The Gordonia region of the Northern Cape province has received relatively little attention from historians. In Hidden Histories of Gordonia: Land dispossession and resistance in the Northern Cape, ...1800–1990, Martin Legassick explores aspects of the generally unknown ‘brown’ and ‘black’ history of the region. Emphasising the lives of ordinary people, his writing is also in part an exercise in ‘applied history’ – historical writing with a direct application to people’s lives in the present.
Tracing the indigenous history of Gordonia as well as the northward movement of Basters and whites from the western Cape through Bushmanland to the Orange River, the book presents accounts of family histories, episodes of indigenous resistance to colonisation, and studies of the ultimate imposition of racial segregation and land dispossession on the inhabitants of the region. A recurrent theme is the question of identity and how the extreme ethnic fluidity and social mixing apparent in earlier times crystallised in the colonial period into racial identities, until with final conquest came imposed racial classification.
This book publishes Martin Legassick's influential doctoral thesis on the preindustrial South African frontier zone of Transorangia. The impressive formation of the Griqua states in the first half of ...the nineteenth century outside the borders of the Cape Colony and their relations with Sotho-Tswana polities, frontiersmen, missionaries and the British administration of the Cape take centre stage in the analysis. The Griqua, of mixed settler and indigenous descent, secured hegemony in a frontier of complex partnerships and power struggles. The author's subsequent critique of the "frontier tradition" in South African historiography drew on the insights he had gained in writing this dissertation. It served to initiate the debate about the importance of the precolonial frontier situation in South Africa for the establishment of ideas of race, the development of racial prejudice and, implicitly, the creation of segregationist and apartheid systems. Today, the constructed histories of "Griqua" and other categories of indigeneity have re emerged in South Africa as influential tools of political mobilisation and claims on resources.
The Marxist Workers’ Tendency (MWT) of the African National Congress (ANC) grew out of the coming together of comrades from the ANC, the emerging internal democratic trade unions, and the Black ...Consciousness Movement (BCM) in Soweto and the Western Cape in the 1970s, together with comrades from the Mpondo revolt of the early 1960s. At its inception, it had a black majority membership. Among those from the ANC were George Peake and Nimrod Sejake, both former trade union leaders and treason trialists who had subsequently been forced into exile, as well as myself, who had worked throughout the 1960s with Mazisi Kunene, then ANC representative in Europe. Among those from the emerging unions were Dave Hemson, Rob Petersen and Paula Ensor, all three declared ‘banned persons’ and going into exile.This chapter deals with the origins of the MWT and its early articulation of a programme and perspectives. It concludes with an examination of the MWT's approach to the National Question.ORIGINSThe South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), a federation of non-racial trade unions, had become defunct through repression in the early 1960s. It survived only as a small rump of officials in exile, oriented to solidarity work (Sithole and Ndlovu, 2006; Legassick, 2008). In the post-Soweto strengthening of the ANC in London, however, Rob Petersen and Paula Ensor were employed by the SACTU office, the former as editor of the revived SACTU publication Workers’ Unity and the latter as personal assistant to general secretary John Gaetsewe. Dave Hemson and I also worked on the paper.The first issues of the paper placed primacy on building SACTU among factory workers underground – to assist in building and to guide the work of the emerging democratic unions. These unions had already become schools of struggle, through which workers came together to discuss not merely factory issues but all the problems they faced and how to overcome them.The independent trade unions, said Workers’ Unity (1977b), were ‘forced by repression to keep themselves cut off from the liberation struggle as a whole but we do not oppose them. Our policy is to fight for independent unions and to give these new organisations our support – in so far as they advance the workers’ struggle.’
The Gordonia region of the Northern Cape province has received relatively little attention from historians. In this book Martin Legassick explores aspects of the generally unknown ‘brown’ and ‘black’ ...history of the region. Emphasising the lives of ordinary people, his writing is also in part an exercise in ‘applied history’ – historical writing with a direct application to people’s lives in the present. Tracing the indigenous history of Gordonia, as well as the northward movement of Basters and whites from the western Cape through Bushmanland to the Orange River, the book presents accounts of family histories, episodes of indigenous resistance to colonisation and studies of the imposition of racial segregation and land dispossession on the inhabitants of the region. A recurrent theme is the question of identity and how the extreme ethnic fluidity and social mixing apparent in earlier times crystallised in the colonial period into racial identities, until with final conquest came imposed racial classification.
A review essay on a book by Jacques Depelchin, Silences in African History: Between the Syndromes of Discovery and Abolition (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota, 2004).
