Empty promises to rural people

The land restitution bill is not the game-changer that President Zuma promised, write Nomboniso Gasa and Nolundi Luwaya. Sunday Independent

The Land Restitution Bill approved by the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) on Thursday may raise a cheer from traditional leaders, but it is not the game-changer that President Jacob Zuma promised in his State of the Nation address last year.

Zuma and his Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, Gugile Nkwinti, punted the bill as a second chance for the Khoi, San and Africans who were dispossessed before the notorious 1913 Natives Land Act redesigned the South African landscape.

Raj Patel Speaks in Grahamstown - 5:00 p.m., 31 March 2014

Reflections on South Africa’s Agrarian Questions after 20 years of Democracy

Call for Abstracts

Reflections on South Africa’s Agrarian Questions after 20 years of Democracy

Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP 14/15 AUGUST 2014

The Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town will be hosting an international workshop which will reflect on South Africa’s land and agrarian questions 20 years after the advent of democracy in South Africa. The workshop will be held in the Centre for African Studies gallery on 14 and 15 August 2014.

Agrarian Summer School, Harare, Zimbabwe (2014)

AGRARIAN SUMMER SCHOOL 2014 (HARARE, ZIMBABWE) PROGRAMME by TigersEye99

The relevance of past rural resistance in contemporary South Africa: The Case of the Mpondo Revolts

The Faculty of Humanities invites you to attend the following seminar:

The relevance of past rural resistance in contemporary South Africa: The
Case of the Mpondo Revolts

Presented by: Prof Thembela Kepe, Geography Department, University of
Toronto

The Farm Workers' Strike: It's Far From Over

by Anna Majavu, SACSIS

The mines and the farms are two enduring symbols of old white colonial theft, of the minerals and land. Because of the monopoly of the National Union of Mineworkers, whose leaders and officials have long preferred compromise and co-determination over worker control, it has been difficult for mineworkers to strike – until the Marikana massacre.

Fire in the Vineyards: The Making of a Farm Worker Uprising in the Hex River Valley

by Chris Webb, The Amandla Blog

As labour tensions continue to simmer in South Africa’s mining industry, farm workers in the Hex River Valley have called attention to the fact that they earn some of the lowest wages in the country. Their voices, so often silenced by the paternalistic relations that still define rural social relations, have once again been dismissed by commercial agricultural interests and their allied political leaders as the voices of mob, directed by shadow ‘third force.’ In reality the deprivations of hunger, poverty and violence are the driving force behind this uprising, as anyone who has visited the shack settlements that skirt the N1 highway in this region and will know. In the township of Stofland workers survive on seasonal work on the farms (often for as low as R65 a day) and rely on social grants and family remittances for the rest of the year. Few trade unions have made inroads in this region, and the firing of live rounds on striking workers by farmers demonstrates the brutal face of modern industrial relations in parts of the agricultural sector.

The Marikana Mine Worker's Massacre – a Massive Escalation in the War on the Poor

8 August 2012

The Marikana Mine Worker's Massacre – a Massive Escalation in the War on the Poor

by Ayanda Kota

It’s now two days after the brutal, heartless and merciless cold blood bath of 45 Marikana mine workers by the South African Police Services. This was a massacre!

South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. The amount of poverty is excessive. In every township there are shacks with no sanitation and electricity. Unemployment is hovering around 40%. Economic inequality is matched with political inequality. Everywhere activists are facing serious repression from the police and from local party structures.

Weapons of the Weak

James C. Scott provides a perspective on hegemony and ‘invisible power’ that has been both influential and controversial. In his influential book Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of resistance (1985) Scott introduces the idea that oppression and resistance are in constant flux, and that by focusing (as political scientists often do) on visible historic ‘events’ such as organised rebellions or collective action we can easily miss subtle but powerful forms of ‘every day resistance’. Scott looks at peasant and slave societies and their ways of responding to domination, with a focus not on observable acts of rebellion but on forms of cultural resistance and non-cooperation that are employed over time through the course of persistent servitude.

Scott’s research finds that overt peasant rebellions are actually rather uncommon, do not occur when and where expected, and often don’t have much impact.  Rather than seeing ‘resistance as organisation’, Scott looks at less visible, every-day forms of resistance such as ‘foot-dragging, evasion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander and sabotage’.  He finds these in rural and factory settings, and also among the middle class and elites (e.g. through tax evasion or conscription), but particularly among rural people who are physically dispersed and less politically organised than urban populations (Scott 1985).

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states.

Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen

The Discarded People by Cosmas Desmond (1971)

The Discarded People
by Cosmas Desmond 

Apartheid era South Africa was also one of the great
innovators in the ultimate form of marginalisation –
discarding. It discovered that it could discard “surplus” people. One of the classic books that exposed the horror of apartheid practice was Cosmas Desmond’s The Discarded People that described how several million Africans were removed from their homes in land that had been declared “white” They were categorised as ‘superfluous and ‘unproductive’. They were not needed in white cities, towns and farming areas. Declared aliens in the land of their birth
they were dumped in remote rural slums, areas for which the government took no responsibility.

Cedric Nunn's 'Call and Response'

There is another video, featuring pictures from this exhibition, online at Cue.

Bare Life in the Bantustans (of the Eastern Cape): Re-membering the. Centennial South African Nation-State

by Ashley Westaway, 2008

This thesis argues that 1994 did not mark a point of absolute discontinuity in the history of South Africa. More specifically, it asserts that 1994 did not signal the end of segregationism; instead of democracy leading to national integration, the Bantustans are still governed and managed differently from the rest of the country. Consequently, it is no surprise that they remain mired in pervasive, debilitating poverty fifteen years after 1994. In insisting that contemporary South Africa is old (rather than new), the thesis seeks to make a contribution to political struggles that aim to bring to an end the segregationist past-in-the-present.

Ethnicity, State and Democracy in Southern Africa: a historical perspective on rural-based nationalities

by Michael Neocosmos, 1994 (revised in 1998)

This paper constitutes an attempt to make some sense out of the vexed question of ethnicity in the context of a democratizing Southern Africa and in Southern Africa alone, although several of my observations may also be valid, with little or no modification, for other parts of the continent. Its objectives are limited to making some general observations on the historical development of ethnic groups, most of which I prefer to call nationalities for reasons which I shall make clear below. Evidently, a discussion of the history of ethnicity presupposes that ethnic groups do have a history, something which I take to be axiomatic.

Locusts on the Horizon

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

Taking over a mode of rule is not the same thing as transforming it. Barack Obama is not George Bush but that fact makes little difference to the bankers looking for a public subsidy or a wedding party in Pakistan at the moment when a drone rushes out of the sky.

Rural poverty in the Eastern Cape Province: Legacy of apartheid or consequence of contemporary segregationism?

Ashley Westaway, Development South Africa, 2012

Poverty in South Africa in general has not declined since 1994, and it is particularly severe in the former Bantustans. This paper discusses two important issues related to rural poverty in the Eastern Cape Province. It questions the applicability of the notion of legacy to explain recent trends in rural poverty and constructs an argument that explains these trends in relation to post-1994 segregationism. It argues that the notion of legacy is not useful in explaining why rural poverty remains entrenched, long after 1994. Rural poverty today cannot be explained as something left behind after the end of apartheid, because its causes and drivers are the same now in 2012 as they were in 1970. The continuity between the pre- and post-1994 periods is best described by exploring and understanding post-1994 policy decisions and power configurations as an expression of contemporary segregationism.

Millions will lose their ‘citizenship’

by Nomboniso Gasa, Independent Online

'We need no mourners in our stride; No remorse, no tears. Only this: Resolve. That the locust shall never again visit our farmsteads.' The above excerpt from a poem by Odia Ofeimun at the end of the Biafra War in Nigeria comes to mind as I grapple with the contestation on constitutionalism, constitutional democracy, majoritarianism and legislative changes under consideration in South Africa.

Capital, Interrupted Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India

 

By Viney Gidwani, 2008

With the Patel caste of western India as his central case, Vinay Gidwani interrogates established concepts of value, development, and the relationship between capital and history. Capitalism, he argues, is not based on the operation of a series of laws, but is rather an assemblage of contingent logics stitched together. Capital, Interrupted unsettles understandings of concepts such as hegemony and agency, and, ultimately, rethinks the constitution of capitalism.

Capital, Interrupted is an outstanding work of social and political critique. It brings razor-sharp intellect to the analysis of development and agrarian politics.

- Arun Agrawal

Everyday forms of peasant resistance

by James C. Scott, LibCom

"Everyday resistance" is the most common form of opposition to oppression. It consists of footdragging, non-compliance, pilfering, desertion, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, flight etc... James C. Scott's article is the classic statement on "everyday resistance". 

I. THE UNWRITTEN HISTORY OF RESISTANCE

The argument which follows originated in a growing dissatisfaction with much of the recent work - my own as well as that of others - on the subject of peasant rebellion and revolution. It is only too apparent that the inordinate attention to large-scale peasant insurrection was, in North America at least, stimulated by the Vietnam war and something of a left-wing academic romance with wars of national liberation. In this case interest and source material were mutually reinforcing. For the historical and archival records were richest at precisely those moments when the peasantry came to pose a threat to the state and to the existing international order.[1] At other times, which is to say most of the time, the peasantry appeared in the historical record not so much as historical actors but as more or less anonymous contributors to statistics on conscription, taxes, labour migration, land holdings, and crops production.

Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India

by Ranajit Guha

This classic work in subaltern studies explores the common elements present in rebel consciousness during the Indian colonial period. Ranajit Guha—intellectual founder of the groundbreaking and influential Subaltern Studies Group—describes from the peasants’ viewpoint the relations of dominance and subordination in rural India from 1783 to 1900.