Organisation and Economic Change

236 Pages·1989·13.28 MB·English

by  Alan Mabin (ed.)

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
I
39001029105171
Edited by Alan Mabin Fi ee z
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/organisationeconO000unse
outhern African Studies Volume 5

Organisation and
“Economic Change
Southern African Studies
Volume 5
Edited by Alan Mabin
Ravan Press a Johannesburg
Published by
Ravan Press (Pty) Ltd
P.O. Box 31134, Braamfontein 2017
in association with
The African Studies Institute
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
© Copyright (in this collection) The African Studies Institute
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the Copyright owner.
First published 1989
ISBN 0 86975 382 7
Cover photograph from the Star Weekly Edition 17 March 1906.
courtesy of the History Workshop.
Printed and bound by Sigma Press (Pty) Ltd, Pretoria
Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction
Margaret Kinsman Populists and Patriarchs: The Transformation of the Captaincy at Griqua
Town, 1804-1822
Alan Mabin Waiting for Something to Turn Up? The Cape Colony in the Eighteen 21
Eighties
Stephen Gelb The Origins of the South African Reserve Bank, 1914-1920 48
Bill Freund The Social Character of Secondary Industry in South Africa: 1915-1945 78
Leslie Witz Support or Control: The Children of the Garment Workers’ Union, 120
1939-1948
Michael Crowder Resistance and Accommodation to the Penetration of the Capitalist 146
Economy in South Africa: Tshekedi Khama and Mining in Botswana,
1929-1959
Chris Rogerson From Coffee-cart to Industrial Canteen: Feeding Johannesburg’s Black 168
Workers, 1945-1965
Deborah Posel ‘Providing for the Legitimate Labour Requirements of Employers’: 199
Secondary Industry, Commerce and the State in South Africa during the
1950s and Early 1960s
Contributors
Michael Crowder is the author of numerous books including West Africa
(London, 1977). He has taught at, among other places, the University of
Botswana and is presently attached to the Institute of Commonwealth Studies
in London.
Bill Freund is Professor of Economic History at the University of Natal,
Durban. He is the author of several books, among them The Making of
Contemporary Africa (London and New York, 1984).
Stephen Gelb works for LERC (the Labour and Economics Research Committee)
in Johannesburg and is a Ph.D. student of the University of Manitoba. He
is co-author of The Crisis in South Africa (New York, 1981).
Margaret Kinsman works for SACHED in Cape Town and is a Ph.D. student of
Yale University. She has published articles on the pre-white-settlement
history of the region centred on the northern Cape.
Alan Mabin teaches in the Department of Town and Regional Planning at the
University of the Witwatersrand. He is co-editor of a selection of
Standard Bank correspondence on the nineteenth-century South African
economy, published under the title The Confidence of the Whole Country
(Johannesburg, 1987).
Deborah Posel was a Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, where she
completed a D.Phil. She is now a Fellow at the African Studies Institute
at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Chris Rogerson is Associate Professor in Geography at the University of
the Witwatersrand and the author of a large number of articles on South
African human geography, past, present and future.
Leslie Witz wrote a Masters dissertation on Solly Sachs and the Garment
Workers' Union for the University of the Witwatersrand, and he has worked
for the University of Bophuthatswana, the History Workshop and UNISA.
Introduction
This volume is the fifth in the series of selected papers
presented to the African Studies Institute seminar at the University of the
Witwatersrand. It is unusual in its focus on economic history. Previous
volumes in the series concentrated on social history and recent politics,
and thus retlected some of the predominant intellectual concerns of the
period since the seminar began in the mid-seventies. By contrast, the
relative neglect of economic history is evident from any survey of recent
academic writing on southern Africa. But as social history and political
studies have drawn attention to new sources and provided new
interpretations, so have they added to the questions about the shape of the
economy and its relationship to other aspects of society in the southern
African past. Over the past few years, an increasing number of scholars
have begun to use those new sources in exploring the economic history of
South Africa in particular, and the region in general, with results which,
to some extent, are displayed in this collection.
No sharp line separates the approaches mentioned in the preceding
paragraph, however. In his introduction to the second volume in this
series, Philip Bonner noted that concern with 'the creation and control of
labour supplies' characterised many of the papers presented to the ASI
seminar during the late seventies. A more ‘economic! topic would be
difficult to imagine; yet, the economic context within which such
‘creation and control of labour supplies' took place, has tended to remain
only very generally understood. The papers in this volume indicate
potentially fruitful approaches to a more complex and satisfactory grasp of
the South African economic past. At the same time, they employ and draw
upon the methods and results of the more socially or politically oriented
work which has gone before. Each paper displays, of course, its own
particularities: the seminar has not consciously been built around a
topic, theme or theory.
As in previous volumes in the series, the papers - originally
presented between mid-1984 and mid-1986 - follow in more or less
historical sequence. The earliest deals with Griqua society in what is now
the northern Cape. Margaret Kinsman shows, as she has in relation to
Tswana societies elsewhere, how the increasing adoption of cultivation in
addition to pastoralism contributed to the transformation of Griqua
society. Internal strains and divisions were modified considerably as
agriculture developed, with consequences for relative positions among the
elite - and for relationships with other groups in the region.
Consequences for external relationships of internal economic
change also provide a central theme of my own piece on the larger world of
the Cape Colony in the 1880s, in which internal political strains are less
thoroughly explored. It is well-known in the literature on economic
fluctuations that southern Africa experienced a major depression in the
first half of the eighties, but its effects have not been carefully
scrutinised outside specific studies of, for example, Kimberley. The paper
attempts to relate thrusts beyond the Cape - into 'Rhodesia' and Transvaal
gold mining - to the devastating impact of recession. It; thus offers) a
different interpretation of a crucial formative stage in southern African
history from those usually accepted in the literature.
Moving well into the twentieth century, Stephen Gelb offers a
reinterpretation of the origins of the South African Reserve Bank. Like my
own contribution in the previous paper, Gelb uses material from _ the
viii Introduction
UeE 30 ee a e
Standard Bank Archives not previously incorporated into an assessment of
his subject. He argues that major changes in the structure of both the
South African economy and its relations with the international economy
necessitated a new form of state intervention after the First World War,
which found expression in the creation of the Reserve Bank.
Bill Freund begins his essay at the same moment Off Peri.
examining the question of industrial growth in the inter-war period from a
new perspective: that of the ‘social character' of secondary industry.
Eschewing ready acceptance of the usual arguments on such subjects as
‘civilised labour' and 'protection of industry', he demonstrates the great
complexity of forms of incorporation of labour which characterised the
period. Against that background, new forms of industrial organisation
developed: among them, of course, a variety of new trade unions. Much
work remains to be done in illuminating those developments; the impact of
the ICU on later industrial organising, for example, remains an open
question. In the shifting economic circumstances of the inter-war years,
the question of organising workers of different racial groups in the same
industry came to the fore.
In the first of three papers which examine changing relations
between black and white, Leslie Witz explores the attempts of the Garment
Workers' Union to organise black workers as the composition of the
workforce in its industrial sector underwent rapid change. He shows that
the leadership imposed its own view of the correct structure for the union,
keeping it racially divided and refusing to allow members to decide on its
direction. As the number of coloured and African workers grew, so this
strategy became less effective in maintaining the strength of the
organisation.
The growth of the black industrial workforce in the thirties and
forties paralleled the great increasé in population, especially black
population, of the major urban areas. Only a few provocative studies have
examined in any detail some of the many consequences of this growth. Adding
to that literature, Chris Rogerson narrates the rise and fall of coffee
cart trading, depicting it as occupying a niche in the informal sector - as
a creative response to the demand for daily victuals among the new
industrial proletariat. Many themes which overlap with the papers by
Freund and Witz emerge: the initial dominance of men, followed both by the
increased migration of women to town and their occupation of positions
previously held by men, provides an important example. Despite their
organisation, coffee cart traders could not ultimately defeat the attempts
of white municipal authority to impose its own prejudices against street
trading.
More successful resistance to white control was accomplished by
Tshekedi Khama and the Bamangwato over the period from the twenties to the
fifties. Khama's opposition to the rape of mineral resources in his
reserve contributed to the growth of Botswana's modern economy, in part
through securing mining development on terms far superior to those imposed
in most other areas of the sub-continent. The inclusion of Michael
Crowder's essay on Khama demonstrates a rather different relation between
politics and economics from those explored in other contributions on the
same period.
In the burgeoning literature on South Africa, the connection
between the state and the economy - between capitalism and apartheid —-
occupies a central place. The last paper in this collection, by Deborah
Posel, re-examines relations between government and business in the
fifties. Doug Hindson noted, in a previous volume in this series, that
recent state policy around urbanisation has been 'conflict-ridden rather