Black Belonging,White Belonging: Primitive Accumulation in South Africa's Private Nature Reserves

Evictions have been shown to be a mechanism of primitive accumulation in nature conservation. This paper adds an historical analysis to the discussion on primitive accumulation in conservation by exploring the seemingly innocuous mechanism of White belonging to land in South Africa's private nature reserves. Contemporary articulations of White belonging are replete with stories and images of White male “pioneers” from the colonial era who, upon arrival in “empty lands”, were able to create economies out of nothing. Such representations of history on private nature reserve websites and other promotional material invisibilise Black belonging and legitimise private conservation. By illuminating the inconsistencies in the empty lands narrative and the legacies of three championed conservation pioneers from the 19^th century, this paper argues that White belonging is a mechanism of primitive accumulation, while Black belonging continues to be expressed in various ways in contemporary South Africa.     

Investigating Identity and Life Histories: Isotopic Analysis and Historical Documentation of Slave Skeletons Found on the Cape Town Foreshore, South Africa

Isotopic analysis of skeletons excavated during the 1950s has confirmed that they are the remains of shipwreck victims: slaves on board the Portuguese slaving brig Pacquet Real when it sank on 18 May 1818. Twenty-five slaves drowned and the remaining 133 became Prize Negroes at the Cape. The isotopic signatures are consistent with values expected for people living in an African village eating a terrestrially based diet. Analyses of different skeletal elements, i.e., teeth, long bone, and rib, are shown to be a valuable tool in tracing change or consistency in diet during a person's life, because different skeletal elements form at different stages of life and, subsequently, remodel at different rates. A comparison of isotope ratios from different skeletal elements indicates a change in diet in all these individuals, probably coincident with their enslavement. Variation between individuals in the isotopic composition of diets eaten early in life is sufficiently large to deduce heterogeneous origins for the group.     

Contesting White Australia: Black Jazz Musicians in a White Man's Country

In March 1928, a tabloid-fuelled interracial sex scandal led to the deportation of an African American jazz orchestra and the introduction of a decades-long ban on black musicians. The incident raised questions about the place of cosmopolitanism within the White Australia experiment and calls into question the widely held assumption that the policy enjoyed unquestioned popular support in this period. By tracing the links between the individuals who championed the deportation, it is possible to identify divisions over the scope and meaning of the White Australia policy.     

Spatiality and the Interpretation of Identity Formation: Fugitive Slave Community Creation in Nineteenth-Century Kenya

In the nineteenth century, the coalescence of a plantation economy on the Swahili Coast provoked an upsurge in the local slave trade. Increasing numbers of enslaved workers fled inland, and, by the 1840s, some had created independent settlements. In Swahili, runaway slaves were known as watoro. Forged by men and women of diverse cultural backgrounds, watoro communities offer broad insight into how groups form and sustain themselves. This study explores how watoro settlement organization and landscape practices reflect the process of community formation. Particular attention is paid to watoro communities?? participation in regional networks and the degree to which fugitive slaves developed homogenized sociocultural norms or maintained long-term cultural plurality. This paper adopts a spatial archaeological approach centered on settlement location, housing density, and domestic architecture. Dissonances between these spatial data and artifact distributions reveal the ways in which both heterogeneity and homogeneity were expressed and experienced. Articulations and disarticulations between different evidentiary types also help to better reveal the diverse range of inter-group interactions that fugitive slaves pursued and avoided.     

''These Untutored Masses'': The Campaign for Respectability Among White and Black Evangelicals in the American South, 1870–1930

In the post-Civil War American South, leaders of both white and black denominations sought to root out southern 'folk' religious practices from their churches. Denominational modernizers preached the middle-class virtues necessary to the building of a new southern social order: piety, sobriety and the systematic accumulation of wealth. They built bureaucracies of benevolence and conceived of 'intelligent worship' as a means of schooling their 'untutored masses' in the ways of bourgeois religiosity. In response, white and black believers, predominantly small farmers and sharecroppers with limited educations, adopted certain forms suggested by the advocates of respectable religion while also maintaining publicly emotive and physically tactile expressions of southern religiosity derived both from the camp-meeting past as well as African-derived rituals of worship. By focusing on worship practices and musical styles, this article illuminates an episode in the dialectic of traditional spirituality and bourgeois decorum in a region in, but not fully of, America.