Rise of the African Peasantry

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The rise and decline of the African peasantry in South Africa from 1860 onwards is a matter that has been given its fair share of attention over the years. Much of the economic history of the Southern Africa in the second half of the 19th century and onwards is incomplete if no mention of the African peasantry is made. In this essay therefore, attempts will be made to account for the rise of the African peasantry form the 1860s. Furthermore, the factors that led to decline of the aforementioned by 1913 will also be mentioned. Colin Bundy is probably one of the authors that researched and wrote extensively on the rise and fall of the African peasantry. He criticized the prevailing view that African agriculture was primitive and backward, and attacked the notion that poverty and lack of development in South Africa were a result of “traditionalism.”[i] Bundy’s work introduced the idea that by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century capitalist development in South Africa was increasingly hostile to peasant producers and a massive onslaught was launched against them. The understanding of this was vital to an understanding of both Southern African past and present.[ii] The liberal economist Hobart Houghton described the years 1870 to 1918 in South Africa as a period when ‘population, wealth and living standards increased greatly.’[iii] During this period, African rural producers suffered a severe deterioration in their living standards and an enforced dependence on providing labour to white farmers and mines. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, (from 1875 onwards) and even earlier, a number of African producers adopted new crops and new methods of production, notably ox-ploughing, earned and re-invested money from transport riding and other occupations and expanded production for the markets opened up by big white settlement, diamond and gold
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