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The Dynamics of Rural Accumulation in South Africa: Comparative and Historical Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Timothy Keegan
Timothy Keegan
Affiliation:
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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Extract

The view that the opening up of Africa by metropolitan capitalism, particularly during the period of direct colonial rule, was bound to lead through evolutionary stages to economic development and modernisation has long since fallen into scholarly disrepute. In the atmosphere of radical pessimism that has pervaded academic perspectives on Africa since independence, an altogether more sceptical view of the beneficence of Africa's integration into imperial economies has prevailed. But as is often the case in scholarly debate, thesis and antithesis occupy the same battleground, and both tend to view the world through similar lenses. What modernisation and underdevelopment theories have in common is the assumption of a single universal dynamic in the making of the modern world; exposure to market forces is thus apparently destined either to reshape third world societies in the image of industrial Europe, or to “underdevelop” them in the interests of capital accumulation in the metropoles.

Type
Capitalist Transformations of Agriculture
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , October 1986 , pp. 628 - 650
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1986

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References

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15 Mosley tells us that many early agricultural settlers in Southem Rhodesia were prospectors or alternated periods on the land with periods in retailing or government employment. In Kenya, “most” early settlers had alternative sources of income, like cutting wood for the railways (Settler Economies, 186). See also Hodder-Williams, , White Farmers in Rhodesia, 24–25Google Scholar: “…it was as intermediaries between the rural Shona and the growing urban centres that most ‘farmers’ made their living.“ These observations prompt wider comparisons with the incomplete forms of accumulation typical of some black rural economies in Africa. What has been called ”straddling“—the process whereby money earned in the wage sector or in trade is ploughed back into rural production—has been common amongst Africa's black farmers (Iliffe, Emergence of African Capitalism, 31Google Scholar; Cooper, ”Africa and World Economy,“ 42–44).Google Scholar Kitching describes in detail those black rural accumulators of Kenya who had larger landholdings and who increasingly employed members of poorer families for wages; usually these landholders were also better educated and held white-collar or clerical or teaching jobs, as well as trading interests, and hence they had greater access to nonagricultural income. Similarly, Beinart shows that in Pondoland, the initial extension of rural production was made possible by, and accompanied, the generalisation of labour migrancy, thus contradicting Bundy's assertion that mass labour migrancy was a function of the decline of peasant production. Of course this process did not proceed very far in Pondoland, which eventually was to degenerate into a labour reserve (Kitching, , Class and Economic Change, esp. 364–72Google Scholar; Beinart, William, The Political Economy of Pondoland, 1860–1930 (Cambridge 1983)Google Scholar; Bundy, Colin, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (London, 1979)). Underdevelopment theorists tend to see the farmer-worker primarily as subsidising the capitalist sector through rural household production, but the phenomenon can perhaps be better understood historically by looking at the dynamics of the rural economy rather than at the requirements of capital.Google Scholar

16 See Men of the Times: Old Colonists of the Cape Colony and the Orange River Colony (Cape Town, 1906), 631–32Google Scholar; for the case of Gradwell, W. B. of Bloemfontein district, see obituary in South Africa (London), 20 02 1925, p. 331. Fuller documentation of points raised here is provided in Keegan, Rural Transformations, ch. 4.Google Scholar

17 The Newberrys provide a telling example. From The Friend (Bloemfontein)Google ScholarPubMed, see ”Jottings from the Conquered Territory,“ 16 03 1894Google Scholar; ”Chips from Moroka,“ 15 04 1892Google Scholar; ”Opening of the New Leeuw River Mills,” 108 1893Google Scholar; “Notes from Ladybrand and District,' 18 08 1893.Google Scholar Also see letter of Harper, F. J. to editor, The Farmer's Advocate (Bloemfontein), 12 1912, p. 193Google Scholar; Bloemfontein Archives (hereafter cited as BAD), CS 4873/07, Director of Agriculture, 19 07 1907.Google Scholar

18 The Annual Cape Colonial Blue Books (magisterial reports) contain masses of evidence on booms and slumps in land transactions.

19 Generally, see Standard Bank Archives, Johannesburg, Annual Branch Inspection Reports.

20 On Nourse, see Dictionary of South African Biography, (Pretoria, 1977), III, 659–60Google Scholar; Men of the Times: Pioneers of the Transvaal and Glimpses of South Africa (Johannesburg 1905), 2829Google Scholar; BAD, NAB 861/07, Gedye, J. B., 27 08 1907.Google Scholar On Bailey's activities, see “Free State: Our Production Possibilities,” The Friend, 20 01 1911Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Eric, Other Men's Millions (Cape Town, n.d.), 178.Google Scholar On Lewis and Marks' farming enterprises, see Dictionary of South African Biography (Pretoria 1968), I, 515–18Google Scholar; “A Great Property,” The Farmer's Advocate, 10 1907, pp. 85–90.Google Scholar On the Bourkes' estates, see BAD, DA 1915/2/09, Daw, G. H., 24 06 1909.Google Scholar

21 E.g., African Farms Limited had sixty farms being worked by white managers or tenants in 1908. The company's goal was to make its farms “self-supporting” and, “if possible,” profitable. To this end the company not only provided capital, but it gathered and indexed “every kind of information which promises to eliminate the element of chance,” thus echoing the kind of entrepreneurial role in promoting scientific agriculture evident in the activities of other large landlords on the Highveld, such as the Duke of Westminster (“Farmers of Orangia,” The Farmer's Advocate, 04 1908, pp. 413–15Google Scholar; “African Farms Ltd.,” Ibid., June 1908, p. 573; “Our Weekly Causerie,” Farmer's Weekly, 10 07 1918, p. 2099).Google Scholar

22 E.g., see “Mr. S. G. Vilonel at De Rust,” The Farmer's Advocate, 03 1908, pp. 371–73.Google Scholar

23 Cartwright, A. P., The First South African: The Life and Times of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick (Cape Town, 1971), 119–20.Google Scholar

24 Trapido, Stanley, “Poachers, Proleta?ans, and Gentry in the Early Twentieth Century Transvaal,” manuscript, African Studies Seminar, University of the Witwatersrand, 1984.Google Scholar

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26 Letter of Seggie, R. to editor, The Friend, 22 02 1912.Google Scholar

27 BAD, DA 1997/1/09, Fitzpatrick, P., 14 06 1909. Cf. the experience of Lord Delamere, Kenya's leading capitalist farmer, who soon discovered that his traction engine was not nearly as satisfactory as “Boer methods” of ploughing (Mosley, Settler Economies, 187). In a situation of “cheap labour, dear capital and high risk,” the use of outdated or improvised equipment and labour-intensive methods was highly appropriate, asserts Mosley.Google Scholar

28 See Keegan, , Rural Transformations, ch. 3Google Scholar; also idem, “The Sharecropping Economy on the South African Highveld in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 10:2/3 (1983), 201–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 The spread of sharecropping in non-European parts of the world not uncommonly accompanied or followed integration into international markets. Sharecropping is entirely compatible with rural capitalism and is often found in economies in which market production is generalised and predominant. See the several contributions in Byres, T. J., ed., Sharecropping and Sharecroppers (London 1983).Google Scholar

30 The notion that the provider of land can be the economically weaker participant in the sharecropping agreement might seem strange to observers of sharecropping elsewhere in the world. The seigneurial stereotype of sharecropping, derived from the image of the European, Latin American, or Asian great estate, where a wealthy, exploitative landholder typically controls a large, impoverished tenantry, is clearly not applicable to the South African case. It has often been assumed that sharecropping did and does not exist in Africa, because of the obvious absence of the seigneurial pattern. However, recent research has shown that share contracts in fact have a long pedigree in Africa and seem typically to have been relatively equitable relationships between households by means of which scarce resources were combined in an efficient manner in order to ensure mutual survival and expanded production. Sharecropping can also be a means whereby resources are transferred within kin groups or between generations (Robertson, A. F., “On Sharecropping,” Man, 15:3 (1980), 411–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Abusa: The Structural History of an Economic Contract,” Journal of Development Studies, 18:4 (1982), 447–78)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Share-contracting is widely practised in parts of southern Africa today, and in these contexts it seems to be a means of ensuring the survival of the household fanning economy in areas that are no longer capable of sustaining their populations without sending out migrants to service the industrial economy of white South Africa. There is little class differentiation in such relationships, which seem by and large to be determined by cyclical, generational factors. See Murray, Colin, Families Divided: The Impact of Migrant Labour in Lesotho (Cambridge 1981), 75–85.Google Scholar

31 Cf the sharp contrast with colonial settlers in Nyasaland, who abandoned pretensions to being capitalist farmers after the Great Depression and came to rely on income from black tenant fanning (Palmer, “White Farmers in Malawi”).

32 Editorial, , The Friend, 4 02 1908Google Scholar; also evidence, E. R. Grobler's, Natives Land Commission, Minutes of Evidence, UG (Union Government) 22–1916 (Pretoria 1916), 81.Google Scholar

33 See Ross, Robert, “The First Two Centuries of Colonial Agriculture in the Cape Colony: A Historiographical Review” in Putting a Plough to the Ground, Beinart, and Delius, , eds., 56–99.Google Scholar

34 Marks, Shula and Trapido, Stanley, “Lord Milner and the South African State,” History' Workshop Journal, 8 (Autumn 1979), 59–80.Google Scholar

35 For a detailed investigation of the political processes involved, see Bozzoli, Belinda, The Political Nature of a Ruling Class: Capital and Ideology in South Africa, 1890–1933 (London 1981).Google Scholar

36 See Adam, Heribert and Giliomee, Hermann, Ethnic Power Mobilized: Can South Africa Change? (New Haven, 1979), ch. 6Google Scholar; Davies, Robert, Kaplan, David, Morris, Mike and O'Meara, Dan, “Class Struggle and the Periodisation of the State in South Africa,” Review of African Political Economy, 7 (09–12 1976), 4–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 For an overview, see Wilson, Francis, “Farming, 1866–1966,” in Oxford History of South Africa, Wilson, Monica and Thompson, Leonard, eds. (Oxford 1971), 11, 104–71Google Scholar; Horwitz, Ralph, The Political Economy of South Africa (London 1967), 148–54. 1934Google Scholar white farmers' debts already amounted to 100 million pounds sterling (Report of the Commission to Inquire into Co-operation and Agricultural Credit, UG 16–1934 (Pretoria 1934), 153–54). See Note 46.Google Scholar

One crucial but less tangible aspect of state intervention lay in the field of education. The state provided an altogether more sophisticated schooling to new generations of Afrikaner youths than was available to their semiliterate forebears, and improved scientific methods and techniques were tirelessly propagated through the extension services of the Department of Agriculture and in farming journals.

38 Cooper, , “Africa and the World Economy,” 18. Amongst those who were excluded in the process were, of course, many whites, including very large numbers of the old Boer population, former landowners as well as those who had never owned land. But the poor whites of the twentieth century were not on their way to becoming a rural proletariat, unlike the black tenants, due, again, in large part to state policies.Google Scholar

39 This is no longer a novel observation of course: see Bundy, Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry.

40 The points made in this paragraph are fully elaborated in Keegan, T., “Crisis and Catharsis in the Development of Capitalism in South African Agriculture,” African Affairs, 84:336 (1985), 371–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 See Richards, Alan, “The Political Economy of Gutswirtschaft A Comparative Analysis of East Elbian Germany, Egypt, and Chile,” Comparative Studies in Society and Riston, 21:4 (1979), 483–518, for comparative perspectives on labour tenancy emphasising its utility in situations of incomplete control over labour.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 The changes in the rural areas in the crucial years since World War I constitute one of the major lacunae in our understanding of contemporary South Africa, and a great deal of research needs to be done. This paragraph is based on oral evidence to be found in the Oral History Project, African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. As a telling example, see Nkadimeng, Malete and Relly, Georgina, “Kas Maine: The Story of a Black South African Agriculturist,” in Town and Countryside in the Transvaal, Bozzoli, , ed., 89–107.Google Scholar

43 See Morris, , “Development of Capitalism”: Greenberg, Race and State, chs. 4–5Google Scholar; Morris, M. L., “Apartheid, Agriculture, and the State,” South African Labour and Development Research Unit Working Paper no. 8, University of Cape Town (1977).Google Scholar

44 According to the very unreliable statistics available, a substantial difference in productivity between black and white farming has developed since the 1940s. But Merle Lipton has persuasively argued that official statistics greatly underestimate output per hectare in the black reserves, and that output per unit cost might indeed be greater than on white farms, despite the absence of incentives and the overcrowded and overexploited condition of reserve land (“South Africa: Two Agricultures?” in Farm Labour in South Africa, Wilson, Francis, Kooy, Alide, and Hendrie, Delia, eds. (Cape Town, 1977), 72–85. Also see Murray, , Families Divided, 7–8).Google Scholar

45 On the consequences of mechanisation, see Klerk, Mike de, “Seasons that Will Never Return: The Impact of Farm Mechanisation on Employment, Incomes, and Population Distribution in the Western Transvaal,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 11:1 (1984), 84–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On population shifts, see the five-volume report of the Surplus People Project, Forced Removals in South Africa (Cape Town, 1983)Google ScholarPubMed. An overview is provided in Freund, Bill, “Forced Resettlement and the Political Economy of South Africa,” Review of African Political Economy, 29 (07 1984), 49–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 By 1985, farmers' debts exceeded 8,000 million rands, despite the massive weeding out of failed farmers over previous decades. Indeed, in September 1985, according to a South African Broadcasting Corporation news report, a prominent farmers' representative predicted that a “second Great Trek” from the land was in the offing, similar in scope to that which accompanied the Great Depression of the 1930s.

47 Goodman, and Redclift, , From Peasant to Proletarian. 13.Google Scholar

48 Ibid. 16–18.

49 Franklin, S. H., Rural Societies (London, 1971), 12–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Franklin notes that “the majority of holdings in Western Europe are uneconomic and with no prospect of becoming viable” (p. 22). See also idem, The European Peasantry (London 1969), 36.Google Scholar

50 See Friedmann, Harriet, “World Market, State, and Family Farm: Social Bases of Household Production in the Era of Wage Labor,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 20:4 (1978), 545–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 See Legassick, Martin, “The Frontier Tradition in South African Historiography,” in Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa, Marks and Atmore, eds., 44–79.Google Scholar

52 See O'Meara, Dan, Volkskapitalisme: Class, Capital, and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1934–1948 (Cambridge, 1983).Google Scholar