By William Beinart
An cutting edge exam of the forces--both harmful and dynamic--which have formed South Africa, this booklet offers a stimulating advent to the background of the kingdom within the 20th century. It attracts at the wealthy and full of life culture of radical historical past writing and weaves monetary and cultural heritage into the political narrative.
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Example text
The agrarian zone around Cape Town was losing its leading role by the mid-nineteenth century to the eastern, sheep-rearing, parts of the colony. But it by no means stagnated. Its Dutch gentry was sufficiently well rooted to withstand the transfer of the colony to the British, the emancipation of slaves in the 1830s, and the advent of representative government in 1854. Only a minority of Afrikaners joined the Great Trek to the highveld (1836–8) and most of them were from the eastern and northern frontier districts.
In the late nineteenth century, the growth of railways, ports, and mines all sucked labour from the western Cape farms. Recession in the 1880s was compounded by phylloxera, which swept aside not only vines but many poorer farmers. Some of those who displaced them had money from land speculation, commerce, the law, and mining. They included John X. Merriman, the eloquent Cabinet minister and Cape liberal, as well as Rhodes himself, who bought twenty-nine farms worth £250,000 in 1897, a year after he had ceased to be Prime Minister.
Especially in Zululand, the coastal Transkei, and the northern Transvaal, the combination of chiefly power, adequate land, and explicit traditionalism held commercial forces at bay. Those who most fully reconstituted their identities and consumption patterns tended to be most numerous where pre-colonial society was disrupted and along the major routes of Boer and British expansion. Mfengu communities, refu African Rural Life and Migrant Labour gees in the eastern Cape from the conflicts in Zululand in the early nineteenth century, as well as Sotho-speaking tenants on the highveld and mission families of Natal were striking examples.