Abstract
In 1910 the South African state was formed. The establishment of the Union of South Africa represented a new phase of white minority rule because it was accompanied by the implementation of extensive segregation laws. These political changes coincided with significant transitions in the economy. South Africa’s political economy entered a period of increased industrialization in the 1910s and 1920s that intensified class and race rivalries.
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Notes
This section relies on the work of Christopher Saunders. See ‘Historians and Apartheid’, in South Africa in Question, ed. John Lonsdale (London: James Currey, 1988), 13–32
Nicoli Nattrass, ‘Controversies about Capitalism and Apartheid in South Africa: An Economic Perspective’, Journal of Southern African Studies 17 (1991): 654–77.
Works with a liberal perspective have different emphases, for example, a’ settler colonial’ bias, the reliance on the ‘frontier myth’, or a focus on political-constitutional matters. See C.W. de Kiewiet, A History of South Africa: Social and Economic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941)
I.D. MacCrone, Race Attitudes in South Africa: Historical, Experimental and Psychological Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937)
W.M. Macmillan, The Cape Colour Question (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927)
E. Walker, The Frontier Tradition in South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930)
Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Oxford History of South Africa, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon and Oxford University Press, 1969, 1971).
Some of the earliest ‘revisionist’ work included D.D.T. Jabavu, The Black Problem (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1920)
Edward Roux, Time Longer than Rope (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964).
F.R. Johnstone, Class, Race and Gold: A Study of Class Relations and Racial Discrimination in South Africa (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976)
Martin Legassick, ‘The Frontier Tradition in South African Historiography’, in Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa, ed. Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore (London: Longman, 1980), 44–79
Harold Wolpe, ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid’, Economy and Society 1 (1972): 425–56.
This section relies on Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Segregation, and Apartheid (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994): 18–25.
See P. Harries, ‘Capital, State and Labour on the 19th Century Witwatersrand: A Reassessment’, South African Historical Journal 18 (1986): 25–45
A. Jeeves, ‘The Control of Migratory Labour in the South African Gold Mines in the era of Kruger and Milner’, Journal of Southern African Studies 2 (1975): 3–29.
A. Porter, ‘The South African War (1899–1902): Context and Motive Reconsidered’, Journal of African History 31 (1990): 43–57
I. Smith, ‘The Origins of the South African War (1899–1902): A Reappraisal’, South African Historical Journal 22 (1990): 24–60.
John Pampallis, Foundations of the New South Africa (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1991), 47.
T.R.H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, 4th edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 213–14.
Dan O’Meara, Forty Lost Years (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1996), 419.
T.R.H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, 3rd edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 243–9.
T. Dunbar Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 75.
For further exploration of nationalist movements in the early 1900s, see Paul B. Rich, State Power and Black Politics in South Africa, 1912–51 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996)
Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London: Longman, 1987)
Peter Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1912–1952 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971).
J.W. Hofmeyr, J.A. Millard, and C.J.J Froneman, History of the Church in South Africa (Pretoria: Promedia Publishers, 1991), 179.
One of the most successful political organizations in the 1920s was the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) formed in 1919. See Peter Wickens, The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1978).
For more information on the political economy during the interwar years, see Robert Davies et al., ‘Class Struggle and the Periodisation of the State in South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy no. 7 (1976): 4–30
D.E. Kaplan, ‘Relations of Production, Class Struggle and the State in South Africa in the Inter-War Period’, Review of African Political Economy nos 15/16 (1979): 135–45
David Yudelman, The Emergence of Modern South Africa: State, Capital and the Organized Labour on the South African Gold Fields, 1902–1939 (London: Greenwood Press, 1983).
Ben Fine and Zavareh Rustomjee, ‘The Political Economy of South Africa in the Interwar Period’, Social Dynamics 18 (1992): 26–54.
Donald Denoon and Balem Nyeko, Southern Africa Since 1800, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1984), 155–60.
A considerable amount of scholarship addresses the phenomenon of Afrikaner nationalism. Scholars that emphasize its ideological, socio-cultural, economic and structural roots include Heribert Adam, Hermann Giliomee, T. Dunbar Moodie, and Leonard Thompson. For a work that points to the materialist base of Afrikaner nationalism, see Dan O’Meara, Volkskapitalisme: Class, Capital and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1934–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Hermann Giliomee, ‘Western Cape Farmers and the Beginnings of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1870–1915’, Journal of Southern African Studies 14 (1987): 38–63.
Hermann Giliomee, ‘The Beginnings of Afrikaner Ethnic Consciousness, 1850–1915’, in The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, ed. Leroy Vail (London: James Currey, 1989), 30.
René de Villiers, ‘Afrikaner Nationalism’, in The Oxford History of South Africa, ed. Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
For more information on the Broederbond, see Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom, The Broederbond (New York: Paddington Press, 1979)
J.H.P. Serfontein, Brotherhood of Power: An Exposé of the Secret Afrikaner Broederbond (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978)
Charles Bloomberg, Christian-Nationalism and the Rise of the Afrikaner Broederbond in South Africa, 1918–48, ed. Saul Dubow (London: Macmillan, 1990).
The AB’s promotion of Afrikaners as a special people was aided by the presentation of Afrikaner history in mythological terms. Scholars constructed an ethnic/nationalistic form of history that promoted the theme of the Afrikaners’ special calling in an isolated, forsaken South Africa because of their overcoming events like the Great Trek, British annexations of the Boer Republics, and the Anglo-Boer War. The myth of Afrikaner group cohesion incorporated a veneration of past heroes, the use of symbolic events, and the belief in divine intervention. See F.A. van Jaarsveld, The Afrikaner’s Interpretation of South African History (Cape Town: Simondium Publishers, 1964)
Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
This argument is used by Broederbonders or other Afrikaner nationalists. See the NP’s commissioned report on the Broederbond, The Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Secret Organizations (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1964) or the Broederbond-sponsored book by A.N. Pelzer, Die Afrikaner-Broederbond: Eerste 50 Jaar (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1979).
See J.A. Loubser, The Apartheid Bible: A Critical Review of Racial Theology in South Africa (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1987).
Jaap Durand, ‘Afrikaner Piety and Dissent’, in Resistance and Hope, ed. Charles Villa-Vicencio and John W. de Gruchy (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1985), 42–5.
Saul Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 1.
Paul Rich’s ‘Race, Science, and the Legitimization of White Supremacy in South Africa, 1902–1940’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 23 (1990): 665–86.
To review the evidence that shows discriminatory race policy existed in the pre-industrial period, see John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, eds., The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989)
David Welsh, The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Colonial Natal, 1845–1910 (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1971).
Some revisionists argued there was little difference between segregation and apartheid because apartheid reproduced the capitalist economic structure. See Martin Legassick, ‘Legislation, Ideology and Economy in Post-1948 South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 1 (1974): 5–35.
Robert Davies, ‘Mining Capital, the State and Unskilled White Workers in South Africa, 1901–1913’, Journal of Southern African Studies 3 (1976): 41–69.
J.D. Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa (London: James Currey, 1987), 169.
Alf Stadler, The Political Economy of Modern South Africa (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 86–101.
English-speaking intellectuals contributed greatly to the ideological development of segregation. See Paul B. Rich, Hope and Despair: English-Speaking Intellectuals and South African Politics, 1896–1976 (London: British Academic Press, 1993).
William Beinart and Saul Dubow, ‘Introduction: The Historiography of Segregation and Apartheid’, in Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa, ed. William Beinart and Saul Dubow (New York: Routledge, 1995), 10–11.
Quoted from Johann Kinghorn, ‘The Theology of Separate Equality’, in Christianity Amidst Apartheid, ed. Martin Prozesky (London: Macmillan, 1990), 60.
Saul Dubow, ‘Afrikaner Nationalism, Apartheid and the Conceptualization of “Race”’, Journal of African History 33 (1992): 214.
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© 1999 Tracy Kuperus
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Kuperus, T. (1999). The NGK’s Development within Afrikaner Civil Society (1910–33). In: State, Civil Society and Apartheid in South Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373730_2
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