From Plough to Entrepreneurship

A History of African Entrepreneurs in Evaton 1905-1960s

by Vusumuzi R. Kumalo

From Plough to Entrepreneurship is motivated largely by
the fact that Africans were deprived of economic and political autonomy
by white government in South Africa. This marginalisation lies in the
complex and interconnected processes of displacement and dispossession
by which Africans were first dispossessed of their own land; then
deprived of independent productive opportunities. The increasing
scarcity of land as scarce commodity and African land ownership in
Evaton, best explains the history of African local economic
independence. For the local residents, land possession in Evaton
provided a space where a moral economy that fostered racial pride and
solidarity was forged. This richly sourced monograph develops the
logical explanation that sticks together all forces that constrained
Africans to give up labour to an industrial economy in Evaton. It
provides the reader and student of racialised inequalities in South
Africa with an understanding steeped in historical ethnography on how
local Africans struggled for economic independence, and how whatever
independence their struggles yielded, changed over time in Evaton.

£36.00

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About the author

Vusumuzi R. Kumalo

Vusumuzi R. Kumalo is a senior lecturer in history at Nelson Mandela
University in Port Elisabeth, South Africa. He completed his PhD on the
history of independent black education in the early- to mid-twentieth
century at the University of the Witwatersrand. His research interests
include African economic independence, African independent education and
African literature. Kumalo’s publications include an annotated version
of the Familiarity Is the Kingdom of the Lost (Ohio University Press,
2020).