A History of South Africa: Social and Economic - CW De Kiewiet

Land, climate, and conflicting peoples: these have been the foundations of South African social and economic life. CW De Kiewiet's history, first published in 1941, recounts attempted, imposed, but ultimately unattainable separations within South Africa. Early colonization sought to make the Cape a way-station for trade between Europe and Asia - seeking to abstract this outpost of economy from its environs. Later Dutch settlers wished to remain at a distance from Cape colonial administrative strictures. As the Boers headed to the hinterlands they wished to found their own society, free of natives and imperial requirements. The Transvaal and the Orange Free State wanted independence; liberty to govern themselves and the natives. The Boers did not, however, wish to shake themselves loose of the land, but to inhabit it and dispose of it as they saw fit. Had the lands which were later to be united as South Africa remained so resource-poor the Boers may have gotten their wish.

Whether for good or for ill gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in surpassing abundance in 1886. This was not California gold - the kind available to the solitary miner with his pan in a stream. The gold of the rand ran in deep, diffuse veins. Vast economies of scale, huge labor forces, and uncountable tons of dynamite, shovels, pickaxes, trolleys, and beams were needed to extract the gold and make it pay. In hordes they came to work the fields, both black and white. The Tshona, the Zulu, the Khoi and the Xhosa; Boers, British, Germans, Australians, and Americans. Soon these latter ones, foreign whites, the Uitlanders, outnumbered Boer citizens, but remained devoid of political rights. Who was to be responsible for these Uitlanders, and who would ensure their rights? The companies? The Cape? The republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State? The Boers were adamantly defensive of their culture and livelihoods - to grant equality to the Uitlanders would be to lose their identity. There was no question of the natives.

Witwatersrand would prove to be the richest gold field in the world, bringing the world to South Africa. Economy brought together all of that which had been previously kept asunder. With the invasion of the world new environments and new communities were built. The contact of men with one another, between people and the soil, and the slow collision of different communities in regards to the land and their neighbors composes the early history of South Africa. The story of one comprises the story of many.

March Up Country (Anabasis) - Xenophon

Though for their part victorious at Cunaxa, the death of Cyrus left the Ten Thousand Hellenes deep in Persia, with few prospects. Without supplies and soon-to-be leaderless, the Hellenic mercenaries would turn to Xenophon, something of an aide-de-camp who was along primarily for the adventure.

Anabasis ("going up") is the story of how the Ten Thousand Hellenes survived and made it ever-closer to Greece, through hostile Persian territory. Xenophon's prose is straight-forward, even somewhat terse. Though he can clearly deliver a stirring oration with the best, when it comes to relating an army's actions or the account of a march, Xenophon is all economy. One gets the sense that, while the settings and challenges are to be accounted for, what matters most is the right way to respond. Settings, particularities: these change. Right thinking and action transcend.

Xenophon makes a different kind of protagonist: he answers to what the world gives him. He is a marked departure from the mythological basileus; a very classical Greek hero. Achilles was all rage, destruction, petulance, and mayhem. Odysseus was the man of many talents, the skilled and learned, crafty and able. Xenophon is the honorable, the right-thinking, the philosopher-soldier. He provides a new kind of Greek ideal.

Xenophon's influence redounds. It is said that Alexander the Great carried the Anabasis as a field manual. Christiaan de Wet had a copy always at hand as he rode and hid in the veld during the Boer War. Xenophon espouses a particular philosophy of leadership: a transparency, a straight-forward practicality, a soldier's ethic. One wonders what it would mean to adopt it beyond the campaign. Maybe there is nothing beyond it. Much as the Ten Thousand seek a way home, we too wish to lay our burden down. Maybe there is no rest.

"thálatta, thálatta"

Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa - William Kelleher Storey

Firearms were not simply tools or weapons which colonials and natives picked up and put down. They were symbols of power, source of legal wranglings, and the means through which power and independence were exercised. Here tools and discourse were interwoven; each shaping the other.

Storey looks at the role of firearms throughout the colonial period in South Africa (ending with the Boer War). Firearms, he finds, were diversely manifest through time. They developed from wildly inaccurate muzzle-loaders to more precise breech-loaders. On the frontier of the veld they were seen to serve one function, on farms another, near urban areas still another. British bureaucrats and law-makers, both in the metropole and within the colonial center (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, D'urbanville) tried to control access to firearms, as a means of controlling the social sphere. Of course, firearms could also be means to challenge power. Therein lay much of the foundation for wrangling over access to firearms.

As a lens through which to view the social sphere firearms allow us to see particular things well - access to political power and speech, changing aspects of self-sufficiency and freedom - yet they can also be manifestations of these things. The question of which comes first tends to ground-out in circularity - each led to the other through a dynamic relationship. Do we find this a satisfying category of historical explanation? It is certainly a common one. This seems indicative of a broader ontology within historical scholarship.

The Boer War - Thomas Pakenham

The commitment, even quixotic commitment, of the Boers. The irrepressible weight of the British military. In its time the Boer War seemed the defining moment, not just for a young and divided South Africa, but for British imperial prospects. Yet, in retrospect, twentieth century events would diminish the conflict's import. Global geopolitical winds and contestations rendered it little more than, as TE Lawrence might have said, "a side-show of a side-show." Afterwards the British interest would recede. The Boers of the Free State and the Transvaal would have their sovereignty. This was the last imperial gasp. The British gained their victory. It, like the Union of South Africa, would come at a terrible cost.

Thomas Pakenham's The Boer War is the history of the twentieth century's first war. In this remote corner of Africa, the set-piece battle of the imperial period gave way to methods of the guerrilla, to the tactics of the trench. The British shipped-off to Natal, the Transvaal, the Cape Colony, and the Free State, unprepared for what they would encounter. It was to be a "walk-over." "Christmas in Pretoria," they said. Yet, out on the veld, British troops were ill-prepared for the costs the Boers would hazard. Only by subjugating women and children, and, yes, even the land, could the British steamroller achieve victory.

Pakenham can rightly be criticized for his marginalization of the native population. Too often armies and commandos march and slip across the landscape; invisible are the inhabitants whose very lives and livelihoods hung in the balance of the conflict. Yet, this oversight is all the more apparent because the fighting feels so fresh, so present. The Boers and the British ushered in a new age of destruction, to be fully realized at Verdun and the Somme.

Though the British would prove victorious, the Boer War marked the end of the colonial period in South Africa. The peace brokered set the stage for the country's independence, a few years later. Pakenham's story, sometimes too often of military might and back-room politics, recounts the first hints that a global order was in retreat. Similarly, this account can be read as a somewhat bygone mode of history. Nevertheless, the humanity and savagery of the Boers and the British, and the lessons which Pakenham draws from it, resonate still.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

Pirsig's emphasis on the relationship between thought context and care binds this work. What we think, and how these are manifest in what is said and done, indicates a type of psychic position in relation to our caring. Care is an investment in the arena of concern; an interested-ness, both in it, and the self's relation to it. Pirsig's concern is the source of the seeming alienation between the modern self, and our thoughts and actions regarding the world and each other. The prevailing thought context is one in which the distance between care and thought, as well as the distance between care and action, has been deemed unimportant. Rationality, in conception and exercise, looks at the distancing of care from thought and action, and finds no grounds to suggest that they ought to be unified. This, Pirsig argues, is a short-coming of rationality, a short-coming which demands that rationality be expanded.

Prisig's answer to the modern feeling of alienation requires that we turn that feeling upon itself; in essence both using this pre-intellectual awareness as an entry point and holding it up for interrogation. Alienation is born from the awareness that our lived context - the social world we inhabit - is somehow unsatisfactory. Yet, our thought context does not readily provide us with the tools to interrogate and voice such dissatisfaction. This was the germ for the counter-cultural movement, for consciousness-expanding practices and narcotics, for the draw of charismatic religions and religious figures; each taps into a subtle but pervasive discontent with acceptable expressions of how our minds relate to the social world we inhabit. Like a muscle, a particular perspective on the world is strengthened or weakened by use. If we do not ignore the pre-intellectual awareness of discontent, if it serves as the foundation to build modes of thought unrecognized in narrow rationality, then people might learn to see differently.

But the sense of alienation cannot simply be overcome by the imposition of a new thought program. The psychic relationship between care and thought context must recognize that care is related to thought. Expressed in the world, care is the flip-side of Pirsig's Quality. Care in thought and action is both reinforced by Quality and helps to generate Quality in the world. The relationship between thought context and care is, for Pirsig, primarily defined in regards to its treatment of Quality - as it exists within the individual, within the world, and within the relationship between the two. Right thought comes from right attitudes Its having the right attitudes that is hard.

"Don't worry... Keep going!"

The Scramble for Africa - Thomas Pakenham

The dark continent. Before the rivers and lakes were charted, before trading routes were hacked through the bush, before maps became filled with lines and the blank spaces were seen to contain numerous tribes, Africa was a foreboding darkness suggesting both untold dangers, and undreamed of possibilities. Between Cairo and the Cape, was a vast hinterland. While missionaries and explorers led the way, bringing back news and rumor, Europe's colonial powers played their diplomats and colonial offices against one another - parsing out vast tracts, with only a cursory appreciation for what the land contained. Though hoped-for fields of gold, ivory, and palm oil could titillate the dreams of men like Stanley and Brazza, European dreams of African promise were often left to colonial administrators; men whose charge was rationalizing and managing a wilderness. Behind Livingstone's banner of the "three C's" - commerce, Christianity, and civilization - colonial rhetoric often traded on the possible future of a continent to be manged without the yoke of a past.

Pakenham's work provides a single-volume account of the transition from the years of exploration, through the period of colonial wrangling, and into the early forays of Africans trying to assert their right to self determination. These years of the so-called "Scramble for Africa" saw some of Europe's most famous, and infamous, 19th century statesmen contesting with one another to extend their nations' claim to empire and African hegemony. Here we witness Disraeli and Gladstone, Bismarck and Leopold, extending empires and contending with foes, both foreign and domestic. While the careful reader might find that Pakenham gives short shrift to the untold millions of Africans who became, some knowingly, most unknowingly, dispossessed of their homelands, his approach is one which clearly prizes the political and diplomatic character of the period. In essence, the streets of London, Berlin, Rome, and Paris, the political whims of European peoples and governments, encroached upon African villages and people, many of whom had never seen a European. As the fingers of empire reached deeper into the continent, European political and military action was broadly manifest. Attempts at control and custodianship of African lands often pivoted-upon political and diplomatic relationships far away. In the hands of the few, the livelihoods, homes, and freedom of many unaccounted for - primarily black - faces were bandied about and, all-so-often, overlooked. As commerce, Christianity, and civilization illuminated Africa, Africans themselves increasingly became a part of a globalized world in which their concerns were given scant consideration.

Pakenham's work is a triumph for weaving together the colonial and metropolitan experiences which spanned both continents. By placing these numerous colonial stories into a single volume, disparate places are brought into stronger contrast and conversation with one another. While this cannot but short-change indigenous peoples, it provides an overview of the continent as it was conceived in the halls of power: a vast blank territory, ripe for the taking.

Leviathan and the Air-Pump - Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer

"solutions to the problem of knowledge are embedded within the practical solutions to the problem of social order... practical solutions to the problem of social order encapsulate practical solutions to the problem of knowledge." p. 15


What is the role of experimentation and the experimenter-as-scientist in society? What counts as knowledge and who gets to judge? In this seminal work, Shapin and Schaffer look back to experiment in its infancy. Before experimentation was the given mode of creating scientific matters of fact, the role of experiment was the source of great controversy. Robert Boyle and the Royal Society of London sought to create a safe space of expertise where experiments could take place and be carefully examined as to the knowledge of the natural world which they conveyed. Pitted against these gentlemen-experimentalists (the term scientist would not be coined until much later) was Thomas Hobbes, dean of 17th century political philosophy and an accomplished natural philosopher in his own right. While Boyle and his associates claimed to be working towards a true account of nature, Hobbes saw a closed society of patricians seeking to rival his hoped-for undivided and all-powerful sovereign. For Hobbes, who held the right to speak on behalf of nature was always a fraught proposition. Any arena in which the state took a back seat to alternate moods of power and truth - whether it be an experimental society or the Church - was potentially an arena in which rebellion and social unrest could foment. Boyle believed his experiments could speak to truths which existed in addition to the given social order. Hobbes knew that speaking for nature would always be potentially transformative for the state.

Shapin and Schaffer agree with Hobbes: "We argue that the problem of generating knowledge is a problem of politics, and, conversely that the problem of political order always involves solutions to the problems of knowledge." There's is a political sociology of knowledge production. Yet, this is not to fall into a social constructivist trap. Recognizing that who is authorized to speak for the world will impact what is spoken of the natural world need not suggest that reality is entirely fabricated by the human component. How do we recognize when something has attained the status of fact? What methods are employed to render experiment intelligible, both to those present and also those absent? What is the measure of sufficient proof? What conventions of practice would be accepted? These are all questions pertaining to, but not defined-by, experimental epistemology. Boyle inverted the necessity of such question by claiming that only things which could be tested via experiment could attain the lofty status of facts. In relation to the above questions this is a form of putting the cart before the horse. For Boyle, knowledge was a matter of shared belief. True belief was only able to be examined collectively via demonstration - this would always overrule an individual's singular position. For Hobbes, the problem was the disparity existing in the distance between causes and effects. Boyle looked to effects first and sought to explain them; Hobbes found this an irreducible difficulty (similar to the problem of infinite hypotheses) and thought only that which was made by people, could be understood. For Hobbes, knowledge comes from the common assent of first principles, which then lead to a knowledge which is clearly manifest within the human purview. Authority, not wisdom, makes all laws.

It would seem that Boyle wins the battle. Scientific experiment appears as the premier mode of constructing knowledge within the world. Yet, Shapin and Schaffer argue, both Hobbes and Boyle saw a causal connection between the structure of knowledge communities and the acceptance of the knowledge produced. What Boyle did not recognize was that his ability to create knowledge, within the experimental or any other space, was contingent upon a variety of political and social factors. What is known by people is always by the hand of people. It is not the story of triumphalism over nature, but of great work, both seen and unseen, to create spaces and techniques where knowledge is possible. Experiment is a social and political activity which is both dependent and bears upon the world and the society we inhabit.