Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Acronyms and Abbreviations
- Timeline
- Introduction
- 1 A Battle of Ideas
- 2 Planters of the Seed
- 3 ‘Anything under the Sun’: The Formation of the New Era Fellowship
- 4 ‘Honest, Sincere and Fearless’, 1937–1940
- 5 The Road to Emancipation, 1940–1953
- 6 A Cauldron of Conflict
- 7 Legacy
- Notes
- List of Illustrations
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - A Battle of Ideas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Acronyms and Abbreviations
- Timeline
- Introduction
- 1 A Battle of Ideas
- 2 Planters of the Seed
- 3 ‘Anything under the Sun’: The Formation of the New Era Fellowship
- 4 ‘Honest, Sincere and Fearless’, 1937–1940
- 5 The Road to Emancipation, 1940–1953
- 6 A Cauldron of Conflict
- 7 Legacy
- Notes
- List of Illustrations
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Just how significant South African colonialism was in the global rise of white supremacy has not been fully acknowledged or understood. It was in South Africa, in circumstances that are very different from those in the United States, that other global laboratory of race-making, that science and politics were yoked together to produce for the world the narratives and strategies it would use to explain and legitimate the great 19th-and 20th-century conceit of white supremacy. Keith Breckenridge, in Biometric State, describes the country as a ‘culture-bed’ for the imperial project. The discourses and policies of eugenics and the practices and procedures of oppression and exploitation were a demonstrably powerful combination.
The science was pioneered by Francis Galton, the founder of the eugenicist movement. In the 1850s he had travelled through South West Africa. His observations of the Herero people there allowed him to conclude that he had the proof to show that black people were the cognitive inferiors of white people. The politics came through a battery of laws, policies and practices evolved by the governments of the Cape Colony and the republics of the Transvaal and the Free State to regulate and control black people. The Glen Grey Act of 1894 was an early indicator. Its purpose was to force able-bodied men off their land and it did this through the imposition of a poll tax. Subsistence lifestyles, which was how people in the rural areas survived, did not place in people's hands the money required to pay the colonial government's taxes. The only way they could get the money was by submitting themselves to the formality of low-paid employment in the mines. The early 1900s saw techniques of labour control being developed on the Rand as the mining industry grew.
Through these developments, South Africa presented itself to the world as an important focal point for the British Empire's imagination and realisation of its class and race mission.
At the same time as this mission was taking shape, a number of developments came together to make South Africa also one of the most important global culture-beds for thinking againstthe imperial project. This thinking, as the country's oppressed people fought for their dignity, took many forms. Its most dominant was expressed in essentially liberal, assimilationist terms.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Cape RadicalsIntellectual and Political Thought of the New Era Fellowship, 1930s to 1960s, pp. 29 - 38Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2019