ABSTRACT
Apart from a very few exceptions, South African labour history presents an angle of vision that only allows us to see how external factors – ecological disasters or social controls (devised by capital and the colonial state) — drove labour into the market; or alternatively, they show how the absence of such factors permitted a temporary escape from wage employment. Most students of the period, attribute the self-direction and relative freedom of Natal’s African population to the availability of land which ensured an independent subsistence, as well as to the inability of the small settler community to agree on an effective ‘native labour policy’. Important as these economic and political factors were, such explanations fall short of assessing the rich cultural nuances surrounding the problem, a failing that can only distort our efforts to comprehend the substance of black proletarianization.
