was in tatters, with thousands in detention without prospect of trial and an occupying army in the townships.

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID 145

It was not only the disenfranchised who rejected the government and its policies. By 1985 those business interests which had cautiously allied themselves with the reformist state in 1979 were now bitterly critical of it. A turning point came in August of that year, when expectations raised by Pik Botha, the Foreign Minister, of an imminent announcement of mean- ingful reform to meet internal demands and stave off foreign sanctions were quashed by an angry and unrepentant P.W. Botha. his ‘rubicon address’, delivered in the full glare of massive international publicity, firmly rejected any notion of majority rule or response to foreign pressure.

The response was immediate. Loans granted by foreign banks in 1982 were now called in, with no facility for renewal. As a result the rand col- lapsed, and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange was temporarily closed. These events ‘spurred South African business leaders on to the offensive’ (Mann 1988: 80). Within a month leading business directors were visiting the ANC in Lusaka. International condemnation of South Africa grew even stronger in intensity, with the United States and most Commonwealth and European Community nations speeding up disinvestment and economic sanctions. only Thatcher’s refusal to follow this trend gave continued open- ings for South African trade and communication links.

other key props of the South African political economy were also col- lapsing by 1987. Although the resistance of the mid-1980s centered on townships, rural opposition also played an important part in defeating government policies. For instance in 1985–6, youth protested in the Sekhukhuneland region of Lebowa, where traditions of opposition to chiefs appointed by the government went back to the revolt of 1958 (see p. 111). Partially inspired by UDF organizers and by migrants with urban experi- ences, ‘comrade’ youth attacked local Bantustan officials, boycotted schools and set up ‘people’s courts’, which replaced chiefly authority. But such actions were also accompanied by more traditionalist local beliefs. Numerous accusations of witchcraft were made against those who were believed to be responsible for local misfortunes, and with the collapse of central authority, many such victims were burnt to death by the ‘comrades’ (Delius 1996). In KwaNdebele mass opposition led to a rejection of inde- pendence in 1986 (Transvaal rural Action Committee 1988). Together with the long-standing refusal of KwaZulu to take independence, this effectively brought a halt to the Bantustan strategy.

With the collapse of ‘total strategy’, the government seemed bankrupted of ideas, relying on internal repression and international bravado. In May 1986 a high-ranking Commonwealth delegation (a concession granted to

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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146 ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID

Thatcher by Commonwealth leaders) arrived in South Africa to investigate the situation and talk to the government. But while the delegation was still in the country, its visit was undermined by South African raids on sup- posed ANC bases in harare, Lusaka and Gaborone. International condem- nation rose to still greater heights, and even Thatcher was appalled.

By 1987 a stalemate existed. Writing in the following year, one academic described the situation as one ‘in which the inability of dissidents to over- throw the hegemony of the state is countered by the incapability of the state to eliminate dissidence completely’ (Frankel 1988: 280). The state had lost the initiative, but no one else had the power to seize it. The tricameral election of 1987 returned the Nationalists to the white house of Assembly, but with a right-wing Conservative Party opposition. The disaffection of white workers and farmers, squeezed by the slumping economy and falling real wage levels, was becoming a serious factor in this right-wing resur- gence. reform was certainly no longer on Botha’s cards. With the banning of many organizations, virtually the only legal voice of opposition came from the churches, especially from the new Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu.

The breaking of this stalemate came from an unexpected source. In August 1989, Botha was forced to step down on the demand of members of his Cabinet, following his public rebuke of the Transvaal leader of the National Party, F.W. de Klerk, for planning a visit to the ANC in Lusaka. De Klerk replaced him and led the government into a tricameral election, where it lost seats to both the Conservatives on the right and the Democratic Party to its left.

resistance to government had taken a new direction in the course of 1989. In contrast to the confrontation of youth and other activists in the streets of the townships, the leaders of the UDF and CoSATU, allied in what was known as the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM), called for a campaign of mass civil disobedience to challenge segregated facilities such as hospitals, schools and beaches. Unlike the rather disparate defiance campaigns of the 1950s, the actions of 1989 were well coordinated. They were also successful in bringing about desegregation. Lodge and Nasson (1991: 110–11) suggest that this may have been because desegregation was already being planned by the government and such challenges were little threat to its authority. After de Klerk’s takeover, police attacks on defiance campaigners were markedly toned down. In September and october a number of peaceful marches were allowed to take place in the centre of the major cities, joined by many whites, in protest against the State of Emergency

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID 147

and the powers of the security forces. No action was taken against the demonstrators. They did not seem greatly to threaten the state, although by the end of the year the initiative clearly lay with the MDM.

But in his opening address to Parliament on 2 February 1990, de Klerk made a dramatic move. he announced the unbanning of the ANC, PAC and South African Communist Party, and in the following weeks released many political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela. In 1991 key pieces of apartheid legislation were repealed, such as the Group Areas Act, the Land Act and the Population registration Act. And later that year, the govern- ment entered into formal negotiations with a range of parties, including the ANC, at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CoDESA), committing itself to a new constitution to give democratic rights in a single unitary state.

What had brought about this complete volte-face by the National Party government? Popular protest and international condemnation were cer- tainly part of the broad background. So was the profound economic crisis. Private capital and investment were flowing out of the country, the state was borrowing heavily and foreign sanctions were beginning to bite severely (Feinstein 2005: 148–9). As the Governor of the South African reserve Bank warned in May 1989,

if adequate progress is not made in the field of political and constitutional reform, South Africa’s relationships with the rest of the world are unlikely to improve . . . In that event South Africa will probably remain a capital- exporting and debt-repaying country for years . . . In such circumstances, the average standard of living in South Africa will at best rise only slowly. (Terreblanche and Nattrass 1990: 18)

Botha’s ‘reforms’ had been unable to overcome the effects of economic isolation. Moreover, the structural inequalities of apartheid were too glaring to be ignored and were detrimental to the whole economy. As elsewhere in the late 1980s, technological changes were making unskilled labor redun- dant. Most blacks, and increasing numbers of whites, were unemployed and unemployable. New capital investment was lacking. Prices were rising and real wages, for those who were earning them, were falling sharply. The relative national prosperity that accompanied apartheid in the 1960s had vanished for ever. historians have debated when this decline set in: some argue that even in the 1960s economic growth levels could have been higher and were held back by apartheid policies which limited local consumer

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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148 ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID

markets (Iliffe 1999: 98–9). Certainly, the effects of such structural prob- lems were visible from the 1970s. It had taken almost two decades for the state to recognize that political reform was a necessary precondition to any attempt at economic recovery. Without this, the continuing spiral of ever- worsening poverty, disaffection and repression was inevitable.

In these circumstances, the new State President and his Cabinet made a political gamble in order to break through the stalemate and regain the initiative. Threats from the growing Conservative Party in an all-white electorate needed to be pre-empted. De Klerk was apparently told by his security advisors in the course of 1989 that the ANC had been sufficiently weakened by attacks on its frontline bases and on its internal underground structures to be a controllable force if unbanned (Giliomee 1992: 33–4). It appeared that an alliance between a ‘new-look’ National Party, drawing in white voters from the left and centre of Parliament, and the conservative Inkatha Freedom Party, with its predominantly Zulu membership, could win over a significant percentage of the population and give the Nationalists a share, if not a monopoly, of power in a democratic, and hence interna- tionally supported, government.

This belief was bolstered by trends outside South Africa. It is now clear that the critical factor in de Klerk’s timing was the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The collapse of Communist states throughout eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union following the Gorbachev ‘revolution’ and the general discrediting of socialism that seemed to accompany it indicated that the ANC and its SACP allies might be weakened in South Africa as well, and that ‘free market’ ideology could triumph. Moreover, the end of the Cold War removed the threat of the ‘Communist onslaught’ that for so long had played a major part in ‘total strategy’ thinking. The demotion of the military in de Klerk’s cabinet marked a move away from such policies.

In 1989 democratic elections had been held in Namibia, from which South Africa had finally agreed to withdraw after its military vulnerability was exposed in Angola by Cuban, Angolan and SWAPo forces in the pre- ceding year. Although SWAPo won a majority, its support was by no means unanimous and the more conservative opposition won a much higher proportion of seats than had been the case in the Zimbabwean independ- ence elections of 1979. radical African nationalism seemed on the wane. De Klerk evidently hoped that he could regain legitimacy and play an important role in a majority government that would be more conservative than had seemed likely at any earlier stage. And in shifting away from

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID 149

single-party rule to multi-party democracy, South Africa was part of a broader trend taking place in other parts of the continent (Etherington 1992).

Certainly, de Klerk’s actions did not represent a surrender on the part of National Party government. rather it was a bid to regain the initiative and de Klerk assumed that the National Party would continue to play a key role in government. Soon after Mandela’s release the ANC agreed to par- ticipate in negotiations with the state and to suspend the armed struggle. As a result, by March 1992 tangible benefits had been obtained for the government. Some economic sanctions were lifted, sports boycotts were removed with South Africa’s participation in the Barcelona olympic Games, and international political acceptance was achieved for the first time since the mid-1970s. The effect of this was demonstrated by a white referendum in which 69% of voters supported continuation of the reform process through negotiation. right-wing claims that de Klerk lacked white support were seen to be unfounded.

But there was little agreement about the form that a future political set- tlement should take. After the referendum victory de Klerk became more assertive, particularly when opinion polls suggested he was gaining colored, Indian and even some African support, whereas the ANC was having dif- ficulty transforming itself from a liberation movement into a political party. The National Party insisted on the protection of minority rights and the election of an interim government of national unity in which it would secure some power for at least a decade.

The ANC faced other difficulties. In 1990 Buthelezi had converted Inkatha to a political party, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), at which stage many anticipated an NP–IFP alliance, or possibly an electoral coalition. More significantly, violence between Inkatha supporters and the now legal- ized ANC and its allies increased in intensity in Natal, especially on the rand, and in other areas of the country. As in Natal during the late 1980s, this conflict was more nuanced than the ethnic battle depicted in the media. The increasing flow of migrants to the cities after the lifting of influx control created new social tensions and economic struggles in townships and in informal ‘squatter’ settlements which meshed with political rivalries (Sapire 1992). A particular cause of conflict on the rand was the tension between migrant hostel dwellers, many from Inkatha-dominated rural Natal, and local township residents. This tension was heightened by unem- ployment and fuelled by ethnic mobilization (Segal 1992). Accusations made by the ANC that a ‘third force’ was at work became credible when it

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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150 ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID

was revealed in 1991 that the government had provided Inkatha with financial backing and military training.

revelations of this kind increased suspicion and mistrust between the government and the ANC. By 1992 the ANC leadership was under growing criticism from its grassroots membership for talking to the enemy while killings continued in the townships. In June, ANC members attending a funeral in the Transvaal township of Boipatong were attacked by Inkatha members supported by the police. The ANC withdrew from negotiations in protest and demanded a full investigation into the causes of violence and a firm check on the activities of the police and security forces. In an attempt to deflect international and local criticism, de Klerk appointed a commis- sion led by Justice Goldstone to investigate the causes of violence. Its investigations and press revelations deeply implicated the state security forces. Such violence by the army and police against ANC supporters was a continuation of the deliberate government policy of elimination and destabilization of its opponents through Botha’s National Security Man- agement System (Ellis 1998).

Tensions increased in subsequent months as the ANC threatened mass action campaigns. A march of ANC supporters to the Ciskei homeland capital of Bisho led to shootings by Ciskei forces and revealed the complex- ity of conflict in rural as well as urban areas. But the problems facing the country were not only political. Caught up in the general world depression of the early 1990s and lacking the necessary boost of capital investment for which de Klerk had hoped, the economy continued to slump. Under these conditions the optimism created in 1990 quickly evaporated. Yet it was clear that the clock could not be turned back to the apartheid era. Neither the government nor the oppositional movements could gain from a long-term stalemate.

In these circumstances, ANC and government leaders maintained a degree of contact and in September 1992 they agreed in a record of Understanding to resume negotiations. In 1993 a new forum was established at Kempton Park. Both parties had recognized their strengths and limita- tions in the aftermath of CoDESA’s breakdown, and the National Party was quietly abandoning its insistence on minority electoral protection.

But such bilateral agreements alienated Buthelezi, who was further offended by the government’s abandonment of a close alliance after its covert military and financial support of Inkatha had been exposed. Buthelezi refused to attend Kempton Park and the IFP held out against a unitary constitutional system, demanding instead federal and ethnic particularism

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID 151

in KwaZulu-Natal under a revamped Zulu monarchy. In this Inkatha found allies in the rulers of Bophuthatswana and Ciskei as well as in the right- wing Conservative Party. Together they formed the Concerned South Africans Group (CoSAG) and opposed ANC and NP agreements in the negotiations.

opposition also came from the PAC and AZAPo, who accused the ANC of being a bourgeois organization that was selling out the interests of the black working class. The PAC was implicated in attacks on whites in both rural and urban areas, made by the guerrilla Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA).

Soon after the convening of the Kempton Park negotiations, this fragile balance was seriously disrupted by the assassination of the popular SACP and Umkhonto we Sizwe leader, Chris hani, by a right-wing gunman. Angered by this, and frustrated by the lack of any meaningful change since 1990, youth protested throughout the country, bringing the specter of violent opposition into the centre of several cities. Many of them ignored Mandela’s appeal for calm and appeared to be either abandoning the ANC for the PAC, or demanding a more radical policy from ANC leaders. Extreme right-wing violence and the frustrations of an alienated black youth had reached a critical level. Time was rapidly running out, both for the government to achieve a settlement in which it could retain some control, and for the ANC to retain its grassroots support.

This new sense of urgency acted as a catalyst at Kempton Park. An elec- tion date was finally set for April 1994 and the National Party, alarmed at polls which showed a significant decrease in its support, conceded the appointment of a Transitional Executive Council to supervise the interven- ing period alongside the government, and also the election of a transitional government for five years without any minority or federal safeguards. As a result, Inkatha walked out of the negotiations and the Conservative Party and other right-wing movements also boycotted Kempton Park. Some right-wing extremists led by the Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging (AWB) (Afrikaner resistance Movement), which had been formed in 1973 under the fanatic Eugene Terreblanche, now threatened civil war if majority rule was implemented, although their actual power remained to be tested.

The other main players at Kempton Park nonetheless proceeded to draw up an interim constitution. For five years South Africa was to be ruled by a democratically elected Government of National Unity, consisting of all parties who won enough votes under a proportional representation system for a place in the 400-seat National Assembly. This represented a major

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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152 ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID

compromise by the ANC which expected to win an outright majority in polls, but which recognized the dangers of continued civil conflict, ‘an attempt to hold it all together and avoid a Bosnia’ as SACP leader Jeremy Cronin put it (Marais 2001: 87). Those parties obtaining over 5 % of the national vote were entitled to representation in the Cabinet, which was to be led by an executive President elected by the majority of members. Any party obtaining more than 80 seats was entitled to a Deputy President. Such a system seemed likely to secure a Deputy Presidency for de Klerk under Mandela’s Presidency, thus reconciling the interests of both key players. The right of veto in the Cabinet or National Assembly by minority parties was denied, but a permanent constitution was to be drawn up by the new gov- ernment supported by at least 66 % of its members. In a bid to assuage whites alarmed by talk of nationalization of land and industry, property rights were guaranteed. A Bill of rights guaranteed fundamental freedoms such as racial, gender and sexual orientation equality. Nine new provinces replaced the former system of provinces and homelands, each with its own legislature, although their powers were vague and their funding dependent on central government. This fell far short of a federal system, although it was to give opposition parties such as the IFP and the DA bases of regional power in Kwa-Zulu Natal and the Western Cape respectively in the subse- quent decades.

Some modification to this constitution was made in early 1994 in an attempt to draw in both the white right wing and Inkatha. Promise of a double ballot (one for central and one for provincial government) and the formation of an Afrikaner volksraad (although with no powers) led to a right-wing split and to a leading army general, Constand Viljoen, register- ing a political party, the Freedom Front (FF), to contest the election. Although the Conservative Party continued its boycott of the election, it was evident by this stage that many right-wing whites, by no means all of whom were Afrikaner nationalists, pragmatically realized that participation in the election offered their best hope, and that the AWB’s threats of a race war were unrealistic and counter-productive (hyslop 1996).

It was less easy to woo Buthelezi back into the fold. Violence in Natal continued unabated, and Inkatha refused to permit voter education or electioneering in KwaZulu. A State of Emergency was declared in Natal and the specter of continued civil war loomed large in the weeks before the election. Desperate mediation, both government and international, failed to persuade Buthelezi to participate until just one week before polling day. only then did he realize that the election was going to take place without

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID 153

him. Moreover, it appears that attempts by the state and the ANC to weaken the link between him and the Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, threatened his ability to stand out as the representative of a united Zulu separatism.

Inkatha’s final participation was also encouraged by the collapse of the other homeland members of CoSAG. South African citizenship had been restored to all homeland residents in order to enable them to vote in the election, and most homeland leaders had backed this. The way was led by the Transkei premier Bantu holomisa, who openly sided with the ANC. Lucas Mangope of Bophuthatswana and oupa Gqozo of the Ciskei still held out against reunification and the loss of their privileged positions. But the reality of the forthcoming loss of financial support from a democratic government in Pretoria led to civil servant and army strikes in both areas. In Bophuthatswana, Mangope was overthrown only a month before the election. A threatened AWB ‘invasion’ to support him failed ignominiously,

Map 6 South African provinces created in 1994

NORTHERN CAPE

NORTH-WEST

LIMPOPO

FREE STATE

EASTERN CAPE

WESTERN CAPE

MPUMALANGA GAUTENG

N

KWAZULU- NATAL

0 200 400 km

Indian Ocean

Atlantic Ocean

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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154 ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID

breaking the mystique of a right-wing military threat. Thus by polling day most of the key players had been incorporated into the election process.

The election campaign focused primarily on the personalities of the party leaders, particularly Mandela and de Klerk, both of whom were more popular than their respective parties. Both the ANC and the NP consciously sought to present a new image to the electorate. The ANC played down its role as a liberation movement and emphasized its careful plans for recon- struction and development in order to counteract accusations that its leaders were inexperienced in government. Although still broadly following the principles of the Freedom Charter, it also played down socialism and entertained free market ideas. The NP stressed de Klerk’s role as South Africa’s savior and the extent to which it had turned its back on apartheid. other parties made little impact in the campaign. The PAC was under- funded, disorganized and overshadowed by the ANC, whereas the DP found its role as a liberal opposition party increasingly irrelevant and its ideals taken over by the more prominent NP.

on polling days the violence predicted by the world media failed to materialize and was replaced by images of patient queues and euphoric voters as almost 20 million South Africans participated. Indeed, the elec- tion was a cathartic breaking point with South Africa’s past and worthy of Mandela’s description of it as a ‘small miracle’ by late twentieth-century standards. But the logistical difficulties of the election were formidable, particularly those caused by the last-minute participation of Inkatha. results were delayed and accusations of electoral malpractice abounded, especially in KwaZulu-Natal. The final results reflected a compromise between contesting parties over disputed cases.

But the results were recognized by all parties, not least because they reflected an ideal situation for a consensus government. The ANC won 62.6 % of the national vote, large enough to give it a convincing majority but just short of the 66 % required for it unilaterally to write a new constitu- tion. The NP scored 20.4 %, ensuring de Klerk his position as one of the Deputy Presidents alongside the ANC’s Thabo Mbeki, and the IFP obtained 10.5 %, giving Buthelezi a seat in the Cabinet as Minister of home Affairs. other parties fared less well. The Freedom Front obtained 2.2 %, enough for it to win nine seats in the National Assembly but failing to over- come the split within the white right wing, whereas the DP and PAC each obtained less than 2 % of the national vote. The only other party to obtain enough votes for seats in Parliament was a hastily formed fundamentalist Christian party.

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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ThE DECLINE AND FALL oF APArThEID 155

At regional level the ANC swept the board in six of the nine provinces and narrowly obtained control in the Northern Cape. But it lost KwaZulu- Natal to Inkatha and the Western Cape to the NP. The Natal result was highly contentious, but grudgingly accepted to prevent threats of continued violence. The Western Cape was the only province where Africans formed a minority: most voters supported the NP, including a large number of coloreds who were alarmed by the specter raised by the NP in the election campaign of ANC affirmative action for Africans in jobs and housing and to whom the ANC’s campaign strategies held little appeal (Eldridge and Seekings 1996). Indeed, it appears that most South Africans did vote on racial grounds, with the large majority of whites, coloreds and Indians backing the NP, DP or FF, and Africans supporting the ANC, IFP or PAC. While the balance of power between the parties at national level achieved the purpose of wide representation in government, this division of voter allegiance also reflected the deep divisions of South African society which were to continue to haunt the newly democratic nation.

Suggestions for further reading

Cobbett, W. and Cohen, r. 1988: Popular struggles in South Africa. London: James Currey.

Davenport, T.r.h. 1998: The transfer of power in South Africa. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Cape Town: David Philip.

Frankel, P., Pines, N. and Swilling, M. 1988: State, resistance and change in South Africa. Johannesburg: Southern Books.

Lodge, T. and Nasson, B. 1991: All, here, and now: black politics in South Africa in the 1980s. New York: Ford Foundation; Cape Town: David Philip.

Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa : Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=822664. Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-10-27 21:32:22.

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A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Apartheid, literally meaning apartness, and pronounced apart‐hate, was the name for the policy and practice of white supremacy through which the National Party ruled South Africa from 1948 until 1994.1 The origins of the policy  –  and its implementation  –  have been highly contested, and the consequences for South Africa since 1994 even more so, but always in separate conversations, racially and ethnically distinct, reflecting the profound impact of institutionalized racism on South Africa past and present.

When Hendrik Verwoerd made his first speech to the South African Senate in 1948, he linked apartheid in theory and practice to the previous policies of segre- gation that had been enforced nationally since the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910:

there is nothing new in what we are propagating, nor have we made any claim that there is anything new in it. The claim we have made is that we are propagating the traditional policy of Afrikanerdom, the traditional policy of South Africa and of all those who have made South Africa their home … whether it is called segregation or by the clear Afrikaans word apartheid.2

The laws underpinning segregation that he would have had in mind would have included the South Africa Act of 1909, which racially restricted elected members of Parliament (House and Senate) to “British subject[s] of European descent”; the Mines and Works Act of 1911 which restricted all skilled jobs in the

Apartheid Forgotten and Remembered

NaNcy L. cLark aNd WiLLiam H. Worger

Chapter twenty-three

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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432 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

mining industry to whites; the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, which limited ownership of 93 percent of the land area of South Africa to whites (who made up 22 percent of the population); the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, which required that Africans live in segregated sections of all urban areas and not be allowed to purchase freehold property therein; the Native Administration Act of 1927, which established administrative (rather than civil) law as primary in all areas inhabited by Africans and made it a criminal offense punishable by heavy fine or a year in prison for anyone (though no whites were ever prosecuted) who “utters any words or does any other act or thing whatever with intent to promote any feeling of hostility between Natives and Europeans”; the Immorality Act of 1927 which made sex between whites and Africans a criminal offense (again, only Africans were ever prosecuted); and the Representation of Natives Act of 1936, which placed the few Africans entitled to vote on the basis of their property holdings on a separate roll from that of all other voters.

Despite the fact that all of these laws were still in force when we first visited South Africa in the mid‐1970s, the government claimed that apartheid was over, a thing of the past, and that the essential divide in the country was between “first‐ world” and “third‐world” societies. What then explained the elaboration of the segregation laws into rigidly enforced separate amenities by race, the different entrances to post offices, the separate busses, the separate trains, or, in the case of Cape Town, the separate carriages depending on which suburb you were traveling to? And, above all, what explained the geographic separation of landownership, with African possession of any land outside certain strictly circumscribed rural areas legally prohibited, and the lack of voting rights for any person of color? Apartheid had indeed, in Verwoerd’s own words, constructed “something new” on the foundation of segregation.

Many of the individuals in power in the mid‐1970s – people like John Vorster, prime minister from 1966 to 1978 and state president from 1978 to 1979, born Balthazar Johannes in 1915 but who preferred to go by the English version of his name, and P. W. Botha, born Pieter Willem in 1916, Vorster’s minister for defense from 1966 to 1978, and then successively prime minister from 1978 to 1984 and state president from 1984 to 1989 – had been instrumental in developing the leg- islation that underpinned apartheid. Such legislation included the 1949 self‐ explanatory Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act; the 1950 Population Registration Act, which established mechanisms for classifying all residents of South Africa as either “Whites,” “Coloureds,” or “Natives” and allocating or removing legal rights (to the vote, most importantly) on the basis of those classifications; the 1950 Immorality Act, which made it illegal for people from different races to have sex with one another (not just whites and Africans as under the Immorality Act); the 1950 Group Areas Act, which retroactively defined spaces within South Africa as belonging to one or other classified group and in practice excluded Africans, or Natives in the then contemporary usage, of owning and being entitled to legal permanent residence in any urban area; and the 1950 Suppression of Communism

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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apartheid forgotten and remembered 433

Act, which banned the South African Communist Party, made being a communist subject to criminal prosecution, and defined, among a variety of ways, being a communist as including any person who engaged in an act

which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social or economic change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder, by unlawful acts or omissions or by the threat of such acts or omissions or by means which include the promotion of disturbance or disorder, or such acts or omissions or threat

– which could, but did not necessarily, include “the encouragement of feelings of hostility between the European and non‐European races of the Union.”3

The practical measure used to enforce these and many other laws introduced in the 1950s and operative throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s was the enforcement of the pass laws, regularized nationally in 1952 by the Native Laws Amendment Act and the Orwellian‐titled Abolition of Passes and Co‐ordination of Documents Act. Under these two acts, and various subsequent revisions, every day in every part of South Africa, which we like everyone else witnessed, tens of thou- sands of black South Africans were stopped by the police and asked to show their passes, documents which listed their racial classification as well as their employment history, and identified whether they had permission, based on their employment status, for being where they were. Those without the documents, or without proof of current employment, were arrested, sometimes whipped, often imprisoned, and exiled back to where they were “supposed” to live until their labor was needed by the migrant system that underpinned South Africa’s rural and urban economies, with their endless need for a constant supply of cheap and compliant workers – ulti- mately a pipe dream and the most fundamental contradiction for state efforts to create permanent white supremacy. What we want to do in this chapter is to discuss how, since 1994, apartheid has been written about in South Africa, how it has been remembered, and how it has been forgotten, who has done the remembering, and who has done the forgetting. Because of the continuing relevance of the historiog- raphy of apartheid to around the early 1990s, we shall start with a survey of that work, focus first on the forgetting, and then on the remembering, and talk about the ways in which the separateness of apartheid, inherited from and perpetuating colonialism, continues to divide South Africa and South Africans.

Removing the black voice

The most detailed and powerful analyses of apartheid and its introduction and impact were written by those most affected by the new laws, just as had been the case under the preceding policies of racial segregation enforced nationally since the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Most of this speech took place in the public and political sphere, since South Africa’s universities were racially segregated in the 1950s, just as they had been since their inception, and academic

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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434 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

analyses were almost without exception white‐authored (the exceptions mainly related to linguistic analyses of African languages). There was a vibrant periodical and newspaper culture in the 1950s through which black authors could express their views about a wide range of topics, from sport to music to detailed analyses of the harshest impact of apartheid laws breaking up families and forcing people, including especially children, to work under onerous conditions. Drum magazine was particularly prominent, employing a range of talented authors such as Henry Nxumalo, Todd Matshikiza, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, and Es’kia Mphahlele, and the photographer Peter Magubane. There were also news- papers targeted at black audiences like the World and the Guardian (later renamed the New Age). But the most powerful speech came in the form of the political statements, sometimes made from the dock, by leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) such as Nelson Mandela (especially his presidential speech for the Transvaal Branch in 1953), Oliver Tambo, and Albert Luthuli, as well as by the leader of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) Robert Sobukwe and by Moses Kotane of the South African Communist Party, banned since 1950. The PAC‐ organized Sharpeville demonstration of March 21, 1960, which was violently repressed by the police, and the subsequent banning by the government of the ANC and the PAC, together with censorship restrictions placed on individuals, organizations, and print media, largely removed black voices from public dis- course about politics in South Africa. All the individuals mentioned above were, by the mid‐1960s, either in prison, in exile, or dead and their speeches and writ- ings were banned in South Africa. Banned meant they could not be read or quoted. The extension of such censorship over a wide spectrum of writing meant that even the works of insightful critics of white racism in South Africa prior to apartheid, like Sol Plaatje and A. T. Nzula,4 among others, could not be read by South Africans throughout almost the entire period of apartheid.5

The absence of these individuals from what was deemed by the state to be legitimate discourse within South Africa meant also the absence of a core argu- ment – the role of race, specifically white supremacy, in propelling and underpin- ning apartheid – in debates about politics and history during the apartheid era. The ANC Youth League in its 1944 manifesto noted that “The White race … had invested itself with authority and the right to regard South Africa as a White man’s country” (ANC 1944). Mandela linked the struggle against apartheid in South Africa with that against colonialism in the rest of the world when he argued in 1953 that “there is nothing inherently superior about the herrenvolk [master race] idea of the supremacy of the whites” in South Africa, it was the same as had been used to rule “in China, India, Indonesia, and Korea, American, British, Dutch and French Imperialism … [now] completely and perfectly exploded” (Mandela 1953). For Sobukwe the problem for South Africa in 1959, as it was for all still colonized societies, was “the ruling White minority,” but he expected that would be overcome, “by 1963, or even by 1973 or 1984,” in South Africa as in the rest of the African continent (Sobukwe 1959: 48).

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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apartheid forgotten and remembered 435

White conversations about black actions

Many white South Africans now, and then, claimed that they did not know of apartheid’s worst policies and practices, or that, even if they did know a bit in passing, they did not know of the worst excesses of the police state – the govern- ment death squads in particular, which assassinated opponents of apartheid from the early 1970s (and perhaps earlier) right up to the beginning of majority rule in April 1994. Claims of not knowing ring hollow, especially because of what people could witness on a daily basis in the streets, unless they chose not to look or to see, and because of what they could read even in a strictly censored press, where stories critical of the government were literally blacked out (as with a black per- manent marker pen), or left with empty newsprint by editors showing what offi- cial censors had required of them. But what of white scholars who were more intent than the average citizen on analyzing the historical trajectory of twentieth‐ century South Africa?

The academic scholarship written about apartheid within South African univer- sities reflected the views of white scholars, especially after the removal of the few blacks with appointments in South African universities. The 1959 Extension of University Education Act (referred to by Afrikaner scholars more accurately as the 1959 Separate Universities Act), prohibited “open universities,” such as the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town (universities that had admitted some black students) from admitting students labeled “non- white”; the latter would now be educated in separate universities set up on a racial basis for African, Colored, and Indian students but employing primarily Afrikaner faculty: at Ngoye in Zululand for Zulu speakers, at Durban for Indians, at Turfloop in Northern Transvaal for Sotho and Tswana speakers, at Belleville in the Cape for Coloreds, and at Fort Hare for Xhosa speakers.6 With the establishment of these separate institutions, the few black scholars who had found academic employ- ment, primarily teaching African languages and literature, were excluded. A. C. Jordan, who had taught African languages at the University of Cape Town since 1945, left South Africa on a one‐way exit visa in the early 1960s; Robert Sobukwe, who had lectured in African languages at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1954 onward, was imprisoned in 1960 and spent the rest of his life in deten- tion or under house arrest; Archie Mafeje, whose appointment to a post at the University of Cape Town in 1968 was rescinded under pressure from the govern- ment, spent almost his entire career in exile from South Africa.

The most prominent writer on South African historiography in the early years of apartheid, F. A. van Jaarsveld, noted in his 1964 collection of essays, The Afrikaner’s Interpretation of South African History, that “the advocates and apol- ogists of ‘apartheid’ on historical grounds” were sociologists and theologians (van Jaarsveld 1964: 151).7 He divided white historians between those who wrote in Afrikaans (and taught in Afrikaans‐language universities: Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Potchestroom, and the Free State) and those who wrote in English and taught in

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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436 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

English‐language universities (University of Cape Town, Rhodes, Witwatersrand, and the University of Natal, Durban and Pietermaritzburg campuses). Their his- torical writing in terms of choice of topic and interpretation reflected their politi- cal differences: the Afrikaners focused on the history of the Great Trek in the 1830s, when thousands of Afrikaans speakers, accompanied by their black serv- ants, sought to escape British colonialism by moving into the interior of South Africa, and the South African War of 1899–1902, when the British conquered the two internal states resulting from the trek, interpreting both events from the viewpoint of people who considered themselves persecuted on the basis of their nationality and who in the twentieth century had built a nationalist movement that culminated in political victory in the 1948 election and the establishment of the apartheid state.

The English speakers by contrast, in van Jaarsveld’s analysis, adopted a tone of blame and regret in their analyses of what had gone wrong in twentieth‐century South African politics. The blame lay on Afrikaners and what were seen as their nineteenth‐century frontier attitudes being extended into a twentieth‐century modernizing economy, to the detriment of the latter. The regret lay in the failure of British imperial authorities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to rein in and control Afrikaner nationalism. Van Jaarsveld’s English contempo- raries, he wrote, “confronted with the Afrikaner’s nationalism and racial policies … [sought] to explain who the Afrikaner is and what one may expect of him.” Their work was full of “disappointment at the present” and “visions of impending catastrophe” (van Jaarsveld 1964: 146). It still is.

Looking to the future of South African historical writing, van Jaarsveld wrote that the “main field of study will be ‘causes of the South African Revolution’”: “If the somber predictions of internal revolution and external pressure are realized,” “if the optimistic belief in the success of apartheid should become a happy reality then no doubt the praises will be sung of the Afrikaner’s far‐seeing vision and sacrifices” (van Jaarsveld 1964: 154).

Two iconic texts first published in 1969 reflected clearly the white dichotomy identified by van Jaarsveld: Five Hundred Years: A History of South Africa, edited by C. F. J. Muller, which recounted “the activities and experiences, over a period of nearly five hundred years, of the White man in South Africa” (Muller 1969: ix8) and the two‐volume Oxford History of South Africa whose “central theme of South African history is interaction between peoples of diverse origins, languages, technologies, and social systems, meeting on South African soil” (Wilson and Thompson 1969: v).9 Muller described South Africa as “a white power in a black continent,” “guided by white intellect and enterprise but for a long time … dependent on non‐white labour,” where “the main concern now is whether less than four million white South Africans [counting Afrikaans and English speakers together] can maintain their supremacy against the more than 300 million black inhabitants of Africa who are supported by many other nations” (Muller 1969: xi). B. J. Liebenberg (1969) ascribed the success of the allied Herenigde Nasionale

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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apartheid forgotten and remembered 437

Party (Reunited National Party) and the Afrikaner Party in 1948 to its taking place in a context in which “racial integration would inevitably cause the White minority to lose power,” where “the idea of apartheid or separate development … attracted the White electorate,” and was “a victory for Afrikaner nationalism” (Liebenberg 1969: 426). He considered the “social legislation” (Population Registration Act, Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, Group Areas Act, etc.) introduced in first decade of apartheid as an extension of previous attempts “to solve the colour question”:

Apartheid in public spaces was naturally not new because there had been separate buses, separate railway coaches, separate benches in public parks and separate bathing facilities and beaches for the different races long before 1948. The inno- vation was that what had previously been custom had now become a written law. (Liebenberg 1969: 428, 429)

More contentious, in Liebenberg’s view, were the laws to enforce “political apart- heid” by putting Colored voters on a separate roll from whites. Steps taken to eliminate any representation for African voters in South Africa  –  the few enfran- chised because of their property ownership had been allowed to vote for whites to represent them – and to lay the basis for self‐governing states in the small rural areas set aside for them (Transkei, Ciskei, etc.) were “a positive aspect” of “apartheid as a policy of separate development” (Liebenberg 1969: 430). Apartheid was, for Afrikaner politicians like J. G. Strijdom, “synonymous with ‘white domination,’” though Verwoerd, whom Liebenberg considered “more than anyone else … the architect and driving force behind the policy of apartheid,” was also “more than anyone else … responsible for transforming this policy of apartheid from a merely negative policy of domination and repression (baaskap) into a positive policy of separate development which aimed at ‘fairness to each and justice to all’” (Liebenberg 1969: 427, 428).10 Muller, like van Jaarsveld, foresaw two opposed futures for South Africa: either going “the same way as ancient Carthage” and disappearing “completely after seven hundred years of progress and prosperity,” or “develop[ing] into one of Africa’s chief spreaders of Western ideas, at a time when Western powers had declined in Africa and elsewhere” (Liebenberg 1969: 478).

Despite or perhaps because of their reference to “interaction” – a process and noun which seemed to have no actors or action – the contributors to the Oxford History, especially volume 2 which focused on the period 1870–1966 (Wilson and Thompson 1971), fitted van Jaarsveld’s description of English‐language scholarship. The author commissioned to write the chapter on the period includ- ing apartheid, an Afrikaner and not an academic (he was a newspaper editor), believed the political victory of Afrikaner nationalism in 1948 was due to its race policies, that is, white supremacy, and added that apartheid “had its positive side as well, and it was the achievement of Dr. Verwoerd … that he gave to the theory a philosophic basis and content,” most clearly reflected, it seems, in his vision of

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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438 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

“the ultimate emergence of some sort of commonwealth of states in South Africa” (de Villiers 1971: 402, 414).11

The one variant on van Jaarsveld’s account of English speakers’ interpretations was the essay by the sociologist Leo Kuper who argued that “the implementation of apartheid which dominated political action and race relations after 1948 was in the nature of a counter‐revolution by whites.” Still not a revolution by Africans as the actors, but rather “to the increasing mobilization of force against opposition … The counter‐revolution was directed to the control of social change, in the interests of white domination, by monopoly of the constitutional means of change” (Kuper 1971: 459). In other words, Kuper alluded in a somewhat opaque manner to growing African resistance to the strictures of both segregation and apartheid. Apartheid censorship, however, prevented all South Africans, white and black, from reading Kuper’s analysis of the actions of black critics of apartheid. Oxford University Press, ultimately supported by the editors of the Oxford History, though opposed by Kuper himself, removed his chapter from the South African edition on the basis that

Legal opinion on the chapter by Leo Kuper … was to the effect that it infringed South African law in many respects, mainly by references to books and articles deal- ing with African Nationalism, policy statements of the African National Congress, and statements by African leaders. (Wilson and Thompson 1971: v)

Under these accepted “rules” of apartheid, or acquiescence, Africans could not be written about for a South African readership, or write about themselves because, as the Oxford History editors noted about themselves and their contributors:

We live, or have lived, in a caste society, and we are all white. This last imbalance occurs because in South Africa today few Africans, or Asians, or Coloured people have the opportunity for unfettered research and writing; and those who have the training and opportunity are for the most part occupied with other commitments … Analysis … by African and Coloured historians, economists, and anthropologists … are long overdue. (Wilson and Thompson 1969: vi, xiii)

The historiography of apartheid began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, through the influence of interpretive approaches that stressed the role of economics in general and capitalism in particular in determining the way in which white supremacy developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In these analyses race was not absent, indeed practically all the texts focused primarily on black actors, but the emphasis was on showing how policies that had a core racial com- ponent – conquest, segregation, and apartheid – served the needs of big business in mining and farming, especially for cheap labor. Three key texts written in the 1970s marked out distinct approaches for the next two decades. Rick Johnstone’s Class, Race and Gold (1976), which analyzed the development of the gold indus- try in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in terms of its

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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apartheid forgotten and remembered 439

dependence on cheap black labor to produce enormous profits; Colin Bundy’s The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (1979), which examined the ways in which initiatives taken by African farmers in the late 1800s were defeated by white industrialists and farmers intent on turning them into migrant laborers; and Charles van Onselen’s two‐volume set of essays, Studies in the Social and Economic History of Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 (1982), which focused on the social history of urban areas. These works were the tip of the iceberg, with an enormous num- ber of studies being published in the 1980s, many of them elaborations of work which first saw print in a series of key collections coedited by Shula Marks: Economy  and Society in Pre‐industrial South Africa (Marks and Atmore 1980), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1870–1930 (Marks and Rathbone 1982), and The Politics of Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth‐Century South Africa (Marks and Trapido 1987).

Several relatively commonplace arguments (but new for South African histori- ography) constituted the core of the revisionist approach. First, mining, manu- facturing, and farming were capitalist enterprises whose owners sought to maximize their profits. Second, central to the maximization of profits in all sec- tors of the economy, but especially in mining and farming, was the need for cheap labor. Third, in workplace struggles race was used intentionally by employ- ers to divide workers and to create hierarchical systems of production in which whites were guaranteed privileged access to ownership and to supervisory and skilled positions. Fourth, in order to secure a constant supply of cheap labor over and above minimum needs so that in cases of worker strikes extra supplies would always be available, Great Britain engaged in a massive process of colonial con- quest in the late nineteenth century aimed at meeting the labor needs of the diamond and gold industries, in the course of which Africans were deprived of most of their land and subjected to onerous taxes in order to produce a constant supply of black migrant workers. Fifth, the combination of these economically based processes underpinned the development of segregation in twentieth‐ century South Africa and, by extension, of apartheid. Above all, the revisionists stressed the importance of local struggles, between employers and workers, colo- nizers and colonized, in accounting for the specific forms of racial rule and oppression in South Africa. And in these struggles blacks – Africans, Coloreds, and Indians – took very active roles.

The natural progression of this work led to an examination of the social costs and struggles of communities under apartheid. Interest in social history gained momentum in the 1980s, stemming from the pioneering work of van Onselen and fueled by the conferences held at the University of the Witwatersrand organ- ized by the History Workshop. Historians, political scientists, sociologists, and geographers sent students and research assistants into the townships and the countryside of South Africa to excavate the history of those who had been silenced. The transcripts of many of those interviews (well over 1,000), under the

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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440 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

auspices of the African Studies Center, today are held at the Wits university library and formed the basis of many important studies including those by van Onselen (1996), Bonner (1983), Keegan (1988), Bozzoli (1991), Moodie (1994), and others. Their work uncovered the many strategies employed by Africans to sur- vive during apartheid and before; they rendered Africans as actors rather than as objects, and opened up exciting avenues for further research.12 Unfortunately, since 1994 much of this work has been abandoned, with the exception of Bonner’s longstanding study of Johannesburg’s townships (see Bonner and Segal 1998; Bonner and Nieftagodien 2001, 2008; and Bonner, Nieftagodien, and Mathabatha 2012). In the grip of the democratic transition, the voices of these actors had presumably been heard and many social historians turned away from the apart- heid past.

Still, for all the intellectual excitement of this work, which effectively domi- nated academic discussion about South African history for two decades and left the works of white liberals and Afrikaners alike largely unread for a generation, there were still (with one or two exceptions) no black contributors, and much of the work rendered Africans as people to be studied and perhaps engaged as  research assistants because of their language skills, but not as potential colleagues to be welcomed to the profession (see especially Worger 1991; Desai and Bohmke 1997).

Forgetting

But what happened to historical analysis of apartheid after the end of National Party rule and the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994? Did van Jaarsveld’s 1964 prediction that “If the somber predictions of internal revolution and external pressure are realized,” then the “main field of study will be ‘causes of the South African Revolution?’” (1964: 154). Did the Oxford History editors’ concern that the long overdue “analysis … by African and Coloured historians, economists, and anthropologists” get resolved (Wilson and Thompson 1969: xiii)?

To start with the last question first, the simple answer is no. Twenty years after the formal end of apartheid, black scholars (meaning African, Colored, and Indian scholars from South Africa) of history employed in South African universities constituted well under 10 percent of professional historians in the country. The professoriate remained much as it had been for the past century, overwhelmingly white males whose academic training and specialization were in researching and teaching South African history (see Worger 2014). There was not a single South African‐born African full professor of history in the country. What this meant for the practice of history was the near complete absence of university scholars who had experienced life under apartheid and who had the language expertise to fully utilize the vast amount of sources available in indigenous languages.

What about the other question – the main field of study being the causes of the South African revolution? In some ways one might have expected that the

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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apartheid forgotten and remembered 441

biggest contribution of the revisionist scholars to the postapartheid history of South Africa would have been to utilize their analytical approaches and research skills to investigate the origins and development of apartheid in much the same revealing ways as they had the history of industrial development, manufacturing, and race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After all, the gov- ernment and private records for the apartheid period that had largely been off‐ limits to researchers during the apartheid era were now much more accessible in the postapartheid period. The state archives reduced their closed period from up to 100 years or more to just 20 years. All the records of the National Party and of most of its leaders became publicly accessible for the first time. And mining company records, available in partial and inconsistent ways during the apartheid years, could potentially have been opened up to broad examination if the schol- arly demand had been there. But in a strangely appropriate way  –  since it had been the Oxford History editors and contributors who had initially borne most of the wrath of the revisionist critique of white liberal history  –  the comment of Wilson and Thompson about black scholars in the 1960s – that “those who have the training and opportunity are for the most part occupied with other commit- ments” (1969: vi)  –  applied to the revisionists in 1990s South Africa. Many hoped to influence government policy in South Africa but found few opportuni- ties in the black majority ANC, and instead aligned with the Democratic Alliance Party, which was always likely to be the perpetual opposition party much like the Progressive Federal Party before it.13

The social historians who had worked hard to study the repercussions of apart- heid on South African society approached the question of the “revolution” with greater effort. Many of the township studies of the 1980s continued, especially with a focus on resistance and the efforts and contributions of Africans outside of the organizational structures of the liberation movement. As these studies dem- onstrated, the effort to dislodge the government was primarily driven by the South African population, although the ANC eventually brokered the change.14 Unfortunately, as the hopes of the transition have soured, the focus of much of this work has turned away from an examination of the popular movement against apartheid and toward denunciations of the ANC and the ANC liberation narra- tive.15 In an especially strange twist, the chair of the History Workshop, Noor Nieftagodien recently called for greater access to government records from the apartheid period, not to learn more about apartheid but rather because “archived documents might reveal more about “what happened in transition,” including any “dirty deals” that took place behind the scenes and whether these established a template for what came after. There has been much speculation, he continued, about whether Nelson Mandela “sold out” in meetings with state officials; “whether economic deals were struck that allowed existing powers to remain intact”; and whether and how far the security apparatus managed to infiltrate the ANC. It is also sometimes assumed that one reason why current politicians get away with so much is because they know the secrets of their rivals. Scholars should

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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442 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

now get a chance to test the truth or falsehood of all these claims: “understanding transition can help us understand South Africa today,” said Professor Nieftagodien” (Reisz 2017). In some recent work, apartheid has even come to be seen with some nostalgia for a system that was “well organized”! (Dlamini 2009: 4).

Another more promising area of historical inquiry has blossomed since 1990: cultural history. As with the historical discipline generally, many historians have moved away from political and economic concerns entirely and are borrowing from sociologists, geographers, and anthropologists to study the cultures that arose under apartheid. Studies of sports, movies, leisure, religion, language, and music have provided a much richer view of South African life and generally intro- duce Africans as actors rather than as the objects of culture. Nevertheless, in most cases, because of the quotidian nature of these studies, there is little analysis of the overall impact of apartheid on culture. With the exception of works on protest songs or art, much of this work isolates culture from politics.16

In practice, academic historical analysis of apartheid post‐1994 largely reverted to the two groups of historians whose work had been overturned in the 1970s and 1980s – the Afrikaners and the English liberals. In postapartheid South Africa whites by and large are the only people who have enough money to buy books, and so it was not surprising that the works that most appeal to this audience are those which, for the Afrikaner section, suggest that apartheid was not all bad and had positive ide- als and outcomes, and for English‐speaking whites, suggest that they were not to blame in the past nor should they be held responsible in the future for the clear economic advantages held by whites in postapartheid South Africa. For this audi- ence, forgetting is a very appealing feature of the historical texts that they buy.

The most prolific Afrikaner historian, Hermann Giliomee has also been one of the most influential in current historiography. He has, in his own account, moved from being an enthusiastic supporter of apartheid in his youth to being perceived as a “snake in the grass” by National Party‐supporting historians in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, to his current role of leading Afrikaans‐language proponent for formerly white universities, Stellenbosch in particular (Giliomee 2016). In his historical accounts of apartheid he has emphasized Afrikaners’ search for “white survival and justice,” most clearly in a multiauthored text written for university students (Giliomee 2014). Instead of the emphasis on “white supremacy” as the driving force behind apartheid found in Giliomee (2016), we have a mix of ahis- torical arguments, false binaries, and imagined idealistic origins. With regard to the ahistorical, Giliomee argues that apartheid must be

weighed up in light of how people viewed it in the years 1948 to 1958, when the policy was in place … [and] not what most political leaders and commentators have done since 1994 … to judge apartheid according to the liberal values which only began to find acceptance on a wide basis in the 1990s. (2014: 434)

Leaving aside the odd dating (1948–1958 – a typo?), and the general problem of moral relativism, to make the argument as Giliomee does, one must ignore

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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apartheid forgotten and remembered 443

everything written and spoken by critics of segregation and apartheid, especially by members of the ANC Youth League in the 1940s and by Nelson Mandela and others in the 1950s (all quoted earlier). Giliomee also presents the reader with curious and ahistorical binaries such as: “Rapid racial integration could have taken place, or the country could, for the greatest part of 25 years, have experi- enced a reasonable measure of stability. There is no way, however, that both these two things could have happened” (Giliomee 2014: 446). Here the key word is “stability.” Stability for whom? What form of stability? Are political assas- sinations and police death squads part of stability? Giliomee does refer somewhat generally to black suffering under apartheid but it is all very generic and very impersonal, with his reference to the damage done to the country (whose?) rather than to individuals:

Apartheid cost the country dearly, especially in the form of poor quality education for black, coloured and Indian children; an unproductive labour force; a lack of skills; and a large turnover of workers as a result of the enormous scope of migrant labour. (2014: 444–445)

As with the earlier work of Afrikaner historians, blacks remain largely objects of history, not people who through their own struggles helped create the course of events. And, just as Verwoerd argued that apartheid was an attempt to create separate development, not a way to enable whites to rule blacks, Giliomee in his stress on the origins of apartheid as tied up with religious ideas of justice in the 1930s, and with the development of separate political institutions for Africans (the bantustans being a way to compensate them for having lost political rights in the 87 percent of South Africa under white rule), provides an intellectual cover for both the rise and the expansion of white supremacist rule post‐1948.17

Whereas Giliomee harks back to the National Party defenses of apartheid in the 1960s, David Welsh (1971) disinters the English‐speaking liberal scholarship of the 1960s to which he had himself contributed with his first book on the origins of segregation in nineteenth‐century Natal. As Giliomee notes approvingly and without irony in a blurb for Welsh’s 2009 book, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, “This is liberal history at its best.” The first two chapter titles signal the core argu- ment: “Afrikaner Nationalism and the Coming of Apartheid” (i.e., it’s all about the Afrikaners); “The Black Experience: A Prelude to Apartheid” (where again blacks are objects, people who suffer, because of the impact of “three interrelated issues … security, land and labour,” essentially imperialism and farming). What about a reverse order – labor, land, and control – as suggested by the revisionist historians, nearly all of whose work is absent from Welsh’s bibliography? There is in Welsh’s index no reference to De Beers Consolidated Mines or to the Anglo‐ American Corporation. There is no discussion of the impact of apartheid on the economic and social life of ordinary people. It is as though nothing had been written, or at least read, between 1969 and 2009 (Welsh 2009).18

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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444 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

Like the work of Giliomee and Welsh, Saul Dubow’s recent study Apartheid, 1948–1994 (2014) focuses primarily on politics to the exclusion of economics and social history, deals primarily with white actors, and engages with some dubious “what if” theories reminiscent of Giliomee’s flawed binaries. Dubow aims to be more provocative, however, rather than apologetic. For example, he speculates that if the ANC had not committed to the violent overthrow of the government in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the Nationalist Party govern- ment might not have outlawed all protest organizations and initiated the con- struction of a police state (Dubow 2015). Raising the question of whether the ANC was somehow responsible for the subsequent creation of the South African police state completely ignores Mandela’s famous speech at the Rivonia trial where he carefully laid out the history of ANC activities and their failed attempts to initiate peaceful change. And, like the other liberal historians, Dubow lays the blame for apartheid squarely on Verwoerd (read Afrikaners); but, rather than res- urrecting the old arguments about the Afrikaner “frontier” mentality and reli- gious justifications, he argues that apartheid was the by‐product of Verwoerd’s ambition to create an empire of his own within the Native Affairs Department (Dubow 2014: 60). There is no mention of the economic benefits for whites – Afrikaners and English alike – of apartheid policies. Dubow’s critique, speculative and unconvincing, has nevertheless gained popularity among white South African historians.

Although South African academia has failed to develop that coterie of “African and Coloured historians, economists and anthropologists” who could provide a different context for our understanding of apartheid, scholarship in the twenty‐ first century has nevertheless expanded through different mediums, giving voice to a broader population than that within the academic community. Life stories, in particular autobiographies, have blossomed through new outlets for publication including online publications, blogs, and even Facebook posts. As one review of the field states, “Individual’s stories have become a legitimate aspect of making new national history” (Jayawardane 2008). These voices are no longer silent and they remember their own apartheid experiences.

Remembering

Since 1990, many South Africans have described their own apartheid experiences through their autobiographies. Especially prominent are those of politicians including Nelson Mandela, F. W. de Klerk, and many others who focus on the political intrigue and present justifications for their actions (Mandela 1994; de Klerk 1998; Heunis 2007; Eglin 2007). As Tom Lodge (2015: 687) has noted, however, we get very little of their personal lives or the context in which they made their decisions; instead most of these works are heavy on justification with a touch of insider gossip. There are also the works by South Africa’s journalists, noteworthy for their style and their ability to tell a story but often gliding over the

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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apartheid forgotten and remembered 445

gritty realities of daily life in favor of the more sensational aspects of apartheid (Pauw 1997; Sparks 2016). Memoirs by the military combatants on both sides abound, along with what Neelika Jayawardane calls the “My Apartheid Boyhood” genre, in which mainly white male authors recount their innocent childhoods free from the knowledge of apartheid (Manong 2015; Van der Walt 2008; Coetzee 1998; MacRae 2012). Nevertheless, what is strikingly different in the autobiog- raphies as opposed to the academic postapartheid scholarship is the shift of focus away from the motivations of whites in implementing apartheid to the impact and effect of apartheid on communities and individuals. While Giliomee, Welsh, Dubow, and others focus on explaining the intent and actions of white politicians, primarily describing Africans as the objects of these actions, the autobiographies reverse the lens and give us a microscopic view of the painful consequences of apartheid’s policies and actions.

While the form of autobiographical narrative is rapidly changing, including online blogs, Facebook pages, auto‐ethnographies, oral recordings, and so on, South Africans in the postapartheid era have eagerly embraced the genre and their stories have been published through old and new avenues. The most interest- ing  –  and least touted  –  are the stories told by the unknowns recounting their everyday experiences. Although these stories are obviously subjective by defini- tion, and they can only present an individual narrative rather than a comprehen- sive, contextual view of apartheid, they demonstrate a central truth of life under apartheid: their lives were defined by their race. And they explain the impact of apartheid on the totality of a life. Alongside a depiction of the grim realities and daily pleasures of a very difficult human existence, these stories demonstrate how the best efforts of hardworking Africans could be derailed by the smallest of injus- tices under apartheid.

The remaining discussion will focus on the life stories of five South Africans. Sindiwe Magona and Letitia Stuurman, both born in 1943, witnessed the begin- ning of apartheid and experienced the impact of its policies throughout most of their lives until the end of apartheid in 1994 (Magona 1990; Stuurman 1995). Tlou Setumu, Jamela Robertson, and Fred Khumalo were all born in the 1960s (Setumu 2011; Robertson 2007; Khumalo 2006). Some grew up in townships; most were moved from rural to urban locations and eventually to the townships. One family resided in a “homeland,” forced to renounce citizenship in South Africa. Some were lucky enough to grow up with their parents but few were able to keep their own families together as the pass laws and the Group Areas Act together conspired to keep them apart. Education was not the panacea for advancement in all cases, primarily because their families were often too impover- ished to pay the fees. And, even with the proper training and qualifications, job reservation and lack of resources often stymied such plans.

How were these relatively “ordinary” South Africans affected by apartheid? Those who have been fortunate enough to be in a position to write and to publish their life stories are by definition already exceptional, and yet their stories can

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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446 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

stand in for the less fortunate. There is little remarkable about their circumstances other than the fact that they survived those circumstances. To be clear, each author wrote of their childhood as happy: “childhood, by its very nature, is a magic‐filled world, egocentric, wonderfully carefree, and innocent. Mine was all these things and more” (Magona 1990: 4). This, despite the fact that few lived with both parents, or even with either parent. Either one or both parents worked in a city, to which they were not allowed to bring their families (Magona 1990: 15; Khumalo 2006: 33; Robertson 2007: 4; Stuurman 1995: 1). Later, when they became adults, the pattern would be repeated with their own children. In the cities, their mothers turned to selling prepared food or liquor “illegally as she did not have a permit for selling anything from her home” (Magona 1990: 26). In the rural areas, “without good rains and harvests, [mother] was literally left with nothing, absolutely nothing to live on” (Setumu 2011: 48).

Where they lived determined much about their lives, yet their residence was restricted by apartheid laws. As Tlou Setumu recounts, “A place to stay was an important factor that determined one’s fortunes in the big city. You couldn’t just go there without knowing where you would be put up” (2011: 76). And, even with residential rights, Africans were continually shifted from place to place. As a child, Sindiwe Magona first moved from a rural village to Blaauvlei, a “location” of corrugated iron shacks; then to a new location, Zwelitsha, where each plot holder built their own house; and, under the slum clearance policies of the 1950s, to one of the massive townships engineered by the apartheid gov- ernment, Guguletu:

The windswept, treeless miles from anywhere township, they were told was their home. Our Pride, Guguletu, the powers that be would have the gall to baptize it, openly declaring to all skeptics their unwavering pursuit: the destruction of African family life, communal life, and all those factors that go toward the knitting of the very fabric of a people. (Magona 1990: 85)

When Jamela Robertson first traveled from her small village near Tzaneen to Mamelodi in Pretoria, she concurred: “Unlike in Dan Village where everyone minded everyone else’s business, in Mamelodi it seemed to be ‘a man for him- self ’” (2007: 34). Some were moved from the multiracial neighborhoods such as Butts Location in Aliwal North, as Letitia Stuurman remembered: “In 1958 we had to move. The government didn’t want white and ‘non‐white’ people to be mixing in the towns so they forced blacks to live in the locations” (1995: 22).

Of course not all experiences were horrible. Fred Khumalo remembers finally moving to his family’s own home in a brand new township in the early 1970s with “a palpable sense of joy in the air. Everything about the township – the neat rows of four‐roomed brick houses, the tarred roads – was new” (Khumalo 2006: 42). The catch was that the township – Mpumalanga – was within the KwaZulu home- land, was paid for by the South African government, and that “by moving here we had, by law, renounced our South African citizenship” (Khumalo 2006: 43). The

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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apartheid forgotten and remembered 447

township was built as a labor reservoir, adjacent to the South African town of Hammarsdale which employed cheap labor from Mpumalanga in the textile facto- ries. This was part of grand apartheid, and the vision of “separate development” that would later result in the removal of over 3.5 million South Africans to the ethnically determined apartheid “homelands” (see Surplus People’s Project 1983).

But for those who could not survive in the countryside or find housing in the cities or in the homelands, the infamous single‐sex hostels housed workers for the mines, factories, and municipalities, and there were even female quarters for nurses and domestic workers. Tlou Setumu landed in one of the hostels in Pretoria as a last resort and described them as institutions designed to separate workers from the local communities:

The high walls that enclosed the hostels separated the inmates from the surrounding community both physically and socially. Besides the fact that almost all of the hostel dwellers came from the rural “homelands,” the hostels themselves completely iso- lated men from township life. As a result of this isolation, relations between the hostel dwellers and the township community were usually not harmonious … This type of tension fitted well into the plans of the National Party government, in which people had to be separated so that they could be hostile to each other. After all, the unity of the black people was the last thing the apartheid government wanted to see. (Setumu 2011: 78)

It is clear that Africans understood that the government created by design resi- dences that undermined African communities, whether in one of the massive townships like Guguletu or Mamelodi, in an ethnically separated homeland like KwaZulu, or in the impersonal hostels of every white town or city. Apartheid’s grand design was thorough and transparent.

While these autobiographies can explain the comprehensive impact of apart- heid, what they reveal even more clearly is how one incident or misstep could completely transform a life in which there was absolutely no margin for error. Being in the wrong place could land one in jail, or missing one rent payment could lead to years of homelessness. The turning points in these lives moved on an apartheid axis that was unforgiving.

For these authors, education was an important key to a better life, and all of them were able to excel in their schoolwork. Nevertheless, their success did not guarantee their future. Fred Khumalo, now a famous journalist and author, was given perhaps the greatest opportunity after graduation: a full scholarship to med- ical school. But this was not his goal. He had already become sensitive to his country’s political situation and sought a career as a journalist. Despite his high grades and qualifications, he was routinely turned away from journalism programs and was ultimately given no financial aid when he finally gained admission to Technikon Natal. It seemed that, while the government was ready to finance his career as a doctor, a career as a journalist was not a path it was going to encourage. After graduation, Khumalo struggled to find a publication that would hire him.

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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448 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

But he was fortunate in that history overtook apartheid South Africa and he has since become one of the country’s leading journalists.

Others were not so lucky. Tlou Setumu’s family lived in the rural northern part of the country and survived on whatever his mother could grow on a small plot of land. Their home was built of mud; they literally had nothing. But when Setumu graduated from high school – at the top of his class – he was offered a temporary teaching position at a local school. The idea was that over a couple of years he would save his money, go to university, and qualify as a full‐time teacher. Yet, when his temporary position ended, he found that he had saved nothing: “the underlying poverty in my family meant that the few rands that I earned were reduced to nothing because each and every aspect at home needed to be taken care of by that meager amount” (Setumu 2011: 68). Nevertheless, he gained a scholarship to the University of the North and traveled there to register, only to be undone by the bureaucracy of apartheid education. There is tragic frustration in his account of the situation:

I joined a long queue outside the campus and slowly moved with my large bag, approaching the caravans where the officials did the registration… I took out the letter which indicated that I was a bursary holder… one of the officials just said: “Here we only want cash money.” … I went to the nearest public phone at the post office where I dialed the bursary section … The lady who answered said there was nothing she could do because the person who was dealing with the bursaries was in a meeting. I realized there was no way I was going to be helped and I dropped the phone with bitterness … There I stood motionless, not knowing what to do next. Time was moving on and I was increasingly becoming concerned about what was going to happen to me in the next few hours. I knew nobody in Turfloop, and if I was not admitted to the university, where was I going to sleep? That was the imme- diate problem. The bus [home] was leaving Polokwane at about two o’clock in the afternoon, so I had to take that into consideration in the process of deciding what I was going to do next … This led me to decide to go back home. Yes, indeed … the registration period at universities came to an end and my dream of being a university student evaporated like dew in the rising sun. (Setumu 2011: 75–76)

A simple misunderstanding and no legal place to sleep changed the course of a life. Although Setumu eventually completed a BA, MA, and PhD over the course of the next 20 years, he had to survive as an itinerant worker and teacher in the meantime, and was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown in his mid‐twenties. One phone call could have made a huge difference, but under apartheid Africans seldom had access to a second chance.

A combination of cruelty and poverty also ended Jamela Robertson’s educa- tion. After accompanying a friend to the hospital and thereby missing a two‐hour study period at school, she and her friend were flogged by the principal. Rather than continue with additional punishment, at the age of 16 she left school. She believed at the time that she could resume her education at another school, but a

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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apartheid forgotten and remembered 449

relative who had been paying her school fees died, and she had no resources to continue her final year of school (Robertson 2007: 86–92). What followed was an escape to Johannesburg and an attempt to continue her education through a clerical college in Johannesburg. But, after she graduated, “at each and every door that I knocked on asking for clerical work, I was told the jobs were reserved for whites” (Robertson 2007: 175). Women like Sindiwe Magona who had earned ther teaching credentials, were ultimately forced to work as domestic “servants” in white homes because they could not find jobs or qualify for urban residence because of the legal strictures of apartheid.

Mention should also be made of the long‐term impact of Bantu Education, Verwoerd’s attempt to curtail black aspirations. Sindiwe Magona, who was born in 1943, had already finished much of her schooling by the time Bantu Education was fully implemented, but she noted the change: “Those students who were from the old stream were faring much, much better than the products of this exclusively African system” (1990: 72). According to Bantu Education goals, stu- dents were taught such subjects as housework and gardening although with important limitations:

Incredible though it may sounds, it is the truth: in this urban environment, where a few students had electricity at home, we were being taught to use irons heated on the stove. The stove itself was a wood or coal burner. As far back as I can recall, mother has always had a Singer sewing‐machine. Granted, a manually operated one … and here I was, learning to sew a garment using needle and thread. Talk about “keeping the native in her proper place”! White and even coloured schools had modern appliances. (Magona 1990: 67)

While it has been argued that overall literacy rates improved under Bantu Education, this system also undereducated generations of Africans while directing a steady stream of racist invective at the students (Robertson 2007: 81–83).

Indeed, apartheid levied a heavy toll on African physical and mental health. While these authors escaped the worst dangers of apartheid, they were certainly aware of them. Almost anyone – and sometimes everyone – in their lives were the victims of police violence. As Fred Khumalo recounts, even obtaining the necessary passbook to allow his father to live and work in the city was a humili- ating ordeal. His father was forced to undergo a genital “inspection” by a white official who “prob[ed] his penis and testicles with a stick” in front of all the other men in the hall: “Outside the hallowed confines of the Native Affairs offices, black men never spoke about their experiences at the Pipi Office as it was called … they couldn’t joke about what happened [there]” (Khumalo 2006: 27–28). This pass, gained through such humiliation, was thereafter used to effect continuing control over blacks. Police raids “with no other objective than to arrest people whose passes were ‘wrong’ or who had forgotten their passes at home” were commonplace, while “police presence in the township had abso- lutely no correspondence to the committing of criminal acts” (Magona 1990: 87).

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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450 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

Blacks who were ordinarily granted rights to be in a city still could not be found outside after curfew “even if you were in a car you were not supposed to drive right through Aliwal North if you were black” (Stuurman 1995: 21).

Jamela Robertson’s experience of being arrested for not carrying a pass nearly ended in tragedy for her; it most certainly did for others. She and her schoolmates were arrested during lunch time in a park in Johannesburg for not having their passbooks. They were loaded into the police van, threatened with deportation to a “homeland,” and jailed in John Vorster Square for the weekend. While there, they learned that they would be held for the weekend “for the entertainment” of the guards. Although she was spared, she noticed that “every now and then a policeman out of uniform would open the cell and pick a girl or two … hours later the girls would be returned either crying or looking sheepish” (Robertson 2007: 149–150). Even worse, she heard people screaming in pain in the middle of the night, “flying from some storeys above us and crushed way down below … fol- lowed by a deadly silence” (Robertson 2007: 150). The worst of apartheid was the creation of a police state to enforce its vision.

The most subjective but perhaps most lasting legacy of apartheid was the psy- chological impact on society. As a small child, Jamela Robertson prayed every night to God to make her white. Indeed, she found the lesson in her own home:

It was a picture of heaven and hell… The queue for black people proceeded straight to hell: a pit of fire with the devil, a hefty naked black man with a tail and horns, standing right in the middle of the fire, holding a huge fork and grilling the poor black souls who were falling into the pit one after another. (Robertson 2007: 36–37)

By the time Sindiwe Magona was a teenager, she understood

my own impuissance … our voicelessness, meticulously designed by the powers that be; our forever being blamed for the untenable conditions others [had] imposed on us; and the squandering, the systematic extinguishing of the breath of a people by rank bigotry and evil incarnate. (Magona 1990: 79)

In some cases, the continual overall stress of apartheid and its unending frustra- tion drove many South Africans toward mental illness and worse. Both Setumu and Robertson write of periods in which they could no longer cope and suffered breakdowns. Setumu was hospitalized for six months, suffering a nervous break- down brought on by his inability to find work and therefore support his mother, and the guilt he suffered from these failures (Setumu 2011: 103–109). Robertson, having endured an abusive relationship and the loss of two children, also broke down. “I felt like a walking empty shell and often I’d find myself floating in and out of reality” (2007: 209). Both of these people had set forth with great hopes in life after enjoying happy childhoods and excelling in school, yet repeated frus- tration and discrimination laid them low. Khumalo writes of another affliction, criminal activity: “Gangsterism and crime are part of township life. Not because

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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apartheid forgotten and remembered 451

black people are inherently criminal but because they are driven to crime out of desperation” (2006: 100).

The danger of recasting history through the perspective of current feelings of disillusionment or resentment, is that the past will not only be distorted or forgot- ten but that it will be forgiven. While many South Africans today suffer deeply, they should not be led to believe that the country’s past was something other than unjust and cruel. The people who lived through apartheid persevered and led full lives in spite of apartheid. Yet the threat of the state, and the possibilities for arrest, harm, and worse were always present. Freedom from those fears is not inconsequential. As Letitia Stuurman wrote upon revisiting the township where she grew up:

I went back again this year – it’s 1994 – and there is quite a big change. The apart- heid is finished … Blacks can buy houses now in town. It was really funny to see black children playing in the streets and going to cafes in the evening … The police are very friendly, not like before … Even the white police, they’re not like the olden days when it was really bad and you didn’t know what you did, right or wrong. (Stuurman 1995: 33–34)

To acknowledge such change, history must be truthful.

Conclusion

Some South Africans have suggested that a remembering/forgetting dichotomy is too crude, that “realities, of course, were a little more complex,” and have argued “that beyond the dynamics of remembering and forgetting, a more pro- found characterization of the struggle in social memory is one of narrative against narrative, story against story” (Harris 1999). We disagree and we agree. Arguing that a remembering and forgetting dichotomy is too crude is all too appealing to white South Africans who now, above all, want to focus their criticisms on the shortcomings of the ANC and to delete from memory what happened while white supremacy was in vogue.

But we do agree that the real future for history in South Africa lies in the stories told by those most heavily affected by apartheid. Few if any of these have been incorporated into the works produced by the historical profession in South Africa. Likewise, almost none of the stories told in the course of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings have been addressed despite the fact that the hundreds of thousands of pages of testimony available online provide historians with a resource richer than any available during the apartheid era. When historians use all these sources instead of complaining about the “failure” of the TRC to establish the full “truth,” as if that was ever its aim or that such a task could be accomplished, and instead of complaining about the supposed lack of materials documenting the apartheid years when vast amounts of written material are available that were not available 20 years ago and, more than that, there are

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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452 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

millions of living witnesses to apartheid willing to tell their stories if anyone will listen, then we may well have a fundamentally new history of South Africa told and heard and written.

Notes

1 Listen to Hendrik Verwoerd pronounce the word at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vPCln9czoys, accessed March 14, 2018.

2 South Africa Senate Debates, September 3, 1948, quoted in Hepple (1967: 111). 3 Suppression of Communism Act, 1950, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Suppression_

of_Communism_Act,_1950, accessed March 14, 2018. 4 Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Before and Since the European War and the

Boer Rebellion went out of print soon after its publication in 1916 and did not become widely available until its republication in 1982 (Plaatje [1916] 1982). A. T. Nzula’s Forced Labour in Colonial Africa was published in Russian in 1933 and was not avai- lable in an English edition until 1979, when it was banned in South Africa (Nzular [1933] 1979).

5 The most useful analysis of state control of writing and publication in South Africa is Merrett (1994).

6 For the reference to the 1959 Act as the Separate Universities Act, see Liebenberg (1969: 430). For a useful analysis of the role of separate universities see Hefferan (2017: 195–214).

7 The books he considered most important for advocacy and apology were all written in Afrikaans and included G. Cronjé’s’n Tuiste vir die Nageslag (1945), Afrika Sonder die Asiaat (1946), Regverdige Rasse‐apartheid (1947), and Voogdyskap en Apartheid (1948), and N. J. Rhoodie and H. J. Venter’s Die Apartheidsgedagte:’n Sosio‐historiese Uitensetting van sy Onstaan en Ontwikkeling (1960). For a critical analysis of Cronjé’s ideas about race see Coetzee (1991: 30), in which he argues that Cronjé in the period 1945–1948 was “crazy” and that the electorate “which bought the package offered by Cronjé and his friends, besides being deceived or self‐deceived, was also for a time crazy, or at least crazed.”

8 Africans (termed “Natives”) are discussed in an appendix written by a “professor of Bantu languages.”

9 Though now dated, the most useful text on Afrikaner history and historians is Smith (1989); see also Thompson (1985). A similar text to Smith, dated but still useful, which deals primarily with English writers on South African history is Saunders (1988).

10 For an informative personal view of the ways in which Afrikaner historians under apartheid often viewed their academic work as needing to support the political aims of the National Party, see Giliomee (2016).

11 See also Spence and his argument: “From 1948 onwards the elevation of apartheid into a symbol of survival for Afrikaner nationalism made domestic policy a crucial factor in governing South Africa’s relations with the outside world” (Spence 1971: 478).

12 For an historical overview of the History Workshop, see Bonner (1994). On a posta- partheid assessment of the future of the field see Cobley (2001).

13 On the disappointed political hopes of white academics in black majority‐ruled South Africa see in particular the scathing critique of Desai Bohmke (1997).

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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apartheid forgotten and remembered 453

14 For a good overview of much of this literature see Sapire (2013). 15 See works by Giliomee (2016), Anthony Butler (2017), and Johnson (2015), among

others. Also see further work criticizing the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Posel and Wits History Workshop (1999).

16 See for example, among others, the works of Paul La Hausse on alcohol (1989), Peter Alegi on sports (2004), Annie Coombes on visual art (2003), David B. Coplan on music (1988), Keyan Tomaselli on film (2016) and Njabulo Ndebele on literature (2006, 2007).

17 In a section of his book The Afrikaners: Biography of a People subtitled “A Christian and Generous Political Approach,” Giliomee’s first sentence goes: “The peculiar fea- ture of apartheid as an ideology was its attempt to reconcile the demands for white survival and justice” (2003: 461).

18 Two historiographical studies published before Welsh wrote his book demonstrate well the wealth of materials on which he could have drawn: Cobley (2001) and Stolten (2006).

Further reading

Alegi, Peter. 2004. Laduma! Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu‐Natal Press.

ANC (African National Congress). 1944. ANC Youth League Manifesto. http://www. ancyl.org.za/docs/political/1944/ANC%20Youth%20League%20Manifestoq.pdf, accessed March 10, 2018.

Azania, Malaika Wa. 2014. Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation. Johannesburg: Jacana.

Barnard, Niel. 2015. Secret Revolution: Memoirs of a Spy Boss. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Bonner, Philip. 1983. Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution

of the Nineteenth‐Century Swazi State. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Bonner, Philip. 1994. “New Nation, New History: The History Workshop in South

Africa, 1977–1994.” Journal of American History 81(3): 977–985. Bonner, Philip, and Noor Nieftagodien. 2001. Kathorus: A History. Cape Town: Maskew

Miller Longman. Bonner, Philip, and Noor Nieftagodien. 2008. Alexandra: A History. Johannesburg: Wits

University Press. Bonner, Philip, Noor Nieftagodien, and S. Mathabatha. 2012. Ekurhuleni: The Making of

an Urban Region. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Bonner, Philip, and Lauren Segal. 1998. Soweto: A History. Cape Town: Maskew Miller

Longman. Bozzoli, Belinda. 1991. Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in

South Africa, 1900–1983. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Bundy, Colin. 1979. The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry. Berkeley: University

of California Press. Butler, Anthony. 2017. Contemporary South Africa. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chikane, Frank. 1988. No Life of My Own: An Autobiography. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Chimeloane, Rrekgetsi. 1998. The Hostel‐Dwellers: A First Hand Account. Cape Town:

Kwela Books.

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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454 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

Cobley, Alan. 2001. “Does Social History Have a Future? The Ending of Apartheid and Recent Trends in South African Historiography.” Journal of Southern African Studies 27(3): 613–625.

Coetzee, J. M. 1991. “The Mind of Apartheid: Geoffrey Cronjé (1907–).” Social Dynamics 17(1): 1–35.

Coetzee, J. M. 1998. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. New York: Penguin Books. Coombes, Annie E. 2003. History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in

a Democratic South Africa. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press. Coplan, David B. 1988. In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre.

London: Longman. De Klerk, F. W. 1998. The Last Trek – A New Beginning: The Autobiography. New York:

Macmillan. De Kock, Eugene. 1998. A Long Night’s Damage: Working for the Apartheid State.

Johannesburg: Contra Press. de Villiers, René. 1971. “Afrikaner Nationalism.” In South Africa 1870–1966, vol. 2 of

The Oxford History of South Africa, edited by Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, 365–423. London: Oxford University Press.

Desai, Ashwin, and Heinrich E. Bohmke. 1997. “The Death of an Intellectual, the Birth of a Salesman: The South African Intellectual during the Democratic Transition.” Debate 3: 10–34.

Dlamini, Jacob. 2009. Native Nostalgia. Johannesburg: Jacana. Dubow, Saul. 2014. Apartheid 1948–1994. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dubow, Saul. 2015. “Were There Political Alternatives in the Wake of the Sharpeville‐

Langa Violence in South Africa, 1960?” Journal of African History 56(1): 119–142. Eglin, Colin. 2007. Crossing the Borders of Power: The Memoirs of Colin Eglin. Cape Town:

Jonathan Ball. Feinstein, Anthony. 2011. Battle Scarred: Hidden Costs of the Border War. Cape Town:

Tafelberg. Giliomee, Hermann. 2003. The Afrikaners: Biography of a People. London: Hurst. Giliomee, Hermann. 2014. “Apartheid: A Different Angle.” In A History of South Africa,

edited by Fransjohan Pretorius, 434–447. Pretoria: Protea Boekhuis. Giliomee, Hermann. 2016. Hermann Giliomee, Historian: An Autobiography. Cape Town:

Tafelberg. Grinker, David. 2014. Inside Soweto: Memoir of an Official 1960s–1980s. Johannesburg:

Eastern Enterprises. Harris, Verne. 1999. “‘They Should Have Destroyed More’: The Destruction of Public Records

by the South African State in the Final Years of Apartheid, 1990–1994.” Paper presented at the TRC: Commissioning the Past Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, June 11–14.

Hefferan, Anne. 2017. “The University of the North and Building the Bantustans, 1959– 1977.” South African Historical Journal 69(2): 195–214.

Hepple, Alexander. 1967. Verwoerd. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Heunis, Jan. 2007. The Inner Circle: Reflections on the Last Days of White Rule. Cape

Town: Jonathan Ball. Hirson, Baruch. 1995. Revolutions in My Life. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Ho, Ufrieda. 2011. Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing Up Chinese in South Africa.

Johannesburg: Picador Africa.

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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apartheid forgotten and remembered 455

Jayawardane, M. Neelika. 2008. “Memoirs Take a Daring Turn in South Africa.” Symposium Magazine. http://www.symposium‐magazine.com/memoirs‐take‐a‐ daring‐turn‐in‐south‐africa, accessed March 14, 2018.

Johnson, R. W. 2015. How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball.

Johnstone, Rick. 1976. Class, Race and Gold: A Study of Class Relations and Racial Discrimination in South Africa. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Keegan, Timothy. 1988. Facing the Storm: Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa. London: Zed Books.

Khumalo, Fred. 2006. Touch My Blood: The Early Years. Johannesburg: Umuzi. Kuper, Leo. 1971. “African Nationalism in South Africa, 1950–1964.” In South Africa

1870–1966, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of South Africa, edited by Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, 424–476. London: Oxford University Press.

La Hausse, Paul. 1989. Brewers, Beerhalls, and Boycotts: A History of Liquor in South Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

Liebenberg, B. J. 1969. “From the Statute of Westminster to the Republic of South Africa, 1931–1961.” In 500 Years: A History of South Africa, edited by C. F. J. Muller, 408– 439. Pretoria: H. & R. Academica.

Lodge, Tom. 2015. “Secrets and Lives: South African Political Biography.” Journal of Southern African Studies 41(3): 687–697.

MacRae, Ian. 2012. Under Our Skins: A White Family’s Journey through South Africa’s Darkest Years, London: Simon & Schuster.

Madikizela‐Mandela, Winnie. 2014. 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69. Johannesburg: Picador Africa.

Magona, Sindiwe. 1990. To My Children’s Children. Cape Town: David Philip. Magubane, Bernard. 2010. My Life and Times. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu‐

Natal Press. Makhoere, Caesarina Kona. 1988. No Child’s Play: In Prison under Apartheid. London:

Women’s Press. Malan, Magnus. 2006. My Life with the SA Defence Force. Pretoria: Protea Books. Mandela, Nelson. 1953. “No Easy Walk to Freedom: Presidential Address by Nelson R.

Mandela to the ANC (Transvaal) Congress.” September 21. http://www.sahistory.org. za/archive/no‐easy‐walk‐freedom‐presidential‐address‐nelson‐r‐mandela‐anc‐ transvaal‐congress‐21‐septemb, accessed March 14, 2018.

Mandela, Nelson. 1994. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston: Back Bay Books.

Manong, Stanley. 2015. If We Must Die: An Autobiography of a Former Commander of uMkhonto we Sizwe. Cape Town: Nkululeko Press.

Marks, Shula, and Anthony Atmore. 1980. Economy and Society in Pre‐industrial South Africa. London: Longman.

Marks, Shula, and Richard Rathbone. 1982. Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1870–1930. London: Longman.

Marks, Shula, and Stanley Trapido. 1987. The Politics of Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth‐Century South Africa. London: Routledge.

Mattera, Don. 2010. Memory Is the Weapon. Oxford: African Perspectives.

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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Mbali, Fanele. 2012. In Transit: Autobiography of a South African Freedom Fighter. Dartford: Xlibris.

Mbeki, Govan. 1991. Learning from Robben Island: The Prison Writings of Govan Mbeki. London: James Currey.

McRae, Donald. 2012. Under Our Skin: A White Family’s Journey through South Africa’s Darkest Years. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Merrett, Christopher. 1994. A Culture of Censorship: Secrecy and Intellectual Repression in South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip.

Mgxashe, Msolisi. 2006. Are You with Us? The Story of a PAC Activist. Cape Town: Tafelberg.

Moodie, Dunbar. 1994. Going for Gold: Men, Mines and Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mphalhlele, Letlapa. 2003. Child of This Soil: The Life of a Freedom Fighter. Cape Town: Kwela.

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and Culture. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu‐Natal Press. Ndebele, Njabulo. 2007. Fine Lines from the Box: Further Thoughts about Our Country.

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and the Boer Rebellion. Johannesburg: Ravan Press Posel, Deborah, and the Wits History Workshop. 1999. The TRC Report: What Kind of

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Village Boy. Pretoria: Unisa Press. Slovo, Joe. 1995. Slovo: The Unfinished Autobiography. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Smith, Ken. 1989. The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing. Athens:

Ohio University Press.

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

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1. Review the photoessay entitled "Hidden in Plain Sight: The Ghosts of Segregation" published by the New York Times. The link is posted below. If you do not have access to it because of the NYT paywall, you can set up a free NYT account using your ISU email account.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/travel/ghosts-of-segregation.html (Links to an external site.)

2. Consider the question posed by photographer Richard Frishman's in the photoessay: "Does such erasure remedy the inequalities and relieve the suffering caused by systemic racism? Or does it facilitate denial and obfuscation?"

3. Write an essay that responds to Frishman's question above, discussing both South Africa and the United States. More simply, Frishman is asking the following questions: What do we lose and gain if we highlight the histories of segregation in the U.S. and South Africa? What do we lose and gain if we erase or ignore those histories?

Essay Expectations:

1. The essay should be at least 4 pages long, double spaced 12 font.

2. The essay should discuss both the U.S. and South Africa when responding to the prompt.

3. The essay should include at least 3 direct quotes from class material. You do not need to do research beyond what has been covered in class. Anything we've read, watched, or analyzed that is posted in our class Canvas site is fair game.

4, You do not need to provide a works cited page. Because all the quotes/references you include are coming from course material, you just need to provide enough identifiable information that I can track back to the specific source- so, for a direct quote from a reading, include author name and page number; for a video, include title of video; for a PowerPoint identify the quote as being from Arrington PowerPoint and provide a title or subject so I know which PP it came from; for a picture, describe the picture you are referencing, etc.

Rosa King

MGT-312-OL01

Professor Jordan Cleveland

April 10, 2022

Company Picnic AON Diagram

Diagram  Description automatically generated

1

Rosa King

MGT-312-OL01

Professor Jordan Cleveland

April 10, 2022

Company Picnic Schedule Baseline

Company Picnic Activities Table

Activity No.

Activities

Sub-tasks

1.

Safety preparation

Water, Bug spray, Sun screen, Body wipes, and Trash bags

2.

Games and Activities

Adults: Boating, Jet ski, Blow and go parachute

Kids: Football, running, and stickball

3.

Employee voting

Food; Fruits and Dishes

Fruits: Apple, Mango

Dishes: Bar BQ, Rainbow Gelatins Cubes, Tomato-Melon chicken Salad, Confetti Snack Mix, and Frosted Lemon-Ricotta cookies

4.

Party gifts

Company picnic

Theme: Healthy Habits and Healthy Eating

Location: North Beach Resort & Villas

Date: May 29

Rosa King

Work Breakdown Structure

Healthy Habits and healthy eating

Safety preparation

Games and Activities

Running

Employee Voting

Football

Stickball

Kids

Adults

Boating

Jet ski

blow-and-go parachute

Trash bags

Sun screen

Bug spray

Body wipes

Water

Food

Fruits

Mango

Apple

dishes

Bar BQ

Rainbow Gelatins Cubes

Tomato-Melon chicken Salad

Confetti Snack Mix

Frosted Lemon-Ricotta cookies

Party Gifts

1

2

Company Picnic

Rosa King

MGT-312-OL01

Professor Cleveland

Company Picnic

Introduction:

I have chosen this annual picnic plan for the organization because I have some experience in arranging picnics and hangout events for different organizations. The budget for this project is 100,000, and a minimum of 350 people are expected to attend this annual picnic. There will be many phases in this project, and we will discuss everything related to this project. (Mavi, 2018)

Theme:

This pandemic situation had a negative impact on most of us. So, the theme should be following healthy habits and healthy eating. At the picnic, we will encourage the participants to do healthy activities and eat healthy food. This theme will help the company introduce a culture among its employees to maintain a work-life balance as healthy activities will lead to a happy mind.

Date:

The date I have selected whenever the long weekend holiday is happening in the next six months. Memorial Day, May 30, is the best in the next six months as it's a public holiday on Monday because of Memorial Day, in line with Saturday and Sunday. So, Sunday, May 29 will be the date for this Picnic event.

Location:

The most suitable location for this picnic event will be a resort beside the lake where water sports activities can be done and a lot of playing space for the kids as well. The natural environment is also very important. The location should be far away from the hustle of city life. A peaceful environment will boost the modes of the participants as well.

Adequate Entertainment:

A lot of sports activities and competitions have been planned for the participant, and water sports activities are for the adults and running, and entertainment competitions are planned for the kids accompanying their parents. This will make the event a perfect family outing.

Menu:

The Menu will consist of mainly healthy options to promote our healthy theme for the event. Most of the food consists of healthy products like fruits and keto-related dishes on the menu, but there will be Bar BQ for the adults as well as Bar BQ is considered an essential part of family gatherings or picnic events.

Employee Voting:

Keeping in mind the theme of the whole event, there will be voting for the menu options, and all of the employees are encouraged to take part in the voting.

Games and Activities:

As this location is a resort beside the lake, water sports activities like boating, jet ski, blow-and-go parachute, and other activities and for the kids, the activities should include running competition, sports like football and stickball.

Party Gifts:

Party gifts will be a very positive addition to this event as they will motivate the families of the employees to participate in the next events as well. Small prizes for the kids who win different competitions of kids like race and climbing competitions and there will be some gifts for those who lost the competition as well. And for the adults, there will be a participation gift for everyone, and employees who participate with families will be given a decoration piece for their homes, and those who participate alone will be given a wristwatch or a shirt as a participation gift. (Mavi, 2018)

Attendance rate of management:

The attendance rate of management is low, so they will be encouraged more than any other department to participate in this annual picnic event, and they will be given some relaxation from work to motivate them.

Equipment and marketing:

Lakeside resorts have all the equipment available at their disposal, so all the equipment needed for all the activities can be rented on the spot from the resort, and marketing material for the event will be good and catchy flyers which will be delivered to all the employees.

Budget

Location:

The first and the most consuming part of this whole project is the location, and booking a good and peaceful resort with all the facilities will be expensive. The total budget of 100,000, and at least 50 percent of that budget will be invested in location. So, 50,000 will be allocated to the location.

Menu:

The second part, while distributing the budget, will go the Menu and healthy food along with BBQ will cost more money, but the budget is limited to 100,000 with a 5% contingency fund. So, the budget allocation for the food will be 30,000 as the expected number of guests will be around 350. (Ansah, 2018)

Activities:

Most of the water sports activities will be paid under the resort budget as all of these activities will be included in the budget of the resort, and some other activities like kid's competitions will cost around 5,000. Other Adult activities and competitions will also cost around 5,0000, and the equipment rented for the event will cost around 5,000 as well, so the remaining budget is 5,000 apart from the contingency fund. (Ploder, 2020)

Gifts:

So, 5,000 is our remaining budget, and we have to buy gifts and prizes for all the participants, who can cost around 15,000 to 20,000 dollars. Instead of buying reasonable products as gifts for the employees, because of the shortage of the budget, we will be forced to buy cheap products as gifts for the employees.

Conclusion:

The number of employees who are expected to participate in this event is 350 out of 500, and the management team is more than encouraged to participate in this event. If they participate with full capacity, then it will be very difficult for the project manager to run this project in this limited budget. The event and the requirements can not be fulfilled in this budget as the shortfall will be around 10,000 dollars to 20,000. So, to complete this project successfully, the budget should be increased up to 120,000, and the contingency fund should be at 10% of the total budget.

References

Mavi, R. K., & Standing, C. (2018). Critical success factors of sustainable project management in construction: A fuzzy DEMATEL-ANP approach. Journal of cleaner production194, 751-765.

Ansah, R. H., & Sorooshian, S. (2018). 4P delays in project management. Engineering, Construction, and Architectural Management.

Ploder, C., Dilger, T., & Bernsteiner, R. (2020). A Framework to Combine Corporate Budgeting with Agile Project Management. In Software Engineering (Workshops).

Liberatore, M. J., & Titus, G. J. (1983). The practice of management science in R&D project management. Management Science29(8), 962-974.

Shujat, S. S. (2011). Effects of Recreational and Entertainment Activities on Employees Job Satisfaction: A Case Study. IBT Journal of Business Studies (JBS)7(1).

Assignment 6 involves updating your project plan by creating a stakeholder communication and management plan.

The stakeholder management plan, is a tool used by project managers to help keep a close eye on all stakeholders in the manner intended. You will be provided with a template to help you complete the information. In the stakeholder management template, you will identify the following:

· Stakeholder

· Level of Power or Influence on the project

· Impact Assessment that covers how they will be impacted by the outcome of the project

· Strategy assessment that defines how you plan to manage the stakeholder.

When completing the Stakeholder Management Template please keep in mind the details of the project, the level of interest of each stakeholder and consider the best interest of the project. Remember to include both internal and external stakeholders.

Next you will use the Communication Management template to determine your communication tools and techniques. Here you must also consider your project details and information. You must also keep in mind your project team and stakeholders.

Please use the template to help you cover the following information:

· Message: What are you communicating?

· Audience: Who is receiving the communication?

· Method: What are you using to communicate?

· Frequency: How often are you sending this communication?

· Senders: Who is responsible for distributing this information?

There are many different forms of communication in a project, try to cover as many as you feel are necessary for your chosen project.

For this assignment, please submit your completed templates for both the stakeholder management and communication management plan.

Download the template as a .doc here .

Download the template as a .pdf here .

Submit your "Stakeholder and Communication Management" to the assignment folder no later than Sunday 11:59 PM EST/EDT. (This folder may be linked to Turnitin). Be sure to review the scoring rubric prior to submitting your assignment.

STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT TEMPLATE

Project Title: Date Prepared:

Role

Influence/Power

Impact Assessment

Strategies

 

 

 

 

 

COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT TEMPLATE

Project Title:

Date Prepared:

Message

Audience

Method

Frequency

Sender

 

 

 

 

 

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