African Women Farmers in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, 1875–1930: State Policies and Spiritual Vulnerabilities

Sean Redding ()
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Sean Redding: Amherst College

Chapter Chapter 18 in Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2020, pp 433-453 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract As whites consolidated political control over South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the economies of rural African families transformed. Redding investigates how, with the exodus of men as migrant labourers to the gold mines, African women became entrepreneurial market farmers in the Eastern Cape region. However, Redding contends, the colonial state’s legal restrictions on women’s property rights drained women’s economic resources and redefined them as dependents of men and ‘subsistence’ farmers. In tandem, accusations of witchcraft against women, often from relations or neighbours, increased as women exercised more power over familial resources. The cumulative impact of legal restrictions and witchcraft accusations threatened African women’s status and their opportunities to engage in entrepreneurial market farming by the late 1920s.

Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palscp:978-3-030-33412-3_18

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-33412-3_18

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