The Zulu story is one illustration of the process of subordination of Africans in the last decades of the nineteenth century. There were, however, great regional differences in the rate and the extent of the erosion of African political, economic, and cultural autonomy. The key variables were the structure and the dynamics of each African society and the degree to which each had resources that attracted Whites.
Other Nguni societies were also profoundly transformed by the end of the nineteenth century. After the colonists got control of the executive branch of the Cape colonial government in 1872, in a series of steps they annexed the territories between the Kei River and the Natal border, which became known as the Transkei. Many of the Xhosa and Thembu inhabitants, whose morale had been broken by the cattle-killing disaster in 1856, offered little physical resistance. Between 1877 and 1881, however, others, including the main Xhosa chiefs Sandile and Sarhili, did defy the government, only to be suppressed by Whites and their Mfengu allies. The hundred years’ war between the Whites and the Xhosa and Thembu had ended at last. Cape colonial expansion to the east culminated in 1894 with the peaceful incorporation of the Mpondo, who had been weakened by civil war between conservatives and modernizers (similar to the cleavage in Zululand) following the death of their paramount chief.20
Within the Transkei, the government took one area from the Africans and allotted it to Griquas—people of mixed descent who migrated there from the middle Orange area, which was being overrun by Afrikaners—calling it Griqualand East. The Griqua, however, gradually lost their land to white settlers in Griqualand East, as they had previously done in Griqualand West. The rest of the land in the Transkei remained in African hands, whereas in the Ciskei to the west of the Kei River a mixture of Whites and Africans held land.
During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, magistrates, traders, and missionaries multiplied among the southern Nguni. Raising taxes and enforcing the law, magistrates undermined the authority of the chiefs. Selling imported foods, clothing, and agricultural implements and buying African produce, traders provided basic instruments of a market economy. Offering practical assistance as well as a literary education and a contemporary Christian, European world view, missionaries assisted Africans to adapt to conquest. All those innovations created fresh divisions in the population, between the chiefs and those commoners who had acquired new forms of wealth and new skills. Many Xhosa, and still more Mfengu, seized the new opportunities and produced a surplus of wool and grain for the market or earned wages as clerical assistants to the magistrates, traders, and missionaries. Among the Mpondo, in contrast, the chiefs were able to exert some control over the activities of traders until their country was annexed in 1894. Some Mpondo chiefs themselves even produced grain and cattle for the market, using communal land and labor, but the dominant trend was for production to be decentralized to the homestead level. By the end of the century, however, the rinderpest, population increase, and the heavy hand of the colonial state were reining in all the southern Nguni peasantry, and the men were finding it increasingly necessary to leave home to earn wages on colonial farms or in the mines.21
Circumstances differed in Natal, where Shepstone had left the chiefs in charge of the African population subject to his ultimate control, but by the end of the century there was a similar trend toward impoverishment. In the early days of white settlement, the Natal Africans had access to sufficient land for their needs, and traders and missionaries provided them with means to market their surplus produce and to acquire a literary education. Nevertheless, the white settlers showed their power in 1873, when they raised such an outcry after a chief named Langalibalele had resisted arrest on a trumped-up charge that he was deposed and banished and his people’s land confiscated. After 1893, when the settlers gained control over the executive branch of the Natal government, they placed increasingly severe demands on the Africans. By the end of the century, the African population had grown to a stage where it was running short of fertile land, while Whites were becoming increasingly involved in commercial farming. This conjuncture, in combination with the rinderpest and taxation, paved the way for a rebellious outburst in 1906, which was ruthlessly suppressed by the Natal forces.22
The southernmost Tswana societies had the misfortune to occupy land in the vicinity of Kimberley, where they bore the brunt of the forces generated by the diamond-mining industry, as well as experiencing pressures both from merchants using long-established trade routes from the Cape to the north and from Afrikaner farmers expanding in a westerly direction from the original settlements in the Transvaal republic. Step by step, they were subjected and impoverished. Much of their land lay inside the boundaries of Griqualand West, as annexed by Britain in 1871. After 1880, when it was incorporated in the Cape Colony, the colonial government corralled the African inhabitants into reserves, thereby freeing land for white speculators. De Beers acquired no fewer than 400,000 acres. Transvaal farmers meanwhile were penetrating the territory between Griqualand West and the Molopo River, playing off one set of southern Tswana chiefs against another. In 1885 Britain annexed most of that territory, and in 1895 Britain transferred it to the Cape Colony. Twice—in 1878 and 1896—97—some of the southern Tswana rebelled against white domination, but to no avail. Then the rinderpest struck the area. By century’s end, the southern Tswana had lost most of their land and nearly all their cattle, and they were among the most indigent and dependent people in Southern Africa.23
The Tswana who lived north of the Molopo River were less disastrously disrupted. By the mid-1880s, British traders and missionaries and imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes were urging the British government to prevent the area from falling into the hands of the Transvaalers, which would have given them a link with the newly annexed German colony of South West Africa (now Namibia). Some of the Tswana chiefs, too, asked for British protection as security against Transvaal expansion. Accordingly, in 1885 Britain proclaimed a protectorate, without encountering Tswana opposition. In theory, protectorate status meant that the chiefs retained control over internal affairs. In practice, a symbiotic relationship developed between the chiefs and the British officials. The chiefs used the officials to strengthen their position against internal rivals and factions. Indeed, the northern Tswana retained exclusive control over most of their land, except for a strip along the eastern border for a railroad to the Zambezi and beyond. In 1896-97, however, the northern Tswana were hit especially hard by the rinderpest. After that, they, like other African societies in the region, were obliged to send out some of their young men to work in the mines.24
The Sotho, who were separated from Griqualand West by the Orange Free State, became closely integrated into the regional economy as suppliers of grain and labor to the diamond-mining industry, but they continued to experience political turmoil. They suffered internally from intense rivalries among the chiefs, notably among Moshoeshoe’s sons and grandsons. Moreover, Great Britain, which had annexed “Basutoland” in 1868, incorporated it in the Cape Colony in 1871, and the colonial government proceeded to appoint magistrates with instructions to undermine the authority of the chiefs, as they were doing in Xhosa country. Resentment by the chiefs led to a popular uprising in 1880, when the colonial prime minister announced that the government would increase taxation and enforce a law for the disarmament of the Sotho. Using guerrilla tactics honed in their wars against the Orange Free State, some 23,000 armed and mounted Sotho warriors outmaneuvered the government’s poorly led amalgam of white, Coloured, and African police, volunteers, and conscripts. Eventually, the colonial government suspended the disarmament legislation and implored Britain to reassume responsibility for Basutoland, which Britain did in 1884.
British administrators then worked closely with the royal family, notably Letsie and Lerotholi, Moshoeshoe’s senior son and grandson. That policy restored domestic peace, but at the cost of reducing the customary checks on abuse of power by the chiefs. Moreover, by the end of the century, the Sotho population
had increased to a level where it was eroding the narrow belt of arable land between the Caledon River and the mountains, and it could no longer produce a surplus. The Sotho had their homes in a rural society devoid of white settlers, but their major source of wealth was in the form of wages they earned by working for white people elsewhere.25
In the eastern highveld, two African communities stood in the way of white ambitions: the Pedi and the Swazi, who occupied fertile but rugged country along the mountain escarpment north of the Zulu. In the 1850s, an able leader named Sekwati brought the Pedi together after they had been shattered during the Mfecane. His hold over the subordinate chiefs was always fragile, however, and during the 1860s, three alien forces threatened the cohesion of the Pedi: Swazi invaders from the southeast; Afrikaner infiltrators from the southwest; and German resident missionaries—Lutherans who, more completely than missionaries of other denominations, regarded themselves as agents of white culture and allies of the Afrikaner farmers. Young Pedi men, moreover, were accustomed to going to work for white farmers, and after 1870 they became the principal laborers on the diamond mines. The pressures then intensified. Subordinate chiefs tried to establish autonomy by playing off Afrikaners against the monarchy. In 1876, Thomas Francois Burgers, president of the Transvaal, invaded Pedi country unsuccessfully with an army of 2,000 burghers, 2,400 Swazi warriors, and 600 Transvaal Africans. That rebuff contributed to Afrikaner acquiescence in the proclamation of British rule the following year. In 1879, however, having defeated the Zulu, the British overwhelmed the Pedi with a massive invasion force, including 8,000 Swazi and 3,000 Transvaal Africans. Under white domination, the Pedi state then fell apart.26
The Swazi state that emerged from the Mfecane was a ruling aristocracy of Nguni conquerors superimposed on an indigenous Sotho population. By 1870, the aristocracy had unified the country, employing a dense network of dynastic marriages, the national symbolism of an elaborate annual first-fruits festival, and a military organization on the Zulu model that cut across ethnic and regional ties. The Swazi rulers maintained good relations with the Transvaal and with Natal, because the Zulu had tried to destroy the state in the time of Shaka and Dingane and continued to threaten it under Mpande and Cetshwayo. After the defeat of the Zulu in 1879, however, white stock-farmers, gold prospectors, and adventurers of all sorts pestered the Swazi king Mbandzeni and his councillors with gifts ranging from greyhounds to champagne, and promises of more to come, if the Swazi would only sign the documents they thrust at him; the Swazi got into the habit of putting their crosses to documents and enjoying the proceeds without understanding their significance. By the time of his death in 1889, Mbandzeni had signed away almost the entire resources of his kingdom, actual and potential: the land, the minerals, and the right to create and operate industries, customs duties, licenses, railroads, telegraphs, and postal services. Finally, a superconcession gave the holder the right to collect all the king’s revenues, including his concession revenues, for an income of twelve thousand pounds a year.
By that time, the Transvaal government was determined to annex Swaziland, as a step toward fulfilling the old voortrekker ambition to get access to the sea. Transvaal and British representatives then settled the fate of Swaziland in a series of negotiations without consulting the Swazi. In 1895, the Transvaal assumed control of Swaziland, but the British blocked the Transvaal from the sea by annexing the coastal strip. Seven years later, having conquered the Afrikaner republics, the British detached Swaziland from the Transvaal and treated it as a separate colony, like Basutoland. Unlike Basutoland, however, when a commission had sorted out the conflicting claims, Whites became the legal owners of nearly two-thirds of the land in the Swazi kingdom.27
In the northern Transvaal, the Venda had held together in the face of early Afrikaner encroachments by occupying the Soutpansberg Mountains. In 1867 they had repulsed a commando led by Paul Kruger and caused the Afrikaners to evacuate their settlements in the area. During the 1880s, however, Afrikaners began to reoccupy the vicinity, and in 1898 a force of four thousand Whites, with Swazi and Tsonga allies, stormed the main Venda stronghold.28
In spite of their losses in the Mfecane and the wars of conquest, Africans continued to constitute a vast majority of the population of the entire region, and of every part of it east of the twenty-inch rainfall line. This is the great and fundamental difference between the outcome of the conquest of the indigenous peoples in North America and South Africa. The Native Americans were reduced to a tiny proportion of the population of North America and were confined to scattered reservations forming a minute proportion of the land area. The indigenous Africans had experienced havoc and losses, but survivors still occupied substantial parts of their ancestral land. A struggle ensued as Africans strove to maintain control over their lives while Whites tried to consummate their political victory with economic success; or, rather, a series of struggles, for the relationships between Whites and Blacks varied immensely from place to place.
In some areas, Africans still exclusively occupied the land, except for the sites of white traders, missionaries, and administrative officials. That was the case in all of Basutoland, in most of Bechuanaland and the Transkei, in much of Zululand and Swaziland, and in the reservations in the Ciskei and Natal; also in scattered areas in the Afrikaner republics, especially in the arc of land around the white settlements in the Transvaal. There, African communities were struggling to continue to produce enough food for subsistence. Where possible, especially among the Xhosa and the Basotho, innovative families were seizing the opportunity to produce a surplus for the market in such towns as Kimberley and Johannesburg, but they were experiencing increasing constraints by the end of the century.
The experience of the Sotho illustrates this process. Ever since the 1830s, when Afrikaner stock farmers began to settle on the highveld, the Sotho had been their major suppliers of grain, and during the 1870s the Sotho responded vigorously to the new market opportunities in Kimberley, but the tide began to turn in the 1890s. The burgeoning population of Basutoland was beginning to bear heavily on the arable land left to it within the boundaries set in 1870. The arrival of the railroad from the ports to Bloemfontein, Kimberley, and Johannesburg led to the importation of grain from the United States, Argentina, and Australia, which could be marketed more cheaply than grain could be transported by ox wagon from the farms. At the same time, white landowners in the Orange Free State were turning increasingly from pastoralism to crop production, the republican government was imposing a tariff against Basotho grain, and the diamond- and gold-mining industries were vigorously recruiting Sotho labor. By 1900, the colony of Basutoland was set on its tragic course from its nineteenth-century role as the granary of the Orange Free State to its twentieth-century role as an impoverished labor reserve for white South Africa.29
In the rest of the region, where white people had effective legal claims to the land, far from expelling the Africans, they were trying to harness their productive capacities, in various ways and with varied success. As yet, few Africans had completely lost control of the means of production. “Kaffir-farming,” as Whites called it, was commonly practiced by absentee owners, such as mining companies and mining capitalists, who invested some of their profits in land and exacted rent from the African occupants. The republican governments tried to reduce this practice by prohibiting more than five African families from residing on a farm, but rarely were they able to enforce such laws. Elsewhere, there were many types of sharecropping arrangements, in terms of which the African tenants had effective control of the means of production—land, plows, and draft oxen—but gave about half of their produce and some labor services to the legal owner, who might be an absentee individual or corporation but more commonly lived on the farm. In some cases, Africans paid rent for their use of part of a farm by providing labor for the white farmer. These categories were neither clear-cut nor static. Many farms contained both sharecroppers and labor tenants. Relationships were fluid and ambiguous
; both sides were continuously probing and testing them.
These processes increased the social differences among both the conquerors and the conquered. There were losers as well as gainers among the Whites, and gainers as well as losers among the Africans. Before the end of the century, there was a distinct class of Poor Whites—Afrikaners who, now that the frontiers had closed, were no longer able to live by rearing cattle, hunting, and transport riding and had failed to make good as arable farmers. There was also a rising class of modestly prosperous African peasant farmers, many of whom had had a mission education and were imbued with the Victorian spirit of improvement.
In 1896-97, the rinderpest carried off most of the cattle of the entire region, and in 1899, a three years’ war broke out among the Whites—a war that disrupted many African communities, as well as Afrikaners throughout the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.30
British Imperialism and the South African War
Before 1896, the affairs of Southern Africa never held the attention of the British public and government for more than brief, intermittent episodes, occasioned by startling news of defeats by the Zulu or the Transvaalers, or of vast finds of diamonds or gold. The British cabinet.was far more concerned with domestic problems, the Irish question, or the intricacies of European diplomacy. British officials in South Africa were thus able to exercise great latitude, subject to supervision from London that varied with the energy and personality of the colonial secretary.
A History of South Africa Page 19