The Agrarian Question in South Africa

Henry Bernstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780714647371
• eBook ISBN: 9781317827443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This is the first collection of its kind. It presents a critical political economy of the agrarian question in post-apartheid South Africa, informed by the results of research undertaken since the transition from apartheid started in 1990. The articles, by well-known South African, British and American scholars, cover a variety of topical theoretical, empirical and policy issues, firmly rooted in an historical perspective.

South Africa's Agrarian Question: Extreme and Exceptional?¹

HENRY BERNSTEIN

INTRODUCTION

Earlier versions of most of the studies in this volume were presented as papers at a workshop on South Africa at the Congress on Agrarian Questions: The Politics of Farming anno 1995, held at Wageningen Agricultural University, the Netherlands, 22–24 May 1995.² All of the contributors, except Allison Drew, participated in the workshop. The occasion provided a unique forum for discussion between the authors. We had not all met together before, although some individuals amongst us have enjoyed close working relationships for some time.³

Beyond the circumstance noted, this collection is distinguished by two features that deserve emphasis. First, its contributors share a commitment to the use of a critical political economy in exploring South Africa's agrarian question, notwithstanding (inevitable) shades of difference in understandings of political economy, its objectives and means. Second, all the studies are based on recent research, conducted since the ‘transition’ from apartheid began with the the unbanning of opposition organisations (and release from prison of Nelson Mandela) in February 1990.⁴

Political and social change in the (almost) six years since then, has been volatile and charged with the intense contradictions inherited from over three centuries of colonisation and white supremacy; current and future developments are marked by great uncertainty, as a number of the papers illustrate vividly. Despite such flux, and its tensions – or, better, helping to illuminate them – a particular strength of the collection is its presentation and analysis of recent research findings.

At the same time, in a number of instances the topical work presented builds on previous research by the authors that enriches its content in various ways. One example is Allison Drew's contribution, drawing on her long-standing project of uncovering the ideas of earlier generations of South African socialists [Drew, 1991, 1995–96]. Another example, and very important for reflection on South African realities (see notes 37, 40, 41), is the substantial research experience of several authors in neighbouring African countries – Ben Cousins and Daniel Weiner in Zimbabwe [Cousins, 1989; 1992; Cousins, Weiner and Amin, 1992; Weiner, 1989], Richard Levin in Swaziland [Levin, 1996], and Colin Murray in Lesotho [C Murray, 1981]. Colin Murray's contribution here also builds on his extraordinary historical reconstruction of the social dynamics of land ownership and use in the eastern Free State over a hundred year period [C. Murray, 1992]. As a final, and somewhat different illustration, Gillian Hart's recent return to research in South Africa utilises the comparative ‘lenses’ of her work in South East and East Asia to illuminating effect.

This introductory essay aims to do three things. First, it sketches the historial context of South Africa's agrarian question, to provide a framework of basic information, and some key reference points for the contributions that follow, to international readers with limited knowledge of South Africa.⁵ The next section introduces the studies within the context sketched, and a final section discusses some of their implications for the extreme – and exceptional? – characteristics of South Africa's agrarian question.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The sketch of historical context is, unavoidably, most schematic. At the same time, it narrows the lens, so to speak, the nearer it approaches the present through three key phases of modern South African history: the ‘mineral revolution’ following the discovery of diamonds in the 1860s and of gold in the 1880s; the processes that led to the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, and that followed it (industrialisation and a consolidating segregation); and the period of apartheid under the National Party (NP) state from 1948 to 1994.⁶

Colonial Settlement and Expansion, 1652–1860s

Prior to the start of mining of the world's largest deposits of diamonds at Kimberley (in the Northern Cape) in 1867, and of gold on the Witwaterstand (in the Transvaal) in 1886, the territory of present-day South Africa had been subject to over two centuries of European colonial expansion. This developed from the small beginning of a refreshment station established by the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, to supply ships plying the trade route between Europe and Asia. The principal processes of change during this long intervening period (mid-seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries) were as follows.

– the growth of Dutch settlement in the Western Cape, including the development of a commercial agriculture (wheat, wine, cattle) and mercantile economy with substantial landowners and burghers at the apex of its class structure and unfree labour at its base (drawn from the survivors of the indigenous Khoisan people and slaves imported from the Dutch East Indies);

– the rapid establishment of formal institutions and informal structures of white supremacy, entrenched in the evolving ‘Africanised’ (Afrikaner) culture of Dutch colonial settlement;

– the expansion of the frontier of Afrikaner settlement, spearheaded by groups of trekkers (pastoralists and hunters) and mediated by their encounters with African social formations (for example, the Xhosa of the Fish River region who fought a long series of wars with the Dutch, and later the British, from the mid-eighteenth century);

– the widespread disruption of the Mfecane, a series of wars and migrations from the late eighteenth century to the 1830s that consolidated five powerful indigenous kingdoms in the central and eastern areas of present day South Africa: those of the Zulu, Ndebele, Swazi, Basotho, and Bapedi;

– the entry and expansion of British colonialism, including rule of the Cape from 1806 and settlement in the Eastern Cape and eastern seaboard (Natal); the impetus of British imperialism in the region brought it into increasing collision with the social formations of the interior, both African and Afrikaner (the two principal republics consolidated by trekkers in the highveld of the Orange Free State and Transvaal in the mid-nineteenth century).

By the 1860s, on the eve of the ‘mineral revolution’,

…British colonialism had overseen the emergence of significant capitalist farming by white settlers in the Western and Eastern Cape and Natal, There also existed pockets of commercial capitalism around the ports of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban. A network of migrant merchants was slowly insinuating commodity relations into all the societies of the region … The Afrikaans-speaking Boer colonialists (of the interior, HB)… lived mainly off the rents in labour and in kind from the various squatters on their extensive landholdings. They justified this pre-capitalist form of colonial exploitation in terms of rigid racist ideologies which forbade any ‘equality in church or state’ between white master and black servant [Davies et al., 1988: 6].

The Mineral Revolution and the Union to 1948

Despite the instances and forms of commoditisation that had developed (very unevenly and often haltingly) in the colonial situations outlined, it was the mineral revolution, above all in gold mining, that definitively shaped the trajectory of capitalist development. The geological conditions of gold mining (low grade ores in deep and widely dispersed deposits) made it profitable only with a high rate of exploitation of labour and large investments of capital. Exploitation rested on the construction of a rapidly expanding and increasingly regulated system of migrant (male) African labour, with some foundations in earlier colonial practices and the social geography of settler expansion and African dispossession. In 1889 the gold mines employed some 17,000 African workers and 11,000 whites; by 1909 these numbers had grown to 200,000 and 23,000 respectively. This labour system returned African migrants, at the end of their contracts, to rural homes where agriculture supported (or ‘subsidized’) their low wages and the reproduction of their labour power.⁷

The massive regional system of migrant mine labour (extending beyond South Africa to the neighbouring colonies of Basutoland [now Lesotho], Nyasaland [now Malawi], Mozambique, etc.), its emergent contradictions and how they were managed by mining capital and the state, constitute one of the most important and enduring keys to the political economy of South Africa. The same is true of one particular contradiction manifested from the early days of mining: the fission of the working class on racial lives. White miners, confronting capital and its preference for cheaper (and more oppressed) ‘coloured’ labour, pursued a militant course that climaxed in the Rand Revolt of 1922 with its slogan of ‘Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa’. The brutal suppression of the general strike on the Rand was followed by the mutual accommodation of capital and white labour under the aegis of an explicitly white supremacist state that generated policies of an ‘industrial colour bar’ and ‘job reservation’ for whites. On the side of capital, the scale of investment required for profitable mining, especially with the advent of deep mining in 1897, produced a rapid centralisation and concentration of capital. By about 1910, virtually all gold production was controlled by six mining houses, one of the two principal origins of the huge conglomerates whose dominance is a striking feature of South Africa's economy today.

The raw dynamic of the mineral revolution elevated the significance of South Africa in the global horizons of British imperialism, leading to a renewed offensive against those social forces still obstructing its ambitions. The colonial conquest of remaining independent African formations was completed, and the Anglo-Boer war of 1899–1902 overturned the Afrikaner republics whose territory incorporated and surrounded the gold fields and their frantically growing centre at Johannesburg. The now four British colonies post-war became the four provinces of the Union of South Africa established in 1910 (Transvaal, Orange Free State, the Cape and Natal).

During the transitional period from 1902 to 1910 the British and Afrikaners forged a particular type of ‘historic compromise’, in effect between imperial mining capital and still predominantly agrarian settler formations. While it contained unresolved tensions (manifested subsequently), it ‘resulted in the imposition of a colonial peace which ended more than a century of war’ and also transferred ‘the economic muscle and bureaucratic sophistication of an advanced capitalist country’ to the formation of the new state [Beinart, 1994: 3]. This historic compromise, of course, was achieved at the expense of Africans, many of whom had participated in the British war effort [Warwick, 1983] and reclaimed lands seized by Afrikaner settlers [Krikler, 1993].

The new state (and the historic compromise it incorporated) was central to systematising the ‘racial order’ [Greenberg, 1980] deposited by its various Afrikaner and British colonial antecedents, adapting it to the demands of capitalist development in mining, agriculture and industry, and managing the tensions generated by the underlying contradictions of extreme national oppression thus combined with class formation and exploitation.

These processes were initially translated into the policies and legislation of ‘segregation’ by the South African Party (SAP) governments of Louis Botha (1910–19) and J.C. Smuts (1919–24), in which the Chamber of Mines was the dominant influence. Of all the measures enacted by the SAP, the Land Act of 1913 was the most fundamental in material terms and also symbolically the most potent up to the present day.⁸ The Act introduced (even if it did not complete) the definitive division, and its legal sanctification, of the land of South Africa between areas of white and black settlement and permanent residence, in the proportions of 92 per cent and eight per cent respectively. In formalising the racial division of land and thereby the spatial basis of social ‘segregation’, and in further limiting the areas ‘reserved’ for African occupation and use, the Land Act served to consolidate the migrant labour system noted above. At the time this was of most concern to mining capital, but the Act also aimed to limit the numbers of Africans settled on white farms. This contributed to the dual process of undermining agricultural commodity production developed by Africans (often on white owned land) during the previous half century [Bundy, 1979; Keegan, 1986], and stimulating the transitions (protracted and uneven as they were) from sharecropping and other rent arrangements to labour tenancy, and from labour tenancy to (unfree) wage labour, in a gradually capitalising white agriculture [Morris, 1976; 1981; Marcus, 1989].

While restricting African land and organising the flows of African migrant labour, mining capital and the SAP governments otherwise pursued a course of economic liberalism at a time when the living standards of white as well as black workers declined, leading to the Rand Revolt of 1922 noted above. This was a turning point that paved the way for the election of the Pact governments of 1924–33 that allied the Afrikaner National Party (NP) and the mostly anglophone Labour Party in common opposition to the SAP and the Chamber of Mines. To Afrikaner nationalism the latter represented the domination of ‘foreign’ interests, and to organised white workers a t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• South Africa's Agrarian Question: Extreme and Exceptional?
• The Theory and Practice of the Agrarian Question in South African Socialism, 1928–60
• The Politics of Land Reform in South Africa after Apartheid: Perspectives, Problems, Prospects
• The Political Economy of the Maize Filière
• Labour Organisation in Western Cape Agriculture: An Ethnic Corporatism?
• Livestock Production and Common Property Struggles in South Africa's Agrarian Reform
• Land Reform in the Eastern Free State: Policy Dilemmas and Political Conflicts
• The Agrarian Question and Industrial Dispersal in South Africa: Agro-Industrial Linkages Through Asian Lenses
• Peasants Speak: The Land Question in Mpumalanga
• Abstracts