Clements Musa Kadalie and the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Dee
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
To Come ◽  
Wage Increases ◽  
Dock Workers

Between 1919 and 1929, Clements Musa Kadalie rose to worldwide fame as secretary of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU). Under his leadership, the ICU transformed Southern Africa’s labor movement. Organizing black railway, dock and factory workers, miners, domestic servants, and farm laborers across South Africa, South West Africa (modern-day Namibia), Basutoland (Lesotho), and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) into “One Big Union,” the ICU led a number of strikes, challenged pass laws and unionized anywhere between 100,000 and 250,000 members. Over six foot tall and always dressed in an immaculate suit, Kadalie regularly addressed mass meetings of thousands of people across rural and urban South Africa. Kadalie was born in Chifira, Tongaland, British Central Africa Protectorate (modern-day Malawi) around 1895. After being expelled from the local mission school, he migrated via Southern Rhodesia to South Africa. He was elected as the ICU’s secretary at its first meeting. The ICU took a leading role in the 1919 Cape Town dock strike and won wage increases for dock workers in 1920. By 1925, the trade union had over 50 branches across Southern Africa and a widely circulating newspaper, The Workers’ Herald. In 1927, Kadalie toured Europe, calling on the international labor movement to campaign against a raft of repressive legislation. Amid fractious internal disputes, however, Kadalie’s “czarlike” character, frivolous expenditure and “foreign” birth were publicly denounced by rivals, and the financial contributions of ICU members collapsed. Kadalie led a breakaway Independent ICU from February 1929 and called a general strike in East London in January 1930. He passed away on November 28, 1951, leaving a complicated legacy. The ICU’s radical rhetoric and mass mobilization, nevertheless, demonstrated both the possibility and necessity of organizing black workers and inspired black leaders across the world for decades to come.

scholarly journals South Africa’s Strategic Investment on its National Security in Southern Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
National Security ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Regional Power ◽  
Strategic Investment ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
External Relations ◽  
To Come ◽  
Global Strength

South Africa is a country of global, continental and regional strategic importance. It is a global actor with the well-entrenched and long-standing international political and corporate role and presence and relative global strength. It is Africa’s qualitatively largest and strongest diversified economy. It is African continental and Southern African regional power with considerable continental and regional strength. These factors give it enormous advantages and privileges in playing a leading role in African affairs. They also, dialectically, serve as its key challenges it faces in its efforts to structurally transform its society and to contribute towards structural regional and continental restructuring. How given these factors should South Africa strategically invest on its national security in Southern Africa – the region where it has considerable power and authority – a region whose dependence upon it is a dominated process? There is a fundamental need for this process to be substantially reduced for South Africa’s long-term strategic interests. Its sustainable national security and increased progressive role in African affairs require truly regional allies in a requisite position to come to its aid in a period of its urgent need. Weak regional countries crucially depending on South Africa are of less importance to it. The achievement of their sustainable development is in the long-term strategic interests of South Africa in its internal and external relations. It is not only regional countries which need South Africa for their national security. South Africa also critically needs them particularly as a country expected to substantially increase its leading role in the structural regional and continental transformation. Its sustainable national security lies not only with the majority of its people, based on the satisfaction of their interests, investing on its defence, but also with the structurally restructured region walking together with it in the advancement of the structural continental transformation.

scholarly journals Rhodesia and the United Nations: The Lawfulness of International Concern

1968 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mybes S. McDougal ◽  
W. Michael Reisman
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
South Central ◽  
Land Mass ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
White Settlers

Locked in south central Africa by Zambia, Mozambique, Botswana and the Republic of South Africa, Rhodesia comprises a land mass of over 150,000 square miles and a population of about four million blacks and 220,000 whites. From 1889 until 1922 the area was administered by a chartered company formed by Cecil Rhodes. In 1922 the white settlers opted for the status of a self-governing colony, and in 1923 Southern Rhodesia was annexed by Great Britain. In 1953 it joined, with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland in a federation, still under the United Kingdom; the venture proved unsuccessful and was terminated in 1963.

The Literary Legacy of Frederick Courteney Selous

1998 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 199-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Mandiringana ◽  
T.J. Stapleton
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Public School ◽  
School System ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Public School System ◽  
Aboriginal Population ◽  
White Writers ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
Ivory Trade

In the works of many generations of white writers on Africa, the “Great White Hunter” has remained one of the most powerful and enduring images. A model of Caucasian masculinity, he quickly masters a hostile and wild environment in ways which amaze the aboriginal population, who are usually portrayed as savage and incompetent. Perhaps the best known real-life example of this classic image was Frederick Courteney Selous, a product of the English public school system, who hunted elephants in southern and central Africa during the 1870s and 1880s. Never having made much money from the ivory trade because of the dwindling number of elephants, Selous became an employee of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSAC) in the 1890s and worked towards the colonization of Southern Rhodesia. After fighting against the Ndebele in 1893 and 1896, Selous eventually based himself in England and became a recognized environmental expert, safari guide, and collector/seller of zoological specimens.Through writing six books and numerous articles from 1881 to the 1910s, Selous successfully created and popularized an image of himself as a skilled, yet sporting, hunter, a painfully honest gentleman of the bush, and a friend, as well as leader, of Africans. He was an adventurer with a dramatic habit of narrowly escaping danger and these episodes were often illustrated through drawings in his books. Discussing one such incident, a writer of hunting stories once remarked that “throughout Lobengula's country the story went that Selous was the man even the elephants could not kill. It helped to build the ‘Selous Legend’ among the Rhodesian tribes.”

Observations on the Coccidae of Southern Rhodesia.—I

1928 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. J. Hall
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
The Family ◽  
Southern Rhodesia

With the exception of a few isolated records nothing is known of the Coccidae of Southern Rhodesia. Dr. Brain has made a study of the family in the Union of South Africa, the results of which are to be found in his excellent Monograph,* and Prof. Newstead has described many interesting and hitherto unknown forms from Central Africa in the earlier volumes of this Bulletin.

The Beginning of Labor's End? Britain's “Winter of Discontent” and Working-Class Women's Activism

2009 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Martin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
National Union ◽  
Level Of Involvement ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
To Come ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Wage Increases

AbstractIn the midst of the freezing winter of 1978 and 1979, strikes erupted across Britain. In what became infamously known as the “Winter of Discontent,” workers struck against the Labour Government's attempts to curtail wage increases. The defeat of this “incomes policy” and Labour's subsequent electoral defeat ushered in an era of unprecedented political, economic, and social change for Britain. Conservative victory, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, not only seemed to signal the dissolution of “traditional” working-class ties to the Labour Party, it also suggested that British working-class politics might finally be on its last leg. Furthermore, a potent social myth developed around the Winter of Discontent, one where “bloody-minded” workers brought down a sympathetic government and “invited” the ravages of Thatcherism upon the British labor movement.Absent from these various narratives are the experiences of rank-and-file activists, in particular, the growing number of female trade unionists active in these strikes. This article examines the experiences of a group of women trade unionists from the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) who participated in the strikes of the Winter of Discontent. Based on oral histories and corresponding archival material, it argues that the Winter of Discontent provided a crucial “rite of passage” for these women, one which exposed them to an unprecedented level of involvement in grassroots labor activism and leadership. Thereafter, these working-class women began to make significant inroads into NUPE and the Labour Party, which helped to make working women's issues more central to the British labor movement for decades to come. Therefore, rather than being the death knell of British working-class politics, this study of women involved in the Winter of Discontent strikes reveals that while one form of working-class politics was in decline, a reconfigured one was in the process of being born.

A reconnaissance of tropical resources during Revolutionary years: the role of the Paris Museum d'Histoire Naturelle

1991 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
MADELEINE LY-TIO-FANE
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Scientific Principles ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Joseph Ii

SUMMARY The recent extensive literature on exploration and the resulting scientific advances has failed to highlight the contribution of Austrian enterprise to the study of natural history. The leading role of Joseph II among the neutral powers which assumed the carrying trade of the belligerents during the American War of Independence, furthered the development of collections for the Schönbrunn Park and Gardens which had been set up on scientific principles by his parents. On the conclusion of peace, Joseph entrusted to Professor Maerter a world-encompassing mission in the course of which the Chief Gardener Franz Boos and his assistant Georg Scholl travelled to South Africa to collect plants and animals. Boos pursued the mission to Isle de France and Bourbon (Mauritius and Reunion), conveyed by the then unknown Nicolas Baudin. He worked at the Jardin du Roi, Pamplemousses, with Nicolas Cere, or at Palma with Joseph Francois Charpentier de Cossigny. The linkage of Austrian and French horticultural expertise created a situation fraught with opportunities which were to lead Baudin to the forefront of exploration and scientific research as the century closed in the upheaval of the Revolutionary Wars.

scholarly journals Traversing a Tightrope between Ecumenism and Exclusivism: The Intertwined History of South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church and the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian in Nyasaland (Malawi)

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 176
Author(s):  
Retief Müller
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Church History ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Christian Nationalism ◽  
The Church ◽  
Dutch Reformed Church

During the first few decades of the 20th century, the Nkhoma mission of the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa became involved in an ecumenical venture that was initiated by the Church of Scotland’s Blantyre mission, and the Free Church of Scotland’s Livingstonia mission in central Africa. Geographically sandwiched between these two Scots missions in Nyasaland (presently Malawi) was Nkhoma in the central region of the country. During a period of history when the DRC in South Africa had begun to regressively disengage from ecumenical entanglements in order to focus on its developing discourse of Afrikaner Christian nationalism, this venture in ecumenism by one of its foreign missions was a remarkable anomaly. Yet, as this article illustrates, the ecumenical project as finalized at a conference in 1924 was characterized by controversy and nearly became derailed as a result of the intransigence of white DRC missionaries on the subject of eating together with black colleagues at a communal table. Negotiations proceeded and somehow ended in church unity despite the DRC’s missionaries’ objection to communal eating. After the merger of the synods of Blantyre, Nkhoma and Livingstonia into the unified CCAP, distinct regional differences remained, long after the colonial missionaries departed. In terms of its theological predisposition, especially on the hierarchy of social relations, the Nkhoma synod remains much more conservative than both of its neighboring synods in the CCAP to the south and north. Race is no longer a matter of division. More recently, it has been gender, and especially the issue of women’s ordination to ministry, which has been affirmed by both Blantyre and Livingstonia, but resisted by the Nkhoma synod. Back in South Africa, these events similarly had an impact on church history and theological debate, but in a completely different direction. As the theology of Afrikaner Christian nationalism and eventually apartheid came into positions of power in the 1940s, the DRC’s Nkhoma mission in Malawi found itself in a position of vulnerability and suspicion. The very fact of its participation in an ecumenical project involving ‘liberal’ Scots in the formation of an indigenous black church was an intolerable digression from the normative separatism that was the hallmark of the DRC under apartheid. Hence, this article focuses on the variegated entanglements of Reformed Church history, mission history, theology and politics in two different 20th-century African contexts, Malawi and South Africa.

scholarly journals Karoo fracking and the Christian faith community

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit Van Tonder ◽  
Roger Tucker
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Practical Theology ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Environmental Concern ◽  
Faith Community ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
World Population ◽  
Waste Products ◽  
To Come

One of the challenges for Practical Theology in Africa is to engage with the continent’s concerns and challenges in such a way that the kingdom of God is realised in society and is seen to be relevant to these issues by people who are outside of academia. In our article, which was first presented at the Practical Theology congress in Pretoria in January 2014, the authors seek to demonstrate how this may be accomplished by applying insights to one concern, namely ‘fracking’. The objective is to mobilise the influential Christian faith community in South Africa to begin to exercise prophetic discernment concerning fracking in the Karoo. The fracking debate is a product of the tension between the environmental degradation that its waste products may cause, on the one hand, and, on the other, the greater energy demands of a rapidly increasing world population along with its expectations of an ever-increasing standard of living. Shale gas fracking in the Karoo region of South Africa promises to make vast reserves of oil and gas available to help meet a significant percentage of the country’s energy needs for many years to come, and so thus aid development and contribute to raising the standard of living of many people. Yet the management of the waste products associated with the process is an area of serious environmental concern. The article aims to apprise the South African Christian faith community of the technology and risks involved. Theological guidelines are presented by which fracking’s benefits and dangers can be interrogated so that the community may come to an informed decision as to whether or not to support fracking.

scholarly journals State and evolution of the African rainforests between 1990 and 2010

2013 ◽  
Vol 368 (1625) ◽  
pp. 20120300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Mayaux ◽  
Jean-François Pekel ◽  
Baudouin Desclée ◽  
François Donnay ◽  
Andrea Lupi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Forest Cover ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Congo Basin ◽  
Landsat Images ◽  
Deforestation Rate ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Moderate Resolution ◽  
Underlying Causes ◽  
Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer

This paper presents a map of Africa's rainforests for 2005. Derived from moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer data at a spatial resolution of 250 m and with an overall accuracy of 84%, this map provides new levels of spatial and thematic detail. The map is accompanied by measurements of deforestation between 1990, 2000 and 2010 for West Africa, Central Africa and Madagascar derived from a systematic sample of Landsat images—imagery from equivalent platforms is used to fill gaps in the Landsat record. Net deforestation is estimated at 0.28% yr −1 for the period 1990–2000 and 0.14% yr −1 for the period 2000–2010. West Africa and Madagascar exhibit a much higher deforestation rate than the Congo Basin, for example, three times higher for West Africa and nine times higher for Madagascar. Analysis of variance over the Congo Basin is then used to show that expanding agriculture and increasing fuelwood demands are key drivers of deforestation in the region, whereas well-controlled timber exploitation programmes have little or no direct influence on forest-cover reduction at present. Rural and urban population concentrations and fluxes are also identified as strong underlying causes of deforestation in this study.

Otta Seals and Gravseals as Low-Cost Surfacing Alternatives for Low-Volume Roads: Experiences in South Africa

2003 ◽  
Vol 1819 (1) ◽  
pp. 338-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Oloo ◽  
Rob Lindsay ◽  
Sam Mothilal
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Cost Savings ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Field Trials ◽  
Low Volume Roads ◽  
Kwazulu Natal ◽  
Traffic Volumes ◽  
Low Volume ◽  
To Come

The geology of the northeastern part of the province of KwaZulu–Natal, South Africa, is predominantly alluvial with vast deposits of sands. Suitable gravel sources are hard to come by, which results in high graveling and regraveling costs brought about by long haul distances and accelerated gravel loss. Most gravel roads carry fewer than 500 vehicles per day of which less than 10% are heavy vehicles. The high cost of regraveling has led to consideration of upgrading such roads to surfaced standard, even though traffic volumes do not justify upgrading. Traditional chip seals are expensive and cannot be economically justified on roads that carry fewer than 500 vehicles per day. The KwaZulu–Natal Department of Transport is actively involved in efforts to identify cost-effective alternative surfacing products for low-volume roads. Field trials were conducted with Otta seals and Gravseals, which have been used successfully in other countries, as low-cost surfacing products for low-volume roads. The Otta seal is formed by placing graded aggregates on a relatively thick film of soft binder that, because of traffic and rolling, works its way through the aggregates. Gravseal consists of a special semipriming rubberized binder that is covered by a graded aggregate. Both Otta seals and Gravseals provide relatively flexible bituminous surfaces suitable for low-volume roads. Cost savings are derived mainly from the broad aggregate specifications, which allow for the use of marginal materials.

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