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    Mandela's Kinsmen: Nationalist Elites and Apartheid's First Bantustan
    Unavailable
    Mandela's Kinsmen: Nationalist Elites and Apartheid's First Bantustan
    Unavailable
    Mandela's Kinsmen: Nationalist Elites and Apartheid's First Bantustan
    Ebook474 pages6 hours

    Mandela's Kinsmen: Nationalist Elites and Apartheid's First Bantustan

    By Timothy Gibbs

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Mandela's Kinsmen is the first study of the fraught relationships between the ANC leadership and their relatives who ruled apartheid's foremost "tribal" Bantustan, the Transkei. In the early 20th century, the chieftaincieshad often been well-springs of political leadership. In the Transkei, political leaders, such as Mandela, used regionally rooted clan, schooling and professional connections to vault to leadership; they crafted expansive nationalisms woven from these "kin" identities. But from 1963 the apartheid government turned South Africa's chieftaincies into self-governing, tribal Bantustans in order to shatter African nationalism.
    While historians often suggest that apartheid changed everything - African elites being eclipsed by an era of mass township and trade union protest, and the chieftaincies co-opted by the apartheid government - there is another side to this story. Drawing on newly discovered accounts and archives, Gibbs reassesses the Bantustans and the changing politics of chieftaincy, showing how local dissent within Transkei connected to wider political movements and ideologies. Emphasizing the importance of elite politics, he describes how the ANC-in-exile attempted to re-enter South Africa through the Bantustans drawing on kin networks. This failed in KwaZulu, but Transkei provided vital support after a coup in 1987, and the alliances forged were important during the apartheid endgame. Finally, in counterpoint to Africanist debates that focus on how South African insurgencies narrowed nationalist thought and practice, he maintains ANC leaders calmed South Africa's conflicts of the early 1990s by espousing an inclusive nationalism that incorporated local identities, and that "Mandela's kinsmen" still play a key role in state politics today.

    Timothy Gibbs is a Lecturer in African History, University College London.

    Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland & Botswana): Jacana
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJames Currey
    Release dateMar 20, 2014
    ISBN9781782042884
    Unavailable
    Mandela's Kinsmen: Nationalist Elites and Apartheid's First Bantustan

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    • 2/5
      Never have the howitzers of historical scholarship been applied with as little effect as in Timothy Gibbs book about the Transkei. Fed with varied ammunition from interviews and noted Eastern Cape historians, dusted with fragments from unlikely archives and assembled with poetic assurance, it really is not the writer's fault that nothing more is unearthed. Lacking an economic base except for the meagre earnings of exploited migrant workers, it is not surprising that the events take on the aspect of grubby playground fights between school children seeking a school master's favour or looting the tuck shop. Gibbs traces cohorts of the fissiparous Transkei elite from a corrupt Bantustan, where bribes got roads built, to the present state of resource chaos where neither bribes nor chiefly influence can get a fully-equipped, completed rural clinic (standing pristine with lights lit during the day time) staffed with either nurses or doctors. Not even heroes like Mandela or Hani are able to fulfil an heroic role in this benighted backwater. Wiseman Nkuhlu deserves better than he gets in this account. Not least a correct spelling of his name, which is rendered as Nkhulu throughout. South Africa today, with its elite politics and the undertow of respect for 'traditional leaders', is cruelly reminiscent of the Bantustan themes drawn together in this most unedifying of histories. The talented author should choose his next subject with more care - and not worry with the second edition promised on page xi.