Beinart / Bundy .:. Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa

Beinart, William and Colin Bundy,
Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa. Politics & Popular Movements in the Transkei & Eastern Cape, 1890 - 1930. London / Berkeley, LA / Johannesburg: Currey / University of California Press / Ravan Press, 1987. xxvi, 326 Seiten mit Abbildungen und Register. Broschiert. 215 x 139 mm. 465 g

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* Perspectives on Southern Africa; 40
Bestell-Nr.159941 | ISBN: 0-520-05780-5

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Beinart Bundy | Afrika | Africa | Suedafrika | Soziale Bewegungen | Social Movements

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This book brings a new dimension to South African history. The authors argue that a larger role should be accorded to the lives and struggles of rural Africans in shaping the country's past. The book is an exercise in historical retrieval, focussed on a series of forgotten episodes which were hidden 'away in the locations' from commentators at the time and have been neglected in subsequent historical writing. Each of the eight local studies in the Transkeian and Ciskeian areas of South Africa introduced new characters to the stage of South African history.

The authors are also concerned to locate their studies in the more general context of peasant studies and agrarian history. They point to the ambiguities of class and ethnic consciousness amongst communities which depended both on rural production and migrant labour. They stress the particularity of rural political movements and the tensions within rural communities. Localised identities were open to, but not displaced by, the growth of broader Africanist ideas; the struggle for local autonomy shaped both attitudes to state intervention and wider political movements. The analysis suggests that this struggle had an important bearing on the peculiar path of development which characterised South Africa in the early decades of the twentieth century.

William Beinart is a Lecturer in Political and Economic History in the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Political Economy of Pondoland 1860-1930

Colin Bundy is the Professor of History in the University of Cape Town and author of The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry

Professor Terence Ranger has described this as a 'land-mark in the historiography of southern Africa. It is a detailed, sophisticated, but readable and exciting, fulfillment of an approach which has been increasingly stated but not yet convincingly carried out ... It is of the greatest significance to all students of agrarian society and agrarian protest'.

The authors are to be commended for integrating this material in the larger literatüre on African resistance to colonial rule. They do this deftly and with sensitivity to the particulars of the Transkei.' Allen K. Isaacman,
Professor of History, University of Minnesota.

ISBN 0-520-05780-5 pbk
University of California Press •
BERKELEY 94720

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