Philip Bonner

African Urbanisation on the Rand Between the 1930s and 1960s: Its Social Character and Political Consequences

This paper investigates the process of African urbanisation on the Witwatersrand. It suggests that much of the existing literature on urbanisation in South Africa has tended to neglect first‐generation immigration into the towns and has preferred to focus instead on migrant labour and second‐generation African urbanites. It argues that the large‐scale settlement of first‐generation immigrants on the Witwatersrand which took place in the 1930s and 1940s was a product of a complex combination of factors ranging from the trivial to the grand, notably the independent movement of women to the towns, the changing residential ecology of the Rand and the forms in which industrial wages were paid. It goes on to trace some of the journeys by which new immigrants came to the Rand and the parochial, heterogeneous and often ethnically inflected associations which they formed in order to survive in this new environment. It concludes by examining the political implications of these transformations.

Rethinking Worlds of Labour: Southern African Labour History in International Context

South African historians and social scientists have often bemoaned ‘South African exceptionalism’: in other words a tendency to see the country’s historical trajectory as absolutely unique. Yet they have also been strangely reluctant to place their findings in a more global context. The articles which comprise this edition were papers given at a University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) History Workshop and Sociology of Work Unit international conference entitled ‘Rethinking Worlds of Labour: southern African labour history in international context’ held from 28 to 31 July 2006.

Company town, company estate: Pilgrim's Rest, 1910–1932

This study of Pilgrims Rest seeks to fill an historiographical gap by exploring labour relations on the periphery of the gold mining industry. The experience of Pilgrims Rest presents a distinctive South African wrinkle to the international phenomenon of companies’ trying to order and control the lives of their employees outside of work. The dominant gold‐mining company in the eastern Transvaal, Transvaal Gold Mining Estates, faced intense competition for labour from the Witwatersrand. To secure a stable and compliant workforce, Transvaal Gold Mining Estates established a company town for its white workers, and more notably, a company estate for its black labour force. Neither mechanism provided Transvaal Gold Mining Estates with complete control over its employees. White workers, as citizens of South Africa, found they could appeal to high‐ranking state officials to intervene in local matters. Unlike the whites, who tried to secure their position as industrial workers, black employees strove to maintai...

Keynote Address to the ‘Life after Thirty’ Colloquium

Over thirty years ago – two years before the launching of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) History Workshop (HW) – Ronald Grele wrote, in an essay titled, ‘Can anyone over thirty be trusted?’, that thirty years had passed since Allan Nevins began the first formal oral history project at Columbia University in New York. In the intervening period, Grele remarked, the oral history movement had come of age and was accepted by the community of historians. In contrast to thirty years earlier, he wrote, ‘we seem to be enjoying the respectability which comes with age’. At the same time he remarked, ‘Just like millions of individuals who have passed the invisible markers of age which our culture sets before us, this celebration comes with certain doubts. After thirty years are we to be trusted. What are our achievements and how can we assess them?’ He went on to conclude:

‘The Great Migration’ and ‘The Greatest Trek’: some reflections

This article compares and contrasts paths, patterns and experiences of migration undertaken by blacks from the southern United States moving to northern cities, and by Africans from the South African countryside moving to the Witwatersrand. It suggests marked parallels between the migration of black share‐croppers from the American South in its latter stages and in the aftermath of the First World War and the migration of African labour tenants from white South African farms in the 1930s and 1940s. It identifies analogous causes (the increasingly depressed condition of both groups, as well as natural disasters), but emphasises the distinction between causes of, and motives for, migration. It highlights the paradox of the coexistence of servitude and mobility in both situations, and plots different modalities of mobility preceding both waves of urbanisation. The article then shifts focus to examine patterns and experiences of working and survival by black immigrants in American cities and on the Witwatersrand. It plots parallel patterns of workplace oppression and discrimination (especially by white foremen) and similar kinds of overt and covert resistance among those so treated, including high levels of occupational mobility. Against this background, it examines the partly similar forms of family unit and modes of family reproduction (taking in lodgers, liquor brewing) that emerged in both places. The article concludes by exploring briefly some of the political outcomes of these pressures and experiences, and suggesting an agenda for future research.

Factions and Fissions: Transvaal/Swazi Politics in the Mid Nineteenth Century

The writing of South African history has yet to catch up with many of the historiographical advances made north of the Limpopo. This is especially obvious in the tendency to view white and black states confronting one another in the pre-conquest era as irreconcilably hostile monolithic blocks. This essay attempts to examine the reality of that interaction by focusing on the eastern Transvaal republics and the Swazi in the mid-nineteenth century. The Swazi, it suggests, were not the integrated society that is often assumed, and were forced to enlist the support of Boer factions in the eastern Transvaal to survive internal dissensions and Zulu attack. The Transvaal republics themselves were similarly divided along constitutional, political and economic lines, with access to African resources, whether for labour, for hunting, or for military assistance, constituting a crucial determinant of political power. As a result a shifting kaleidoscope of factional relationships grew up, characterized by changing political alliances and by fissions from both parties concerned. Only once they were freed from the fear of Zulu invasion after 1852 were the Swazi able to proceed undisturbed with the process of internal consolidation, and to present a more unified front to their neighbours. For the Transvaal (by then the South African Republic) that process was postponed even longer, until after the civil wars of the early 1860s, and the discovery of gold a decade after that. Only then can one talk of the South African Republic or the Swazi as being states in any meaningful way.

Introduction: Labour Crossings in Eastern and Southern Africa

This special focus presents a selection of four papers presented to an international conference on ‘Labour Crossings: World, Work, Society’, organised by the History Workshop, University of the Witwatersrand, and the Centre for Sociological Research, University of Johannesburg, from 5 to 7 September 2008. The conference drew in participants from four continents, with the East Asian and Latin American presence a particularly noteworthy development.

History and the here and now

This paper explores the lesser-known histories and present-day realities of small towns and non-metropolitan areas in the internal provinces of South Africa. It is different inasmuch as it focuses on transformations that have taken place at the local level, and where possible, generalises from these, rather than following the normal route taken by social scientists – at least from 1994, which has been to examine them from the top down. One feature of such changes has been the growth of gated communicates across the length and breadth of South Africa, but there are many more. One reason for their anonymity is that their evolution has been gradual and corpuscular, that they have become unconsciously familiar and are left unexamined. Another is our collective preoccupation with the metropolitan areas rather than the smaller localities where such processes are subterranean and confined. This paper presents very briefly some of the results of the researchers of the Local Histories and Present Realities programme over the past five years, in 19 separate centres. It examines the history and present circumstance of chiefdoms of Ga-Mphahlele and reveals the surprise finding that much of recent and contemporary politics revolve around events 200 years old. An analogous situation has arisen in Venda as well as in Mpumalanga and elsewhere, where a combination of new legislation to revive chiefly powers, and land reclamation legislation have lent a new legitimacy to chiefly powers, and inspired hundreds of phantom – and time-consuming – quests. Another massive development which has gone on around us but whose internal dynamics have never been observed is the rise of game hunting and ranching all over the interior of South Africa. This is a monster subject which is likely to have influence on all of our lives into which our group is now in a position to offer insights. A change of equal proportions is the rise of mining all over the interior Bushveld Igneous Complex – Mokopane is a good example of this and the huge social consequences this has brought in its wake. One final theme which embraces all the communities that we have studied is the local histories of transformation – collectively the most important – since 1994. This is almost entirely hidden to a wider world, including the transformed positions of local Indian residents.