Gender and Generations Apart: labor tenants and customary law in segregation-era South Africa, 1920s to 1940s (review)

McClendon’s book sets out to provide a history of labour tenancy in the Natal Midlands, weaving together legal and rural social history. Integrated in this project, so the author claims, is the study of domestic struggles as exemplified by generational and gender conflicts. Referencing Martin Chanock’s analysis of patriarchal alliances between colonizers and African male elders in order to control young men and by extension women, McClendon aims to extend this analysis. He seeks to show that young men and women themselves possessed agency and managed to influence the ‘hardening of customary law’ during this period of (re)invention and to gain from it. Readers who are encouraged by the promise of a riveting new analysis soon will be disappointed, however, because the book has a tendency to repeat itself without managing to move the analysis to new interpretations. Most disappointing is the treatment of gender relations and struggles, which never really find a place in the analysis beyond the occasional sentence.

The core of the book is represented by Chapter 3, which explores in detail the historical and social context of labour tenancy and the 6-months system against the backdrop of the rising discontent expressed in union membership and migration to the cities, on the one hand, and greater state control and intervention on the other. This is in many respects the most eloquent of the chapters, and sets the stage for the generational conflicts as Natal labour tenants were caught between new legislative acts which sought to enforce compliance with the 6-months labour rule, restrict the movement of young men and women, and reinstate the ‘traditional’ power of homestead heads to command the labour of their dependants, albeit for the benefit of the landlord. The effects of the expansion of commercial farming, as well as recurring drought and pestilence throughout the 1930s – both of which accentuated the ever more dismal situation of tenants – and the increasing discontent of youth in the face of contracting opportunities in farming are other themes that are explored. In rural Natal, government, white landlords and African homestead heads colluded in order to establish control over the labour of young men. Legislation was put in place which threatened those households whose youngsters were unable or unwilling to supply their share of labour with eviction, causing homestead heads to crack down on wayward sons by withdrawing help in supplying them with lobola cattle, their means to marry and establish independence.

In Natal this mixture of repression and collusion was exacerbated, first, by the expansion of commercial agriculture that led to the imposition of restrictions by landlords on tenants with regard to the number of cattle they could keep and the areas of land they could cultivate; and, second, by the drought and pestilence that further reduced wages and crops. It was little wonder that young men left for the better opportunities of the cities, where they were able to earn their own lobola payments, and where young married women also followed, eager to escape their oppressive rural lifestyle.

The rest of the book is rather disjointed and includes many repetitions, as if sections were written separately to stand on their own. There is, however, a useful discussion about the contestation of custom between fathers and sons. The power struggle over the interpretation of the filial contract and the obligations connected with it, which finds its expression in court cases about claims to lobola payments, is of central importance in McClendon’s analysis. What is entirely left out is a discussion of the effects of migrant labour on the lobola system: was it monetized, for example, further altering the roles of young men and homestead heads? The inclusion of interviews with men and women who lived as labour tenants at the time, and the...