Nationalism or ‘Tribalism’: The Evolution of Cape Afrikaner Ethnic Consciousness in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract. This article seeks to explore the evolution of the ethnic consciousness of the Afrikaners in the Cape Colony at an initial and crucial stage. The colonial Cape Afrikaners are treated as a core community, distinguished from Afrikaner communities in other states in South Africa. It is argued that their collective consciousness was shaped primarily by their core colonial experience rather than by their ethnocultural commonality with the other diaspora Afrikaner communities. Having been socialised into the British colonial state, they have evolved a collective consciousness premised on neither ethnic self-determination nor ethnic exclusiveness. Correspondingly, their political outlook incorporated both British imperialism and Cape white multi-culturalism. They were mobilised ethnically to secure their share in the spoils of the British colonial state rather than to attain ethno-nationalist goals.     

Following the Ancestors: Six Moments in a Genealogy of Urban Design and Heritage in the City of Cape Town

In 2014, Cape Town is celebrating its design in all its forms, having been voted the World Design Capital (WDC). The hopeful rhetoric of the city as ultimate holiday destination, African creative metropolis, prime global-events location or city of freedom indicates powerful cultural discourses at work. In this paper, I will give a series of insights into the links between colonial modernity, on the one hand, and the origins of contemporary discourses of urban design and heritage in Cape Town, on the other. I intend to discuss the function of official discourse concerning the design of the city as well as the sudden eruptions that disturb these constructs. I point to the recurrent patterns and moments in which design is made plain and unspoken. I will trace the genealogy of official or top-down design and heritage discourses as well as the moments or movements that are at odds with or embarrass this official discourse.     

Religion in an Age of Empire: The Salvation Army and British Imperialism, 1878–1914

Debates about the British Empire continue to rage, especially those concerned with its impact on domestic affairs during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The degree to which empire mattered to average Britons at home has tended to generate polarised responses from historians. Some have sought to downplay its overall significance, whereas others have been prone to argue that its effects on society were widespread. The present article speaks into this debate by examining one notable British organisation — the Salvation Army — which came into being in the second half of the nineteenth century. While a number of scholars have addressed the imperialist implications of Army work in the colonies, much less work has been done to scrutinise the empire's influence on Salvationists within Britain itself. Looking at three characteristics frequently associated with imperialist ideology — militarism, racial othering, and devotion to the monarchy — this article contends that the Salvation Army's relationship to the British Empire was remarkably dynamic and complex during the timeframe under review. Demonstrating that Salvationist thinking and practice could both help and hinder the aims of imperialism, it points to the need for more balanced and nuanced approaches to the study of the empire in the metropole.     

A divided city: Cape Town

A sketch of Cape Town’s history since its 1652 foundation is offered. A mixed Afro–euro–asian people, the Coloureds, evolved during the era of Dutch and then British colonialism. By the time of apartheid’s imposition from 1948 onwards they had become Cape Town’s majority population group. Now, half a century later, the defeat of apartheid has brought a great influx of Black African poor from distant parts of South Africa, persons whom White rule’s infamous Pass Laws had formerly prohibited from Cape Town. The results: the metropolis has in the last twenty years doubled in population and has not only seen an immense growth in self-built shantytowns and in basic low-income housing, but also a change in complexion. An African majority is now in view, with attendant social tensions and social possibilities.     

‘The Laws of his Own Country’: Defamation,Banishment and the Problem of Legal Pluralism in the 1820s Cape Colony

In 1824 the Cape colony was rocked by three criminal libel trials brought by the colonial administration against settlers who had criticised its officials. To further silence their critics, a recently established colonial newspaper was suppressed and an order banishing its editor was issued by executive decree without judicial process. While these actions are well known to historians of South Africa, the important legal and constitutional issues they raised have not been properly recognised. In tracking the controversy that these trials unleashed in London, Cape Town and other colonial localities, this article argues that these events must be situated within a broader crisis of legal pluralism playing out within the British Empire. The confusion between English and Dutch law highlighted by these cases and their aftermath reveals constitutional debates that underscore the deep contingency of conquest law at a highly unstable legal and political moment. The political disputes inspired by these actions demonstrate that conflicts between variants of European law need to be more clearly recognised as instrumental to the strengthened implementation of British imperial legal hierarchies in colonial localities through the 1820s and 1830s.     

Governing Post Apartheid Spatiality: Implementing City Improvement Districts in Cape Town

Abstract: To achieve a world‐class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio‐spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post‐apartheid regime and its governance. Analyzing discursive and spatial practices of Cape Town Partnership, the managing body of downtown CIDs, from 2000 to 2006, the paper reveals its difficulties in stabilizing the socio‐spatial relations of a transnationalizing urban revitalization strategy and rejects the view of CIDS as simply a global roll‐out of neoliberal urban policies. It highlights how CIDs are challenged from both within and outside of their managing structures by contentious local issues, and in particular by vast social inequalities and citizens' historical struggle for inclusive citizenship and the right to the city. Whether and how CIDs' inherent limitations can be overcome to address socio‐spatial inequalities is an open question.     

A total extinction confidently hoped for: the destruction of Cape San society under Dutch colonial rule, 1700-1795

San (Bushman) society in the Cape Colony was almost completely annihilated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of land confiscation, massacre, forced labour and cultural suppression that accompanied colonial rule. Whereas similar obliterations of indigenous peoples in other parts of the world have resulted in major public controversies and heated debate amongst academics about the genocidal nature of these episodes, in South Africa the issue has effectively been ignored aside from passing, often polemical, references to it as genocide. Even recent studies that have approached the mass killing of the Cape San with sensitivity and insight do not address it as a case of genocide. This article sets out to redress this imbalance in part by analysing the dynamic of frontier conflict between San and settler under Dutch colonial rule as genocide. It demonstrates both the exterminatory intent underlying settler violence as well as the complicity of a weak colonial state in these depredations, including its sanctioning of the root-and-branch eradication of the San.     

The Salvation Army in Sweden and the Making of Gender — Conversion Narratives 1887–1918

This article discusses how Swedish Salvationists wrote about femininity and masculinity in conversion narratives during the period 1887–1918; the “breakthrough” of modern Sweden. Through their religious conversion female Salvationists adopted a femininity that demanded the same right to participate in religious life as men. In a similar manner, men in the Salvation Army achieved a changed masculinity through conversion, which allowed them to express feelings and cry in public. Doing so, these Salvationists expressed an unconscious or conscious criticism towards the prevailing values about gender in society.     

Coarse Earthenware at the Dutch Colonial Cape of Good Hope, South Africa: A History of Local Production and Typology of Products

Coarse earthenware production at the Dutch East India Company (VOC) Cape settlement began shortly after the Company established its mercantile entrepôt on the shores of Table Bay in 1652. Made by European Company potters, these vessels reproduced the forms of the homeland in the raw materials of the colony. A history of VOC pottery manufacture and a typological examination of the products illustrates how the global movements of mercantile capitalism combined with the local circumstances of the Cape settlement to create a material form reminiscent of Europe, but purely colonial in the dynamics of its production and use.     

Truth as historical recapitulation: the dead of Cape Town’s District One

In this essay, I reflect on the massive and dramatic re-emergence of the dead of Cape Town’s District One in 2003, and its aftermath. I discuss how the resurfacing of these ancestors helps us understand how heritage discourses operate in Cape Town, and how their agency forces us to consider what it means to live in the city during post-apartheid urban renewal. I argue that the agency of the District One dead hinges on their exposure of the internal workings of discourse and the associated disciplinary practices through which we experience Cape Town and its heritage. This story ends ambiguously. I discuss how, following the storage of the District One dead in the Prestwich Ossuary, the gaze on Cape Town was redirected away from the city’s past and towards its future; I explore how their reinterment foreclosed a series of discussions regarding the reconciliation of past events with the present realities of Cape Town. I argue, finally, that truth at District One can be understood as a form of historical recapitulation.     

Survey and excavation of the main well in Cape Town Castle, South Africa: fieldwork and structural aspects

During the last few decades, Cape Town Castle has been extensively renovated. Parallel to this, a series of archaeological excavations were undertaken under the auspices of different institutions. During the course of these, it became clear that one specific site needed to be approached in a rather unorthodox way. This site, the main well situated in the centre of the previous headquarters of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope, was filled with water. Owing to its inaccessibility and other constraints, which made the application of adapted excavation techniques necessary, the need arose to call in the assistance of a diver-archaeologist. This article describes the approach to fieldwork undertaken in the Kat well during 1989 and 1999 and some of this feature's structural details.     

When open data and data activism meet: An analysis of civic participation in Cape Town,South Africa

Municipal open data projects are motivated by a desire to democratize data access and knowledge production, strengthen transparency, and advance cities socially and economically. However, their effects and implications are insufficiently analyzed. This paper examines civic engagement in open data in Cape Town, South Africa, the continent's first municipal-level open data initiative. Findings reveal how local civil society organizations have been driving engagement with municipal open data as part of their recent turn towards technology and data-driven forms of public engagement and activism. This analysis highlights the important role of the “smart civil society organization”—occupying a position between the smart city and smart citizen—that is developing significant capacity to produce and share data about the city's informal settlements with stakeholders in government, the private sector, and wider society. Minimal engagement with or recognition of civil society efforts illustrates the limits to the city's philosophy of data openness, which is largely restricted to releasing selected government datasets to the public. The notion of “bi-directional open data” is developed here to characterize emerging possibilities for data openness between governments and the public. This may be particularly relevant for cities like Cape Town with a highly active, capable, and data-literate civil society.     

The Poolitical City: “Seeing Sanitation” and Making the Urban Political in Cape Town

In an urbanizing world, the inequalities of infrastructure are increasingly politicized in ways that reconstitute the urban political. A key site here is the politicization of human waste. The centrality of sanitation to urban life means that its politicization is always more than just service delivery. It is vital to the production of the urban political itself. The ways in which sanitation is seen by different actors is a basis for understanding its relation to the political. We chart Cape Town's contemporary sanitation syndrome, its condition of crisis, and the remarkable politicization of toilets and human waste in the city's townships and informal settlements in recent years. We identify four tactics—poolitical tactics—that politicize not just sanitation but Cape Town itself: poo protests, auditing, sabotage, and blockages. We evaluate these tactics, consider what is at stake, and chart possibilities for a more just urban future.     

Land,Labour and Ambivalence: Lutheran Missionaries Managing Land Disputes at Cape Bedford Mission

This article provides a close reading of a land dispute between Lutheran missionaries at Cape Bedford mission during the 1920s and 1930s in order to extrapolate understandings of missionary ambivalence, power, and privilege within colonial processes of dispossession. The main contention is that missionaries felt compelled to promote Aboriginal engagement in agricultural labour in order to ensure that they could visibly demonstrate the land's productivity, and then maintain access to it. It also contributes to understandings about missionary power and privilege within the colonial context and how at times the authority of missionaries was undermined by bureaucracy. It points to the discrepancies between settler and humanitarian discourses around Indigenous land use in Queensland's north during this period, and the relationships between missions and the state.     

Christian-Muslim Marriage and Cohabitation: An Aspect of Identity and Family Formation in Nineteenth-Century Cape Town

Nineteenth century Cape Town – Mother City of a ‘Christian’ colony within the British Empire – became the home of an expanding Muslim community which, at its peak, numbered a third of the town's population. Islam had arrived at the Cape by a variety of means. Most of those who were attracted by that faith were slaves or, post-emancipation (1834) and apprenticeship (till 1838), the descendants of slaves. The slaves' exclusion from legal marriage until shortly before abolition had profound consequences for family life – notably, respecting out-of-wedlock births – which the state and the Christian churches attempted to address. In that environment the Muslim family, though on religious terms a thing apart, was often perceived as a model of stability; less acceptable were Christian-Muslim interactions when they entailed the formers' apostasy. This article investigates Cape Town's post-emancipation underclass through the lens of Christian-Muslim unions. It focuses on family life and the status of children born of marriages which, though binding on the parties thereto, did not legitimise their offspring. Equally it traces steps whereby an urban populace, which had been deracinated by slavery, forged new identities. In that development, the manner in which Muslims and Christians mingled, yet remained discrete, played an important part.     

Reactionary modernism: Technology,culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich

Scholarship on European imperialism in the Americas has become increasingly prominent in the historiography of early America after a long period when the subject was hardly discussed. Historians have come to see that local experience in the Americas needs to be placed in a wider, comparative Atlantic context. They have realised that what united most peoples’ experiences in the Americas was that they lived as colonial subjects within colonies that were part of imperial polities. This article examines recent writings on European empires in the Americas, relating imperial history to related developments in fields such as Atlantic history. It suggests that renewed attention to imperialism allows historians to discuss in a fruitful fashion the relationship between power and authority in the formation of colonial societies and draws attention to the continuing importance of metropolitan influence in the articulation of colonial identities.     

Providing local color?: "cape coloreds," "cockneys," and Cape Town's identity from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s

Jim Dyos, founding-father of British urban history, argued that cities have commonly acknowledged “individual characteristics” that distinguish them. Such distinctive characteristics, though usually based on material realities, are promoted through literary and visual representations. This article argues that those who seek to convey a city’s distinctiveness will do so not only through describing its particular topography, architecture, history or functions but also by describing its “local colour”: the supposedly unique customs, manner of speech, dress, or other special features of its inhabitants. In colonial cities this process involved white racial stereotyping of “others”. In Cape Town, depictions of “Coloured” inhabitants as unique “city types” became part of the city’s “destination branding”. The article analyses change and continuity in such representations. To this end it draws on the insights of Gareth Stedman Jones into changing depictions of London’s “Cockneys” and the insights of Stephen Ward into historical “place-selling”.     

Race,Masculinity and Imperialism: The British Officer and the Egyptian Army (1882–1899)

In recent years, there has been increased historical interest in the way in which Western militaries have understood, interacted with and represented Oriental native peoples. However, the influence which the Western perception of the Orient had on the British officers seconded to reform and lead the Egyptian Army between 1882 and 1899 has been overlooked. This oversight is particularly surprising since the reformation the Egyptian Army and its use in the re-conquest of the Sudan between 1896 and 1899 constituted one of the main British military commitments to the Middle East at the height of Empire. Consequently, an examination of the reformation of this force offers the opportunity to examine not only the construction of British racial ideas and their influence on imperialism, but also how they directly affected British actions in Egypt and Sudan. In order to fill this gap in the historiography, this article examines how Western ideas on race, masculinity and imperialism affected the British reformation and leadership of the Egyptian Army as well as how the Europeans attached to the force represented the region in their writing. It argues that the notion of Oriental inferiority quickly became institutionalised amongst the British officers seconded to the force and this not only had a major influence on how the Egyptian Army was both reconstituted and led, but also on how those Europeans attached to the force wrote about their experiences.     

Protecting Tasmanian Aborigines: American and Queensland Influences on the Cape Barren Island Reserve Act, 1912

Early twentieth-century Tasmanian discourses about racial difference reflected trans-imperial connections between England, its colonies, and the United States. This globalised discourse and ideological interconnectedness in turn produced recognisably and intentionally similar policies, although historians bounded by the interests of later nation-states have tended to overlook this. Tasmania's Cape Barren Island Reserve Act 1912 exemplifies how a particular colony's ideology and policy, while attuned to local conditions and particularities, was nonetheless a product of an international framework for regulating the colonised. This legislation was demonstrably modelled on Aboriginal protection legislation passed in the Australian state of Queensland in 1897 and has significant commonalities with the Dawes Act passed in the United States in 1887 to provide for the subdivision of Indian reservations. In Australian historiography, the fact that Tasmania had an Aboriginal reserve and enacted Aboriginal protection legislation has been under-appreciated and even denied. This article redresses these omissions. It also contributes towards redressing the myopic focus on nation and/or colony that has, until recent years, left Australian historiography devoid of a full appreciation of colonial dependence on, and contributions to, a global discourse of race.     

‘An Alternative to Imperialism’: Leonard Woolf,The Labour Party and Imperial Internationalism, 1915–1922

This article examines writings by the British Labour Party theorist Leonard Woolf on international government, imperialism, and the League of Nations. Woolf was a leading member of a group of party officials who supported a deepening commitment to the League of Nations in the immediate post First World War period. Woolf, and his colleagues in the Labour Party, argued that transforming the practice of economic imperialism in European colonies would help to ease tensions between the European powers. The result of such arguments was to present empire as a canvas for displaying an improved sense of European virtue. In particular, abandoning the practice of economic imperialism could instead allow colonial powers to meet their responsibility to ready colonial peoples for self-government and full participation in the global economy. The reforms proposed by Woolf and his Labour Party colleagues could be considered a last gasp of early twentieth century British imperial internationalism.