Land ownership remains an important and contested issue in contemporary South African politics. Drawing inspiration from Hernando de Soto’s work, especially his book, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (2000), which sees equitable and private land ownership as a key factor for economic growth and development, this thesis details South Africa’s own landed past in order to better understand its political present. Its central research question asks: What role did South Africa’s land and agricultural policies from 1860-1920 play in the country’s unequal development over time? This thesis traces historical transitions in land ownership patterns from the four weak and underdeveloped settler colonies (The Cape Colony, Natal, Orange Free State and the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek) to the rapidly industrialising, but racialised, South African state and the eventual emergence of white commercial farming by 1920. The thesis engages with a long heritage of South African historical writing on political economy as a central methodology, from its early liberal roots with W.M. Macmillan’s writings on rural poverty in the 1920s, to more radical, neo-Marxist writings of the 1970s and 1980s. This thesis argues that the racialised land and labour policies from 1860-1920 produced a white oligarchy of landowners, which led to an unequal distribution of wealth over time and following De Soto, therefore inhibited economic growth and development. The thesis ultimately speaks to the validity of De Soto’s work, as well as the importance of land and agricultural policies in South Africa today. / Dissertation (MScoSci (History))--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. / Historical and Heritage Studies / MSocSci (History) / Unrestricted

Political cartoons as headline representation are in effect a combination of artistic licence and a critical version of the truth. Linley Sambourne and Jean Veber’s 1901 cartoons on the Boer War for Punch and L’Assiette au Beurre create tensions and dialectic not only on British and French feeling about foreign policy in South Africa and at home, but also indicate fine points on each publication’s editorial remit. This comparative study is a mirroring synthesis of these approaches that sets the Boer War forty five cartoons in context. Whereas Punch’s cartoons are set within a text layout and L’Assiette’s are the text themselves, both transmit set ideas on The Boer War as ‘sight bite’ news and opinion pieces. Veber’s cartoons offered swift knee-jerk reactions against the ruling elite and the horrors of British cruelty toward Boer prisoners as coverage of the war escalated in 1901. His extreme capturing of the zeitgeist followed the magazine’s editorial bent, but they also reflected his brave counter-hegemonic stance towards a French government seeking an alliance with its British counterpart. With this in mind, Antonio Gramsci’s theory on hegemony as applied to journalism allows the scholar to look at the media from a cultural perspective. This focus is used to show cartoons as representative of conflicts in the fight for power, but this time publicly conveyed to the readership. Thus, types of truth enhancements in each set of cartoons indicate the cartoonists’ respective entrenchment with, or detachment from, Imperial institutions, thereby signalling emerging attempts of the attitudinal persuasion of the reader toward Punch or L’Assiette’s political leanings. The inclusion of political cartoons in editorial pages was part of the cult of visual attention-grabbing news values that had become professionalised, industrialised and popularised by the early Twentieth Century. Cartoons can be decoded using Ernst Gombrich’s six-point filter in order to identify the cartoonist’s method of compressing messages about people and events. A publication’s politics are reflected in the telescoping of exaggerated opinions – an effective way to pass on an authoritatively saturated message to the readership. Gombrich recognised the power of conveying messages to the audience through seemingly incongruous placement of figures in odd situations within cartoons. His methodology acts as visual shorthand for images designed to elicit a desired response to a reported situation as the publication saw it. In the context of the history of journalism, his psychologically analytical approach is appropriate in the appreciation of cartoons’ extremes, often made more acute by the partisan politics of war.