Saul Dubow

Racial segregation and the origins of apartheid in South Africa, 1919-36

Preface and Acknowledgements - List of Abbreviations - Introduction - Section I: The Elaboration of Segregationist Ideology c.1900-36 - Segregation and Cheap Labour - Section II: Structure and Conflict in the Native Affairs Department - The Ideology of Native Administration - Section III: The Passage of Hertzogs Native Bills Part One - The Passage of Hertzogs Native Bills Part Two - Conclusion - Bibliography - Index

How British was the British World? The Case of South Africa

This paper discusses the utility of the term ‘Britishness’ in the context of the ‘British World’ conference series. It suggests reasons why the ‘British world’ idea as presently understood was relatively slow to emerge out of traditional nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial and commonwealth history. Ranging over more than a century from the 1870s to the present, it surveys uses of the term ‘British’ in imperial historiography and draws most of its empirical evidence from the unusual case of South Africa. The paper eschews ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ definitions of Britishness and proposes instead a more capacious formulation capable of including elective, hyphenated forms of belonging. It suggests that there are advantages in thinking of the British Empire less in the possessive sense – the empire that belonged to Britain – and more in the adjectival mode as a mode of description capable of taking into account self-declared affinities and values.

Scientism, social research and the limits of 'South Africanism': The case of Ernst Gideon Malherbe

Most recent discussions about race and racism in South Africa have focused on white constructions and representations of blackness. By contrast, understandings of whiteness have hardly been explored at all. A reluctance on the part of white South Africans to problematise themselves as settlers or conquerors is one probable reason for this silence: for most of the twentieth century Afrikaners have insisted on their rights as Africans (often to the exclusion of those whose claim to such status is more obvious) whereas English-speakers have managed the trick of defining everyone else in the country as either racially or ethnically ‘other’ -while blithely assuming their own identity to be somehow ‘normal’ and therefore not suitable for deep investigation. South Africa’s major historiographical traditions have compounded this lack ofself-reflectiveness over issues of identity. Typically, liberal writers have tended to represent modem South African history as a titanic struggle played out by two competing and ever more extreme nationalisms, African and Afrikaner, with the doughty defenders of noble liberal values squeezed uncomfortably inbetween. Those unsympathetic to the liberal predicament see the problem rather differently. Thus, marxists have cast liberals as (at best) self-righteous moralists and (at worst) conservative reformers and apologists for a system of capitalist exploitation of which they have been the chief beneficiaries. Conversely, Africanists and Afrikaner nationalists have both rounded on liberals as hypocritical interferers or as ciphers for the forces of capitalism, imperialism and communism. Polarised positions such as these have merely served to hollow out our understanding of the history of white politics, power and identity in South Africa issues which, in a post-apartheid era, are being revisited in new and troubling ways. This article is not expressly about liberalism. Instead, it takes its cue from the related, sometimes overlapping, and largely forgotten centrist tradition of ‘South Africanism’ so as to cast ambient light on the formation of white identity and its

Earth history, natural history and prehistory at the Cape, 1860 - 1875

It is commonplace to treat the 1860s and 1870s as a crucial period in the making of modern South Africa. These two decades saw the beginnings of the mineral-led industrial revolution that so dramatically transformed the political economy of the region; they marked a decisive moment in the assertion of colonial political hegemony over regional African kingdoms; and they witnessed a secular intensification in imperial involvement in the sub-continent. In light of their importance in understanding the history of white supremacy in twentieth-century South Africa, these social, economic, and political processes have been extensively analyzed. Yet, settler power and authority were not expressed only in terms of economic control or political conquest: in order to achieve the mature form of colonial proprietorship that distinguishes South Africa from most other nineteenth-century settler societies in Africa, cognitive as well as physical mastery had to be established over indigenous peoples and the natural environment. It is surprising, therefore that so little attention has been devoted to the conspicuous display of intellectual curiosity that accompanied growing colonial and imperial engagement in the African subcontinent at this time. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance.

Human origins, race typology and the other Raymond Dart

Abstract Raymond Dart is one of the best‐known figures in the early development of the University of the Witwatersrand. He is most famous for his claim in 1925 that the newly discovered Taung fossil skull (which he termed Australopithecus) represented a crucial ‘missing link’ in the evolution of modem humankind. Darts view was highly contested at the time and some twenty‐five years were to pass before the significance of Australopithecus gained general scientific acceptance. This article, focusing on Darts inter‐war work, raises questions about his status as scientific hero. It considers the wider intellectual context of Darts work, in particular the race typology model which he embraced as well as his infatuation with cultural diffusionism. The paper concludes by suggesting that Dart contributed to the development of scientific racism in South Africa and that his ideas both reflected and reinforced assumptions of white racial superiority.1

The Commonwealth and South Africa: From Smuts to Mandela

ABSTRACT The creation of modern South Africa as an independent unitary state within the British Empire (c. 1910) gave birth to the Commonwealth idea. Jan Smuts’s views on Commonwealth were formative and they continued to inform the evolution of the organisation until the end of the Second World War. Also significant was the role played by Afrikaner nationalist leader J. B. M. Hertzog, who exerted a critical influence on the 1926 Balfour Declaration and Statute of Westminster. At the point of South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth in 1961, the Commonwealth divided between new entrants, who cast South Africa as a pariah, and older member states who lamented the exit of a troubled family member. Even after South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth in 1961, apartheid’s significance as the global exemplar of institutionalised racism and colonial rule helped to bind the Commonwealth as a multi-racial organisation with strongly defined ethical values. South Africa’s reintegration in 1994, with Nelson Mandela to the fore, was welcomed as a triumph for the Commonwealth. Paradoxically, however, this proved a pyrrhic victory and may actually have contributed to the Commonwealth’s state of indirection.

Imagining the New South Africa in the Era of Reconstruction

Causes, motives and outcomes have dominated discussion of the South African War. In charting the developments of postwar reconstruction, the established historical literature has centred on the successes or otherwise of Milner’s policies; on the political processes by which Union was achieved; on the importance of the first decade of the twentieth century for the rise of a modern, segregationist state; on capitalist industrialization as a structural determinant of South African history; and on the overall significance of this era for the subsequent emergence of competing African and Afrikaner nationalisms.1 By contrast, one of the major themes of this period — the ideological construction of white ‘South Africanism’ — has been pushed to the margins, and the effusion of political and cultural activities associated with the creative imagining of the first ‘New South Africa’ has been overlooked, or mentioned only in passing.2

WERE THERE POLITICAL ALTERNATIVES IN THE WAKE OF THE SHARPEVILLE-LANGA VIOLENCE IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1960?

In many accounts, the Sharpeville emergency of 1960 was a key ‘turning point’ for modern South African history. It persuaded the liberation movements that there was no point in civil rights-style activism and served as the catalyst for the formation of the African National Congresss armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe . From the South African governments perspective, the events at Sharpeville made it imperative to crush black resistance so that whites could defend themselves against communist-inspired revolutionary agitation. African and Afrikaner nationalist accounts are thus mutually invested in the idea that, after Sharpeville, there was no alternative. This article challenges such assumptions. By bringing together new research on African and Afrikaner nationalism during this period, and placing them in the same frame of analysis, it draws attention to important political dynamics and possibilities that have for too long been overlooked.

Opération coup de poing

Nathan Schlangers entry point into the history of South African prehistory may be read as an academic coup de poing, a sharp fist strike designed to cleave its way into the archaeological establishment; yet, like the examples of such ‘palaeoliths’ that so fascinated earlier prehistorians, the object of study may require further contextualization and understanding in order to yield up its wider meanings.

Forum: Liberalism in South Africa

White power and the liberal Conscience: Racial Segregation and South African Liberalism 1921–60 by Paul Rich. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984. Pp. viii & 192. R12,50