Grassroots Literacy and the Written Record

A Textual History of Asbestos Activism in South Africa

John Trimbur

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788926829
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines how asbestos activists living in remote rural villages in South Africa activated metropolitan resources of representation at the grassroots level in a quest for justice and restitution for the catastrophic effects on their lives caused by the asbestos industry. It follows the Asbestos Interest Group (AIG) over a fifteen-year period through its involvement in grassroots research, in legal cases and in the compensation systems for asbestos-related disease. It examines how the AIG became grassroots technicians of translocal paperwork, moving texts back and forth between periphery and center, pushing documents through the textual mazeways of the courts, medical institutions, the compensation system and various government agencies. The book addresses rhetorical mobility and the extent to which, given the AIG's position on the periphery, it has been able to enter the voices and interests of villagers into formerly inaccessible forums of deliberation and decision-making.

1On the Periphery: Life and Literacy in the Kuruman District

The Kuruman district lies in an out-of-the-way part of South Africa, distant from major cities, at the edge of the global systems that connect the far south to the rest of the world. The Northern Cape, where Kuruman is situated, is the largest of the South African provinces, a vast territory about the size of Germany. The Kuruman district (itself as large as Belgium) is located in the northeast corner of the province, close to the Botswana border (Figure 1.1). In the colonial era it took eight days to reach Kuruman by ox-wagon from Kimberley, the boomtown of the 1870s diamond rush and now the provincial capital. It’s faster today, of course, by automobile on paved roads, but the Kuruman district remains a remote place, predominantly rural in character and sparsely populated, with a regional economy based on farming and mining.

Figure 1.1 Map of the Northern Cape, South Africa

The town of Kuruman was built on an oasis in the thornveld, around a natural spring or ‘eye’ which supplies water to the most favorable farming and grazing land in the district. At 3710 feet above sea level, Kuruman sits on the Ghaap plateau, which rises from an escarpment on the Harts River in the east and slopes north and west to merge into the semi-arid savannah of the Kalahari. The Ghaap plateau contains major mineral deposits, including diamonds, limestone, manganese, iron ore and – central to the focus of this book – the Cape Asbestos Belt, a 250-mile long vein of banded ironstone that holds the largest known commercial source of crocidolite, or blue asbestos, in the world. At the end of the 19th century, about 100 miles south of Kuruman, mining interests began prospecting in the Asbestos Mountains near Prieska. By the early 20th century, the asbestos industry had spread north to the Kuruman district, extending the central impulse of the South African mining industry to extract the untold mineral wealth in the interior of southern Africa. Residents rightly say that ‘asbestos built Kuruman’ (AC, 2001: 20).

The fate of the Kuruman district has always been entangled with historical forces emanating from the metropolis. Rather than being cut off from the modern world by geographical isolation – an ‘outside’ in a binary world order divorced from the ‘inside’ of the metropolitan center and mainstream modernity – the Kuruman district is positioned on the perimeter as a localized version of modernity. To put it another way, the periphery, as it is inhabited in the Kuruman district, is more than an accident of geography; it is also a state of affairs, something that happens in historical time, resulting from the prevailing asymmetrical distribution of resources and risks in the global systems that connect center and periphery.

The Kuruman district is, in Charles Piot’s (1999) memorable phrase, ‘remotely global,’ a geohistorical location produced within modernity as a fraught and unequal position in transnational networks, exchanges and divisions of labor. Everyday life in the town and the surrounding villages is unevenly plugged into urban economies of attention, and the feeling of being at a remove is simultaneously geographical and semiotic, experienced as a measure of distance from the prevailing compressions of time and space and the full-tilt connectivity that make up metropolitan experience in late mainstream modernity.1 For the village-based activists in the Asbestos Interest Group (AIG), the available means of representation on the periphery are partially inserted into the modalities of the metropolitan center and partially bypassed by the transnational connections that link premium places in South Africa to the wider world. Half in, half out of this global circuitry, villagers are positioned at the edge of the paperwork, archives of knowledge and channels of communication that animate the internal workings of metropolitan modernity.

This chapter examines how the peripheral modernity of the Kuruman district was shaped by intersecting historical forces that linked center and periphery in unequal relations through a political economy of extraction, the dispossession of indigenous polities, and the geo-racial separation of white towns and native locations. These are the geohistorical circumstances in which the AIG’s grassroots activism operates, the grounds upon which villagers encountered the skewed circulation of knowledge and metropolitan means of representation that divide elite and grassroots literacies. The peripheral modernity of remotely global villages in the Kuruman district is the AIG’s ‘locus of enunciation,’ the term Walter D. Mignolo (2000: 114–116) uses to designate how rhetorical agency and representational power are distributed unequally in the world system.

The Periphery and the Political Economy of Extraction

Before Europeans arrived, the southern Tswana who inhabited the western high veld that is now the Kuruman district built towns of 10,000 or more based on political wards and complex client relations. They incorporated multiple ethnicities into their polities, manufactured iron implements and developed a surplus-producing stratified political economy of wealth in cattle which, along with extensive horticulture adapted to arid conditions and hunting and gathering, constituted the indigenous means of livelihood in the Northern Cape. Kuruman appears in the written record with the founding in the 1820s of Moffat Mission by the London Missionary Society. In its earliest days, Kuruman was an outpost of empire, a trading depot for hides, fur, ivory, feathers, guns and ammunition, brandy and the illicit capture and sale of slaves. Located north of the mixed-ancestry proto-state Griqualand, Kuruman was the last settlement on the northern frontier, at the edge of imperial rule and the supply chains that linked the local hunting, cattle-raiding and slaving expeditions of frontier commandos to legitimate and non-legitimate markets in Cape Town and beyond.2

From its earliest days, Kuruman has been tied into world circuits as a remote transfer station of raw materials for export, on trade routes that lead inescapably to the northern metropolis. This is the political economy of extraction in the far south. The situation is well known: the value added, the profits realized and the capital accumulated increase as the sources of wealth move from the site of extraction on the periphery to financial and manufacturing centers in the metropolis. The unidirectional movement of wealth production and its resulting inequalities are familiar features of a global system of exploitation and accumulation that keeps the relation of periphery and center in a persistent state of ‘friction’ and grievance.3

In the political economy of extraction, moreover, the human burden of production falls disproportionately on the periphery and its residents, concentrating the social costs of wealth creation in towns and villages far from metropolitan centers. This asymmetric distribution of the risks and social costs of production appears at an early date in the Kuruman district, in the mid-19th century when the impact of commercial hunting was absorbed locally, as the southern Tswana means of livelihood by hunting game were diminished and, in some areas, depleted entirely.

The introduction of guns to supply world markets with furs, hides, ostrich feathers and ivory intensified the game hunting that the southern Tswana had long established as a sustainable source of food in the Northern Cape. As Kevin Shillington (1985: 24) notes, however, ‘the traffic in firearms upset [this] delicate ecological balance of the Southern Tswana economy’ beyond the capacity of game populations to reproduce. By the 1860s, as a local observer in Kuruman wrote, ‘hundreds of natives were employed by storekeepers to hunt every season and many closely packed wagonloads of this costly product of the desert [ostrich feathers] annually arrived at the Cape’ for shipment to world markets (quoted in Shillington, 1985: 24). In 1866, a magazine was built in Kuruman to provision white hunters with guns and ammunition for long-distance hunting expeditions into the far interior (Shillington, 1985: 24).

Just before the mineral revolution began on the Kimberley diamond fields in the 1870s, the hunting trade was extensive and unregulated in the Northern Cape, leaving the western high veld littered with the carcasses of game whose hides, feathers and tusks had been removed and shipped away and whose meat was wasted. By the late 1870s, game had largely disappeared as a source of food in Tlhaping territory east of the Kuruman hills and in the upper Molopo and Setagoli valleys occupied by the Rolong, while hunting for food was still possible north and west of Kuruman (Shillington, 1985: 195).

The reduction or depletion of game on the northern frontier through the incursion of transnational trade looms as a fateful premonition of the maelstrom about to be unleashed by the mineral revolution. As diamond mining began in the late 1860s, what initially had the strongest impact on southern Tswana economic and social life was the market to provision the rapidly industrializing mines and the fast-growing boomtown at Kimberley. In the early days at the alluvial diggings on the Harts and Vaal rivers, Tlhaping in the region sold to miners what Shillington (1985: 66) calls ‘the natural surplus of the rural economy,’ such as fresh milk, game, firewood, and reeds and grasses for thatching. With the shift to dry diggings at the Great Hole and the growth of Kimberley domestic markets, however, demand quickly outstripped reproductive capacity. The use of firewood to fuel the mechanization of mining and to meet domestic needs led to widespread deforestation, while hunting for meat to feed the growing population in Kimberley further depleted the stock of game.

The upshot is that the provision trade amplified the effects of the hunting trade, extending market forces from the metropolis to the mining boomtown and its outlying territories. Some Tswana sold their cattle, the traditional source of wealth and social distinction, in order to buy wagons to haul wood, while others turned to the plough to grow grain commercially for the Kimberley market. The wood trade and commercial farming may have produced short-term profits, new wealth and self sufficiency for a few, but this orientation to the market also heightened the risks of economic activity, destabilized Tswana social life, and weakened the authority of those chiefs who were trying to resist British encroachment on Tswana land and sovereignty.4

The mineral revolution in Kimberley served, in effect, as the gateway to modernity for the southern Tswana by overstimulating economic life. In the political economy of extraction, where wealth is transferred to the center and the social costs of production are absorbed on the periphery, the southern Tswanas’ traditional economic resources – cattle, game, wood, pastures and arable land – were commercialized and consumed in order to supply the Kimberley markets and fuel the mineral revolution. In this sense, peripheral modernity in the Kuruman district begins at a moment that depleted what were once sustainable patterns of subsistence, asset stripping the southern Tswana economy and throwing local sources of life into permanent crisis. For the southern Tswana, peripheral modernity takes shape as flows of trade, transnational divisions of labor and unequal distributions of risks put into place the fatal links between center and periphery.

Town and Village: A Geohistory of Dispossession

The creation of a disposable black labor force was a by-product of the political economy of extraction, quickly becoming the dominant means by which the risks of the South African mineral revolution fell disproportionately on the periphery and its residents. In the migrant labor system that began at Kimberley and, with the discovery of gold, extended to the Rand, black mineworkers were recruited as contract labor, housed in company compounds and then repatriated to native locations. Denied legal residence on the mines, black labor was considered transient, to be disposed of when contracts expired or when an injury, the sign of disease or other unfitness for work was detected by the mine operators. The disposability of black labor meant that the risks of work and the costs of the social welfare needed to recuperate and reproduce labor power – to deal with injury, disease, periods of unemployment and the diminished vitality of older workers – all fell on the families and communities of mineworkers.

As we will see in more detail in the next chapter, this outsourcing of the social costs of extraction appeared as well in non-migratory settings, such as the branch of the mineral revolution just starting on the Cape Asbestos Belt in the late 19th century. The point I wish to emphasize here is that the disposability of human life, as Athena Athanasiou notes, is closely linked to dispossession – of land, political sovereignty and control of the means of livelihood.5 Events in the Kuruman district and across the Northern Cape show how the creation of a disposable black labor force was enabled by the dispossession of the southern Tswana through military conquest, occupation, annexation and white settlement on formerly Tswana land.

Historian Leonard Thompson notes that the ‘southernmost Tswana societies had the misfortune to occupy land in the vicinity of Kimberley,’ where the South African mineral revolution began. ‘Step by step,’ Thompson (2001: 127) says, southern Tswana polities ‘were subjected and impoverished.’ In the late 19th century, driven by the need to secure the peri...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. On the Periphery: Life and Literacy in the Kuruman District
• 2. Asbestos Mining and the Written Record: A Brief History
• 3. The Emergence of Asbestos Activism: From the ‘Period of Non-awareness’ to the National Asbestos Summit of 1998
• 4. Grassroots Activism and the Mobility of Documents: The Formation of the Asbestos Interest Group
• 5. Insurgent Lawfare and the Gencor Case: From Asbestos-related Disease Sufferers to Plaintiffs
• 6. ‘The Lawyer Stole the Money’: The Political Economy of Certifiable Asbestos-related Disease
• Conclusion: Grassroots Activism, Popular Participation and Contextual Spaces
• References
• Index