ABSTRACT
This peculiarity can be located in the aporia at the heart of colonial modernity, in the incommensurability between the promise of emancipation in the city and the practice of retribalization and poverty in the country. Increased industrialization, spurred by wartime isolation, severe droughts, and a temporary relaxation of influx control, led to the expansion of the urban African population (Thompson 1990:178)1 and, in time, to organized resistance in the form of effective bus-boycotts and a spectacular, if ineffective, strike by migrant miners, as well as to a newly militant ANC spurred on by the Youth League (led by Anton Lembede, Nelson Mandela, and Walter Sisulu) in 1944 (Thompson 1990:179-84; Lodge 1985:18-20).2 When the Afrikaner National Party came to power in 1948, however, it attempted to reverse African urbanization, assimilation, and politicization. Responding to Afrikaner ideologues’ calls for complete separation of the races, the state tightened restrictions on African labor, social and residential mixing, and non-racial political opposition, while it consolidated existing segregation, forcing Africans onto the reserves that would eventually become bantustans. Drawing its support primarily from farmers or displaced “poor whites,” the National Party spoke an antiurban, even anti-modern language, arguing for an innate tribal connection to the soil for
the Afrikaner and, in debased form, for Africans as well. In practice, however, apartheid legislation aided the expansion of Afrikaner capital and an Afrikaans labor aristocracy, which depended on a labor reserve of unskilled Africans, even as it made permanent African residence in the cities increasingly difficult.
