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African Women Farmers in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, 1875–1930: State Policies and Spiritual Vulnerabilities
Abstract
As whites consolidated political control over South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the economies of rural African families transformed. Redding investigates how, with the exodus of men as migrant labourers to the gold mines, African women became entrepreneurial market farmers in the Eastern Cape region. However, Redding contends, the colonial state’s legal restrictions on women’s property rights drained women’s economic resources and redefined them as dependents of men and ‘subsistence’ farmers. In tandem, accusations of witchcraft against women, often from relations or neighbours, increased as women exercised more power over familial resources. The cumulative impact of legal restrictions and witchcraft accusations threatened African women’s status and their opportunities to engage in entrepreneurial market farming by the late 1920s.
Two cases in the Kei Valley and western Venda (Ha Ramabulana) about colonial land mensuration, bounding, and claims, and how other articulations of space and belonging complicated and at times thwarted them. Appeared Oct 2014, copyright date 2015. Now Open Access.
Migrant mineworkers from Mpondoland came into the news as the victims of the shootings at Marikana platinum mine in August 2012. Fourteen out of the 45 people who met their deaths over the two weeks of turmoil at Marikana came from this area and another 16 from other former Transkeian districts in the Eastern Cape province. Evidence suggests that workers from such rural communities, which have been sending long distance migrants to the mines for over a century, are still migrating in some numbers and were central in the strike. This article outlines changing patterns of migration over the long term and suggests that these did not entirely undermine agricultural production, at least till the later decades of the twentieth century. It aims to explore aspects of agency and identity from the perspective of workers who returned to the Mpondoland districts and to suggest how new solidarities and associations emerged from the interactions between changing rural and urban contexts. It also discusses some of the generational and gender tensions that reflected the circulation of earnings. Migrants from Mpondoland have been characterised in both historical literature and contemporary journalism as traditionalist and fiercely attached to their rural homes. It is important not to ethnicise a diverse segment of the South African workforce, and we need to allow for many different individual trajectories, as well as changes over time. However, I will suggest that a sense of collective identity has in part shaped their responses over the long term and seem to be evident, alongside unions, in new expressions of worker solidarity.
The press has, from time to time, reported on the occurrence of episodes of witchcraft-related violence in the northeast of South Africa. Social analysts often attribute witchcraft beliefs and accusations to the persistence of ‘traditional’ beliefs in the contemporary world. This article challenges such interpretations and asks whether it is possible to see witchcraft beliefs and accusations as a product of people's exposure to the South African system of Native Reserves and bantustans. Drawing on multi-temporal fieldwork in Bushbuckridge, a district of the South African lowveld, I endeavour to show how witchcraft beliefs have been structured by the historical processes of population relocation, the implementation of agricultural betterment schemes, labour migration, and by ideologies of cultural difference, that were central to the bantustan system. At the local level, I suggest that accusations have been fuelled by experiences of social confinement in ‘closed’ communities, relative deprivation and of competition for scarce resources.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Cape Colonial government attempted to formalise African law and custom within its native territories. This process, particularly apparent in the Commission on Native Law and Custom (1878–1883), involved much discussion between colonial representatives and African men in the Eastern Cape about the origins, utility and worth of customs and practices such as initiation, lobola (bridewealth) and polygamy. Particular areas of concern for both groups were the gender relations and sexual codes that existed in Xhosa-speaking society. The Commissioners, partially as a result of exposure to missionary thinking, viewed practices such as polygamy as troublesome, retrogressive and oppressive to women. Xhosa, Fingo and Thembu men were concerned, on the contrary, to assert the validity and worth of such practices. One noticeable change in African attitudes to gender relations concerned the way in which African men were beginning to view female sexual activity in less forgiving terms. This discussion has further implications. In a context in which much of the information sought and testimony received concerned sex and gender codes, discussion around sex framed a metanarrative more diffusely concerned with racial differences. The Commissioners repeat edly stressed the relative superiority of English gender ideology and its treatment of women (this was not a discussion in which women participated). Through reference to social behaviour, the Commissioners could underscore racial difference without resorting to race as an explanation of difference. Their witnesses were, however, assiduous in refuting suggestions of cultural inferiority. They countered allegations of cultural barbarism in the treatment of women through references to the suitability of such practices as validated by antiquity. This assertion, common to Xhosa, Fingo and Thembu men, formed the basis for the articulation of a more unified regional identity than had previously been the case between the three groups.
Son of Tiyo Soga, the first black South African to be ordained, John Henderson Soga (1860–1941) was a Xhosa minister and scholar. Like his father, he was one of the first of his people to be educated in Europe and to marry a European woman. His perspective on his people's history and culture is therefore distinctive. Conscious of the effects of modernity on Xhosa traditions, he published this work of social anthropology in 1932 to record their way of life as distinct from other tribal communities in South Africa. Soga traces the historical development of their clan system and laws, while offering uniquely informed insights into their beliefs and practices, such as the function of witch doctors and the customs of circumcision, lobola or 'bride price', and polygamy. The South-Eastern Bantu (1930), Soga's earlier survey of three branches of the Bantu family, is also reissued in this series.
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116822/1/Ashforth on Human Security and Spiritual Insecurity.pdf
This article argues that rural South African women's importance as spiritual actors in the period from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries stemmed from their ability to embrace hybrid spiritual identities that corresponded closely to the lived reality of African rural life, and that by embracing those identities, women expanded their roles as social healers. Professing a belief in Christianity did not prevent individuals from practicing as diviners, nor did it prevent Christians from consulting diviners to determine the causes of death or misfortune. Similarly, young women who converted to Christianity often maintained close ties to non-Christian families and bridged spiritual lives on the mission stations with life in their families. Over this time period, women became cultural mediators who borrowed, adopted, and combined spiritual beliefs to provide more complete answers to problems faced by rural African families in South Africa.
The first phase of a project to determine the distribution of pre-colonial farming settlement through space and time in the former Transkei, Eastern Cape, was carried out during 1983-87. This archaeological reconnaissance, using a stratified random sampling method, located 15 Early Iron Age settlement sites within and two next to five of the 12 study areas searched. These findings have largely escaped subsequent attention. An additional site was found adjacent to the Great Kei River after the project finished. The distribution and altitude of these sites indicate that they are confined to localities in deeply incised river valleys (as predicted from the pattern in KwaZulu-Natal), but at decreasing distances from the sea and declining altitudes in a southwesterly direction across the Eastern Cape. This might reflect the operation of a human rather than a physical geographical factor. One possibility is the early presence of Khoekhoen herders, perhaps with seasonal camps along rivers, westward of about 29°E. The distribution of a) rivers with names derived from Khoekhoen, b) isiXhosa dialects with a strong Khoekhoen component, and c) herder pottery along the coastline, all strongly support this proposal. The geographic limit of Early Iron Age settlement southwestward of East London remains to be determined. Woodland disturbance by early farmers in the larger, incised river valleys would have initiated processes of plant succession in a geographical patch-work in the later first millennium AD, that continue in places today, albeit with far greater intensity. This can be relevant to the management of such vegetation in protected areas.
The importance of Act 25 of 1894 of the Cape parliament, the Glen Grey Act, in the pattern of legislation to regulate the lives of the Black population of southern Africa is generally admitted. It was intended that the law should apply initially to the Black people of the Glen Grey district of the northern Cape where there were White farmers in the neighbourhood eager for more land. It was, however, also intended that the measure could be applied by proclamation to other districts of the Cape and of the Transkei. The incorporation of Transkeian districts into the Cape was completed in the same year with the annexation of Pondoland. In the course of the parliamentary debates Rhodes described the legislation as “a bill for Africa”. He evidently envisaged that the provisions contained in the Glen Grey Act could be introduced in time to areas beyond the Cape, such as the land north of the Limpopo which in 1898 became known as Rhodesia.
The extant literature about migrant worker hostel violence in South Africa in the early 1990s is critiqued in this article from a gendered perspective. Based on that critique, a feminist geographical framework is developed to examine hostel violence during South Africa's transition. By locating hostels and their residents within this geographical framework, referred to as the procreational geography of apartheid, it is argued that hostel violence evinces male hostel-dwellers' resistance to a perceived erosion of heteropatriarchal family power structures inside hostels and in far-flung rural homes. From this perspective, the post-1994-election hostels' internal political geographies are shown to reinscribe many of the heteropatriarchal claims to power negotiated under the conditions of apartheid.
Fundamental rethinking is required to tackle the durability of the legacies of poverty and inequality inherited by the democratic government of South Africa. Such rethinking has to start with an understanding of the long historical processes that brought us to where we are. This paper traces, albeit briefly, the ways in which first land and water, then minerals, capital for investment and finally human capital were accumulated over several centuries primarily (though not exclusively) into white hands. Along the way there is a discussion about the long term consequences of conquest of the Land Act of 1913, of the migrant labour system first entrenched by the mining industry and extended by apartheid, of the Bantu Education Act of 1953, of the barriers to occupational mobility raised by colour restrictions during South Africa's industrial revolution, and by the essentially extractive philosophy that underpins the economy. The net result of this long process is to bequeath to the country today not only widespread poverty but one of the deepest levels of inequality in the world. This history has to be recognized and understood if we are to devise effective strategies to overcome it.Of the many problems facing the South African economy, the four most intractable relate to poverty, unemployment, inequality and environmental sustainability. They are all, of course, interrelated but in this special issue we focus particularly on the inequality whose roots go down deep into the history of the country.
A gender revolution allegedly occurred in the British Cape Colony (and South Africa at large) in the nineteenth century. African patriarchs, traditionally pastoralists, took over women's agricultural work, adopted Victorian gender attributes, and became prosperous peasants (nicknamed ‘black English’). Scholars have accepted the plausibility of these seismic shifts in masculinity, postulated in Colin Bundy's classic, The Rise & Fall of the South African Peasantry. I re-examine them, for Bundy's ‘Case Study’ of Herschel, acclaimed as one of the regions that best fits his thesis. This Case Study omits women, who were the typical peasant producers. It marginalizes men failing to conform to bourgeois Victorian gender norms. Itmisrepresents class formation, causation, periodization, and peasant well-being. It misdates proletarianization by at least three decades. The zenith of commodity production is misdated by at least half a century. A labor reservoir characterized by severe subsistence problems is represented as a prosperous peasantry. Bundy postulates that patriarchs ‘rose’ into women's work and colonial masculine scripts in response to favorable conditions; I argueinstead that younger men ‘fell’ into these domains in response to disasters. A silent gender bias—towards black Englishmen, against African women—had a marked impact on Bundy's analysis of class formation. The purpose of this article is to interrogate this silence and to show how it has warped a classic text.
This article argues that the published and unpublished records of the Berlin Missionary Society in the Transvaal in the nineteenth century are sufficiently rich to allow for at least a partial reconstruction of perceptions and practices with regard to witchcraft in African societies. It also uses the perspective provided by this material to re-interpret a key episode in the history of the region – the clashes between Christian converts and wider Pedi society in the 1860s. The article concludes that concern about witches was profound and pervasive and needs to be given much fuller attention in historical analysis. However, it also argues that the incidence of individuals being either openly accused of, or punished for, witchcraft was low, and that large-scale and lethal witch-hunts were extremely rare. It further suggests that the contemporary tendency to see women as particularly prone to witchcraft is not paralleled in nineteenth century accounts and may therefore be the result of processes of social change set in motion late in the century. In addition, it notes that the 'zombies' who have commanded widespread comment and concern in recent years are probably neither as exotic nor as new as some writers have supposed.
Rebellions broke out in many areas of South Africa shortly after the institution of white rule in the late nineteenth century and continued into the next century. However, distrust of the colonial regime reached a new peak in the mid-twentieth century, when revolts erupted across a wide area of rural South Africa. All these uprisings were rooted in grievances over taxes. Rebels frequently invoked supernatural powers for assistance and accused government officials of using witchcraft to enrich themselves and to harm ordinary people. As Sean Redding observes in Sorcery and Sovereignty, beliefs in witchcraft and supernatural powers were part of the political rhetoric; the system of taxationâwith all its prescribed interactions between ruler and ruledâwas intimately connected to these supernatural beliefs. In this fascinating study, Redding examines how black South Africansâ beliefs in supernatural powers, along with both economic and social change in the rural areas, resulted in specific rebellions and how gender relations in black South African rural families changed. Sorcery and Sovereignty explores the intersection of taxation, political attitudes, and supernatural beliefs among black South Africans, shedding light on some of the most significant issues in the history of colonized Africa.
Rhodes and the Poisoned Goods: Popular Opposition to the Glen Grey Council System
- Colin Bundy
- Mr
- C Bundy
The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry
- Colin Bundy
- C Bundy
Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa
- Monica Wilson
- M Wilson
The History of Native Policy in South Africa from 1830 to the Present Day
- Edgar H Brookes
- EH Brookes
The Transkei in the Making
- Govan Mbeki