The Meaning of Urban Violence in Africa: Bulawayo,Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1960 |
| |
| Abstract: | Until recently the abundant literature on South African urban history has seen violence in towns and cities in terms either of anti-colonial protest or of labour consciousness. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission defined the urban violence with which it was concerned as exclusively political. More recently, however, questions of spatiality, township culture, generation, and gender have offered alternative or supplementary explanations.This article moves from the South African historiography to the less well known history of Southern Rhodesian towns and townships. In particular it focuses on Rhodesia's main industrial centre, Bulawayo. Between 1929 and 1960 there were four dramatic events in Bulawayo which involved varying degrees of violence. These were the ‘faction fights' of December 1929; the railway strike of 1946; the general strike of April 1948; and the so-called zhii riots of 1960. There have recently been authoritative analyses of the 1946 and 1948 strikes. This article therefore concentrates on the events of 1929 and 1960.The 1929 ‘faction fights' have been claimed for political economy by a classic article which sees them essentially as a response to changing patterns of colonial labour exploitation; the 1960 riots have been claimed as the first achievement of confrontational African nationalism in Southern Rhodesia. This article argues that an alternative explanation can be found in internal African struggles for dominance of an emerging black urban culture. It analyses the 1929 violence as a struggle between ‘stylish’ young labour migrants and a longer established township elite. It analyses the 1960 riots as a ‘war’ between the township poor and the newly prosperous traders and rentiers. Both episodes greatly complicated the prospects for a unitary urban nationalism or for effective and combined labour action. |
| |
| Keywords: | freak show masculinity working class Joseph merrick Frederick Treves Tom Norman |
|
|
