Abstract
In 1993, while an undergraduate and reproductive rights activist living in Victoria, I made my first trip to Southern Africa as the Canadian delegate to an international conference on youth and AIDS in Windhoek, Namibia. After the conference, I spent some weeks traveling around the country, which had obtained its freedom from South African rule a few years previously, and met Namibians from all walks of life with whom I chatted about my reasons for visiting their country. When I told them it was to share experiences with youth from around the world engaged in HIV/AIDS education and activism, I was repeatedly dumbstruck by peoples’ comments and stories related to contraception. One young African man, for example, said he never used condoms because they were part of the CIA’s plan to reduce the African population. As a student interested in the history and politics of reproduction I had read about population control in Asia but had learned nothing about it in relation to Africa; indeed, I do not think Africa had ever figured in my undergraduate studies. Consequently, his response intrigued me. Perhaps, I thought, his story was an example of gender politics; maybe he simply justified avoiding condoms by drawing on popular anti-American/imperial sentiments.
The existence of the white race in Africa is by no means assured, and unless we mend our ways we may go the same way in the south that the Roman and the Greek, the Carthaginian and the Vandal did in the north.
John X. Merriman, 19131
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Notes
Cited in H. Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (London: Hurst and Company, 2003), p. 310.
Studies include: M. Edmunds, “Population Dynamics and Migrant Labour in South Africa,” in K.L. Michaelson (ed.), And the Poor Get Children: Radical Perspectives on Population Dynamics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), pp. 154–79;
M. Gray, “Race Ratios: The Politics of Population Control in South Africa,” in L. Bondestam and S. Bergstrom (eds), Poverty and Population Control (London: Academic Press, 1980), pp. 137–55;
B. Brown, “‘Facing the Black Peril’: The Politics of Population Control in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 13, 3 (1987), pp. 256–73;
B. Klugman, “The Political Economy of Population Control in South Africa,” (BA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1980);
B. Klugman, “Decision-Making on Contraception Amongst a Sample of Urban African Working Women,” (MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1988);
B. Klugman, “Politics of Contraception in South Africa,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 13, 3 (1990), pp. 261–71;
B. Klugman, “Population Policy in South Africa: A Critical Perspective,” Development Southern Africa, 8, 1 (1991), pp. 19–34;
E. Boikanyo, M. Gready, B. Klugman, H. Rees, and M. Zaba, “When is Yes, Really Yes? The Experiences of Contraception and Contraceptive Services Amongst Groups of South African Women,” Report of a Study Conducted for the Women’s Health Project, Centre for Health Policy (Johannesburg: Department of Community Health, 1993);
and E. Salo, “Birth Control, Contraception and Women’s Rights in South Africa: A Cape Town Case Study,” unpublished paper (1993).
D.T. Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and Politics of Meaning (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, US: Blackwell Press, 1993), p. 81. For a periodization of the South African racial order see P. Maylam, “South Africa’s Racial Order: Some Historical Reflections,” paper presented at The Burdens of Race? “Whiteness” and “Blackness” in Modern South Africa, a conference organized by History Workshop and the University of the Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, July 5–8, 2001.
Brown, “Facing the Black Peril”; Salo, “Birth Control, Contraception and Women’s Rights in South Africa,” Klugman, “Politics of Contraception in South Africa,” and Klugman, “Decision-Making on Contraception Amongst a Sample of Urban African Working Women.” The state’s growing preoccupation with African population growth was evident in the rising studies it commissioned on black fertility rates in the 1970s. See J.M. Lotter and J.L. van Tonder, “Fertility and Family Planning in Thlabane” (Pretoria: HSRC, 1975);
J.M. Lotter and J.L. van Tonder, “Fertility and Family Planning Among Blacks in Africa: 1974” (Pretoria: HSRC, 1976);
H.J. Groenewald, “Fertility and Family Planning in Atteridgeville: Data for 1969, 1974 and 1975” (Pretoria: HSRC, 1978);
J.M. Lotter and J.L. van Tonder, “Certain Aspects of Human Fertility in Rural Bophuthatswana” (Pretoria: HSRC, 1978);
J.J. van Wyk, “Multipurpose Survey Among Blacks in Urban Areas — 1978: Some Practices with a Contraceptive Effect: Abstinence and Breast-feeding” (Pretoria: HSRC, 1979);
and R.B. van der Merwe and J.J. van Wyk, “Fertility and Family Planning in Daveyton: Survey Among Men” (Pretoria: HSRC, 1982).
H. Bradford, “Herbs, Knives and Plastic: 150 Years of Abortion in South Africa,” in T. Meade and M. Walker (eds), Science, Medicine and Cultural Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 120–47;
C. Burns, “Sex Lessons from the Past,” Agenda, 29 (1996), 79–91.
See also L. Newton-Thompson, “Birth Control Clinics in the Western Cape, c.1932 to c.1974: A History,” (BA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1992).
This is a vast literature. Significant studies include the following: On Britain: H. Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004);
A. McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England pom the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1984);
A. McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1978);
J. Lewis, Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900–1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1980);
R.A. Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1982);
J. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (New York: Longman, 1981);
D. Cohen, “Private Lives in Public Spaces: Marie Stopes, the Mothers’ Clinics and the Practice of Contraception,” History Workshop, 35 (1993), pp. 95–116.
On the United States: L. Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America, 2nd edn (New York: Penguin Books, 1990);
L. Ross, “African American Women and Abortion, 1800–1970,” in S.M. James and A. Busia (eds), Theorizing Black Feminisms (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 141–59;
J. Rodrique, “The Black Community and the Birth Control Movement,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 333–44;
A. Davis, “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights,” in Marlene Gerber Fried (ed.), From Abortion to Reproductive Freedom: Transforming a Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 15–26;
CR. McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994);
J.C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);
R. Petchesky, Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom, 2nd edn (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1990);
J. Reed, From Private to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 (New York: Basic Books, 1978);
A. Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).
On the British Dominions: A. McLaren and A. Tigar McLaren, The Bedroom and the State: The Changing Practices and Politics of Contraception and Abortion in Canada, 1880–1980 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986);
S. Klausen, “Doctors and Dying Declarations: State Regulation of Abortion in British Columbia, 1917–1936,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadien d’Histoire de la Medecine, 13 (1996), pp. 53–81;
B. Brookes, “Reproductive Rights: The Debate over Abortion and Birth Control in the 1930s,” in B. Brookes, C. Macdonald, and M. Tennant (eds) Women in History: Essays on European Women in New Zealand (Wellington: Allen and Unwin, 1986), pp. 119–36;
H. Smyth, Rocking the Cradle: Contraception, Sex, and Politics in New Zealand (Wellington: Steele Roberts Ltd., 2000);
S. Siedlecky and D. Wyndham, Populate and Perish: Australian Women’s Eight for Birth Control (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990).
Other significant studies: A. Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
A.B. Ramírez de Arellano and C. Seipp, Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception: A History of Birth Control in Puerto Rico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
See for example E.H. Burrows, A History of Medicine in South Africa upto the End of the Nineteenth Century (Cape Town and Amsterdam: A.A. Balkema, 1958),
M. Gelfand, Tropical Victory: An Account of Medicine in the History of Southern Rhodesia (Oxford: Juta, 1953);
A.P. Cartwright, Doctors of the Mines. To Mark the 50th Anniversary of the Founding of the Mine Medical Officers Association of South Africa (Cape Town: Purnell, 1971);
P.W. Laidler, South Africa and Its Medical History, 1652–1898 (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1971).
M. Swanson, “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and the Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–1909,” Journal of African History, 18, 3 (1977), pp. 387–410;
R. Packard, White Plague, Black Labour: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989);
S. Marks and N. Andersson, Health and Apartheid (Geneva: WHO, 1983);
S. Marks and N. Andersson, “Diseases of Apartheid,” in John Lonsdale (ed), South Africa in Question (London: Cambridge African Studies Centre with James Currey, 1985), pp. 172–99;
S. Marks and N. Andersson, “Typhus and Social Control: South Africa, 1917–1950,” in R. MacLeod and M. Lewis (eds), Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 257–83;
S. Marks and N. Andersson, “Industrialisation, Rural Change and the 1944 National Health Services Commission,” in S. Feierman and J. Janzen (eds), The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 131–61;
S. Marks, Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession (London: Macmillan Press, 1994);
and K. Jochelson, The Colour of Disease: Syphilis and Racism in South Africa, 1880–1950 (Basingstoke and Oxford: Palgrave in association with St. Antony’s College, 2001).
On segregation and apartheid see W. Beinart and S. Dubow (eds), Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995);
D. Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
C. Burns, “Reproductive Labours: The Politics of Women’s Health in South Africa, 1900 to 1960” (PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 1995), pp. 226–28.
See the collection of essays in R. Morrell (ed.), White But Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1992);
C. Bundy, “Vagabond Hollanders and Runaway Englishmen: White Poverty in the Cape Before Poor Whiteism,” in W. Beinart, P. Delius and S. Trapido(eds), Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa, 1850–1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986).
A.L. Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-century Colonial Cultures,” American Ethnologist, 16, 4 (1989), p. 635.
Planned Parenthood Association of South Africa, Johannesburg (hereafter PPASA JHB), Minutes of the Second Meeting of the South African National Council for Birth Control, October 6–7, 1936, p. 8. On Reitz’s election to Parliament see R. Macnab, The Story of South Africa House: South Africa in Britain — The Changing Pattern (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1983), p. 127.
See D. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991).
B. Bozzoli and P. Delius, “Radical History and South African History,” History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), pp. 3–25.
The published collections of conference papers from the History Workshop series held at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1970s and 1980s offer a comprehensive view of the work of radical social historians. See B. Bozzoli (ed), Town and Countryside in the Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983);
B. Bozzoli (ed), Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987);
P. Bonner, P. Delius and D. Posel (eds), Apartheid’s Genesis, 1935–1962 (Braamfontein: Ravan Press, 1993).
S. Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 5;
N. Roos, From Workplace to War: Class, Race and Gender Amongst White Volunteers, 1939–1953 (PhD thesis, University of North West, 2001);
J. Hyslop, “Why Did Apartheid’s Supporters Capitulate? ‘Whiteness,’ Class and Consumption in Urban South Africa, 1985–1995,” Society in Transition, 31, 1 (2000), pp. 36–44;
and J. Hyslop, “The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself ‘White’: White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa Before the First World War,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 12, 3 (1999), pp. 398–421.
A.L. Stoler and F. Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 4.
See especially A. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994);
M. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995);
A.L. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995);
A.L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
A. Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and the collection of essays in Stoler and Cooper (eds), Tensions of Empire.
See, for example, K. Fisher, “‘She Was Quite Satisfied with the Arrangements I Made’: Gender and Birth Control in Britain 1920–1950,” Past and Present, 169 (2000), pp. 161–93.
See M. Lock and P. Kaufert, “Introduction,” in M. Lock and P. Kaufert, Pragmatic Women and Body Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–27, as well as the essays in this excellent collection.
For a nuanced analysis of the interconnections between local and the national organizations in the provision of maternal and infant welfare services see L. Marks, Metropolitan Maternity: Maternal and Infant Welfare Services in Early Twentieth Century London (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996).
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© 2004 Susanne M. Klausen
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Klausen, S.M. (2004). Introduction. In: Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910–39. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230511255_1
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