- Title
- Die historiese en sosiale formasie van 'n nedersetting in Mhala, Gazankulu
- Creator
- Fischer, Adriaan
- Subject
- Blacks - Gazankulu - Mhala - Social conditions, Blacks - Gazankulu - Mhala - History
- Date
- 2014-04-14
- Type
- Book
- Identifier
- uj:10627
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10210/10148
- Description
- D.Litt. et Phil. (Anthropology), Seville is a small settlement in the Mhala district in Gazankulu. It is a former white-owned farm taken over by the South African Development Trust in the 1960's. When the Trust took over: the land it was planned according to 'betterment' principles. This meant that the former tenants were relocated into a central village, and separate arable and grazing lands were demarcated by officials. Today poverty and powerlessness dominate the life of the inhabitants who depend on the export of. labour, migrant remittances and subsistence agriculture. This situation is directly related to the history of capitalist and state penetration in the Lowveld. Since the 1860's the population of the Lowveld were systematically dispossessed by the State. Their incorporation into the capitalist economy followed the process of dispossession and proletarianization. In the 1890's drought, rinderpest and the Anglo-Boer War completed the process of incorporation as the Lowveld population were increasingly forced to join the migrant labour force. From the early 1930's when ownership of Lowveld farms changed from mining companies to individuals, labour tenancy replaced rent paying squatting as the dominant form of residence of the black population in the Lowveld. Labour tenancy on farms in the Bushbuckridge area provided the Lowveld population with opportunities for accumulation. Cattle numbers increased and small surpluses were produced. Tenants on Seville whose owners only used Seville for hunting in winter, enjoyed considerable freedom, and migrant labour became a matter of choice and not of necessity. But the recovery did not last long. State penetration to bring about racial separation transformed Busbuckridge farms into reserves, and as ethnic nationalism developed and became the dominant framework for intervention, reserve areas in the Lowveld were apportioned into ethnic homelands. Seville changed from a white-owned farm to a ward in the Mnisi Tribal Authority Area in Mhala, and the former tenants became citizens. of Gazankulu. These developments accelerated the process of rural decline and stagnation, leading to ever increasing poverty and powerlessness. Faced with these insecurities economic diversification and social mechanisms are major strategies to overcome poverty and survive. Though migrant labour is the material base of.life in this rural village, it cannot sustain social reproduction on its own. Neither can rural production. Families and households are forced to diversify economic activities and to find, according to their particular circumstances, a balance between migrant labour, local employment, rural production and informal economic activities. The demands of production and reproduction in the context of poverty and powerlessness also require the diversification of social relations to maximize the possibilities the social environment as a resource provides. And to maintain a community life and live as individuals in Seville, a balance between relations that unite and the relations that divide the community is necessary. Social diversification and the balance of relations that unite and divide are manifest in residential and domestic relations, and in cooperation and conflict.
- Contributor
- Kotze, J.C., Prof.
- Rights
- University of Johannesburg
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