ABSTRACT
This essay examines the role that violence played in the forging of segregation in South Africa in the period between the two world wars. At the time the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, blacks confronted what this chapter will generally treat as two distinct sources of violence—violence from ordinary white citizens and from the state. South African historiography usually focuses on state repression and, except for several recent essays on the topic, has not paid much systematic attention to the role of private or interpersonal violence by white citizens. The emerging work on this topic locates the source of civilian violence in the “crisis of white masculinity” that rattled white men just before and after the disruptions occasioned by the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1901). By concentrating on the prerogatives and assumptions that white men viewed as central to their identities as men who bore responsibility for controlling black men, this approach has opened up an important and promising line of inquiry. 1 I suggest in this chapter, however, that an overly narrow focus on the psychodynamics of masculine identities runs the risk of obscuring distinctive trends in the evolution and management of racial violence in the segregation era. It is for good reason that the bulk of the literature on state formation in South Africa is devoted to the role of state repression: racial domination would have been impossible without the concerted efforts of the state to coerce, intimidate, and kill blacks who opposed the evolving racial order. In this sense, the violence used to establish segregation in South Africa illuminates the violence that was indispensable to most—perhaps all—settler society regimes.
