An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Khwezi Mkhize (African Fellow; University of the Witwatersrand).
A Home-Made Empire: Jan Smuts, Sol Plaatje
This presentation draws on sections in a chapter of my book manuscript A Home-Made Empire: South Africa’s Imperium. Sharing the same main title as the book, the presentation focuses largely on the careers of two figures, namely Jan Smuts and Sol Plaatje. It argues that with the making of the Union of South Africa in 1910, Cecil Rhodes' dream of an empire from the Cape was reimagined. The Union of South Africa sought to consolidate settler colonialism into a federal state across the Southern African region. While this ambition was largely provisional, with Germany’s loss of Namibia during the First World War and the making of the League of Nations, South Africa began an almost century-long occupation of Namibia in 1915. The South African occupation of Namibia opens up a vista to explore the Union’s rationality of racial rule that went beyond entrenching segregation in South Africa. During this period, Jan Smuts who, prior to the formation of the League of Nations, coined the term apartheid, emerged as one of the leading statesmen in the remaking of the world order. Smuts positioned the Union of South Africa on the world stage as a the poster child of a kind of proto-apartheid state. But he also fought long and hard to have Namibia brought into South Africa’s borders. This chapter traces South Africa’s itinerary of imperialism focusing on its occupation of Namibia.
On the other hand, this chapter re-reads black responses to one of the more seminal pieces of legislation in South Africa: the Native Lands Act of 1913. Along with the formation of the Union Act of in 1909, the Native Lands Act turned the promise of the non-racial franchise in South Africa on its head. As black political organizations such as the African People’s Organization and the South African Native National Congress (formed in 1912 and later renamed the African National Congress) fought against the Act, black politics turned sharply toward England and the politics of imperial citizenship. Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (1916) is the one of the most important documents against the Native Lands Act. As a seminal work in early twentieth century South Africa Native Life in South Africa shifted the grammar of imperial citizenship into other political energies such as Pan-Africanism. Written during the time of South Africa’s occupation of Namibia, Native Life in South Africa is also an early document of South Africa’s imperial politics. Written in England for an English readership, Native Life in South Africa furtively conceptualized (as the imminent failure of British imperial responsibility) South Africa’s imperial state in ways that have not been fully engaged with. While W.E.B. DuBois was arguing in “The African Roots of War” (1915) that “in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see,” Plaatje was grappling with how the First World War was throwing up new prospects of colonial rule which saw South Africa assume an expansionist imperium in Southern Africa.
Click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86535202023
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2