Читать книгу Land, Chiefs, Mining - Andrew Manson - Страница 10
ОглавлениеCHAPTER 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 1800 they enjoyed privileged status among the local residents, though this pre-eminence was probably not continuous.4 What is more certain is that they were engulfed in a series of localised intra-baTswana conflicts from about 1790 to 1820, when they were attacked by new raiders from the south.5
THE ‘TSWANA WARS’ AND THE DIFAQANE
The difaqane has been translated variously as ‘the crushing’ and ‘the time of troubles’. Prior to the 1970s, it was generally thought that these changes derived from the growth of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka in the south-east, and that the changes occurred from the end of the eighteenth century up to the 1820s. Such views were later challenged and, as a consequence, modified. The impact of the Zulu on their neighbours has been questioned and the geographic focus of the process has been widened to include the interior of South Africa (in particular the baTswana of the western highveld), and the beginning of the mfecane has been extended back from about the 1790s to the mid-eighteenth century.1
Earlier accounts and versions focused on events in the territory from the Thukela River to Delagoa Bay in the south-east. It was noted that from about 1780 certain African chiefdoms expanded in size and power, whereas weaker ones were displaced or incorporated. In response, most chiefdoms looked to bolster their military capabilities, and by 1818 two dominant forces had emerged: the Ndwandwe under Zwide in northern Zululand and the Mthethwa under Dingiswayo further south. Among Dingiswayo’s allies were the Zulu, whose leader, Shaka, had been installed by Dingiswayo. The Zulu subsequently established a powerful state. To avoid the growing conflict, several local leaders took their followers out of the Zululand region, across the Drakensberg and north to the present-day Swaziland/Delagoa Bay region, and west onto the central highveld. From the perspective of the baTswana on the western highveld, the most important of these leaders was Mzilikazi of the Khumalo, who led his followers out of present-day KwaZulu-Natal because he may have crossed swords with Shaka (as old-style historians have suggested) or because he simply sought a more peaceful and secure home for his followers.
The next obvious question asked by historians was why there should have been such a relatively sudden spate of upheavals and political realignments. Various ideas have been propounded: overpopulation, the effect of climate changes caused by drought, environmental degradation and competition for good pastures were among those put forward in the 1960s. In the next decade, the effect of the entry of new trade goods and the competition created for control of this trade, coupled with European demand for ivory, gold and slaves, were propagated as reasons for the sudden shift to more extreme military measures and organisation. In the 1980s, a group of historians led by Julian Cobbing, building on earlier ideas of Martin Legassick, shifted the debate away from the Zulu and other African communities to advance the idea that the ‘time of troubles’ was caused by expeditions and raiding parties who wanted to seize labour and slaves from Africans living in the interior. These were inspired, organised and conducted by whites (or colonial surrogates such as the Griqua and Kora) living at the Cape or in Portuguese Mozambique. While the evidence for such activities has not been consistently convincing, these scholars have reminded us that there were other actors apart from the Nguni states that were exerting significant influence on the affairs of South Africa’s interior regions several decades before formal colonisation.2
The baTswana were broadly affected by these developments at least two decades before the first ‘raiders’ arrived from Nguni land. Oral traditions point to ‘general restlessness and instability’3 (sometimes called the ‘Tswana wars’) among the various merafe from the late eighteenth century. These were caused by pressure on good pastures, raiding for cattle and the seizure of women as captives, and competition for control of trade items, especially ivory which was in great demand in the East.
NOTES
1For more detailed information on the ‘Mfecane debate’ see the contributions in C. Hamilton (ed.), The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History, (Johannesburg and Scottsville: Witwatersrand University Press, Natal University Press, 1995).
2For these developments see in particular J. Cobbing, ‘The Mfecane as alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo’, Journal of African History, 18 (1977); and most chapters in Hamilton (ed.), The Mfecane Aftermath, and more recently N. Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa 1815-1854, (Harlow, 2000).
3N. Parsons, ‘Prelude to the Difaqane in the Interior of South Africa, c. 1600-1822, in Hamilton (ed.) The Mfecane Aftermath, p. 323.
The career of Moiloa II
Moiloa was born in about 1796 and would have been a young man when these conflicts broke out. By 1821 his father, Diutlwileng, had been killed, probably by raiders under Sebetwane of the Patsa-Fokeng. When the LMS missionary John Campbell visited the Hurutshe capital at Kaditshwene, he reported that a ‘gloomy spiritlessness’ pervaded the townspeople and that Hurutshe regiments (mephato) were patrolling the perimetres of Kaditshwene.6 Moiloa’s uncle, Mokgatlhe, was acting as regent, but Campbell remarked on Moiloa’s popularity, and predicted (correctly) that he might ‘wrest control from [Mokgatlhe’s] hands’.7 Between April and September 1823, further raids led to the abandonment of the town and the baHurutshe fled westwards to the hills of Mosega. However, a new threat was emerging. Mzilikazi’s amaNdebele were now taking total control of the western highveld and expanding ever westwards. This forced Moiloa and Mokgathle to flee further southwards where they were found in a state of near destitution by a group of French missionaries of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, one of whom recorded that the baHurutshe, ‘in the interval of a day, found themselves reduced to a diet of meagre roots’.8 The French missionaries put their number at a paltry 700 to 800 souls, compared to the ‘thousands’ they had encountered at Mosega, just west of modern-day Zeerust.
Though invited by the missionaries to join them, Moiloa and Mokgatlhe chose to move, in 1834, to a place called Modimong on the Harts River. Here they attached themselves to the Kora, an independent Khoekhoe community under David Mossweu. The baHurutshe under Mokgatlhe and Moiloa then joined an aggressive Kora/Griqua alliance to try and force Mzilikazi out of the Madikwe region; thus in 1834 a commando sent against Mzilikazi contained within its ranks a contingent of Hurutshe men under Moiloa, who returned with a few hundred cattle.9 This alliance was strengthened by the arrival of a trekker party under Andries Potgieter, who had left the Cape Colony in 1836. In January 1837 the two groups joined forces to drive the amaNdebele out of their military fortresses. Once the amaNdebele had left the western highveld, Moiloa was quick to appreciate the power of the trekkers, and personally visited Potgieter soon after their arrival to ask if he could resettle in the former Hurutshe homeland, to which Potgieter agreed – however, over a decade was to pass before the move was finally made.
There were several reasons for this lengthy delay. First, there was a possibility that the amaNdebele might return, and there was no way of knowing if the trekkers would settle once and for all in the western highveld or if they would continue to hold power in the region.
Second, there was a power struggle among the baHurutshe over the succession. Moiloa and Motlaadile were the sons of the deceased kgosi Sebogodi. Their older brother Menwe had died before their father, but Mokgatlhe their uncle then ruled the chiefdom as they were both minors at the time of Sebogodi’s death. Mokgatlhe had in turn married Menwe’s main wife and had ‘raised up seed’ on behalf of his dead nephew and fathered a son named Lentswe. Thus there was a three-way rivalry for power between Moiloa, Motlaadile and Lentswe and this jockeying for the chieftainship seemed to preoccupy Hurutshe politics for several years. The alliance between Moiloa and his uncle did not fall apart, despite Mokgathle’s claiming of the right to leadership for his son Lentswe. Of the three men, however, Moiloa was the most politically astute, and grasped the realities of the time better than the others. He enlisted the aid of the militarised Griqua under their leader (or kaptyn) Waterboer, and requested his assistance in the relocation of the baHurutshe to the Madikwe region. Not only could the Griqua offer military support in times of need, but they could also provide other skills and services (for example literacy) which might stand the baHurutshe in good stead. Moiloa also approached Walter Inglis of the LMS in Griquatown in about 1838, and by all accounts the idea of a mission to the baHurutshe was discussed during this visit.
The LMS was in fact already preparing to receive the baHurutshe in the Madikwe district. In 1842, David Livingstone, famous later for his explorations in southern Africa, had established a station among the baKgatla ba Mmanaana at a place called Mabotsa, near present-day Gopane, and it was proposed that the baHurutshe be settled nearby, at Mangelo River, some five kilometres from the old town of Kaditshwene. Between April 1847 and September 1848 the baHurutshe under Mokgatlhe and Moiloa moved to this vicinity. They were finally home again. Their missionary, Walter Inglis, was delighted. He wrote to his superiors:
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 Khoekhoe and coloured labourers were used for a variety of unpaid domestic and military functions.21 The inboekelinge males were supposedly manumitted (freed) at the age of twenty-one and the females at twenty-five. Many of them, however, were alienated from African society and chose to remain within Boer households – others such as the residents of the Bethlehem location in Rustenburg and a group of oorlams who occupied a farm (Welgeval) in the Pilanesberg crater, lived in distinct oorlam communities.22
Several Setswana-speaking chiefdoms tried to resist the hardship imposed on them by the trekkers, and this frequently led to direct armed confrontation. The best-known incident is that of the attack on the baKwena and Livingstone at Dimawe in Botswana, an event that had direct implications for Moiloa’s baHurutshe living close by. The confrontation, however, had its origins in the Transvaal when Mosielele, the kgosi of the baKgatla ba Mmanaana at Mabotsa, and neighbour to Moiloa, decided to flee the Transvaal and seek refuge with Setshele’s baKwena after repeated demands to provide labour which he had ignored. The Marico Boers decided it was time to punish such ‘impertinence’. Commandant A Stander advocated sending a commando against Setshele, but Jan Viljoen initially opposed the idea. The general Boer determination to punish the baKwena was, however, unstoppable and a commando attacked Setshele and Mosielele in 1852. The attack was a disaster for Africans living alongside the western Transvaal’s border. The baHurutshe under Mangope living at Borutwe were forced to assist the commando, as was a contingent of Moiloa’s men who headed the commando sent to torch Setshele’s town.
After this incident Moiloa decided to abandon Dinokana. He sought protection first among Setshele’s baKwena themselves and then with the baNgwaketse under Senthufe, further west in today’s southern Botswana. This was in itself an indication of the ‘diplomatic’ contacts Moiloa had forged with the independent western baTswana. Viljoen encountered him in January 1853 at Chonwane, Setshele’s former capital, about eighty kilometres north of Mathebe, and asked him why he had fled during the raid, to which he replied that other dikgosi around him had also fled, and that furthermore he ‘was looked upon as a traitor because he lived among whites’.23 Moiloa nevertheless affirmed that he wanted peace, and Viljoen asked him to return to the Transvaal. The meeting ended with an interesting exchange: Viljoen insisted that Moiloa observe the labour regulations (that dikgosi render up men for Boer work parties) to which he reportedly replied, ‘No, don’t ever ask me for people, I have too much to do myself, but keep the road of peace open and I will see to it that people come to you as before.’ By August, most of Moiloa’s followers had returned to Dinokana, although he personally was still resident with Senthufe, and only returned after another appeal from Viljoen.
The attack on Dimawe and its consequences also signalled the end for the LMS in the Transvaal. The missionaries Edwards and Inglis remonstrated with the authorities of the South African Republic about the incident and Edwards criticised it in a local newspaper. The Boers were incensed and charged the missionaries with high treason (for allegedly supplying guns to the Africans). After rather comic opera court proceedings the two men were found guilty and expelled from the Transvaal.24 This left Moiloa stripped of the potential backing of the LMS although, given the antagonistic relationship between the British missionaries and the trekkers, this may have been a blessing in disguise.
By this time the Setswana-speakers in the western Transvaal were beginning to understand that they were dealing with a society that was far more powerful than even the amaNdebele had been, and that it would be difficult to retain a hold on the crucial resources of land and labour, as well as to retain a semblance of political autonomy. Coupled with this was the clear military and technological superiority of the whites. This realisation led Moiloa to make the disconsolate observation in 1852 that he was nothing but a ‘dog of the Boers’.25
But the trekkers had by no means created the conditions for exercising supreme control in the Marico district. In 1849 they convened a meeting at Deerdepoort to try and establish a government of unity for the Transvaal, but Potgieter stood aloof from the meeting. Provision was, however, made for a Volksraad (parliament), and some officials were appointed to key positions such as commandant-general to oversee African affairs. Despite this, the state was administratively weak and financially bankrupt and remained so even after the formation of the South African Republic in 1852. African leaders like Moiloa realised this and began to see that they could avoid the worst cases of Boer authority.
The Dimawe affair has been fully recorded, largely because their missionary David Livingstone was himself a victim and widely publicised it. But subsequent events in the bushveld are less well known. Once the commando had been disbanded and returned home laden with booty, the Marico Boers were at the mercy of reprisal attacks from the baKwena and the baRolong (who had also been attacked) who wanted to recapture their stolen cattle and children. Among those captured was Setshele’s son Kgari, and the failure of the Boers to return him was a source of ongoing anger to the baKwena. During 1852 and 1853 three Boers were killed in minor skirmishes, the Marico farms were abandoned, and the Boers went into laager. In January 1853 James Chapman, the English explorer, hunter and trader, encountered 200 wagons headed for the security of Potchefstroom. Hunting was suspended and several Boer farms were looted. The attack, moreover, divided the Boers. Viljoen, representative of the ‘hunters faction’ was openly critical of Commandant Scholtz who had led the commando, accusing him of having caused the ‘ruination of the inhabitants by his wanton proceedings’.26 In fact the Marico Boers almost abandoned the district, a misfortune which befell other trekker frontier outposts in the Transvaal such as at at Ohrigstad and Schoemansdal. It was left to Viljoen and his ‘hunters faction’ to negotiate peace terms with Setshele. Although the meeting was successful it took several years before the trekkers returned to their Marico farms.
It was not only the Boers who felt the insecurity of the Marico. Some of Mangope’s baHurutshe at Borutwe (Mangope’s Siding) fled the Transvaal and took refuge with Setshele.This kind of ‘protest migration’ was made possible by the proximity of the Transvaal border with the independent and frequently related Setswana-speaking chiefdoms living just across the line. Even after the formal restoration of peace, instability continued as a result of the murder of three Boers and retaliatory attacks on groups of baKwena living in the Transvaal; Viljoen established that the culprits were subjects of Makopane’s Nzundza or Transvaal Ndebele in the Waterberg district. The borderland between the Transvaal and the baKwena remained intermittently unsafe for all, although peace, largely as a result of Viljoen’s efforts, was finally restored. For several decades, relations between the South African Republic and the independent baTswana merafe became what has been characterised as a ‘diplomatic game’ between the two leading figures, Setshele and Jan Viljoen, who has been portrayed as a peacemaker along the Marico frontier.27 There certainly is good reason to include a third player in Moiloa, who assumed the role of intercessor between the two men.
The Dimawe affair and its consequences was revealing to the more capable African leaders in the region such as Moiloa. It became evident that the trekkers were unable to bring the western Tswana chiefdoms under their control (or to expand in their direction) and that they were thus not as all-powerful as they at first appeared. In addition, in order to keep the important ‘hunters road’ to the north open, the trekkers had to rely on certain African allies. Moiloa, one such ally, realised he could buy some breathing space by offering support to the Boers when convenient. This mutually dependent relationship bears a strong resemblance to that which developed elsewhere in the Transvaal between factions of trekker and African society.28 Thus it was, for example, that negotiations between a number of African leaders and the Boers took place at Dinokana; that Moiloa acted as a messenger between them; and that he reported any incidents which might threaten the peace of the district. During the troubles between the South African Republic and Setshele’s baKwena, Moiloa and his entire council held meetings with Viljoen on his farm at Vergenoeg, where Moiloa offered ‘to make further enquiries into the rumours [of impending war] and to punish the guilty’.29 The extent of the support Moiloa was prepared to give the authorities is suggested by a statement he made in 1856 to Pretorius that ‘if a fly falls in the milk from my side I will take it out so you [Pretorius] can punish the culprit’.30 By adopting a cooperative position, Moiloa was in fact making himself indispensable to the Boers, and was later able to make certain demands on them.
For nearly all the Setswana-speaking communities in the bushveld, missionaries became a necessary precondition for independent political and economic activity, and Moiloa consequently turned his thoughts to this soon after the expulsion of the LMS. Of course, it entailed making compromises. In return for their support, missionaries expected that African dikgosi would create the right circumstances for successful proselytising and conversion to Christianity. Most active of the missionary societies in the region was the Hermannsburg Mission Society (HMS). After the expulsion of the LMS from the Transvaal, the authorities sought missionaries who would encourage their converts not to challenge the supremacy of the Transvaal state. In 1858 the baKwena paramount Setshele had asked the South African Republic to assist him in finding missionaries for his followers in Botswana and President MW Pretorius had no doubts about approaching the Hanoverian mission in Natal. ‘In their schools,’ he wrote, ‘they concentrate on encouraging the barbarians to work and on giving them a sound conception of the secular order of affairs before instructing them in the divine.’31 The HMS thus revealed little of the humanitarian zeal displayed by many of the LMS missionaries. As one of them explained to the Reverend John Mackenzie of the LMS, ‘We Hermannsburgers are so deficient as politicians that we cannot dispute the supremacy of the South African Republic over the Bechuana tribes.’32 Nevertheless, the HMS missions were generally established at the request of the African population, and by not antagonising the state authorities they were generally left undisturbed to serve their communities.
THE HERMANNSBURG MISSION SOCIETY
In addition to ministering to the baHurutshe and baFokeng, the HMS also worked among the baKwena-ba-Magopa at Bethanie, where the Reverend W Behrens settled in 1864. Before the turn of the century, the HMS also founded stations among the baPhalane in the Pilanesberg district (Kroondal), the baPhiring in Mabaalstad (Emmaus), at Pella among the baKwena ba Modimosana, and among the oorlams people in Rustenburg town. Thus, with the notable exception of the baKgatla-ba-Kgafela, the HMS had a monopoly over missionary work among the African population in the bushveld during the nineteenth century.
Some time near the end of 1858 Moiloa requested the HMS missionaries then with the Bakwena at Diteyane in Botswana to visit him, and three missionaries led by Reverend Ferdinand Zimmermann came over to Dinokana. They were quick to spot the good agricultural potential of Moiloa’s location. Moiloa offered them a large site on which they could establish a mission. Zimmermann obtained the permission of the SAR authorities to work among the baHurutshe and soon after the establishment of the mission Zimmermann lived up to Moiloa’s expectations of him as an intermediary with the SAR authorities by requesting guns and ammunition for Moiloa’s people to hunt with and to protect their cattle from wild animals.33
The Tswana merafe of the north-west highveld generally welcomed missionaries for the range of services they could offer; they were useful, for example, as emissaries and diplomatic agents for the dikgosi or their representatives, and introduced their converts in particular to new economic methods and concepts – in particular that of land ownership. Their influence was not limited to the realm of the political economy however: they largely dismissed African cultural practices and beliefs and encouraged Africans to embrace an awareness of the ideas and cultural beliefs of Europeans. They therefore provided a window into the world and the consciousness of the makgowa (Europeans). The significant leaders, including Moiloa, initially resisted conversion to Christianity, probably because it would have risked alienating powerful traditionalists within their communities but, nevertheless, relations between him and the missionaries were cordial. Moiloa encouraged children to attend the mission school and was considered by Ferdinand Jensen, a Dane from Schleswig-Holstein who assumed duty after Zimmermann, to be ‘an excellent man, not only as a ruler but in the way he aids the spread of Christianity … It is a joy to be a missionary to him because he respects his teachers in all ways and protects them.’34 Although, in time, most of the ruling families became converts, throughout his life Moiloa refused to accept conversion. He was thus able to keep a foot in the camps of both the traditionalists and the Christian converts in his society. Possibly it was because of his reluctance to fully embrace Christianity that the missionaries, even though they wrote glowing reports about Moiloa, were slow to make inroads among the people they sought to convert. It took Jensen a decade to convert 110 of the baHurutshe (the number of conversions did, however, pick up pace in the last decade of the century).
FIGURE 2: Moiloa with missionary Ferdinand Jensen c. 1865 (the only known photo of Moiloa II)
Source: BaHurutshe Tribal Office, Dinokana
It was the missionaries’ role in land acquisition in the western Transvaal that was to leave a more permanent and, for most African communities, more important mark. Most historians have remarked on how land purchases in the north-western Transvaal were an important way in which Africans resisted being drawn into wage labour and retained a hold over land when others were losing it.35 Although the law strictly forbade Africans from purchasing land and holding title to it they could get around this legislation by purchasing land in the name of the missionary, who held it in ‘trust’ for the chiefdom. Moiloa first acquired land in 1867, with missionary intervention, purchasing two farms next to the baHurutshe location called Dam van Matsego and Matjesvallei. The latter was bought from a well known hunter in the district, Marthinus Swart, for a hundred head of cattle, in apparent contravention of a Volksraad resolution, so it is not clear if this was a legally approved transaction – Moiloa tried in 1874 to get a binding deed of sale from President Burgers but gained nothing before his death. Moiloa also entered into grazing agreements with some of the surrounding Boers, on the farms Welbedacht, Nooitgedacht, Tweefontein and Stinkhoutboom, and he gained access to cattle posts and arable land in Ngwaketse territory. The baHurutshe did not engage in land acquisition on the scale that some other merafe did, in particular the baFokeng, but this can be attributed to the fact that Moiloa’s location was quite extensive and they enjoyed ensured tenure to it (see Map 7).
Moiloa was an astute politician. On the one hand, he obeyed the Boers and satisfied their demands; on the other hand, in return, he insisted on maintaining a degree of independence. This policy helped to create the kind of stability needed for economic security. The arrival of the trekkers heralded the expansion of a mercantile economy in the western Transvaal hinterland, centred first on hunting and trading in captives and then on land acquisition. By the mid-1850s the extension of the trade frontier in the bushveld region occurred along two routes: one was from Potchefstroom (the commercial capital of the western Transvaal until the last decades of the century) through to Rustenburg; the other along the hunters, missionaries and traders ‘road to the north’ through Vryburg, Kanye (the baNgwaketse capital from 1852), to Shoshong and then to Ngamiland and Barotseland. A quite popular deviation was to go via Zeerust and up the Ngotwane River to Mochudi in modern Botswana. This meant that a number of mainly English traders such as Chapman, Anderson, Baldwin and Cumming passed through the Hurutshe capital at Dinokana.
In addition, many Boers, acting as middlemen for various agencies in the Transvaal, came to Dinokana to purchase hides, livestock or feathers. Zeerust in 1867 was described as ‘a new village in the vicinity of friendly [native] tribes who live in peace and carry on an extensive trade in ivory, ostrich feathers, etc.’36 The supply of ‘exportable produce’ from the Marico and Potchefstroom districts was so great that it drew traders from the Cape and Orange Free State, leading the Transvaal Argus to complain about the presence of ‘colonial sharks hovering about our borders’.37 The long-held view that the Boers were an isolated community clinging to a subsistence economy has in recent times been exposed as a fallacy38 – as the activities of the Marico Boers disclose, they were well aware of the commercial potential of southern Africa’s interior and were linked to longdistance markets. However, in the western Transvaal the once lucrative ivory and ostrich-feather trades declined as the century wore on, and the Boers were unable to command good prices for their products at the colonial markets of the Transvaal and the Cape. The Boers did, however, stimulate trade and commerce among the western Tswana groups such as the baHurutshe.
The extent and diversity of baHurutshe economic activity between 1860 and 1880 is fully recorded by the missionaries and other visitors to their capital. On his arrival there in 1859, for example, Zimmermann described:
… this wonderful wide valley with Linokana just about in the centre. The land brings enormous amounts of corn as the people concentrate more on agriculture. Linokana is surrounded by many large vegetable gardens. The Bahurutsi already know how to irrigate. They are generally well off, some even really wealthy, because they have their cattle farming as well as good lands. They have bought many wagons and ploughs.39
FIGURE 3: The Dinokana valley with Gopane village in the distance
Source: The authors
A few years later, W Behrens, the HMS supervisor for Bechuanaland missions, reported approvingly of conditions in the town, noting that:
The baHurutshe have so much corn as they have not had for years. Here in the town of Moiloa there are about five wagons and 200 oxen. You can easily imagine how much work can be done with them. In addition, chiefs, deputies and all who own oxen use the plough, and sow wheat, like the Boers. They hunt in great numbers and shoot wild meat and ostriches and bring back on their pack oxen, meat skins and feathers … for their own use as well as for sale. Here in Moiloa’s stad are several thousand guns; a man without a gun is a poor man.40
Hunting declined in the mid-1870s owing to competition from white hunters, a decline in the numbers of animals locally, and a restriction by the authorities limiting the baHurutshe to hunting within their reserve. But there was no such reduction in agricultural activity if the reports of literate observers are to be believed. In 1875 the Austro-Hungarian botanist, Emile Holub, recorded that the baHurutshe ‘gathered in as much as 800 sacks of wheat, each containing 200 pounds and every year a wider area of land is brought under cultivation … beside wheat they grow maize, sorghum, melons and tobacco.’41 He also noted that irrigation had become a widespread practice.
The use of wagons indicates that much of this produce was transported elsewhere for sale, and that wealthier producers were investing their profits from agriculture to increase their share in the trading economy. Wagons assumed great significance in the period before white and Indian traders settled in the reserve and bought up locally produced goods. They became all the more crucial from 1869 when a significant new market was opened up at Kimberley by the discovery of diamonds. Holub wrote in 1872 that the baHurutshe ‘sold what they did not require for their own consumption in the markets of the Transvaal and the diamond fields’.42 The diamond fields opened up opportunities for Africans in the western Transvaal bushveld, and from even further afield, to seek the higher wages offered there.
This economic growth benefited many Hurutshe cultivators who were transformed into a thriving peasantry, much as happened among nearly all African societies that engaged with the colonial economy. It also allowed for personal accumulation by Moiloa himself – it is absolutely clear that from his position as kgosi he entrenched his own wealth and power through control over land, production and trade among the baHurutshe. He ensured that missionaries and traders purchased grain directly from him (his death, according to the local landdrost, had a ‘negative effect on trade with the white population’).43 In addition, he was paid £25 per annum by the state to collect taxes from his followers, a task normally entrusted to the landdrost, but perhaps a form of reward to Moiloa for his considered loyalty. Possibly the most visible sign of Moiloa’s power was the fact that he married eleven women; in the opinion of Holub, who travelled extensively through the bushveld, this was more than most Batswana dikgosi at the time. He also formed six new Hurutshe mephato (age-regiments) during his period of rule, the largest, Matshelaphala, under his direct control – an indication of chiefly control and political stability.
It should be borne in mind that Moiloa was a ‘pretender’ to the chieftainship of the baHurutshe. We raised this point in the Introduction, when discussing Moiloa’s reluctance to return immediately to his former homeland in the later 1830s, but the issue is complicated and requires repeating; and in addition some of the circumstances prevailing in the earlier period had changed. Sebogodi, the rightful kgosi, had been killed in action against the baNgwaketse. He had three sons: Menwe, Motlaadile and Moiloa. But Sebogodi’s rightful successor, Menwe, had predeceased his father so Sebogodi’s brother Diutlwileng assumed the chieftainship. He, in turn, died during the disturbances of the difaqane. This is when Sebogodi’s youngest brother Mokgatlhe took over the reins of power. Strangely, Motlaadile seems never to have made a bid for chieftainship and was eclipsed by the Mokgatlhe/Moiloa faction (this may be because when the majority fled Kaditshwene in 1821-22 Motlaadile had remained and became a tributary of the amaNdebele, thus losing support). According to Hurutshe genealogies, Motlaadile had no children. However, to complicate matters Mokgatlhe had married the appointed ‘great wife’ of Menwe and according to custom had ‘raised up seed’ of behalf of his nephew. Mokgatlhe’s sons Lentswe and Gopane were thus considered by many to be the rightful line of succession once Moiloa died. Others, however, claimed that Moiloa’s son, Ikalafeng, should become the kgosi.
Even though the laws of succession were neither fixed nor binding among the baTswana, Moiloa could not ignore the fact that he lacked a really legitimate claim to leadership of the merafe, and it was a source of obvious concern for him. He countered it by gathering around him diverse groups of supporters on whom he counted to balance the scales of power in his chiefdom. First among these were the Griqua converts whose support he had sought and acquired during the late 1830s and early 1840s. As Moiloa probably anticipated, they offered a ready link with the missionaries and other African converts, and provided a number of services through their agricultural and linguistic (Dutch-speaking) skills. Moiloa allocated them two separate wards in Dinokana where they enjoyed a measure of autonomy and gave him their support.44 Interestingly, a number of so-called ‘coloured’ families, presumably descendants of these original Griqua, assumed his name, which they still bear today. He also drew support from converts, and from a number of non-baHurutshe immigrants, who came to settle in the reserve during the 1850s. When Moiloa died, the authorities of the incoming British administration considered that the ‘pure’ baHurutshe were the followers of Gopane, and that it was the immigrants who enjoyed status at Dinokana. This development indicates also that the ethnic composition of the baHurutshe was constantly changing and was never fixed or immutable – certainly the ethnic face of the predifaqane and post-difaqane Hurutshe merafe was quite different, though there was probably a significant core of ‘pure’ baHurutshe among it. The region had been occupied by different groups of people in the years of Hurutshe displacement, some of whom did not trek away with Mzilikazi, and would have most likely been incorporated into baHurutshe society as the Tswana ward system allowed for the incorporation of ‘foreigners’ or strangers, who were semi-independent. However, the prevailing trend among minority factions from the mid to late nineteenth century (and perhaps beyond) was to seek for incorporation into the expanding Hurutshe chieftaincy rather than establishing an independent identity.
Though dependent on a number of different sections of baHurutshe society, Moiloa tried at the same time to weld his community together through a process of political involution, (around the person of himself as the kgosi). It was therefore essential to maintain and even strengthen key social practices and institutions. His refusal to convert perhaps indicates his desire not to alienate traditional elements of baHurutshe society, as does the re-formation of former mephato and the introduction of new ones. In addition, during his time no marriages (save Christian ones) were considered legal without the passing of bogadi cattle (bridewealth payment).45 Moiloa’s ‘domestic policy’ therefore was a dual (though perhaps contradictory) one of strengthening support among ‘non-traditional’ elements among the morafe while at the same time rebuilding the essential props of traditional society that had broken down during the difaqane.
Moiloa’s external policies were geared to ensure stability with neighbours and with the authorities of the South African Republic. He had a difficult relationship with Setshele’s baKwena across the border, who initially regarded Moiloa as a vassal and tool of the trekkers, but he sent Setshele oxen, probably as a token of friendship, and many Boers thought that Moiloa ‘would stand by’ the baKwena during the war scare time of 1856,46 an allegation that Viljoen was forced to investigate but later repudiated. His relations with the baNgwaketse also appeared good – he had, after all, earlier sought and received sanctuary from them. According to evidence given in 1871 to the Bloemhof Commission, which sat to arbitrate the various contested claims to the diamond fields, the cattle belonging to the respective merafe used to ‘depasture’ in each other’s territory between the winter and summer months.47 The only nearby group with whom Moiloa did not mend relations was the baTlhaping. When the baHurutshe returned from Modimong after seeking sanctuary there during the difaqane, their kgosi, Mahura, was incensed that they had ‘defected’ to another authority by returning to what became the Transvaal. Mahura consequently dispatched a raiding party into the Transvaal which overwhelmed the unsuspecting baHurutshe killing over fifty people, and returned with a number of cattle.48 After that Moiloa remained suspicious of the baTlhaping.
Moiloa was also considered by the South African Republic authorities to be a major figure in the politics of the wider region. In 1870 he attended a joint meeting of the baRolong, baNgwaketse, baHurutshe and Kora leaders with, among others, President MW Pretorius, to affirm the territorial integrity of the baTswana bordering the Republic, and he was also invited to give evidence to the Bloemhof Commission.
In July 1875 Moiloa’s death was imminent. Although he had steadfastly refused to accept conversion, even on his deathbed, in a typical gesture of compromise he instructed Jensen to lay him in a coffin upon his death and not to bury him in the seated position as was African custom. This symbolic rejection of tradition ‘stilled the large group of mourners into silence’.49 After his death the relative stability the baHurutshe under his rule had enjoyed for nearly two decades collapsed, and a period of division, civil strife, and ultimately dispossession ensued. Moiloa, however, had done much towards creating the necessary unity required for the re-building of the baHurutshe after the turbulent years of the 1830s and 1840s, a role which earned him the accolade of the ‘mighty man with thick neck who does not walk behind the people’, in Hurutshe praise poems.50 He was succeeded by Ikalafeng Moiloa in 1877.
OTHER LESSER-KNOWN BATSWANA LEADERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Ratheo Monnakgotla
Whereas Moiloa was perhaps the most successful of the lesser-known nineteenthcentury southern African leaders, there were others who re-established control over their communities and laid the basis for economic and political security. One was Ratheo Monnakgotla of the baKubung. Towards the end of the difaqane he seized control of the fragmented chiefdom from Lesele Mathope, who probably had a greater claim to it. Monnakgotla led his followers to Heilbron in the Free State where they remained for close to forty years. In 1880, the farm where Lesele Mathope had settled at Molotestad, north-west of Ventersdorp, was put up for sale. The two factions seem to have buried the hatchet by this time and Lesele approached Monnakgotla with a view to re-uniting the baKubung and settling as one community at Molotestad; it was to Monnakgotla, however, who actually clinched the purchase of the farm with the assistance of the Anglican missionary to the Bakubung-ba-Mathope at Molotostad, the Reverend Clulee of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Clulee was led to believe that Monnakgotla was the legitimate chief, and assisted him in negotiat ions for the purchase. Monnakgotla then returned to the western Highveld in 1881. The aggrieved Lesele, who by 1882 had fallen foul of the colonial authorities, abandoned Molotestad with a handful of supporters but some years later they, too, acquired land in the Derby district and called the settlement Mathopestad. The two baKubung groups remained independent from one another, though both were in possessi on of good farmland.1
NOTES
1These events are recorded by H.L. Dugmore, ‘Land and the Struggle for Sekama: The Transformation of a Rural Community, the Bakubung of the Western Transvaal’, (B.A. Hons dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand), 1985, and in Dugmore, ‘The Rise to Power of the Mmonakgotla Family of the Bakubung,’ Africa Perspective, 1985, pp. 101–116. See also P-L. Breutz, Tribes of the Ventersdorp District, Government Ethnological Publications no. 5, (Pretoria, 1957).
KGAMANYANE
The baKgatla ba Kgafela did not fare as well during these years. Pilane, the kgosi during the period of upheavals, fled north to the baLaka of kgosi Mapela in the country of the baPedi. He returned in 1837 after the amaNdebele had gone, but he appears to have made a serious enemy of them, and the amaNdebele allegedly raided him again from their new abode in Matebeleland as late as 1842,1 and according to baKgatla traditions some of his sons were taken captive. Pilane’s son Kgamanyane succeeded him in 1850 or 1851. By then the baKgatla resided as tenants at Moruleng (on the farm Saulspoort owned by Paul Kruger); in 1864, Henri Gonin, a Swiss national and member of the Buitelandse Sending (foreign mission) of the NG Kerk, was allowed by Kruger to work among them and through Gonin’s efforts the baKgatla purchased Saulspoort in 1898.2 It may have looked promising for Kgamanyane’s baKgatla, but the demand for forced labour on Boer farms in the Pilanesberg had become unbearable by 1865, and some baKgatla left the district altogether.
In addition, Kgamanyane’s relations with Kruger worsened. Early in 1870, upon Kruger’s instruction to his representative official in Saulspoort, HP Malan, a Kgatla work team was inspanned to wagons and carts containing stone boulders and forced to pull them to a dam construction site on an irrigation project of Kruger’s within Saulspoort. This caused extreme discontent and, on receiving complaints from the men, Kgamanyane agreed that they should stop working. For this ‘misdemeanour,’
FIGURE 4: Kgamanyane
Source: Mphebatho Museum, Moruleng
FIGURE 5: Paul Kruger, Commandant 1865
Source: National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria
Kgamanyane was publicly flogged by Kruger at a meeting convened at Saulspoort in April of that year. In addition to continual Boer demands for Kgatla labour and the extortion of their goods and money over land,3 the flogging was the proverbial ‘last straw’. In a state of understandable anger and distress, Kgamanyane, with at least half of his people, emigrated to Mochudi in baKwena country in present-day Botswana. This was a huge blow for the baKgatla who stayed behind in the Pilanesberg, and they remained in a state of relative insecurity until the South African War, when they managed to recoup some of their losses.4 We follow the fortunes of the Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela during and after the war in the next chapter.
NOTES
1Breutz, Tribes of Rustenburg, p. 257.
2For an account and analysis of Gonin’s life and work among the baKgatla see B. Mbenga, ‘The baKgatla baga Kgafela in Pilanesberg District of the Western Transvaal, from 1899 to 1931’, Ph.D thesis, University of South Africa, 1996, Ch2; and B. Mbenga and F. Morton, ‘The Missionary as Broker: the Rev. Henry Gonin, the BaKgatla of Rustenburg District, and the South African Republic, 1862-1922’, South African Historical Journal, 36, (1997), pp. 145-167.
3Morton, When Rustling Became an Art, p. 101.
4For a full account of this incident see B. Mbenga, ‘Forced Labour in the Pilanesberg: The Flogging of Chief Kgamanyane by Commandant Paul Kruger, Saulspoort, April 1870’, Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, March 1997, pp. 127-140.
THE REVEREND HENRI GONIN, MISSIONARY TO THE BAKGATLA BA KGAFELA
Henri Gonin was born in Switzerland in the early 1830s. In 1860, he received his theological training in Geneva, Switzerland, and in Edinburgh, Scotland. Before the end of his training in Edinburgh, he was recruited as a missionary by the Reverend Dr DW Robertson of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in South Africa. The foreign sub-committee of the DRC, which catered for black people in the Transvaal and beyond, sent Gonin to open a new mission in the Transvaal. He and his wife arrived in Rustenburg by ox-wagon in May 1862. After two years of waiting in Rustenburg, they went to work among the baKgatla ba Kgafela in the Pilanesberg, with the permission of the most senior government official of the district, Commandant Paul Kruger. The Kgatla chief, Kgamanyane, allowed the Gonins (now with three children) to settle at Saulspoort, his headquarters. In June 1864, in order to have personal independence and also security of tenure, the Gonins bought their own farm, Welgeval (or Welgevallen), close to Saulspoort. Gonin was on good terms with Kgamanyane and quickly learnt Setswana but struggled to make converts among the reluctant baKgatla. There were, however, a large number of literate Africans living at Saulspoort – the oorlams. These were the men and women who Gonin recruited as his teacher-evangelists and depended upon for opening up new mission stations and spreading the gospel all over the Pilanesberg and up to the border with Bechuanaland. As the baKgatla were a people divided by an international border, their paramount chief living in Mochudi, Bechuanaland, Gonin opened another mission station there at the beginning of the twentieth century and converted many baKgatla to Christianity. Apart from his missionary work, Gonin also assisted the baKgatla to purchase land by registering it in his name, as during the nineteenth century Africans in the Transvaal were not allowed to register land in their own names. In 1910, Gonin had become the longest-serving DRC minister in South Africa, having served at Saulspoort continuously for forty-six years.
FIGURE 6: Henri Gonin’s original church at Saulspoort, being renovated, 2014
Source: The authors
ENDNOTES
1 Shillington, Luka Jantjie.
2 Molema, Montshiwa.
3 B. Mbenga and A. Manson, ‘People of the Dew’: A History of the Bafokeng of the Rustenburg District, South Africa, from Early Times to 2000 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2010), 27-74; J. Bergh, ‘We Must Never Forget Where we Come From’: The Bafokeng and Their Land in the Nineteenth Century (History in Africa, 32 (2005); and G. J. Capps, ‘Tribal Landed Property: The Political Economy of the BaFokeng Chieftaincy, South Africa, 1837-1994’, D. Phil thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2010.
4 See M. Legassick, ‘The Sotho-Tswana peoples before 1800,’ in L. Thompson (ed.), African Societies in Southern Africa (London: Heinemann, 1969); Manson, ‘The Hurutshe in the Marico’, pp. 36-43.
5 A. Manson, ‘Confict in the Western Highveld/Southern Kalahari, c. 1750 -1820’; and N. Parsons, ‘Prelude to the Difaqane in the Interior of Southern Africa, c.1600-1822, in C. Hamilton (ed.) The Mfecane Aftermath, Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History, (Johannesburg and Pietermaritzburg: University of Witwatersrand Press and University of Natal Press, 1995).
6 S. Kay, Travels and Researches in Caffraria (London 1833), pp. 225-227.
7 J. Campbell, Travels in South Africa Undertaken at the Request of the Missionary Society Narrative of a Second Journey, (London: Westley, 1822) vol. 1, p.261.
8 Records of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, Journal des Missions Evangelique, vol. 8, 1833, pp. 202-203.
9 See Manson, ‘The Hurutshe in the Marico region’, pp. 66-74.
10 Official correspondence of the London Missionary Society (henceforth LMS Correspondence), Box 23, Inglis to directors, 26 September 1848.
11 This account of the baHurutshe during the Difaqane is taken from Manson, ‘The Hurutshe in the Marico District,’ pp. 62-90. More information on the relations between the baHurutshe and the Transvaal is available in A. Manson ‘The Hurutshe and the formation of the Transvaal state, 1835-1875’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 25, 1 (1992).
12 LMS Correspondence, Box 24, Edwards to Tidman, 19 June 1849.
13 LMS Correspondence, Edwards to directors, 9 September 1849.
14 See Manson, ‘The Hurutshe’, pp. 96-98.
15 LMS Correspondence, Inglis to Tidman, 24 August 1850.
16 Landau uses the baHurutshe’s return to the Marico as a case in point for the creation of ‘tribes’ by Europeans during the colonial period. Potgieter apparently ‘stipulated that only “they, the Barurutse”’ [sic] could return to Mosega, thus ‘blocking add-ons, allies, subordinate lords and so on’. By so doing he allegedly fashioned the baHurutshe into a distinct ‘tribal’ entity. But the evidence suggests that they were quite heterogenous, nor had Potgieter any coercive means of enforcing such a stipulation. The notion that African communities were simply some sort of helpless ‘tabula rasa’ on which Europeans drew tribal maps is one that needs repudiating. See Popular Politics, p.121.
17 Morton, ‘Slave Raiding’, pp. 102-3. ‘Captive Labour in the Western Transvaal after the Sand River Convention’, in Eldredge and Morton (eds.), Slavery in South Africa, (Boulder and Scottsville: Westview Press and University of Natal Press, 1994), p. 175.
18 J. Freeman, A Tour in South Africa (London 1851), p. 274.
19 Delius, The Land Belongs to us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers, and the British in the Nineteenth Century Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1983) p. 35.
20 Cited in Morton, ‘Slave Raiding’, 107; ‘Captive Labor in the Western Transvaal after the Sand River Convention’, in Eldredge and Morton (eds), Slavery in South Africa, p. 175.
21 For more information on the oorlam phenomenon, see the seminal article by P. Delius and S.Trapido, “‘Inboekselings and Oorlams’: The Creation and Transformation of a Servile Class,’ Journal of Southern African Studies, vol.8, no 2, (1982).
22 For an account of these communities see A. Manson and B. Mbenga, ‘The Evolution and Destruction of Oorlam Communities in the Rustenburg District of South Africa: The Cases of Welgeval and Bethlehem, c. 1850-1980”, African Historical Review, vol 41 (2), ( 2009); B. Tema, The People of Welgeval, (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2005) is an autobiographical account of growing up on the farm.
23 National Archives’ Depot, Transvaal Archive (TA) of the State Secretary (henceforth SS), vol.5, r 468/53, Report of Viljoen’s Meeting by Afteraardigden (Representative), 16 January 1853. Unless indicated all archival sources are contained in the TA section of the SA Depot in Pretoria.
24 For more detail see J.A.I. Agar-Hamilton, The Native Policy of the Voortrekkers, (Cape Town: Maskew Miller, 1928), p. 116; and W. Cochrane, Memoirs of Reverend Walter Inglis (Toronto, 1887).
25 Cited in R. Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society, 1795-1895, (London, 1899), p. 596.
26 Cited in J. Chapman, Travels in the Interior of South Africa (London 1868), p. 88; and State Archives SS vol.5, r517/53 J.W. Viljoen to A.W. Pretorius, 16 April 1853.
27 See J. Grobler, ‘Jan Viljoen, the South African Republic and the Bakwena, 1848-1882’, South African Historical Journal, no 36, (May 1997) pp. 241-249.
28 For example the Swazi and the Ohrigstad trekkers, and in the Zoutpansberg.
29 Grobler, ‘Jan Viljoen’, p. 247-248.
30 Transvaal Archives, SS vol. 11, r1127/56, J.W. Viljoen to A.W. Pretorius, 30 July 1856.
31 Cited in W. Kistner, The Anti-Slavery Agitation against the Transvaal Republic, 1852-1862 (Parow 1952), p. 221 from Eerste Volksraad Notule, E.R.V 105, 1858.
32 Cited in Kistner, Anti-Slavery Agitation, p. 222, from LMS correspondence, Mackenzie to Tidman, 8 September 1864.
33 Manson, ‘The Hurutshe in the Marico District’, pp. 142-144.
34 HMB, Report from Linokana Station, 1864, p. 189.
35 See G. Relly, ‘The Transformation of Rural Relationships in the Western Transvaal’, M.A Thesis, University of London, 1978; J. Bergh and H.M. Feinstein, ‘Trusteeship and Black Land Ownership in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Kleio, 36, (2004) pp. 170-193; J. Bergh, ‘“We must never forget where we come from”: The BaFokeng and their land in the nineteenth century Transvaal’, History in Africa, 32, (2005) pp. 95-115.
36 The Transvaal Argus, 7 February 1867.
37 The Transvaal Argus, 21 February 1867.
38 See C. Hamilton, B. Mbenga and R. Ross, Cambridge History of South Africa: From Early Times to 1885, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). pp. 340-350.
39 Unpublished HMS Correspondence, “Affairs at Linokana Station”, F. Zimmermann, c.1859.
40 Hermannsburg Missions Berichte (henceforth HMB), unnumbered, 1864, p. 138.
41 Holub, Seven Years in South Africa, (Reprint Johannesburg 1975), vol. 1, p. 22.
42 E. Holub, Seven Years in South Africa, vol. 2, p. 22.
43 TA SS r 287/77, Report of Landdrost, Zeerust, re. Conditions in Linokana, 13 November 1877.
44 HMB, no. 7, Report by L. Harms, ‘Affairs of Linokana Station’, F. Zimmermann, p. 2.
45 Manson, ‘The Hurutshe in the Marico district’, pp. 156-157.
46 TA SS vol. 11, r 1113/56, notule. 9 June 1856.
47 Bloemhof Blue Book CA 21/1, Evidence of Gaseitsiwe, pp. 188-189, and M[a]ranyane, 329.
48 TA SS vol.3 r 290/51 Inglis to M.W. Pretorius, 3 June 1851. See also J.A.I Agar-Hamilton, The Native Policy of the Voortrekkers (Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1928), p. 79.
49 HMB, no.4, 1875, p. 221.
50 See Breutz, Tribes of Marico, p. 31 from songs collected by missionaries of the Hermannsburg Mission, Dinokana, 1906.
