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Priorities and Opportunities for Research in Swaziland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Alan R. Booth
Alan R. Booth*
Affiliation:
Ohio University
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Extract

      “I cry because the people cause me to
      cry about the Taxes…We have now to
      sell our children in order to get
      money to pay the Tax which is heavy.”
      [Labotsibeni, Queen Regent of Swaziland, 1906]
      “On these distant hills, catch the sun before its sets, you are mourned!
      I'm now just a song that everyone sings!
      I loved a young man,
      But they took him, he signed on at Mankaiana,
      Now I am ruined!”
      [Swazi women's working song, traditional]
      “It is sometimes said that the operations of the recruiting organization are tantamount to a policy of forced labour and that pressure is brought to bear to make Natives go to the mines. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
      [J.A. Genmill, General Manager, N.R.C., 1961]

During the past decade the cascade of literature dealing with capital penetration into Southern Africa and its various consequences has set all of us, liberal and radical, awash. There is not sign of letup. We have learned that pre-industrial economies were self-sustaining at the very least, some of them very much more than that; and that many were dynamic in their subsequent response to market forces. We have learned that peasants had to be forced to go to work, and how efficient the systems of coercion were. We have learned how those pre-capitalist societies reacted to the seductions and the entrapments of capitalism, some through collaboration, others through patterns of resistance, most, surely, combining the two.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 9 , 1982 , pp. 325 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1982

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References

NOTES

1. See Sikhondze, Bongi, “The Role of the Money Economy in Changing the Nature of Swazi Agriculture With Special Reference to the Development of Cotton Cultivation, 1900-1968,” (seminar paper, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 18 June 1980).Google Scholar

2. Bonner, Philip, “The Rise, Consolidation, and Disintegration of Dlamini Power in Swaziland Between 1820 and 1889,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1977).Google Scholar

3. Sibisi, Harriet, “Traditional Securities and the Response to ‘Modern Economic Opportunities,” Ministry of Agriculture, Sociological Observations and Some Aspects of Rural Development in Swaziland, Paper No. 3, March 1980Google Scholar; Low, A.R.C.et al, “Cattle Wealth and Cash Needs in Swaziland: Price Response and Rural Development Implications,” Journal of Agricultural Economics, 31(1980), 225–35Google Scholar; Doran, M.H., Low, A.R.C., and Kemp, R.L., “Cattle As a Store of Wealth in Swaziland: Implications for Livestock Development and Overgrazing in Eastern and Southern Africa,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 61(1979), 41–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fowler, M.H., “Maize in Swaziland: A Review of Its Production and Marketing in Recent Years,” Ministry of Agriculture, December 1980Google Scholar, mimeo; Low, A.R.C., “Migration and Agricultural Development in Swaziland,” International Labour Organization [hereafter ILO] Migration for Employment Project, August 1977Google Scholar, mimeo. See also Sterkenberg, J.J., “Agricultural Commercialization in Africa South of the Sahara: The Cases of Lesotho and Swaziland,” seminar paper, Afrika Studiecentrum, Leiden, November 1979Google Scholar, mimeo; de Vletter, F., “Subsistence Farmer, Cash Cropper or Consumer?: A Socio-Economic Profile of a Sample of Swazi Rural Homesteads,” Ministry of Agriculture, August 1979Google Scholar, mimeo.

4. Fransman, Martin, “The State and Development in Swaziland, 1960-1977,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sussex, 1978)Google Scholar; Crush, J.S., “The Genesis of Colonial Land Policy in Swaziland,” South African Geographical Journal, 62(1980), 73–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “The Parameters of Dependence in Southern Africa: A Case Study of Swaziland,” Journal of Southern African Affairs, 4(1979), 55-66; idem, “Settler Estate Production, Monopoly Control and the Imperial Response: The Case of the Swaziland Corporation Ltd.,” African Economic History, no. 8 (Fall 1979), 183-98.

5. “How the Land Was Lost,” Times of Swaziland, April 1, 1981Google Scholar; “How the Nation Was Manipulated,” Times of Swaziland, April 16, 1981Google Scholar; “How the Settlers Settled In,” Times of Swaziland, April 30, 1981.Google Scholar

6. Heilbronn, S.G., “Water Laws, Prior Rights and Government Apportionment in Swaziland, Southern Africa,” mimeo, 1981.Google Scholar

7. Leys, Colin, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism (Berkeley, 1974).Google Scholar

8. Swaziland, , “Inquiry Into the Causes of the Labour Disturbances at Big Bend,” (Mbabane, 1963).Google Scholar

9. de Vletter, Fion, “The Swazi Rural Homestead: Preliminary Findings of a Socio-Economic Survey Undertaken Jointly by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the University College of Swaziland,” 1981Google Scholar, mimeo; Swaziland, Ministry of Education, and UNICEF (Rosen-Prinz, Beth D.), “The Survey of Roles, Tasks, Needs and Skills of Rural Women in Swaziland 1978/1979,” Mbabane, 1979Google Scholar; Beth Rosen-Prinz, D. and Prinz, Frederick A., “Migrant Labour and Rural Homesteads: An Investigation Into the Sociological Dimensions of the Migrant Labour System in Swaziland,” I.L.O. Migration for Employment Project, 1978, mimeo.Google Scholar See also footnote 3 above.

10. A beginning is made by de Vletter, Fion, “Migrant Labour in Swaziland: Characteristics, Attitudes, and Policy Implications,” I.L.O. Migration for Employment Project, 1979, mimeo.Google Scholar

11. The N.R.C. was interested in conditions likely to generate output so that reports detailed droughts, hail, excessive rainfall, and invasions of locusts, army worms, cutworms, and the like.

12. Diseases mentioned and/or discussed include: bilharzia, chicken pox, cholera, colds, diarrhea, diphtheria, gastroenteritis, influenza, malaria, malnutrition, measles, meningitis, pellagra, phtisis, poliomyelitis, sinusitis, smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever.

13. File numbers and titles include: 2: Agreements, Licenses, Runners’ Permits; 3: Annual Reports; 6: A.V.S. Non-arrivals, Rejects, etc; 13: Correspondence, general; 14: Donations; 15: Deserters; 25: Miscellaneous; 26: Monthly Reports; 26A: Monthly Tour Reports; 33: Native Remittances; 34: Out-puts: Tribal and Territorial Analysis; 36: Propaganda; 42: Recruiting Orders; 44: Rejects and ‘Repats’ 51: Undesirables and Other Carded Natives; 52: Voluntary Deferred Pay; 54: Native Matters, Complaints, etc.