From the 1950s, the apartheid system in South Africa created a new set of circumstances for most of the inhabitants of the region. They were herded into the Bophuthatswana homeland, and faced new challenges, no less demanding or difficult than before. In an attempt to gain full political and economic control, especially of the platinum mines, Lucas Mangope and the Bophuthatswana government intervened in the affairs of the baTswana in the bushveld and this led to a spate of conflicts and resistance, with dire consequences. In Chapter Six we describe how these materialised and their resolution, which included some of the most vicious litigation in the history of mining law between the baFokeng on one hand, and the big mining companies and Mangope on the other. Significantly, changing concepts of ethnicity define the Mangope years, at a time when the ‘bantustan’ concept allowed for flexible interpretations of ethnicity.
Finally, we look at the conditions prevailing in South Africa’s ‘Platinum Belt’ in modern times and provide observations as to how it has been radically transformed in recent years, although the transformation was by no means an even one. This chapter summarises the impact of the expansion of the platinum mining sector and the massive windfall that accrued from it, on nearly all the baTswana in the Rustenburg region. In important ways it has been beneficial: for example it has enabled the baFokeng, the first and major beneficiaries of mining on their land, to corporatise their affairs and, paradoxically, to realign themselves as a ‘nation’ headed by a traditional ruler (termed their king) and governed by a Royal baFokeng Administration. But the massive profits from mining, coupled with the financial deals concluded with the local dikgosi, under the terms of black economic empowerment (BEE), have led to the rise of mineral-based ethnic assertion – and this in turn has created the possibilities for huge personal accumulation and the eruption of social turmoil on a scale not seen before. By 2013 there was hardly one African ethnic community in the bushveld that was not embroiled in a malevolent contest for the various earnings from mining on their land, or for control or ownership of the land itself. These events unfolded in the context of the ‘new’ South Africa, where rights were considered inalienable, and where the state, capital, labour and ‘traditional’ communities contended for mining revenues.
Finally, another face of the bushveld region in particular is represented by its national game reserves and the vast entertainment complex of Sun City. We look at the consequences of this for the local communities. While profitable, certainly in the long-run, to significant sectors of the population, it served only to further marginalise and impoverish other segments of the rural population, some of whom were removed from their homes to make way for the parks.
ENDNOTES
1 S.M. Molema, Montshiwa, 1815-1896: Barolong Chief and Patriot (Cape Town: Struik, 1966).
2 K. Shillington, The Colonisation of the Southern Tswana, 1870-1900, (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985); K. Shillington, Luka Jantjie, Resistance Hero of the South African Frontier, (Johannesburg, London and New York: Wits University Press, Aldridge Press and Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
3 A. Delegorgue, Travels in South Africa, 2 vols. (Scottsville: Natal University Press, 1997), pp. 237-244.Translated by F. de B. Webb.
4 J. Campbell, Travels in South Africa … Narrative of a Second Journey, 1820, (London, 1822), p. 220.
5 W.C. Harris, The Wild Sports of Southern Africa (London, 1861), p. 195.
6 A.A.I. Agar-Hamilton, The Road to the North, South Africa, 1852-1886 (London, 1937), p.1.
7 The phrase is Martin Legassick’s from ‘The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries, 1780-1840, The Politics of a Frontier Zone’, Ph.D thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1969, p. 380. Landau prefers the term ‘metis’.
8 See A. Manson ‘The Hurutshe in the Marico District of the Transvaal, 1848- 1914’, PhD thesis University of Cape Town, 1990, p.31, citing N. Parsons, ‘Khama III, the Bamangwato and the British: with special reference to 1895-1923’, Ph.D thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1973, p. 77.
9 N. Parsons, ‘Khama III, the Bamangwato and the British’, p.77.
10 See for example, R. Mason, Prehistory of the Transvaal: A Record of Human Activity (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press,1969); T. Huffman Handbook to the Iron Age: The Archaeology of Pre-Colonial Farming Societies of Southern Africa (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007); T. Maggs and G. Whitelaw, ‘A review of recent archaeological research on food-producing communities in southern Africa,’ Journal of African History, 32 (1991); J.C. Pistorius, Molokwane, An Iron Age Bakwena Village: Early Settlement in the Western Transvaal (Johannesburg: Perskor, 1992) especially pp. 20-32, 38-46; J.C. Boeyens, ‘The Late Iron Age sequence in the Marico and early Tswana history, South African Archaeological Bulletin, 58, 178 (2003) and S. Hall, ‘The Late Precolonial Tswana in the Rustenburg District’, in N. Swanepoel, A. Esterhuysen and P. Bonner, (eds) Five Hundred Years, Rediscovered (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008).
11 Hall, ‘The Late Precolonial Tswana’.
CHAPTER 1
‘The dog of the Boers’? Moiloa II of the baHurutshe
INTRODUCTION
We know a lot more nowadays about important chiefly personalities in the history of the baTswana in South Africa. Luka Jantjie – despite initially placing faith in British justice and European religion – found his people subject to colonial laws, and his country overrun by white colonists. In order to defend shrinking independence and constant land alienation he resorted to a final desperate act of military defiance in 1897.1 Montshiwa, similarly, fought for a quarter of a century to protect his territory in the Molopo region from the ambitions of white mercenaries, as did Mankurwane of the baTlhaping further south near Vryburg.2 Both finally opted for British protection, despite the significant loss of autonomy that this meant. The career of Mokgatle Thethe of the baFokeng near Rustenburg has now also been revealed. As the ‘founding father’ of the baFokeng, he formed a close association with Paul Kruger, later president of the South African Republic. This enabled him to buy a much needed measure of independence and to embark on a programme of extensive land acquisition which was later to form the basis for baFokeng material security and, later, mineral wealth.3 To preserve their land, their independence and ethnic unity, these men resorted to tactics ranging from outright resistance to accommodation with the colonising forces – but they lived in difficult and complex times, and to view them as mere collaborators (as has been the case with Mokgatle) would be an oversimplification.
Our focus, though, is on a kgosi who has not received full recognition for the role he played in reconstituting and laying the foundations for the continued security of his society. In many respects Moiloa’s career mirrors that of other nineteenth-century Tswana leaders. It also reflects some of the key features of the experiences of African communities from the mid-1840s to the turn of the century. Reconstructing his life means also examining crucial external forces and institutions such as the missionaries, the local Boers who had moved onto the western highveld from 1838, state officials of the South African Republic, and Tswana neighbours.
Introduction
In 1800 the baHurutshe lived about twenty kilometres north of the present-day town of Zeerust in the wider Marico district. Archaeological evidence reveals that they had been in this locality for close to half a century. How far back we can trace the baHurutshe as an identifiable community calling themselves by that name is a moot point; probably, as with all Tswana merafe, there had been almost constant fission, breakaways, regroupings and new arrivals so that the composition of the baHurutshe was constantly changing. They certainly were one of the larger factions of what has been termed ‘lineage-clusters’ (people related by common descent) in the western bushveld. For periods before