Building on earlier political, economic, and institutional dynamics, the apartheid era led to intensified racial segregation, state violence toward black South Africans, and “separate development.” However, those directing apartheid never completed their aim of “ordering” black urban and rural spaces in South Africa (Posel 1991). While traditional leaders exerting political authority in rural Bantustans may have functioned as “decentralized despots,” they also highlighted the limited reach of the South African state (Mamdani 1996). Recurrent forms of self-governance emerged intermittently in black urban areas: the history of the Soweto and Alexandra townships show how a lack of legitimate and representative political institutions led to political self-organization. The anti-apartheid movement also had urban roots, considering the complicity of rural traditional leaders with the apartheid state. Anti-apartheid activists built on the political principles developed by black urban social formations that served as the foundation for the Mass Democratic Movement in the 1980s that aimed to end apartheid and, subsequently, the South African HIV/AIDS movement.
Tracing the political principles of the anti-apartheid movement to the HIV/AIDS movement, I take a multipolar approach to South African history, showing how the interaction between linked but distinct social formations produced unequal health effects that adversely affected nonwhite populations. But in order to discuss the historical context for the emergence of the world’s largest HIV/AIDS epidemic, I first outline how particular populations came to embody inequality. In addition, understanding how the HIV/AIDS movement transformed the state to sustain the lives of historically marginalized people entails understanding the roots and principles of political resistance across South African history.
Precolonial Social Formations, Contact, and Colonization
As others have emphasized, the peoples of the world have histories that do not begin—or end—with European contact and colonization (Asad 1973). The history of Southern Africa is no different. Prior to European contact, Southern Africa was populated by indigenous social formations that had a diverse array of political, economic, and cultural practices.2 Colonial settlement across the region was met with resistance, which continued until black South Africans liberated themselves from apartheid. The dualistic nature of colonization, with British and Dutch settlers bringing different modes of political, economic, and cultural organization, produced divergent regional dynamics, but these regional differences were eventually subsumed under the aegis of unified white rule.
Initially, European explorers articulated with social formations located along the Southern African coast. Portuguese explorers and Dutch settlers first came into contact with the Khoisan, known to settlers as Hottentots and Bushmen, who descended from nomadic hunter-gatherers and pastoralists from across Southern Africa.3 Cape Town’s role as a refueling hub for European maritime trade led to Dutch enslavement of Khoisan people to support agricultural production and expand colonial trade, undermining life outcomes and social reproduction for South Africa’s first people.4 The violence of colonization extended beyond the domain of economic production, as Dutch settlers, who were predominantly men, took Khoisan women as sexual partners during the early colonial period.5 The forcible intermixing of people, culture, and language transformed the Dutch settler language of Afrikaans, among other cultural shifts.6 Nevertheless, the Khoisan did not passively accept the violence of colonization. Raids, slave rebellions, and migration were responses to the violent expansion of European settlements. Many Khoisan people dispersed northward, but their freedom from European settlers would be short lived.
Toward the central and eastern stretches of South Africa’s coast, European explorers and settlers came into contact with Xhosa people who were part of a larger migration of Bantu-speaking peoples from Central Africa.7 Part of the group of Nguni-language speakers, the ancestors of the Xhosa people traveled from the Great Lakes region of the continent southward, eventually arriving in present-day South Africa. In contrast to Khoisan hunter-gatherers, the Nguni-speaking groups brought with them a society centered on cattle herding and iron technologies. Organized into autonomous but interconnected kingships, the Xhosa displaced the Khoisan as they moved into and settled central and eastern areas of present-day South Africa.8 In doing so, Xhosa culture was transformed, with key linguistic features adopted from the Khoisan, such as the characteristic Khoisan clicks. Notably, the word “Xhosa” roughly translates to “enemy” in the South African Khoisan dialect. European settler contact with the Xhosa was marked by armed conflict over land and resources, mirroring a similar pattern for indigenous social formations across Southern Africa.
On South Africa’s eastern coast, Portuguese explorers and settler populations consisting of Dutch and British colonists came into contact with the Zulu Kingdom. The Zulu and Xhosa peoples shared several key cultural characteristics, including ancestral roots in the Nguni migration from central Africa, the displacement of Khoisan hunter-gatherers, linguistic and cultural influence from South Africa’s first people, and sustained conflict with European settler populations. The Zulu polity unified autonomous but linked kingships under the leadership of King Shaka, the figure for whom they are best known. From the outset of Afrikaner and British settlement, the Zulu Kingdom responded with considerable military force to European colonization.9 However, the Zulu polity was made up of regional kingships, where aspirant leaders negotiated with—and at times sided with—European settlers to maximize their power. The actions of regional power brokers and/or rival factions were central to the subsequent movement of European settlers into the Southern African hinterland, a fact that undermines simplistic narratives of colonization and conquest.
The movement of Europeans inland was enabled by colonial war, and settlement contributed to changes in sociopolitical organization that reverberated across the region. Central to the settlement of South Africa’s interior was conflict between British and Dutch colonists in the Cape Colony, which encompassed the present-day Western, Eastern, and Northern Cape Provinces. In repossessing the Cape Colony in 1806, the British crafted an alliance with the Dutch elite based on shared political and economic interests, such as the continued function of Cape Town as a port of supply for mercantile trade. Political compromise led to the continuation of established colonial practices, such as the utilization of a pass system for black South Africans. Since the 1760s, a pass system had been used to distinguish between enslaved and free Africans, whereby those engaged in wage labor were required to present passes provided by employers to prove their freedom (Lester 1996, 24). The British adoption of the pass system maintained a racially defined labor structure established during early Afrikaner rule.10
In adapting to local conditions, British colonial administration secured the support of Dutch farmers on the frontier who supported mercantile trade. There, Dutch settler social organization was associated with decentralized political and legal authority. Within each district (drostdy), a field cornet (veldkornet) combined the roles of district administrator, judge, and militia leader.11 The field cornet embodied, both de jure and de facto, colonial authority and law in rural areas under Dutch political control. While British legal and institutional norms were established in urban areas, rural areas maintained social order based on the practices developed by Dutch colonial settlers.12 One effect of British support for Dutch landholders was to uphold and extend their “labor-securing practices,” which in practical terms meant the conquest and enslavement of African people.13
The alliance between the British colonial state and the Dutch farming sector would not last long. The Cape Colony’s economic dependence on slave labor undermined the political and economic ties that bound two variants of European colonial settlement. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 banned slavery across the British Empire, and the formal end of slavery in 1834 undermined the farming sector across the Cape Colony.14 Dutch landholders sold their properties and headed north in search of farmland outside of British colonial oversight, producing a mass exodus of Dutch farming families. The migration of Dutch settlers to the areas north of the Orange River, known as the Great Trek,