Research Articles (PLAAS)

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Browsing by Subject "Apartheid"

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    Gender, generation and the experiences of farm dwellers resettled in the Ciskei Bantustan, South Africa, ca 1960–1976
    (Wiley, 2013) Evans, Laura
    This paper examines the experiences of farm dwellers resettled in rural townships in theCiskei Bantustan during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on the oraltestimonies of elderly residents of Sada and Ilinge townships, the paper shows how genderedand generational inequalities within households were crucial factors shaping individuals’experiences of resettlement from the farms. The paper engages with an older literature thatregarded the abolition of labour tenancy and linked resettlement programmes as the finalstage of farm tenants’ proletarianization. It highlights the problems of this linear narrative,and argues that men and women experienced and understood this process in radicallydifferent ways. Male labour migration and the remnants of farm paternalism meant thatwhile resettlement cemented the status of migrant men, for women and non-migrant menthis process was characterized by contradiction: on the one hand, escape from the spatialhegemonies of farm paternalism and, on the other, heightened economic exposure.
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    The legacies of the Natives Land Act of 1913
    (Stellenbosch University, 2014) Hall, Ruth
    Looking back at the century since the promulgation of the Natives Land Act, it can be argued that it shaped the trajectories of most South Africans’ lives. It expelled black people from the land into crowded reserves and formed the cornerstone of the migrant labour system and through which, accumulation of wealth in white-owned mines, farms and factories. Far from unravelling this history of dispossession, the land reform process has merely dabbled at its edges while the inequalities it set in place have in some ways been further aggravated since 1994. Four legacies of the Act are identified: the material legacy of poverty and inequality in the divided countryside but also the displaced legacy of urban poverty and inequality; the social and spiritual legacy of division, invisibility and failed reconciliation; and a political legacy of legal pluralism and dualistic governance that denotes zones of tradition or custom, distinct from the rest of the country. In this context, the church needs to reflect not only on its mixed involvement in dispossession and resistance to it in the past, but also on its role in dismantling the structures of poverty and inequality, social and spiritual division, invisibility, and dualistic governance.
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    South Africa’s Bantustans and the dynamics of “decolonisation”: Reflections on writing histories of the homelands
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2012) Evans, Laura
    From the late 1950s, as independent African polities replaced formal colonialrule in Africa, South Africa’s white minority regime set about its own policy ofmimicry in the promotion of self-governing homelands, which were to beguided to full ‘independence’. Scholarly study of South Africa’s homelands hasremained largely apart from accounts of decolonisation in Africa. Aninterpretation of South Africa’s exceptional political path in the era of Africandecolonisation that has dominated the literature has meant that importantdebates in African history, which might helpfully illuminate the South Africancase, have been neglected. In seeking inspiration for new histories of thehomelands, this article looks beyond South Africa’s borders to processes of anddebates on decolonisation in Africa.