The peasantariat and politics: migration,wage labor,and agriculture in Botswana

This article examines Botswana's wage labor migration in terms of 2 reigning theories: 1) as a dichotomy between traditional and modern society, with workers viewing agriculture as an alternative to more desirable wage employment; or 2) as a subordination of colonial society to capitalist society, with workers drawn from the resulting underdeveloped and impoverished areas and divorced from their agricultural potential. Approximately 90% of Botswanan households have a wage worker; less than 1/4 of households rely on the agricultural economy alone. 80% of the population works in agriculture in some way, but agriculture contributes only 35% of total rural income. Over 50% of households are below the poverty level, and most must rely on a variety of income sources for subsistence. 68% of rural households (Botswana is 84% rural) have absent wage earners while 45% have 1 or more wage earners present. Absent wage earners work mainly in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in Botswanan towns (44%) and villages (22%), and lands and cattlepost locations (5%) in South African mines (19%), and other jobs in South Africa (8%). Individuals with low socioeconomic status tend to migrate to South Africa; those with higher status move to Botswanan towns. Working for wages has become customary for most Botswanans. This article undermines conventional development theories by showing the close interweaving of the modern and traditional societies, and arguing that traditional retention of communal land rights and cattle ownership served the capitalistic system by becoming the basis for wage earning; previous income source (agriculture) did not disappear, but their use was altered. South African mining returns to the Botswanan government since 1965 largely benefited a growing petty-bourgeois class and marginally improved the life styles of the peasant labor class. Botswana's development depends on the relationship between the peripherial laboring class and the dominating petty-bourgeois and its internal structure.     

Historical Archaeology in Africa: An Appropriate Concept?

The term ‘ historical archaeology’ originated in the United States and was subsequently adopted in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, all places subjected to European colonization during the last few centuries. The idea of historical archaeology has had relatively little application in Europe, birthplace of the antithetical idea of prehistory. In Africa, other than at the southern tip of the continent, the practice of what is called historical archaeology has developed only recently and the relevance of the concept in Africa might be questioned. There are chronological problems in its application: not only are the interfaces between preliterate and literate societies spread over thousands of years in different areas but they can at times be regressive. The matter is further complicated if the term historical archaeology is used for societies whose history is oral not written. However, there is an ambiguity in this concept that also has methodological and other connotations. In these respects the idea of historical archaeology does perhaps have a place in Africa as a whole, but it represents a compartmentalization of our discipline still inadequately defined.     

Johannes Nkosi and the Communist Party of South Africa: Images of 'Blood River' and King Dingane in the Late 1920s–1930

In divided societies like South Africa, history, among other things,serves ideological purposes. The colonial encounter between King Dingane, the second Zulu king, who ruled from 1828 to 1840, and white settlers highlights this fact. The core of Afrikaner Nationalist historiography regarded the king as a treacherous, uncivilized barbarian. He was perceived to be an anti‐white demagogue who was beyond redemption. But elsewhere, African nationalists and workers viewed the king as one of the original freedom fighters who resisted thetyranny of the land‐grabbing white settlers and voortrekkers of the nineteenth century. Their interpretations of King Dingane's relationship with white settlers depict the latter as disrespectful imperialists and unscrupulous men, attempting to enrich themselves at the expense of the indigenous population. Accordingly, their interpretation of this encounter revolves around the land question in South Africa. This article discusses a case study regarding these issues. It is about the challenge mounted by African workers in the late 1920s and 1930 against the official celebration of December 16. This celebration honored the victory of the voortrekkers at the so‐called battle of ‘Blood River’ on December 16, 1838—hence the public holiday was once referred to as ‘Dingaan's Day.’ As a counter‐commemoration of this day, African workers regarded the official celebrations as symbolizing the loss of their land and the passing of their freedom. As a result African workers aligned with the Communist Party of South Africa, and through the leadership skills of Johannes Nkosi, mounted vigorous protests and challenges against these celebrations by white South Africans. They staged protest marches and defiant anti‐pass campaigns that emphasized the centrality of the land question in South Africa. They also paid tribute to their past, include King Dingane. Through their actions they imbued conscience in African workers throughout the country, hence the response of the state was brutal and culminated with the death of Johannes Nkosi in 1930.     

Beyond Modernization and Development, or Why the Poor Reject Development

This paper examines the processes and impact of modernization and development paradigms upon poor communities in non-Western societies. It traces the original classical meaning of modernization as being a process of transformation of the rural economy into modern industrial urban-based capitalist society. This transformed society at a later stage through colonization exports "modern development" to these non-Western societies but with very different consequences in terms of their impact on the lives of millions of people who are marginalized and exploited through these means.
Instead of transforming their agriculture into modern industrial development, these societies are subjected to a "reverse modernization" in which the prior European industrial relations and structure are superimposed on to the traditional structures of the Third World using neo-traditional ideologies and structures as part of the process of penetration. This "enforced development" is resisted in many parts of the world and rejected through diverse means including post-traditionalism. The paper ends by posing questions as to what are the appropriate responses to modernization and development as we move towards the twenty-first century.     

The MSA sequence of Diepkloof and the history of southern African Late Pleistocene populations

This paper presents the first multidisciplinary synthesis of the Middle Stone Age sequence of Diepkloof Rock Shelter (South Africa). We explore the main cultural changes that characterized southern African hunter–gatherer societies from OIS 5 to the beginning of OIS 3. We discuss the tempo of these changes, test the current interpretative hypotheses and explore an empirical model to explain the early appearance of symbolic marking within the Pleistocene hunter–gather societies of southern Africa.     

Early Evidence for Domestic Chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) in the Horn of Africa

Domestic chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus L. 1758) are one of the most valued farm animals in the world today. Chickens are widespread and economically and socially significant in Africa. Despite their importance, little is known about the nature of their introduction and subsequent integration into African economies. One reason for this is the morphological similarity of domestic chickens to wild galliform birds in Africa such as guineafowl and francolin. Here, we present direct dates and morphological evidence for domestic chickens recovered from Mezber, a pre‐Aksumite (>800–450 BCE) rural farming settlement in northern Ethiopia. Key morphological markers differentiated these domestic chickens from francolins. The Mezber direct chicken element accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates of cal 820–595 BCE and indirect/charcoal AMS dates of cal 921–801 BCE constitute the earliest osteological evidence for chickens in Africa. Chicken bones in the domestic food waste of an early rural settlement at Mezber and their presence in later Aksumite urban contexts show that chickens were integrated into diverse Ethiopian highland settings. The Mezber specimens predate the earliest known Egyptian chickens by at least 550 years and draw attention to early exotic faunal exchanges in the Horn of Africa during the early first millennium BCE. These findings support previous archaeological, genetics and linguistic data that suggest maritime exchange networks with South Arabia through ports along the African Red Sea coast constitute one possible early route of introduction of chickens to Africa. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Civil Society,Locality and Globalization in Rural Tanzania: A Forty–Year Perspective

In the last decade, much discussion of civil society in LDCs, especially those in Africa, has been based on two sets of normative assumptions, one deriving from the Tocquevillian tradition, the other concerning the nature and implications of globalization. This article criticizes both these approaches, on the basis of a restatement of the Hegel–Young Marx position on civil society. This is then used to compare and contrast the character of rural civil society in northern Tanzania in the 1950s and 1990s, allowing a critical consideration of the emergent properties of LDC civil societies, of the changing significance of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ within them, and of the underlying sources of their transformation.     

Historical Perspectives on Pre-Colonial Irrigation in Southern Africa

Abstract

One of the basic areas of interaction between water as natural resource and human societies as agents of cultural transformation is the technology of irrigation. In Africa at least 66 per cent of the available water is used for purposes of irrigation. For more than 4 000 years irrigation has secured food supplies for humans on a continent that is noted for its relative shortage of sufficient natural water supplies.

There is a remarkable hidden power of water in the history of southern Africa. This is particularly the case when we consider the development of early irrigation technologies of Iron Age farmers. The small irrigation furrow of the subsistence farmer was just as important to an insular community of Bantu-speaking people in pre-colonial times, as is the sophisticated irrigation technology in present-day South Africa. Currently there is a paucity of information about pre-colonial indigenous irrigation technology. This can be ascribed to a number of factors of which the invasion of modern Western traditions in the nineteenth century is perhaps the most important. A number of other factors for the apparent blind-spot is also presented in this study.

In southern Africa there are traces of indigenous pre-colonial irrigation works at sites such as Nyanga in Zimbabwe; the Limpopo River Valley; Mpumalanga; and South Africa's eastern Highveld. Reference is also made in this article to specific strategies of irrigation used by Iron Age communities, prior to the advent of a colonial presence. Finally, attention is also drawn to pre-colonial land tenure and state formation against the backdrop of Wittfogel's theories on hydraulic society.     

Civil society and public–private partnerships: case study of the Agri-FoodBank in South Africa

In recent decades, civil society organizations (CSOs) have joined public–private partnerships (PPPs) to reduce poverty and promote local development. In what follows, I analyze the development of the Agri-FoodBank (AFB) CSO in South Africa in order to critically examine PPPs. As part of the FoodBank South Africa (FBSA) network of food banks, the AFB has emerged to reduce rural and urban food insecurities. Building on the national system of food banks, the AFB aims to train small-scale rural farmers to sell their crops to the food bank’s network of local food organizations which then feed the urban poor. In the case of the AFB, findings suggest that the PPP emerged as a mutually beneficial collaboration between the state and FBSA, as the state needed political power and FBSA needed money. However, for this PPP to form, FBSA completely transformed its mission and structure to fit the state’s preference for rural development projects. Thus, although the AFB formed to empower FBSA, data findings indicate that the AFB has increased state control over FBSA. In this way, PPPs need to be understood within the context of local state-civil society relations, as methods of state control reflect South Africa’s unique version of neoliberalism.     

Ochre Provenance and Procurement Strategies During The Middle Stone Age at Diepkloof Rock Shelter,South Africa

Usually referred to in archaeological contexts simply as ‘ochre’, ferruginous rocks were commonly used during the Middle Stone Age (MSA) in South Africa. While ochre use by early modern humans has often been interpreted as reflecting complex behaviours, related procurement strategies and selection criteria remain poorly documented. Eight ochre sources from the surroundings of Diepkloof rock shelter in South Africa and 28 ochre pieces from the site's MSA levels were studied by XRD, ICP–OES and ICP–MS. Mineralogical and geochemical data demonstrate that ochre was both locally procured and transported to the site from more distant sources. Here, we investigate the reasons underlying the choice of particular local and non‐local ochre sources exploited at Diepkloof, emphasizing differences in their physico‐chemical properties. Regardless of the motivations behind ochre selection, our data shed new light on the behavioural complexity of MSA societies and suggest that ochre procurement strategies may be independent of subsistence concerns.     

"Own a Home in North Carolina": Image and Reality in Ethnic European Colonies

Between 1905 and 1912, six planned farm colonies were developed in southeastern North Carolina. The dream of Wilmington utilities magnate Hugh MacRae, the colonies were visualized as an experiment in "human engineering" to create a "back to the land" movement as a remedy to the economic ills of the rural South. The six communities (Castle Haynes, Marathon, St. Helena, Van Eeden, New Berlin and Artesia) were anomalies in the rural South in that they were miniature "melting pots" for the flood of European immigrants who flocked to America in the early 1900s. Through the use of documentary photographs, promotional propaganda brochures and oral histories, the material culture of the colonies is explored and analyzed. The images of the spatial patterns and house types that were created in the minds of the potential colonists by the promotional literature are contrasted with the stark realities of the landscapes that confronted the settlers upon arrival.     

Europe’s First Settler Colonial Incursion into Africa: The Genocide of Aboriginal Canary Islanders

The annihilation of the aboriginal societies of the Canary archipelago, which consists of seven islands off the coast of southern Morocco and was populated by indigenes derived from Berber-speaking communities of north-west Africa, represents modern Europe’s first overseas settler colonial genocide. The process of social destruction, initiated by European slave raiders in the first half of the fourteenth century, was propelled to completion by mainly Iberian conquistadors and settlers towards the end of the fifteenth century. In addition to unrestrained mass violence against Canarians, European conquerors practised near-total confiscation of land and near-total enslavement and deportation of island populations. Enslavement and deportation, which went hand in hand, accounted for the largest number of victims and were central to the genocidal process. They were in effect as destructive as killing because the victims, generally the most productive members of their communities, were permanently lost to their societies. Child confiscation, sexual violence and the use of scorched earth tactics also contributed to the devastation suffered by Canarian peoples. After conquest, the remnants of indigenous Canarian societies were subjected to ongoing violence and cultural suppression, which ensured the extinction of their way of life. That the enslavement and deportation of entire island communities was the consciously articulated aim of conquerors establishes their “intent to destroy in whole,” which is the central criterion for meeting the United Nations Convention on Genocide’s definition of genocide. This article argues that individually and collectively all seven cases of social obliteration in the Canaries represent clear examples of genocide, and it is the first article to contend that the destruction of aboriginal Canarian societies constitutes genocide.     

The Mongol invasions of Europe

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Zionist Christianity emerged in South Africa out of the peasant revolt that occurred in the Boer Republics during and after the South African War. Using the experiences of early Zionist leaders Daniel Nkonyane and Engenas Lekganyane, the article demonstrates the continuity of their theology with the ideology of the ‘Rebellion From Below’ first described by Jeremy Krikler. The early Zionists, like their predecessors, were primarily interested in recreating a world based on communal politics and land ownership – a world without rents, landlords, or white supervision.     

Urban Land Restitution and the Struggle for Social Citizenship in South Africa

Reintegrating the city is a priority of social justice and development in many urban centres of the ‘South’ that bear the legacy of forced displacement. In South Africa, much of the land restitution programme has thus far focused on urban areas. In certain large cluster claims involving the transfer and development of significant tracts of well‐placed land, restitution has presented the prospect of altering landed property regimes in the heart of the city. The predominantly rural and economic emphasis in scholarship and policy debate on land reform in South Africa — which reflects historical trends in development studies — has led to a narrowed vision of what is at stake in urban land restitution. Complex interventions aimed at redressing urban spatial segregation can potentially alter the relationship between citizens, institutions and urban space in ways that expand the possibilities for social and political agency in sites that are strategically important for influencing the direction of change more broadly. A key, as yet unrealized, challenge is how to articulate such struggles for a ‘right to the city’ with efforts at redressing the spatialization of poverty on the urban periphery.     

Commonlands,mineral rights and industry: changing evaluations in an industrializing society

This paper is concerned with a society experiencing significant change, an industrializing society. Throughout the South Wales coalfield in the second half of the eighteenth century, rural structures were being supplanted by urban-industrial structures, traditional modes of landuse were being dislocated by new enterprises and the former pastoral landscape was being invaded by the paraphernalia of mining and manufacturing. The old cultural region, “Blaenau Morgannwg” was being transmuted into the new cultural region, “The Valleys”.More particularly, this industrializing society experienced a significant change in the attitudes of landowners to their estates and also a change in both the mechanisms and intensity of control. With the recognition of the opportunities for industrial development, many lords evinced an increased concern for the integrity of their manorial perquisites, particularly those related to minerals and their access to them. The assertion of neglected rights, the institution of rigorous estate management and the prosecution of previously neglected abuses constituted a dislocation of local landuse practices and traditional ways of life. To some extent, the experience was similar to that of other areas experiencing increased industrial activities at this time, although the effect of certain local cultural influences may be recognized in the particulars of the response.The specific focus of this study is on the important roles which manorial wastes were to play in these new industrial enterprises. Whereas in the past the wastes had been but peripheral elements of the total estate economy, the industrial demand for minerals, fuel and land occasioned a radical reappraisal of their contribution. Many studies have considered encroachments and enclosure in the context of agricultural systems but it is argued here that in certain parts of Britain, industrial considerations were of paramount importance. The primary challenge to the very existence of manorial wastes and commons, the Enclosure Movement, was contemporaneous with the initial stages of the industrialization of this region. But rather than expediting the elimination of these lands, several factors caused manorial wastelands and commons to bulk large in the early industrialization of the South Wales coalfield.The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to attempt a better understanding of the impact of industrialization upon the wastelands of the South Wales coalfield and of the society formerly dependent upon them. Particular attention will be focused upon the way in which this process affected the attitudes of the various interested parties towards mineral rights, encroachments and parliamentary enclosure, and which in turn required reappraisals of a way of life by an old social order.     

Defusing Land Disputes? The Politics of Land Certification and Dispute Resolution in Burundi

There is a growing interest in localized land registration, in which user rights are acknowledged and recorded through a community-based procedure, as an alternative to centralized titling to promote secure tenure in sub-Saharan Africa. Localized land registration is expected to reduce land disputes, yet it remains unclear how it impacts disputes in practice. This is an urgent question for war-affected settings that experience sensitive land disputes. This article discusses findings from ethnographic fieldwork in Burundi on pilot projects for land certification. It identifies three ways in which certification feeds into land conflicts rather than preventing or resolving them. First, land certification represents a chance for local people to enter a new round of claim making, as those ignored or disenfranchised in earlier rounds see new opportunities. Second, it offers an avenue for institutional competition between different land-governing institutions. Third, certification provides politicians with openings to interfere in tenure relations and to expand their support base. The authors conclude that these problems are not simply a matter of inadequate policy design. Rather, there are crucial political dimensions to land conflicts and land tenure in Burundi, which means that land registration programmes run the risk of inflaming conflictive property relations in rural communities.     

本杰明·富兰克林与早期费城的公共社会

以富兰克林在费城社会活动的轨迹为视角,通过对城市精英在推动城市社会公共领域的发展、促进公民公共意识的形成等方面的作用的考察,可以得出如下结论：独立前的北美不同于近代早期的欧洲,殖民政府很少承担城市的公共事务;在城市精英的组织和领导下,公民积极参与和管理公共事务,开创了近代城市的管理模式。     

Missionaries,Evangelical Identity,and the Religious Ecology of Early Nineteenth‐Century South Carolina and the British Caribbean

This article examines a critical question that fraught contemporaries throughout the Atlantic system in the early nineteenth century: could slavery be ameliorated and, thus, by implication, could slaves be ‘improved’? Despite strong eighteenth‐century connections through trade and as provincial outposts of the British Empire, South Carolina and the British Caribbean differed markedly on this issue by the early 1800s. But the reasons for this divergence cannot be adequately explained by the effects of the American Revolution. South Carolina slaveholders believed that slavery could be ameliorated through the adoption of evangelicalism. West Indian proprietors, however, believed that the introduction of evangelical religion among their slaves would only incite them to rebel. Thus, evangelical missionaries were often crucial figures in defining the character of slaveholding societies in South Carolina and the West Indies. These missionaries illustrated South Carolinians' paternalistic, benevolent sense of a permanent slave society, while itinerants in the West Indies described a violent, lawless, and temporary society beyond the pale of British standards of civility and humanitarianism.     

The Evolution and Destruction of Oorlam Communities in the Rustenburg District of South Africa: The Cases of Welgeval and Bethlehem, 1850s–1980

Abstract

This is a study of two Oorlam communities in the Rustenburg district. The one, Welgeval, was predominantly rural, the other Bethlehem, otherwise known as the Oorlam Locasie, in Rustenburg town itself, was mostly urban in character. They were situated no more than 60 kilometres apart. They were both off-springs of Boer, later Afrikaner society, and, to a lesser extent, of attachment to missionaries. They both survived for approximately the same duration, and both were victims, in slightly different ways, of apartheid. There was some known contact between the two communities. The emergence of their respective histories has rested in part on land restitution claims, which like many across South Africa, have brought to light previously forgotten or uncovered remembrances. There are, therefore, significant points of similarity and comparison between them. This article further complements the existing literature of previous scholars on the Oorlam by uncovering the experiences of two more sites of Oorlam occupation. Finally a study of the two communities raises interesting issues regarding their identity and the ways in which they have remembered and reconstructed their pasts.     

Communal Tenure and Rural Poverty: Land Transactions in Svosve Communal Area,Zimbabwe

The idea of communal tenure has formed a key plank in the rural governance of Zimbabwe since independence, but its retention following the Fast Track land reforms of 2000–2002 perpetuates a distinction between ‘commercial’ land governed by a land market and ‘communal’ land on which market transactions are illegal. This article draws on recent research in Svosve Communal Area to examine the dynamics of land access and their implications for rural poverty in Zimbabwe. The authors argue that, as in many other parts of Africa, access to land governed by customary authority in Svosve is increasingly commoditized via informal, or ‘vernacular’, sales or rental markets. In failing to acknowledge and address this commoditization of land, the ‘communitarian’ discourse of customary land rights that dominates the politics of land in Zimbabwe — as elsewhere in much of Africa — undermines, rather than protects, the livelihoods of the rural poor.