Peter Delius

Sexual Socialisation in South Africa: A Historical Perspective

The HIV/AIDS pandemic in Southern Africa has focused attention on how children and youth learn about sex. This research has revealed an alarming failure of communication between parents and children on sexual issues. Parents find it very difficult to broach the issue of sex with their children who as a result have little option but to seek information elsewhere -- normally from their peers. There is also now a considerable body of work on sexual attitudes and practices which paints a bleak picture of contemporary realities. There are high levels of premarital sexual activity and teenage pregnancy. But perhaps most disturbing of all is the research on youth sexuality that suggests that sex -- especially for girls -- is often coercive and violent and that this is to some extent accepted as the norm by both males and females. While these patterns are increasingly well documented they have not been adequately explained. Some commentators have suggested that a promiscuous and violent sexual culture is primordial in Africa and that contemporary realities are an inevitable outcome. This point of view unsurprisingly has angered many people on the continent. It also contradicts historical evidence. (excerpt)

Sex, disease and stigma in South Africa: historical perspectives

This paper attempts to analyse historically why stigma and denial around HIV/AIDS is so powerful in South Africa, so powerful that ailing family members can be shunned and evicted. For many observers, the answer lies simply in its being a venereal disease, in its connotation with promiscuity and unregulated sexuality. We argue that this is not an adequate explanation. Pre-colonial African societies were relatively open about sexuality. Though pre-marital and adulterous pregnancy certainly caused social disruption, extra-marital sex per se was not stigmatised. Even the sexual shame introduced (unevenly) by Christianity and its hybridised forms is inadequate in explaining the degree of stigma associated with HIV/AIDS. We extend the discussion by exploring the stigma associated with various forms of pollution and the inevitability of death. The peculiarly interwoven mixture of sexual transgression, pollution and delayed death, we argue, makes HIV/AIDS an extraordinarily powerful generator of stigma.

Strengthening institutional safety nets in South Africa: Sharing operation hunger's insights and experiences

Poverty and malnutrition are major problems in South Africa, especially among black people in rural areas. The poorest are heavily dependent on social pensions, remittances, low wages, piece jobs and, to a very small extent, household agriculture. Industrial safety nets are weak and do not necessarily help the vulnerable to overcome their poverty. This article draws on the experience of Operation Hunger, a South African NGO founded in 1980, to examine the impact of poverty-alleviation programmes on the recipients. The article reviews the strategies employed by the government and NGOs to strengthen vulnerable households -food aid, public works and agricultural programmes - drawing on Operation Hungers experience in these areas. The article concludes that targeting, monitoring and evaluating, and piloting development programmes are crucial, and stresses the importance of NGOs in this regard.

Sebatakgomo; Migrant Organization, the ANC and the Sekhukhuneland Revolt*

This article argues that Sebatakgomo — a migrant worker based political organization formed from within the ANC in 1954 — played a crucial role in the events that culminated in the Sekhukhuneland Revolt of 1958. It places the emergence of the movement in the context of changing patterns of migrant employment and association from the 1930s. And it traces Sebatakgomos involvement in mounting popular resistance in the eastern Transvaal to state attempts to restructure rural society in the 1950s.

Inboekselings and Oorlams: The creation and transformation of a servile class

In the thirty years between 1840 and 1870 a new underclass came into being on the highveld of South Africa. The members of this class were known to the Boer society of what became the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) as Inboekselings, the unfree servants of the white households in the interior. Inboekselings were children and to a much lesser extent young women formally apprenticed ingeboek to Boer settlers and they were acquired by these households either as a result of being taken captive by Boer commandos, or they were handed over by African societies as tokens of political and diplomatic assurance, or they were sold by settlers or by some African societies. There were also an unknown number of clients-cum-servants who had remained with the Boers when they migrated from the Cape in the eighteen-thirties and eighteen-forties. Inboekselings were acquired in these various ways by Boer society in an attempt to reconstitute itself after its migrations into the interior. This was because in their new settings the Boers could, for the most part, no longer call upon the variety of forms of labour which had, in different ways, served the households in the pre-Trek Cape. Because British influence prevented the establishment of a formal system of slavery with a slave code and an open market in human beings and because settler society on the highveld was too weak to maintain such a system, these children and young women were ultimately incorporated, not as slaves but as a dependent servile class. The exact situation of members of this social class rested on both the demands made upon them by settlers and on their capacity to resist their demands. They might, therefore, have become either household servants, professional hunters serving the household economy, or dependent tenants mediating between Boer households and the farm servants of later decades. Others broke away from rural society to become some of the first black townsmen of the pre-mining 19th century highveld villages and towns. Similarly, mission stations may have also provided havens of a kind for those

Soil Conservation in a Racially Ordered Society: South Africa 1930-1970

This paper examines the ways in which the formulation and implementation of strategies of soil conservation in South Africa during the period 1930–1970 were powerfully influenced by racist attitudes and by the differential political and economic position of whites and blacks within the systems of segregation and apartheid. The paper traces and compares the evolution of state intervention in pursuit of soil conservation in relation to white farmlands and African reserves with a particular emphasis on processes in the Transvaal. The forms of state intervention that emerged provoked bitter resistance in many African communities while they unintentionally supported inefficient and destructive practices amongst many white farmers. The policies took different forms, changed over time and had diverse consequences. But they did achieve an overall uniformity of outcome ‐ they failed to live up to the expectations of conservationists. The paper seeks to demonstrate that there were problems both with excessively coercive and excessively cooperative policy approaches, which suggests that a policy framework that strikes a balance between the two extremes is likely to be more successful.

Sebatakgomo and the Zoutpansberg Balemi Association: The ANC, the Communist Party and Rural Organization, 1939–55

Sebatakgomo — a migrant worker-based movement – was founded in 1954 and went on to play a central role in the Sekhukhuneland Revolt of 1958. It was launched from within the ANC, and a number of its leaders were also members of the Communist Party. This article explores the roles played by these wider political movements in the formation of Sebatakgomo. It argues that, while ANC networks and individuals within its central leadership made an important contribution, the rural presence of the ANC was fragmentary in this period and that its central organizational strategies had been effectively checkmated by an increasingly authoritarian state. It suggests that the crucial initial impetus and strategy behind Sebatakgomo came from Communist Party members living in a migrant world and trained in the Partys history and methods of organization. In particular Alpheus Maliba, who led the Zoutpansberg Balemi Association in the northern Transvaal in the early 1940s, provided a mentor and model for Flag Boshielo, who was the driving force in the establishment of Sebatakgomo. The article also suggests that the history of Sebatakgomo provides an example of the impact of Communist Party activists in transforming the ANC into a mass organization in the early 1950s.

The Historical Context and Legacy of the Natives Land Act of 1913

The Natives Land Act of 1913 was a key example of the segregationist and racist legislation that fixed discriminatory foundations in South African law. We argue in this article that the Act did not take land away from African people directly, and that in the short term its impact was limited. Its most immediate effect was to undermine black tenants on white-owned land, but even here the consequences were mixed and slow to materialise. In many ways the 1913 Land Act was a holding operation and statement of intent about segregation on the land. These are some of the most difficult issues in understanding the Act and its legacy, in part because the Act itself tends to become subsumed into, and ascribed responsibility for, other historical processes: dispossession during the nineteenth century, and apartheid in the second half of the twentieth century. This article sets the Act and its consequences in historical context and, drawing on a number of case studies, points to regional and even local variations in its impact. Our analysis contests some of the conclusions in key books by Plaatje (in the 1910s) and Keegan (in the 1980s). We review some of the major discussions about the social forces behind the Act, assess its significance in destroying the African peasantry and shaping the system of migrant labour, question ideas about a bifurcated world of urban citizens and rural subjects, and conclude by outlining our view of some of its most enduring and destructive legacies. These include outcomes that were not specified in the original legislation, such as the cementing of traditional authorities in the African rural areas.

Reading the Rocks and Reviewing Red Herrings

Stonewalls connect over 10,000 square kilometres of the Mpumalanga highveld into a complex web of homesteads, towns, terraces and roads, that stretches for 150 kilometres in an almost continuous belt. They suggest a substantial population, and speak to the investment of vast amounts of labour in infrastructural development along with extraordinary levels of agricultural innovation and productivity. This network of stone embodies Bokoni, the pre-nineteenth century home of people from a range of origins who practiced distinctive forms of agriculture (Maggs 2008) and participated in regional and international trade (Delius and Schoeman 2008). Yet, the academic gaze seldom rested long on these extraordinary archaeological/historical sites, hence thin archaeological accounts are supplemented by even thinner historical accounts. Whilst archaeologists and historians largely ignored Bokoni, exotic accounts have proliferated. In this article we explore why so little academic research has focused on Bokoni and why exotic accounts became so dominant.

Caught in a Crossfire: A History of Covie, 1883-2002

Covie village lies amid fynbos and forest on the cliffs high above the rocky Tsitsikamma coast. In 1970 it was a bustling settlement of over 250 people living in wooden cottages on ample stands with access to a large commonage which stretched down towards the sea. The majority of the inhabitants were classified as coloured. But a handful of white families still lived there despite the tightening grip of apartheid on the wider society. By the 1980s little remained of the community. Most of the people had been moved and their cottages had been destroyed. Only a few scattered houses and the fading outlines of the old stands remained to mark the site. Grim transformations of this kind were, of course, commonplace in South Africa in these decades as millions of people were uprooted and resettled by the zealous application of racial segregation. But the application of racist legislation does not alone account for Covie’s demise. Indeed in 1976 it appeared that the coloured population of Covie had been able to use the Group Areas Act to protects its position when a successful application was made to have Covie designated a coloured area. This new status was not, however, sufficient, to protect the village from powerful adversaries. The history of Covie provides a case study which traces the emergence of a racially mixed woodcutter community and shows how the classifications, restrictions, contradictions and opportunities created within the apartheid system moulded its fate. In the 1970s coloured leaders at Covie attempted to work within apartheid ideology and institutions to try to entrench their claim to the land and to secure additional services and resources. Their attempts to do so were aided by the growing concern within sections of the state to build support in the coloured community. But their initiatives were ultimately undermined by countervailing