African History Lecture Notes - 20/11/03

South Africa - 1880s-1918

Background from previous lecture: Gold was discovered in Transvaal in 1886. Combined with diamonds, this completely changed the nature of South  African history - crucially, attracting the attention of Britian - in their eyes making South Africa valuable
- Boers saw that despite attempting to avoid the British, their states were becoming exposed to invasive capitalism

within 6 months of the first goldstrike, it wa clear that it was the richest in the world, require very deep mining (up to six miles), and therefore massive investment; invest millions to get billions
- The city of Johannesburg was built near gold, very rapidly from scratch in the late 1880s to one of the biggest cities in sub-equatorial Africa by the start of World War I

Transvaal had no choice but to accept growing British pressure, and the immigrants they called Uitlanders became a significant minority; the rate of immingration/employment was such that the British would soon become dominant
- Rural Afrikaners saw that their culture was going under (under the leadership of Paul Kruger)

South Africa didn't just attract miners, financiers and workers, but also entrepeneurs and impressarios, principally Cecil Rhodes, who made a large fortune very quickly (at least in part through various dodgy deals); as with many such individuals, he then went into politics; formulating and crystallising the idea that Afrikaner backwardness stood in the way of full British econmic and terrotorial domination of South Africa

In the 1890s the Boers began to court Germany as a potential 'counter-weight' to Britain; the Boers felt a degree of culural and lingustic similarity with the Germans
- The British response to this was to seize what was then called 'Southern Rhodesia', the idea being to cut off, box in and threaten the Boers, percieved by the Boers as an attempt to liquidate their 'volk' = culture

In 1895 (less than 10 years after the intial gold strike) Rhodes launched a 'pre-emptive strike', which became a somewhat farcical international incident - The Jameson Raid: an attempted coup d'etat, failed because Dr. Jameson was an incompetant drunk, but also Rhodes mis-interpreted British enthusiasm for mining and greed as patriotism, and thus their was no uprising as Jameson attempted to seize power in Pretoria
- this action furth galavansied the feelings of the Boers, and humiliated the British (paticularly Rhodes, a vain man) - now even previously moderate Boers supported military action action, and the British were convinced that military action was needed

Thus, in 1899, the Second Anglo-Boer War began, to be the largest ever imperial battle, dragging on into 1902; much largely that the first Boer war, little more than series of skirmishes; In the early stages (until 1901) the Boers effectively used guerilla tactics to repel the British, but by 1902, Britian's dominance forced a Boer surrender - at one stage Britian had 450,000 troops, a huge commitment of men and resources - Rhodes dream of a united British South Africa had been realized

Lord Milner was made ruler of this state, and encoraged British and European immigration, in an attempt to out-number the Boer as the majority white group; but Milner had miscalculated, depending on the continutation of the the great European migration, which petered out, and he thus lacked the numbers of migrants needed

It was clear that the Boers were not happy to become British subjects, so in 1910, South Africa was made a self-governing state, with Britain retaining rights to mineral wealth, use of ports etc
- This fulfilled the interests of the British, i.e. prestige, minerals, territorial oversight, but solved the problem of having to deal with the Boers
- Although the Boers had conceeded the minerals, such autonomy seemed a good deal given their miltary defeat 8 years previously, and the state existed thus from 1910 to 1961

The impact of Boer assualt and British imperial penetration had left Bantu societies in disarry, not cohesive as they had been  in the Shaka/post-shaka era - they no longer had the power to infuence macro-politics or the processes of European industrial modernity - as a result of this their land was easily expropriated. 

Why was Bantu land being stolen? Obviously for the land itself, but the hidden reason was that the White govenment wanted to drive the Bantu peoples into mining and industrial labour, which was much cheaper than the imported 'Uitlanders' (we know this was a deliberate attempt to use cheap labour from non monetized societies)

in 1910 there was the beginning of Black African Development - some Bantu peoples had begun to recover. Some had embraced elements of 'modernity', such as 'literacy' and were trained as lawyers, 'doctors' and writers/editors, and had adopted Christianity.
- Ethiopian Churches had no physical association with Ethiopia, but at the beginning of the 20th century Ethiopia was a rare example of an independent African state, these churches were very important, not so much because they transacted an African version of Christianity, but as because the help to mend communities and knit them together - they generated the idea of Africans entering modernity, while opposing root and branch white rule
- these chuches generated not revolutionary movements, but lower middle-class aspirational groups

In 1912, the South African Native National Congress, soon abreviated to the African National Congress formed. It was a minority, paranoid organization, seperated from the Black majority, campaigning constitutionally for black rights, scholarly and legalistic.

Development in white society in this period drew the battle lines for the rest of the 20th Century; the Boers, feeling fortunate and 'chosen', began with two simple ideological principles (1) the must remain the white majority (2) they must organise African societies in their interest, to serve the Boers

The Internal government from 1910-1994 was Afrikaner dominated; in 1913 they enacted the first Land Act (revised, amplified & extended in 1923 and 1933) and was the beginning of the seperation of South Africa using racial criteria, the 'archeology' of apartheid
- the South African population was divided approximately 77% black, and 13% white. It was understood that both needed land, but territories allocated the percentages in reverse, giving 77% to the whites, and the 13% that was given to the Blacks was of poor quality, desert and scrubland
- this land allocation didn't mean you to live in these places, but your only right of residence was in your zone, and you must have permission to live in other areas, not allowed to possess land of property in others - creation of 'nature reserves'

Why did the white South Africans do this?
1- Cleaned up questions of ownership
2- Consolidated Afrikaner power
3- Black population could not survive in their zones, and were thus forced into the labour markets of the whites

Huge infrastructural investments were made - with black labour used to build them

the Land Act was designed for a boom economy, but if this doesnt work out, the blacks are in white South Africa and can be exported back to 'where they belong'
- note: the policy was the ancestor of the Bantustan policies of the 1970s, which wanted the black reserves to become independent states

the start of the battle for terrotorial, and ultimately, ECONOMIC control of South Africa