The consequences of this unbridled explosion of mining in the BIC led to the migration of large numbers of workers into the region, most of them ethnic ‘strangers’ from other parts of South Africa. Low wages and poor living conditions on the mines led to bouts of labour unrest that culminated in the strike at Lonmin’s Marikana plant in the baPo area that led to the tragic events of August and September 2012 when close to fifty people were killed, most of them mineworkers. These events are etched indelibly on the public mind and caused an international outcry and considerable self-reflection in all sectors of South African society. Although this book is not directly about the revolutions (economic, social and environmental) that have accompanied the mining history of the bushveld, it does provide a context and background to some of the significant moments of the region’s past that gave rise to these chaotic conditions. Moreover, labour-related issues are not the only source of socioeconomic discontent and division among the region’s inhabitants. They have also been afflicted by deep-rooted forms of ethnic contestation.
A second image which the bushveld evokes today is that of its well-known game reserves. The two that stand out are the Pilanesberg and Madikwe reserves, but in recent years there has been a proliferation of smaller game farms in the area. Linked to the Pilanesberg reserve is the Sun City resort, a controversial island of opulence in what has been, despite the advent of mining, a very impoverished rural district. The development of these aspects of the tourism industry affected the surrounding communities in several ways – for example, it led to land alienation, and while work opportunities were created they were accompanied by exploitation and social dislocation.
A further outstanding characteristic of the region as a whole is its palaeontology which points to humankind’s evolutionary past. The famous Taung child fossil was discovered in 1924 by Raymond Dart and the rich archaeology of the early baTswana has been excavated and written about by several of southern Africa’s leading archaeologists.10 Many important sites dot the countryside and provide evidence for its settlement by the forefathers of the African communities who still inhabit it. The sites range from small outposts, probably cattle kraals, to large towns or mega-sites inhabited by up to 20 000 people. The most spectacular were at Kaditshwene, north of modern Zeerust, and at Dithakong, the capitals respectively of the baHurutshe and baTlhaping in the early decades of the nineteenth century, both visited by European observers. More recently, large sites have been discovered at Molokwane and Marathodi, providing evidence of large-scale cattle keeping, extensive trade networks, an understanding of stone wall construction and the centralisation of power and wealth in the hands of a chiefly elite.11
Many of the sites are within a day or two’s walking distance apart, suggesting close political and trading relations between the groups who lived there. Although this volume’s narrative begins well after these developments, the rich archeological evidence illustrates the longevity of the people in the bushveld/thornveld and their expertise as cattle keepers, and fashioners of iron implements and other trade items.
The archaeological evidence pointing to the origins and early settlement of Tswana-Sotho groups is confirmed by quite a rich body of oral traditions (pointing to when people have ruled and when specific events are said to have occurred) which trace the Tswana ruling lineages to as far back as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD. The archaeology and the oral records prove conclusively that the pre-colonial baTswana did not live in conditions of tribal primitiveness or isolation and that they were thus capable of responding to, and engaging with, the new forces that swept across the western highveld from the mid to late-1830s.
Lastly, another view of the bushveld in particular is presented through the novels of Herman Charles Bosman written in the 1920s and based on his time in the Marico or Madikwe district. Particularly (but not solely) for generations of white South Africans for whom Bosman was prescribed reading at schools during the last fifty-odd years of the twentieth century, it is represented as a charming backwater of changeless quietude. Certainly, Bosman was too astute an observer not to ironically allude to the prejudices, hypocrisy and contradictions of Afrikaner society in the Marico, but the overriding impression one gains is of a Boer society which first tamed and then laid claim to the region. In fact, it was a much more contested terrain than that, and the African societies of the bushveld exercised more independence than is presented in Bosman’s novels.
The window through which all of these features of the North West Province can to varying degrees be viewed are the predominantly Tswana merafe or chiefdoms: the baHurutshe, the baKgatla ba Kgafela, the baFokeng, the baKwena, the baKubung ba Rantheo and ba Monnakgotla, the baRolong, the baTlhaping and a number of smaller or related offshoots of these communities. Scholars examining African settlement and social organisation in southern Africa have in recent times questioned the usefulness and precision of describing African societies in terms of ‘tribes’ or ethnic groups. The membership of these merafe was not fixed, and they were constantly being reshaped by newcomers or a changing of names. Nor can we simply assert that people a few centuries ago might even have called themselves the baRolong or baHurutshe. Despite this, we have adopted the ‘ethnic formulation’ while recogising its limitations.
TRIBES AND ETHNICITY
Recent reformulations of the nature and meaning of ‘tribes’ among the baTswana (and in South Africa generally) have stressed their fluid, fluctuating and multiethnic character. Ethnicity is viewed therefore as a form of false consciousness, one that was imposed on African society by settler and colonial societies anxious to divide African people into recognisable and delineated ‘tribes’. In 2010, Paul Landau extended this hypothesis by suggesting that there were other equally binding and durable forms of association and mobilisation that characterised African political organisation before their history was recorded and before ‘tribes’ or chiefdoms emerged as the key form of affiliation among Africans.1 He rejected what he called the ‘fog’ of tribalism and the institution of chieftainship as colonial constructions.
The concept of ‘tribalism’ is open to manipulation, and has been recognised as such for some time. ‘Tribes’ are not primordial, and their size and composition changed over time owing to particular historical circumstances – yet they clearly had resonance and meaning for large numbers of the African population, and there is an equally cogent and countervailing view that ethnic groups are very real. As the late Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake, has pointed out:
Apart from the question of its historicity, the logic for the argument for the non-existence of ethnic groups is flawed. Ethnic groups are no less real for existing intermittently, for having fluid boundaries, for having subjective or even arbitrary standards of membership, for opportunistic use of tradition … They are real if they are actual people who are united in consciousness of their common ethnic identity … ethnicity is not a fossilised determination but a living presence produced and even driven by material and historical forces.2
In a recent study of political responses to colonialism in south-western Zimbabwe, Enocent Msindo convincingly shows how Kalanga ethnic identity ‘was not a creation of the colonial state and did not need to be’, nor did these communities ‘require colonial control to reinforce notions of community and identity’.3 Moreover, Landau’s significant initiators and actors of ‘overlapping movements and … authority-building practices’4 remain just as opaque as his ‘fog of tribal peculiarism’. Thus we get a bewildering host of terms: ‘princes’,