Onselen The Seed is Mine

The life of Kas Maine, a South African sharecropper 1894-1985
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-86842-963-9
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 664 Seiten

A bold and innovative social history, The Seed Is Mine concerns the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa. After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbors, employers, friends, and family - a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication - Charles van Onselen has recreated the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart.

CHARLES VAN ONSELEN is the acclaimed author of several books including The Fox and the Flies, Masked Raiders, and, most recently, The Cowboy Capitalist. His book, Showdown at the Red Lion, has been opted for an international television drama series based upon the acclaimed title and embellished with characters from Masked Raiders. Van Onselen has been honoured with visiting fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford, and was the inaugural Oppenheimer Fellow at Harvard's WEB Du Bois Institute. He is currently Research Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Onselen, Charles Van

Leseproben

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My father, the oldest son in an eastern Cape family of seven children, joined the South African Police during the Great Depression. In the early 1950s, after two decades of highly successful service, the incoming Afrikaner Nationalist government decided that there was no room in the force for career policemen who did not subscribe to their political vision. His career came to an abrupt end and he left the police. He then found employment in the estates division of one of the smaller Rand mining houses, and spent the next twenty years of his life as stand-in landlord for the company, overseeing several large properties in the southwestern Transvaal and northern Orange Free State. Much of my childhood and all of my adolescence was spent in small mining towns—mere industrial islands set amidst seas of green maize that were ruled by bands of rugged Afrikaner farmers. To the extent that I have roots anywhere, I am a son of the South African highveld.

I know that there are other, more attractive, verdant, and densely settled parts of the country. South Africa has a narrow, fairly well-watered east coast littoral where thick bush and occasional forest is the historic home of indigenous Nguni-speakers such as the Xhosa and the Zulu and many nineteenth-century European settlers. But an escarpment, which curls from north to south divides this ‘wet’ eastern third of the country from the dry western two-thirds, and behind this lies the highveld—-the elevated plateau that dominates the interior. Between five and six thousand feet above sea level and tilting gently towards the distant Atlantic, the highveld’s scattered acacia bush and thin grasslands eventually concede defeat to a demanding climate and make way for the Kalahari Desert. These hot, dry and expansive plains of the subcontinent provide the country with its most characteristic landscape, and a distinctive terminology which singles out for special attention any geomorphological feature which so much as hints at either height or water. Koppie, krans, pan, platteland, rand, sloot, spruit, vlakte, and vlei—are all Afrikaans words that defy easy translation and which have been incorporated holus-bolus into the vocabulary of all urban South Africans. They are quintessentially highveld words; words that give life to the ways in which one senses and experiences much of what it is to be South African.

The highveld has, for more than a century, also been the site of some of the most intense, intimate and searing interactions between Afrikaner landlords and their predominantly Sotho-speaking labour tenants and farm labourers. Bitter-sweet relationships born of paternalism and unending rural hardship have seen the emergence of peculiar quasi-kinship terms such as outa (venerable father) and ousie (older sister)—nouns that are as embedded in the modern SeTswana lexicon as they are in Afrikaans. When an authentic South African identity eventually emerges from this troubled country it will, in large part, have come from painful shared experiences on the highveld.

1 South Africa, relief

Only twenty-five years ago most South Africans still lived and laboured in the countryside. Now noisy, young, mass-schooled, semi-literate urban insiders dominate the political order and pointedly ignore our rural origins, the lingering ideologies of the highveld, and experiences that moulded an often silent, bemused and largely illiterate older generation. Those intent on building our future around industry may do well to pause and reflect on the fact that we live in times when the field has barely given way to the factory, the peasant to the proletarian, and the patriarch to his family.

This book—a work of biography—seeks to establish some of the deepseated personal, psychological, social and structural reasons that underlay one family’s gradual move away from the highveld into the twilight world of labour migrancy, peri-urban space and industry. It does so knowing, as the German historian Meinecke warned us more than half a century ago, that ‘behind the search for causalities there always lies, directly or indirectly, the search for values.’ Contemporary South African values evoke hope and despair in equal measure. Perhaps there could be no other way for we are in the adolescence of our nationhood.

I have explored some of the factors that govern the attitudes, beliefs, cultural practices and values of South Africa’s highveld inhabitants elsewhere—notably in essays which appeared in The American Historical Review (1990) and in the Journal of Historical Sociology (1992). Readers interested in the theoretical issues that underpin this narrative of Kas Maine’s life, such as the ideology of paternalism, are invited to consult these articles. Likewise, those wishing to engage with the hidden methodological assumptions that inform this study as well as the real and imagined limitations of oral history as a research technique might turn to The Journal of Peasant Studies (1993). But writing articles and writing a book—especially a rather lengthy book—are two very different exercises.

*

We live in an era dominated by the state, big business and the mass media. They are, we are told, great supporters of the arts and social sciences. Maybe. In my experience, however, statutory funding agencies serve the government of the day far too zealously, and large corporations often hire narrow eyes and silky tongues to protect their ‘social responsibility’ budgets from academic projects with unpredictable outcomes. Historians could do with a few of the monarchs, monks and madmen of yesteryear to patronise the pursuit of ideas. Progress has its down side. But I have been lucky. This book has been generously supported by many foundations, institutions and their intermediaries.

Back in 1979 Michael O’Dowd and the Anglo American & De Beers’ Chairman’s Fund provided seed-money for a research programme in oral history. Jean Copans and the Centre D’Etudes Africaines at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales gave me time and space to work through some ideas with colleagues in Paris in 1991. When it wasn’t always easy, Bill Carmichael and the Ford Foundation were willing to be associated with a white man in a city that abounded with more politically correct causes. The Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies’ Joint Committee on African Studies came to my rescue when all work on this project had ground to a halt. And the managers of the Smuts Memorial Fund in Cambridge, England, helped in the most generous way possible. They underwrote an Overseas Visiting Fellowship for me during 1989–90; Michael Allen at Churchill College and John Lonsdale of Trinity made my stay in Cambridge as pleasant as it was productive.

Institutions pay the bills; people do the work. I have been spurred on by a group of remarkably warm and supportive colleagues. Celeste Emmanuel, Arlene Harris, Paul la Hausse, Jeanette Kruger, Steve Lebelo, Nita Lelyveld, Hosea Mahlobane, Ephraim Msimango, and Karin Shapiro all helped in ways too numerous to mention. David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng do not need me to sing their praises, for their photographs speak for themselves. I value the friendship, professionalism and support of all these people more than they can imagine. My only regret is that two others—the late Thomas Matsetela and Moss Molepo—brother historians lost amidst the mindless battles of a bloody society, did not live to see the conclusion of this project. I like to think that they would have approved of why I want to single out Thomas Nkadimeng for special praise. Historical research is for stayers rather than sprinters. For fourteen years Thomas Nkadimeng lent me his eyes and his ears. He never hesitated to crisscross the Transvaal in search of data that might have struck him as boring, crass, irrelevant, insensitive, repetitive, vague or plain stupid. On one occasion during South Africa’s long undeclared civil war, he was woken by a nervous landlord prodding him in the head with a double-barreled shotgun. It is my hope that, through our efforts in bad times, we may just have created something of value that our grandchildren can share in better times.

Family-centred research is both intrusive and interactive. At a turbulent time in their own lives and in South African history, the Maines answered a knock, opened their doors, and allowed strangers to wander round their homes at will. Those who possess least in material terms often give most by way of friendship, hospitality and kindness; but the Maine miracle surpasses what one expects of good hosts. Their courage, honesty and commitment to the pursuit of historical knowledge through all its painful twists and turns are all extraordinary. Sons and daughters of a formidable father, they acted in the tradition of Kas, who once observed, ‘I have always differed in spirit from others insofar as I wanted to preserve knowledge, values and wisdom.’

I would also like to thank the many doctors, farmers, labour tenants, landlords, lawyers, magistrates, politicians, sharecroppers, shopkeepers and traders from Bloemhof, Schweizer-Reneke and Wolmaransstad who assisted me in the research for this book. The Triangle is part of South Africa’s Deep South. Its Asians, blacks, coloureds and whites all had complex reasons for fearing the changes in South African society that were only just becoming apparent when this project was coming to fruition. They, too, took me in and willingly shared insights that sharpened my understanding of their...