| In the last twenty years there has been much scholarly discussion regarding violence within South African farm labour relations, yet little comparative analysis has been conducted to date. Studies addressing violence between white masters and black labour tenants, sharecroppers and wageworkers have remained isolated regionally and have neglected to address this phenomenon's changing nature over a protracted timespan. To that end, this thesis examines three South African agricultural regions comparatively during the period c. 1900--2003 and reveals that violence varies over time and is employed by white farmers to various degrees, in a number of ways, and for a wide array of reasons. As a feature of rural labour relations in South Africa during the twentieth century, violence was shaped by specific economic, social, ideological, and political conditions present at certain times and places. These included types of farming practiced, modes of labour utilized, levels of white agrarian capital accumulation, and the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, among many others. Yet violence within the black/white, master/servant, landlord/tenant nexus was neither sufficient to maintain absolute dominance of the countryside nor the sole means of ensuring white hegemony. The development and entrenchment of an ethos of paternalism in rural South Africa often placated the more violent tendencies of white masters. But paternalistic relationships were also, at times, violent themselves and paternalism as an ideology did not in itself preclude the use of violence. In regions where paternalism existed, violence was mediated and less common; where a sense of paternalism was absent, violence was more pervasive. Paternalism and violence were not mutually exclusive. They interacted in an intricate manner and constituted the core of a highly complex and diverse power relationship also grounded in notions of patriarchy, coercion and control. |
