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Introduction

This book deals with aspects of the history of the black, predominantly Setswanaspeaking population of today’s North West Province of South Africa. It covers the period from approximately1840, with the beginning of settler and colonial domination, to the present. It is not a comprehensive account but, rather, a number of interrelated chapters on different topics which chart the various political and economic forces that have shaped the fortunes of communities and personalities in the province.

The North West Province is a recent geographical construct that arose out of the Constitution underpinning the new democratic dispensation in 1994. It comprises parts of the former western Transvaal, most of the former homeland of Bophuthatswana, and the northern reaches of the Cape Colony, later Cape Province (see Map 1). In one sense, the construct is not entirely artificial, for its inhabitants broadly comprise two culturally and politically homogeneous units – Setswana-speakers and Afrikaners – who have experienced close to 200 years of contact with one another. This is not to suggest that both societies were sealed off from outside influences. Both had extensive contact with their surrounding inhabitants and there was a constant infusion of other people into this region over a long period of time. Both societies interacted with British colonialism and bore the imprint of that association.

The history of the baTswana in South Africa has by no means been neglected. The early arrival of missionaries, traders and hunters from south of the Orange River, and the settlement of the Boers on the western highveld have ensured that many aspects of their societies were written down, providing a rich source of information for later scholars.

IMPORTANT PUBLISHED WORKS ON THE BATSWANA IN SOUTH AFRICA

Between the burgeoning of research and writing on African societies in South Africa beginning in the late 1960s, and its petering out some two decades later, the baTswana in the Republic – with the exception of Kevin Shillington’s history of the colonisation of the Southern baTswana – rather missed the boat as far as published works are concerned. Shillington’s work, however, principally covered the Southern Tswana living in the former colonies of Griqualand West and British Bechuanaland. As far as other Tswana chiefdoms are concerned, the baFokeng have been the focus of a recent study by the authors of this volume as well as Heinrich Baumann, and Fred Morton sheds light on events in the Pilanesberg district through several studies of the closely related baKgatla ba Kgafela in the Bechuanaland Protectorate.

Important aspects of twentieth-century Kgatla affairs are recounted in J Magala’s history of the baKgatla ba Kgafela. Nancy Jacobs has written an environmental history of the black Tswana residents of the Kuruman district (although it is a little removed geographically from the North West Province). This declining attention to African societies in the pre-colonial and colonial eras was partly a reflection of increasing concern for other scholarly movements such as postmodernism, social and urban history, feminist and gender studies and, in South Africa especially, liberation histories which, on the whole, treated rural affairs in an understated way in which African reserves were viewed ‘largely in terms of their functionality to the developing capitalist system’.¹ The other diversionary development was the rise of nationalism in Africa which focused on ‘the larger narrative of national self-fulfilment’.² In this vision of Africa’s past, colonialism was either regarded as dead and buried and best forgotten, or reformulated as neocolonialism and used as a justification for the failures of many modern African states. Recent times, however, have seen a shift in interest to the last two centuries in Africa, sparked by renewed interest in postcolonial and subaltern studies. Finally, recent interest in the impact of South Africa’s ‘bantustans’ has led to a revival of interest in the lives of those trapped ‘away in the locations’.³

Some of the more important books that have been published include Kevin Shillington’s The Colonisation of the Southern Tswana, 1870-1900 (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985) which deals mainly with the baTlhaping and baTlharo merafe south of the Molopo River up to the turn of the nineteenth century. Part of this story has been reworked into a book on one of its leading figures, Luka Jantjie: Resistance Hero of the South African Frontier (London and Johannesburg: Aldridge and Wits University Press, 2011). Silas Modiri Molema wrote biographies of two prominent nineteenth century baRolong leaders, Montshiwa 1815-1896, BaRolong Chief and Patriot (Cape Town: Struik, 1966) and Chief Moroka: His Life and Times (Cape Town: Struik, 1950). The baFokeng received attention from the authors in ‘People of the Dew’: A History of the BaFokeng of Rustenburg-Phokeng Region of South Africa from Early Times to 2000 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2010). Nancy Jacobs wrote a socioenvironmental history of the Kuruman district entitled Environment, Power, and Justice: A South African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) that has implications for the wider thornveld districts of Mafikeng/Vryburg/Taung. For relations between the baKgatla in the Bechuanaland Protectorate and in the Pilanesberg see F Morton, When Rustling Became an Art: Pilane’s Kgatla and the Transvaal frontier, 1820-1902 (Cape Town: David Philip, 2009). An account of Kgatla affairs in the Transvaal is recounted in J Magala, History of the Bakgatla baga Kgafela (Crink City, 2009). Valuable, though in respects tainted, ethnographic information is available in P-L Breutz, A History of the Batswana and the Origins of Bophuthatswana, A Survey of the Tribes of the Batswana, S Ndebele, Qwaqwa and Botswana (Ramsgate: Breutz, 1989). M Legassick, The Politics of a South African Frontier, The Griqua, The Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries, 1790-1840 (Basler Afrika Bibliografen, 2010), (based on his doctorate of 1969), is an invaluable source for the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century. Of interest on other baTswana societies are C Murray, Black Mountain, Land, Class, and Power in the Eastern Orange Free State,1808s to 1980s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992; the cultural anthropological studies of the Comaroffs on the Tshidi-BaRolong – J Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: Chicago University Press) and J Comaroff and J Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1997) – which shed light on the processes of cultural diffusion and assimilation between the baRolong and the evangelising nonconformist mission movement in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, closely bound up with the objectives of British colonialism.

NOTES

1W. Beinart and C. Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and the Eastern Cape, 1890-1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1987).

2P. Limb, N. Etherington and P. Midgley (eds), ‘Grappling with the Beast’: Indigenous Southern African Response to Colonialism, 1840-1930 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010). p.5.

3South African Historical Journal, vol.64, no 1, (2012). See especially the Introduction by William Beinart, ‘Beyond Homelands: Some Ideas about the History of Rural Areas in South Africa’, pp. 5-21.

Generally speaking, however, the prominent Tswana personalities are less well-known and respected than leading figures among other African societies in South Africa such as the amaZulu, amaXhosa and baPedi, and some of their contemporaries in Botswana. Of course there are exceptions. Silas Modiri Molema wrote an excellent account of the life of Montshiwa of the Ratshidi baRolong, surely one of the most outstanding African figures of the nineteenth century.¹ Kevin Shilling-ton published his important doctoral thesis on the colonisation of what he terms the Southern Tswana (mainly the baTlhaping, baTlharo and baRolong) in 1986, putting them on the map. His work culminates with the last act of local resistance, the Langeberg revolt in 1896 and its consequences: land confiscation, human displacement and immiseration. He afterwards wrote another book on the longneglected personality Luka Jantjie, almost certainly the real hero of baTlhaping resistance to colonialism.²

In this volume we draw together previously unpublished material and existing literature, much of it resulting from our own research (but also that of others) to provide a fuller narrative of important aspects of the history of the Setswanaspeakers and a few of its leading figures in the North West Province. A lot of this had been updated or re-interpreted. Only a portion of the scholarly work that has been conducted has been published, and much of it in rather esoteric publications not generally accessible or of interest to a general reading public. Our volume is an attempt to fill the gaps that exist in our understanding of the history of African people in the region, especially in the twentieth century, but this is not to imply that the collection represents the final or complete word on the region’s past. It is intended more to open up a number of perspectives, and a subset of shared experiences, on the history of this particular region of South Africa. We hope to expand our understanding of Setswana-speaking communities in South Africa; to inform and enthuse students of South African history; and to attract a wider readership among those whose pasts we recount.

Setting the scene: The land and its inhabitants.

Geographically, one can broadly divide the North West Province into two subregions. The first is the western bushveld which stretches from the western Magaliesberg to the Marico district. The bushveld is not a neatly bounded region (literally, it describes a form of terrain and vegetation characterised by quite dense woodland and tall grasses) but lies between the southern Kalahari Desert and the land slightly west of the Magaliesberg range. More specifically, within this is the area bounded by the Madikwe/Ngotwane rivers in the west, the Limpopo River in the north and the Odi (Crocodile) river system, comprising the Elands (Kgetleng), Apies (Tshwane) and Pienaars (Moretele) rivers, in the east. The water flow from the Odi river system drains into the Limpopo. Not all these rivers are perennial. Today this region forms the northern part of the North West Province where it borders on the Limpopo Province and the Republic of Botswana. Three mountain ranges punctuate the generally undulating nature of the region: the Dwarsberg (Motlhwane) in the north-west, the crumpled ridges of the Swartruggens in the centre, and the Pilanesberg crater in the south-east. Human habitation, in the past and even at present, becomes more scattered and sparse the further north one proceeds, until the higher plateau of the Waterberg in Limpopo affords a milder and more pleasant environment (see Map 2).

The western bushveld was largely impenetrable for Africans and Europeans alike in the nineteenth century. One intrepid traveller, Adolphe Delegorgue, attempted to cut through the bushveld in the early 1840s. Within a week he had begun to turn back, forced by the ‘haak-doorn (acacia) whose fang-like thorns tore pitilessly at the flesh … like fishhooks’, the ‘death of the last of my oxen … from the sickness which people attribute to flies’, and the insects (specifically ticks and mosquitoes) which tormented him ‘as no others had in Africa’.³ The unfortunate man was furthermore plagued by a tapeworm that forced him to consume a vast amount of meat each day.

Wildlife was still plentiful in the early nineteenth century, supporting early occupants of the region who were adept hunters, and attracting the early attention of gun-using hunters on the western highveld. Most of the animals of the African savannah were to be found here and lions were a common scourge. John Campbell, a missionary of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1821, noticed that the African population was forced to build special elevated sleeping structures for their children to protect them from lions,⁴ and the explorer David Livingstone nearly met his end in a lion attack in 1846 in the Gopane area, just north of modern Zeerust. Well-known nineteenth-century big-game hunters such as Gordon Cumming, William Cornwallis Harris and Frederick Courtney Selous found the area to their liking. Visiting the Pilanesberg in 1836, Harris remarked on the sight of ‘three hundred gigantic elephants, browsing in majestic tranquility amidst the wild magnificence of an African landscape, and a wide stretching plain darkened, as far as the eye could see, with a moving phalanx of gnoos and quaggas whose numbers simply baffle computation’.⁵

FIGURE 1: The road to Dinokana c. 1987 – typical bushveld terrain

Source: Joe Alfers

The second subregion comprises the area south of the Molopo River (bordering on Botswana) to the southern reaches of the Harts River before its confluence with the Vaal, and east of the Ghaap plateau: that is, the land between modern Mafikeng down to Vryburg and Taung. This is a drier and ecologically more limited part of the province. Though criss-crossed with a number of westward-flowing river systems, the river beds remain dry for most of the year. With an average rainfall of between 38 and 56 cm agriculture provided only a precarious source of livelihood, particularly in times of drought. In the early to mid-nineteenth century the vegetation comprised mainly intermittent but palatable grasses, bushveld scrub, trees and succulents, usually classified as ‘Kalahari thornveld’. This grassland could sustain cattle and other animals, especially in the Molopo basin where more rain fell and the grasses were sweeter. Fortunately, for the inhabitants and animals alike, limestone outcrops give rise to many springs or fountains (also called ‘eyes’) that provide constant water, and enable boreholes to be sunk, especially close to the river beds. Since the mid-nineteenth century, overcrowding and ecological degradation has caused the region’s flora to deteriorate. In his pioneering book The Road to the North, the historian AJI Agar- Hamilton describes this part of the country as ‘bleak, arid and treeless’, and exposed to ‘a desiccating dry wind’.⁶ However, early nineteenth-century observations by travellers, missionaries and naturalists, most of whom pioneered the hunters’ and missionaries’ ‘Road to the North’, suggest that it was more arable and provided better conditions for human habitation and the fauna of the region than it does today (see Map 3).

Until well into the nineteenth century, this territory accords with what historians have described as an ‘open’ frontier, one where two distinct societies, one indigenous (in this case the Setswana-speakers) and one intrusive, comprising white adventurers and other immigrants (principally the Griqua and Kora), encountered one another and struggled to establish full hegemony over the region. This north-west bushveld frontier opened up as the Transorangia frontier further south closed in the 1840s. The Transorangia region had, from the late eighteenth century, been a ‘mélange of people’: Griqua, Kora, Khoisan, Sotho-Tswana and a handful of white farmers, for the most part seeking stability in a volatile region.⁷ Some of the inhabitants of the north-west frontier, through trade activities and by displacement from the bushveld during the migratory years after the so-called difaqane in the 1820s, had in fact already experienced life in Transorangia.

The north-west frontier closed in two stages, first with the declaration of the Bechuanaland Protectorate in the 1880s (which led to British control and safe passage through to the Ndebele state in Matebeleland), and second with the Boer defeat of Mabhogo during 1894 (which provided the Boers with easier occupation of the Waterberg district) and the rinderpest epidemic (1896) which killed off much of the wildlife hosting the tsetse, thereby facilitating trekker penetration of the Limpopo valley.⁸ As Neil Parsons observes,‘contemporary maps customarily marked the Limpopo as the boundary (of the South African Republic, SAR) and South African historians have accepted this fiction as if before the 1900s the SAR had indeed “filled out” as far north-west as the Limpopo’.⁹ The failure of the South African Republic accurately to define its borders or even to publish official maps led to numerous disputes between Africans and the trekkers or, as the Transvaal Argus of 1876 put it, ‘perpetual haggling and bandying of words with a dozen (native) chiefs’.

The sense of region is not carried forward into this narrative in any intentional thematic way. However, this is as much a ‘regional’ history as anything else, one in which the people happen to share a common past and are mainly Setswana-speakers. The territory offers a number of unique features and evokes quite specific images in the popular imagination. Most obvious and most current is its association with mining. It is home to what is called the Bushveld Igneous Complex (BIC) which, along with Zimbabwe’s Great Dyke Complex, is in turn home to the largest concentration of the ore-bearing lodes that contain the Platinum Group Metals (PGMs). The metals found in the BIC are distinguished by the fact that they contain more platinum than other areas in the world where the PGMs are mined. But in addition to this the BIC contains the world’s largest reserves of chrome and vanadium, both part of the PGM. At the heart of the BIC is the Merensky Reef whose core runs through the western bushveld. Global demand and improved technological ability led to a steady increase in platinum mining from the early to mid-1980s to the point where 44 million ounces of the metal were refined in 2011. The mining of PGMs constitutes what can be termed the third mineral revolution in South Africa, after diamonds and gold. The earlier revolutions led to the expansion of colonialism and the rise of the capitalist state, at considerable cost to the indigenous population; the platinum revolution coincided with the advent of democracy, with different interest groups able to exert pressure on the state. This has introduced a new set of complexities and contradictions that are still playing themselves out in the second decade of the new millennium.

The consequences of this unbridled explosion of mining in the BIC led to the migration of large numbers of workers into the region, most of them ethnic ‘strangers’ from other parts of South Africa. Low wages and poor living conditions on the mines led to bouts of labour unrest that culminated in the strike at Lonmin’s Marikana plant in the baPo area that led to the tragic events of August and September 2012 when close to fifty people were killed, most of them mineworkers. These events are etched indelibly on the public mind and caused an international outcry and considerable self-reflection in all sectors of South African society. Although this book is not directly about the revolutions (economic, social and environmental) that have accompanied the mining history of the bushveld, it does provide a context and background to some of the significant moments of the region’s past that gave rise to these chaotic conditions. Moreover, labour-related issues are not the only source of socioeconomic discontent and division among the region’s inhabitants. They have also been afflicted by deep-rooted forms of ethnic contestation.

A second image which the bushveld evokes today is that of its well-known game reserves. The two that stand out are the Pilanesberg and Madikwe reserves, but in recent years there has been a proliferation of smaller game farms in the area. Linked to the Pilanesberg reserve is the Sun City resort, a controversial island of opulence in what has been, despite the advent of mining, a very impoverished rural district. The development of these aspects of the tourism industry affected the surrounding communities in several ways – for example, it led to land alienation, and while work opportunities were created they were accompanied by exploitation and social dislocation.

A further outstanding characteristic of the region as a whole is its palaeontology which points to humankind’s evolutionary past. The famous Taung child fossil was discovered in 1924 by Raymond Dart and the rich archaeology of the early baTswana has been excavated and written about by several of southern Africa’s leading archaeologists.¹⁰ Many important sites dot the countryside and provide evidence for its settlement by the forefathers of the African communities who still inhabit it. The sites range from small outposts, probably cattle kraals, to large towns or mega-sites inhabited by up to 20 000 people. The most spectacular were at Kaditshwene, north of modern Zeerust, and at Dithakong, the capitals respectively of the baHurutshe and baTlhaping in the early decades of the nineteenth century, both visited by European observers. More recently, large sites have been discovered at Molokwane and Marathodi, providing evidence of large-scale cattle keeping, extensive trade networks, an understanding of stone wall construction and the centralisation of power and wealth in the hands of a chiefly elite.¹¹

Many of the sites are within a day or two’s walking distance apart, suggesting close political and trading relations between the groups who lived there. Although this volume’s narrative begins well after these developments, the rich archeological evidence illustrates the longevity of the people in the bushveld/thornveld and their expertise as cattle keepers, and fashioners of iron implements and other trade items.

The archaeological evidence pointing to the origins and early settlement of Tswana-Sotho groups is confirmed by quite a rich body of oral traditions (pointing to when people have ruled and when specific events are said to have occurred) which trace the Tswana ruling lineages to as far back as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD. The archaeology and the oral records prove conclusively that the pre-colonial baTswana did not live in conditions of tribal primitiveness or isolation and that they were thus capable of responding to, and engaging with, the new forces that swept across the western highveld from the mid to late-1830s.

Lastly, another view of the bushveld in particular is presented through the novels of Herman Charles Bosman written in the 1920s and based on his time in the Marico or Madikwe district. Particularly (but not solely) for generations of white South Africans for whom Bosman was prescribed reading at schools during the last fifty-odd years of the twentieth century, it is represented as a charming backwater of changeless quietude. Certainly, Bosman was too astute an observer not to ironically allude to the prejudices, hypocrisy and contradictions of Afrikaner society in the Marico, but the overriding impression one gains is of a Boer society which first tamed and then laid claim to the region. In fact, it was a much more contested terrain than that, and the African societies of the bushveld exercised more independence than is presented in Bosman’s novels.

The window through which all of these features of the North West Province can to varying degrees be viewed are the predominantly Tswana merafe or chiefdoms: the baHurutshe, the baKgatla ba Kgafela, the baFokeng, the baKwena, the baKubung ba Rantheo and ba Monnakgotla, the baRolong, the baTlhaping and a number of smaller or related offshoots of these communities. Scholars examining African settlement and social organisation in southern Africa have in recent times questioned the usefulness and precision of describing African societies in terms of ‘tribes’ or ethnic groups. The membership of these merafe was not fixed, and they were constantly being reshaped by newcomers or a changing of names. Nor can we simply assert that people a few centuries ago might even have called themselves the baRolong or baHurutshe. Despite this, we have adopted the ‘ethnic formulation’ while recogising its limitations.

TRIBES AND ETHNICITY

Recent reformulations of the nature and meaning of ‘tribes’ among the baTswana (and in South Africa generally) have stressed their fluid, fluctuating and multiethnic character. Ethnicity is viewed therefore as a form of false consciousness, one that was imposed on African society by settler and colonial societies anxious to divide African people into recognisable and delineated ‘tribes’. In 2010, Paul Landau extended this hypothesis by suggesting that there were other equally binding and durable forms of association and mobilisation that characterised African political organisation before their history was recorded and before ‘tribes’ or chiefdoms emerged as the key form of affiliation among Africans.¹ He rejected what he called the ‘fog’ of tribalism and the institution of chieftainship as colonial constructions.

The concept of ‘tribalism’ is open to manipulation, and has been recognised as such for some time. ‘Tribes’ are not primordial, and their size and composition changed over time owing to particular historical circumstances – yet they clearly had resonance and meaning for large numbers of the African population, and there is an equally cogent and countervailing view that ethnic groups are very real. As the late Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake, has pointed out:

Apart from the question of its historicity, the logic for the argument for the non-existence of ethnic groups is flawed. Ethnic groups are no less real for existing intermittently, for having fluid boundaries, for having subjective or even arbitrary standards of membership, for opportunistic use of tradition … They are real if they are actual people who are united in consciousness of their common ethnic identity … ethnicity is not a fossilised determination but a living presence produced and even driven by material and historical forces.²

In a recent study of political responses to colonialism in south-western Zimbabwe, Enocent Msindo convincingly shows how Kalanga ethnic identity ‘was not a creation of the colonial state and did not need to be’, nor did these communities ‘require colonial control to reinforce notions of community and identity’.³ Moreover, Landau’s significant initiators and actors of ‘overlapping movements and … authority-building practices’⁴ remain just as opaque as his ‘fog of tribal peculiarism’. Thus we get a bewildering host of terms: ‘princes’, ‘lords’, fighters’, ‘patriarchs’, who were members of ‘rural hegemonies’, ‘admixtures, amalgamations’, ‘splittages’ and ‘regional patrol circuits’. Traditional leadership structures and figures are shifted to the margins and centralisation and state-building by powerful figures get relegated to a lesser category of mobilisation. We have decided to retain the term in its now common form of chiefdom or morafe in Setswana to discuss these bushveld communities, while recognising that they were not bounded and impermeable. In addition, from the midnineteenth century these communities occupied largely fixed boundaries.

NOTES

1P. S. Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

2C. Ake, ‘What is the Problem of Ethnicity in Africa?’ Transformation, 22 (1993), p. 1.

3E. Msindo, ‘Social and Political Responses to Colonialism on the Margins: Community, Chieftaincy and Ethnicity in Bulilima-Mangwe, Zimbabwe, 1890-1930’, in Limb, Etherington and Midgley (eds), ‘Grappling with the Beast’, p. 155.

4Landau, Popular Politics, p. 246.

This approach is largely a matter of convenience, for the sources – colonial, missionary or other – perceived and wrote about them in this way. In addition, the ‘chief’ became a lens through which a wider community was refracted.

From early in the nineteenth century, the baTswana in South Africa were influenced by Christian missionaries, in particular those of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the Wesleyan Missionary Societies. In the western bushveld many became Lutherans under the direction of the Hermannsburg Mission Society (HMS), for whom land and agricultural production were essential material adjuncts to the evangelising mission. Land acquisition, with missionary encouragement and legal abetment, provided the cornerstone for economic security; it enabled many peasant producers and reserve dwellers to continue enjoying a relatively independent livelihood beyond the period when most other Africans in the country had joined the ranks of migrants or urbanised workers. Later (owing to mineral discoveries) ownership of land proved to be a windfall.

The LMS, who sought to convert the Southern baTswana to Christianity, placed an emphasis on education and the cultivation of European mores and cultural norms. Although it was often modified and adapted to suit their circumstances and practices, Christianity fundamentally challenged the ethical values and belief systems of the baRolong and baTlhaping, for example. People who became Christians often considered themselves to be a ‘respectable’ elite which was out of step with many aspects of traditional society. This changing identity was something many baTswana had to grapple with as they engaged with a new and ‘modern’ world.

We shed light on a number of themes that typify the history of the African people of southern Africa – migration, settlement, economic diversification, state formation, missionisation, colonisation, peasantisation, labour migration, accommodation and resistance. However, the book also guides readers to the more unusual aspects of the region’s past and its significance for the present, especially as far as the black population is concerned.

Issues and themes

Between about 1820 and the late 1830s, the difaqane, a period of conflict and rapid transformation that involved many African societies, was ushered in across southern Africa. Almost immediately afterwards, white trekkers established a state on the western highveld. Significant new leaders emerged after these turbulent years. Chapter One recounts the life of a hitherto neglected mid-nineteenth century leader, Moiloa II of the baHurutshe. Like a number of his contemporaries such as Montshiwa of the Ratshidi baRolong and Mokgatle Thethe of the baFokeng, Moiloa showed the ability, coupled probably with some good fortune, to re-build his community from the 1840s through to almost the mid-1870s. It meant dealing with a more complex set of circumstances than he had experienced before. His ability to strike up a good relationship with powerful Boer personalities, in particular Jan Viljoen in the Marico district, was critical to the reconstruction of Hurutshe society.

The North West Province was one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds of the South African War. Our book adds to the growing historiography on the role of black communities in that war by providing, in Chapter Two, a holistic sweep of the encounters between the Boers and the local African populations. The conflict played itself out on different levels – on the battlefield, on Boer farms, and in Tswana villages and towns. We also discuss its aftermath, showing that its repercussions and impact were profound for the African population; albeit for a short moment, factions within African society tried to reverse the inexorable tide of segregation and dispossession that had swept over them by seizing Boer assets.

The next three chapters examine aspects of economic and social change among the province’s black population in the first half of the twentieth century. As alluded to above, land acquisition enabled African communities in the western Transvaal to keep livestock and maintain a reasonable level of agricultural production. The bushveld inhabitants and their rulers were especially concerned with buying or gaining access to farms, acquired either with missionary assistance or in defiance or ignorance of legislation designed to prevent Africans from purchasing land in the Transvaal.

In the Bechuanaland reserves, from Mafikeng south to Vryburg and Kuruman, owing to circumstances relating to Britsh colonial expansion the African population was allocated inalienable land, distinct from the government or crown land from which Africans could be removed. This provided a measure of security from potential land-grabbers of various kinds.

The need to obtain and retain a hold on land is a recurring motif in the history of the baTswana of the western Transvaal. When the 1913 Natives Land Act was passed (demarcating the limits of African land holdings) just about every western Transvaal chief enthusiastically supported the South African Natives National Congress (SANNC, later African National Congress), hoping it could reverse the deleterious consequences of the legislation. Their enthusiasm waned in most cases when it became apparent that the ANC was incapable of doing so. On the other hand, a negative and potentially destructive consequence of land acquisition was that it created discord between rulers and subjects over access to and control of land and the material resources it provided.

Thus in Chapter Three we examine the internal crises of authority and chaos that afflicted the baFokeng, the baKwena ba Mogopa, the baKgatla ba Kgafela and the baKubung bushveld merafe from about 1902 to the middle of that century. This instability was caused primarily by questions of control over material resources. Although they led to social stress and conflict, the basic symmetry of traditional society was not significantly eroded by these conflicts, but simultaneously individuals began to see themselves as independent from the framework of traditional society. What is important about these crises is that they reoccur in an even more contested form after the platinum revolution.

Chapter Four examines the fortunes of the baRolong and, to a lesser extent, the baTlhaping, who inhabited the reserves set aside for them in the late nineteenth century. Confined to an area smaller than they had occupied before colonisation, and restricted by colonial legislation, these rural communities endured considerable hardships but successfully negotiated the transitions of the first half of the century. The nature of Rolong politics was historically rooted and complex, but most of the significant conclusions to this past were resolved in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chiefly political struggles for local control were commonplace, and were closely related to resource control in a difficult environment, especially where the jurisdiction of traditional authorities was defined and limited. The growth of a progressive rural elite and an administration generally supportive of innovation, education and ‘advanced’ farming methods combined to keep the reserves sustainable and limit their incorporation into the political and economic framework of the colonial state.

Chapter Five has a different focus in that it consists of a re-appraisal of an event known as the 1957/58 Bahurutshe Revolt. We give an account of what actually transpired and its noteworthy features, and we then analyse the reasons for the revolt which was led by the kgosi, Abram Moiloa, and was strongly supported by the women of what was called Moiloa’s Reserve, north of Zeerust. The reason for the resistance is considered to have been the order by the South African government that women should carry passes, as African men had been forced to do some years earlier. But this was the straw that broke the camel’s back – yet another incident in a continuum leading to the collapse of the sustainability of Moiloa’s Reserve. We profile the history of the reserve from the early nineteenth century in order to show how it was these longer-term hardships that best explain the depth of anger and frustration of the women in particular in the reserve and their determination to resist the carrying of passes.

From the 1950s, the apartheid system in South Africa created a new set of circumstances for most of the inhabitants of the region. They were herded into the Bophuthatswana homeland, and faced new challenges, no less demanding or difficult than before. In an attempt to gain full political and economic control, especially of the platinum mines, Lucas Mangope and the Bophuthatswana government intervened in the affairs of the baTswana in the bushveld and this led to a spate of conflicts and resistance, with dire consequences. In Chapter Six we describe how these materialised and their resolution, which included some of the most vicious litigation in the history of mining law between the baFokeng on one hand, and the big mining companies and Mangope on the other. Significantly, changing concepts of ethnicity define the Mangope years, at a time when the ‘bantustan’ concept allowed for flexible interpretations of ethnicity.

Finally, we look at the conditions prevailing in South Africa’s ‘Platinum Belt’ in modern times and provide observations as to how it has been radically transformed in recent years, although the transformation was by no means an even one. This chapter summarises the impact of the expansion of the platinum mining sector and the massive windfall that accrued from it, on nearly all the baTswana in the Rustenburg region. In important ways it has been beneficial: for example it has enabled the baFokeng, the first and major beneficiaries of mining on their land, to corporatise their affairs and, paradoxically, to realign themselves as a ‘nation’ headed by a traditional ruler (termed their king) and governed by a Royal baFokeng Administration. But the massive profits from mining, coupled with the financial deals concluded with the local dikgosi, under the terms of black economic empowerment (BEE), have led to the rise of mineral-based ethnic assertion – and this in turn has created the possibilities for huge personal accumulation and the eruption of social turmoil on a scale not seen before. By 2013 there was hardly one African ethnic community in the bushveld that was not embroiled in a malevolent contest for the various earnings from mining on their land, or for control or ownership of the land itself. These events unfolded in the context of the ‘new’ South Africa, where rights were considered inalienable, and where the state, capital, labour and ‘traditional’ communities contended for mining revenues.

Finally, another face of the bushveld region in particular is represented by its national game reserves and the vast entertainment complex of Sun City. We look at the consequences of this for the local communities. While profitable, certainly in the long-run, to significant sectors of the population, it served only to further marginalise and impoverish other segments of the rural population, some of whom were removed from their homes to make way for the parks.

ENDNOTES

1 S.M. Molema, Montshiwa, 1815-1896: Barolong Chief and Patriot (Cape Town: Struik, 1966).

2 K. Shillington, The Colonisation of the Southern Tswana, 1870-1900, (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985); K. Shillington, Luka Jantjie, Resistance Hero of the South African Frontier, (Johannesburg, London and New York: Wits University Press, Aldridge Press and Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

3 A. Delegorgue, Travels in South Africa, 2 vols. (Scottsville: Natal University Press, 1997), pp. 237-244.Translated by F. de B. Webb.

4 J. Campbell, Travels in South Africa … Narrative of a Second Journey, 1820, (London, 1822), p. 220.

5 W.C. Harris, The Wild Sports of Southern Africa (London, 1861), p. 195.

6 A.A.I. Agar-Hamilton, The Road to the North, South Africa, 1852-1886 (London, 1937), p.1.

7 The phrase is Martin Legassick’s from ‘The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries, 1780-1840, The Politics of a Frontier Zone’, Ph.D thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1969, p. 380. Landau prefers the term ‘metis’.

8 See A. Manson ‘The Hurutshe in the Marico District of the Transvaal, 1848- 1914’, PhD thesis University of Cape Town, 1990, p.31, citing N. Parsons, ‘Khama III, the Bamangwato and the British: with special reference to 1895-1923’, Ph.D thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1973, p. 77.

9 N. Parsons, ‘Khama III, the Bamangwato and the British’, p.77.

10 See for example, R. Mason, Prehistory of the Transvaal: A Record of Human Activity (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press,1969); T. Huffman Handbook to the Iron Age: The Archaeology of Pre-Colonial Farming Societies of Southern Africa (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007); T. Maggs and G. Whitelaw, ‘A review of recent archaeological research on food-producing communities in southern Africa,’ Journal of African History, 32 (1991); J.C. Pistorius, Molokwane, An Iron Age Bakwena Village: Early Settlement in the Western Transvaal (Johannesburg: Perskor, 1992) especially pp. 20-32, 38-46; J.C. Boeyens, ‘The Late Iron Age sequence in the Marico and early Tswana history, South African Archaeological Bulletin, 58, 178 (2003) and S. Hall, ‘The Late Precolonial Tswana in the Rustenburg District’, in N. Swanepoel, A. Esterhuysen and P. Bonner, (eds) Five Hundred Years, Rediscovered (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008).

11 Hall, ‘The Late Precolonial Tswana’.