Revolution From Above, Rebellion From Below: The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century.

At a time when the lemmings of cultural studies have gleefully flung themselves over the Cliffs of Culture, it is somewhat refreshing to read a book that is audaciously materialist and unabashedly political. No "signification" here and "invention" there; Krikler, a la Marx and Lenin, is writing about nothing less than capitalism, proletarianization and, of course, class struggle. His subject matter is the rural Transvaal during and immediately after the 1899-1902 South African War. Located in the north-east of South Africa, in the late nineteenth century the Transvaal was home to the conquest state of the South African Republic, headed by Afrikaner Paul Kruger, and the gold mines of the Witwatersrand controlled by capitalists like Cecil Rhodes. The former was founded earlier in the century when Dutch-speaking colonists moved into the region and began extending their domination over the African communities living there. What developed was a weak state and a backward rural economy. The gold mining industry developed only from the late 1880s, when ore was first discovered and foreign capital began flowing into the interior of Southern Africa. These two worlds, so declares conventional wisdom, were economically irreconcilable and socially incompatible. Divorce was inevitable. The South African War, the logic follows, was about the development of capitalism and, specifically, about the social organization of industrial capitalism in the Transvaal.

Krikler's book, however, is less about the glitter of gold and the dark Byzantine politics of big capital, than about what was happening in the countryside. He has unearthed some fascinating evidence. According to Krikler, during the South African War a "class war" erupted in the rural Transvaal, though this conflict was characterized by "no evidence of class consciousness amongst rural producers." (p. 33) White farmers, to put it mildly, were rather alarmed by British arming of black peasants. Africans, often directly abetted by British forces, destroyed and pillaged Boer farms. Communal land that had begun to be privatized under Boer rule was, in many areas, effectively recommunalized. Lands that were still communal were extended. Tenants often repudiated and mocked the rule of their landlords. Not surprisingly, according to Krikler their "hope and expectation" was a "world without landlords." (p. 28)

Such was not to be. Krikler argues that the British administration following the war essentially restored class rule in the rural Transvaal. The conflict seemed to aim at little more than making South Africa safe for the capitalist mode of production. The British restituted looted Boer property and disarmed the very same people they had supplied with guns a few years earlier. Restitution was not very successful. However disarmament, Krikler argues, occurred with little more than a squeak of peasant protest, though much ammunition was expended on hunting game. More importantly, processes unfolding prior to the war - the development of industrial capitalism and the expropriation of peasant lands - continued, but at a quicker pace. Restoring class rule was synonymous with the development of private property and the rise of alienated labor, that is, with the emergence of agrarian capitalism.

Much of Revolution From Above, Rebellion From Below is an excursus into how "the Transvaal's new overlords ushered the farm worker towards the freedom of wage slavery." (p. 66) The central assertion is that as late as 1902 the rural economy of the Transvaal was dominated by "pre-capitalist relations of production." (p. 93) This would change. Agrarian capitalism would take root, however crooked those roots might be. The state was at the epicenter of these transformations: "the half-decade or so from 1899 encompassed the political transition to capitalism in the Transvaal." (p. 228) If economic forces were absent or inadequate the "extra-economic coercion" of the state would do the trick. Central to the "coercion" of the state was the 1895 Squatter's Law, which was aimed at destroying peasant communities and which was, interestingly, promulgated prior to the outbreak of the South African War. Not surprisingly, the actions of white farmers and the state profoundly shaped agrarian class struggle in the Transvaal.

These are powerful, even seductive, arguments, presented clearly and with great confidence. But sometimes they are obvious, simplistic and, well, a bit sophomoric. That the state is coercive, especially in a colonial context, will not come as a surprise to scholars of colonialism and capitalist development. The thrust of Krikler's argument about the state and capitalist development was made a long time ago by Barrington Moore Jr., albeit in a very different context.(1) Despite his insistence on nuance, taken as a whole the book is quite vulgar. Central to his argument, for example, is the distinction between private and communal property. But the distinction is as much ideal as real, and we learn almost nothing about the precise forms of communal tenure or about how Africans perceived property. At every turn Krikler reifies theoretical categories. The peasantry remains remarkably undifferentiated. And for the most part ungendered. English peasants, Russian peasants, African peasants - are they really all the same? And are the rural poor really hopelessly lost because they lacked a "modern secular theory of socialism"?(2)

There is also no attempt to engage historical writing elsewhere on the African continent. The book ends up reproducing the insularity of much historical writing on South Africa. Nor does the author delve into recent critiques and revisions of Marxist historiography. We end up with a book that forecloses other approaches and possibilities, dispenses with nuance, and reads ideology from relations of production. We also end up learning virtually nothing about how Africans represented themselves, or about the constitution of community and identity. Krikler should have listened to the wise words of two Africanists sympathetic to Marxist analysis: "Good theory should not produce bad history, but such is often the case when it is asserted that something must have happened because it is logically required by the postulates of theory."(3)

ENDNOTES

1. Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Landlord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern Work/(Boston, 1966).

2. Ibid, 233.

3. Brace Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London, 1992), 4.

Clifton Crais Kenyon College