THE CULTURE OF FAILURE - RACISM, VIOLENCE AND WHITE FARMING IN COLONIAL SWAZILAND

Recent geographical writing on colonial discourses, influenced by Said and his imitators, has tended to view colonial racism primarily as an imperial creation and projection. Racial discourses of the centre wer e, in fact, reworked and reformulated in local colonial settings, not just by officials, governors, missionaries and transient travellers, b ut by those who tried to put ''the native'' to work. In Swaziland, as elsewhere, the quality and intensity of racism was intimately connecte d to the changing material circumstances of the colonial economy and s truggles between colonized and colonizer. Against this backdrop, the p resent paper analyses the cultural and political implications of the f ailure of white fanning in colonial Swaziland before 1940. The paper t races the genealogy of the British vision of a white Swaziland, the ma terial conditions that compromised and subverted the implementation of that vision, and the intersection of both with white settler discours es and practices of paternalism and violence. (C) 1996 Academic Press Limited