South Africa

Imperialism and Resistance in South Africa

In South Africa, European settlers claimed African territories that they eventually considered as their own homelands. There were European settlers in other parts of the continent, the Kenyan highlands, for example, but only in South Africa had the European presence taken root as early permanent settlement and in such a peculiar way. Isolated from their European roots and marginalized by shifting global relations, these “white” settlers—the Afrikaners—found themselves competing with Africans and European empires for control over territory and resources. They were descendants of early Dutch settlers who began arriving only in the seventeenth century; by the nineteenth century they displayed a language and culture born of centuries of interaction with African populations and began to develop a cultural nationalism that would eventually turn political.

Excluded from the same political process, Black South Africans created separate nationalist movements, which shared some tactics and visions with the anticolonial revolutions in neighboring African territories. The Black South African nationalist leader, Anton Lembede, once repeated a quote that he attributed to Paul Kruger, the father of the white Afrikaner state. Lembede said: “One who wants to create the future must not forget the past.” It is interesting, but not surprising, given the role of history in shaping the unique landscape of people and power, that the two leading figures in parallel nationalist movements in the same land should have both invoked a reverence for the historical past. However, Lembede and Kruger probably would have disagreed on the meaning of that past.

Competing Histories

For the Afrikaner the history of South Africa began in 1652, the year of the first permanent settlement in the Cape. From that century onwards, their history took on mythic proportions. With motives they considered of divine origin and therefore pure (the claiming of lands by God’s chosen people) and

with their God’s protection, the descendants of these early European settlers found themselves pitted against two traditional sets of enemies: the British, who acquired control over Cape Colony in 1815, and the Africans. In the Afrikaner view of history, the central saga is the so-called Great Trek, the era of the Afrikaner migration northward out of the Cape when both sets of enemies opposed the expansion of the Afrikaner state.

From the African point of view, the central theme of recent history—merely the last several hundred years out of many millennia—was white conquest and the expropriation of African lands. The quarrels between the British and the Afrikaner Boers were of little concern. What both African and Afrikaner historical traditions might agree upon is the critical importance of the century between about 1790 and 1890. This was a period of devastating transformations in African and European societies coexisting in the southern- most part of the African continent.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the players in the historical drama that was about to unfold were in place or, as in the case of the expanding farmers of Dutch descent (trekboers), moving into place. The geography of southern Africa had determined to a large extent the nature of population movements and the ultimate distribution of pastoralists, mainly Boers moving north and eastward from the Cape Colony, who were blocked by mountains and attracted by pasturelands for their cattle. To the west expanding populations of Sotho speakers spread across the plateau in search of pasture lands, from the Limpopo to the Orange rivers. The Tsawa were pushed by the farmers against the fringes of the Kalahari Desert in the west.

Zulu Imperialism

The ecological balance that most Africans had attained through stockkeeping and mixed farming, including the cultivation of grains, was a delicate, if successful one. In Zululand, an area well-suited to its cattle-keeping cultivators, a system of exploitation of native grasses had developed, whereby the configuration of grass types available in different seasons and at different elevations affected the development of political and economic units. Territorial expansion took place to acquire seasonal pasturelands.

Nguni Militarization and Resistance

The Nguni were one of a number of Bantu-speaking peoples whose ancestors had originated thousands of years earlier in the region of the Nigerian- Cameroon border of West Africa. Arriving in southern Africa during the Early Iron Age (by about 500 c.e.), these farmers with cattle had become the dominant group. Their expansion, often at the expense of herders, hunters, and gatherers, had resulted in the growth of villages and towns and the increasingly stratified society of the 1700s.

Used by permission for Bridging World History, 7 The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004

The traditional methods for dealing with ecological constraints—population movements in response to cycles of environmental degradation, concentrated grazing, overpopulation, shortages of resources and land—depended on the availability of pastures over the next hill. Famine and drought, if combined with overpopulation, could result in a crisis. Such was the time of Madlathule, a famine that devastated Zululand from the 1790s until about 1810.

Shaka and the Zulu Kingdom

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the rise and consolidation of the great Zulu kingdom. That the centralization of authority and increased expansionary efforts occurred following the great famine is not coincidental. During the famine larger villages were needed to defend grain storage from the attacks of marauders. The control of cattle over a larger area was also necessary to compensate for the decrease in palatable grasses. One great revolutionary leader known as Shaka (r. 1818–1828) exploited the crisis. Of enormous importance was Shaka’s control over three factors of production: cattle, women, and marriage.

Some of the tremendous changes of Shaka’s time were inevitable. Revolutions in military tactics (the use of a new weapon, the short stabbing spear, and a new formation, the cow-horn formation) included the conversion of the traditional age-grade system into a military organization. The system was an association of similar-aged males, who from boyhood to manhood created regiments in a unitary, nationalized army. Social changes also made the chief more powerful.

Through his control over marriage (and thus population and production), Shaka was able to revolutionize Zulu social relations. Marriage practices had potentially important economic and political consequences. As social and political transactions, marriages transferred wealth and created strategic alliances between families. Shaka, by delaying the marriage of his young soldiers, was able to control the movement of a significant proportion of the kingdom’s power and production. With marriages delayed and warfare increased, Shaka was able to resolve the population pressures that the Madlathule had induced. To his enemies Shaka became a beastly and harsh ruler. He became a legend in almost every version of southern African history.

The Impact of the Mfecane

The era after the famine came to be called the Mfecane, the “time of the crushing.” The forces and peoples of the Mfecane transformed the region, and societies that could not resist Shaka’s armies became starving, landless refugees. Survivors were highly militarized. Small political units were no longer viable; populations were dramatically redistributed across southern Africa. The Great Trek era (1836–1854) of Afrikaner history was the collision of Boer expansion with these forces.

The mid-nineteenth century presents a momentary balance of power: the independent states of the Zulu and other Africans, independent Boer “republics” (not much more than lumps of settlements), and British control over two southern African colonies, Cape and Natal. The Mfecane had left large unpopulated areas vulnerable to European imperialists. This was the eve of the country’s mineral revolution: the European discovery of diamonds and gold in 1868 and 1886 dramatically altered the role of land and capital.

Gold, Diamonds, and the Mining Industry

Mining spurred significant economic changes as southern Africa, unlike the rest of the sub-Saharan Africa, underwent the early stages of an industrial revolution. South African capitalist development intensified with the recognition of extensive mineral resources. British capitalists, backed by foreign finance and technology, succeeded in gaining the mining territories. The sudden influx of people and capital transformed the areas of the Transvaal and Orange Free State where the mining settlements were attracting a large number of immigrants and investments and creating urban crises. The land on which the gold and diamonds were situated had been easily expropriated from Africans. More complicated was the problem of attracting labor to the mines while industrializing the operations.

Eventually, the economy developed a dependence on cheap and temporary unskilled labor to work in the mines. Legislative initiatives in the colony and the ravages of the Anglo-Boer conflicts at the end of the century speeded up the process by which Africans and their labor were brought under control. Initially both African and Afrikaner were attracted by the opportunities for employment. The wide disparity between the earnings of skilled and unskilled laborers in the mining sector came to be entrenched along racial lines, as discrimination and color prejudice were used to give white workers advantages. Between 1913 and 1922, the government imposed a series of discriminatory legislation. For example, the Natives Land Act (1913) prevented Africans from acquiring certain lands and this restriction and later laws helped create an unsettled migrant labor pool. Thus industrialization set the standard for racial discrimination and for the racist presumptions that white, rural competitors (Afrikaners) brought to the new urban setting of the mines.

The Anglo-Boer War

Conflicts over land and ideology erupted between farmers and capitalist interests. Known as the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), this period of conflict witnessed the birth of Afrikaner nationalism, which was based on a sense of shared religion and historical experience of the Boers. The civil religion and sacred history that came to fruition in the twentieth century was first expounded by Paul Kruger, an Afrikaner leader in the Anglo-Boer conflict. Kruger was a Voortrekker, one who had been a part of the expansion from the Cape, and he was president of the South African Republic between 1881 and 1900. His thinking was influenced by the theology of John Calvin, whose emphasis on collective individualism, encouraging individual action on behalf of the collective good of the group, was useful in Kruger’s development of nationalist sentiment among Afrikaner settlers. Afrikaner nationalism became the struggle among the white people of South Africa for political control.

In contrast to the Afrikaner “whites,” who were a diverse and widely differentiated population of landowners, rich commercial farmers, professionals, and impoverished, unskilled workers, the Africans for the most part remained peasants and pastoralists for whom wage labor was occasional. After the 1880s and under the influence of capitalist economic forces, rural and urban whites sought and received privileged status. Parallel to this movement were the expropriation of African land and the incorporation of African labor into the South African process of industrialization.

The Anglo-Boer War was basically about who should dominate South Africa: the British, who controlled mining, or the Boers, who controlled politics. The conflict temporarily halted mining and capitalist development. When Africans resumed mining in post-war South Africa, the unity of whites resulted in black political exclusion. The blacks of South Africa began to feel the contradictions of white domination and their own increased economic participation. African political movements seized the opportunities provided by the forces of urbanization, industrialization, and the very tools of the European empire: western-style education and Christianity. In the end the tools would be turned against the imperialists here as elsewhere in Africa, where broad nationalism transcended both individual and ethnic differences.