Memorandum on the problem of farm labour (1937)

Abstract

In 1937, Max Gluckman submitted a memorandum to a commission of inquiry into the shortage of farm labour in South Africa. In the memorandum, he criticised the presumption that the government should induce African male migrants from the reserves to work on white-owned farms and sugar plantations as “wrong”. Gluckman observed that African men preferred more prestigious and better paid work in the mines and towns. Rather than increase the number of farm workers, he recommended that farm owners improve the conditions and productivity of labour tenants already resident in these farms. This required providing better nutrition and health care, more courteous treatment, the efficient coordination of labour and mechanisation. This intervention had no impact on the Commission’s report, and Gluckman’s outspokenness might well have contributed to the Native Affairs Department’s decision to revoke their permission for him to do further fieldwork in Zululand. This article reproduces the memorandum with only minor editorial corrections. In the introduction, Niehaus outlines the historical context in which Gluckman wrote the memorandum and shows how it provides crucial insights into his early career and his later pessimism about the prospects for applied anthropology.