ABSTRACT
This chapter examines ways that socially constructed images of the supposedly separate pasts of various categories of South Africa’s population have been used both to legitimate, and to contest, socio-legal categorization and the domination that it has produced. Such appeals created images of essentialist continuities, helping to carry imagined characteristics of different population categories into present struggles over social and legislated differentiation. Representing Africans as ‘traditional’ has been just one weapon in a discursive armoury used to deny Africans full participation in the country’s political and economic processes. Land dispossession in South Africa reached its zenith with the 1913 Natives Land Act prohibiting Africans from owning land, or being self-employed agricultural tenants, in all but 7 per cent of the country. Domination, and resistance to it, is no more restricted to the public political domain in South Africa than elsewhere, and as in the former sphere, tradition is used as a resource in both local and domestic contexts.
