Browsing by Author "Webb, Colin"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    A history of the Xhosa of the Northern Cape, 1795-1879
    (1985) Anderson, Elisabeth Dell; Webb, Colin; Saunders, Christopher
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    Political and social theories of Transkeian administrators in the late nineteenth century
    (1978) Martin, Samuel John Russell; Saunders, Christopher; Webb, Colin
    This study sets out to examine the order of categories and values, structuring men's thought and perception at a fundamental level although not systematically formulated, in terms of which the Transkeian magistrates viewed the African communities under their governance. It is thus an essay in colonial administration, but the critical focus has been narrowed and is centred primarily upon the ideas and assumptions the magistrates used in the business of administration to explain society, government and law. At the same time, a major concern of this work has been to place the particular problem with which it deals - the elucidation of magisterial ideas and attitudes - within a wider framework of contemporary social and political thought, to fit them into the matrix of Victorian culture as it conditioned and shaped the administrators' perceptions and responses touching the indigenous black population. A methodological pitfall opens here, of assimilating individual or local currents of ideas to more general patterns - the 'climate of opinion' or what Matthew Arnold called the 'main movement of mind' of the age; of trying to press disparate, multifarious and often carelessly formulated ideas and assumptions into a conceptual framework or theoretical construct that was independently arrived at and presented as given. The mode of procedure followed was one that allowed the source material to suggest broader patterns and larger perspectives according to which it could be most intelligibly and satisfyingly ordered; one also that wove together various logically independent concepts and general propositions, derived from general studies of the topic and period, and brought them to bear on the Transkeian situation. In this way it is hoped that the main features and contours of the magisterial mind have been rendered with as much precision of detail and emphasis as the demands of analytical depth and conceptual rigour would permit.
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    The San of the Cape thirstland and L. Anthing's "Special Mission"
    (1977) Findlay, Deborah Anne; Webb, Colin
    The Cape Thirstland (comprising modern Namaqualand, Bushmanland, the Karoo, Gordonia and Griqualand West) became, from the beginning of the influx of herding and cultivating peoples into South Africa, an area of retreat - not only for San hunters and gatherers but later for disgruntled Khoi/Coloureds and Bantu-speakers. As population pressure grew, so the search for unoccupied land became more urgent, and even the most arid part of the country became coveted. What the first chapter of this essay attempts to show is how the San were caught up in the general competition for land, which seems to have shaped so much of South Africa's history, and how they dealt with the threat to their independence.
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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.