Lance van Sittert

The tyranny of the past: why local histories matter in the South African fisheries

Abstract Co-management is widely advocated internationally as the solution to the purported failure of state management in the fisheries and has won adherents in South Africa. The theory, however, rests on a set of unexamined modernist assumptions, which raise serious doubts about its likely successful import to South Africa. These problems are demonstrated through a review of indigenous co-management in the South African inshore fisheries c.1905–1939. This suggests that co-management in South Africa was a historical compromise between a weak, pre-scientific state and the patrons of client fishing communities menaced by industrialisation whereby control was granted over marine resources within defined sea territories in exchange for governance at the coastal margins. The factors sustaining indigenous co-management have long since passed and the alignment of forces in the current conjuncture is hostile to its re-imposition from outside.

Marine protected area management in South Africa: new policies, old paradigms.

A historical perspective on MPA identification and governance in South Africa reflects the continued influence of a top-down and natural science-based paradigm, that has hardly changed over the past half century, despite the wealth of literature, and a growing consensus, that advocates the need to adopt a more integrated and human-centered approach. Based on extensive research in two coastal fishing communities, the paper highlights impacts and conflicts arising from this conventional approach to MPA identification, planning and management. It argues that failure to understand the particular fishery system in all its complexity, in particular the human dimensions, and involve resource users in planning and decision-making processes, undermines efforts to achieve conservation and fisheries management objectives. The customary rights of local resource users, and their food and livelihood needs in relation to marine resources, need to be acknowledged, prioritized and integrated into planning and decision-making processes. Convincing ecologists, fisheries scientists and managers, that MPA success depends on addressing the root causes of resource decline and incorporating social factors into MPA identification, planning and management, remains a huge challenge in South Africa.

Historical perspectives on global exports and research of African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis)

Trade in live animals has been associated with populations of invasive species as well as the spread of disease. The African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, was exported from its native region of southern Africa for use in pregnancy testing, and later for laboratory use as the model amphibian. We use historical export figures and publication records to detail the size and extent of the global trade. In addition, we explore the link between exports, scientific use, and invasive populations and chytrid outbreaks. Exports reached 400 000 animals in the first 30 years from 1940, but only 86 000 were sent outside Africa. Exports out of Africa peaked in the 1950s, while scientific publications using Xenopus laevis grew in the 1970s, coinciding with a rise in invasive populations and chytrid outbreaks. We show a lag between exports of Xenopus laevis and a rise in invasive populations of around 15 years. Our data demonstrate the global reach of the exports of Xenopus laevis from South Africa, and a later, much wider distribution via the scientific network which was supplied by secondary means outside of South Africa. We contend that our data demonstrate that by 1970, Xenopus laevis was the world’s most widely distributed amphibian: institutions in 48 countries were supplied with live colonies on all continents except Antarctica. There is some evidence linking exports and scientific studies with invasive populations, but others appear to be linked to secondary distributors of this species.

Bringing in the Wild: The Commodification of Wild Animals in the Cape Colony/Province c. 1850-1950

The history of the imperial/colonial elites preoccupation with saving a handful of specific ‘game’ species in reserves has come to stand for the relationship of all classes with all wild animals in both South Africa and the wider world of the British empire. The result is a narrative of process and periodization flawed in general and false in the specific case of the Cape Colony/Province, where economics rather than ideology was both the primary motor of game conservation and the mediating factor in human relationships with wild animal species. Here the general trend across the century from 1850 to 1950 was, contra MacKenzian orthodoxy, towards private not public ownership of game propelled by a rural rather than an urban elite. Public ownership was instead restricted to ‘vermin’ species in which the state created a market in which it became the chief consumer. The Capes great tradition was refracted through its customary permissive legislation to yield a myriad of small traditions at the regional or local level. Rather than an argument for Cape exceptionalism, its wild animal history is a caution against glib generalizations from the elite archive and an indication of the need to broaden prevailing ‘game reserve history’ to include the full range of human and animal inhabitants as agents rather than as residual analytical categories in any narrative.

Canis Familiaris: A Dog History of South Africa

Dogs, like humans, are products both of culture and nature. For the past twelve thousand years they have been entangled with human societies. Dogs connect the wild and the tame. They occupy an ambiguous position, straddling the opposing spheres of nature and culture.’ They occupy warm stoeps, follow their masters at night, track insurgents, patrol borders, sniff: out strangers, hunt game, protect homesteads and leave their pawprints all over the archives. Yet equally, they are often scavengers, liminal creatures in only loose association with human society, foraging at the peripheries of homesteads and nomadic groups, spreading disease and polluting civilized streets. This suite of essays is a first step in recovering Canis famifiaris ’s ubiquitous yet invisible presence in southern African history and, because of its relationship with humans, some of our own species’ past as well. What is revealed is in many respects familiar territory, albeit illuminated in an unfamiliar light, but in others it is a terra incognito mapped here for the first time. The use of the dog to think about human society has a long scholarly pedigree and the recent animal turn in the humanities has sparked a florescence of canine studies.‘ These have emphasi-

‘Making like America’: the industrialisation of the St Helena Bay Fisheries c. 1936‐c. 1956

This paper offers a critique of structuralist theories of the salience of ‘external determinants’ in South Africas post‐1945 industrialisation by way of a case study of the St Helena Bay fisheries, which underwent rapid industrialisation and subsequent deindustrialisation during and after the Second World War. This process was characterised by the state‐engineered articulation of secondary factory production with a primary fishing sector dominated by small boat owners. The reasons for this articulation are located in the nature of primary production, the rise of trade unionism in the fisheries during the war and Afrikaner nationalisms concern to foster small capital. The boat owning petty‐bourgeoisie which emerged at the Bay comprised a substantial speculative element and was unwilling to invest in new technology capable of freeing fishing from its dependence on environmental constraints. The combination of falling prices on the international market and falling catches at the Bay after 1953 created a se...

The Supernatural State: Water Divining and the Cape Underground Water Rush, 1891-1910

The revisionist scholarship on colonial science assumes its inherent rationality. The example of water divining in southern Africa, however, suggests that the irrational was as much a feature of western as indigenous knowledge systems. The state-led opening of an underground water frontier in the arid (Karoo) interior of the Cape Colony in the two decades after 1890 brought this issue into sharp focus. State water boring was guided by a combination of geological and engineering science, but encountered sustained resistance from settler farmers who preferred the word of their water diviners over the official experts in deciding where to bore. After failing to suppress the practice, the colonial state belatedly promoted and adopted it after water-boring was privatized in the mid-1900s. A detailed analysis of the wealth of correspondence on the subject in the department of agriculture journal after 1905 reveals both a sustained attempt by supporters to rationalize divining and a reticence on the part of skeptics to submit to a definitive empirical test. The debate over water divining suggests that colonial ideologies of agricultural improvement were more eclectic and irrational than crude dichotomies opposing western rationality to native superstition allow. In short, the other was within as well as without.

Begging Letters: Tin Trunk Literacy and the Empathy Economy of Tristan da Cunha, c. 1909–39

ABSTRACTEuropean colonialism fostered ‘radically constrained’ literacies in the global south dominated by the epistolary form produced by ‘tin trunk literati’ frequently scribing as amanuenses for collectives. Literacy on the British mid-South Atlantic island colony of Tristan da Cunha was marginal to the nineteenth century male exchange economy and consequently relegated to the female domestic sphere. With the shift from sail to steam in trans-oceanic shipping at the turn of the twentieth century the male exchange economy vanished and female literacy acquired a vital new importance in the creation and maintenance of an empathy economy with the Atlantic mainlands generating the manufactured imports essential to the colony’s survival. The low literacy level and new dependence for subsistence on writing undermined the patriarchal authority of ‘headmen’ and gave a small group of female amanuenses effective political power on the island. The latter worked hard to maintain their newfound power by thwarting rep...ABSTRACT European colonialism fostered ‘radically constrained’ literacies in the global south dominated by the epistolary form produced by ‘tin trunk literati’ frequently scribing as amanuenses for collectives. Literacy on the British mid-South Atlantic island colony of Tristan da Cunha was marginal to the nineteenth century male exchange economy and consequently relegated to the female domestic sphere. With the shift from sail to steam in trans-oceanic shipping at the turn of the twentieth century the male exchange economy vanished and female literacy acquired a vital new importance in the creation and maintenance of an empathy economy with the Atlantic mainlands generating the manufactured imports essential to the colony’s survival. The low literacy level and new dependence for subsistence on writing undermined the patriarchal authority of ‘headmen’ and gave a small group of female amanuenses effective political power on the island. The latter worked hard to maintain their newfound power by thwarting repeated metropolitan attempts to spread literacy or socialise the island economy and fostering fear and ignorance of the outside world among the islanders. The profoundly conservative and even oppressive nature of ‘functional literacy’ on Tristan da Cunha in the first half of the twentieth century provides a corrective to the emancipatory claims made for ‘tin trunk literacy’ elsewhere in the global south.

Historicising perceptions and the national management framework for invasive alien plants in South Africa

This article offers a historical framework for understanding changes to human perceptions and efforts to manage invasive alien plants and weeds in South Africa from the mid-nineteenth century until the present. The article argues that South African legislation and policy for managing invasive alien plants and weeds has historically been limited because people have held contradictory values about plants, many private land owners have lacked resources and have not been compelled to follow government legislation and because policy has reflected the interests of a small group of farmers or scientific experts who have had limited influence on most private land owners and traditional land users. Successful control efforts often relied on technical expertise that was applied controversially or could be implemented on government land without extensive public consultation or social conflict. The creation of a national framework for invasive alien plants through the Working for Water Programme in 1995 and National Environmental Management of Biodiversity Act (no. 10) of 2004 (NEMBA) has increased public awareness, but the Programme and NEMBA remain limited by many of the same institutional and social constraints that experts and institutions faced in the past. In conclusion, the article draws on history to provide insights to contemporary challenges.

Children for Ewes: Child Indenture in the Post-Emancipation Great Karoo: c. 1856–1909

While the employment of child labour in the Cape Colony under slavery is well known, the same cannot be said for the post-emancipation period, despite the hinge masters and servants ordinance of 1841 governing the new free labour market legitimating employment of two categories of child labour: those indentured by their parents, and ‘destitute children’ indentured by the state. Both groups left paper trails. That of destitute children is easier to follow because they had to advertised in the press, but a few scattered sets of contracts of ‘indenture of apprenticeship by parents’ (IAP) survive in the archives of the colonial magistrates. The article offers a close reading of the destitute children advertisements and IAP contract archive for one such magistracy: that of Colesberg in the Great Karoo in the second half of the 19th century. It traces patterns in the aggregate demography, form and features of the more than 250 IAP contracts signed in the magistracy over this period to demonstrate the gendered nature of child indenture, its relation to and dampening effect on adult wage rates, and its contributions to reproducing proletarian households in the commercialising pastoral economy of the Great Karoo. In so doing, it troubles two prevailing assumptions about the post-emancipation Cape labour market: that settler employers dictated the terms of exchange through coercion, and that the proletarian household was a haven from such exploitation. It detects evidence for both the patrimonial exchange and parental exploitation of proletarian children. Finally, the article offers a corrective to the scholarship on the invention of colonial childhood in the final quarter of the 19th century, based exclusively on the white middle-class experience of the south-western Cape, by suggesting that post-emancipation black childhood was without formal education or indolent adolescence, but rather an apprenticeship in labour.While the employment of child labour in the Cape Colony under slavery is well known, the same cannot be said for the post-emancipation period, despite the hinge masters and servants ordinance of 1841 governing the new free labour market legitimating employment of two categories of child labour: those indentured by their parents, and ‘destitute children’ indentured by the state. Both groups left paper trails. That of destitute children is easier to follow because they had to advertised in the press, but a few scattered sets of contracts of ‘indenture of apprenticeship by parents’ (IAP) survive in the archives of the colonial magistrates. The article offers a close reading of the destitute children advertisements and IAP contract archive for one such magistracy: that of Colesberg in the Great Karoo in the second half of the 19th century. It traces patterns in the aggregate demography, form and features of the more than 250 IAP contracts signed in the magistracy over this period to demonstrate the gendered n...