Crisis and Catharsis in the Development of Capitalism in South African Agriculture

In: African affairs: the journal of the Royal African Society, Band 84, Heft 336, S. 371-398

Abstract

An exploration of the relationship between state initiatives & the transformation of Ru economy & society on the arable high veld of South Africa in the early industrial period, when the countryside was being revolutionized by the influx of capital & the rise of Ur markets. Specifically, the Ru crisis that marked the years before & after the passing of the 1913 Natives Land Act, the foundation stone of segregation/apartheid policy, is examined. Archival documentation, contemporary journals, evidence before official commissions, & oral evidence from elderly Africans were used. It is concluded that social intervention by the state in the promotion of white capitalism at the expense of the black peasantry played a more problematical role than is commonly assumed, & that the consequences of the Land Act (which sought to outlaw black commercial sharecropping enterprise & turn blacks into a laboring class) were quite different from those envisaged by the legislators. Local struggles are charted in order to understand the Ru crisis of the years leading up to 1913 & the great dispersal of black tenants that followed the passing of the Land Act, & the economic context in which this social crisis originated. It is concluded that Ru social transformations should be understood in the context of local struggles for racial domination, rather than in terms of legislation & state interventions, which were generally ineffective, but which did provide the stimulus for local organization by whites on the land in pursuit of the ideals of a white-controlled, capitalist agriculture based on the use of servile black labor. AA