Natures of Colonial Change

Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei

Jacob A. Tropp

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2006
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780821442272
• Index: History

In this groundbreaking study, Jacob A. Tropp explores the interconnections between negotiations over the environment and an emerging colonial relationship in a particular South African context—the Transkei—subsequently the largest of the notorious "homelands" under apartheid.

In the late nineteenth century, South Africa's Cape Colony completed its incorporation of the area beyond the Kei River, known as the Transkei, and began transforming the region into a labor reserve. It simultaneously restructured popular access to local forests, reserving those resources for the benefit of the white settler economy. This placed new constraints on local Africans in accessing resources for agriculture, livestock management, hunting, building materials, fuel, medicine, and ritual practices.

Drawing from a diverse array of oral and written sources, Tropp reveals how bargaining over resources—between and among colonial officials, chiefs and headmen, and local African men and women—was interwoven with major changes in local political authority, gendered economic relations, and cultural practices as well as with intense struggles over the very meaning and scope of colonial rule itself.

Natures of Colonial Change sheds new light on the colonial era in the Transkei by looking at significant yet neglected dimensions of this history: how both "colonizing" and "colonized" groups negotiated environmental access and how such negotiations helped shape the broader making and meaning of life in the new colonial order.

Part I

1

Tensions in the Colonial Restructuring of Local Environmental Authority, 1880–c. 1915

AS THE COLONIAL GOVERNMENT appropriated Transkeian resources through annexation and the establishment of new administrative institutions, intense disputes emerged over the nature and scope of environmental authority. Paramount chiefs were demoted, commoner headmen were elevated to new ranks, magistrates took over the helm of newly demarcated districts, and the Forest Department increasingly exerted its influence on the lives of African communities. From the 1880s to the mid-1910s, as colonial personnel, chiefs, headmen, and commoners negotiated control over natural resources across the Transkei, they simultaneously contested the meaning of these collective transformations in local political and environmental relations.

In KwaMatiwane negotiations over environmental authority were embedded within the region’s unique histories of political and environmental restructuring. Following the final major Transkeian rebellion of the nineteenth century, officials expanded the colonial domination of both local populations and resources, viewing them as mutually supportive agendas. From the early 1880s onward, controlling forests became a key ingredient in official strategies to stabilize the social order, consolidate colonial rule, and resettle local populations. The settlement of diverse populations into newly created subdistrict locations and the appointment of government-salaried headmen to oversee them served the twin causes of political stability and expanded resource regulation. As colonial conservation was formally established and expanded from the late 1880s onward, officials more systematically empowered and obliged headmen to help enforce governmental forest schemes in their locations. Over the course of the 1890s, the government also expanded the activities of European forest officers and African forest guards in local areas, who worked alongside headmen in controlling location forest access until the late 1900s, as a new management policy emerged for location forests. From this point forward, foresters’ patrols were confined to only demarcated government reserves, and headmen took over the daily supervision of newly defined “headmen’s forests” in their wards.

Differently situated chiefs, headmen, and commoners brought their wider personal experiences of social, economic, and ecological transformation to bear on their responses to these changes in environmental authority. The complex relocation policies of the postwar 1880s, including the resettlement of economically and culturally differentiated groups into common locations, exacerbated ongoing tensions and magnified such lines of difference. As such groups competed over land and forest resources, intralocation factions settled their scores in heated disputes over headmen’s political and environmental authority. African authorities’ ambiguous participation in colonial forest policies particularly generated uneasy and unpredictable relations with both location residents and officials, as newly subordinated chiefs and newly appointed headmen often exploited their hand in forest control to derive various political and economic benefits. With the expansion of forest patrols and personnel in the region in the 1890s and early 1900s the politics of resource negotiations became even more complex and intense, as headmen jockeyed to maintain their influence over popular resource access and location residents felt and expressed their deeper frustrations with the colonial state, particularly in a period of acute rural stress, through struggles with forest officers and guards. At the same time, headmen, residents, and forest guards each brought deeper personal histories and vendettas to their negotiation of these shifting power relations.

Over the course of the late 1900s and early 1910s, as location forests were placed under headmen’s exclusive control, negotiations over forest access continued to involve a combination of various social, economic, and environmental stakes for differently situated actors. Officials still faced ambiguously positioned headmen who often exploited their limited sphere of authority for the benefit and protection of themselves and the people of their wards. Simultaneously, many men and women contended with headmen who extracted demands and constrained local forest access according to personal interpretations of their environmental prerogatives.

REBELLION AND ITS AFTERMATH: STABILIZING COLONIAL RESOURCE AND POPULATION CONTROL

By the late 1870s colonialism had already begun reshaping the political landscape of KwaMatiwane and adjacent areas. From the early 1860s onward the Thembu paramount Ngangelizwe developed increasingly closer ties with Cape authorities, strategically weathering multiple frontier wars in the wider region, and by 1876 Thembuland was divided into four new magistracies.¹ Across the Umtata river, the Mpondomise chiefdom under Mditshwa began negotiating for colonial “protection” in the early 1870s, particularly as a means to defend against raids from neighboring Mpondo groups. By 1877, the chiefdom came under complete colonial control when the Cape formally annexed the entire area of East Griqualand, with a magistrate based at Tsolo overseeing Mditshwa’s territory.² Just as Cape rule began to unfold, however, the rebellion of 1880–81 redefined the terms of colonial engagement with local peoples and environments. Restoring order and resettling populations in the war’s aftermath forced colonial authorities to refine their political and environmental strategies. More intensive schemes to restructure boundaries of local political authority and assume control over essential natural resources worked hand in hand.

Besides its anticolonial dimensions, the rebellion in the early 1880s brought to a head escalating tensions between African groups with various political motives, cultural affiliations, and economic positions.³ In Thembuland, KwaMatiwane populations in the two magistracies of Umtata and Engcobo were predominately comprised of Thembu clans, Hala and Jumba, as well as amaQwathi under Chief Dalasile, all of whom had formally recognized Ngangelizwe’s authority as paramount.⁴ Yet the paramount’s courting of Cape ties in the prerebellion period exacerbated strained relations with Dalasile, who resented both Ngangelizwe’s use of authority and the expansion of colonial power in the Qwathi chiefdom.⁵ Another source of tension in both Thembuland and Mditshwa’s territory was the accelerating influx of Mfengu and other immigrant populations from the Eastern Cape and other parts of the Transkei.⁶ Many of these newcomers, with much longer and closer interaction with colonial society than the majority of their new African neighbors, had already incorporated “progressive” economic ideals and Christian beliefs and practices into their culture and thus were viewed much more favorably by the colonial government. Various missionary groups—Free Church of Scotland, Anglican, Wesleyan Methodist, and Moravian—also expanded their local activities in the late nineteenth century, deepening lines of cultural and economic differentiation within and between many African communities.⁷

The combination of such competing interests and allegiances exploded into open conflict in 1880. Those Mpondomise, Qwathi, and Thembu groups who rebelled, led by such prominent chiefs as Mhlontlo, Mditshwa and Dalasile, directly opposed the colonial government’s imposition of taxation, threats of disarmament, and broader exercise of power over their chiefdoms.⁸ The war itself was relatively short-lived, however. By April 1881, colonial forces had broken the backbone of the resistance, and officials began the difficult task of stabilizing colonial control among the region’s now incredibly fractured and war-torn populations.

In restructuring the social landscape of KwaMatiwane in the rebellion’s aftermath, colonial officials combined three immediate and interrelated goals: the establishment of social control and political stability in the Territories, the interspersing of officially designated “rebel” and “loyalist” African communities across the region as a means to prevent future outbreaks, and the opening up of particular lands for the expansion of white settlement from the Cape Colony. In defensively redesigning the region, government leaders resuscitated a well-worn tradition in colonial expansion on the Eastern Cape frontier: the creation of human “buffer zones.”⁹ Following the war, colonial authorities strategically located African groups that had allied themselves with the Cape government as “buffers” between former rebel groups or independent African polities, on the one hand, and European settlements along the widening Cape Colony border. European and African populations in much of the Engcobo, Umtata, and Tsolo districts, as well as populations in the adjoining Qumbu and Maclear districts, were reassigned specific territorial boundaries. Nodes of European settlement and colonial administration at Tsolo, Umtata, and Engcobo, as well as the expanding European farming populations in the Elliot and Maclear districts, would be “protected” by corridors of loyalist Mfengu, Thembu, and Mpondomise groups; former rebels would be relocated on the other side of these “buffer zones.”¹⁰

An essential component of this resettlement mosaic was the partitioning of forest access. Throughout the rebellion, as in previous wars, many local people had exploited nearby forests as strategic sites of refuge, hiding themselves and their livestock from enemy forces, relying on wild foods for daily subsistence, and utilizing plants and trees for the manufacture of weapons and ammunition.¹¹ Even after the fighting ended in 1881, many fugitives from either side of the Umtata-Tsolo district border and in the Engcobo District continued to hold out in local mountain forests.¹² Over the next few months, thousands of individuals, driven by hunger and desperation, eventually moved down into the nearby valleys to seek refuge with loyalist Thembu and Mfengu communities and peace with the colonial government.¹³ Yet the threat of rebellion still seemed very real to many African and colonial authorities, each of which sensed serious risks in resettling in their midst former rebels who might at any moment take up arms or flee to military strongholds in the forested mountains.¹⁴ In order to preempt any such unpredictable maneuvers, officials ensured that the relocation of rebel communities involved distancing them from advantageous natural areas.¹⁵

First, colonial authorities sent troops to root out any rebels still hiding in the mountains, capture any livestock secreted there, and regain military control over the forest areas.¹⁶ Then the complex relocation game began, balancing the need to separate European settlements from former rebel groups with the desire to obstruct the latter’s direct access to less easily controlled forest and mountain areas. Officials devised a creative solution to the problem: loyalist “buffer zones” would be used for both purposes.¹⁷ In the Engcobo District, Walter Stanford made it a policy to “cautiously” locate only those headmen and people “of tried Loyalty” in close proximity to any natural strongholds in the nearby forested mountains: the rebel amaQwathi were settled between an artificial line below the Gulandoda Range and a circle of loyalist Mfengu and Thembu communities surrounding the Engcobo magistracy; lands “vacated” by rebels between the Gulandoda Range and the more distant Drakensberg foothills were likewise reserved for settlement by loyalist “natives of good character and inclined to adopt civilized habits,” a move favored by Stanford “from a military point of view.”¹⁸ In the Umtata District, RM A. H. Stanford established locations under loyalist Mfengu and Thembu headmen along the Tsolo District border; loyalist Mfengu and Mpondomise headmen were similarly put in charge of locations on the Tsolo side of the line. Together, these moves created buffers between Mpondomise rebels settled in the interior of the Tsolo District and the European center at Umtata, as well as between former rebel communities and the bulk of the mountain forests in the adjoining districts. Likewise, toward the northern boundary of the Tsolo District, a mixed location of loyalist Mfengu communities was established, hemming in Mpondomise rebels in the district from the nearby Drakensberg Mountains.¹⁹

Initiating this strategic mapping of local populations and resource areas at the close of the war was one thing; making it run smoothly would be another matter altogether. As colonial authorities attempted to restore stability and regularize social and ecological control in African communities, local tensions exacerbated by war and resettlement would complicate official plans. Management of people and resources was soon mired in Africans’ multiple, conflicting experiences of change under expanding colonial rule in the post-war period.

POSTWAR STRUGGLES OVER RESETTLEMENT, AUTHORITY, AND RESOURCE CONTROL

Alongside postwar resettlement schemes, settling the parameters of political and environmental authority in different magisterial districts and subdistrict wards was an essential ingredient in official strategies to stabilize colonial control. In the early 1880s, responding primarily to mounting conflicts over natural resources among and between African communities and European settlers, colonial authorities instituted several commissions to determine political and natural boundaries within Thembuland and East Griqualand, and between these territories and the expanding settler communities in what would become the Elliot and Maclear districts.²⁰ More persistent resource disputes accompanied the restructuring of authority within and between subdistrict locations. Conflicts immediately developed in many locations in the Umtata, Tsolo, and Engcobo districts over access to productive resources, interwoven with deeper contests over power and authority in newly constituted locations. As different groups competed for soils, gras...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbrevations
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index