The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry

by Colin Bundy

The first edition of this book was hailed as a major reinterpretation of South African history. It criticised the prevailing view that African agriculture was primitive or backward, and attacked the notion that poverty and lack of development were a result of 'traditionalism'. Bundy's work introduced the idea that by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century capitalist development in South Africa was increasingly hostile to peasant producers and a massive onslaught was launched against them - the understanding of this was vital to an understanding of both the South African past and present.

Genres: South Africa, History, Africa

Paperback

First published June 27, 1979

Reviews

[JP · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bundy is bunk.
Recording the economic history of South Africa in the mid- to late-19th century, Colin Bundy’s The Rise of the South African Peasantry became the definitive narrative detailing Africans’ successful economic transition from subsistence farming to a productive and entrepreneurial peasant class. Helen Bradford found several discrepancies in both Bundy’s evidence and his methodology, and questioned Bundy’s conclusions in her response, Peasants, Historians, and Gender. After reviewing Bundy’s and Bradford’s work, it becomes clear that they cannot both be right in their assessments of African economic opportunity in the latter half of the 19th century. While Bundy missed key aspects of the peasantry debate, Bradford effectively presented and defended her analysis of the South African economy. The holes in Bundy’s argument can be filled with the information from Bradford’s study, and Clifton Crais’ Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa provides salient information to be used in analyzing the facts surrounding a ‘rise’ in either peasants (according to Bundy) or paupers (according to Bradford).
In his study of South African economic development, Colin Bundy finds that white expansion, and the economic transformation forced on African communities by both colonization and land redistribution, was overwhelmingly beneficial for the natives. In Rise, a growing demand for food brought about by the rapid settler expansion around gold and diamond mines gave an amazing opportunity to African farmers. Those peasant farmers who chose to work the land instead of working in other sectors of the economy profited from this demand, and their bargaining power rose accordingly. Quoting S.T. van der Horst, Bundy argues that “the development of diamond production led to a rise in the demand for produce of Native as well as European farmers…the prices of Native produce rose, that is, the terms on which Natives could sell their produce…improved.”
In addition to the allegedly growing strength and productivity of African farmers, there is also a definite expansion of African opportunity in the labor market. Growing populations allowed Africans to seek work “in the diamond mines, upon road, rail, and harbor projects…in road transport as leaders and drivers…and as independent entrepreneurs.” According to Bundy, these opportunities would not have arrived without the redistribution of land, which, though it evicted thousands of Africans from their homes, was supposedly successful in its goal to “deprive the natives of the means of leading a lazy, lounging life, at the expense of their more industrious fellows” while ensuring that “thousands of natives… will be forced to enter the colonial labor market to supply the wants thus created.” Ultimately, Bundy depicts an African experience where “in the matter of civilization, great strides have been made.” Ploughs were “observable everywhere,” and the increased economic activity by natives had led to the rise of an African peasantry and new opportunities for all.
In blaring contrast to the previous assessment of the 19th century South African economy, Bradford describes a world where African marginalization, landlessness, and joblessness were intermingled, and starvation was never too far behind. Bundy depicts a successful and thriving male peasantry, but Bradford correctly points out that he ignores “two-thirds of the adult populace in 1865” : women. This lack of attention is more than a slight oversight, since women were not only the primary producers of the African economy, but also because they demanded resources which Bundy does not account for, thereby making his African peasantry seem much wealthier than they actually were.
Women were traditionally the primary producers in the African household. This made wives a valuable economic asset sought by men. Bundy ignores women’s contributions, and misquotes a commission report from 1852-1853 to support his evidence of successful African peasants without the inclusion of women in the record. He quotes that Africans were “rapidly becoming rich and independent” , though Bradford exposes the full commission passage, which reads that Africans were “rapidly becoming rich and independent, in a great deal owing to the polygamy and female slavery which prevails…the wealth…merely is an index of the increasing numbers and exertions of women.” African prosperity would have been far more visible in a female peasantry than in a male. Bundy becomes unfortunately committed to a “Eurocentric” picture of peasant development, and ignores the fact that “an African household…revolved around the wife” and that “the man has no house of his own.”
Bradford thus showed, by presenting contradictory evidence, that Bundy’s central tale of male-dominated economic prosperity was highly unlikely. As for surplus crops for sale on the open market which brought “wealth, prosperity, and civilization” to the African population, Bradford once again dissects Bundy’s numbers to show that his argument is lacking in substance. In discussing the “most prosperous” year of Herschel’s 19th century records, Bundy misses an essential comma while citing a report on production levels, and then cites a non-existent source. In actuality, Herschel never experienced much prosperity, and there was never a peasantry that existed along the lines of Bundy’s claims. Bradford goes on to cite a half-dozen examples of Bundy inventing facts to support his thesis. After failing to count for women’s consumption needs, misreading the central quote for his argument of surplus production, ignoring census results, inaccurately guesstimating trade in stock, failing to account for faults in wool production, thus overestimating that production by ~66%, ignoring infrastructure failures, which affect wheat prices, meaning he had overestimated wheat prices by >50%, underestimating skin and hide production, which is linked to the animal carcasses of an unhealthy populace, and attempting to dismiss census figures which fail to agree with his argument, historians have to seriously question any conclusions reached in Rise. Without those academic mishaps, Bundy would have the evidence needed to support his claims surrounding a prosperous peasant class, but that is simply not the case. Bradford’s disapproval of Bundy’s methodology and academic practices are obvious: “‘At the most elementary level, one cannot simply read into documents words that are not there;’ Unfortunately, Bundy did.”
As one would expect after reflecting upon the factual discrepancies mentioned above, Bundy’s claims that there existed adequate land for Africans and a fair opportunity for them to find remunerative work are suspect, and Bradford dispels these too by noting that “‘rural’ Herschel had a population density triple that of ‘urban’ East London.” Ultimately, this competition for land and the struggle led huge swaths of the African population to outwardly make a point of their landlessness and the economic hardships they faced as a consequence. Lastly, Bradford makes mention of drought which is scurrilously downplayed by Bundy in his case study.
Bradford makes clear that Bundy’s economic transformation was nowhere to be found. “Far from this being a prosperous era, in no other period between the 1860s and 1920s were there so many signs of starvation.” Crais’ study of power dynamics, food shortages, and the effect of violence on natives’ well-being would seem to corroborate Bradford’s claims of deprivation, while exploring the considerable contribution of war to these tragic conditions.
While Helen Bradford focuses her argument primarily on gender roles in South Africa, Clifton Crais uses Poverty, War, and Violence to display the intermingled history of those three subjects. Drought and disease – which affected both crops and cattle – was an ever-present factor that threatened Africans’ continued existence, and contributed to thousands of deaths over the course of the 19th century. These droughts and diseases (namely, pellagra) were exacerbated by colonial policy, which pushed maize on African farmers, regardless of the fact that maize was both less nutritious and far harsher on the soil than the native sorghum. Though the forced production of maize (whether directly or indirectly- through the coercion of a market which would not sell anything but maize) and environmental conditions were terrible for the African population, Crais identifies the real source of African hardship and decimation as violence and legal restriction coming from the colonial authority.
Though Crais documents genocidal practices which amount to an extreme execution of total war by the British authority, in the period after the Xhosa Wars (the period studied by both Bradford and Bundy) violence was less widespread or devastating. This does not mean, however, that it didn’t exist, and Crais is careful to include such late actions as “a single 1877 campaign [where] European troops and their African auxiliaries destroyed ‘a large proportion of the huts,’ plundered ‘thousands of cattle,’ and left 1,040 people dead.” Unlike Bundy’s somewhat idyllic picture of a thriving African peasantry sparsely dotted with conflict, “war unfold[ed] across large areas of the Transkei during the 1870s and 1880s” which “left many dead and created considerable want.” Crais states conclusively that “There is no evidence of peasant prosperity in any locale over which British troops…prosecuted violence.”
When considering land redistribution, one must always remember Crais’ depictions of starvation and devastation. The landless and the poor, as is always the case in harsh economic downturns, were the hardest hit by this persistent hardship, and even amidst this vast want of the populace, land was divided up and distributed extremely unequally among those in the favor of the government. “In 1868 and 1869, the government issued title deeds to fourteen men totaling 35,533 acres, an average of 2,537 acres each.” These large land holdings did nothing for the general economy except to make their owners extremely wealthy at the expense of potential African land holders who could have been accumulating wealth for themselves if they had the opportunity, land, and/or capital to do so.
Considering whether or not Bundy and Bradford can both be right in their arguments because of the staggered case study time periods, one must unequivocally answer in the negative. Though Bradford starts earlier in her study and Bundy ends later in his, the bulk of Bundy’s argument takes place well within the confines of Bradford’s analysis. They could have coexisted in the academic record as slightly different views of the same subject if Bradford had simply studied women’s role in the South African economy, but she revisited Bundy’s statistics and undermined the foundation of his argument, leaving him with scant anecdotal evidence that cannot effectively confront Bradford’s (and others’) statistical analyses.
It is rare that a historian completely covers all facets of a topic when they set out to discuss an issue from the past. That said, Bundy seems to miss everything essential to a sound academic argument, while Bradford omits information that, while extremely informative – even necessary for a complete perspective of 1860-1890 in South Africa – was beyond the scope of her goals in a paper on Peasants, Historians, and Gender. This is an important difference. As mentioned above, Colin Bundy’s argument is made in Rise not only without facts, but by dishonestly citing nonexistent sources and by failing to account for historical context when estimating figures which conveniently support his thesis. Also mentioned above, Bundy simply forgets to include women, only mentioning them to note that he did not pay any attention to them, noting that “an insensitivity to issues of gender runs right through [his] book.” As Helen Bradford points out, “this insensitivity (by which is meant the marginalization of women) has consequences.” The consequences are that Bundy’s case study loses much of its importance.
While briefly summarizing existing histories of South Africa’s developing economy, Crais notes that Bradford failed to explore the “explosion of pauperism” or the intricate relations which caused inequality and poverty in South Africa. Crais developed a record of this pauperism, while simultaneously unraveling the “mechanisms that produced inequality and poverty in rural South Africa” which had been missed by Helen Bradford. Crais’ biggest contribution to the debate over peasant prosperity is his detailed description of a narrative that shows the immense impact of colonial violence on the region, and how this violence both destroyed African’s initial socio-economic stability by conquest, and devastated native populations in unprecedented levels. Without understanding the amount of devastation wrought on the region, both by natural and unnatural forces, it is impossible to grasp the context needed for effective historical analysis.
Bundy and Bradford cannot both be right in their assessments of African economic opportunity in the latter half of the 19th century. Bundy’s case study is thoroughly debunked by Bradford’s paper, and while Bundy missed key aspects of the peasantry debate, Bradford effectively presented and defended her analysis of the South African economy. While the Bundy’s shortcomings can be met by the information from Bradford’s study, Clifton Crais’ Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa provides the necessary information to analyze the lack of facts surrounding a ‘rise’ in peasants, and the ‘rise’ of paupers in South Africa.

[Nozipho T]

Iam conducting a research

[Muke Lishandu]

its a good book