scholarly journals POPPIES AND GOLD: OPIUM AND LAW-MAKING ON THE WITWATERSRAND, 1904–10

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
THEMBISA WAETJEN
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
South African ◽  
Policy Reform ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
The State ◽  
Chinese Men ◽  
Gold Mines ◽  
South African War ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
Law Making

AbstractIn the wake of the South African war, the indenture and transport of over 63,000 Chinese men to gold mines in the Transvaal sparked a rush to supply smoking opium to a literally captive market. Embroiled in a growing political economy of mass intoxication, state lawmakers shifted official policy from prohibition to provision. Their innovation of an industrial drug maintenance bureaucracy, developed on behalf of mining capital in alliance with organized pharmacy and medicine, ran counter to local trends of policy reform and represents a unique episode for broader histories of modern narcotics regulation. This article considers the significance of this case and chronicles the contradictory interests and ideologies that informed political scrambles over legitimate opium uses, users, and profiteers. It shows how the state maintained its provision policy, for as long as it proved expedient, against varied and mounting public pressures – local and international – for renewed drug suppression. The argument here is that the state managed an epidemic of addiction on the Rand as an extraordinary problem of demography. It achieved this both through redefining smoking opium from intoxicant to mine medicine and through the legal construction of a ‘special biochemical zone’, which corresponded with the exceptional status and spatial segregation of a despised alien labour force.

The Recruiting of Chinese Indentured Labour for the South African Gold-Mines, 1903–1908

1977 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
South African ◽  
Vertical Integration ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Mining Industry ◽  
The South ◽  
Gold Mines ◽  
South African War ◽  
Northern Chinese ◽  
High Degree

One of the responses of the Transvaal gold mining industry to the economic crisis after the South African War of 1899–1902 was to import Chinese indentured mine labour. To facilitate this process and to integrate it with the overall demands and requirements of the industry, the mining companies established a recruiting and shipping company in 1904, known as the Chamber of Mines Labour Importation Agency. This short-lived company, which was characterized by a high degree of vertical integration, operated as recruiting and shipping agency in China, receiving agent in Natal and co-ordinating and advising agent in the Transvaal. Despite complex arrangements designed to exploit the Chinese labour market, the company was, generally speaking, successful in securing the requisite labour force of suitable size and quality for the Transvaal mines. However, it showed a longer-term susceptibility to competitive pressures in the northern Chinese labour market. The company was amalgamated with WNLA in 1908.

Farmers, Randlords and the South African state: Confrontation in the Witwatersrand Beef Markets, c. 1920–1923

1986 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Morrell
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Cold Storage ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
African State ◽  
The State ◽  
Gold Mines ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Cost ◽  
First World

The pervasive importance of gold mining in modern South Africa has become embedded in South African historiography. Despite this, little research has been done to ascertain its impact on the other major sector of the economy, agriculture.The gold mines had a profound effect upon one particular branch of agriculture – beef farming. The mines purchased large amounts of beef and were able to use their buying power to confront beef farmers in the marketplace. In the recession following the First World War, the mines were caught in a profitability crisis that was to lead to the Rand Revolt in 1922. One of the ways in which mining attempted to ease its position was by cutting back on the cost of the meat it supplied to its African labour force. This initially involved co-operation with a powerful cold-storage company, big ranchers and a number of smaller farmers to form a Meat Producers Exchange. This fragile alliance fell apart when farmers, themselves on the verge of bankruptcy, attempted to take control of the Exchange and raise beef prices. The farmers failed and in 1923 the exchange collapsed.The victory of the mining and cold-storage companies rested on a number of factors. Farmers were unable to organize effectively because of the defection of ranchers to the mines. Changing economic conditions in 1922 and 1923 permitted the mines to terminate their co-operation with beef farmers. Finally the mines were able to call upon the state for support. The state ensured the demise of the Exchange and the defeat of the beef farmers. In the process it showed itself capable of intervening decisively to protect the interests of certain sections of capital.

scholarly journals Reading Practices and Literacy of Boer Combatants in the South African War of 1899–1902

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-307
Author(s):  
Fransjohan Pretorius
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
South African ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
The State ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
The South ◽  
Planning Strategy ◽  
The Bible ◽  
South African War ◽  
Reading Matter

In investigating the reading practices of Boer combatants during the South African War, diaries, letters, and reminiscences were consulted. The state of literacy reveals a picture of a small number of highly literate men, a larger group of adequately literate men, a still larger group of semi-literates, and the illiterate. Reading matter included the Bible, newspapers, and books. Issues raised are: Did literacy (or illiteracy) influence military decision-making or troop morale? Were certain works making some impact on the battlefield? Was the practical experience the Boers had gained before the war more successful in planning strategy and tactics than literacy?

scholarly journals Seeking the good (peace) of the republic: The violence against and of difference in defining the public space

2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann-Albrecht Meylahn
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
South African ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
Common Space ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
African Context ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Church ◽  
Law Making

This article will reflect on the role of legitimate and authorised violence in state-making. This violence in the name of the good defines the state (Benjamin�s law-making violence) by the exclusion of others (Benjamin 1996). Law-making violence together with the violence that coerces or binds [religare] the public into a common understanding of the good (Benjamin�s law-maintaining violence) is at the exclusion of other interpretations of the good (Benjamin 1996). As the law-making and law-maintaining violence of the state is always at the expense of the excluded other, the excluded other will produce a counter violence of difference seeking a legitimate place within the common space of the republic (Benjamin�s divine violence). What is the church�s role in such a context of violence? Is the church�s role to help clarify and clearly define the good that will bind [religare] the citizens into a stronger and more prosperous and peaceful state � onward Christian soldiers marching as to war? Or is there another calling, to be disciples of Christ � with the Cross of Jesus going on before � and enter the space of violence beyond the knowledge of good and evil as peacemakers? These questions will be examined by bringing into dialogue �i�ek�s (1997) interpretation of Christianity with Derrida�s (2002) interpretation of hospitality, specifically in the violent South African context.

scholarly journals Making Sense of “Senseless Violence”: Thoughts on Agrarian Elites and Collective Violence during “Reconstruction” in South Africa and the American South

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 851-880
Author(s):  
John Higginson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
South African ◽  
Black People ◽  
American South ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Industrial Transformation ◽  
Gold Mines ◽  
South African War ◽  
The American South ◽  
Just Society

AbstractKey moments of the American Civil War and the 1899–1902 South African War and their tragic immediate aftermaths remain powerful features of national memory in both countries. Over the past century, vengeful politicians and ideologues in both have transformed them into formidable stock-in-trade. Second-, third-, and fourth-hand accounts of the alleged churlish manner of the victorious armies, especially soldiers of African descent, were made into combustible timber for reactionary political campaigns. The perceived cruel turns of fate have made their way into literature, stage, and screen. The two wars afforded people of various races and social conditions opportunity to act upon their conceptions of a just society, albeit amid terrible carnage and loss. They also underscored the permanence of the industrial transformation of both countries. In the decades following these two wars most of the black and white agrarian populations discovered that state and agrarian elites had cynically manipulated and then extinguished their aspirations. Most often, for black agrarians, violence was the preferred instrument to pursue desired outcomes. Reconstruction in the American South was a paradox. The Civil War emancipated the slaves but left the entire South, especially upland cotton regions, economically backward. In Louisiana, especially, politicized violence to coerce black labor was pervasive. After the South African War, white violence against rural black people was widespread. Lord Milner’s Reconstruction Administration was more concerned to bring South Africa’s gold mines back into production than to stem the violence. The low-intensity violence of the postwar countryside became the backland route to apartheid.

Coal, Rail and Victorians in the South African Veld. The Convergence of Colonial Elites and Finance Capital in the Stormberg Mountains of the Eastern Cape, 1880–1910

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-194
Author(s):  
Pat Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Eastern Cape ◽  
The South ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Gold Mines ◽  
Class System ◽  
The North ◽  
South African War ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
The Town

This article investigates an intermediary period in the Cape colony when the largely unknown convergence of British social and industrial capital around coal mining occurred in the Stormberg Mountains of the North Eastern Cape. Within the context of a triangular nexus of mining and its two major clients, the diamond mines at Kimberley and the newly arrived Cape Government Railway, a social coalescence of mainly British immigrants arose in the town of Molteno, exhibiting an distinctly British Victorian culture. This paper also shows how the town became a colonial enclave on the remote periphery of the Cape Colony, utilising a racialised class system, and the ways in which the singularity of Victorian society was emphasised by two surrounding cultures which were alien to the British. After the South African War ended, one of these cultures had begun to take root within the town. When the coal mines were brought to an end by the erratic orders of the Cape Government Railway and its access to superior and cheaper coal from Lewis and Marks at Viljoensdrift in the ZAR and the greater economic pull of the Rand gold mines which diverted labour to the north, this ‘colonial moment’ in the Stormberg was over.

Moral Subjectivity and Affective Deficit in the Transitional State

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 66-82
Author(s):  
Christiaan Beyers
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Land Claim ◽  
Transitional State ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
Political Resource ◽  
Legal Subjects ◽  
Land Restitution

In the context of transitional justice, how does the reinvented state come to be assumed as a social fact? South African land restitution interpellates victims of apartheid- and colonial-era forced removals as claimants, moral and legal subjects of a virtuous 'new' state. In the emotional narratives of loss and suffering called forth in land claim forms, the state is addressed as a subject capable of moral engagement. Claim forms also 'capture' affects related to the event of forced removals as an unstable political resource. However, within an ultimately legal and bureaucratic process, the desire for recognition is typically not reciprocated. Moreover, material settlements are indefinitely delayed due to political and institutional complications. The resulting disillusionment is counterweighed by persistent aspirations for state redress.

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