The movement of the Dutch pioneers northward was not a uniform process; Afrikaner migrants navigated their movement amid African social formations using various tactics, including negotiations, warfare, and enslavement. Some treks ended in ruin, with all who participated meeting their ends.29 While advanced military technology was central to the success of the Afrikaner migrants in their movement northward, so too was an ability to leverage internal fissures within African societies to the benefit of mobile settler populations. The diverse outcomes reached by different voortrekker groups underscores the contingency of these forays into the South African hinterland. While the eventual outcome of the treks has become accepted history, one must not fall prey to the bias of presentism in analyzing the movement of European colonial settlers northward.
As the northern and central areas of present-day South Africa were settled by Dutch voortrekkers, a multipolar colonial arrangement came into focus. African social formations had been transformed and displaced by a combination of European expansion, slavery, colonial conflict, and warfare emanating from the Zulu and Matabele Kingdoms in the east and north, respectively. British control over the southern reaches of the African continent had expanded from the Cape Colony eastward, with Natal now an established British territory. A war with the Zulu Kingdom on South Africa’s eastern coast would also see British influence on the region expand. However, the accords that maintained an uneasy détente between the British Empire and Afrikaner republics would not hold for long. The discovery of vast diamond and gold deposits in South Africa’s northern reaches would irrevocably shift the balance of power in the region.
Gold, Settler Conflict, and African Resistance
The “scramble for Africa” among European colonial powers and the uncovering of South Africa’s vast mineral wealth instigated British imperial expansion and fomented further conflict between European settlers and African social formations. After an extended period of conflict that enveloped the lives of noncombatants, the British Empire and Afrikaner republics reached a compromise that unified white rule and expropriated land and other resources from African peoples. The transition from a multipolar colonial period to unified white rule set into motion political, economic, and institutional dynamics that expanded colonial pass laws, racial segregation, and the power of traditional authorities across rural South Africa. African peoples continued to resist the expansion of white political and economic authority through the vectors of armed conflict and political activism.
The detection of vast mineral deposits in the northern areas of the region led to profound changes. An immense concentration of diamond reserves was uncovered in the settlement of Kimberley, located in the Cape Colony’s northern region. The discovery led fortune seekers from around the world to converge on the South African north, initiating an extractive economy that would be largely controlled by British interests. As the scope of South Africa’s mineral wealth became clear, the British sought to further their interests in the region, annexing Botswana, then known as Bechuanaland, in 1885. However, the decisive event for South Africa’s historical trajectory was the declaration of British control over the Vaal Republic in 1877. While the British had acknowledged the political autonomy of both Afrikaner republics in 1852, their relationship with the northern colonial settlements was characterized by intermittent conflict. British efforts to subsume the northern Afrikaner republics occurred alongside war with the Zulu Kingdom (1879), underscoring the colonial violence that emanated from British imperialism and settlement.
The multipolar context within which the colonial wars of the late nineteenth century unfolded inexorably shifted with the discovery of substantial gold deposits in the Vaal Republic. Between 1884 and 1886, a series of mining expeditions uncovered gold in the Witwatersrand area of contemporary Johannesburg. The subsequent gold rush led to an influx of foreign miners in the area, and Johannesburg was established as the “city of gold.” The British initially engaged in conflict with the Vaal Republic from 1880 to 1881, but the commandos of the Afrikaner republic successfully engaged in guerilla warfare to undermine the British incursion. However, the discovery of gold and the threat of German and Portuguese regional claims precipitated the British initiation of the South African War (1899–1902). After the British failed in an attempt to spur an uprising against the leadership of the Vaal Republic in 1895, the commandos of the Afrikaner states attacked British-held areas across Southern Africa in 1899. Afterward, the Afrikaner commandos dispersed back into society, reverting to the guerilla tactics that had secured victory during the previous British invasion. However, this time British military commanders employed a new tactic to undermine Afrikaner resistance: concentration camps. Employing a scorched-earth policy, the British forcibly relocated the Afrikaner population into concentration camps, leading to the deaths of approximately twenty-six thousand women and children, primarily due to infectious disease, malnutrition, and lack of access to medical care.
The aftermath of the South African War saw the Afrikaner republics annexed and incorporated into British colonial territory, along with the continued expansion of South Africa’s mining industry. British colonial authorities had long worked to establish a wage-labor system in Southern Africa, with the imposition of hut taxes payable only in hard currency a central intervention in this regard. But it was a pathogen, the rinderpest virus, which led many black South Africans to seek work at the mines or commercial farms controlled by white settlers.
Nearly a half century after the Xhosa cattle killings, a rinderpest outbreak during the 1890s devastated cattle populations across Southern Africa, undermining social reproduction and the subsistence agriculture most African social formations depended on in lieu of wage labor.30 As black South African men were drawn into the wage-labor sector by the impact of rinderpest and the continued European encroachment on African land, traditional authorities emerged as important intermediaries for a transforming colonial state and economy.
As colonial war waned and the colonial economy grew, the intermediary role of traditional authorities between the colonial state and rural black South African communities was formalized. The establishment of rural reserves, where traditional law governed social relations, formalized European settlement areas and reinforced the power of traditional lineages. As tradition was codified into law, women’s formal political roles waned, reflecting European conceptions of political institutions and gender hierarchies. Traditional elites, as intermediary political actors, also buttressed the growth of wage labor by serving as labor brokers for the mines, securing the participation of black South African men in the workforce on contracts ranging from six to nine months.31 The formalization of “native reserves” also produced stratification within the rural black South African population, as land and resources allocated within these sociospatial enclosures reflected political authority, with traditional authorities garnering the lion’s share. Poor and working-class South African families crowded into huts amid the pressure generated by the appropriation of land by traditional elites within the reserves and the necessity of paying hut taxes. The spatial densification and material deprivation associated with the rural reserves facilitated the spread of deadly pathogens, most notably tuberculosis.32
In concert with traditional authorities, the South African mining industry constructed a migrant-labor system that drew from the black South African population and other Southern African countries such as Mozambique, Lesotho, and Swaziland (First 1977, 1983). A circular pattern of labor migration was established during the colonial period as black male South African mine workers oscillated between contracted periods of labor in the mines and urban areas and their ethnically designated areas of residence in the rural reserves.33 Mine workers were housed in compounds, often divided according to ethnicity,