African Marriage Regulation and the Remaking of Gendered Authority in Colonial Natal, 1843–1875

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nafisa Essop Sheik
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Traditional Authority ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Younger Men ◽  
Political Intervention ◽  
Native Policy

Abstract:This article examines the gendered relationships of authority that are at the heart of the processes of customary marriage in South Africa, as well as the ways in which colonial political intervention worked to effect social change in nineteenth-century colonial Natal. This analysis reinforces the established historiographical understanding that instigating generational shifts in authority was important to Natal Native Policy, unlike customary regulation elsewhere in colonial Africa in which colonial law worked to shore up the authority of senior men. However, it seeks to underline that while negotiations of colonial power began to shift authority from older to younger men by manipulating Native marriage, and in particular the practice of lobola, the effects of such policies produced profound shifts in the experience and articulation of gendered relationships of marriage and colonial authority. The imbrication of changes in gender and generational norms ultimately reveals the contradictions in both colonial claims of liberal gender reform and African claims that colonial policy provoked the usurpation of male traditional authority.

The Origins of African Political Consciousness in South Africa

1969 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. P. Walshe
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Christian Missions ◽  
Native Policy ◽  
The Impact

The origins of African political consciousness in Southern Africa can be traced back to the first half of the nineteenth century, to the impact of the Christian missions and to the development of a non-racial constitution in the Cape. As the century progressed, mission-educated Africans came to exercise a limited but real influence within Cape politics, and the Native policy of that Colony was seen to contrast favourably with those policies developing in the Boer Republics and Natal. By the turn of the century a new African élite had emerged, committed to non-racial ideals gleaned from Christianity and supported by the theory, and to some extent the practice, of Cape politics.

Humanitarianism, Human Rights and Biopolitics in the British Empire, 1890–1902

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Clark
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Personal Rights

The 1890s were a key time for debates about imperial humanitarianism and human rights in India and South Africa. This article first argues that claims of humanitarianism can be understood as biopolitics when they involved the management and disciplining of populations. This article examines the historiography that analyses British efforts to contain the Bombay plague in 1897 and the Boer War concentration camps as forms of discipline extending control over colonized subjects. Secondly, human rights language could be used to oppose biopolitical management. While scholars have criticized liberal human rights language for its universalism, this article argues that nineteenth-century liberals did not believe that rights were universal; they had to be earned. It was radical activists who drew on notions of universal rights to oppose imperial intervention and criticize the camps in India and South Africa. These activists included two groups: the Personal Rights Association and the Humanitarian League; and the individuals Josephine Butler, Sol Plaatje, Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, and Bal Gandadhar Tilak. However, these critics also debated amongst themselves how far human rights should extend.

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

Normal Rights, Just New: Understanding the Judicial Enforcement of Socioeconomic Rights

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Fowkes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Inherent Property ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Existing Structure

Abstract A common skeptical view holds that socioeconomic rights are a different kind of right than civil-political rights. Even those who support justiciable socioeconomic rights often see them as a different kind of right with special challenges. I argue that this view is wrong. What all these observers are reacting to is not an inherent property of socioeconomic rights: it is a contingent property of a situation in which judges are asked to enforce a rights claim without a pre-existing set of familiar public understandings of the right’s content and/or an existing structure of officials and procedures to give effect to that content. It is because the rights claim is new, and this is something that can be, and often is, true of rights across the spectrum. Any rights claim is problematic to enforce to the degree that it is new, but these obstacles can and do disappear if society changes and the claim becomes less new. In the first part of the Article, I seek to establish the accuracy of this argument, drawing on examples of rights distinctions from the nineteenth-century United States and rights across the spectrum displaying newness in contemporary South Africa and India. I then show how controlling for newness can help us to understand standard features of the socioeconomic rights debate: the ubiquitous, but misleading, negative–positive distinction; arguments about resources; Fuller’s endlessly cited polycentricity argument; and current controversial cases, such as the budget-shifting judicial enforcement of Latin American healthcare entitlements. These topics are central to our widespread intuition that socioeconomic rights are different; newness can help us to see that this intuition is misleading us, and by recalibrating the debate can filter out some distractions that have long dogged it.

scholarly journals Rethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methods

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942098201
Author(s):  
Sarah Comyn ◽  
Porscha Fermanis
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Canons ◽  
Methodological Position

Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional networks and relations across intersecting oceanic spaces; and third, because of the long history of racialized imperialist imaginaries of the south. This methodological position rethinks current approaches to “British world” studies in two important ways: first, by decoupling the southern settler colonies from studies of settler colonialism in North America; and second, by rebalancing its metropolitan and northern locus by considering south-south networks and relations across a complex of southern islands, oceans, and continents. Without suggesting either that imperial intercultural exchanges with Britain are unimportant or that there is a culturally homogenous body of pan-southern writing, we argue that nineteenth-century literary culture from colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa — what we call a “southern archive” — can provide a counterbalance to northern biases and provide new purchase on nation-centred literary paradigms — one that reveals not just south-south transnational exchanges and structural homologies between southern genres, themes, and forms, but also allows us to acknowledge the important challenges to foundational accounts of national literary canons initiated by southern theory and Indigenous studies scholars.

Colombian Parties and Political Development

1976 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Peeler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Political System ◽  
Traditional Authority ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Authority Relationships ◽  
Latin American Countries

Colombia remains one of a very small group of countries in Latin America which retain competitive, liberal-democratic political institutions at this writing. Indeed, Colombia's civil government, recognizing a modicum of individual liberties and conducting periodic elections, has been shattered on relatively few occasions since the mid-nineteenth century, a record equalled or surpassed by few other Latin American countries. The Colombian political system is still dominated by the two traditional political parties (Liberal and Conservative) which arose in Colombia and elsewhere in the region in the nineteenth century. In almost every other country they have long since passed into oblivion or insignificance. This continued dominance by the traditional parties is commonly attributed to their successful mobilization of mass support, especially among the peasantry. The Colombian parties (unlike their counterparts elsewhere) early moved beyond being mere elite factions by using traditional authority relationships, clientelistic exchanges and ideological appeals to develop durable bases of mass support.

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