Mastering the Sharecroppers: Land, Labour and the Search for Independence in the US South and South Africa

Literature › Works

Ian Ochiltree (2004). Mastering the Sharecroppers: Land, Labour and the Search for Independence in the US South and South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Special Issue: Race and Class in South Africa and the United States). Taylor & Francis (Carfax Publishing).

Type	journal article
Scope	Comparative and methods
Method	synthesis review
Period studied	1860s–1930s
Regions	US South, South African Highveld, Orange Free State, Transvaal
Themes	agriculture land, origins segregation, comparative theory, labour markets wages, business and state
Citation key	ochiltree2004

Argument

Ochiltree compares sharecropping in the post-Civil War US South and on the South African Highveld after the mineral discoveries and the South African War. In both places war left white landowners too weak to impose the labour settlement they wanted, so black families farmed white-owned land for a share of the crop and won real autonomy. That autonomy clashed with agricultural 'modernisation' and white supremacy, and whites counter-attacked by changing legal status, restricting land, grazing and common rights, and curbing mobility. In South Africa the modernising colonial and Union state, culminating in the 1913 Natives Land Act, drove the attack, which was only partly successful. In the US South, Redemption restored white supremacy but the state did little to modernise, so sharecropping lasted until the New Deal.

Evidence and method

Secondary literature (Keegan, Bundy, Foner, Fields, Hahn, Woodman, Reidy, Burton, Lichtenstein) plus contemporary quotations from planters, farmers and newspapers (The Friend, Loring and Atkinson's questionnaires, Somers, Reid), official reports (SANAC 1903-05, SAIRR 1939) and oral histories (van Onselen, Keegan).

Findings

• Sharecropping arose because war-weakened landowners could not impose the labour settlement they wanted, in both countries. (p. 2)

  sharecropping represented something of a reluctant concession to the reality that neither landlord nor tenant could achieve their desired goals

• Highveld sharecropping grew from mining-driven grain demand, as white farmers lacked labour, implements and oxen. (p. 9)

  Allowing black farm families to settle on white-owned land, in exchange for a share of the harvest, brought the landowner the labour force that he desperately needed for his fields

• The South African War left white landholders more dependent on black producers (Keegan). (p. 9)

  most white landholders came out of the war more vulnerable and dependent on black productive enterprise than before

• Black tenants probably produced most Highveld grain in the early twentieth century. (p. 10)

  It is quite possible that the bulk of grain produced on the arable Highveld in the early twentieth century

• The 1913 Natives Land Act attacked sharecropping, cattle holdings and grazing, driving an exodus from white farms. (p. 11)

  The Act proscribed sharecropping in the Free State and attempted to turn sharecroppers from peasants into wage labourers and labour tenants.

• The state backed white agriculture with credit, infrastructure, marketing controls and labour-supply intervention. (p. 12)

  not only for subsidies, tax relief, tariff protection, credit, price stabilisation, marketing controls and training, but also for large-scale intervention in the supply, distribution and retention of labour

• The 1913 Act laid foundations for later homeland policy and its enforcement was uneven. (p. 13)

  it also laid the foundation for what would later become the homeland policies of apartheid

• The Land Act was weakly enforced, and sharecropping persisted illegally, but the Act gave farmers a legal framework to reshape tenancy. (p. 20)

  Sharecropping, concluded Keegan, 'was not yet suppressed; it was transformed', and nothing in the countryside was ever quite the same again.

• In the US South, Redemption reasserted landlord control, redefining croppers as wage labourers and restricting credit and common rights. (p. 18)

  Southern courts revised the legal status of sharecroppers, effectively transforming the cropper into a wage labourer with no legitimate claim to ownership of crops grown

• Key differences are duration and political access: Highveld sharecropping was brief, and South African peasants lacked Reconstruction-style political participation. (p. 22)

  the peasant farmers of the South African Highveld never had the chance to engage with politics in the way that the freedpeople of the South