Hilary Sapire

Politics and protest in shack settlements of the Pretoria‐Witwatersrand‐Vereeniging region, South Africa, 1980–1990

(1992). Politics and protest in shack settlements of the Pretoria‐Witwatersrand‐Vereeniging region, South Africa, 1980–1990. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 18, Political Violence in Southern Africa, pp. 670-697.

Apartheid's 'testing ground': urban 'native policy' and African politics in Brakpan South Africa 1943-1948

Although studies of both state ‘urban native’ policy and African life on the Witwatersrand in the 1940s have increased in volume and sophistication over the last decade, these two themes have generally been treated discretely in the literature. While a regional focus has yielded a complex and differentiated picture of urban African politics and culture, studies of the state still tend to miss this complexity by focusing on the ‘view from above’, from the vantage point of central state institutions. This article draws together these two separate historiographical threads to examine state policy from the perspective of local state officials, those individuals most intimately concerned with day-to-day administration of urban African communities in the rapidly industrialising Witwatersrand of the 1940s. Through the narrative of a deep personal antagonism between an African politician in the Witwatersrand location of Brakpan and a white administrator, the article explores the intersection of two microcosms: the world of the Afrikaner intellectual, educated in the tradition of ‘volkekunde’ and thereby claiming expert knowledge of the African, and the real worlds of the Africans the expert claimed to know—themselves shaped by new, radical currents in the changing wartime urban context. Using the Brakpan case study, the article also shows that in contrast to the national governments fumbling indecision in the face of the urban crisis, it was the municipalities which agitated for state control over all Africans, tighter influx and efflux controls and the more efficient distribution of African labour between different economic sectors. In voicing their discontent with state policy and in their policy improvizations, local officials anticipated much in the apartheid order of the 1950s.

Township Histories, Insurrection and Liberation in Late Apartheid South Africa

Abstract This article reviews the literature on resistance in South Africas African townships that emerged in response to the township insurgencies of the 1980s and early 1990s. It focuses on two bodies of writing: the literature that chronicled the revolt as it unfolded on the one hand, and the historical literature that explored township politics and culture during the first half of the twentieth century on the other. It evaluates these writings’ strengths and points to the inevitable gaps and blind spots. It also highlights the disjunctures that existed between the two. The current wave of historical writing on South Africas liberation struggle as well as the reassertion of township-based resistance and of township history gives this survey a particular salience. This article argues for the need for both a ‘joined-up’ liberation history that gives due place to the township-based rebellions (as opposed to one that is subordinated to that of the exiled ANC in contemporary public history) and one that recognises the deeper roots of, and continuities with, earlier phases of township resistance and rebellion. It also considers this body of writing in the light of subsequent critiques of the resistance paradigm and the social history approach that dominated the study of townships in the 1980s.

African loyalism and its discontents: the royal tour of South Africa, 1947

This article explores the late flowering of ‘black loyalism’ during the visit of the British royal family to Southern Africa in the summer of 1947. Whereas most accounts of post-war African politics emphasize the radicalization of political organizations, the growth of nationalism, and grassroots insurgency, this account of African engagement with the royal tour indicates that professed faith in the British monarchy as the embodiment and guardian of the rights and liberties of all peoples living under the crown was more widespread and longer lived than is generally assumed. However evanescent the phenomenon, extensive participation in the ceremonial rituals associated with the tour and the outpouring of expressions of black loyalism underlines the fluidity and unpredictability of black politics in this decade. At such a highly charged moment internationally, with India on the cusp of independence, and political turmoil at home, there was reason to hope that the loyalty of Africans during the Second World War might just be rewarded by the extension of political rights. This article traces the complex legacies and contested expressions of ‘black loyalism’ in what was effectively its swansong.

Liberation Movements, Exile, and International Solidarity: An Introduction* * I am grateful to Wayne Dooling and Donal Lowry for their suggestions and references, and Saul Dubow, Shula Marks and Jeremy Krikler for their incisive comments on an original draft of this introduction. Thula Simpson kindly made his unpublished articles available to me.

The publication of a special issue of this journal devoted to the entwined histories of the Southern African liberation struggles and international solidarity has been timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the British Anti Apartheid Movement. The largest and most sustained international solidarity movement ever mounted in the United Kingdom, it was a key constituent of a worldwide mobilisation of solidarity with Southern African liberation struggles that traversed national boundaries, bridged domestic divides and gathered mass support from ordinary people on political and moral grounds. The anniversary provides an apposite moment to reflect upon its history, and to showcase the most recent scholarship on international solidarity movements and the subcontinent’s freedom struggles which they championed.

Engendering Segregation: ‘Black Women's Work’ in the Urban American South and South Africa in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

An enduring preoccupation of the comparative scholars of American and South African societies has been the creation and entrenchment of racially divided social orders. Whilst race and class relations, and their complex intertwining, have been at the centre of these studies, the analytical category of gender has only obliquely been brought into the comparative equation. Historians of the United States and South Africa, however, have increasingly devoted attention to the gendered character of racial ideologies, the operation of political power, and the social relations of gender within in and between the ‘ruling races’ and the subordinate or subaltern black societies.’ The powerful insights yielded from these country-

Rebuffing Royals? Afrikaners and the Royal Visit to South Africa in 1947

ABSTRACT This article traces the responses of Afrikaners to the symbolism and political purposes of the 1947 royal visit to Southern Africa, the first post-war royal tour and the first visit of a reigning sovereign to the Union of South Africa. Taking place in the aftermath of a war that had caused bitter political divisions within Afrikaner ranks and stimulated radical populist nationalism, a royal tour intended to express the crowns gratitude for South Africas participation in that war was bound to be contentious. Drawing on press accounts, biographies, autobiographies and archival sources, this article argues that the layered reactions of Afrikaners demonstrate that, even on the eve of the National Partys electoral victory on a republican and apartheid platform, attitudes towards monarchy and the British connection were more fluid and ambiguous than either contemporary propaganda or recent accounts have allowed. The diverse meanings attributed to this iconic royal tour reveal a process of intense contestation and reflection about South Africas place in an empire that was in the throes of post-war redefinition and transformation, and confirm recent characterisations of the 1940s as one of manifold possibilities such that outcomes, like the electoral victory of the National Party in the following year, was far from predetermined.

‘We have seen the son of Heaven/We have seen the Son of Our Queen’

Book synopsis: Mistress of everything examines how indigenous people across Britains settler colonies engaged with Queen Victoria in their lives and predicaments, incorporated her into their political repertoires, and implicated her as they sought redress for the effects of imperial expansion during her long reign. It draws together empirically rich studies from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Africa, to provide scope for comparative and transnational analysis. The book includes chapters on a Maori visit to Queen Victoria in 1863, meetings between African leaders and the Queens son Prince Alfred in 1860, gift-giving in the Queens name on colonial frontiers in Canada and Australia, and Maori womens references to Queen Victoria in support of their own chiefly status and rights. The collection offers an innovative approach to interpreting and including indigenous perspectives within broader histories of British imperialism and settler colonialism.

Introduction – South Africa on Film

This Part Special Issue on ‘South Africa on Film’ reflects both the exponential growth in film history since the 1980s and the visual turn taken in social research in Southern African Studies more recently. While the articles reflect this flourishing academic interest in southern African (and African) film and build on an extant, albeit modest, scholarship on film history and cinema-going in southern African urban popular culture, they have also been prompted by the increasing availability of this medium to researchers through the digitisation of film and the labours of film historians and scholars in identifying obscure or forgotten film footage of the region, whether these are silent feature, instructional film or newsreels scattered in archives in southern Africa, Britain and Europe. The details of the provenance of films discussed in the articles and some lengthy footnotes referencing archival holdings have been retained because a key purpose behind this Part Special Issue is to provide a resource both for teaching and research and to draw attention to these compelling and woefully underused primary sources, some of which have been used for the first time by authors of these articles, and who are also thus key contributors to the construction of a new archive – an issue addressed in Carli Coetzee’s afterword. All articles address films made in the first half of the twentieth century, and necessarily, therefore, are concerned with the early history of the medium and the film and entertainment industry in South and southern Africa. Three of the articles are written by historians with a specialist interest in film as historical sources and the role of film in the history of society and culture more generally, but – given the complex nature of this source, the motion picture’s own ‘language’ and its distinctiveness from the ‘paper’ or literary sources characteristically used by historians – the authors have embraced an ‘interdisciplinary openness’. In all cases too, whilst closely analysing the films, authors draw upon a wider range of literary sources and, as in Vivian Bickford-Smith’s article on ‘cinematic cities’, they consider the mutual borrowings and contestations between film and written sources. The articles by film scholars