Shane Moran - Alternation Journal

.- -. . . ,.- 2 r I,UIILLLUYL qj ,>(j/~~h Ajric~~n Ffj,st~q,
rtin Legassick ancl C;avj/ Minkleji
disjrllegration (after the 1930s) of a class of black sharecroppers in tile southwestelll
7iansvaal He is a Samuel Smiles hero, a self-made man-brought down in the end by
a~al-theid This trajectory is closely intertwined with the history, nature and production
of white owned and worked land, and ultimately with the developlnent and
enaoach*nent of white capitalist relations of production in agriculture. This is the
narrative thrust of The Seed is Mirze, although it is simultaneously a narrative in whi
Kas Maine and his productive wishes, strategies, entrapments and forms
illde~elldence are lnapped in all their specifics of locality and change.
in addition tllough, as Bundy has suggested, there is also a secolld story
intelTwinedwith it and resting 011 the concern with the sharecropping fainily as a 'social
's adolescent iiatiollhood' (Nasson 1996:3). It is a book larger than itself, a~nodel
South African past, standing for that past. Its past moreover-in contrast to the
or~n of social histoly-is consistent with the idea of reconciliation. This rests not
a history of simple racial separation, exclusio~i and the repression of imagined
e (and thus on forgetting) but also on a history of social assimilation, inclusion,
osmosis', of 'paternalism and violence', of a shared, albeit uneven past of an
able inter-racial ~nilieu':~. The message of the book is thus a~nbiguous as
epresent ofreconciliation. On the one hand it has a past pretnised on areading
ower relations and conflict that also involves social assimilation (within and
the categories of race). Making that past visible makes the politics of
entit>" (Bulld~ 19971366; drawing on Van Onselen 1996:9). Here is Bundy's
description:
Kas Maine lnay have been heroic in llis versatility as far~l~er. stock-breedel-.
artisan. mechanic. tradcr. speculator. and traditional IleaIcr. Yet lmally readers
will wince at his record as husband and father: flogging his daugllters,
estranging his sons, tnargi~ialising his wives. What van Onselen makes
possible is an understanding of how two sets of demands-economic
viability and domestic pliability-colluded and collided (Bundy 1997:367).
ation a much Inore deeply embedded historical project than is conducted by
, for exa~nple. On the other hand, however, the book emphasises the dramatic
ping impact of a colnplex rural class conflict and transition to agrarian capitalisln
below'. These collflicts of class would be displaced and silenced if all-embracing
ial definitions (as defined by apartheid and resistance to it, and assulned in the TRC
course) were taken as the categories to be reconciled.
areas are important in examining the production of academic histoly in
uth Africa. The first relates to methodology: of how peasants (and Kas Maine) speak
e book. The second relates to the ways that the empirical research is conlbinedwith
It is in these intersections between productive structure and peasant agency, and
between sharecropper and patriarch, that Van Onselen parts company with lnuch south
African social history. The categories of 'history from below' and of subaltenl agency
and experience as distinctive and 'autonomous' are problematised. The book details
how relations of kinship and paternalism were painful and violent, but also intimate and
searing in their interactions between different categol-ies of black and white people on
the Highveld. This meant that experience was a 'painful .sl~nredexperience7, mutually
deterlnining in Inany respects and that a South African identity, incl~lding racial id en ti^
elne%ed out of a nexus of colnplex relations betwecn trust and betrayal, colnpassioll
and humiliatioll, love and hatred. Thus Terry Ranger (1997:384) suggests that van
retical analysis of social aid economic change. AS regards the first there is a
ificant paradox. Kas Maine's memory and his feats of re~nelnbrance validate the
ole book as a subaltern 'peasant' voice ofthe past and of history. Yet Maine's voice is
t made in the book, and neither is his or others' remembrances made explicit
memory. AS importantly, though, Kas Maine's memory and his voice is seen to
emplify 'histoly living on in the mind' where he 'never once ceased to amaze with tile
curacy, depth and extent of his insights into the social, political and ec~nolnic
ctures that dominated the south-westem Transvaal' .
This shows, by the way, a different sense in which the book can be taken as
collciliatioll history. Colin Bundy (1997:369) has suggested that in its combinatioll of
Onsele~l's biography cnables us to see that 'Kas lives most of his life as an
.4fi-ikanerised black on the land ofAti-icanised whites'. Relatiollships between hnnels
and sharecroppers are m~~cll more fully integrated than in the conventional
l~istol~. 'rhere is little place, Inoreover, for simple racial stereotype when the
oppressive landlosd in the book is black.
The ma.jor new insights in The &Seed is Mine arc prilnnr-i]y those of content
aro~lnd the shared and interconnected nature of rural experience, At the sa1-n~ tiune, Van
Ollselcn (1996:vi-vii) argues that 'the field ha[s] barely given way to the factoly, the
e research with analysis rooted in theoretical understanding of economic
social change, The Seed is Mine has 'outstripped or transcended the eitherlor
cturalists vs social historians] antinomies of the 1980s'. The evidence of memory
en, 1l0t only tells the peasant or subaltern story but also that of structures, providing
cans to 'transcend the eitherlor antinomies of the 1980s scholarship'. What is
ling, however, is that this is done without an engagement of me1norY, without
Peasant to the proletarian, and the patriarch to his family': these changes, in other
~\~nrds, ale I-ece~it. Tliis effectively jnscrts a 'peasant's voice' onto t]le centre st
llistoly of twentieth Century and apartheid South Africa. Revisiollism (including,
al-g~1aI?ly, earlier work by Van Otlselen (1 976) admittedly on Rhodesia and not soutll
Aeica) constructed the migrant ~ninewol-kel- as the central s~lhjject of racial and class
divisioll of the society and its history. Now, for Val1 Onselen, it is rather the mutual
ex~el-iences of the sllare~ropping peasant on the I-ligliveld that is the 'very gastric juice
of So~ltll Afi-icanism' aiid which should he the model or social vangllard 01. c~outll
~l~~ notions of Lcultnra[ osmosis' and of and violence are cirawn from tllc titles
two prior van ~ ~ ~ arlicles ~ ~ (1990: l e 1992) n wliicll predate thc book anci discirss of its
eoretical arid mctllodological ~lndcrpinnings. The notion of a reconciliationist IlistoI-Y is oLir
owrl. and is colrtrasted to tllc growing representations presented in official versions aimed at
achieving political as in the TRC, for example. The LcSlnS 'incsca~abie interracial
is Nassonls (1 ')96:4) , talking about van Onseten's anaiysjs of sllasecrupping in
distant decades w[lere Afrikarlers wcrc Africaniscd and Afi-ica~is Afriknnerised ~l~i.o~~g11
proczsses ofsocial assirnilation.