NOTES
1P. S. Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
2C. Ake, ‘What is the Problem of Ethnicity in Africa?’ Transformation, 22 (1993), p. 1.
3E. Msindo, ‘Social and Political Responses to Colonialism on the Margins: Community, Chieftaincy and Ethnicity in Bulilima-Mangwe, Zimbabwe, 1890-1930’, in Limb, Etherington and Midgley (eds), ‘Grappling with the Beast’, p. 155.
4Landau, Popular Politics, p. 246.
This approach is largely a matter of convenience, for the sources – colonial, missionary or other – perceived and wrote about them in this way. In addition, the ‘chief’ became a lens through which a wider community was refracted.
From early in the nineteenth century, the baTswana in South Africa were influenced by Christian missionaries, in particular those of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the Wesleyan Missionary Societies. In the western bushveld many became Lutherans under the direction of the Hermannsburg Mission Society (HMS), for whom land and agricultural production were essential material adjuncts to the evangelising mission. Land acquisition, with missionary encouragement and legal abetment, provided the cornerstone for economic security; it enabled many peasant producers and reserve dwellers to continue enjoying a relatively independent livelihood beyond the period when most other Africans in the country had joined the ranks of migrants or urbanised workers. Later (owing to mineral discoveries) ownership of land proved to be a windfall.
The LMS, who sought to convert the Southern baTswana to Christianity, placed an emphasis on education and the cultivation of European mores and cultural norms. Although it was often modified and adapted to suit their circumstances and practices, Christianity fundamentally challenged the ethical values and belief systems of the baRolong and baTlhaping, for example. People who became Christians often considered themselves to be a ‘respectable’ elite which was out of step with many aspects of traditional society. This changing identity was something many baTswana had to grapple with as they engaged with a new and ‘modern’ world.
We shed light on a number of themes that typify the history of the African people of southern Africa – migration, settlement, economic diversification, state formation, missionisation, colonisation, peasantisation, labour migration, accommodation and resistance. However, the book also guides readers to the more unusual aspects of the region’s past and its significance for the present, especially as far as the black population is concerned.
Issues and themes
Between about 1820 and the late 1830s, the difaqane, a period of conflict and rapid transformation that involved many African societies, was ushered in across southern Africa. Almost immediately afterwards, white trekkers established a state on the western highveld. Significant new leaders emerged after these turbulent years. Chapter One recounts the life of a hitherto neglected mid-nineteenth century leader, Moiloa II of the baHurutshe. Like a number of his contemporaries such as Montshiwa of the Ratshidi baRolong and Mokgatle Thethe of the baFokeng, Moiloa showed the ability, coupled probably with some good fortune, to re-build his community from the 1840s through to almost the mid-1870s. It meant dealing with a more complex set of circumstances than he had experienced before. His ability to strike up a good relationship with powerful Boer personalities, in particular Jan Viljoen in the Marico district, was critical to the reconstruction of Hurutshe society.
The North West Province was one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds of the South African War. Our book adds to the growing historiography on the role of black communities in that war by providing, in Chapter Two, a holistic sweep of the encounters between the Boers and the local African populations. The conflict played itself out on different levels – on the battlefield, on Boer farms, and in Tswana villages and towns. We also discuss its aftermath, showing that its repercussions and impact were profound for the African population; albeit for a short moment, factions within African society tried to reverse the inexorable tide of segregation and dispossession that had swept over them by seizing Boer assets.
The next three chapters examine aspects of economic and social change among the province’s black population in the first half of the twentieth century. As alluded to above, land acquisition enabled African communities in the western Transvaal to keep livestock and maintain a reasonable level of agricultural production. The bushveld inhabitants and their rulers were especially concerned with buying or gaining access to farms, acquired either with missionary assistance or in defiance or ignorance of legislation designed to prevent Africans from purchasing land in the Transvaal.
In the Bechuanaland reserves, from Mafikeng south to Vryburg and Kuruman, owing to circumstances relating to Britsh colonial expansion the African population was allocated inalienable land, distinct from the government or crown land from which Africans could be removed. This provided a measure of security from potential land-grabbers of various kinds.
The need to obtain and retain a hold on land is a recurring motif in the history of the baTswana of the western Transvaal. When the 1913 Natives Land Act was passed (demarcating the limits of African land holdings) just about every western Transvaal chief enthusiastically supported the South African Natives National Congress (SANNC, later African National Congress), hoping it could reverse the deleterious consequences of the legislation. Their enthusiasm waned in most cases when it became apparent that the ANC was incapable of doing so. On the other hand, a negative and potentially destructive consequence of land acquisition was that it created discord between rulers and subjects over access to and control of land and the material resources it provided.
Thus in Chapter Three we examine the internal crises of authority and chaos that afflicted the baFokeng, the baKwena ba Mogopa, the baKgatla ba Kgafela and the baKubung bushveld merafe from about 1902 to the middle of that century. This instability was caused primarily by questions of control over material resources. Although they led to social stress and conflict, the basic symmetry of traditional society was not significantly eroded by these conflicts, but simultaneously individuals began to see themselves as independent from the framework of traditional society. What is important about these crises is that they reoccur in an even more contested form after the platinum revolution.
Chapter Four examines the fortunes of the baRolong and, to a lesser extent, the baTlhaping, who inhabited the reserves set aside for them in the late nineteenth century. Confined to an area smaller than they had occupied before colonisation, and restricted by colonial legislation, these rural communities endured considerable hardships but successfully negotiated the transitions of the first half of the century. The nature of Rolong politics was historically rooted and complex, but most of the significant conclusions to this past were resolved in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chiefly political struggles for local control were commonplace, and were closely related to resource control in a difficult environment, especially where the jurisdiction of traditional authorities was defined and limited. The growth of a progressive rural elite and an administration generally supportive of innovation, education and ‘advanced’ farming methods combined to keep the reserves sustainable and limit their incorporation into the political and economic framework of the colonial state.
Chapter Five has a different focus in that it consists of a re-appraisal of an event known as the 1957/58 Bahurutshe Revolt. We give an account of what actually transpired and its noteworthy features, and we then analyse the reasons for the revolt which was led by the kgosi, Abram Moiloa, and was strongly supported by the women of what was called Moiloa’s Reserve, north of Zeerust. The reason for the resistance is considered to have been the order by the South African government that women should carry passes, as African men had been forced to do some years earlier.