To transform the future we need to understand the forces that have created our present, writes Professor Francis Wilson, 3 July 2007
Readers of The Grapes of Wrath will remember the haunting descriptions of American families driven to desperation by drought, depression and agricultural mechanisation in the Dust Bowl of rural Oklahoma moving with their meagre possessions to seek a new life in California.
A similar process is under way in South Africa today. While we wait for our own John Steinbeck to burn this social upheaval into the national consciousness it may be helpful if a social scientist could provide the context within which this is happening so we may better understand the process.
Economists pay little attention to history. But in South Africa we know that such a two-dimensional view of the universe is inadequate. History matters because it has shaped the world in which we live and determines the parameters within which decisions have to be made.
Which is not to say that we cannot overcome the past but rather that in order to transform the future we need to understand the nature of the forces that have created our present.
Perhaps the place to begin is with a recognition of the impact of the hundred years' war, directed from Cape Town, on the Eastern Cape frontier during the period between roughly the French revolution and the discovery of diamonds.
Although early battles between settler-invaders and Khoi-khoi and Xhosa pastoralists took place under the governance of the Dutch East India Company, it was not until the British took over in 1806 that a policy was consolidated of systematically pushing the Xhosa east, back from the Gamtoos and Sundays rivers, across the Fish and the Keis-kamma, towards the Kei. Noel Mostert, in his classic study, has meticulously described the destruction of the Xhosa political-economy.
This conquest led to the establishment of reserves, Ciskei and Transkei, which the Xhosa, without sufficient land to support their traditional cattle-based economy, had to leave to work on the farms of the Western Cape and the diamond and gold mines further north.
The mineral discoveries ignited South Africa's industrial revolution.
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