Peasants, historians, and gender: A South African case study revisited, 1850-1886

A gender revolution allegedly occurred in the British Cape Colony (and Sout h Africa at large) in the nineteenth century. African patriarchs, tradition ally pastoralists, took over women's agricultural work, adopted Victorian g ender attributes, and became prosperous peasants (nicknamed "black English" ). Scholars have accepted the plausibility of these seismic shifts in mascu linity, postulated in Colin Bundy's classic, The Rise & Fall of the South A frican Peasantry. I re-examine them, for Bundy's "Case Study" of Herschel, acclaimed as one of the regions that best fits his thesis. This Case Study omits women, who were the typical peasant producers. It marginalizes men fa iling to conform to bourgeois Victorian gender norms. It misrepresents clas s formation, causation, periodization, and peasant well-being. It misdates proletarianization by at least three decades. The zenith of commodity produ ction is misdated by at least half a century. A labor reservoir characteriz ed by severe subsistence problems is represented as a prosperous peasantry. Bundy postulates that patriarchs "rose" into women's work and colonial mas culine scripts in response to favorable conditions; I argue instead that yo unger men "fell" into these domains in response to disasters. A silent gend er bias-towards black Englishmen, against African women-had a marked impact on Bundy's analysis of class formation. The purpose of this article is to interrogate this silence and to show how it has warped a classic text.