A selection of the best of recent research on the shaping of apartheid between the 1940s and the 1960s. It shows how apartheid, with its massive apparatus of social regulation and political control, can be viewed as a peculiar South African response to the twin forces of industrialization and urbanization. This was akin, in important respects, to the responses of other societies elsewhere in the world experiencing the same transformations. The volume demonstrates how popular struggles, and countless atomised acts of non-compliance and defiance, were among the most important defining influences on the apartheid state both in terms of eliciting legislative responses and through repeatedly bending and undermining the structures that had been set in place. In so doing, the volume links the traditional "history from below" approach - which is amply represented in this collection - with the general issues which exercised the minds of previous generations of South African scholarship.
"When are they going to fight?" - Tsotsis, youth politics and the pac,
Clive Glaser; "First win the war, then clear the slums" - the genesis of the
western areas removal scheme, 1940-1949, Deon van Tonder; Verwoerd versus the
"Visionaries" - the South Africa Bureau of Racial Affairs (SABRA) and
apartheid, 1948-1961 John Lazar; "A destruction coming in" - Bantu education
as a response to social crisis, John Hyslop; African political organizations
in Brakpan in the 1950s, Hilary Sapire; The nursing profession and the making
of apartheid, Shula Marks; The Russians on the reef, 1947-1957. Urbanization,
gang warfare and ethnic mobilization, Philip Bonner; Economic aspects of the
construction of apartheid, Nicoli Nattrass; The limits of industrialization
under apartheid, Nancy L. Clark; Trade unionism, race, class and nationalism
in the 1950s resistance movement, Robert V. Lambert; Migrant organization,
the Communist Party, the ANC and the Sekhukhuneland Revolt, 1940-1958, Peter
Delius; "He has been sold to a farmer" - foreigners, the state and "Mealie
Kings" in the Eastern Transvaal, 1918-1950, Helen Bradford; Reaping the
whirlwind - the East London riots of 1952, Ann Mager and Gary Minkley; So who
was Elias Kuzwayo? Nationalism, collaboration and the Picaresque in Natal,
Paul la Hausse.
