MAP 7: Native Reserves in Vryburg District (2013)
Introduction
This book deals with aspects of the history of the black, predominantly Setswanaspeaking population of today’s North West Province of South Africa. It covers the period from approximately1840, with the beginning of settler and colonial domination, to the present. It is not a comprehensive account but, rather, a number of interrelated chapters on different topics which chart the various political and economic forces that have shaped the fortunes of communities and personalities in the province.
The North West Province is a recent geographical construct that arose out of the Constitution underpinning the new democratic dispensation in 1994. It comprises parts of the former western Transvaal, most of the former homeland of Bophuthatswana, and the northern reaches of the Cape Colony, later Cape Province (see Map 1). In one sense, the construct is not entirely artificial, for its inhabitants broadly comprise two culturally and politically homogeneous units – Setswana-speakers and Afrikaners – who have experienced close to 200 years of contact with one another. This is not to suggest that both societies were sealed off from outside influences. Both had extensive contact with their surrounding inhabitants and there was a constant infusion of other people into this region over a long period of time. Both societies interacted with British colonialism and bore the imprint of that association.
The history of the baTswana in South Africa has by no means been neglected. The early arrival of missionaries, traders and hunters from south of the Orange River, and the settlement of the Boers on the western highveld have ensured that many aspects of their societies were written down, providing a rich source of information for later scholars.
IMPORTANT PUBLISHED WORKS ON THE BATSWANA IN SOUTH AFRICA
Between the burgeoning of research and writing on African societies in South Africa beginning in the late 1960s, and its petering out some two decades later, the baTswana in the Republic – with the exception of Kevin Shillington’s history of the colonisation of the Southern baTswana – rather missed the boat as far as published works are concerned. Shillington’s work, however, principally covered the Southern Tswana living in the former colonies of Griqualand West and British Bechuanaland. As far as other Tswana chiefdoms are concerned, the baFokeng have been the focus of a recent study by the authors of this volume as well as Heinrich Baumann, and Fred Morton sheds light on events in the Pilanesberg district through several studies of the closely related baKgatla ba Kgafela in the Bechuanaland Protectorate.
Important aspects of twentieth-century Kgatla affairs are recounted in J Magala’s history of the baKgatla ba Kgafela. Nancy Jacobs has written an environmental history of the black Tswana residents of the Kuruman district (although it is a little removed geographically from the North West Province). This declining attention to African societies in the pre-colonial and colonial eras was partly a reflection of increasing concern for other scholarly movements such as postmodernism, social and urban history, feminist and gender studies and, in South Africa especially, liberation histories which, on the whole, treated rural affairs in an understated way in which African reserves were viewed ‘largely in terms of their functionality to the developing capitalist system’.1 The other diversionary development was the rise of nationalism in Africa which focused on ‘the larger narrative of national self-fulfilment’.2 In this vision of Africa’s past, colonialism was either regarded as dead and buried and best forgotten, or reformulated as neocolonialism and used as a justification for the failures of many modern African states. Recent times, however, have seen a shift in interest to the last two centuries in Africa, sparked by renewed interest in postcolonial and subaltern studies. Finally, recent interest in the impact of South Africa’s ‘bantustans’ has led to a revival of interest in the lives of those trapped ‘away in the locations’.3
Some of the more important books that have been published include Kevin Shillington’s The Colonisation of the Southern Tswana, 1870-1900 (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985) which deals mainly with the baTlhaping and baTlharo merafe south of the Molopo River up to the turn of the nineteenth century. Part of this story has been reworked into a book on one of its leading figures, Luka Jantjie: Resistance Hero of the South African Frontier (London and Johannesburg: Aldridge and Wits University Press, 2011). Silas Modiri Molema wrote biographies of two prominent nineteenth century baRolong leaders, Montshiwa 1815-1896, BaRolong Chief and Patriot (Cape Town: Struik, 1966) and Chief Moroka: His Life and Times (Cape Town: Struik, 1950). The baFokeng received attention from the authors in ‘People of the Dew’: A History of the BaFokeng of Rustenburg-Phokeng Region of South Africa from Early Times to 2000 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2010). Nancy Jacobs wrote a socioenvironmental history of the Kuruman district entitled Environment, Power, and Justice: A South African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) that has implications for the wider thornveld districts of Mafikeng/Vryburg/Taung. For relations between the baKgatla in the Bechuanaland Protectorate and in the Pilanesberg see F Morton, When Rustling Became an Art: Pilane’s Kgatla and the Transvaal frontier, 1820-1902 (Cape Town: David Philip, 2009). An account of Kgatla affairs in the Transvaal is recounted in J Magala, History of the Bakgatla baga Kgafela (Crink City, 2009). Valuable, though in respects tainted, ethnographic information is available in P-L Breutz, A History of the Batswana and the Origins of Bophuthatswana, A Survey of the Tribes of the Batswana, S Ndebele, Qwaqwa and Botswana (Ramsgate: Breutz, 1989). M Legassick, The Politics of a South African Frontier, The Griqua, The Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries, 1790-1840 (Basler Afrika Bibliografen, 2010), (based on his doctorate of 1969), is an invaluable source for the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century. Of interest on other baTswana societies are C Murray, Black Mountain, Land, Class, and Power in the Eastern Orange Free State,1808s to 1980s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992; the cultural anthropological studies of the Comaroffs on the Tshidi-BaRolong – J Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: Chicago University Press) and J Comaroff and J Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1997) – which shed light on the processes of cultural diffusion and assimilation between the baRolong and the evangelising nonconformist mission movement in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, closely bound up with the objectives of British colonialism.
NOTES
1W. Beinart and C. Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and the Eastern Cape, 1890-1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1987).
2P. Limb, N. Etherington and P. Midgley (eds), ‘Grappling with the Beast’: Indigenous Southern African Response to Colonialism, 1840-1930 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010). p.5.
3South African Historical Journal, vol.64, no 1, (2012). See especially the Introduction by William Beinart, ‘Beyond Homelands: Some Ideas about the History of Rural Areas in South Africa’, pp. 5-21.
Generally speaking, however, the prominent Tswana personalities are less well-known and respected than leading figures among other African societies in South Africa such as the amaZulu, amaXhosa and baPedi, and some of their contemporaries in Botswana. Of course there are exceptions. Silas Modiri Molema wrote an excellent account of the life of Montshiwa of the Ratshidi baRolong, surely one of the most outstanding African figures of the nineteenth century.1 Kevin Shilling-ton published his important doctoral thesis on the colonisation of what he terms the Southern Tswana (mainly the baTlhaping, baTlharo and baRolong) in 1986, putting them on the map. His work culminates with the last act of local resistance, the Langeberg revolt in 1896 and its consequences: land confiscation, human displacement and immiseration. He afterwards wrote another book on the longneglected personality Luka Jantjie, almost certainly the real hero of baTlhaping resistance to colonialism.2