The next seminar in the Labour Studies Seminar Series is by Julie Wells, entitled "'To Conquer or be Slaves': The 1819 Battle of Egazini, Grahamstown/ Makhanda, and the Making of the Cape's Black Working Class."
The seminar will also launch Wells' "The Return of Makhanda: Exploring the Legend," in partnership with the Isikhumbuzo Applied History Unit.
The series is run by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) and the Departments of Sociology & Industrial Sociology, History, and Economics & Economic History.
Speaker: Julie Wells
Date: Wednesday, 18th September 2019
Time: 4:15pm
Venue: Eden Grove Seminar Room 2
2019 is the bicentenary of the attack by Makhanda, Xhosa prophet and resistance leader, on the British imperial garrison at Egazini, at the city’s edge. This was part of a larger series of wars on the Eastern Frontier. These were won by the British empire, whose forces included a substantial number of local black and Coloured people. The Empire extended its power throughout the 1800s, conquering black African, Afrikaner and Khoesan polities across southern Africa, forging the region as we know it, and forging the states we have today. Conquest brought in its wake land dispossession, state-building and new taxes, the incorporation of African kings and chiefs into colonial rule and a massive expansion of the working class, and integration into world capitalism. The talk recovers the story of Makhanda, a controversial figure, and links the battle of Egazini to larger processes of resistance, proletarianisation and capitalist development, and considers the legacy of British conquest for understanding inequality and exploitation today.
Copies of the book will be available and there will be a raffle for students.
SPEAKER: Julie Wells is Associate Professor Emerita at Rhodes University, and Head of the Isikhumbuzo Applied History Unit. Her books include "The Return of Makhanda: Exploring the Legend"(2012), "Rebellion and Uproar: Makhanda and the Great Escape from Robben Island, 1820" (2007),"We now Demand: The History of Women's Resistance to Pass Laws in South Africa" (1994) and "We Have Done with Pleading: The Women's 1913 Anti-Pass Campaign" (1991). A member of the anti-apartheid movement, she served in the provincial executive of the African National Congress in the Eastern Cape Province. She is a founder of the Egazini Outreach Project for community arts and crafts.
ALL WELCOME
QUERIES: Valance Wessels, 046 603 8939, v.wessels@ru.ac.za