Political Economy and the Socio-cultural History of Land Dispossession, Proselytization, and Proletarianization of African People in South Africa: 1488–1770 (Part 1)

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-59
Author(s):  
Mbhekeni Sabelo Nkosi
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
African People ◽  
Land Dispossession ◽  
History Of

Land Reform in South Africa: An Overview

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Rugege
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Black People ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Land Dispossession ◽  
Fundamental Cause ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racial Domination ◽  
The Many

South Africa suffered a long history of colonization, racial domination and land dispossession that resulted in the bulk of the agricultural land being owned by a white minority. Black people resisted being dispossessed but were defeated by the superior arms of the newcomers. As Lewin has written, “whatever minor causes there may have been for the many Bantu-European wars, the desire for land was the fundamental cause.” Despite the claims that South Africa was largely uninhabited at the time of the arrival of Europeans, documentary evidence shows that in fact the land was inhabited. Thus the journal of the first European to settle at the Cape, Jan van Riebeeck records incidents of confrontation with the indigenous Khoi-khoi (or Hottentots) in 1655.

scholarly journals Land, labour and capital in Natal: The Natal Land and Colonisation Company 1860–1948

1975 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Slater
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Good Time ◽  
Insurance Company ◽  
Property Development ◽  
Reliable Source ◽  
History Of

The history of the London-based Natal Land and Colonisation Company is explored against the background of the evolving political economy of rural Natal. In the early years of the colony, white-controlled farming operations consistently failed. The landholdings of bankrupt colonists passed into the hands of a small group of men with capital. In 1861 this group activated its links with financiers in Britain to float the Natal Land and Colonisation Company. The Company ‘bought’ 250,000 acres of surplus lands from them in return for an injection of metropolitan capital into productive operations to be carried out on the remaining mainly coastal lands, or into further speculative activity. In fact, white-controlled farming activity in the interior continued to stagnate. Money which the Company loaned to white farmers in the 1860s, secured as mortgages on their farms, was not repaid, and the Company took over the lands of the bankrupt until in 1874 it controlled 657,000 acres in Natal. Anxious for a sizeable and more reliable source of income, the Company, in common with some colonists, concentrated on extracting rent from Africans, as yet the only successful farming population of the Natal interior. The increasing importance of this source of income to the Company was rudely interrupted in the 1890s by a fundamental shift in the Natal political economy. New mining centres in South Africa looked to Natal to furnish some of their needs for raw material and labour. The balance of economic and political forces favoured those who demanded labour, not rent, from Natal Africans. The Company switched its capital in good time out of renting land to African farmers and into renting and property development in the growing urban areas of white South Africa. Its properties were brought within the empire of the Eagle Star Insurance Company in 1948.

scholarly journals The Empty Land Myth: A Biblical and Socio-historical Exploration

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ntozakhe Simon Cezula ◽  
Leepo Modise
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Free Movement ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Third ◽  
African People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Nature

Persistent discourse on the contentious “empty land” theory remains relevant within a biblical and socio-historic milieu, especially in the history of a colonialised country such as South Africa. Seeing that there are still arguments in favour of the “empty land” theory, the authors of this article undertook a venture to engage with the “empty land” theory as a myth. This article consists of four parts: the first part discusses the myth of “empty land” in the Old Testament Bible in relation to the “empty land” myth in South Africa. Secondly the researchers will argue for the occupation of land by the indigenous people of South Africa as early as 270 AD–1830. The vertex for the third argument is of a more socio-economic nature, namely the lifestyle of the African people before colonialism. The article contends that people were nomadic and did not regard land as property to be sold and bought. There were no boundaries; there was free movement. Finally, the article explores the point of either recognition of Africans as human beings, or in a demeaning way viewing them as animals to be chased away in order to empty the land, thereby creating “emptied” land.

scholarly journals The Other Side of the Story

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Simangaliso Kumalo
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
The Other ◽  
African People ◽  
Land Dispossession ◽  
Work Done

This article provides a critique of the role played by progressive missionaries in securing land for the African people in some selected mission stations in South Africa. It argues that, in spite of the dominant narrative that the missionaries played a role in the dispossession of the African people of their land, there are those who refused to participate in the dispossession. Instead, they used their status, colour and privilege to subvert the policy of land dispossession. It critically examines the work done by four progressive missionaries from different denominations in their attempt to subvert the laws of land dispossession by facilitating land ownership for Africans. The article interacts with the work of Revs John Philip (LMS), James Allison (Methodist), William Wilcox and John Langalibalele Dube (American Zulu Mission [AZM]), who devised land redistributive mechanisms as part of their mission strategies to benefit the disenfranchised Africans.

Health Justice, Activism, and the Crisis of HIV/AIDS in South Africa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mandisa Mbali
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Black People ◽  
Migrant Labor ◽  
Health Politics ◽  
Concept Of Health ◽  
Aids Crisis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Labor System ◽  
Health Justice

The political economy of the AIDS crisis in South Africa’s past can be understood in terms of the concept of health justice. In particular, health justice can help us interpret the history of AIDS in South Africa according to the intersecting manifestations of socioeconomic inequality in the country, including the migrant labor system, the apartheid-era health system, with its racial segregation and inferior service provision for black people, the feminization of poverty, and, legal and institutionalized homophobia and transphobia. We can also use the overarching concept of health justice to understand the histories of public health and progressive health advocacy in relation to the epidemic over three periods. First, early in the history of the disease in South Africa, health injustice was manifest in the socioeconomic phenomena behind its arrival in the country in 1982. Secondly, its subsequent entrenchment in the country in the pre-1994 period can be related to South Africa’s late-apartheid political economy. Thirdly, in the postapartheid period, the Nelson Mandela (1994–1999) and Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008) administrations exhibited deficits in political will in the development of effective AIDS policies, most notably evident in Mbeki’s AIDS denialism. In response to this, in 1998 the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) emerged from the AIDS advocacy of various strands of antiapartheid activism. The last section highlights how the TAC’s activism influenced global health politics from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. This history points to the TAC’s valuable legacy of activism in addressing AIDS and general health injustices. Interpreting the socioeconomic and political history of AIDS is of wider relevance to important historiographical bodies of literature in relation to South Africa, including those around medicine and health, gender and sexuality, black politics and social movements, and, South Africa’s role in world history. The topic is therefore especially deserving of sustained study.

‘The Actors Are Come Hither’: Shakespeare Productions by Travelling Companies in Asia

2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kobayashi Kaori
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theatre Companies ◽  
History Of

In 1882, a critic of the journal Theatre noted that ‘the theatrical life of the present day might be described as a round of glorified strolling. The ‘circuits’ of Bristol, Norwich, and York of the last century are now replaced by those of the United States, South Africa, India, and Australia, and a modern actor thinks as little of a season in Melbourne or New York as his grandfather did of a week’s ‘starring’ in Edinburgh.’ Yet the story of how these Western theatre companies reached audiences in the faraway lands of the British Empire and Asia is still relatively untold. In this article Kaori Kobayashi explores in detail some itineraries around the turn of the twentieth century of these travelling companies, many of them relatively obscure, showing that the companies had a particular and significant impact on the development of Shakespearean performance and interpretation in the East. In essence, it is impossible to understand the rise of ‘Asian Shakespeare’ without also grasping how Western touring companies helped shape the East’s engagement with the West’s most canonical dramatist. Kaori Kobayashi is Professor of English at Nagoya City University, author of The Cultural History of The Taming of The Shrew (in Japanese, 2007), and editor of Shakespeare Performance Studies in Japan (in Japanese, 2010).

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