ABSTRACT

Until about thirty years ago few scholars saw any special or necessary connection between industrialisation and racism in South Africa. Indeed the dominant view was that racism and discrimination were essentially products of the preindustrial order, and that industrialisation would tend to erode those supposedly archaic beliefs and values that produced racial discrimination. However, from the 1970s the relationship between industrialisation and racism in South Africa came to be rethought, reevaluated, and reconceptualised. If industrialisation had the effect of eroding a racial order, it was asked, why did racial discrimination come to be so firmly entrenched and institutionalised in South Africa precisely during the industrial era? Materialist analysis seemed to provide an answer to this question: the racial oppression of people of colour served the interests of the country's emergent capitalist class. This line of analysis had far-reaching implications for the wider consideration of the history of racism in South Africa. One corollary was to play down the significance of racism in the preindustrial era - thereby nullifying many of the findings and conclusions that have been discussed in the previous chapters of this book. Another was to minimise the importance of the political, psychological, ideological and cultural dimensions of racism, stressing rather the material forces that gave rise to the a racial order.