The political system was the product of the process of fission and expansion that had been going on ever since mixed farmers began to move into Southern Africa in the third or fourth century A.D. The effective political units were autonomous chiefdoms—territorial units under hereditary chiefs. They varied in size and population, and they changed over time. Some had less than one thousand people; a few had fifty thousand or more. Whereas small chiefdoms, comprising little more than a central hamlet or village and its immediate vicinity, were controlled directly from the center, large chiefdoms consisted of a series of “concentric ‘circles’ of diminishing control,” from the core, where the paramount chief exercised his authority directly, to the periphery, where local subchiefs were loosely allied to the paramount.66 Down to the nineteenth century, this regional system was maintained despite a gradual increase in population. In some cases, paramount chiefs expanded their territories by placing relatives on the periphery; in others, relatives struck out on their own to found independent polities. Chiefdoms were often named for an ancestral figure, such as Xhosa or Zulu. Sotho and Tswana chiefdoms often carried the names of the clans of the ruling family, such as Kwena (Crocodile), Taung (Lion), Khatla (Monkey), or Tloung (Elephant).
The populations of the chiefdoms were not closed entities. Besides members of a ruling lineage, they included people of different descent groups, and they frequently incorporated aliens—people who had quarreled with their original chiefs or had left drought-stricken areas. They even incorporated individuals from the aboriginal hunting communities and, in and after the sixteenth century, from European shipwrecks. For example, “There are two clans, the Lungu and Mholo, still living on the Transkei coast, who trace descent from the survivors of shipwrecks, and whose appearance and ritual practice support this claim.”67 The Western concept of tribalism, which is usually taken to refer to closed populations reproducing fixed cultural characteristics, is not applicable to African farmers.
A chief spent much of his time in the open-air meeting place near his personal hut. There, in cooperation with his councillors, who were drawn from the heads of homesteads, he regulated the affairs of his people, listening to complaints, settling disputes, and receiving visitors. He was the richest man in his territory. His subjects paid him sheep and cattle for settling their disputes, his men handed over to him any livestock they seized from neighboring chiefdoms, and he had the right to summon his people to work for him. They cultivated the fields of his senior wives, since he was expected to use their produce to entertain guests and feed the men when they were summoned to his village for political discussions or military purposes. A chief was thus rich enough to marry more wives and provide more generous hospitality than any of his subjects.68
Most conflicts that came to the chief arose from arguments about cattle or about women. Was that man entitled to reclaim his daughter, whose husband’s family had failed to hand over the promised number of bohali cattle? Should that client have the right to own the calf of a cow that his patron had committed to his charge? After a case had been argued at great length by interested parties, the chief would announce his verdict. That would be based on custom, but custom could be modified to suit the occasion. In theory, the primary objective was to heal divisions in society and restore harmony rather than to punish offenders, but people guilty of disloyalty or witchcraft might be killed. In other cases, the normal penalty was a fine, shared between the chief and the successful litigant.
A chief’s powers were limited by necessity as well as by custom. He had no standing army, no police force, no jail. He relied on the cooperation of his councillors—male relatives and commoners, many of whom were his initiation-mates. He also needed the respect of his people. If a chief required public support for some enterprise or had important information to communicate, he would convene a meeting of his male subjects. This custom was particularly firmly entrenched among the Basotho and Bats-wana. At a pitso, the men had considerable freedom of speech—they could, and often did, make pointed criticisms of the chief or a councillor. In the last resort, alienated subjects would vote with their feet—leaving their chiefdom and joining another, where they were nearly always welcome, because people were the most important gauge of the power and prestige of a chiefdom; or an aggrieved kinsman might build up a following and split the polity. In practice, there were great variations in the relationships between chiefs and their male subjects, and in the expansion or contraction of chiefdoms, depending on the context and the interplay of personalities. The Basotho had two sayings that summed up the underlying tension: “Morena ha a fose” (The chief can do no wrong) and “Morena ke batho” (No people, no chief).69
American historian Robert Harms has emphasized the powers of male commoners in African societies, pointing out that
Africa has been unique in the degree to which peasants have remained uncap-tured by elites. This situation owed much to the existence of vacant land which made emigration an ever-present option to peasants who felt themselves oppressed. It is also due to the strength of kinship networks in providing vital services. . . . [The peasants] defined the limits of elite power and the framework of African political economy. They sometimes accomplished this by armed rebellion, but more commonly they would “drag their feet,” “vote with their feet,” and find a variety of other ways to frustrate policies emanating from higher authorities.70
There are no traditions of devastating warfare among the mixed farming people in Southern Africa before the nineteenth century. Their weapons were knobkerries (wooden clubs) and spears about five feet long with wooden shafts and metal blades. They would throw their spears from a distance and the enemy would usually ward them off with large cowhide shields. If they got into close combat, they would use their knobkerries. Fighting usually took the form of cattle raids. Cattle-raiding was a manly sport and a way of increasing one’s wealth. Alberti noted that the Xhosa “cannot really be called a warlike people; a predominant inclination to pursue a quiet cattle-raising life is much more evident amongst them.”71 Wars of conquest were more frequent among the Tswana, since they lived in an area that was conducive to competition for control of limited water supplies. Even there, not many people died in the wars. Moreover, throughout the farming culture women and children were seldom molested and prisoners were rarely executed.
Ideology underpinned the culture of the Bantu-speaking mixed farmers. In the initiation schools, the teachers instilled respect for the elders, for chiefly authority, and for established religious beliefs and rituals. As in medieval Europe and other preindustrial societies, people sought supernatural explanations for phenomena they could not account for in material terms.72 Ancestral spirits had powers over the material world. Dingaka, religious specialists, established communication with the ancestral spirits and invoked their support. In personal crises—illnesses, bereavements, domestic conflicts, material losses—individuals would sacrifice sheep or cattle to their ancestors. Alternatively, they might assume that a person had caused their calamity. Hence the concept of witchcraft:
Evil was personified in myths of witchcraft: certain persons were believed to have innate powers which they used directly, or through familiars—hyenas, baboons, or the fabulous tikoloshe and lightning bird—to injure their neighbours; and other evilly disposed persons were thought to use poison. The beliefs were rooted in nightmares and the awareness of anger, lust, and envy in man. These realities were interpreted in material form—envy became a baboon sent by a poor man to suck dry the cows of his rich and stingy neighbour, and lust a demon lover. Hence the “smelling out” and torture of supposed witches and sorcerers.73
From time to time, an exceptional man or woman, such as Mohlomi in late eighteenth-century Lesotho, earned a reputation that extended far beyond the confines of any single chiefdom as an ngaka who was able to heal the sick, foretell the future, and show the people how to recover from disasters. In crises affecting a chiefdom—as during droughts—the chief would engage such a person to perf
orm the correct sacrifices on behalf of his community.74
The Mixed Farmers’ Relations with Hunters and Herders
With its superior technology and more diversified economy, the farming way of life gradually became dominant in the eastern part of Southern Africa wherever arable agriculture was possible. We cannot reconstruct the process in detail, but we can identify the basic dynamics of the interactions that took place.75
When the first mixed farmers entered a locality previously occupied by aboriginal hunting bands, they would probably have been too few in number to present a threat to the autonomy of the aborigines. In that context, mutually beneficial symbiotic relations would have developed—farmers obtaining the meat and skins of wild animals from hunters and hunters receiving grain and milk in return. We have evidence that friendly symbiotic relations persisted in the southern highveld on either side of the Caledon River as late as the eighteenth century, while that area was still being settled quite thinly by pioneer farmers.76
In some cases friendly symbiosis on a basis of complementarity eventually gave way to structured, differential incorporation of the hunters into plural societies under the control of the farmers. This was the nearest approach to slavery in precolonial Southern Africa. In Botswana, down to the present day, farmers control the lives of hunting aborigines.77
In most areas, however, as farming people built up their numbers and gained control of the land, with its springs and streams, the unincorporated hunting bands, struggling for survival, attacked the livestock of the farmers, as they were wont to attack wild game, and as hunting bands in the western part of Southern Africa had been wont to attack the sheep and cattle of the pastoralists. This interaction often degenerated into endemic warfare. White people described such a state of affairs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alberti reported that the Xhosa lived “in constant feud” with their hunting and gathering neighbors, who persisted in robbing them of their livestock. A Xhosa, he wrote, “regards and treats these robbers as beasts of prey, follows their spoor after they have perpetrated their deed, and kills those that one can lay hold of. In the same way one also traces the whereabouts of such a robber-band, attacks them during the night-time and destroys them without the slightest forbearance and regardless of age or sex.”78 In 1804, German doctor Henry Lichtenstein noted that a Xhosa had told the governor of the Cape Colony that “it was impossible that a Bosjesman [Bushman: hunter-gatherer] could ever abandon his villainous ways, and it was necessary to destroy such vermin wherever they were found.”79
At all stages, however, mixed farmers incorporated and assimilated numbers of hunter-gatherers into their societies. We know that the mixed farming chiefdoms in nineteenth-century Lesotho included people of aboriginal antecedents. Some were the children or grandchildren of hunter-gatherers who had become clients of individual farmers and gradually melded into the farming society, like clients whose parents were farmers. Chiefs themselves took such women as junior wives to acquire the ability to protect the land that was believed to be vested in the aborigines as the first inhabitants.80
By the time mixed farmers reached the western limit of the land where it was possible to grow crops, if not earlier, they had encountered pastoralists. The mixed farmers and the pastoralists were compatible, since both were cattle-owners, and they tended to mingle and form composite communities, with cultural and biological roots in both societies. Initially, in some cases, pastoralists incorporated mixed farming individuals and families into their polities, but sooner or later farming chiefdoms acquired control.81 South African historian Jeffrey Peires has described the final phase of that process among the southern Nguni. During several generations starting in the late seventeenth century, the Xhosa expanded to the southwest as sons of the reigning chiefs of the Tshawe royal family split off to found new chiefdoms. Some pastoral groups joined the Xhosa voluntarily; others were incorporated through conquest. The pastoralists who were incorporated “were not expelled from their ancient homes, or relegated to a condition of hereditary servitude on the basis of their skin colour. They became Xhosa with the full rights of any other Xhosa. The limits of Xhosadom were not ethnic or geographic, but political: all, persons or groups who accepted the rule of the Tshawe thereby became Xhosa.”82
In the middle of the seventeenth century, when white people began to settle in the Cape peninsula, hunter-gatherers and pastoralists were still in sole occupation of the western part of Southern Africa. In the eastern part, the mixed farming way of life was overwhelmingly dominant with the exception of small pockets of unassimilated hunter-gatherers in the mountain escarpment, especially in the Drakensberg range, where they survived to nearly the end of the nineteenth century. In between, where the rainfall averaged about twenty inches a year, communities of mixed biological and cultural inheritance occupied a frontier zone. There, the mixed farming culture and chiefdoms were becoming increasingly dominant: the Gqunukwebe chiefdom in the south and the Tswana chiefdoms in the north.
Over the years, the mixed farmers had acquired considerable cultural and genetic influences from hunter-gatherers and pastoralists. Their Bantu languages incorporated numerous loan words from the hunters’ and herders’ vocabularies—notably, words with click sounds that were originally exclusive to the hunters. As one would expect, the greatest proportion of click words and hunters’ and herders’ genes are to be found among the mixed farming peoples nearest to the frontier zone—the Xhosa and the Tswana. Linguists estimate that one-sixth of all Xhosa words contain clicks.83 The early history of the region has also left its mark in numerous non-Bantu names of rivers and mountains in the eastern as well as the western part of Southern Africa.
The mixed farming communities were far from static. They had many of the characteristics of a frontier society. During the first millennium A.D. a “tidal frontier” of mixed farmers had founded a series of settlements south of the Limpopo. During the second millennium, mixed farmers had been expanding from those established settlements along a myriad of “internal frontiers” into lands previously occupied, if at all, by hunter-gatherers or pastoralists. Old chiefdoms split and new chiefdoms arose, and in due course they too threw off splinter groups to form the nucleus of new chiefdoms.84 The entire process hinged on the availability of fresh land. By the end of the eighteenth century, the population on the land east of the twenty-inch rainfall zone was reaching its limits in relation to the economic system. The precondition for the continuation of the frontier dynamics was beginning to collapse, with dire consequences, which we shall describe in chapter 3.
CHAPTER 2
The White Invaders: The Cape Colony, 1652–1870
The hunting and herding peoples of Southern Africa remained isolated from the wider world until the end of the fifteenth century. Throughout that century, Portuguese mariners were probing further and further from Europe along the western coast of the African continent.1 Eventually, in 1487, Bartholomeu Dias’s expedition of two fifty-ton caravels rounded the Cape peninsula in a storm, anchored in Mossel Bay 170 miles further east, arid sailed another 170 miles along the coast to Algoa Bay before returning to Lisbon. In 1497, five years after Christopher Columbus had crossed the Atlantic under Spanish patronage, Vasco da Gama led another Portuguese expedition that rounded the Cape, sailed along the east African coastline to Malindi (modern Mombasa), and then crossed the Indian Ocean to Calicut, India, returning to Portugal with two of his four ships after an absence of twenty-six months. These epic enterprises were longer, more hazardous, and in the short run far more rewarding than Columbus’s crossings of the Atlantic Ocean. As the American historian Daniel Boorstin remarks, they “changed the course of both Western and Eastern history.”2
During the sixteenth century, the Portuguese government sent annual fleets round the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean. They brutally destroyed the Arab shipping they encountered in the Indian Ocean and began to divert the European trade with southeast Asia from the ancient routes via the Persian Gulf and the Red
Sea to the oceanic route via the Cape. During the sixteenth century, the Portuguese established fortified bases at Goa on the west coast of India, Malacca on the northern side of the strait between Malaya and Sumatra, and Ormuz, gateway to the Persian Gulf. From West Africa, they started the nefarious export of slaves to the Americas. In East Africa, they built forts at Mombasa and Mozambique. Lured by gold in what is now Zimbabwe, they created garrison towns on the Zambezi River and established trading posts in the auriferous area. They also founded prazos (great estates) in the Zambezi valley. By the eighteenth century, though the Portuguese had lost control of the East African interior, they were exporting slaves to Brazil and North America from the coastal fortress at Mozambique.
The Portuguese occupied no territory south of Luanda (the capital of modern Angola) and Mozambique. Their slave-trading activities just grazed the territories of the modern Republic of South Africa. Experience made them fearful of the region’s navigational hazards and people. Tempestuous seas, strong currents, and perilous shoals wrecked several Portuguese ships along the coast between Mozambique and the Cape, and in 1510 Francesco d’Almeida, returning to Portugal at the end of his term as viceroy in the East, was killed with several companions in a fracas with the local inhabitants in Table Bay, at the northern end of the Cape peninsula.
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