A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  Outcrops of iron were spread unevenly in Southern Africa, however. There were gaps in their incidence in the areas occupied by Bantu-speaking farmers—for example, toward the southern end of the territory of the Nguni-speaking people. Iron was thus a major trade commodity. Most farmers managed to possess iron-tipped spears, but some were obliged to use wooden digging tools.

  Copper, too, was available on and near the surface in numerous localities in northern Botswana and the northern Transvaal. The people exploited this resource extensively. At Lolwe Hill in the northern Transvaal, “It has been estimated that over the centuries more than 10,000 tons of rock containing the ores were dug from its shafts and galleries, to be smelted in the myriad furnaces of the surrounding plain.”37 Throughout the region—and indeed throughout all of tropical Africa to the north—copper was in great demand. People used it almost exclusively for decorative purposes. “Copper adorned the body from head to foot and laterally to the tips of the fingers: hair ornaments, earrings, collars and necklaces, pendants, girdles and cache-sexes, bracelets, anklets, bells, amulets, crowns. Copper ornamentation is, or has been, quasi-universal in African societies.”38

  People valued iron and copper so dearly that the metals were principal commodities of trade and major targets of theft and robbery. European survivors of shipwrecks on the southeast African coast found that iron and copper items from the wrecks were in great demand. In 1689, the commander of the Dutch Cape Colony informed his superiors in Amsterdam that some survivors of the wrecked Stavenisse who had lived in Natal for nearly three years reported that “one may travel 200 or 300 miles through the country, without any fear of danger from the men, provided you go naked [unarmed] and without any iron or copper, for these things give inducement to the murder of those who have them.”39

  Cattle were the most prized possessions of all and the principal indicators of wealth. Ludwig Alberti, who was employed by the Dutch government as commandant of the garrison at Fort Frederick (later Port Elizabeth) between 1803 and 1806, wrote that the Xhosa, the southernmost Nguni people,

  live principally by cattle-breeding. For the well-being of the family, a sufficient number of cattle are required, whose attendance and treatment is the sole responsibility of the father of the family, in which he is assisted by his sons. The Kaffir’s cattle is the foremost and practically the only subject of his care and occupation, in the possession of which he finds complete happiness. He sees to their grazing, and in the evening to their return to the stable, constructed of a jumble of thorny branches, and which adjoins his hut. He also attends to the milking of the cows and generally to everything requiring attention in cattle raising.40

  There was a vast vocabulary concerning cattle. The Mpondo had “at least fifty-seven different terms describing cattle of different markings, as well as five terms describing the horns.”41 A man had a name for every beast he owned and composed praise songs for his favorites. Among the Basotho, there is a saying: “Dikgomo ke banka ya Mosotho” (Cattle are the bank of a Mosotho).42

  In many areas, cattle were moved from one type of pasturage to another during the year. In the summer, the Xhosa grazed their cattle in what is now known as sourveld—grasses that are nutritious in their early stages of growth but then lose their protein and mineral content and become unpalatable and indigestible to animals; and in the autumn they moved them to sweetveld, which remains nutritious through the year. In Lesotho, when the lowlands became densely populated, cattle wintered in the lowlands but spent the summer in the mountains.43

  The farmers practiced various types of swidden agriculture—that is, they cultivated a field for several years, then allowed it to lie fallow for a time. Whereas cattle care and ownership were a male monopoly, women did most of the agricultural work. Every married woman cultivated at least one field. The primary crop was sorghum. They also grew several varieties of millets, pumpkins, watermelons, and calabashes, and a type of tobacco; in some places they produced beans and yams. Where sufficient metal was available, they dug with iron-headed hoes with wooden shafts, but where iron was scarce they used spades made of hard wood. The Sotho-speaking people stored the grain in large baskets, the Nguni-speaking people in pits.44

  Down to the nineteenth century, hunting was still an essential part of the mixed farmers’ economy. It provided food and clothing, and it was a major sport. In about 1825, John Brownlee, a British missionary, described Xhosa hunting, which was still practiced in the customary manner:

  Though not, like the poor Bushmen, impelled to the chase to provide for their subsistence, they are passionately fond of it, as an active and animating amusement. They generally go out to hunt in large parties, and when they find game in the open fields, they endeavour to surround the animals, or drive them to some narrow pass, which is previously occupied by long files of hunters, stationed on either side, who, as the herd rushes through between, pierce them with showers of assagais [spears]. This mode is chiefly pursued with the larger sorts of antelopes. The smaller bucks they sometimes knock down with the kirri, or war club, which they throw with great force and expertness; birds are generally killed with the same weapon. They have also modes of catching the smaller game by gins and springs, fixed in their paths through the woods and thickets.45

  Brownlee went on to explain how they attacked larger game: elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, buffalo, and lions.46

  Metals were unevenly distributed in Southern Africa. The grasslands of the southern highveld and also the southern part of the country below the escarpment were deficient in iron and copper. Many areas, moreover, were short of salt, also a desired item. Consequently, there was considerable economic specialization. At Phalaborwa in the eastern Transvaal, for example, people specialized in iron and copper production, and nearby in the same Olifants River drainage system other people specialized in the manufacture of salt from crusts formed by seepage from saline springs.47

  Specializations such as these were the basis for complicated long-distance trade networks, which knit the region together. The Xhosa chiefdoms, for example, were linked with the Tswana chiefdoms to their north and the northern Nguni chiefdoms to their northeast, the Xhosa receiving iron and copper goods in exchange for cattle.48 There were also trade links between the mixed farming communities and the hunters and herders, who bartered such goods as copper ornaments and tobacco for such items as meat and cattle.49

  Nevertheless, there were no professional merchants, no marketplaces in Southern Africa, and the farmers made scarcely any use of oxen for portage. The trade was predominantly a relay trade. The mixed farmers had strong acquisitive instincts. They entered into barter transactions with people from neighboring villages as a means of increasing their prestige and their wealth by accumulating large numbers of livestock, especially cattle. The sum of such exchanges constituted the long-distance networks that moved goods from areas where they were plentiful to areas where they were in short supply.

  In southeastern Africa natural hazards were less severe than in the tropics. Except for the lowveld in the northeast, the region was free of anopheles mosquitoes and, thus, of malaria. Locusts, however, frequently ravaged the crops and rains were exasperatingly irregular. Most areas experienced a drought about every eight years and some droughts were severe and widespread, resulting in famine. There was a particularly devastating drought over much of southeastern Africa during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Years later, an elderly Zulu told a white questioner that during the resulting famine “we were obliged to eat grass.”50

  The Bantu-speaking mixed farmers were generally a healthy people. This was especially true of the Nguni, whose country below the mountain escarpment was bountiful down to the late nineteenth century but is now dessicated and eroded. Ludwig Alberti found that the Xhosa “enjoy exceptional health [and] . . . very rarely suffer from infectious diseases or fatal illnesses.” The men, he wrote, “are remarkable for their imposing height,” and “the female is no less well-built.”51

 
; The farmers owed their robust health to their rich and varied diet. Except in times of drought, pestilence, or war, they drank milk (always used sour) in most seasons. They ate sorghum green during the growing season and cooked after harvest. They regularly used vegetables. They often ate meat from the hunt, and they consumed domestic cattle, sheep, and goats at frequent feasts and sacrifices. Beer brewed from sorghum was also drunk frequently.52 This diet included an ample caloric content, as well as adequate amounts of carbohydrates for energy and calcium and other minerals essential for the functioning of the central nervous system. Moreover, the farmers had an intimate knowledge of the medicinal effects of the plants in their vicinities and used them to mitigate the impact of illness.53

  There is no doubt that many of the Bantu-speaking mixed farmers of Southern Africa attained a high level of material security and prosperity. In 1689, the Dutch commander of the Cape Colony interviewed the men who had survived the wreck of the Stavenisse and spent nearly thee years in Natal. He reported to Amsterdam that “the country is exceedingly fertile, and incredibly populous, and full of cattle, whence it is that lions and other ravenous animals are not very apt to attack men, as they find enough tame cattle to devour.” He added: “In their intercourse with each other they are very civil, polite, and talkative, saluting each other, whether young or old, male or female, whenever they meet; asking whence they come, and whither they are going, what is their news, and whether they have learned any new dances or songs.”54

  Nevertheless, in comparison with farmers in other continents, the Southern African mixed farmers were not very productive. Like their counterparts in tropical Africa, they used a swidden agriculture that did not yield impressive results, and, since they accumulated as many cattle as possible, their beasts were generally thin, produced little milk, and tended to overgraze their pastures. But, as Ralph Austen points out, African agricultural methods provided insurance “by natural restoration of fertility through fallow and a scattering of plots within cultivated areas,” and “a large and scattered herd is the best insurance against complete loss from [natural] . . . disasters even if individual animals are thus less well-nourished.” Instead of maximizing production, African farmers minimized the risks involved in farming with a preindustrial technology.55

  Mixed Farming Society

  Unlike the hunters and herders, the mixed farmers built nonportable huts of saplings or stone, depending on what was available. Their settlements varied in size. The Nguni generally occupied small hamlets comprising extended families and their dependents; most Sotho lived in villages containing between fifty and four hundred people, including a dominant extended family, several other families, and a few dependents. In the northwest, near the limit of arable farming, numbers of villages coalesced into townlike aggregations within reach of springs or streams. When William Burchell, a British traveler, visited the Tswana town of Dithakong in 1812, it occupied “the greater part of a plain of about two miles in diameter,” and he estimated its population at five thousand.56

  The mixed farmers had a keen sense of kinship solidarity and obligations, extending far beyond the nuclear family. In 1689, the shipwrecked Dutchmen who had spent nearly three years in Natal reported, “It would be impossible to buy any slaves there, for they would not part with their children, or any of their connections for anything in the world, loving one another with a most remarkable strength of affection.”57 A century and more later, Alberti commented on “the bonds of love and friendship” among the Xhosa “and particularly in the case of blood-relations” and observed that they catered to sick relatives and respected the aged.58

  Married men dominated farming society. The senior married man controlled his homestead. He was the owner of both the agricultural produce and the cattle. He was responsible for clearing the land for agriculture, for cattle-keeping, for building the huts, and for many crafts, including making clothes of cowhides and the pelts of wild animals. He was assisted by his unmarried sons and his clients. Boys did much of the routine work with the cattle. Women were responsible for raising the children, for planting, weeding, and harvesting the crops, for maintaining the home, for making the clay pots, and for serving the food. Catholic missionary A. T. Bryant, who was a collector of Zulu oral traditions, summed up the division of labor:

  In the Zulu social system every kraal [homestead] is self-contained and self-supporting, and by a tradition that bears the force of law, the work of the home is clearly, though far from equally divided between its male and its female inmates. It is the peculiar province of the male to provide and maintain the fabric of the kraal; of the female to provide the family and to support it, in other words, to find the food. The men function as the artisans and pastoralists; the women as the housekeepers and agriculturalists.59

  For a woman, the daily routine was arduous. Not the least of her tasks was fetching water to the home from the nearest stream, carrying the liquid on her head in a pot. A man often had more time on his hands and would spend hours in the village center, making clothes from skins and attending to the business of village government. Women’s work was neither so tedious nor so inequitable as white commentators have tended to assume, however. The women of a village or several neighboring hamlets would work together, taking each woman’s field in turn; men assisted their wives when there was heavy work to be done; and from time to time a woman would make a special brew of beer and convene a working group, when up to two hundred people, men as well as women, might come together for a task such as weeding, culminating in a party when the day’s work was done.60

  Marriages were major social and economic events. Complex negotiations between the kin of the bride and the kin of the bridegroom preceded a marriage. It was accompanied by a series of exchanges of property between the two groups, including the transfer of cattle from the bridegroom’s kin to the kin of the bride. This custom (Nguni lobola; Sotho bobali) cemented the relations between the two groups. It also strengthened the hold of parents over their children, since the parents received the bridewealth and usually decided whom their children should marry—though young people would often find ways to flout their parents’ wishes. Wealthy men, especially chiefs, were polygynous. An exceptionally powerful chief might have as many as a hundred wives, one of whom was recognized as the “great wife” and the mother of the heir.

  People owned such personal equipment as weapons, axes, hoes, mats, household utensils, clothing, and ornaments. In addition, men owned the cattle and the grain, which gave them economic power over women. There was no concept of individual land ownership, however. Land belonged to the community, not to individuals. Families could use land in the hamlet or village as building sites and kitchen gardens. During the growing season, women controlled the land they cultivated, but between the harvest and the preparation of the land for the new planting, the fields were common property; any member of the community could let his cattle forage there. The rest of the land was the property of the community as a whole throughout the year. Anyone could use it to pasture livestock, to hunt game, or to gather plants. But even with cattle and grain, the “owner” was not considered to have unqualified rights of disposal. He was meant to consult his kin and to administer the property for the benefit of his dependents.61

  The mixed farmers were highly competitive. Skillful men built up large herds of cattle; unsuccessful men possessed none at all. The two extremes were bound by a system of clientage. A rich man would lend beasts to a poor man, who would have the responsibility for herding them and the right to consume their milk and to own a proportion of their progeny. This custom, practiced widely with local variations, saved the impoverished from starvation, took care of the most valued property of the wealthy, and spread the cattle for grazing purposes. It also made a client dependent on his patron. Indeed, society was very hierarchical. To a considerable extent, men controlled women, elders controlled youths, patrons controlled clients, and, as we shall see, chiefs controlled commoners. American anthropologist Igor Kopytoff
remarks that in the farming societies throughout sub-Saharan Africa “There were seldom any equals—one was either a senior or a junior, a superior or a subordinate. . . . This inequality, however, had to be instituted and maintained with circumspection, for . . . conditions also made it relatively easy for dissatisfied adherents to leave. Hence ... the adherents had to be well-treated in everyday life—usually as quasi-kinsmen.”62

  The educational system reinforced the hierarchical principle. At or soon after reaching puberty, boys were segregated from the rest of society for as long as six months and prepared for adult life. In the form that prevailed among the Basotho, a chief would convene a lebollo (initiation school) when one of his sons had reached the appropriate age. This was a dramatic episode in the life of a chiefdom—the village or cluster of villages that recognized the authority of a single leader. Only the chief could authorize a lebollo and make it effective, because it was he who appointed the mohlabani (distinguished warrior), the mesuoe (instructors), and the thipane (surgeon) who conducted the ceremonies. The chief also supplied the crucial ingredients: a bull, butterfat, and, most important of all, his lenaka. This was a horn, preferably a rhinoceros horn, containing a powder composed of a mixture of vegetable and animal materials and human flesh. The bull and the cow that produced the butterfat were meant to have been captured from a rival chiefdom, and the human flesh should have been cut from the body of an enemy who had been killed, fighting bravely.63

  The initiation process included circumcision, various physical tests, and instruction in the customs and traditions of the chiefdoms, under rigorous discipline. When it was over, the boys were men. As the French Protestant missionary Eugene Casalis described it: “Circumcision makes the child a man. Anyone who has not experienced this rite is unequipped for war, unfitted for business, inadmissible in society. In a word he is not a Mosotho, he lacks the distinctive mark of his race, his father and mother disown him, his equals insult him and run away from him.”64 Another missionary observed that its objective was “to incorporate them into the nation, to attach them to the young chief who is part of the band.”65 The boys who were initiated together formed a distinct group under the leadership of the chief’s son for whom the leballo had been convened. A chief had a group of devoted followers in his initiation-mates.