Keith Shear

Chiefs or Modern Bureaucrats? Managing Black Police in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

• Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. • Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. • User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) • Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain.

From ethnographic knowledge to anthropological intelligence: An anthropologist in the office of strategic services in Second World War Africa

ABSTRACT This article explores the overlapping modalities and practical purposes of anthropological ethnographic knowledge and political–military intelligence gathering – the commonalities as well as the boundaries between them – through an analysis of the career of the anthropologist Jack Sargent Harris (1912–2008), a secret operative for the United States’ Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War in Nigeria and South Africa. Calling upon archival and oral historical sources, the article relates Harris’s training in Boasian cultural anthropology and as a professional ethnographer of African societies and cultures to the ways he recruited informants, conducted surveillance, related to foreign Allied officials, utilized documentary evidence, and worked to establish authority and credibility in his wartime intelligence reporting. The article argues that political purpose is a central artefact of anthropological ethnography as it is in other ethnographic modalities even if the justifications for these endeavours remain distinct.

At War with the Pass Laws? Reform and the Policing of White Supremacy in 1940s South Africa

This article analyses a key reformist gesture by General Smutss Second World War South African government – the May 1942 order suspending enforcement of the pass laws in major cities. Hated by Africans for curbing their mobility, employment opportunities, and urban residence rights, the pass laws were a fundamental instrument of white supremacy. What then did the suspension order signify? Reconstructing debates and divisions within and beyond the state, the article traces the steps leading to the suspension order, and discusses the responses to its implementation resulting in its later withdrawal. The account considers common explanations for the suspension orders genesis: industrys demand for labour, the wartime states reduced policing capability, and official anxieties about Africans’ loyalty at a time of vulnerability to invasion. Of these, only the last has clear merit. The real puzzle is the relaxations continuance beyond the emergency situation of 1942. For this, the credit belongs to the momentum of liberal organization and opinion in encouraging advocates of reform within the state to hold their nerve. Only gradually could the opposition Nationalists, the party of apartheid, mobilize whites’ hostility to black urbanization, thereby enhancing the influence of restorationist elements within the state calling for renewed coercion.

TESTED LOYALTIES: POLICE AND POLITICS IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1939–63 *

Well into their rule, at a time when South Africa was increasingly perceived as a police state, the Nationalists, the party of apartheid, depended for the implementation of their policies on structures and personnel inherited from previous governments. Even in the South African Police, the institution most associated with the countrys authoritarian reputation, key developments of the early apartheid decades originated in and cannot properly be understood without reference to the preceding period. A legacy of conflict between pro- and anti-war white policemen after 1939 was particularly significant. Concentrating on the careers and views of illustrative officers, notably members of the Special Branch, rather than on ‘the police’ in abstraction, this article analyses the complexities and continuities in the South African states handling of domestic dissent in the years before and after the apartheid election of 1948.