Mines,Minstrels,and Masculinity: Race,Class,Gender,and the Formation of the South African Working Class,1870–1900

Abstract

This paper argues that the discovery of diamonds in South Africa in the late nineteenth century facilitated the rapid growth of Kimberley as an urban center where black and white males were forced into close and unpredictable proximity, and where they forged relationships that alternated between mutual cooperation and dependence and fierce rivalry and competition. The rapidity with which economic relations changed threw conventional class and social relationships into upheaval and resulted in a tremendous amount of class-based anxiety and insecurity on the part of European males. These anxieties and insecurities were not only caused by the presence of black men as sources of economic competition but were also projected onto them in the form of fantasies about hyper-sentient black male bodies. The figure of the “Dandy,” a trope from the American blackface minstrelsy tradition, became a cultural symbol for expressing and managing class and race insecurity.