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| Title: | 'The new generation... jeer at me, saying we are all equal now': impotent African patriarchs, unruly African sons in colonial South Africa |
| Author: | Carton, Benedict |
| Book title: | The Politics of Age and Gerontocracy in Africa |
| Year: | 1998 |
| Pages: | 31-64 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | South Africa Natal Great Britain |
| Subjects: | generation conflicts colonialism |
| Abstract: | Beginning in the 1880s, this chapter explores how tightening colonial rule, expanding opportunities for wage labour, and a series of environmental disasters had, by the turn of the century, transformed generational hierarchies in the Thukela basin of South Africa. By 1880, through British military conquest, the Natal Colony had imposed its rule over the Zulu Kingdom and drawn boundaries for magisterial districts in the Thukela basin. The white government scaled back basin chiefs' authority and compelled homestead patriarchs to surrender more and more taxes, land, and labour to colonists. Dependent on their older guardians for bridewealth cattle and land, growing numbers of young men blamed the loss of their political autonomy and material birthright on African elders. While the colonial government stifled the authority of the chiefs, Natal settlers strangled the ability of African cultivators to maintain subsistence. Many young men departed from their homesteads to work in the industrial centres of the Transvaal. From the middle 1890s onwards, young men increasingly defied their own patriarchs and colonial laws, breaking filial obligations and customary prohibitions against unbridled drinking, fighting and courting. The magistrates' role as arbiters in faction fight cases underscored how difficult it was for homestead heads to discipline their sons. Notes, ref. |
