Land, Chiefs, Mining. Andrew Manson

‘would stand by’ the baKwena during the war scare time of 1856,⁴⁶ an allegation that Viljoen was forced to investigate but later repudiated. His relations with the baNgwaketse also appeared good – he had, after all, earlier sought and received sanctuary from them. According to evidence given in 1871 to the Bloemhof Commission, which sat to arbitrate the various contested claims to the diamond fields, the cattle belonging to the respective merafe used to ‘depasture’ in each other’s territory between the winter and summer months.⁴⁷ The only nearby group with whom Moiloa did not mend relations was the baTlhaping. When the baHurutshe returned from Modimong after seeking sanctuary there during the difaqane, their kgosi, Mahura, was incensed that they had ‘defected’ to another authority by returning to what became the Transvaal. Mahura consequently dispatched a raiding party into the Transvaal which overwhelmed the unsuspecting baHurutshe killing over fifty people, and returned with a number of cattle.⁴⁸ After that Moiloa remained suspicious of the baTlhaping.

      Moiloa was also considered by the South African Republic authorities to be a major figure in the politics of the wider region. In 1870 he attended a joint meeting of the baRolong, baNgwaketse, baHurutshe and Kora leaders with, among others, President MW Pretorius, to affirm the territorial integrity of the baTswana bordering the Republic, and he was also invited to give evidence to the Bloemhof Commission.

      In July 1875 Moiloa’s death was imminent. Although he had steadfastly refused to accept conversion, even on his deathbed, in a typical gesture of compromise he instructed Jensen to lay him in a coffin upon his death and not to bury him in the seated position as was African custom. This symbolic rejection of tradition ‘stilled the large group of mourners into silence’.⁴⁹ After his death the relative stability the baHurutshe under his rule had enjoyed for nearly two decades collapsed, and a period of division, civil strife, and ultimately dispossession ensued. Moiloa, however, had done much towards creating the necessary unity required for the re-building of the baHurutshe after the turbulent years of the 1830s and 1840s, a role which earned him the accolade of the ‘mighty man with thick neck who does not walk behind the people’, in Hurutshe praise poems.⁵⁰ He was succeeded by Ikalafeng Moiloa in 1877.

      OTHER LESSER-KNOWN BATSWANA LEADERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

       Ratheo Monnakgotla

      Whereas Moiloa was perhaps the most successful of the lesser-known nineteenthcentury southern African leaders, there were others who re-established control over their communities and laid the basis for economic and political security. One was Ratheo Monnakgotla of the baKubung. Towards the end of the difaqane he seized control of the fragmented chiefdom from Lesele Mathope, who probably had a greater claim to it. Monnakgotla led his followers to Heilbron in the Free State where they remained for close to forty years. In 1880, the farm where Lesele Mathope had settled at Molotestad, north-west of Ventersdorp, was put up for sale. The two factions seem to have buried the hatchet by this time and Lesele approached Monnakgotla with a view to re-uniting the baKubung and settling as one community at Molotestad; it was to Monnakgotla, however, who actually clinched the purchase of the farm with the assistance of the Anglican missionary to the Bakubung-ba-Mathope at Molotostad, the Reverend Clulee of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Clulee was led to believe that Monnakgotla was the legitimate chief, and assisted him in negotiat ions for the purchase. Monnakgotla then returned to the western Highveld in 1881. The aggrieved Lesele, who by 1882 had fallen foul of the colonial authorities, abandoned Molotestad with a handful of supporters but some years later they, too, acquired land in the Derby district and called the settlement Mathopestad. The two baKubung groups remained independent from one another, though both were in possessi on of good farmland.¹

      NOTES

      1These events are recorded by H.L. Dugmore, ‘Land and the Struggle for Sekama: The Transformation of a Rural Community, the Bakubung of the Western Transvaal’, (B.A. Hons dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand), 1985, and in Dugmore, ‘The Rise to Power of the Mmonakgotla Family of the Bakubung,’ Africa Perspective, 1985, pp. 101–116. See also P-L. Breutz, Tribes of the Ventersdorp District, Government Ethnological Publications no. 5, (Pretoria, 1957).

      KGAMANYANE

      The baKgatla ba Kgafela did not fare as well during these years. Pilane, the kgosi during the period of upheavals, fled north to the baLaka of kgosi Mapela in the country of the baPedi. He returned in 1837 after the amaNdebele had gone, but he appears to have made a serious enemy of them, and the amaNdebele allegedly raided him again from their new abode in Matebeleland as late as 1842,¹ and according to baKgatla traditions some of his sons were taken captive. Pilane’s son Kgamanyane succeeded him in 1850 or 1851. By then the baKgatla resided as tenants at Moruleng (on the farm Saulspoort owned by Paul Kruger); in 1864, Henri Gonin, a Swiss national and member of the Buitelandse Sending (foreign mission) of the NG Kerk, was allowed by Kruger to work among them and through Gonin’s efforts the baKgatla purchased Saulspoort in 1898.² It may have looked promising for Kgamanyane’s baKgatla, but the demand for forced labour on Boer farms in the Pilanesberg had become unbearable by 1865, and some baKgatla left the district altogether.

      In addition, Kgamanyane’s relations with Kruger worsened. Early in 1870, upon Kruger’s instruction to his representative official in Saulspoort, HP Malan, a Kgatla work team was inspanned to wagons and carts containing stone boulders and forced to pull them to a dam construction site on an irrigation project of Kruger’s within Saulspoort. This caused extreme discontent and, on receiving complaints from the men, Kgamanyane agreed that they should stop working. For this ‘misdemeanour,’

      

      FIGURE 4: Kgamanyane

       Source: Mphebatho Museum, Moruleng

      FIGURE 5: Paul Kruger, Commandant 1865

       Source: National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria

      Kgamanyane was publicly flogged by Kruger at a meeting convened at Saulspoort in April of that year. In addition to continual Boer demands for Kgatla labour and the extortion of their goods and money over land,³ the flogging was the proverbial ‘last straw’. In a state of understandable anger and distress, Kgamanyane, with at least half of his people, emigrated to Mochudi in baKwena country in present-day Botswana. This was a huge blow for the baKgatla who stayed behind in the Pilanesberg, and they remained in a state of relative insecurity until the South African War, when they managed to recoup some of their losses.⁴ We follow the fortunes of the Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela during and after the war in the next chapter.

      NOTES

      1Breutz, Tribes of Rustenburg, p. 257.

      2For an account and analysis of Gonin’s life and work among the baKgatla see B. Mbenga, ‘The baKgatla baga Kgafela in Pilanesberg District of the Western Transvaal, from 1899 to 1931’, Ph.D thesis, University of South Africa, 1996, Ch2; and B. Mbenga and F. Morton, ‘The Missionary as Broker: the Rev. Henry Gonin, the BaKgatla of Rustenburg District, and the South African Republic, 1862-1922’, South African Historical Journal, 36, (1997), pp. 145-167.

      3Morton, When Rustling Became an Art, p. 101.

      4For a full account of this incident see B. Mbenga, ‘Forced Labour in the Pilanesberg: The Flogging of Chief Kgamanyane by Commandant Paul Kruger, Saulspoort, April 1870’, Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, March 1997, pp. 127-140.

      THE REVEREND HENRI GONIN, MISSIONARY TO THE BAKGATLA BA KGAFELA

      Henri Gonin was born in Switzerland in the early 1830s. In 1860, he received his theological training in Geneva, Switzerland, and in Edinburgh, Scotland. Before the end of his training in Edinburgh, he was recruited as a missionary by the Reverend Dr DW Robertson of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in South Africa. The foreign sub-committee of the DRC, which catered for black people in the Transvaal and beyond,