Sustaining Life. Theodore Powers

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СКАЧАТЬ camps. Employing a scorched-earth policy, the British forcibly relocated the Afrikaner population into concentration camps, leading to the deaths of approximately twenty-six thousand women and children, primarily due to infectious disease, malnutrition, and lack of access to medical care.

      The aftermath of the South African War saw the Afrikaner republics annexed and incorporated into British colonial territory, along with the continued expansion of South Africa’s mining industry. British colonial authorities had long worked to establish a wage-labor system in Southern Africa, with the imposition of hut taxes payable only in hard currency a central intervention in this regard. But it was a pathogen, the rinderpest virus, which led many black South Africans to seek work at the mines or commercial farms controlled by white settlers.

      Nearly a half century after the Xhosa cattle killings, a rinderpest outbreak during the 1890s devastated cattle populations across Southern Africa, undermining social reproduction and the subsistence agriculture most African social formations depended on in lieu of wage labor.³⁰ As black South African men were drawn into the wage-labor sector by the impact of rinderpest and the continued European encroachment on African land, traditional authorities emerged as important intermediaries for a transforming colonial state and economy.

      As colonial war waned and the colonial economy grew, the intermediary role of traditional authorities between the colonial state and rural black South African communities was formalized. The establishment of rural reserves, where traditional law governed social relations, formalized European settlement areas and reinforced the power of traditional lineages. As tradition was codified into law, women’s formal political roles waned, reflecting European conceptions of political institutions and gender hierarchies. Traditional elites, as intermediary political actors, also buttressed the growth of wage labor by serving as labor brokers for the mines, securing the participation of black South African men in the workforce on contracts ranging from six to nine months.³¹ The formalization of “native reserves” also produced stratification within the rural black South African population, as land and resources allocated within these sociospatial enclosures reflected political authority, with traditional authorities garnering the lion’s share. Poor and working-class South African families crowded into huts amid the pressure generated by the appropriation of land by traditional elites within the reserves and the necessity of paying hut taxes. The spatial densification and material deprivation associated with the rural reserves facilitated the spread of deadly pathogens, most notably tuberculosis.³²

      In concert with traditional authorities, the South African mining industry constructed a migrant-labor system that drew from the black South African population and other Southern African countries such as Mozambique, Lesotho, and Swaziland (First 1977, 1983). A circular pattern of labor migration was established during the colonial period as black male South African mine workers oscillated between contracted periods of labor in the mines and urban areas and their ethnically designated areas of residence in the rural reserves.³³ Mine workers were housed in compounds, often divided according to ethnicity, while those working in urban areas stayed in all-male hostels (Moodie 1994). In Johannesburg, the nearly eighty thousand black urban residents lived in backyard shacks, overcrowded compounds, and informal settlements at the turn of the twentieth century (Harrison 1992). From the ethnic segregation of laborers to the exclusion of women and families from the mining areas, the mining sector set in motion particular modes of sociospatial organization that were to feature prominently in South African urban social life.³⁴

      The exploitation of South Africa’s vast mineral wealth also increased socioeconomic stratification within the white settler population. The extraction of profit created a new set of mining conglomerates, such as De Beers Consolidated Mines, founded by Cecil Rhodes. While the British figured centrally in the mining interests of the region, Afrikaner settlers also participated in the mining sector. The emergence of a new economic elite, the Randlords, marked the emergence of a white elite that spanned the British-Afrikaner political divide. The white South African elite incorporated black South Africans into the global economy as manual laborers, shaping class structure across the region. The transnational mining sector that encompassed South Africa set pathways for disease transmission that were first highlighted by a black rural and urban tuberculosis epidemic, evidence of the growing disparity in health outcomes between white and black South Africans.

      Socioeconomic stratification and increasingly unequal health outcomes were accompanied by the normalization of racial segregation across South Africa. Within the Afrikaner republics, racial segregation had marked social organization from the outset, with black South Africans restricted to settling in periurban areas. In British-controlled Cape Colony, urban segregation intensified in response to an outbreak of bubonic plague that had originated in Hong Kong. Growing international trade in the nineteenth century led to the increased movement of people, commodities, and pathogens, leading to racial segregation in colonial cities (Swanson 1977). Informed by miasmatic theories of disease, medical authorities utilized public health measures to implement racial segregation in colonial Cape Town and other cities across the European colonial empires. Black South Africans were designated as the source of disease, with their “unsanitary” residences, interspersed with white homes, designated as a threat to public health by medical authorities. Colonial authorities destroyed these homes, and black South Africans were moved against their will to racially defined urban areas. In Cape Town these measures were met with resistance by the black dockworkers and urban laborers who were forcibly removed from their homes. However, their protests did not prevent the deployment of public health concerns to create racially segregated urban spaces in Cape Town or elsewhere in South Africa.

      A period marked by European expansion and colonial war set into motion institutional dynamics that presaged the intensified racial segregation during apartheid (Cook 1986). Through political, economic, and sociocultural processes, racial segregation and socioeconomic stratification transformed urban and rural areas in South Africa during the late colonial period.³⁵ A native reserve system demarcated ethnically defined rural areas, establishing formal institutional roles for traditional elites and regulating the movement of black South Africans. Urban segregation was also extended across South Africa, predicated on a policy of “influx control” that regulated the movement of black South African laborers between the reserves and urban areas. The structural segregation established during the colonial period continued to mark South African society as British and Afrikaner polities united in the aftermath of the South African War, leading to further disenfranchisement of black South Africans.

       Unified Rule, the ANC, and the White Welfare State

      The social, political, economic, and institutional dynamics that emerged during the colonial period were carried forward with the unification of British and Afrikaner colonial polities. Unified white rule emerged in South Africa with the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, a white colonial compromise that was built on the expropriation of black South Africans. The power-sharing government of British and Afrikaner settlers reversed legislation that had granted limited citizenship rights to black South African during the late colonial period. For example, the Glen Grey Act (1894) had established limited citizenship rights for black South Africans within racially defined territories.³⁶ However, the Natives Land Act (1913) reversed this policy by preventing land sales between white and black South Africans while formalizing expropriation, with 87 percent of the land set aside for white colonial settlers (WHO 1983). The exclusion of black farmers ended the emergence of a black South African peasantry and eliminated competition in the agricultural sectors since black South African farmers had generally outperformed their white counterparts with higher per-acre agricultural production (Bundy 1979). Black South African social formations, which constituted 70 percent of the country’s population, were left to carry out subsistence farming on poor quality farmland within densely settled reserves or seek out wage labor in the mines or in urban areas.³⁷

      Unified white rule was met with political resistance, most notably from the South African Native National Congress, which was established in 1912 and later renamed the African National Congress in 1923.³⁸ СКАЧАТЬ