Paul Kruger
The
Voortrekker state in the Transvaal, the South African Republic (SAR), possessed
tenuous control at best of many parts of the region. The Voortrekkers’ arrival in
the 1830s and 1840s as well as subjugation of some African societies never
resulted in the defeat of the largest or most powerful chiefdoms.[1] Consequently,
relations with African neighboring societies were a mixture of collaboration
and cooperation versus outright war, slave raiding, and hostility. Moreover,
the importance attached to race and class in determining social status, as well
as the widespread practice of slavery through captive women and children from
surrounding African societies, reveals an increasingly important attachment to
European-descended authority in the Transvaal, but weakened by the SAR’s
dependence on African allies for labor, aid, and economic vitality.[2]
Thus, Boer-African relations in the Transvaal varied, depending on economic,
political, and social factors such as the subjugation or alliance of African
polities with the SAR, or mutually beneficial trade and slaving to commando
raids, war, and African dispossession and flight in the face of further
colonial encroachment. The diversity of Boer relations with their African
neighbors illustrates the dangers or anachronistic historical perspectives that
posit an unchanging landscape of racial relations between the ancestors of
Afrikaners and Black South Africans.
The
positive elements of Transvaal Boer relations with their African neighbors
primarily revolved around mutually beneficial trade. Chiefly concerning Boer
relations with African neighbors in the ivory and skins trade, for instance,
led to Boers selling guns to Africans as well as linking African communities
with the global economy through the Cape Colony, Natal, and Delagoa Bay.[3] In
addition to hunting and the ivory trade, African and Boer traders, besides
providing some access to firearms for Africans, also engaged in slave trading
with African societies. The AmaSwati, who targeted the BaPedi, for instance, a
mutual enemy of Boers and AmaSwati, sold captives to the Boers.[4]
African allies and armed auxiliaries of Boer commando raids procured the “black
ivory” of women and children captives, legally inboekelinge, or “apprentices,” not only from the BaPedi, but also
in the north, in Zoutpansberg, from VhaVenda chiefdoms in the 1850s and 1860s.[5]
From slave trading, African allies and auxiliary forces gained slaves, as women
to marry and incorporate into their societies, and additional labor.[6] This
was all in spite of the SAR’s prohibition on slavery and the slave trade after
the 1852 Sand River Convention with Britain.[7]
Furthermore, the
BaTswana groups who stayed in the Transvaal under the authority of the
Transvaal Boers often acquired additional wealth and power through their
alliances. They collaborated with the Boers against Mzilikazi, joining
commandos largely comprised of Griqua, Tswana, and Korana, paving the way for
Boer land grants and entrenchment of whites.[8] Those
men and their followers who joined Boer commando raids on African societies
outside of the Transvaal or control of the Republic often acquired followers,
captives, wealth in cattle, other booty from raids, and, in some cases,
attained a higher material standard of living than most Boers.[9]
Boer leaders, unsurprisingly, protected the interests of prosperous BaTswana
chiefs who supported their rules, in exchange for labor of some BaTswana on
Boer farms, participation in the commando raids, and acceptance of Boer
authority in the Transvaal.[10] Some
of these BaTswana chiefs, such as Chief Kgamanyane, whose Kgatla dependents
lived on a farm that would become property of Commandant Paul Kruger, increased
the sizes of their towns and settlements, accumulated more cattle and
dependents, gained access to new, industrial tools and manufactured goods, and,
in some cases, acquired European skills and influences in the construction of
homesteads and buildings.[11] These men, dikgosi, BaTswana chiefs who profited through their relationship
with Boers, prove local African agency since they chose alliances with Boers
for their material, political, or personal interests against other African
societies.[12]
In addition,
others living within the boundaries of the SAR were often able to negotiate
favorable contract agreements with white landholders who gradually acquired
more and more of the land.[13] As
a result, some Africans became relatively prosperous through some of their
landlord-tenant agreements with Boers landholders, and, like the aforementioned
BaTswana chiefs, could attain further wealth through trade and alliances with
Boers against other African societies. The Transvaal Republic was too weak,
unwilling, and unable to introduce effective measures to compel African
peasants to work or redistribute African labor from the largest white
landholders to small, white farmers, so Africans could take advantage of their
position with influential white landholders, usually in political power as
field-cornets, commandants, and presidents, since the SAR paid government
officials with land due to its debts and lack of cash.[14]
Indeed, some large landholders offered higher wages to Black African workers
than poor whites for their labor, because the latter were perceived as superior
laborers and producers.[15]
Moreover, Boer dependence on the swart skuts,
armed African receiving guns from the Boers, illustrates the degree to
which mutual relations between the two in terms of expanding the hunting and
commercial activities linking the Transvaal, their African neighbors, other
Boer states, and the global economy.[16]
Increasing class
divisions among the white population also cautions 21st century
assumptions about race and class in the Boer republic. The class divide,
exemplified by officials such as Paul Kruger and other field-cornets,
commandants, and presidents, though elected, invariably arose from landed
elite. Transvaal Boer elites, who, as mentioned previously, received their
salaries in the form of land payments from the state, as well as through their
privilege of engagement in commando raids and deals with local African
communities, distanced themselves from what would become the “poor white
problem”. White elites’s reluctance to redistribute African labor for small
farmers, partly due to their dependence and alliances with Africans, as well as
their own economic interests, symbolized the growing divides within white
society.[17]
As a result, any shared common cultural, racial and religious background in the
Transvaal could not override the existence of growing class divide among Boers
while some Africans in their midst became wealthier than most whites. Even
important figures such as Kruger, Pretorius, and other Transvaal white elites,
despite a shared view of African societies as savage or heathen and believing
in white supremacy, were capable of acts of benevolence and mutually agreeable
relations with African workers, neighbors, and chiefs.[18]
In some ways, class rather than race emerged as a signifier of status, since
some aforementioned African chiefs and communities retained their land, power,
acquired further wealth. Others escaped to the nascent mining centers at
Kimberley for wage labor or refusing to work for whites altogether in the
Transvaal remained viable options for most of the second half of the 19th
century.[19]
Whites, like their Black African neighbors, were divided, perhaps not along
ethnic lines as the African polities in the region were, but class divisions
among Boers facilitated the position of wealthy Black chiefs.
As for the
African communities who remained at odds with Boer expansion and migration,
relations were, unsurprisingly far more negative. Boer commando raids against the VhaVenda in
the north with African auxiliaries and allies, for instance, illustrated the
decidedly negative relations between the two groups in Zoutpansberg.[20] Becoming
targets for slave raiding for inboekelinge,
or indentured child and female labor, turned into a reality for African
societies beleaguered by Boer raids to the north and eastern Transvaal, in
contradiction of the 1852 Sand River Convention and various ZAR legislation
acts prohibiting slavery.[21]
These children and women were traded between and among the various Boer
republics and their African allies, such as the captive women among the
VhaVenda who were taken by VaTsonga men participating in Boer raids in
Zoutpansberg in the 1860s.[22]
Contrary to the expressed abolitionist decrees of the Transvaal, both Boers and
British observers knew of the vast internal slave trade among Boer republics, reaching
proportions wherein nearly ten percent of the entire Boer population was
indentured or enslaved women and children from African societies.[23]
Their abuse was rampant, manumission seldom, and cases of torture and killings
of inboekelstel often went
unpunished. Upon adulthood, these slaves often married other slaves, became
acculturated, speaking Dutch, converting to Christianity and, in many cases,
losing all connection to their parents’ societies and African cultures. The
racist epithet for such individuals, Oorlam
Kaffers, implying that their conversion to Christianity, learning of Dutch,
and acquiring skills Boers wanted them to gain, endowed a civilized status,
nonetheless did not change their social status as a multi-generational servile
class to Boer families.[24]
Besides slave
raiding and abduction of African children for their labor, Boer relations with
African neighbors became negative in some attempts to regulate, control, and
demand labor of those within the confines of Boer authority while also
manipulating disunity and conflicts among their African neighbors for their own
interests. The case of the exodus of the Mokgatle Thethe, located on Kruger’s
farm, Saulspoort, motivated by increased demands in the 1870s for taxation and
labor, indicates how Boer landlords and the Transvaal government overstepped
their bounds and made demands they could not enforce from Africans.[25]
Boer floggings of African chiefs likewise contributed to problems with African
neighbors, since public corporal punishment of African leaders, such as the
flogging of Kgamanyane in 1870, was remembered well into the twentieth century
by descendants of the Bakgatla in modern Botswana.[26]
Such acts not only served to humiliate and enforce Boer authority over subject
African chiefs, but disgraced his entire people.
The mid-1860s
marked worsening relations between Tswana groups and Boers, when the latter
increased pressure for payment of taxes in the form of cash, livestock, labor,
and plans for irrigation farming led to more labor demand for dams.[27]
So, Boer relations with their allies, such as some Tswana groups, deteriorated
over time, or as in the case when closer British inspection lowered the scale
of slave raiding and trading, Boer demand for necessary African labor meant
expectations of additional labor and taxation from subject Africans within SAR.[28]
Boer attempts at controlling and regulating Africans’ labor and access to land
were enshrined within the SAR’s legislation prohibiting Africans from
purchasing land, as well as the 1871 Commission on African Labour.[29]
The inability to meet African labor by Boers, despite the discriminatory and
racist Native Act of 1870[30]
and decades of land dispossession since 1839, when land was accumulated in the
hands of a relatively small group of white land barons, such as Kruger and Piet
Joubert, prompted the Commission.[31]
The discriminatory laws of the Native Act against black ownership of freehold
farms, blacks carrying passes, and the interpretation of to what degree should
these laws be enforced were open to interpretation to different officials, so some
opposed the compulsory labor component, whereas others saw it as a necessity as
the diamond fields of Kimberley attracted laborers away.[32]
Measures taken by the state to ensure African subservience according to
Articles 15, 16, and 17 focused on the use of taxation for coerced African
labor, labor contracts imposed on those violating pass laws, and higher taxes
on Africans not employed on white-owned farms.[33] White
employers often failed to remunerate their African laborers, though the
Africans sent petitions and complaints, another example of conflicts and
negative relations between Africans within the Transvaal and Boers.[34]
Racist laws and
dispossession withstanding, Boer attempts to completely subjugate and control
or regulate African movement, labor, and power in the Transvaal was limited
because of their dependence on African allies, the cash-strapped central
government, and African access to Kimberley for better wages in later decades,
thereby reducing the degree to which the SAR could be too strict with
subjugated natives, since they could also flee to autonomous societies near and
outside the Transvaal.[35] Throughout
the second half of the nineteenth century, Transvaal Boer-African relations
were complex, dynamic, depended on location and other factors, and illustrate
the fallacy of inserting racial notions and conflict of the twentieth century
into the past. Undoubtedly, the ZAR was a white supremacist state as enshrined
in the 1858 Constitution, declaring white supremacy in terms of church and
state, and explicitly designated as such through the exploitation and equating of
Africans with slave labor as subservient peoples.[36] But
their dependence and mutually beneficial relations with some Tswana and other
African societies indicates more fluid relations contingent upon economic
interests, political conflict with and among African polities, and the class
divisions among whites.
Some Africans
attained higher living standards and wealth then most Boers, and the
intensification of class stratification amongst Transvaal Boers suggests the
importance of multiple factors and personal motives in the interactions of
Boers and African chiefdoms. Similarly, that relations could begin with
alliance and end poorly, as in the case of some Tswana chiefdoms and the SAR,
whereas others remained negative throughout the period, such as the Transvaal
Boer and allies expulsion of the Ndebele, or the series of commando raids
against the VhaVenda led by commandos under Albasinia in Zoutspanberg ending
with Boer flight from the region by the 1870s, reveals the dynamic nature of
political and economic interactions between Boers and Africans. In summation, Boer-African
relations, in flux during the second half of the 19th century, defies
singular reduction.
Bibliography
Bergh, J.S. “S.J.P. Kruger and the
Transvaal Hardliners on Race Policies and Practices in the Early 1870s”, South African Historical Journal 58 (2007): 142-173.
“To Make Them Serve”: The 1871 Transvaal
Commission on African Labour as a Source for Agrarian History”, History in Africa 29 (2002): 39-61.
“(To) Reserve to the Native Tribes Such
Location as They May Be Fairly and Equitably Entitled To”: The Transvaal
Location Commission (1881-1899)”, South
African Historical Journal 54 (2005): 1-15.
Boeyens, J.C.A. “Black Ivory: The
Indenture System and Slavery in the Zoutpansberg, 1848-1869”, in E. Eldrige and
F. Morton (eds), Slavery in South Africa:
Captive Labour on the Dutch Frontier (Pietermaritzburg, 1994).
Bruyn, J. du. “Early Transvaal—A
Historiographical Perspective”, South
African Historical Journal 36 (1997): 136-144.
Giliomee, H. “Processes in Development
of the South African Frontier”, in H. Lamar and L. Thompson (eds), The Frontier in History: North America and
Southern Africa Compared (New Haven, 1981).
Mbenga, B.K. “Forced Labour in the Pilanesberg:
The Flogging of Chief Kgamanyane by Commandant Paul Kruger, Saulspoort, April
1870”, Journal of Southern African
Studies 23:1, (1997): 127-140.
Morton, F. “Captive Labour in the
Western Transvaal after the Sand River Convention”, in E. Eldrige and F. Morton
(eds), Slavery in South Africa: Captive
Labour on the Dutch Frontier (Pietermaritzburg, 1994).
“Female Inboekelinge in the South
African Republic, 1850-1880”, Slavery
& Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 26:2, (2005):
199-215.
Trapido, Stanley. “Reflections on Land,
Office and Wealth in the South African Republic, 1850-1900”, in Marks and
Atmore (eds), Economy and Society in
Pre-Industrial South Africa (Longman, 1980).
[1] Johannes du Bruyn,
“Early Transvaal—A Historiographical Perspective,” South African Historical Journal 36 (1997), 142.
[2] Johan S. Bergh, “To
Make Them Serve”: The 1871 Transvaal Commission on African Labour as a Source
for Agrarian History”, History in Africa
29 (2002), 59.
[3] Jan C.A. Boeyens, “Black
Ivory: The Indenture System and Slavery in the Zoutpansberg, 1848-1869”, in E.
Eldrige and F. Morton (eds), Slavery in
South Africa: Captive Labour on the Dutch Frontier (Pietermaritzburg, 1994),
198.
[4] Fred Morton, “Female
Inboekelinge in the South African Republic, 1850-1880”, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies,
26:2, (2005), 201.
[5]Jan C.A. Boeyens,
“Black Ivory: The Indenture System and Slavery in the Zoutpansberg, 1848-1869”,
in E. Eldrige and F. Morton (eds), Slavery
in South Africa: Captive Labour on the Dutch Frontier (Pietermaritzburg,
1994), 196.
[6] Ibid, 199.
[7] Fred Morton, “Captive
Labour in the Western Transvaal after the Sand River Convention”, in E. Eldrige
and F. Morton (eds), Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labour on the Dutch
Frontier (Pietermaritzburg, 1994), 167.
[8]Bernard K. Mbenga, “Forced
Labour in the Pilanesberg: The Flogging of Chief Kgamanyane by Commandant Paul
Kruger, Saulspoort, April 1870”, Journal
of Southern African Studies 23:1, (1997), 130-131.
[9] Fred Morton, “Captive
Labour in the Western Transvaal after the Sand River Convention”, in E. Eldrige
and F. Morton (eds), Slavery in South
Africa: Captive Labour on the Dutch Frontier (Pietermaritzburg, 1994), 175.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid, 176-177.
[12] Ibid, 177.
[13] Hermann Giliomee,
“Processes in Development of the South African Frontier”, in H. Lamar and L.
Thompson (eds), The Frontier in History:
North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven, 1981), 110.
[14] Stanley Trapido, “Reflections on Land, Office
and Wealth in the South African Republic, 1850-1900”, in Marks and Atmore
(eds), Economy and Society in
Pre-Industrial South Africa (Longman, 1980), 352.
[15] Hermann Giliomee,
“Processes in Development of the South African Frontier”, in H. Lamar and L.
Thompson (eds), The Frontier in History:
North America and Southern Africa Compared
(New Haven, 1981), 111.
[16] Ibid, 92.
[17] Ibid, 108.
[18] Johan S. Bergh, “S.J.P.
Kruger and the Transvaal Hardliners on Race Policies and Practices in the Early 1870s”, South African Historical Journal 58 (2007), 168.
[19] Johan S.
Bergh, “To Make Them Serve”: The 1871 Transvaal Commission on African Labour as
a Source for Agrarian History”, History
in Africa 29 (2002), 58.
[20] Jan C.A. Boeyens, “Black Ivory: The Indenture
System and Slavery in the Zoutpansberg, 1848-1869”, in E. Eldrige and F. Morton
(eds), Slavery in South Africa: Captive
Labour on the Dutch Frontier (Pietermaritzburg, 1994), 193.
[21] Ibid, 192.
[22] Ibid, 199.
[23]Fred Morton, “Captive
Labour in the Western Transvaal after the Sand River Convention”, in E. Eldrige
and F. Morton (eds), Slavery in South
Africa: Captive Labour on the Dutch Frontier (Pietermaritzburg, 1994), 173.
[24] Ibid, 178.
[25]Johan S. Bergh,
“S.J.P. Kruger and the Transvaal Hardliners on Race Policies and Practices in
the Early 1870s”, South African Historical Journal 58 (2007), 165.
[26] Bernard K. Mbenga,
“Forced Labour in the Pilanesberg: The Flogging of Chief Kgamanyane by Commandant
Paul Kruger, Saulspoort, April 1870”, Journal
of Southern African Studies 23:1, (1997), 129.
[27] Johan S. Bergh,
“S.J.P. Kruger and the Transvaal Hardliners on Race Policies and Practices in
the Early 1870s”, South African Historical Journal 58 (2007), 148.
[28] Johan S. Bergh, “To
Make Them Serve”: The 1871 Transvaal Commission on African Labour as a Source
for Agrarian History”, History in Africa
29 (2002), 54-55.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid, 59.
[31] Ibid, 44-45.
[32] Ibid, 58.
[33] Ibid, 54-55.
[34] Ibid, 53.
[35] Ibid, 59.
[36] Bernard K. Mbenga,
“Forced Labour in the Pilanesberg: The Flogging of Chief Kgamanyane by
Commandant Paul Kruger, Saulspoort, April 1870”, Journal of Southern African Studies 23:1, (1997), 131.
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