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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Vorsters and Clarks: Alternative Models of European Farmer in the Tuli Block of Botswana
Author:Mazonde, Isaac N.ISNI
Year:1991
Periodical:Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume:17
Issue:3
Period:September
Pages:443-471
Language:English
Geographic term:Botswana
Subjects:farmers
colonists
Europeans
farm management
animal husbandry
Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment
Economics and Trade
History and Exploration
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637194
Abstract:The social history of family firms, founded by white settlers in Southern Africa, has been almost totally ignored. A central problem of settler enterprise is its viability when the enterprise becomes dependent on the State. State support in developing countries is notoriously fickle. When it fails, as it often does, it leaves dependent enterprises in disarray. How do settler family firms avoid such dependence or become captive to it? What kinds of organizational structures do the different types of settler family develop, and why? To answer these questions, the author focuses on two extremes among European farmers in the Tuli Block, eastern Botswana. Each case is a microhistory of processes of change in a family firm of a distinctive type. These processes occur over at least three generations. They culminate in the emergence of an extreme type, the paternalist entrepreneur, on the one hand, the technocrat, on the other. The outcome depends upon the interface between each firm and its social environment. The firms dealt with are both cattle trading and breeding farms; one was established in 1934 by an Afrikaner settler, the paternalist Vorster, and the other shortly before World War I by an English settler, the technocrat Clark. The two case studies show that a viable enterprise can be forged both within the frame of the State and without. Notes, ref.
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