Overview

How can we account for the apparent increase in ethnic violence across the globe? Donald L. Donham develops a methodology for understanding violence that shows why this question needs to be recast. He examines an incident that occurred at a South African gold mine at the moment of the 1994 elections that brought apartheid to a close. Black workers ganged up on the Zulus among them, killing two and injuring many more. While nearly everyone came to characterize the conflict as ""ethnic,"" Donham argues that heightened ethnic identity was more an outcome of the violence than its cause. Based on his careful reconstruction of events, he contends that the violence was not motivated by hatred of an ethnic other. It emerged, rather, in ironic ways, as capitalist managers gave up apartheid tactics and as black union activists took up strategies that departed from their stated values. National liberation, as it actually occurred, was gritty, contradictory, and incomplete. Given unusual access to the mine, Donham comes to this conclusion based on participant observation, review of extensive records, and interviews conducted over the course of a decade. Violence in a Time of Liberation is a kind of murder mystery that reveals not only who did it but also the ways that narratives of violence, taken up by various media, create ethnic violence after the fact.

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Taking off from a single episode, Donald L. Donham provides readers with a rich account that makes an important point: ethnic identification is often more the consequence of violence than the cause. Since people involved may, in retrospect, interpret an event using ethnic categories, understanding the complexity of the processes leading up to violence requires peeling back layers of backward projection and a reconstruction of the flow of events, tasks Donham performs here with sensitivity and insight. Frederick Cooper, author of Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History Violence in a Time of Liberation is an absorbing and exceptionally clear-sighted analysis of violence and ethnic consciousness in South Africa. Focused on a specific set of events that occurred at a gold mine in the mid-1990s, Donald L. Donham brings vivid ethnographic description and analysis to bear on some of the thorniest questions faced by social analysts of violence. His book is lucidly written and cunningly constructed, with a substantial narrative pull. It is a very significant contribution both to scholarly understandings of contemporary South African society and to theoretical debates around ethnic violence. James Ferguson, author of Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order

Author Information

Donald L. Donham is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution; History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology; and Work and Power in Maale, Ethiopia.

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