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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'The Natives are Always Stealing': White Vigilantes and the 'Reign of Terror' in the Orange Free State, 1918-1924
Author:Murray, Martin J.ISNI
Year:1989
Periodical:The Journal of African History
Volume:30
Issue:1
Pages:107-123
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:Whites
farmers
organized crime
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
History and Exploration
colonialism
Ethnic and Race Relations
Labor and Employment
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/182697
Abstract:During the formative years of capitalist agriculture, white farmers in the Orange Free State, South Africa, relied on both legal and extralegal means to create a docile labour force of African workers. Coercive laws were a necessary component in the overall process of fashioning a rural working class out of quasi-independent squatter communities. Yet, no matter how repressive, the legal system alone was not sufficient to ensure work discipline and docility on the white-owned farms. Frustrated with their inability to force African farm labourers to work diligently and to prevent them from deserting the farms, white farmers frequently turned to violence to sow terror amongst the dispossessed African rural population. White vigilantes formed a kind of paramilitary wing of the white farming class. While the State authorities never officially sanctioned vigilantism, those white farmers who used violence to intimidate their African labourers had little to fear with respect to prosecution. Rural Africans, too, remembered: the shooting incidents that occurred between 1918 and 1924 were indelibly etched in their collective memory. Notes, ref.
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