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Periodical article | Leiden University 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. |
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. |