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Urban Violence and the Colonial Experience: Bulawayo, Rhodesia, 1893 to 1960
Terence Ranger
April 14, 2005

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This paper was presented by Terence Ranger to the African Studies Seminar at the University of Toronto on Thursday April 14 2005. He gave it as a tribute to Yvonne Vera, who had died a week before, explaining that the title of his projected book, Bulawayo Burning was intended to echo Yvonne's novel Butterfly Burning. She had written that without any research: he wanted to see what could be produced with a lot of research. But there was no intention – or possibility – of surpassing Yvonne. His history would reflect the message of her novel with its mixture of hope and struggle and tragedy.

Introduction
When I was still a historian of Britain and Europe in the 1960s - while at the same time beginning to turn myself into an Africanist - European urban history was at an exciting stage. It was the heyday of 'the crowd'. The 'faceless mob' was being giving a face, or rather many faces. Urban disorder was being given a new rationality. I bought and treasured and still possess the series of studies by George Rude – The Crowd in the French Revolution, 1959; The Crowd in History, 1964; Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century, 1970. At that stage, however, there was in effect no African urban history – or at least no southern African urban history. In the 1950s and 1960s Southern African cities were the territory of the sociologist.

Things are very different today. I take a no doubt unfair characterisation of contemporary European urban studies from a review in The Literary Review for June 2004. (Jan Ridley reviewing Tristan Hunt, Building Jerusalem. The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, p.38):

But if studies of British and European cities have left riot and protest far behind this has not been so for Southern African urban studies. In South Africa, in particular, black nationalist militancy found its expression through youths making the townships ungovernable. Historians have studied these upheavals, punctuated as they were by terrible moment of police repression and so-called 'black-on-black violence'. The South African Justice and Truth Commission has collected a mass of evidence about this urban violence.

Further to the north, admittedly, the liberation war was fought much more in the rural areas. Nevertheless, settler states designed colonial towns so as to achieve the maximum separation between rulers and ruled, white and black, 'rich space' and 'poor space'. Any urban upheaval in such circumstances was bound to appear 'anti-systemic' and to be interpreted as part of the struggle against colonial rule or colonial capitalism. Hence the black urban 'crowd' has become the hero of a new historiography; faces have emerged from within it; reason has been pre-eminently restored to it. One might well expect a book to be published called The Crowd in Southern African History.

Much of this new history has been stimulated by the struggles and eventual triumph of African nationalism. Hence the urban crowd in Southern Africa has been often been seen as acting primarily politically. Iain Edwards, in his study of the Durban Beer-Hall riots of June 1959 – riots in which the crowd was mainly female – describes two contrasting political interpretations. One was the interpretation of the apartheid state; the other was the interpretation of the African nationalist movement. As Edwards remarks, 'remembering the late 1950s was crucial to both'.

The state 'stressed riotous, drunken anti-social violence. The riot legitimated repressive measures against violent insurrectionary crowds and their political leaders.' For the African National Congress:

In the end, of course, the ANC triumphed. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission explored urban violence it took it for granted that the narratives of the apartheid state were merely ideological justifications for its crimes. It also took for granted the ANC's notion that urban crowds were acting politically and that urban violence was part of a national protest history. Hugo van der Merwe in his 'National Narrative versus Local Truths' emphasises that the TRC was primarily concerned with 'national unity'. 'The TRC's formula for uncovering the truth and making sense of a victim's experience was to contextualise the abuse within the national political conflict.'

Phil Bonner and Noor Nieftagodien, analysing the TRC's handling of violence in Kathorus in the East Rand in the 1990s – violence which included taxi-wars, clashes between squatters and hostel dwellers, students and youth gangs, the ANC and Inkatha – stress that the Commission ignored 'any human rights violations that could not be termed political'. Nevertheless, this allowed a wide range of violence to be included since 'struggles simply needed to have taken place within the wider context of political conflict to qualify as political.'

All these authors, and many others, are critical of such an overly political approach. Iain Edwards believes that it 'misrepresents the nature of the [1959] riot' in Durban; that it is based on a 'simplistic view of crowds' and 'simplistic notions of relations between political party leaders and the masses'. In his view, crowds are constantly changing; 'major struggles are being waged within the crowd'; participants have multiple social, economic and cultural motives. 'The politicising histories under which men and women have lived so long need to be re-examined'.

van der Merwe argues that the TRC's emphasis on 'the national political conflict' failed to make sense of or to reconcile people to what were primarily local experiences. The TRC needed 'a much more involved, long-term engagement with the dynamics of local conflict'.

Bonner and Nieftagodien insist that 'adequate social explanations' require a recognition that violence was 'socio-political in character'; that one needs to examine 'social and economic processes as well as political processes'. Violence, they say, 'was only secondarily party political'. And if interpreters insist on a party analysis they reduce participants to 'faceless and increasingly dehumanised' puppets 'driven by unconstrained visceral passions'. Bonner and Nieftagodien wish instead to ' insert faces and motives'.

However, nationalist interpretations have not been the only way of capturing Southern African urban violence in the interests of a Grand Narrative. As powerful as the Grand Narrative of nationalism has been the Grand Narrative of class. In Southern Africa urban violence has often been explained as the result of the uneven and contradictory processes of proletarianisation. In so far as it has been anti-systemic it has been seen as anti-capitalist. Frederick Cooper's seminal collection, Struggle for the City, bears the sub-title, Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State in Urban Africa. In his introduction, 'Urban Space, Industrial Time and Wage Labor in Africa', Cooper describes a particular 'radical position' in urban scholarship:

Such a narrative has been applied particularly to ports and to railheads, where a large work force lives actually in the town rather than in mining compounds outside it and where workers in one town have a ready means of communication with those in another.

Clearly some part of what Bonner and Nieftagodien are saying about the overly-political reading of urban violence by the TRC is that the nationalist and the class narratives ought at least to be combined. But that is only part of what they are saying. Taxi wars, urban gangs, 'ethnic' conflict relate to other dimensions of the Southern African urban experience which cannot be reduced either to the story of the growth of national consciousness or to the story of the growth of proletarian consciousness. In 1983 Cooper noted the need for urban historians to explore the way in which African townspeople drew upon pre-urban traditions of association. He also noted the need to explore the struggle over 'ideologically charged' urban space.

In the twenty years since Struggle for the City points have been emphasised and others added. As Paul Maylam writes in his introduction to The People's City: 'almost all the essays in this collection implicitly consider the organisation and occupation of urban space – living space, cultural space, political space and space for pursuing material ends.' As he also notes, the essays show 'a convergence of rural "traditionalism" and urban popular protest'. Iain Edwards' chapter on the Cato Manor riots of 1959, from which I have already quoted, insists on the importance of a gendered approach to urban violence. Paul La Hausse's chapter portrays 'marginalised peasant, lumpen elements who formed themselves into amalaita gangs, prostitutes ... traders in dagga, animal skins and herbs ... and most importantly beer-brewers'. He emphasises that whites feared 'possible violent outbreaks on the part of these newly urbanised people'. But urban crime and gangs were not only a product of recent urbanisation. They remained a characteristic feature of the African township and a key element in much urban violence.

Paul La Hausse notes at the beginning of his chapter that it clearly 'betrays its origins' in the work of E.P.Thompson and George Rude and of the South African urban historians who drew on them. But 'in its concern with the question of culture – a rather unpopular field for a number of revisionist urban social historians in South Africa – this essay represents a bridge ... between earlier historical work and more recent literature preoccupied with questions of culture and identity.' Veit Erlmann's chapter on black popular music in Durban has crossed that bridge. So too has work on black urban clothes and fashion. In short, there has developed a Southern African urban cultural history which is not only about cultural nationalism or proletarian 'culture as resource' but also about urban style. Struggles over who sets urban style have also been a cause of violence.

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