As with identities, the arts in South Africa are characterised by diversity rather than a common set of concerns, styles, and approaches. Although the postcolonial state has sought to marshal the arts in the service of the notion of a new nation, major South African writers continue to insist that one cannot speak of a unique South African literature, for that literature rests on a paradox. Apart from vernacular texts, the greater readership of the work of South African writers exists outside the country. These readers’ sense of aesthetics, derived from previously read texts, influences the way South African writing is received. Until the late twentieth century, the major divide in the arts was racial: black creative arts were not produced under the same conditions and experienced audiences and reception responses that were generally different from colonial writing, painting, and performance activities. Equally, both colonial and postcolonial contexts have been characterised by the contestation of meanings, literariness, and artistic value. Moreover, the political domain has tended to dominate in the arts, encroaching on the ways in which artistic works have been received, albeit in dynamic ways. The processes of reading and interpretation are constantly changing, and new readings make possible new interpretations. Selecting a finite set of themes, this chapter explores the links among modernity, culture and nation in the broad field of cultural production in South Africa over the long twentieth century.

Introduction

Changes in core demographic variables – population size and composition, fertility, mortality and migration – can indicate a great deal about the development of a society. For a start, they indicate the status of the demographic transition, the move from a demographically wasteful regime of high fertility and high mortality rates to an efficient one of low fertility and mortality. No society reaches developed status without passing through the demographic transition. To the core demographic variables, fertility and mortality, can be added marital status and household size, education, language most often spoken at home, religion, labour market status, urbanisation and inequality, and poverty. Each of these variables further illuminates social conditions.

The conflict that broke out on 10 October 1899, with the expiry of President Kruger's ultimatum to the British government, was South Africa's ‘Great War’, as important to the shaping of modern South Africa as was the American Civil War in the history of the United States. South African union, on the imperial agenda since the failure of confederation in the 1870s, was born in its ashes, as whites on both sides joined hands to shore up white supremacy against the background of rumours of revolt by restive Africans. If, at one level, it was a war about colonial self-determination – however limited – at another, it was also a war for the survival of a settler society, and about the credibility and international reputation of the British Empire, raising major moral issues of global importance. As the ‘biggest ever “small war” of late Victorian “new Imperialism”, the 1899–1902 conflagration has a recognised significance in world history’, not least because of the way it touched the fin de siècle European and American imagination.

Through its preceding chapters, this book has sought to provide not only a sustained account of modern South Africa's historical development but also, as its contributors stress at various points, a conscious reflection of what has been a particularly fertile brand of national historiography. Naturally, the rethinking of approaches to the understanding of both pre-1994 and post-1994 South African society continues, and in this initial postapartheid phase, scholars have been inserting new explanatory perspectives or empirical information into a complex story. As the introduction to the volume has emphasised, more recent stories remain to be told. Equally, there are older or more established stories that may have been told but that can bear retelling through fresh analytical perspectives or on the basis of categories of evidence previously neglected or unavailable. Thus, in this concise concluding chapter, we consider four significant thematic areas with which South Africa's historians have been engaging particularly since the 1990s. These are the issues of the environment, of heritage and history, of later anti-apartheid resistance – or what has also come to be known as struggle history – and the history of health.

Going back more than a century, it is the tradition of Cambridge Histories to provide synthetic and authoritative surveys of the history of various parts of the world. Their primary concern is to produce broad essays that cover a given field of history at any given point and that serve as a starting point for those who need to gain access to the established historical scholarship on a given country or field of inquiry. This volume in the history of South Africa seeks to maintain this approach. It represents a culmination of several decades of scholarship on the history of South Africa in the twentieth century, above all, that produced by so-called radical or revisionist historians and their successors since about 1970. In this period, South Africa and its past turned from being an international historiographical backwater into what was, at least temporarily, one of the most dynamic and innovative fields of African historical scholarship. That said, producing a synthesis of the present kind has offered particular scholarly challenges. In this introduction, we try to examine what those challenges represent and how this volume attempts to meet them, if not necessarily to resolve them.

The South African War of 1899–1902 was the culmination – if not an inevitable one – of a hundred years of British domination of the region. That domination began with the seizure of the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch in 1795, beginning an economic and ideological as well as political hegemony. Britain's presence in South Africa followed from strategic assumptions born of its need to defend Indian Ocean interests. Strategic considerations meant that the British, like the Dutch before them, had to provision the Indian Ocean's naval and mercantile fleets. Settler expansion into more and more distant hinterlands – to secure ecological zones where crops or stock could be raised – not only had to be allowed but also had to be furthered with imperial troops. The impact of British rule in South Africa, with Downing Street's power and Whitehall's administration, was willy-nilly, turning social structures in the Cape, and beyond, into a series of new and changing collaborations, alliances, oppositions and identities. Expansion required conquering African territories and, thereafter, the distribution of African land and labour. This was a process that mostly favoured British merchants and traders at the expense of Dutch Afrikaner settlers in the interior. Eventually, local ethnic and regional groupings were provoked into a new assertiveness and began to acquire objectives of their own. In this way, subimperialisms emerged. Then, in the last third of the century, the region was further transformed by the discovery of diamonds and, thereafter, gold. Out of these latter discoveries came a powerful and confident mining capitalism embedded in South Africa but linked to the world's major financial centre, which was the City of London. Determining how these transformations took place and how interactions among the imperial state, settler ambitions and capitalist enclaves eventually erupted into war is the major purpose of this chapter. The analysis and the narrative that trace these developments have a well-known and considerable, if contentious, literature. It stretches from the contemporary observers of empire and imperialism to the analysts and the analysis operating before and after the South African War. The first section of what follows examines the many forces shaping the political economy of southern Africa in the period up to the mid-1890s. Section II concentrates on the tumultuous years between circa 1895 and 1899, from the moment when the discovery of ‘deep levels’ of gold underneath the first Rand caused the pace of events to quicken throughout the region.

Introduction

The Union of South Africa came into being with the opening of Parliament in November 1910, following a lengthy period of negotiation between the four self-governing British colonies in southern Africa. The Union closely resembled an independent country, and it would evolve, as would the other British dominions, further in that direction. This chapter considers that what ensued after 1910 was an attempt, an attempt that ultimately failed, to establish a hegemonic order in South Africa. By hegemony, what is meant is not merely dominance, not merely state control, but pervasive and internalised dominance that flows through nationally based and structured institutions and civil society. In other words, the goal was the construction of a society based on shared assumptions and mediated conflicts contained in a legal and political order that could endure.

The idea of apartheid has long had an international currency that goes well beyond its national historical reference. Apartheid originated as a label for the system of institutionalised racism and racial social engineering inaugurated by the National Party after its election victory in 1948. But the term has since been appropriated as a global signifier of racialised separation, inhumanity and exploitation. International cross-references have the virtue of prompting a more global reading of apartheid as one among many projects of racialised discrimination and subjugation. The historiography of apartheid has tended to be rather more insular and inward looking in the past, particularly in the thick of the anti-apartheid struggle, when the specificities of the South African experience dominated both the analytical and the political agenda of debate. Yet there is also the obvious risk of caricature, essentialising and dehistoricising a system of rule that was more internally fractious and fractured, historically fluid and complex, than the formulaic reductions can possibly render. The symbolic condensation of apartheid as the global signifier of racism risks conferring an apparent – and misleading – transparency on the system of apartheid, as if comprehensible simply as the extremity of racism. This renders its historical unevenness and complexity irrelevant and/or uninteresting.

The Act of Union of 1910 provided the keystone to the edifice of white supremacy. It consolidated efforts that had been under way through the period of reconstruction, and more particularly responsible government (1907–1910), to reestablish white colonial hegemony after the shocks it had sustained during the South African War by putting an end to debilitating interstate competition over railways, labour and a variety of other issues. It provided a basis on which this could be systematically extended through the policy of segregation. Union facilitated the prosecution of two complementary and closely related programmes – the upliftment of poor whites and the subjugation of Africans. These two themes – poor whites and poor blacks – are generally treated separately from each other and have their own segregated historiographies, yet they are intimately related and constantly refract off each other. An attempt is made in this chapter to discuss them together.

I

Over the past two decades, many South African historians, like their peers elsewhere in the world, have been absorbed in analysing problems associated with nationalism, race, and identity formation. Questions about the process of national imagining have transformed our understanding of nationalism and ethnic identity, especially in relation to Africans and Afrikaners. Yet the larger categories of ‘South Africa’ (as a nation-state) and ‘South Africans’ (its constitutive peoples) have largely been taken for granted or else addressed only in passing. Given the stress on nation building in contemporary South Africa, as well as growing sensitivity around issues of citizenship, race, belonging, and entitlement, there is a palpable need to explore such questions historically.

The mineral discoveries that launched its industrial revolution between the late 1860s and the end of the 1890s were crucial in the shaping of modern South Africa and the peculiarities of its social order. Within that period, the years between 1880 and 1899 were both violent and formative. Framed by wars of conquest at their beginning and by the outbreak of the South African War of 1899–1902 at their end, at the heart of those years lay the mineral discoveries of the 1860s–1880s, first diamonds in Griqualand West in 1868 and then alluvial gold in the eastern Transvaal in the early 1870s, followed by gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. All over southern Africa, mining led to a dramatic increase in economic activity and to renewed imperial intervention in its affairs. For the first time, the region received large flows of immigrants and capital investment from abroad. New towns, railways, roads and harbours were built, and new urban markets opened up for locally produced food and manufactured goods. The earlier movement of African migrants in search of work in colonial labour markets was greatly accelerated. And as the demand for African land and labour spiralled, conflict was heightened as white farmers tightened their grip on rent and labour tenants on their land and encroached on African lands beyond the colonial and republican borders.

How did the people most affected by apartheid respond to the implementation of government measures between 1949 and the early 1970s? What informed people's opposition, silences and acquiescence at different moments across the country? In seeking to provide an answer to these questions, this chapter constructs an archive. It begins by mapping out a decade of mass protest against the first wave of apartheid laws. Then it goes some way toward explaining the quiescence that followed the banning of African nationalist organisations in 1960 and understanding the burden of coping with the intensified apartheid controls that followed. Thereafter, it identifies some of the ambivalence in responses to the various stages of Bantustan (homeland self-government) creation in the 1960s and charts the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement in the early 1970s.