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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Show panel list
Creating a New Nation
| Panel |
34. Post-apartheid: ethnographies of the South African transition
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| Paper ID | 501 |
| Author(s) |
Donham, Don
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | On the first celebration of Soweto Day (later to be called Youth Day), a little over a month after the famous elections of 1994, other black workers at a East Rand gold mine ganged up on the Zulus amongst them, killed two, and seriously injured many more. Eventually, all of the 350 Zulus (out of approximately 5,000 black workers) would be retrenched, after management claimed that it could find no way of solving the ethnic tensions involved. Everyone, black and white, narrated the violence in ethnic terms: The Xhosas had attacked the Zulus. As such, this conflict joins many others that occurred on the East Rand between 1990 and 1994 in which thousands upon thousands died, as a new nation was being born.
This paper, like other recent work, attempts to provide a deeper explanation of the violence, in this case, the incident at the mine I am calling Cinderella. Among the factors involved are, surprisingly, management’s last-minute support of unionization of its black workforce, and the National Union of Mineworkers’ strategy of using ethnic structures in order to organize the workforce. At the time, a new vernacular notion of the nation was also being created among black workers--one in which South African ethnic groups, defined in apartheid history, could now be potentially hierarchized. In this local discourse (that neither the higher levels of management nor of the union subscribed to) the Xhosas had led the struggle to create a new nation. The Zulus were potential traitors within. And Mozambicans were newly defined “foreigners.” This case provides materials for considering the paradoxical connections between nonracialism and ethnic identity, between liberal notions of the New South Africa and black nationalism.
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