The more the Xhosa traditional leaders joined the ranks of the slaughterers, the more the fate of the traditional social and economic order became tied up with the fate of Nongqawuse’s prophecies. When they failed, the entire traditional order fell with them, never to rise again except as an empty shell.
But not all the Xhosa followed Nongqawuse. A minority, maybe 10 or 20%, refused to kill their cattle. The doomed believers referred to these men as amagogotya, stingy, hard people who stand aside when you need help, who put their selfish interests ahead of the interests of the nation. After the catastrophe was over, the amagogotya formed one component of the new class, which – following the convention established by the historian Colin Bundy – can be called ‘peasants’.
The other components of this peasantry were convinced adherents of mission Christianity. What united the amagogotya and the Mfengu peasants, the population of displaced persons from the Mfecane, was their common and positive response to the new economic and political opportunities on offer from the liberal Cape. What were these new opportunities?
• The right to own and accumulate private property, land and capital goods such as ploughs and wagons, free of collective obligations imposed by the chiefs in the name of the community.
• Access to national markets on equal footing with the white settlers.
• Access to education, information and technical knowledge.
• Political rights, including the right to a government protective of one’s interests and chosen by oneself.
Time would tell that the ‘peasant moment’ was built on an illusion – the illusion that the colonial situation could accommodate black people on an equal footing with white people. The ‘peasant moment’ is nevertheless historically important because it demonstrates the capacity and the potential of the black farmer and the black entrepreneur, a capacity and potential that were shut down in the course of South Africa’s transition from an agrarian to an industrial society.
Rev. John L. Dube (1871–1946), known as Mafukuzela, or ‘the one who struggles against obstacles’. Sent to the US to be trained as a minister, Dube became acquainted with the American black leader Booker T. Washington. He founded the Ohlange Institute at Inanda on the model of Washington’s industrial school at Tuskegee, and established the newspaper Ilanga lase- Natal in 1903. In January 1912 he was elected fi rst president of the South African Native National Congress, the future ANC.
The peasants obtained their land foothold in the Cape due to the expedient decision of the Cape authorities to allocate strategically located territories to black farmers for the sake of creating buffer zones between white farmers and black traditionalists. That the peasants seized their opportunities is shown by the following quotations from Colin Bundy’s seminal book, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry.
‘All these people are in the strictest sense agriculturalists . . . They are the larges producers of grain in the division; without them the trade of Queenstown would not be anything like what it is at present. It is an indisputable fact that comparing them with Europeans, taking man for man and acre for acre, the native produces from a smaller extent of ground, and with more primitive appliances, more than the Europeans’. (Queenstown, 1881)
‘Many cattle are fattened here for the markets . . . Dealers and purchasers procure large quantities of slaughter animals from this district. The wheat and other cereals rendered excellent crops . . . The peasants were yearly becoming richer, and there is an increasing desire to obtain land . . . Taking everything into consideration, the native district of Peddie surpasses the European district of Albany in its productive powers’. (Peddie, 1870 – 1875)
‘Wherever I went I found substantial huts and brick or stone tenements. In many cases, substantial brick houses had been erected and fruit trees had been planted; wherever a stream of water could be made available it had been led out and the soil cultivated as far as it could be irrigated; the slopes of the hills and even the summits of the mountains were cultivated wherever a plough could be introduced’. (Hewu, 1876)
Peasant production in Natal and in the two Boer republics differed from the Cape less in terms of economic practice than in terms of political profile. Or, to put it another way, the peasants were there but they were politically invisible due to constraints at the political level.
Under the conditions of poorly capitalised, labour-intensive agriculture that existed in the three northern territories, African peasants were able to produce more at a lower cost than white farmers, particularly with regard to familiar staple crops such as maize. Essentially, land was worth little without labour to work it. White farmers, with an abundance of land and a shortage of labour, inclined to stock farming, while Africans concentrated on agricultural production for the urban market. Africans in Natal exported maize all the way to Cape Town in the 1850s, even earlier than they produced maize for the diamond fields in the 1870s.
For most of the nineteenth century, access to land was not as severe a problem for Africans as it later became. Loss of land was a political problem, a spiritual problem, but from a narrowly economic point of view, land was still available in the nineteenth century to enterprising people who were prepared to take available opportunities. In Natal, for example, five out of six million theoretically white acres in 1870 were in fact owned by big land companies who were quite willing to rent it out to Africans while waiting for the value of land to rise.
The market at the diamond fi elds in the 1880s. African farmers were able to produce more at a lower cost than white farmers, particularly with regard to maize. Africans in Natal exported maize to Cape Town in the 1850s, even before they started to meet the demand coming from the diamond fi elds in the 1870s.
Land companies also rented out extensive lands to Africans in the Voortrekker republics; the proprietor known to Sotho speakers as Mmangolwana was in fact the Vereeniging Estate Land Company. Sharecropping or ‘farming on the halves’ – personified by ‘Oom Kas’ Maine in Charles van Onselen’s famous biography The Seed is Mine – was also prevalent and so popular among the poorer class of Afrikaner farmers, especially in the Free State, that it took the Native Lands Act of 1913 to stamp it out.
Politically, however, the peasant outside the Cape Colony was almost voiceless. The main exceptions were the amakholwa (believers) communities of Natal, roughly equivalent to the mission peasants of the Eastern Cape. Most notable among these was the Edendale community near Pietermaritzburg, which expanded out of its home base and replicated itself in different parts of Natal, and the 47 African planters of Mvoti (Groutville) who cultivated 300 acres of sugar cane and milled 140 tons of sugar by 1871.
Natal also had one advantage over the Eastern Cape in that it was serviced by the American Board Missions, through which early Natal African leaders such as John L. Dube and Pixley Seme were exposed to black American models of economic upliftment. Political representation for blacks was, however, a no-go area in Natal. The advent in Natal of responsible government in 1893 represented a setback, not a platform, for African political aspirations.
