ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by examining the fount of power within the colony. In South Africa before 1870, power was only very partially, though increasingly over time, a derivation of local relations of production and exchange. To the extent that power did depend on such relations, it was only at several removes, and, moreover, not on those located within the continent of Africa. Rather, power at the Cape derived in the first instance from the strength of the Dutch and British imperial systems, in which the colony at the southern tip of Africa was of minor and essentially strategic significance. This was of course by no means an atypical relationship between a colony and a colonising country. In the recent historiography of South Africa, the study of cultures has primarily been concerned with two problems, namely their use for the establishment of hegemony, in the Gramscian sense, and with the opportunities they gave for the maintenance of African resistance.
