Anne Kelk Mager

Youth Organisations and the Construction of Masculine Identities in the Ciskei and Transkei, 1945-1960

Organisations of Xhosa‐speaking youth — predominantly boys and young men — in the 1950s and 1960s were critical spaces for the construction of masculine identities in rural Ciskei and Transkei. In the context of post‐Second World War industrialisation, collapsing reserve agriculture and apartheid rule, these organisations were critical sites for filtering influences and fashioning values and lifestyles. While boys and young men constantly reconstructed a distinction between boyhood and manhood around the axis of circumcision, they reinvented notions of masculinity in the shadow of decreasing prospects of establishing themselves as men with rural homesteads and herds of cattle. Moreover, in the absence of migrant fathers, youth organisations operated with considerable autonomy in rural localities. Concomitantly, the terrain on which boys and young men constructed their identities was shaped more by inter‐group rivalry, aggressive behaviour and control over girls than by generational conflict.

The Apartheid Project, 1948–1970

The idea of apartheid has long had an international currency that goes well beyond its national historical reference. Apartheid originated as a label for the system of institutionalised racism and racial social engineering inaugurated by the National Party after its election victory in 1948. But the term has since been appropriated as a global signifier of racialised separation, inhumanity and exploitation. International cross-references have the virtue of prompting a more global reading of apartheid as one among many projects of racialised discrimination and subjugation. The historiography of apartheid has tended to be rather more insular and inward looking in the past, particularly in the thick of the anti-apartheid struggle, when the specificities of the South African experience dominated both the analytical and the political agenda of debate. Yet there is also the obvious risk of caricature, essentialising and dehistoricising a system of rule that was more internally fractious and fractured, historically fluid and complex, than the formulaic reductions can possibly render. The symbolic condensation of apartheid as the global signifier of racism risks conferring an apparent – and misleading – transparency on the system of apartheid, as if comprehensible simply as the extremity of racism. This renders its historical unevenness and complexity irrelevant and/or uninteresting.

The Economy and Poverty in the Twentieth Century

The South African economy experienced substantial growth and change over the twentieth century. By the time of Union in 1910, gold mining on the Witwatersrand had already and rapidly transformed what had been a peripheral agricultural economy into one that was industrialising around mineral exports. Gold attracted British capital and immigrants from Europe (as well as from across southern Africa), and made possible secondary industrialisation and four decades of sustained economic growth in the middle of the century. Between the early 1930s and early 1970s, the South African economy grew approximately tenfold in real terms. Even taking into account the steady increase in the population, real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita tripled (see Figure 11.1). Despite faltering growth in the 1980s, South Africa accounted for almost exactly one half of the total GDP of sub-Saharan Africa at the end of the apartheid period, in 1994.

Apartheid and business: Competition, monopoly and the growth of the malted beer industry in South Africa

The South African brewing industry experienced enormous growth in the apartheid era, following the lifting of prohibition on the sale of ‘European liquor’ to Africans in 1961. Successive international brewers and local entrepreneurs sought to benefit from increased demand in the 1970s but were unable to withstand competition from South African Breweries (SAB), the dominant player in the industry. A decade of intense competition in the brewing industry ended with the intervention of the cabinet of the Afrikaner Nationalist government. SABs status as ‘sole supplier to the industry’ remained virtually unchallenged until the demise of apartheid and the end of South Africas international isolation. The end of apartheid and changes in the global brewing industry brought renewed competition to the South African beer market in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Sexuality, fertility and male power

In the decade following the second world war, more and more African women were relegated to objects of sexual gratification, as men attempted to reassert their patriarchal domination. ANNE MAGER examines sexuality, fertility and male power in the Eastern Cape in the 1950s

Trafficking in Liquor, Trafficking in Heritage: Beer Branding as Heritage in Post‐apartheid South Africa

A burgeoning literature on post‐apartheid heritage configuration has largely overlooked the use of branding in the creation of heritage discourses in South Africa and the significance of liquor for national identity. This article brings these two concerns together through an examination of two heritage‐scapes—the SAB World of Beer and the SAB Newlands Brewery Heritage Centre—constructed by South African Breweries (SAB) in 1995. It suggests that the commercial construction of heritage as branding provided a vehicle for a powerful corporate capitalist narrative in the post‐apartheid rhetorical contestation over a desired path for the future. It also suggests that dissonance within and between these corporate visitors’ centres mirrored a wider uncertainty over the meaning of national identity in early post‐apartheid South Africa.

Patriarchs, politics and ethnicity in the making of the Ciskei, 1945-1959

Abstract The demise of the Ciskeian General Council or Bunga in 1955 was followed by the implementation of the Bantu Authorities Act (1951) and the reinforcement of patriarchal control. This political restructuring was linked to ongoing changes in gender power relations and was partly an attempt to contain them. Vast opportunities were offered to collaborating men by a Bantu Affairs Department seeking a measure of consensus for its new‐style indirect rule. Concomitantly, militant chiefs and fiery African nationalists were removed and replaced by those who saw some gain in adopting an ethnic stance and a reinforcement of patriarchal authority.

Colonial Conquest and the Tambookie Frontier: The Story of Maphasa, c.1830–1853

Tambookie, the San name for abaThembu, was adopted by the British for the area north of the eastern Cape colonial boundary in the 1820s. By the 1830s, all those who lived in this liminal zone had become snared in the trap of conquest – none perhaps as inexorably as Maphasa, chief of the amaTshatshu, a Thembu clan. Unstable colonial policy and successive failed attempts to control the Tambookie frontier between 1830 and 1850 buffeted Maphasa. After the eighth frontier war, the British singled out his people serving on them a proclamation that sought to destroy their political power and group identity. In an effort to understand the position of Maphasa and the destruction of his people, this article explores the making of the Tambookie frontier and discusses the chiefs vulnerability in his relations with the Moravian missionaries, the Thembu paramount and the British. The story of Maphasa amplifies the history of the north eastern frontier and raises questions for the crisis in African authority in the mid-nineteenth century.

Resistance and Reform, 1973–1994

Between 1973 and 1994, a succession of protests and rebellions transfigured South African political life. These eruptions assumed different forms and supplied different leaders and followers within different groups, but increasingly they converged strategically. Together, they embodied a challenge to authority without precedent in its scale, its resilience and in its depth of organisation. Early stages of this resistance engendered significant shifts in government policies. These policy shifts themselves in turn both facilitated and provoked fresh waves of revolt. Whilst opening up new opportunities for organised resistance, a combination of liberal reforms and militarised repression succeeded in containing or at least defining limits to popular insurgency. The relative success of these state policies helps to explain why the political settlement of 1994 left intact much of the structure of an extremely inequitable society.

Gungubele and the Tambookie Location 1853-1877: end of a colonial experiment

This article brings a fresh perspective to colonial encounter in the north-eastern Cape frontier through the story of Gungubele, chief of a senior Thembu clan living in the southern part of the Tambookie location. Queenstown and the Tambookie location were established as twin colonial projects at the end of the seventh frontier war. While the location evolved as a prototype experiment in peasant agriculture and freehold tenure, the white town provided a locus for settler colonial commerce and magisterial control over the district that encompassed the Tambookie location. Both projects were creations of frontier conflict, and tensions simmered. Boers coveted the land granted to Africans in the district, and residents of Queenstown struggled to align their dependence on indigenous people with their desire to distance themselves from them. African inhabitants of the Tambookie location chafed at their confinement in a tiny corner of the vast territory from which they had been routed. In 1856–67, the episode known as the Great Cattle Killing shifted economic power relations and created a new dependence on the white colonists. Making use of this vulnerability in the mid 1860s, colonial authorities attempted to relocate Africans further away from Queenstown in order to free up land for further colonial settlement. When this strategy failed, they fell back on the hope of drawing Africans into settler capitalist development, and began tinkering with the system of land tenure, imposing taxes and appointing compliant headmen. Tensions exploded in 1877, when the Queenstown magistracy clashed with Gungubele, setting in motion the final tragic showdown between the colonists and the Tambookie location. The moment came to define the hardening character of settler colonialism on the north-eastern frontier and inexorably altered relations both within African society and between colonist and colonised.