Land, Chiefs, Mining. Andrew Manson

communities in the bushveld, missionaries became a necessary precondition for independent political and economic activity, and Moiloa consequently turned his thoughts to this soon after the expulsion of the LMS. Of course, it entailed making compromises. In return for their support, missionaries expected that African dikgosi would create the right circumstances for successful proselytising and conversion to Christianity. Most active of the missionary societies in the region was the Hermannsburg Mission Society (HMS). After the expulsion of the LMS from the Transvaal, the authorities sought missionaries who would encourage their converts not to challenge the supremacy of the Transvaal state. In 1858 the baKwena paramount Setshele had asked the South African Republic to assist him in finding missionaries for his followers in Botswana and President MW Pretorius had no doubts about approaching the Hanoverian mission in Natal. ‘In their schools,’ he wrote, ‘they concentrate on encouraging the barbarians to work and on giving them a sound conception of the secular order of affairs before instructing them in the divine.’³¹ The HMS thus revealed little of the humanitarian zeal displayed by many of the LMS missionaries. As one of them explained to the Reverend John Mackenzie of the LMS, ‘We Hermannsburgers are so deficient as politicians that we cannot dispute the supremacy of the South African Republic over the Bechuana tribes.’³² Nevertheless, the HMS missions were generally established at the request of the African population, and by not antagonising the state authorities they were generally left undisturbed to serve their communities.

      THE HERMANNSBURG MISSION SOCIETY

      In addition to ministering to the baHurutshe and baFokeng, the HMS also worked among the baKwena-ba-Magopa at Bethanie, where the Reverend W Behrens settled in 1864. Before the turn of the century, the HMS also founded stations among the baPhalane in the Pilanesberg district (Kroondal), the baPhiring in Mabaalstad (Emmaus), at Pella among the baKwena ba Modimosana, and among the oorlams people in Rustenburg town. Thus, with the notable exception of the baKgatla-ba-Kgafela, the HMS had a monopoly over missionary work among the African population in the bushveld during the nineteenth century.

      Some time near the end of 1858 Moiloa requested the HMS missionaries then with the Bakwena at Diteyane in Botswana to visit him, and three missionaries led by Reverend Ferdinand Zimmermann came over to Dinokana. They were quick to spot the good agricultural potential of Moiloa’s location. Moiloa offered them a large site on which they could establish a mission. Zimmermann obtained the permission of the SAR authorities to work among the baHurutshe and soon after the establishment of the mission Zimmermann lived up to Moiloa’s expectations of him as an intermediary with the SAR authorities by requesting guns and ammunition for Moiloa’s people to hunt with and to protect their cattle from wild animals.³³

      The Tswana merafe of the north-west highveld generally welcomed missionaries for the range of services they could offer; they were useful, for example, as emissaries and diplomatic agents for the dikgosi or their representatives, and introduced their converts in particular to new economic methods and concepts – in particular that of land ownership. Their influence was not limited to the realm of the political economy however: they largely dismissed African cultural practices and beliefs and encouraged Africans to embrace an awareness of the ideas and cultural beliefs of Europeans. They therefore provided a window into the world and the consciousness of the makgowa (Europeans). The significant leaders, including Moiloa, initially resisted conversion to Christianity, probably because it would have risked alienating powerful traditionalists within their communities but, nevertheless, relations between him and the missionaries were cordial. Moiloa encouraged children to attend the mission school and was considered by Ferdinand Jensen, a Dane from Schleswig-Holstein who assumed duty after Zimmermann, to be ‘an excellent man, not only as a ruler but in the way he aids the spread of Christianity … It is a joy to be a missionary to him because he respects his teachers in all ways and protects them.’³⁴ Although, in time, most of the ruling families became converts, throughout his life Moiloa refused to accept conversion. He was thus able to keep a foot in the camps of both the traditionalists and the Christian converts in his society. Possibly it was because of his reluctance to fully embrace Christianity that the missionaries, even though they wrote glowing reports about Moiloa, were slow to make inroads among the people they sought to convert. It took Jensen a decade to convert 110 of the baHurutshe (the number of conversions did, however, pick up pace in the last decade of the century).

      FIGURE 2: Moiloa with missionary Ferdinand Jensen c. 1865 (the only known photo of Moiloa II)

       Source: BaHurutshe Tribal Office, Dinokana

      It was the missionaries’ role in land acquisition in the western Transvaal that was to leave a more permanent and, for most African communities, more important mark. Most historians have remarked on how land purchases in the north-western Transvaal were an important way in which Africans resisted being drawn into wage labour and retained a hold over land when others were losing it.³⁵ Although the law strictly forbade Africans from purchasing land and holding title to it they could get around this legislation by purchasing land in the name of the missionary, who held it in ‘trust’ for the chiefdom. Moiloa first acquired land in 1867, with missionary intervention, purchasing two farms next to the baHurutshe location called Dam van Matsego and Matjesvallei. The latter was bought from a well known hunter in the district, Marthinus Swart, for a hundred head of cattle, in apparent contravention of a Volksraad resolution, so it is not clear if this was a legally approved transaction – Moiloa tried in 1874 to get a binding deed of sale from President Burgers but gained nothing before his death. Moiloa also entered into grazing agreements with some of the surrounding Boers, on the farms Welbedacht, Nooitgedacht, Tweefontein and Stinkhoutboom, and he gained access to cattle posts and arable land in Ngwaketse territory. The baHurutshe did not engage in land acquisition on the scale that some other merafe did, in particular the baFokeng, but this can be attributed to the fact that Moiloa’s location was quite extensive and they enjoyed ensured tenure to it (see Map 7).

      Moiloa was an astute politician. On the one hand, he obeyed the Boers and satisfied their demands; on the other hand, in return, he insisted on maintaining a degree of independence. This policy helped to create the kind of stability needed for economic security. The arrival of the trekkers heralded the expansion of a mercantile economy in the western Transvaal hinterland, centred first on hunting and trading in captives and then on land acquisition. By the mid-1850s the extension of the trade frontier in the bushveld region occurred along two routes: one was from Potchefstroom (the commercial capital of the western Transvaal until the last decades of the century) through to Rustenburg; the other along the hunters, missionaries and traders ‘road to the north’ through Vryburg, Kanye (the baNgwaketse capital from 1852), to Shoshong and then to Ngamiland and Barotseland. A quite popular deviation was to go via Zeerust and up the Ngotwane River to Mochudi in modern Botswana. This meant that a number of mainly English traders such as Chapman, Anderson, Baldwin and Cumming passed through the Hurutshe capital at Dinokana.

      In addition, many Boers, acting as middlemen for various agencies in the Transvaal, came to Dinokana to purchase hides, livestock or feathers. Zeerust in 1867 was described as ‘a new village in the vicinity of friendly [native] tribes who live in peace and carry on an extensive trade in ivory, ostrich feathers, etc.’³⁶ The supply of ‘exportable produce’ from the Marico and Potchefstroom districts was so great that it drew traders from the Cape and Orange Free State, leading the Transvaal Argus to complain about the presence of ‘colonial sharks hovering about our borders’.³⁷ The long-held view that the Boers were an isolated community clinging to a subsistence economy has in recent times been exposed as a fallacy³⁸ – as the activities of the Marico Boers disclose, they were well aware of the commercial potential of southern Africa’s interior and were linked to longdistance markets. However, in the western Transvaal the once lucrative ivory and ostrich-feather trades declined as the century wore on, and the Boers were unable to command good prices for their products at the colonial markets of the Transvaal and the Cape. The Boers did, however, stimulate trade and commerce among the western Tswana groups such as the baHurutshe.

      The extent