I am happy to say Moiloa, my old chief, has joined me with his people … He was with me last Sabbath. It was by far the largest meeting [of the baHurutshe] I have ever had. It had been a great misfortune to me that the baHurutshe did not come on all at once. The whole question is an involved map of native politics. Now Moiloa has come the scattered villages will be gathered together. Moiloa … will add weight and respectability to the mission.10
By this time Mokgatlhe had allegedly fallen out with his son Lentswe, who went to join Montshiwa’s baRolong; and Moiloa, who was now in his midforties, had taken effective control of the chiefdom.11 He was to enjoy a long and important reign.
Matters seem to have gone well for the first year. The Boers in the Transvaal were thinly spread and concentrated nearer to the settlement at Potchefstroom. Andries Potgieter had moved with his followers to the eastern Transvaal in 1845, and the other trekker parties were preoccupied with attempts to expel the British from the Orange River Sovereignty; however, after the defeat of the Boers by the British at the battle of Boomplaats in August 1848, they fled over the Vaal River and by early 1849 were beginning to encroach onto the land of the baHurutshe. Trouble was looming.
The Marico trekkers shared similar aims to the African people in that frontier zone. Both white and black societies wanted to settle on the land and gain control over land and labour, and both had just undergone periods of extreme disruption. One of the prominent trekkers, destined to play a significant role on the frontier, was Jan Viljoen. As a reward for serving under the forces of Pretorius in the battle of Boomplaats in 1848, he and a number of other trekkers received farms close to the Klein Marico River, some of them as large as 30 000 morgen. The trekkers who arrived some years later and who had not been rewarded with land grants were those who sought to gain land at the expense of local African chiefdoms such as the baHurutshe.
Thus the first problem confronting Moiloa was the encroachment of the Boers onto land that the baHurutshe considered theirs. In early June 1849 Rodger Edwards (who had joined Inglis) reported that a number of Boers ‘had located at Mosega on the streams in the vicinity about twenty miles distant. Their future progress will be northwards.’12 Anticipating trouble, Edwards met with Potgieter and was assured by him that both the baHurutshe and the missionaries had nothing to worry about. But relations remained strained. By September, Edwards reported again that the trekkers were ‘determined to occupy every available fountain and are resolved upon making chiefs and the people bow to their rule’.13 At the Manegelo River, Moiloa had received an order from the Boer authorities to provide labourers, and thought it more prudent to move away from the advancing Boers to Dinokana (place of many streams), about twelve kilometres away from them. With him were 1 500 followers and about fifty Griqua converts who had been ‘given’ to him by Andries Waterboer. Dinokana was a good site and remained the centre of Hurutshe settlement. The new mission station was called Mathebe and here Moiloa began the long and laborious task of reconstructing his morafe.14
There were several advantages favouring Moiloa’s baHurutshe. The first was that they had been promised land by Potgieter, and this location formed the basis of what became known later as the Hurutshe Reserve or Moiloa’s Reserve. The grant was in return for Moiloa’s assistance in providing men for the campaign against Mzilikazi in 1837. In 1865 the Volksraad (parliament) passed a resolution defining the reserve and adding to its original size. Later it was estimated at 125 584 morgen – the largest tract of land set aside for African occupation in the western Transvaal (the creation of the Hurutshe Reserve was unusual, for most Africans in the former western Transvaal at this time lived on privately owned land). The second advantage was that the number of Moiloa’s followers increased as he was joined by many of the splinter groups that had gone their own way from 1823. These included two of his brothers, Motlaadile and Pule (though the latter’s relationship to Moiloa is not absolutely clear) and his nephew Sethunya. In August 1850, Inglis reported the arrival of a party of baHurutshe in Dinokana from a ‘town east of the Limpopo’ [river].15 By the early 1860s the population numbered about 8 000. They were probably not all ‘pure’ baHurutshe, but included the Griqua converts and a number of strangers (subordinates or auxiliaries) encountered during the years of exile and wandering south of the Molopo River.16
An important event occurred during these years. Lentswe was killed in a skirmish with some Boers near Lotlakane, some sixty kilometres from Dinokana, in the territory of the raPulana baRolong. Lentswe’s son, by rights, had a prior claim to the chieftainship, an issue that had complex and divisive implications later on. But his death meant that for the time being at least there was no effective opposition to Moiloa, as Lentswe’s son Gopane was only about six years old. It was therefore futile for any opponents of Moiloa to try to manipulate succession laws to elevate a possible rival to power. Moiloa was the kgosi accepted by those who saw him as the rightful successor to Diuwitleng or by those who claimed Gopane as the rightful chief.
Thus the baHurutshe not only had access to sufficient land and an abundance of spring water at Dinokana; they also had an unchallenged leader in Moiloa who was backed by a majority of the morafe. His main problem, however, was that the trekkers resorted to frequent and random attacks. In one sense, these attacks were an expression of their own weakness and inability to control the African population through laws and regulations (the Boers were at this time still battling to form an effective state on the highveld). Furthermore, the LMS missionaries soon proved to be more of a burden than anything else for the baHurutshe. Their presence antagonised the Boers and they failed to prevent aggression against their followers.
What lay at the root of these attacks was the system of ‘apprenticeship’ introduced by the trekkers, something that deeply affected nearly all African people living in the bushveld during these years. Soon after they arrived in the Transvaal, Boer commandos began periodic raids on weaker and less organised African communities with the intention of capturing their children in order to use them as ‘bonded labourers’.17 As the Reverend Freeman, on a visit in 1849 to the LMS stations among the baHurutshe and baKgatla ba Mmanaana at Mabotsa and Mathebe, graphically recorded:
… a party of armed Boers came and demanded orphans who might be there … after much altercation and the steady refusal of the chief to give up the orphans, the Boers demanded the children of the people. The Boers began to seize them and put them into wagons; the men interfered; the Boers fired, and in the result most of the men were killed defending their families and the wagons were loaded with the children and driven off as booty.18
Sometimes the children were demanded as tribute, or were traded, or secured through exchange. Such captive children, known in Dutch parlance as inboekelinge (registerees), were ‘booked in’, as ‘orphans’, and indentured to their masters.19 Rustenburg commandos, for example, raided African groups in the far northern Transvaal – indeed, Rustenburg has been described as ‘a slave trading centre with its own resident dealer’ (the ‘dealer’ referred to was none other than Paul Kruger, the future president of the South African Republic, later the Transvaal).20 The young captives were shared among the Boer commandos and brought up on their farms.
As servants on the Boer farms, the inboekelinge were trained in a variety of skills: stonecutting and building, brick making, cookery, veterinary and folk medicine, wagon repair, hunting, gun maintenance, making cheese and plough farming. In time they adopted the customs, norms and language of the trekkers and became known as oorlams. Perhaps the most important use to which the oorlams were put was that they were trusted with firearms, and became expert hunters who accompanied the Boers on hunting and trading expeditions. In using inboekelinge labour, the Boers were in fact continuing an old tradition they had brought with them from the Cape where indentured