15.HC Botha, John Fairburn in South Africa (Cape Town: Historical Publication Society, 1984), 20–23; JR Wahl (ed.), Thomas Pringle in South Africa 1820–1826 (Cape Town: Longman Southern Africa, 1970), Chapter 5.
16.Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry to Earl Bathurst upon the complaints of Mr Lancelot Cooke, 22 July 1825 in RCC XXII, ed. Theal, 40, 211–213; New Monthly Magazine, July 1827, 211–212; Z Laidlaw, ‘Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40.5 (2012), 759.
17.Exodus 21:2 (King James): ‘If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.’
18.P Machado, ‘A Forgotten Corner of the Indian Ocean: Gujerati Merchants, Portuguese India and the Mozambique Slave Trade, 1730–1830’, Slavery and Abolition 24.2 (2003), 25; P Harries, ‘Slavery, Social Incorporation, and Surplus Extraction: The Nature of Free and Unfree Labor in South-East Africa’, Journal of African History 22 (1981), 314–316.
19.Slave Trade Data Base, www.slavevoyages.org.
20.Harries, ‘Negotiating Abolition’, 581–582.
21.R Pélissier, Naissance du Mozambique: Résistance et Révoltes Anticoloniales (1854–1918) (Orgeval: Éditions Pélissier, 1984), vol 1, 35, 85–86.
22.J Capela, ‘Mozambique and Brazil: Cultural and Political Interferences through the Slave Trade’, in Africa and America: Interconnections During the Slave Trade, ed. J Curto and R Soulodre-La France (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005), 243–258.
23.P Harries, ‘The Hobgoblins of the Middle Passage: The Cape and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade’, in The End of Slavery in Africa and the Americas: A Comparative Approach, ed. U Schmieder, K Füllberg-Stolberg and M Zeuske (Berlin: LIT, 2011), 27–50; M Schuler, ‘Alas, Alas, Kongo’: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); ME Thomas, Jamaica and Voluntary Laborers from Africa 1840–1865 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1974).
24.Proclamation of 13 December 1839 in Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 3 January 1840; CC Saunders, ‘Liberated Africans in Cape Colony in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 18.2 (1985), 235.
25.WL Mathieson, Great Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839–1865 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929), 47–48; H Temperley, British Antislavery 1833–1870 (London: Longman, 1972), Chapters 3 and 4; P Hill, Fifty Days on Board a Slave Vessel in the Mozambique Channel, April and May 1843 (London: John Murray, 1844).
26.TNA, Foreign Office (FO) 312/17, Cape Town mixed commission judges to Earl Russel, 15 May, 18 and 20 September 1862; L McLeod, Travels in Eastern Africa (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1860), vol 1, 117, 188–189, 194–200, 252, 331–332.
27. Boletim Oficial de Moçambique 23 (7 June 1862) and 44 (5 December 1862).
28.House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 1865 (3503), correspondence with British Commissioners at the Cape of Good Hope, 1864, 70.
29.Natal Government Notice 177, 1873; NA (Natal Archives), Government House (GH) 59.9, Barkly to HM Consul, Zanzibar 9 July 1873 and consul to Barkly, 25 August 1873 in Kimberley to Pine, 26 January 1874. NA, Indian Immigration (II), 1/2. 3590/76, annotation of colonial secretary, 30 December 1876. On this ‘Zanzibari’ community at Durban, see P Kaarsholm, ‘“Diaspora or Transnational Citizens?” Indian Ocean Networks and Changing Multiculturalisms in South Africa’, Social Dynamics 38.2 (2012), 454–466.
30.NA, Secretary for Native Affairs (SNA) 1/1/27, Protector of Immigrants, ‘Memo’, 18 January 1876; Supt Police to SNA, 2 March 1876. See also NA.II 482/75; II 496/75.
31.NA II 1/3 R509/77, Bennet to Protector of Immigrants, 28 November 1877; George Stevens to the Cape of Good Hope Labour Commission 1893 (G.3993), 62.
32.NA GH 55, Joseph Sturge to Hubert, 23 April 1872 in Kimberley to Natal Governor, 4 May 1872; memorandum in Murdoch to Hubert, 4 May 1872.
33.NA GH 845, Colonial Secretary to Protector of Immigrants, 11 September 1878.
34.Portuguese Colonial Archives, Lisbon (AHU), Correspondence of the Mozambican Governor, pasta 32, Curadoria Geral dos Individuous sujeitos a tutella publica to Governor, 17 August, 1877; Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lisbon, English Legation in Portugal, RB Morier to Marquis de Avila, 13 March and 24 April 1877.
35.V Schloecher, Restauration de la Traite des Noirs à Natal (Paris: Brière, 1877), 3.
36.P Harries, ‘Mozbiekers: The History of an African Immigrant Community in the Western Cape: 1877–1881’, in Collected Seminar Papers, Cape Town History Workshop, University of Cape Town, 1979.
37.Harries, ‘Slavery, Social Incorporation’, 324–325.
38.NA II 1/5 502/79, Assistant Protector of Immigrants to Colonial Secretary, 28 May 1879, annotation of attorney general, 29 May 1879.
39.George Stevens and ML Neethling to the Cape of Good Hope Labour Commission 1893 (G.3993), 61–62.
40.P Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2007), 165–166.
41.Swiss Mission Archives, Lausanne 497/E, P Berthoud to Leresche, 11 October 1888; 513/A, Grandjean to Leresche, 21 August 1893.
42.On Mashaba, see Harries, Butterflies, 90, 171–172, 187–188, 263–264. On Mizeki, see D Ferrant, Mashonaland Martyr: Bernard Mizeki and the Pioneer Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 50–53, 63; GWH Knight-Bruce, Memories of Mashonaland (London: Edward Arnold, 1895), 90–91, 170–171; T Ranger, ‘Taking Hold of the Land: Holy Places and Pilgrimages in Twentieth-Century Zimbabwe’, Past and Present 117 (1987), 167, 177, 187–193.
43.H St George, ‘A Lay Apostle of the Nineteenth Century: Saturnino do Valle; Pioneer of Zulu Catholicism’, Études Oblates 25 (1966), 135–152.
CHAPTER 3
Walking 2 000 Kilometres to Work and Back: The Wandering Bassuto by Carl Richter
Peter Delius
Large-scale and widespread labour migration is often associated with (and explained by) the mineral revolution in South Africa. But long before the creation of the insatiable appetite for black labour, as a result of the growth of the diamond fields in the 1870s, thousands of men from a wide range of societies in what was then the Transvaal and beyond travelled vast distances to seek work in the Cape and Natal. In the 1860s, their main destination was the Eastern Cape – especially Port Elizabeth – which was in the grip of a boom in wool production and export, but the Natal sugar plantations were also an important magnet for migrants. The migrants were largely young men and the missionary Alexander Merensky commented in 1862 that, in the Pedi kingdom, it was an established practice for each youth on reaching maturity to go to the Cape Colony for one or more years. Since maturity was defined sociologically as well as biologically, this comment implies that these youths had passed through the challenging rites of initiation and had been constituted into regiments under royal authority. They usually travelled in large groups and were more than ready to defend themselves against predators and attempts to rob or press-gang them.1 It was this system that was reoriented and transformed by the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and then gold on the Rand.
Recent research has also underscored that travelling over long distances and for long periods in pursuit of income and employment was far from novel for the inhabitants of the interior. For centuries, people had travelled the long-distance trade routes that spanned the interior