Browsing by Author "Harries, Patrick"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    A history of the Committee on South African War Resistance (COSAWR) (1978-1990)
    (1996) Collins, Brian F; Saunders, Christopher C; Harries, Patrick
    COSAWR consisted mainly of white male South Africans who avoided whites-only conscription into the South African Defence Force (SADF) by going into exile in Britain and the Netherlands. COSAWR was founded in 1978 with the assistance of the African National Congress (ANC) and the British Anti-Apartheid Movement. Its goals were to advance war resistance both within South Africa and overseas, research the militarisation of Southern Africa, influence the ANC's opinion on war resistance, bring Western European peace groups and soldiers' unions into the fold of the antiapartheid movement, and involve white South Africans in the anti-apartheid movement and the ANC. The thesis puts COSAWR in the context of South African history in the 1970s and 1980s. The dissertation evaluates COSAWR in relation to the personal and political dynamics of the individual members who shaped the organisation, the development of the South African war resistance movement, its association with the ANC and the broad international anti-apartheid movement, its antagonistic relationship with the South African government and the militarisation of South Africa. The discourse explores the exiles' personal and political motives for avoiding military service. These reasons helped to determine the extent to which the organisation was successful. It is a general history, because the security consciousness of interviewees and the lack of access to certain COSAWR and South African government records inhibited the writing of a detailed study.
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    Learning South African languages : the historical origins of standard Xhosa , and the uses to which the written form of the language was put c. 1770-1935
    (2000) Mathiesen, Kim Brereton; Harries, Patrick
    This dissertation centres on the social history of the Xhosa language as it became codified into writing during the nineteenth century. My particular is interest is in why efforts were made to learn written Xhosa, and how the written form of the languages was used variously by travel writers, missionaries, converts, interpreters, indigenous speakers, the educated African elite, and professional philologists between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. The outcome of the uses to which the language was put was the construction of a standard form of the language.
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    The politics of land in Levubu, Northern Province c.1935-1998
    (2000) Nefale, Mukondeleli Michael; Harries, Patrick
    This thesis explores the development of capitalist agriculture and apartheid in the Levubu settlement, in the Northern Province. Capitalist agriculture was characterised by the quest for fertile land for white farmers while, at the same time, dispossessing indigenous communities. Land as the country's main political and economic resource has been manipulated to control people. The thesis shows how a system of political oppression has been used to deny indigenous communities access to viable land and water by different white supremacist governments. The study examines how white settlers in Levubu were helped by the state in the development of commercial farming. In such an endeavour, a black landless working class was created. The material conditions of the white beneficiaries of the settlement are contrasted with those of the dispossessed blacks. The material conditions of the black population, both in the ""homelands"", and on the white farms, were characterised by poverty and overcrowding. On the other hand, white farmers were reaping enormous profits by producing food for local and international markets. The struggle for survival between white landowners and the landless blacks is the product of 20th century racialised capitalist development in the Levubu countryside. The last part of the study looks at the new democratic government of South Africa and its endeavour to redress the unequal distribution of wealth created by the apartheid regime. It focuses on the market approach which has been adopted to deliver a better life for all, and it examines how such an approach shows continuities with past injustices.
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    Remembering Albasini
    (1998) Van Ryneveld, Teresa Ann; Harries, Patrick
    This dissertation uses the historical figure of Joao Albasini to explore some historiographical issues related to how people commemorate their past. Joao Albasini was a Portuguese trader who operated through the port of Delagoa Bay for a large part of the 19th Century. He was based in Portuguese East Africa in the1830's and early 1840's, and moved into what would become the Transvaal in the late 1840's, becoming a powerful political force in the region. This thesis looks at the strikingly different ways in which Albasini has been remembered by different individuals and groups. Part 1 deals with his South African family's memories of him, focusing in particular on the portrayal of Albasini in a celebration held in 1988 to commemorate the centenary of his death. This is compared with fragments of earlier family memories, in particular, with the testimony of his second daughter recorded in newspaper articles, letters and notes. This comparison is used to argue that the memories of Albasini are being shaped both by a changing social context, and by the influence of different literary genres. Part 2 looks at a doctoral thesis on Albasini written by J.B. de Vaal in the 1940's. This is placed in the context of a tradition of professional Afrikaner academic writing, which combined the conventions and claims of Rankean scientific history with the concerns of an Afrikaner Volksgeskiedenis, and which became powerful in a number of South African Universities in the early decades of this century. The text of de Vaal's thesis is examined in detail with a view to focusing on the extent to which it was shaped by this tradition. Part 3 looks at a group of oral histories collected from the former Gazankulu Homeland between 1979 and 1991, and focuses on the way in which a memory of Albasini has been used in the construction of the idea of a Tsonga/Shangaan ethnic group. One oral tradition is examined in detail, and used to argue for an approach to oral history that attempts to focus on the structure and commentary of oral history, instead of simply using it as a source of empirical fact.
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    "The sea is in our blood" : community and craft in Kalk Bay, c. 1880-1939
    (1989) Kirkaldy, Alan; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Harries, Patrick
    This thesis examines the historic right of the Kalk Bay fishermen to occupy the area and exploit the marine resources of False Bay. It attempts to provide the historical base absent from anthropological, and other, works which have focussed on the area. In recent years, the local handline fishing community has faced destruction by a complex web of political, social and economic forces. This work shows that these have simply been new challenges in a long line, albeit the most serious, faced by the fisherfolk of Kalk Bay. The study begins with an examination of human settlement, and the origins of fishing, in Kalk Bay to the late nineteenth century. This is followed by an analysis of the organisation of the local fishing industry at the close of that century. These two chapters provide the backdrop for discussion of the commercialization of the local fishing effort, between 1890 and 1913. The fourth chapter deals with the establishment of the modern fishing industry in Kalk Bay, from 1913 to 1939. The thesis concludes with a brief examination of the community to the 1980s. Major findings are that the local fishermen of today are the product of a cultural and economic tradition stretching back thousands of years. By the late nineteenth century, the rhythm of life in the area was being rapidly changed by its incorporation into the social and economic orbit of greater Cape Town. Over the main period covered by the thesis, the local fishermen, as a result of their race and class, occupied the weaker position in conflicts with local authorities, the state and capital. However, they were able to fight dependence upon a single buyer and growing pressures for their proletarianisation and managed to maintain their independence as petty-commodity producers. The independence of the fisherfolk was nevertheless maintained at the expense of increasingly depressed local markets for their fish. Since the Second World War, the escalating political, social and economic subordination of the fisherfolk has progressively threatened the existence of the handline fishing industry and the fishing community at Kalk Bay. However, should racial ideologies and commitment to monopoly capitalization of the industry be set aside by the state, the Kalk Bay fisherfolk could survive, albeit in altered and diminished circumstances.
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    The separation of powers in Africa : a comparative analysis of Cameroon and South Africa, (c.1961-c.1996), with special reference to nation-building
    (2000) Akoh, Harry Asana; Saunders, Christopher; Harries, Patrick
    Too often writers have focused on the economic and political factors in attempting an answer to the question why so many conflicts in Africa? This study breaks new grounds and seeks to demonstrate the role of law in these conflicts. The focus here is on the constitutional law paradigm of the separation of powers. The research is an investigation of the primordial role of the law in causing conflicts in Africa it seeks to demonstrate that the crises that dominated them from 1961-1996 was as a result of constitutional manoeuvres. The hypothesis investigates the separation of powers between the judiciary, legislature and executive in Cameroon and South Africa, which are from enhancing nation building has often been a source of conflict. The manipulation of the constitutions in Cameroon by the francophone majority and in South Africa by the white minority undermined nation building and laid the seed beds for conflicts in the period under survey.
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    The struggle for the city : alcohol, the ematsheni and popular culture in Durban, 1902-1936
    (1984) La Hausse, Paul; Webb, Colin; Harries, Patrick
    This thesis concerns itself with the genesis and development of the Durban system but also provides a point of entry into the social history of Durban. There are a number of threads which hold this study together. The most central of these comprises an examination of those struggles between ordinary African people and the white rulers of the town over access to, and the production of drink generally, and utshwala in particular. The lengths to which the state in South Africa has gone in order to control the supply of alcohol, particularly utshwala, to African popular classes and the intensity of the resistance to this control has, with one notable exception, been largely ignored by historians. This neglect is understandable. Not only is the study of the making of South Africa's working classes in its infancy but regional social histories have only recently begun to make their appearance in written form. Moreover, research has tended to focus on the Transvaal, especially the Witwatersrand, and the main concern of such studies has been to concentrate on the regional with a view to arriving at more general conclusions about the state and the nature of class formation and consciousness. In their sensitivity to local-level and regional concerns, these studies are invaluable and certainly they represent an important step away from, as Tim Keegan has noted, the growing sterility of the debates on race and class, on segregationist ideology and practice, and on the nature and role of the state.