Derek Charles Catsam

Marching in the “Dark City”: Bus Boycotts in South Africa in the 1940s and the Limits and Promise of Comparative History

In early January 1957, South Africa’s Public Utility Transport Corporation (PUTCO) announced that it would be raising bus fares by one penny, from 4d to 5d. Spokesmen for the parastatal organization announced that this would be the first fare increase on PUTCO buses in twenty years, and was largely the result of rising petroleum costs. The fare hike would take place effective on 7 January, a Monday. In response, more than two thousand black South Africans in the northern Johannesburg township of Alexandra met under the leadership of the Alexandra People’s Transport Committee (APTC) and voted to commence a boycott of PUTCO. That Monday, thousands heeded the boycott, with APTC estimating that more than five thousand walked the nine-plus miles into Johannesburg, the main center of employment opportunities for township dwellers. Residents of Sophiatown also boycotted PUTCO services, as did blacks in Lady Selborne, a Pretoria township where fares had also increased. PUTCO officials estimated that Monday ridership was down to two percent of its normal levels; and by 8 January the boycott was total, with no black riders in Alexandra. Some thirteen months earlier and thousands of miles away, in December 1955 Rosa Parks had famously refused to yield her seat when ordered to do so by a bus

“The Creation of a Frustrated People”: Race, Education, the Teaching of History and South African Historiography in the Apartheid Era

South African history is inextricably bound with the issue of race. As a consequence, South African historiography is inextricably bound with the country’s racial past (and present). Almost inarguably, no country’s humanities culture is as deeply tied to the concept and the manifestation of race as is South Africa’s. And while in the period after World War II race may have lost much of its legitimacy as a cultural, political and scientific category, the caveat is that such a trend played out just about everywhere save southern Africa, where Apartheid and white supremacy reigned not only in South Africa until 1994 but also in South-West Africa/Namibia until 1990 and Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe until 1980. And even after the end of Apartheid rule and South Africa’s multiparty, multiracial elections in 1994, race has continued to dominate the work of South Africa’s historians and historians of South Africa the world over. This chapter looks at the development of South African historiography during the Apartheid era and assesses the state of both the historiography and the historical profession in the nearly two decades since Nelson Mandela’s release.

Safundi Book Notes

This is a new semi-regular feature on books and other media. Given the wide geographic, thematic, disciplinary, and chronological range that Safundi covers, there are always more new books, documen...

A Review of “The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics”

demonstrated that the Free Soil movement represented a temporary diversion rather than a major alteration. The first book-length study of the 1848 contest in forty years, Party over Section ably presents the complexities of the contest in a brief 156 pages. Scholars will find careful accounts of party conventions, organizations, funding, and campaign activities, as well as of the process of voting. Appendices provide the Democratic and Free Soil platforms, along with the Whig “Statement of Principles” and Taylor’s inaugural address. The work’s length and clarity make it useful for classroom assignment, although some complex sentences will challenge undergraduates. In sum, Party over Section is a welcome contribution that should become the standard account of an important yet often overlooked election.

Introduction: Southern Identity: Geography, Culture, and History in the Making of the American South

Safundi’s readers are well aware that at the heart of this journal’s endeavor, the attempt to understand South Africa and the United States through a comparative and transnational lens, are the truculent questions of identity. Surely there are lots of potential nodes of comparison between these two countries, but without the vexing dilemmas of race, and the politics that accompany race, it seems unlikely that there would be the need for Safundi to exist. Jim Crow and apartheid represent the victory of white supremacy over a dark-skinned other. The civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid struggle represent a demand for equal rights, equal justice, and equal treatment in those societies where white supremacy prevailed in whole or in part. Race, ethnicity, identity, and the reconciliation of otherness in many ways represent Safundi’s sine qua non. Race and racial identity are, for better or worse, defining elements of the historical experience of both the United States and South Africa. In this special issue of Safundi on the theme of ‘‘Southern identity,’’ we aim to illuminate some aspects of the experience in the United States, but hope that our readers will continue the conversation by drawing lines and making connections with the South African experience. Secretly, many historians of the American South suffer periodic existential crises. This is understandable, what with C. Vann Woodward having asked as far back as 1960 whether there was even any point in Southerners calling themselves ‘‘Southerners’’ and John Egerton having declared the Southernization of the United States and the Americanization of the South some three decades ago. And with several generations of Southern history as a discrete phenomenon, most historians of the region still cannot definitively say what ‘‘the South’’ even is.

Reply: The Irony of Southern Identity: A Defense of Communal Imaginations

My initial response upon reading Alex Lichtenstein’s thoughtful and pointed (if at times barbed) response to our small collection of essays on Southern identity, and more directly, to my introduction to this special issue of Safundi, was to take what those who know me might consider to be an uncharacteristic tack: to agree that he may be right. I can see where my introduction might be both reductionist and deterministic, and as I believe I readily acknowledge, the issue of Southern identity is broad and difficult to pin down. Lichtenstein is a perceptive and talented scholar whose work I have long admired. My approach in writing the introductory essay for this collection was, as I indicated, to allow scholars working on facets of Southern identity to answer some questions that Jeff Woods and I had initially posed, and not to write a conclusive treatise on the topic. I believe that questions of identity are important in history, both because a large enough swath of Southerners have invested themselves in this question, and, perhaps more importantly, because many of the dilemmas of Southern history, particularly those vexatious questions of race and racism, are directly tied to issues of identity. Identity can often become contested terrain, a proprietary realm within which all sorts of other conflicts are fought. When Lichtenstein differentiates between the role of race in Southern history and the role of racial domination, is he not parsing unnecessarily, making a distinction without a meaningful difference? In studying the history of the South, one cannot reasonably study race without racial domination, as the one is the sine qua non of the other. Identity, and especially proprietary identity, involves not only who and what one believes oneself to be, it also involves the establishment of an other, who is not the same as oneself. This attempt to claim oneself (or more to the point, one’s

Brave New Worlds

Using Robert Kennedys 1966 speech at the University of Cape Town as a method of introduction, the author discusses his experience teaching a comparative U.S. and South African course and provides both the rationale for such a course and the syllabus used in the classroom.

Choosing the Wings on Which One Soars

The author responds and offers a critique of Lewis V. Baldwins article in Issue 16 of Safundi, “Soaring on the Wings of Pride: Martin Luther King Jr. and the ‘New’ South Africa.” The author questions the continued relevance of the United States’ civil rights history to South Africa today, that the article “tends to overemphasize the importance of the American racist past for South Africans.”

What's Greatness Got to Do with It?

The author continues a discussion on Martin Luther King Jr.s lasting legacy in South Africa in the 1980s, begun with the publication of Lewis V. Baldwins article in Safundi Issue 16, “Soaring on the Wings of Pride: Martin Luther King Jr. and the ‘New’ South Africa.”

Brave New Worlds: Teaching Comparative United States and South African Race Relations

Using Robert Kennedys 1966 speech at the University of Cape Town as a method of introduction, the author discusses his experience teaching a comparative U.S. and South African course and provides both the rationale for such a course and the syllabus used in the classroom.