Land, Chiefs, Mining. Andrew Manson

previously unpublished material and existing literature, much of it resulting from our own research (but also that of others) to provide a fuller narrative of important aspects of the history of the Setswanaspeakers and a few of its leading figures in the North West Province. A lot of this had been updated or re-interpreted. Only a portion of the scholarly work that has been conducted has been published, and much of it in rather esoteric publications not generally accessible or of interest to a general reading public. Our volume is an attempt to fill the gaps that exist in our understanding of the history of African people in the region, especially in the twentieth century, but this is not to imply that the collection represents the final or complete word on the region’s past. It is intended more to open up a number of perspectives, and a subset of shared experiences, on the history of this particular region of South Africa. We hope to expand our understanding of Setswana-speaking communities in South Africa; to inform and enthuse students of South African history; and to attract a wider readership among those whose pasts we recount.

      Setting the scene: The land and its inhabitants.

      Geographically, one can broadly divide the North West Province into two subregions. The first is the western bushveld which stretches from the western Magaliesberg to the Marico district. The bushveld is not a neatly bounded region (literally, it describes a form of terrain and vegetation characterised by quite dense woodland and tall grasses) but lies between the southern Kalahari Desert and the land slightly west of the Magaliesberg range. More specifically, within this is the area bounded by the Madikwe/Ngotwane rivers in the west, the Limpopo River in the north and the Odi (Crocodile) river system, comprising the Elands (Kgetleng), Apies (Tshwane) and Pienaars (Moretele) rivers, in the east. The water flow from the Odi river system drains into the Limpopo. Not all these rivers are perennial. Today this region forms the northern part of the North West Province where it borders on the Limpopo Province and the Republic of Botswana. Three mountain ranges punctuate the generally undulating nature of the region: the Dwarsberg (Motlhwane) in the north-west, the crumpled ridges of the Swartruggens in the centre, and the Pilanesberg crater in the south-east. Human habitation, in the past and even at present, becomes more scattered and sparse the further north one proceeds, until the higher plateau of the Waterberg in Limpopo affords a milder and more pleasant environment (see Map 2).

       The western bushveld was largely impenetrable for Africans and Europeans alike in the nineteenth century. One intrepid traveller, Adolphe Delegorgue, attempted to cut through the bushveld in the early 1840s. Within a week he had begun to turn back, forced by the ‘haak-doorn (acacia) whose fang-like thorns tore pitilessly at the flesh … like fishhooks’, the ‘death of the last of my oxen … from the sickness which people attribute to flies’, and the insects (specifically ticks and mosquitoes) which tormented him ‘as no others had in Africa’.³ The unfortunate man was furthermore plagued by a tapeworm that forced him to consume a vast amount of meat each day.

      Wildlife was still plentiful in the early nineteenth century, supporting early occupants of the region who were adept hunters, and attracting the early attention of gun-using hunters on the western highveld. Most of the animals of the African savannah were to be found here and lions were a common scourge. John Campbell, a missionary of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1821, noticed that the African population was forced to build special elevated sleeping structures for their children to protect them from lions,⁴ and the explorer David Livingstone nearly met his end in a lion attack in 1846 in the Gopane area, just north of modern Zeerust. Well-known nineteenth-century big-game hunters such as Gordon Cumming, William Cornwallis Harris and Frederick Courtney Selous found the area to their liking. Visiting the Pilanesberg in 1836, Harris remarked on the sight of ‘three hundred gigantic elephants, browsing in majestic tranquility amidst the wild magnificence of an African landscape, and a wide stretching plain darkened, as far as the eye could see, with a moving phalanx of gnoos and quaggas whose numbers simply baffle computation’.⁵

      FIGURE 1: The road to Dinokana c. 1987 – typical bushveld terrain

       Source: Joe Alfers

      The second subregion comprises the area south of the Molopo River (bordering on Botswana) to the southern reaches of the Harts River before its confluence with the Vaal, and east of the Ghaap plateau: that is, the land between modern Mafikeng down to Vryburg and Taung. This is a drier and ecologically more limited part of the province. Though criss-crossed with a number of westward-flowing river systems, the river beds remain dry for most of the year. With an average rainfall of between 38 and 56 cm agriculture provided only a precarious source of livelihood, particularly in times of drought. In the early to mid-nineteenth century the vegetation comprised mainly intermittent but palatable grasses, bushveld scrub, trees and succulents, usually classified as ‘Kalahari thornveld’. This grassland could sustain cattle and other animals, especially in the Molopo basin where more rain fell and the grasses were sweeter. Fortunately, for the inhabitants and animals alike, limestone outcrops give rise to many springs or fountains (also called ‘eyes’) that provide constant water, and enable boreholes to be sunk, especially close to the river beds. Since the mid-nineteenth century, overcrowding and ecological degradation has caused the region’s flora to deteriorate. In his pioneering book The Road to the North, the historian AJI Agar- Hamilton describes this part of the country as ‘bleak, arid and treeless’, and exposed to ‘a desiccating dry wind’.⁶ However, early nineteenth-century observations by travellers, missionaries and naturalists, most of whom pioneered the hunters’ and missionaries’ ‘Road to the North’, suggest that it was more arable and provided better conditions for human habitation and the fauna of the region than it does today (see Map 3).

      Until well into the nineteenth century, this territory accords with what historians have described as an ‘open’ frontier, one where two distinct societies, one indigenous (in this case the Setswana-speakers) and one intrusive, comprising white adventurers and other immigrants (principally the Griqua and Kora), encountered one another and struggled to establish full hegemony over the region. This north-west bushveld frontier opened up as the Transorangia frontier further south closed in the 1840s. The Transorangia region had, from the late eighteenth century, been a ‘mélange of people’: Griqua, Kora, Khoisan, Sotho-Tswana and a handful of white farmers, for the most part seeking stability in a volatile region.⁷ Some of the inhabitants of the north-west frontier, through trade activities and by displacement from the bushveld during the migratory years after the so-called difaqane in the 1820s, had in fact already experienced life in Transorangia.

      The north-west frontier closed in two stages, first with the declaration of the Bechuanaland Protectorate in the 1880s (which led to British control and safe passage through to the Ndebele state in Matebeleland), and second with the Boer defeat of Mabhogo during 1894 (which provided the Boers with easier occupation of the Waterberg district) and the rinderpest epidemic (1896) which killed off much of the wildlife hosting the tsetse, thereby facilitating trekker penetration of the Limpopo valley.⁸ As Neil Parsons observes,‘contemporary maps customarily marked the Limpopo as the boundary (of the South African Republic, SAR) and South African historians have accepted this fiction as if before the 1900s the SAR had indeed “filled out” as far north-west as the Limpopo’.⁹ The failure of the South African Republic accurately to define its borders or even to publish official maps led to numerous disputes between Africans and the trekkers or, as the Transvaal Argus of 1876 put it, ‘perpetual haggling and bandying of words with a dozen (native) chiefs’.

      The sense of region is not carried forward into this narrative in any intentional thematic way. However, this is as much a ‘regional’ history as anything else, one in which the people happen to share a common past and are mainly Setswana-speakers. The territory offers a number of unique features and evokes quite specific images in the popular imagination. Most obvious and most current is its association with mining. It is home to what is called the Bushveld Igneous Complex (BIC) which, along with Zimbabwe’s Great Dyke Complex, is in turn home to the largest concentration of the ore-bearing lodes that contain the Platinum Group