Browsing by Author "Saunders, Christopher C"

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    Aspects of the social and political history of Langa Township, Cape Town, 1927-1948
    (1993) Musemwa, Muchaparara; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Saunders, Christopher C
    This study focuses on the social and political history of Africans in Langa Township from 1927 to 1948. Langa conveniently and justifiably serves as a good case study of the urban African experience because it is the area in Greater Cape Town, during this period, where there was the largest concentration of a relatively organised, stabilised and permanent African working class community. It is also the oldest township with the deepest roots and longest evolution in Cape Town. Langa also makes an interesting area of study because the politics surrounding its evolution as an urban African segregated residential township presents it not only as an arena of social conflict between the ruler and the ruled, but also stands out as a veritable testimony of the African struggle to become an integral part of the city. The thesis traces what, initially, began as an "externalised" struggle by Africans against the forced removals from the city and Ndabeni Location to Langa and attempts to establish the continuities of this struggle within the township - i.e."internalised" struggle. African popular struggles in Langa predominantly centred around such issues as rents, railway fares, living conditions, restrictions on beer brewing and trading activities, the demand for direct municipal representation and the freedom of movement. The study explores the nature of the relationship that subsisted between the Langa residents and the Cape Town City Council and the internal social and political relations in the Langa community, paying particular attention to conflicting tendencies and the forms of resolution implemented. The thesis aims to highlight the fact that protest and resistance were the only weapons that empowered the Langa residents to fight against unilateral unpopular decisions by the local authority or central government. Flowing from these findings is an attempt to discover how the lived experiences of the Langa people, their frustrations, disillusionment, crises of expectations, translated into political consciousness and how these help us to explain the people's role in nationalist politics. Alternatively, this will help us to explain how political parties, the African National Congress (ANC), the Communist Party of South Africa (CPS A), and the National Liberation League (NLL) exploited the crises in civic matters to enhance or strengthen their support bases and with what results.
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    George Frederickson's Racism and United States/South African Comparisons
    (Taylor & Francis, 2003) Saunders, Christopher C
    After spending much of his career comparing the United States and South Africa, George M. Fredrickson has now written a short history of racism.1 This is, of course, a bold undertaking, and let it be said at once that his book is both very readable and densely packed with illuminating and suggestive insights. After some discussion of the meaning of the term “racism,” Fredrickson begins with a survey of its origins. He moves from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the rise of modern forms of racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Along the way, he inevitably draws a number of comparisons between different racial systems. What follows here is not a review of the book as a whole—that has been done elsewhere, most notably by Orlando Patterson2 —but is a commentary on what he says regarding the United States and South Africa, as a way of drawing the attention of those interested in comparing the two to Fredrickson’s ideas in his latest work. These ideas are of course in part drawn from his earlier comparative writing. It is indeed fortunate for those interested in such comparisons that so distinguished a scholar, a former President of the Organization of American Historians,3 who has described himself as a “heterosexual white male of Swedish-American ancestry,”4 should have devoted so much of his distinguished academic career to comparing aspects of race in these two societies.
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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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    The University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop and radical South African historical scholarship in the 1970's and 1980's
    (1992) Tatham, Gayle Kirsten; Bundy, Colin; Saunders, Christopher C
    The thesis examines the History Workshop at the University of the University of the Witwatersrand in the context of radical South African historical scholarship. Not only is the History Workshop shown to mirror developments in radical scholarship but it is seen to guide and stimulate particular directions of research. The history of the Workshop is traced and its academic as well as popularising activities are examined. The Marxist social history approach, which was encouraged by the Workshop, is considered with reference to the social and political environment in which it emerged, and the international and local historiographical context. The issues, themes and concepts reflective of that approach are unpacked and some thought is given to their impact on Marxist categories of analysis. The History Workshop is seen to reflect and to have some influence on the direction pursued in labour and urban as well as rural history. In labour history, it pursued concerns of the social history of labour. Labour history was to take two different paths in the 1980's due partially to the influence of the Workshop group. Urban history grew rapidly as a field in the 1980's. The triennial Workshops reflected that development while the Workshop group particularly encouraged social history concerns within that field. The development of Marxist social history is seen in the change from an economistic approach in some of the papers presented at the first History Workshops to a broader social history emphasis in many of the later papers. The themes and issues arising out of urban Marxist social history are considered, as is their impact on the understanding of South Africa's urban history in general. The Workshop reflected and encouraged social history themes in rural history studies, which was another expanding field of research in the 1980's. These themes incorporated Africanist insight as well as an emphasis on oral history and local history. The Marxist social history studies, which were presented at the triennial Workshops, produced new insights into the rural history of South Africa which challenged earlier theories. The History Workshop with its materialist social history approach acted as a forum and as such, a catalyst for a radical scholarship in South Africa. The triennial workshops reflected what was happening in the terrain of Marxist social history. These Workshops, which attracted a large gathering of local, as well as foreign academics, legitimised that research and gave the Marxist social history scholars a certain standing within the local academic community. Although the study of South Africa's past may have similar directions in the late 1970's and 1980's without the presence of the Workshop, that presence gave a coherence and an added impetus to those routes of Marxist social history.