Abstract
Let us begin with an assumption: the most fitting category with which to analyse the patterns of stratification within modern South Africa are Weberian estates. The problem about so doing, however, is to find a suitable definition of what Weber (or anyone else for that matter) meant by “estates”. Weber himself emphasised honour and style of life as the main determinants of an estate, a status situation, while later commentors have stressed that estates are recruited very largely in terms of primordial loyalties. Individuals are born into estates, but “bot propertied and propertyless peoples can belong to the same status group, and frequently they do, with very tangible consequences”. Thus the nations, “tribes” and ethnic groups of southern Africa would seem, at first sight, to be estates, although the Weberian criterion of “honour” would have to be replaced by others stressing the ways in which conquest situations created designation of people with presumed distinct ancestry and thus ascription.1
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References
H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber, Essays in Sociology (London, 1948), pp. 186–87.
Gail M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: the Evolution of an Ideology (Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1978).
I. Wallerstein, “Social Conflict in Post-Independence Black Africa: the Concepts of Race and Status Group Reconsidered”, in The Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge, 1979), p. 166.
By Southern (as opposed to southern) Africa, I mean not so much the geographical region as the society that emanated from the foundation of the Cape Colony in Cape Town, whether or not it eventually became part of the state of South Africa.
His nickname referred not only to the colour of his hair, but also to that of his opinions.
I.D. MacCrone, Race Attitudes in South Africa: Historical, Experimental and Psychological Studies (Oxford, 1937).
W.M. MacMillan,My South African Years, an Autobiography (Cape Town, 1975), p. 214.
It would be tedious to list a complete bibliography of this school. Their work can be found above all in the journals Economy and Society, Journal of Southern African Studies and Review of African Political Economy.
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The term is not meant to mean “near-Marxists”, but in contradistinction to “palaeo-Marxist” (never to my knowledge so used), for instance those members of the South African Communist Party of whom R.W. Johnson writes “had the South African revolution produced its own Lenin, he would undoubtedly have been drummed out of the CPSA”. How Long Will South Africa Survive? (London, 1977), p. 25.
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The reference is of course to Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon”, in Surveys from Exile (Harmondsworth, 1973; Penguin edition), p. 146. It is notable that in his “Mining Capital, the State and Unskilled White Workers in South Africa, 1901-1911” [Journal of Southern African Studies 3 (1976)], Robert Davies makes a very similar point, but for him the determinant class struggles did not begin before 1892.
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It may be different in those societies which did not make such a stark distinction, but which included a specific mulatto stratum within their system of stratification, but wherever there was slavery coupled to racial distinction, there was also a large number of free blacks/coloureds. Certainly there was at the Cape.
The best description of these measures and their effects is still J.S. Marais, The Cape Coloured People, 1652-1937 (Oxford, 1939 ), pp. 177–215.
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The most notable of these were in Namibia. See H. Vedder, South West Africa in Early Times, trans. C.G. Hall (Oxford, 1938 ).
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In particular, from the work of Stanley Trapido, notably “The South African Republic: Class Formation and the State, 1850-1900”,SSA 3 (1972); and “Landlord and Tenant in a Colonial Economy, the Transvaal 1880-1910”, Journal of Southern African Studies 5 (1978).
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For an example, see K.W. Smith, From Frontier to Midlands, a History of Graaff-Reinet District (Grahamstown, 1976).
See Robert Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas: a Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa (Cambridge, 1976).
Tony Kirk, “Progress and Decline in the Kat River Settlement, 1829-1854”, Journal of African History 14 (1973):415,
Tim Keegan, “Peasants, Capitalists and Farm Labour: Class Formation in the Orange River Colony, 1902-1910”, SSA 9 (1979); and Paul Rich, “The Agrarian Counter-revolution in the Transvaal and the Origins of Segregation”, in P.L. Bonner, Working Papers.
John Mawbey, “Afrikaner Women of the Garment Union during the Thirties and Forties”, in Essays in Southern African Labour History, ed. Eddie Webster (Johannesburg, 1978).
Robert Davies, “The 1922 Strike on the Rand: White Labour and the Political Economy of South Africa”, in African Labor History, ed. P.C.W. Gutkind, Robin Cohen and Jean Copans (Beverly Hills and London, 1978).
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Ross, R. (1982). Pre-Industrial and Industrial Racial Stratification in South Africa. In: Ross, R. (eds) Racism and Colonialism. Comparative Studies in Overseas History, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7544-6_6
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