Highways, Byways and Culs-de-Sacs: The Transition to Agrarian Capitalism in Revisionist South African History

Moralising the agrarian question: Concealed meanings and competing master narratives in the construction of an imagined South African countryside

“…The principal aim of this Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 03:12 03 February 2015 essay is not to enter into a substantive discussion about agrarian structures and rural relations, nor to address theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded questions about "what happened" and "why" in the South African countryside. Nor is its purpose to offer fresh new insights that might provide a useful way forward, or an escape from the "byways and culs-de-sacs" that Helen Bradford (1990) has so brilliantly described elsewhere. Instead, this essay is primarily devoted to exploring the underlying a priori regulative foundations of rival paradigms.…”

“…The intricacies of this debate have been explored in greater detail elsewhere and need not be repeated here (Morris 1987;Freund 1987;Keegan 1989aKeegan , 1989bMurray 1989b;Bradford 1990). Suffice it to say that scholars tended to polarise into two rival camps: theoretically-inclined, panoramic views of agrarian transformation influenced mainly by macro-structuralist strains of Marxism, on the one Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 03:12 03 February 2015 hand, and more narrowly-focused, empirically-driven local studies inspired by what critics labelled the 'social history' perspective, on the other (C. Murray 1987).…”

“…Instead of focusing on the kinds of hegemonic class alliances, production systems, and modes of labour control that accompanied long-term patterns of agrarian transformation, these studies opened up whole new arenas of scholarly investigation, particularly an emphasis on regional variation and local heterogeneity (Morrell 1986), rural conflict and resistance Bundy 1980, 1987;Bradford 1987a;Atkins 1988Atkins , 1993Krikler 1989Krikler , 1993, violence and accommodation (Murray 1989a;Beinart 1992;Van Onselen 1992), migration and the rural underclasses (Beinart 1979(Beinart , 1991Harries 1994), ambiguities of group solidarities and class consciousness (Marks 1986), servile forms of labour control (Trapido and Delius 1983;Keegan 1982Keegan , 1983Keegan , 1985Keegan , 1986Keegan , 1987, and the linkages between popular protest and wider political struggles (Bundy 1987;Bradford 1987a). What these studies accomplished was to reopen theories of closed histories with their vivid accounts of spatial and temporal unevenness, entangled relations, and hierarchical social arrangements.…”

“…In her excellent study of rural protest during the 1920s, Helen Bradford (1984Bradford ( , 1987a painstakingly reconstructed how the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU), for a brief fleeting moment, was able to bring Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 03:12 03 February 2015 together disparate rural Africans to challenge the autocratic power o"f the landed classes and their state allies. Similarly, Bradford (1987bBradford ( , 1992 along with others, such as Wells (1983), Bozzoli (1991, and Beinart (1987d), placed women at the forefront of rural protest, thereby undermining one long-standing, sterile conventional wisdom that has ignored almost entirely the position of gender in understanding rural politics.…”

“…My own research (Murray 1988b) on unexplained, anonymous arson in the Middelburg district falls within this genre. Despite the defeat of the labour movement they chronicled, Bradford (1987a), Bundy (1987), and Beinart (1987b) paint the ICU in romantic hues. Similarly, Matsetela (1982), Keegan (1982, 1985), and Van Onselen (1990 provide an essentially heroic narrative lauding the ingenuity of share-croppers who successfully resisted efforts to proletarianise their labour.…”