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older men and some of the women could work on the farms’,48 he proposed in one of his statements on the ideal future of mining.

Besides the mine-owners themselves, the imperialists under whose aegis the new South African state was forged had themselves been drawn from a Britain in which the state’s interest in ‘motherhood’ and childrearing had become considerable. Imperial ideology was male-centred. In Davin’s words: the vocabulary of the time reflected ‘the anxiety to build a race of strong men, to promote virility and so on’.49 The separation between males (production/war) and females (reproduction/ family) was thus part of the social consciousness of the dominant classes, a factor which should not be underestimated in assessing the nature of their visions for the future South Africa. However, this gender-specific vision could only be realized in the case of blacks—whose proletarianization process was in any case taking a markedly gender-differentiated pattern. Furthermore it was the weight of the African domestic domain that helped determine that the particular form taken by gender division should be that of territorial separation and migrant labour.

In the case of white workers, a similarly complex struggle took place between rulers and the dominated, leading to a somewhat different outcome. Two issues were at stake here: the presence in the towns of wives and children; and the use by the white family of domestic servants. Both of these struggles could be categorized as ‘domestic’ in the sense in which the term is defined here; and both concern, among other groups, women. In the case of ‘wives and children’, their presence in the mining areas was partly the result of explicit manipulation by capitalists. As Percy Fitzpatrick said of Rand Mines: ‘We recognize that until men can settle in their homes with their families under reasonable conditions as to comfort and cost, a stable and contented mining population is not to be expected.’50

Housing policy was self-consciously used by mine-owners to ensure a stable white working class, to reduce its militancy and to ensure its reproduction. And yet this interpretation still begs the prior question—why was the presence of wives and children seen as beneficial to capital in the case of whites, but detrimental to it in the case of blacks? Seeing all strategies, even dramatically opposed ones, as serving capitalist interests smacks of functionalism once again. Surely it must be the case that the presence of ‘wives and children’ was an unavoidable given of the

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conditions under which a white male working class could be obtained and kept? In the case of English immigrant workers, this may have been a consequence of their own struggles to retain their domestic ties and dictate their own family lives; in the case of the Afrikaner workers we have already examined, it may rather have been a consequence of the inexorable proletarianization of women. The creation of particular family forms was thus the outcome of class and domestic struggles, rather than of simple capitalist manipulation.

The matter of domestic service in white households was also one which can better be understood as the outcome of a complex series of domestic struggles, rather than as an institution designed to serve the interests of capital in an uncomplicated fashion. From the earliest times, many white families were able to build into the cost of their reproduction (‘necessary means of subsistence’) the price of domestic labour. Many white workers (though by no means all) and particularly white women, were thus able to exact a price from capital in return for their ‘stability’ and acquiescence—the price of a relatively high standard of living. A middle-class lifestyle was defined as being both attainable and necessary for some sections of the white working class. This was not only a moral victory for parts of the white working-class family ‘against’ capital, but a victory for the white woman within that family. Through the employment of domestic labour she was able to defend herself against the isolating and unrewarded labour which her kin would otherwise expect her to perform; and against the double shift. Her victory was at the expense of the subordination and oppression within the white family of the black male domestic worker;51 and, in later years, of the black female.52

How ‘functional’ the institution of domestic service has been for capitalism is thus debatable. In the early years of mine labour shortage, for example, domestic service drew vital male workers away from the mining industry; throughout this century, white working-class wages have had to include the price, however pitifully low, of one or more servants; some of these servants moreover, perform tasks such as gardening, waiting at table and so on, hardly essential items to the reproduction of the labour force. These ‘dysfunctions’ are just as important to recognize as are the functions of domestic labour—for in time, it did come to absorb the otherwise unemployable, and thereby act as a

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mechanism of social control.53 But its existence must surely also be seen as a victory for the white woman against capitalism’s tendency to privatize and trivialize domestic work; and its capacity to burden her with the ‘double shift’ where necessary.

The gentility of middle-class white home life has an almost precapitalist character, akin to the plantation life of white American slave-owners. This pre-capitalist ethos is no accident. For although the domestic sphere is nuclear and apparently a modern capitalist institution as far as formal, kin relationships are concerned (although even here, extended family networks seem to operate more effectively in white society than in, say, the North American equivalent), it is in fact a subsystem within the wider economy with a clearly pre-capitalist character. The domestic labourer has a semi-feudal relationship with her employer, where she is paid partly in kind, and is tied to the employer by a series of obligations, by economic need, and sometimes by law.54

To conclude, then, what has been suggested is that struggles both within the domestic sphere, and between that sphere and outside forces, are of some analytical importance in our understanding of modern class and patriarchal relationships. It has been useful to see the white household as a refuge, an arena of defence against capitalism, as much as an institution which serves it; and to see the relative strengths and weaknesses of particular household types, as well as the various strengths of the protagonists in particular household struggles, as having an important influence on the emergence of a privileged white working class, as well as on the places and experiences of men and women respectively.

EDITORS’ NOTES

a‘Imifino’: a general term for a number of species of wild plants collected and eaten as green vegetables by Xhosa-speaking peoples of the east coast.

b‘Umzi’: a Xhosa term for the homestead inhabited by one extended family. Physically, this consisted of a number of huts, traditionally set in a semi-circle around the cattle byre.

c‘Bywoner’: the Dutch/Afrikaans term used to describe a white tenant on white-owned farms. As non-propertied rural whites, they were economically vulnerable and the term is often associated with ‘poor whites’.

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NOTES

*I would like to thank William Beinart, Jacklyn Cock, Peter Delius, Shula Marks, Julie Wells, Marcia Wright and the ‘Women in South African History’ group for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article—but to absolve them from responsibility for the errors

and oversimplifications which undoubtedly remain in the present version.

1Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (London, 1971).

2See Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London, 1969).

3‘Patriarchy’ is a controversial term, retained in this discussion only with certain provisos discussed below. For discussions concerning the use of the term see Shelia Rowbotham, ‘The Trouble with Patriarchy’, and S.Alexander and B.Taylor, ‘In Defence of “Patriarchy”’, both in R.Samuel (ed.), Peoples History and Socialist Theory (London, 1981). See also the discussions by Michele Barrett, Woman’s Oppression Today (London, 1980), ch. 8; and Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women’ in A.M.Jaggar and P.R.Struhl (eds), Feminist Frameworks (New York, 1978).

4Barrett, Woman’s Oppression.

5Women’s organized resistance in South African history has been discussed in several recent papers. See C.Kros, ‘Urban African Women’s Organisations and Protest on the Rand from the Years 1939–1956’, BA Honours dissertation (University of the Witwatersrand, 1978); J.Yawitch, ‘Natal 1959: The Women’s Protests’, paper presented to the Conference on the History of Opposition in Southern Africa, 1978; C.Walker, ‘The Federation of South African Women’, paper presented to the Conference on the History of Opposition in Southern Africa, 1978; B.Kaim, ‘The New Surgery: The Illicit Liquor Problem on the Rand, 1920–1945’, Sociology III Project, University of the Witwatersrand, 1978; I.Obery, ‘Makabongwe Amakosikazi! The FSAW and Mass Struggle in the 50’s’, Africa Perspective, 15 (Autumn, 1980), 36–41; J.Wells, ‘Women’s Resistance to Passes in Bloemfontein during the Inter-War Period’, Africa Perspective, 15 (Autumn, 1980), 16–35; J.Yawitch, unpublished essay on the Bafurutse Revolt against passes; J.Wells, ‘The Day the Town Stood Still: Women in Resistance in Potchefstroom, 1912–1930’, in B.Bozzoli (ed.), Town and Countryside in the Transvaal (Johannesburg, 1983); R.de Villiers, ‘The Resistance to the Extension of Passes to African Women, 1954–60’, unpublished paper; Cherryl Walker, ‘Women in Twentieth Century South African Politics: The Federation of South African Women, its Roots, Growth and Decline’, MA thesis (University of Cape Town, 1978); and T.Lodge, ‘Women’s Protest Movements in the 1950s’, unpublished ms.

6C.Stone, ‘Industrialisation and Female Labour Force Participation’; and J.Westmore and P.Townsend, ‘The African Women Workers in the Textile Industry in Durban’, South African Labour Bulletin, 2, 4, 1976.

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7See L.Callinicos, ‘Domesticating Workers’, South African Labour Bulletin, 2, 4, 1976, 60–8.

8J.Yawitch, ‘Black Women in South Africa: Capitalism, Employment and Reproduction’, BA Honours dissertation (University of the Witwatersrand, 1978); reprinted by Africa Perspective, 1980.

9C.Stone, ‘Female Labour Force Participation’.

10Maxine Molyneux, ‘Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate’, New Left

Review, 116 (1979), 3–27; H.Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’, Capital and Class, no. 8 (1979), 1–33; and M.Barrett, Woman’s Oppression.

11Hartmann, ‘Unhappy Marriage’.

12Hartmann, ‘Unhappy Marriage’.

13H.Wolpe, ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid’, Economy and Society, 1, 4 (1972), 425– 56 [this volume, Chapter 3—Eds].

14Yawitch, ‘Black Women in South Africa’.

15J.Kimble, ‘Concepts in Transition: Labour Migration in Southern Africa c. 1890–1910, with Reference to Basutoland’, paper presented to the Seminar on Peasants, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London (1980); and W.Beinart and P.Delius, ‘The Family and Early Migrancy in Southern Africa’, paper presented to the African History Seminar, School of Oriental and African Studies (1980).

16L.Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy (New York, 1971).

17Maureen Mackintosh, ‘Reproduction and Patriarchy: A Critique of Claude Meillassoux, “Femmes, Gremiers et Capitaux”’, Capital and Class, 2 (1977), 119. For further criticisms of the French structuralists see M.Molyneux, ‘Androcentrism in Marxist Anthropology’, Critique of Anthropology, 9 and 10 (1977).

18See, for example, the collection edited by S.Marks and A.Atmore,

Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (London, 1980).

19A task which John Wright has set himself in his article ‘Men’s Control of Women’s Labour in the Zulu Kingdom’, unpublished seminar paper, Natal University Working Group on Women (1980).

20W.Beinart and P.Delius, ‘The Family’.

21Wright, ‘Women’s Labour’.

22Jeff Guy, ‘The Destruction and Reconstruction of Zulu Society’, paper presented to the South African History Conference, East Anglia (1980), published in S.Marks and R.Rathbone (eds),

Industrialization and Social Change in South Africa (London, 1982).

23As Rubin says, ‘We [should] look for the ultimate locus of women’s oppression within the traffic in women, rather than within the traffic in merchandise…. Women are given in marriage, taken in battle, exchanged for favours, sent as tribute, traded and bought and sold’. The exchange of women, she suggests, ‘is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have full rights to themselves’. ‘The Traffic’, 160–1.

24R.Brenner, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, 104 (1979), 25–92.

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25Wolpe, ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power’.

26Chris Middleton, for example, uses the term ‘patriarchy’ in a dynamic and historical manner, in his ‘Peasants, Patriarchy and the Feudal Mode of Production in England: A Marxist Appraisal’,

Sociological Review, 29, 1 (1981), 105–54.

27See Kate Young’s brilliantly executed analysis of the effects of mercantile capital on the place of women in a remote Mexican region, ‘Modes of Appropriation and the Sexual Division of Labour’, in A.Kuhn and A.Wolpe (eds), Feminism and Materialism (London, 1980).

28S.Marks and E.Unterhalter, ‘Women and the Migrant Labour System in Southern Africa’, unpublished paper (Lusaka, 1978).

29John Wright, ‘Women’s Labour’.

30Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest (Oxford, 1936), 106–7. See also her ‘The Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Status of Pondo Women’, Africa, VI (1933). See I.Schapera, Married Life in an African Tribe (Harmondsworth, 1971), 160 for an even more dramatic depiction of the difference in labour between young men and women.

31S.Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa (London, 1916), quoted in J.Yawitch, ‘Black Women’.

32W.Beinart, The Political Economy of Pondoland 1860–1930 (Cambridge, 1982), 157.

33This is based on a conception of ‘feudal’ patriarchy derived from Middleton, ‘Peasants, Patriarchy’, C.Middleton, ‘The Sexual Division of Labour in Feudal England’, New Left Review, 113–14 (1979), 147–68 and Roberta Hamilton, The Liberation of Women (London, 1978).

34This is not to suggest that a certain status was not conferred upon Boer women within the patriarchal structure as well.

35However, the point about the feudal household, and this applies to the ‘Boer’ one too, was that it was a site of productive activity—in contrast to the modern capitalist one, in which production is socialized and removed from the domestic domain. See E.Zaretsky,

Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (London, 1976).

36The discussion is based upon the Carnegie Commission Report, vol. V(b), The Mother and the Daughter of the Poor Family (Stellenbosch, 1932), 169–97.

37See the Report of the Transvaal Indigency Commission, 1906–8 (Pretoria, 1908); and the Carnegie Commission Report, vol. I, Rural Impoverishment and Rural Exodus, for the background to this argument.

38Carnegie Commission Report, vol. I, 214–29; Solly Sachs, Rebel’s Daughters (London, 1957).

39Carnegie Commission, vol. I, 215.

40As note 39.

41C.Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (London, 1979).

42Carnegie Commission Report, vol. II, 60.

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43See P.Delius and S.Trapido, ‘Inboekselings and Oorlams: The Creation and Transformation of a Servile Class’, and T.Keegan, ‘The Sharecropping Economy’, both in B.Bozzoli (ed.), Town and Countryside.

44R.Davies, ‘Mining Capital, the State and Unskilled White Workers in South Africa, 1901–1913’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 3, 1 (October, 1976), 41–69.

45The critique that follows owes much to the work of Charles van Onselen, ‘The World the Mine-Owners Made’, in Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1890–1914, 2 vols (London, 1982), as well as to Maxine Molyneux, ‘Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate’.

46See Women in South African History, no. 1 (January, 1981), 25–6.

47B.Bozzoli, The Political Nature of a Ruling Class (London, 1981), 54.

48Bozzoli, Ruling Class, 97.

49Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, 5 (Spring, 1978), 9–66, esp. 12–24.

50Bozzoli, Ruling Class, 96.

51C.van Onselen, ‘The Witches of Suburbia’, in Studies.

52C.van Onselen, ‘The Witches’ discusses the transition from male to female, as does J.Cock, Maids and Madams (Johannesburg, 1980).

53J.Cock, ‘Disposable Nannies’, African Studies Institute Seminar Paper, University of the Witwatersrand (1981).

54L.Callinicos, in ‘Domesticating Workers’.

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6

THE ELABORATION OF

SEGREGATIONIST

IDEOLOGY

Saul Dubow

Saul Dubow, a South African historian now teaching at the University of Sussex in Britain, has explicitly sought to reintroduce an analysis of segregationist ideology into the debate. His argument is not intended as direct restatement of older liberal views where apartheid was seen as the result of blind racial prejudice. But it does suggest that left analysts placed too much emphasis on the cheap labour system as the driving force of segregation and its ideologies. There were broader white fears, he suggests, relating particularly to black urbanization and proletarianization. Segregation in its early twentieth-century form was conceived by British officials influenced by evolutionist and social Darwinist thought, as well as by South Africans of liberal disposition who used the anthropological notion of cultural relativism as a means of steering a path between ‘assimilation’ and ‘oppression’. The ideology of segregation was primarily expressed as a means to defuse potential class conflict and maintain overall white hegemony. In this account, segregation is viewed as an umbrella ideology which was capable of serving a range of white interest groups, and even some black ones. Its flexibility explains its historical success as an ideology of social and political containment.

* * *

EARLY EXPONENTS OF SEGREGATION

Historians hold a multiplicity of views as regards the historical origins of segregation. Some writers, like Marian Lacey and Richard Parry, trace segregation back to the nineteenth-century Cape and the provisions of Cecil Rhodes’s 1894 Glen Grey Act.1 It has been suggested too that the experience of British rule in

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Basutoland provided a model for some of the early theorists of segregation.2 During the interwar years and beyond there was a widespread assumption (especially among liberal scholars) that the origins of segregation were to be found in the racial attitudes characteristic of the ‘frontier tradition’ and in the institutions of the nineteenth-century Boer republics. Against this view, David Welsh has claimed that the antecedents of segregation and apartheid are to be found in the Shepstonian policies of colonial Natal. It is in Natal, Welsh argues, that the demarcation of native reserves, the state’s use of chiefs for administrative purposes and the recognition of customary law, were pioneered.3

The salience of Natal is also highlighted by Shula Marks, who gives the argument a fresh analytical twist. In her study of that region Marks shows that segregation was a means whereby capital and the colonial state came to terms with the ‘still pulsating remains of powerful African kingdoms’. Segregationist policies were therefore not simply imposed by an all-powerful state; they emerged out of a complex process of struggle which was ‘profoundly shaped’ by the ‘structures and social relationships of African precapitalist society’.4 The importance of Natal—which, of all South Africa’s regions, most closely resembles a colonial/ settler frontier—is further underlined by the fact that many of the principal advocates of twentieth-century segregation, e.g. Maurice Evans, C.T.Loram, Edgar Brookes and G.H.Nicholls, were closely associated with that province.

There are sound reasons to support all the above claims for the paternity of segregation, and it would therefore be misleading to cite one region to the exclusion of all others. Indeed it was ideologically advantageous to South Africa’s early twentiethcentury social engineers that segregationist precedents could readily be demonstrated in all the provinces of the Union of South Africa; for, in the context of the centralization of the state after 1910, segregation could be shown to be a consistent feature of the Union’s diverse political and constitutional traditions.

At this point it is worth noting that of all the competing explanations for the origins of segregation-apartheid, the theory of Afrikaner nationalist responsibility is perhaps the least convincing. That view is exemplified by such historians as C.W.de Kiewiet and Eric Walker, who portray segregation in terms of the imposition of a retrogressive ‘frontier mentality’ on the attitudes of the twentieth century, and C.M.Tatz, for whom segregation

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represents the victory of the racially exclusive north over the liberal traditions of the Cape.5

Although now a somewhat discredited view among academic historians, the misleading notion of apartheid as the eccentric creation of racist Afrikaners continues to enjoy wide provenance. In a recent book the BBC radio journalist Graham Leach, for instance, tells us that apartheid ‘was a policy steeped in the Afrikaner’s 300 years of history’ and, even more inaccurately, that ‘it was South Africa’s first attempt at solving its racial problem’.6

This sort of account ignores the fact that the first group of theorists to outline a systematic ideology of segregation were Englishrather than Afrikaans-speaking, and that many of them were associated with the interwar tradition of South African liberal thought. Prime Minister Hertzog, who was directly responsible for the passage of the 1936 Native Bills, promoted segregation as a white supremacist rather than an Afrikaner, and he derived most of his ideas from English-speaking thinkers. It is notable that the Afrikaner Broederbond, that powerhouse of twentieth-century Afrikaner nationalist ideological thought, only began to shift its concerns from Anglo-Afrikaner relations to the ‘native question’ in the midto late 1930s, by which time segregationist ideology was already deeply entrenched.7 The earliest examples of Afrikaner proto-apartheid theory date from the early 1930s, but although they bear the distinctive imprint of Christian-Nationalist thinking and embrace a purist view of total separation, in substance they are largely derivative of already extant segregation and trusteeship ideology.

The first use of the word ‘segregation’ remains a matter of historical conjecture. Martin Legassick tentatively traced its first occurrence back to around 1908.8 John Cell considers it ‘truly remarkable’ that the report of the 1903–5 South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) did not actually employ the term, even though it advocated a policy of ‘territorial separation’.9 (In fact, the word ‘segregation’ does occur in paragraph 190 of the report.10) Paul Rich recently claimed that ‘segregation’ was first used in 1903 by the Cape Liberal lawyer Richard Rose Innes ‘to rationalize a policy of establishing “native reserves” in order to induce a ready supply of black labour for the mines and farms’.11 But the word also crops up during the opening of the 1902 Cape parliament, when the Governor-General declared that it was ‘necessary for the Government to be endowed with larger powers

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