European Colonial Despotism: A History of Oppression & Resistance in South Africa 0907015743

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A HISTORY OF OPPRESSION &

RESISTANCE

IN SOUTH AFRICA

HOSEA JAFFE

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/europeancolonial00O0Ojaff

Fig. 1: The author, Hosea Jaffe (left) with friend and colleague, R.O. Dudley, former president of Unity Movement.

Hosea Jaffe European Colonial Despotism A History of Oppression & Resistance in South Africa © 1994 Hosea Jaffe

All Rights Reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and/or the Publisher. First published in Britain and the USA by Kamak House 300 Westboume Park Road London W11 1EH England

Fax: 071.221.6490 Typesetting produced by Kamak Imagesetters ISBN 0 907015 74 3

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea and London Arts Board for financial assistance.

Dedicated to Saul Jayiya and Jonie Bosch Proletarian Anti-Imperialists of

Sanland (South Africa)

CONTENTS

PART ONE Chapter 1

The Conceptual-Colonialist Framework — The Becoming and Being of the Capitalist System in South Africa "Civilization’ Theories of History and South Africa Theory of Modes of Production for South African Historiography The Three Modes of South African History The Nether and Upper Sides of Capitalist Mode

The Hierarchy of Intra-modal Divisions in South Africa Colonial Conquest: A Class or a Modal Struggle? Antagonistic Relations of Production in the Modal Struggle The Backwardness of Pre-Colonial Europe The Colonialistic Nature of Capitalism in South Africa The Racial nature of Capitalist-Colonialism in South Africa The Dialectics of Colonial Racism

Chapter 2

South Africans Before Capitalism The San (Hunter-Gatherers) The Khoi-San Modal Revolution “Stone Age” San and “lron Age” Bantu? Euro-Racist Chronicling of Pre-Colonial Societies Khoi-Khoi and Bantu Hunters, Herders and Farmers

Chapter 3

Capitalist Slavery Versus Communalism The Portuguese “Navigators” German Merchant-Financiers of the “Discoveries” Portuguese Pressures on San-Khoi and Bantu Societies The Coming of the first Dutch Multi-National (the DEIC) Free “White” or Slave “Black” Labour? A Class-Modal War on two Fronts Free “White” or Slave “Black” Labour? The Second Land War

Colour Slavery Slave Revolts Settlers Versus DEIC: A Family Quarrel? The Genocide of the San The Conquest of the Khoi-Khoi

ESESRE

PART TWO The Wars of Dispossession

Chapter 4 Xhosa Frontier, "Zulu Difaqane"

and "Great Trek" (1805-1952) The Subjugation of the Conquered Red Khoi-San Ordinance 50, 1828: Racist “Equality” The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest Missionaries and Liberals in the 1812 War on the Xhosa The War of Nxele Makanda, 1818

The Zulu “Difaqane” Dingane and the Trek-Boers Blood River The Northern (Orange River) Frontier The Transvaal Frontier (Against the Tswana-Sotho-Matabele) The 1829 and 1834 Anti-Xhosa Wars and the “Great Trek” The 1845 “War of the Axe”

Chapter 5 The Killing of Cattle and the Communal Mode (1850-1885) The Xhosa-Sotho-Khoisan Unity War of 1850 The 1856-7 Cattle-Killing: Suicide or Genocide? The Last Stand of the Xhosa The Free State and Basutoland The Diamond War, 1879-1880 Shepstone’s Policy and the Langalibalele War The Victory and Defeat of Cetswayo, 1879 The Dispossession of the Tswana The Resistance and Defeat of Sekukuni The German War for Namibia

57

Part Three

Colonial Fascism

Chapter 6 Imperialism — The Foundations of Apartheid (1870-1910) The Kimberley Diamond Mines The Witwatersrand Gold Mines The 1894 Glen Grey Act. Early Political Resistance Movements The Last British Land-War: Rhodesia The Last German Land-War: Namibia The Anglo-Boer War for Anglo-Boer Dominion An “Anti-lmperialist War"? The 1906 Bambatta Peasant Revolt Selbome: The National Convention Towards White Union Liberals outside the Convention The 1910 Act of Union

:

114 115 117 120 122 124 125 127 129 129 131 132

Chapter 7

The Economic Apartheid Superstructures (1910 -1936)

135

The 1911 Labour Regulation Act. The 1913 Land Act.

136 137

1912: The Birth of the African National Congress Racism in the First World “War for Democracy” The International Socialist League, 1915-1920 The Bondelswartz and Bulhoek Massacres Urban Regimentation, 1920-1923 The 1922 Pogrom-Strike The White Labour Policy

138 139 141 142 142 143 144

The Communist Party of South Africa

145

vi

The |.C.U. (Industrial and Commercial Workers Union) Rural Regimentation The CPSA's “Black Republic(s)” Trotsky’s Letters, 1934-5

Chapter 8

The Political Apartheid Superstructures (1936-1960) The All African Convention (A.A.C.) Neo-Liberal Stalinism The National Liberation League and the Non-European United Front, 1935 - 1941

The The The The The The The

War: Imperialist or for Democracy? Anti-C.A.D. Committee (1943 - 1960) Non-European Unity Movement. Historical N.E.U.M. Boycott. N.E.U.M. Versus Recommunalisation Peasant Revolts and Point 7 of the 10-Point Programme Freedom Charter or the 10-Point Programme?

Part Four

Democracy or Partition? Chapter 9

Fascist Tribalisation (1960-1976) The Pan-Africanist Congress and Sharpville, 1960 The 15-year Night After Sharpville The “Black Consciousness” Movement The “Soweto” Nation-wide Revolt, 1976 The Bantustans and the Kaufmann Plan South Africa: An Atomic Power

146

Chapter 10 The Consittutional Crisis (1976-1990) The Economic and Liberation Movements Race Relations Survey (1988—1991) South Africa in World Crisis Economic Sanctions South African Front-line Neo-Colonies The Armed Struggle The 1983-1986 Boycotts The New Unity Movement: Non-Collaboration and Anti-imperialism

Repression and Negotiations The Homeland Police-"States" Negotiations and "Reforms", 1985-1990 The Release of Nelson Mandela Culture - "Races" Constitution and Consittuent Assembles The Boipatong and Bisho Massacres Towards a Multi-racial Neo-Colonialism References

Bibliography Index

323

X

South [in Africa of the in representation hunting prehistorical Early Fig. 2. caves scene a State]. Free Orange the reffered region to as now

Part One

Chapter One

THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK THE BECOMING AND BEING OF THE CAPITALIST-COLONIALIST SYSTEM IN SOUTH AFRICA

“Civilization” Theories of History and South Africa T: narrations and biographies of Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, to name but a few Greeks, continued the much older African tradition, pursued

in Egypt by scribes of the Pharaohs, like Ipuwer (c. 2000 B.C), or of despotic societies in Babylonia, India, China and, doubtless, of the ancient urban societies of Central America and the Andes. These descriptions of events were the first steps in historiography in the scientific sense. They introduced the observational phase of

2

European Colonial Despotism

history-writing, but selection of material was undisciplined and arbitrary. An advance on this was made by those who, like Aristotle in his Poetics, held that history was about specific people, places, constitutions and set out to classify these and similar unordered and usually unrelated data. But even classified events do not yet constitute history proper, especially if the time axis, so to speak, is absent. In the 14th century B.C., the Philosopher Pharaoh, Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV) wrote an Aton (Sun) based monotheistic and naturalistic theory of truth and pnmordial "Law of Oppoisites". Around 280 B.C. the great Egyptian historian Manetho recorded 31 dynasties in his Anegyptiaca, and laid the foundation of "long time" historiography by gouping them into seven sequences used by the Taoist historian, Tssuma Chien (145-179 BC), who wrote Shi Chi (Records of History), used “long time” as a measure of historic change 2000 years before Braudel and Wallerstein. He documented 1000 years of what later became known as “primitive communism” from the Shang to the Han “dynasties”. The concept of time-relation sets of events was developed further by the Shih T'ung of Liu Chih-chi (661-721), by Ssuma Kuang (1019-86), and the Ming historian, Wang Fu-Chih (1619-1692), who possibly influenced the Jesuit missionary and scientist, Matthew Ricci, and thence Leibnitz, and developed a materialist method based on dynamic equilibnhum. Wang Fee-Chih saw that forms, called Hsing, remained unchanged for long periods, while their content, Chih, continually changed. We may use the Hsing concept if we consider the Marxist evolution from slavery-to-feudalism-to-capitalism in much of Europe or from “savagery” to “barbarism” to “civilization”, in any part of the world, if we use Morgan’s Hsing forms. These changes were brought about by a generative force, Yin Yun, in both nature and society. We may consider Marx's “class struggle’, taken as “the motor of history’, as such a Yin Yun. This Yin Yun or the Yin-Yang dialectic, was a philosophical methodology for bringing time-order into the chaos of events. It introduced a scientific inductive methodology into historiography, if we take Yin Yun to be a generalisation of significant, event-making forces in social science. One form of Yin-Yang would be the conquest-resistance dialectic in South African history. The Tarikh-Il-Jehano-Gusha of Persia's great historian, Joveyni (1226-1283), enriched the methods of West Asian and North African historians with his thorough and careful selectiveness in the face of “facts” and “events”. So, too, did El Idrisi (13th century) and El Masudi (10th century), whose descriptions of East Africa are helpful to South African historiography; Ibn Battuta (1304 - 1369), whose Rihlah (Travels) covered 120,000 kilometres including long coastal areas of West and Eeast Africa, Leo Africanus (16th century) and, above all, Ibn Khaldun (b. Tunis, 1332, died

Cairo, 1406). Khaldun’s Mugaddimah (Introduction to his History of North Africa, Kitab al’ Ibar) was, wrote the British liberal historian, Toynbee, in 1934: “the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind." The greatest heritage

The Conceptual Framework

3

left to modern historians is his “science of culture”, of socio-economic analysis. This

science, I] Al Umran, focussed on “social transformations that succeed each other in the nature of society’. He contrasted the cohesion of people under a social bond which he called Asabiyah (600 years before Durkheim's celebrated “organic society’) with class struggles between commoners, despots and usurpers.' The African historian, Khaldun, was probably the first to give historiography a method which, coupled with the Yin-Yang dialectics of the Chinese materialist historians, could be considered to make histonography scientific. This combination was regenerated in the methodology of Marx's “dialectical materialism” and its sub-set, in the field of human history, known as “historical materialism.” In terms of the results of the above evolution of history-writing, history is not a chaos of events strewn about world, space and time. We agree with Kant when he said that history's events have both order and coherence.’ For Voltaire, in Essai sur Les Moeurs et L'Esprit des Nations (1745-53), this order came from God. Max Weber also used religion as a driving force in his Die Protestantische Ethik und Der Geist Der Kapitalismus (1904-5; in English, 1930), which tried to show that Calvinism led the triumph of capitalism and was more racialistic in the colonies than Catholicism. This factually false idea has also entered deeply into South African liberal and neo-liberal historiography which sees in Calvinistic Afrikanerdom the diabolo of apartheid. Calvinist, Anglican and Catholic missionaries alien to Voltaire’s deism nevertheless went to convert the African peoples with the idea that history was, indeed, the work and word of God. But they, as the spiritual part of the worldly army of European conquistadores, also propagated the historiographic theories of Gibbons, renewed in the 20th century by Toynbee and Braudel, theories which centred on the diffusion of something called “civilization."* For South Africa this meant simply that everything that has happened since da Gama in 1497 or Van Riebeeck in 1652 has been the result of the spread of this “civilization” by the Europeans. Indeed, a strong current of the concept of “race” and of racism in his handling of the

European slave-trade, runs through Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism (1979). Voltairean and Braudelian theories combined to form what has become known as the “civilizing mission” of Europe and the Europeans in all the world, and thence, too, in

South Africa. This explanation for history was integrated with the theory that this “civilization” spread through the dynamism and superiority of one sub-species or race of humani-

ty, known as the “Whites” or “Europeans’. This theory was the work of Positivists like Herbert Spencer and historians like de Gobineau and Carlyle® in the 19th century during the final European conquest of the world. The British historian, Toynbee (1889-1975), in his A Study of History, listed no fewer than 21 “civilizations” of which

4

European Colonial Despotism

“two have been created by contributions from three different races, nine by contnbutions from two different races, and ten by the united endeavours of a single race in each case”®adding: “When we classify Mankind by colour, the only primary race that has not made a creative contribution to any civilization is the Black race”,’ due to “certain features in the Negro's circumstances”? Toynbee, like the German-American anthropologist-historian, Franz Boas (1858 - 1952) believed in “equal but different races” and that there were race-related “civilizations” or “cultures”. To obtain a valid historiography we attempt to find the Hsing forms in South Africa and the Asabiyah preserving and the Yin Yun revolutionising these forms. We come to the conclusion that the real framework of South African history is constituted by the becoming and being of modes of production and distribution and by the ratification of their social formations. This reality, in tum, translates into becoming also the conceptual framework of scientific South Afncan historiography. The inclusion of “race” in the above modal and class analytic approach reflects the unique expression, in the South African case, of the general world processes of the colonial — capitalist sys-

tem. When we refer to a world economy or world system we do not do so in the sense used by Braudel, following, as he says,” the work of John Heinrich Von Thunen (1780 - 1851) who ranks alongside Marx as the greatest German economist of the 19th century’."° Von Thunen’s Der Isolierte Staat (1826) pictures a city (the Braudelian “centre”) in a fertile plain, with concentric zones of farming ranging from expensive ones near the centre to cheap ones towards a surrounding wildemess (the “periphery’), with diminishing returns from the land as transport costs increased with distance from the city “centre” bounded by a wildemess (the “periphery”). This model, not being based on a nation, by nation exploitation, is invalid for the world-capitalist system. It has reference to “centre-periphery’ trading “world economies” which may or may not be exploitative; and not to unequal inter-national relations of production. Its components are “civilizations” (which, for Braudel, include “European civilization” "Jewish civilization”, Moslem or Arab civilization, including Arab-Africa, which Braudel regards as “White”, as distinct from sub-Saharan “Black” Africa). These civilizations are more or less timeless.

Each world-economy “invanably has a centre, with a city

and an already-dominant type of capitalism’."" The Braudel view is that capitalism has always been part of “civilizations” and that it is only a third layer superstructure above a timeless primary layer of “structures of everyday life’, and a secondary layer, the timeless market economy. We see the Thunen-Braudel model! as unhistorical and inapplicable, in particular, to the world-capitalist system. Whereas, for example, the Braudel school, as continued by Wallerstein,’? would see the Homelands and Bantustans as peripheral “household economies” continuing an age-old primary layer and secondary layer (market-economy) structures, “capital-

Fig. 4: Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902), British imperialist, honoured by Oxford University with the annual Rhodes scholarship.

Fig.3: Lobengula (1833-1894), Ndebele King and resister.

The Conceptual Framework

5

ism’ as a third layer (of multi-nationals and state-powers) above the homelands/ Bantustans, we cannot but see the latter as an integral part of the colonial base of capitalism, as a part of capitalism proper. Instead of these timeless categories and structural models of “civilization” and “world economies’, we rely on the concepts of modes of production or social formations and their total systemics. |. Theory of Modes of Production for South African Historiography We use the concept of mode of production and distribution in the most general sense in which it was used by Marx, that is in the sense of a system, a social formation, together with its economy.’* We do not use “mode of production” in the narrow sense of a specific method of production, such as hunting, herding or metal-working. Nor do we use “mode” in the intermediate sense of a form of labour, such as slavery, serfdom, or wage-labour. We do not use “mode” to connote solely the economic forces and relations of production, the “economic base” of a system. We use it to

connote the system itself, in its totality, comprising its economy, its society, its politics and its culture. Following Marx's Critique and Grundrisse, we take the main modes or systems to have been those holding pre-class societies, slavery, feudalism, state-communalism and capitalism.'* This does not imply that all of these existed in South Africa or that they form a necessary sequence. Slavery, feudalism and state-communalism never properly existed in South Africa as modes or systems. Yet there were slaves, serfs and despots in South Afncan history. But, as we hope to be able to show, these functioned within a colonial-capitalist mode or system. They did not, as we see them, exist in pre-capitalist social formations. There were, for example, no pre-colonial despots, not even in the cases of Tshaka, Lobengula and Moshoeshoe, for the sim-

ple reason that in South Africa a system akin to what Marx called “Oriental state-communalism’” or the “Asiatic mode of production” did not have time to mature. Its development was, indeed, truncated by wars of dispossession and conquest waged for over 200 years in South Africa by a world-scouring capitalist systemic. Likewise, the Boers, British and German settlers of the 19th century had serfs, but not within a feudal systemic. Similarly, from 1658 to 1834 there were slaves at the Cape, but there

was, as we shall try to show, no slavery mode or system. Instead slavery was a labour form within a capitalist mode and systemic operating in the Western Cape and, after “abolition” in 1834, in parts of the Boer Republics. What we mean by “mode” or “system”, then, is not any specific technological method of production, nor

any particular form of labour. By “mode” or “system” we mean an overall economicsocial-political-cultural entity.

6

European Colonial Despotism

ll. The Three Modes of South African History In the case of South African history, no more than three such entities have existed. The first such mode or system was that of the ancient food-gatherers and hunters, called or calling themselves the San, Xam or !Ke. Over a century ago, Morgan and Engels eurocentrically called this mode “savagery” and Marx, “primitive communism’. The second mode was that of the so-called Khoi-Khoi and Bantu herders or agriculturalists or farmers, which Morgan and Engels called “barbarism’.'® Both these modes may be collectively called “communalism’, with the qualification that many of the pre-conquest hunters and farmers were not organised into who the Europeans were later to call "tribes". The third mode (or second, if the previous two are regarded as one set) was and remains the most savage and barbarous of all: that of capitalism. Ill. The Nether and Upper Sides of Capitalist Mode The capitalist mode has an upper and a nether side. It is divided, and divides the world, in two ways. Firstly, it divides the peoples into rich and poor nations. Lenin called these rich, oppressor nations and poor oppressed nations."® We prefer this characterisation.

Frank, Wallerstein, Amin and, with qualifications, this author, at

times, calls them “centre” and “periphery”. Popularly, these are referred to as the West and South respectively. Our history needs to ask and to try to answer the question: “On which side of this divide does South Africa lie? In the West, the “cen-

tre”, the “rich oppressor”, area? Or in the South, the “periphery”, the “poor oppressed” side? However, it is theoretically possible that no clear answer can be given to this question and that South Africa may, indeed, contain both sides. In such an event, our South African history would, conceptually at any rate, be of world significance. This problematic is an inevitable and necessary task of our methodology. The single general concept embracing this division of the global economy and system is: “colonialism". This is meant to cover the entire process of capital accumulation. For some this process starts with the Crusades.’ For others, it begins in 1492." It is, however, widely agreed, following Hobson and Lenin’, that the phase of colonialism which opened up together with the Suez Canal, the Kimberley diamond mines and the Johannesburg gold mines during the final conquests of Africa and

Asia by the European powers in the last part of the 19th century, be denoted by the concept and term: "imperialism".

In the case of South Africa, historians have to

enquire: "Was South Africa, as a political economy, like the U.S.A., Canada, Australia

and New Zealand, converted, perhaps after the Boer War, perhaps only after the 1910 Act of “White” Union, from a colony into an imperialism? Or, if not, did it

The Conceptual Framework

Ui

become a hybrid combining the colonial Yin and the imperialist Yang of capitalism in one national territory? IV. The Hierarchy of Intra-Modal Divisions in South Africa The concept of modes or systems is our primary concept. The concept of intramodal division requires a distinction between national, “racial”, “communal” and class groups and categories. These we hierarchise in the order given, considering first the nature of the South African “national state” entity within the panoply of capitalist nations; second, the partition of the South African population into “races” and “tribes”: third (but only third), the “class-structure” within and between the “races” and between the South African sub-set and the world set into which it is nested. Only if taken in this hierarchic context does “class analysis” of the South African story function in the way in which both the great African historian, Ibn Khaldun, and the internationalist, Karl Marx, intended: namely both as an accurate description and as a

means of social reform or revolution. To place class analysis above the racial division of the populace would, for example, include economistic categories which, inter alia, would place the racist, privileged, "White” citizen — worker in the same class as the rightless, oppressed non-citizen “Black" worker. This would be neither real nor realistic. One such aberration we shall need to examine is that of “White socialism” in the first quarter of the 20th century. At the same time, the historian needs, in steer-

ing clear of this kind of economism — which is not without its own willy-nilly racism — to avoid the pitfalls of non-class “Africanist” concepts — which, in turn, are bom in the European or eurocentric Yang, but bred in the Yin locations of the system. Our effort is to achieve an internationalist and non-racial class analysis within a surrounding modal “systemology’. V. Colonial Conquest: A Class or a Modal Struggle? Marx's dictum, in the “Communist Manifesto’, to the effect that the history of “civi-

lized” society is a history of “class struggles” and that these class struggles are the motor of historical change, makes sense and holds true only when placed in the context of modal/systemic evolution and revolution.

For example, can the wars of dis-

possession, which make up a large part of our history, be regarded as “class struggles” pure and simple? Or were these not modal struggles, conflicts between the opposite modes of production of San, Khoi-Khoi and Bantu communalism and European capitalism, locked in an antagonistic contradiction with each other for over two centuries? Was this modal struggle, between opposite and antagonistic systems, part of a world-wide struggle waged throughout Africa, the Americas and Asia

8

European Colonial Despotism

since at least the Voyages of Diaz, Columbus, Cabral and da Gama? And was this struggle inter-modal rather than inter-class in character? Was this modal conflict the main process of capitalist primary accumulation? Was this global, inter-continental conflict between European modes and American, African and Asian modes, more fundamental for the birth and breeding of the capitalist system — and of Europe itself — than the intra-national class-struggles between feudals and bourgeoisie inside Europe? It is against the background of this question that we look at the wars of dispossession, conquest, the cheap labour policy, the racial laws and “customs”, and re-communalisation, as the new, capitalist mode overcame and dilated the modes of the

hunters and herders — and of the birth-lands of the slaves imported into the Cape. Conceptually, it is possible to reconcile the modal conflictuality with a class struggle, provided the latter is conceived of as not being between classes in a national entity, but between different class-systems situated in different geographic areas. In some cases, as in the conquests of Mexico, Peru, Egypt, Ethiopia, and India, inter alia, there were struggles between opposite and antagonistic class systems. At each pole of the conflict there were class systems: at one pole, ultimately victorious, there were bourgeois, feudal and toiling classes; at the other pole, ultimately defeated, there were communal state-classes, as Marx called them” and commoners.

However, in

the case of the conflict between rising European capitalism and pre-class, non-class, communal or pre-communal societies, as was the case from Van Riebeeck (perhaps from da Gama) to Rhodes, class systems did not exist at both poles of the historical dialectic. In the case of South Africa — and most of Africa and America, many parts of Asia and all of Australasia — a class system existed on one side only — the European side. If the antagonism between a class system and a non-class system is taken as an inter-system class struggle, the class struggle concept is reconcilable with the over-riding modal struggle concept. In the case of struggles between different class-systems (e.g., capitalism and Asian, Arab, African, Aztec, state-communalism; or in much earlier times, German barbarism and Roman slavery), there is no need for this conceptual modification. But, in the case of South African history, if it be true that capitalist conquest cut short evolution from communalism to state-communalism, this modification is needed if the concept of class struggle is to be held to apply to the periods, areas and protagonists of the Wars of Dispossession in our history.

VI. Antagonistic Relations of Production in the Modal Struggle A basic contradiction ran through the inter-modal struggle between the European, feudal-capitalist class system, on the one side, and the pre-communal hunting and

The Conceptual Framework

9

food-gathering San and the communal herding Khoi-Khoi and herding and agricultural Bantu, on the other side. This contradiction lay in the different and, indeed, mutu-

ally antagonistic, relations of production of the contending modes or systems. Historians have stressed, not without facts and reason, the difference between the forces of production at the disposal of the Europeans — thanks largely to those borrowed from the Chinese, Indians, Arabs and Egyptians — and the relatively inferior forces of production, certainly for warfare, of the San, Khoi-Khoi and Bantu peoples defending their lands and animals and resisting conquest. But insufficient attention has been, or is, paid to the qualitative difference in the relations of production between the European class-structured mode and the pre-class or non-class African modes from the Cape to the Limpopo. This difference is between the 2000-year old privatisations of land and labour in Europe, and the age-old relative absence of private property in land and labour not only in South Africa, but in most of Africa. The property of land and buildings in the ancient Greek and Roman cities and countryside was privatised. The main form of labour in the classical cities and rural surrounds of Athens, Sparta, Corinth and Rome was privatised labour: either slave or free. In the classical state-communalism societies of Babylonia, Egypt, India, China,

Mexico and Peru, inter alia, private property in land and labour was the exception. The rule was communal property in land and communal labour. In Mediterranean Europe and especially in the areas occupied by the Celtic, Frankish and Slavic there were at first, as elsewhere in the world, many forms of communal property in land and in labour. However, slavery reduced the area and influence of this communalism in Mediterranean Europe and feudalism adapted, eroded and in many areas destroyed and privatised the old communal mark, mir, obschina etc., in Central and

Eastem Europe. On the long eve of the capitalist revolution private property in land and labour had become dominant in much of Europe. Capitalism completed this process in Europe and violently extended it to the rest of the world, including South Africa during its wars of dispossession and the rest of the process of primary accumulation. This process of colonialistic privatisation underlies the destruction of the communal modes of the San, Khoi-Khoi and Bantu. Vil. The Backwardness of Pre-Colonial Europe At the time the conquests began Europe was technologically and culturally backward compared with what we have called the communal modes or systems in Asia, North Africa, and parts of the highlands of America. Europe was also poorer in raw materials for use in industry — but not in the iron and coal needed to make industrial machines. This backwardness and poverty stimulated the capitalists to push aside or to

10

European Colonial Despotism

absorb the feudals in a process of expansion abroad. But the element which enabled this expansion more than any other element was the pre-existence of private property in land and labour in the feudal mode from which they were trying to escape. This factor gave backward Europe the mobility and elasticity, as Amin has called it *, which gave it a decisive advantage over the superior communal non-European mode, and, certainly, over the technologically and scientifically inferior communal mode of pre-communal and communal societies in most of Africa, including South Africa. The individualism and freedom of action within classes having private means of production and privatised labour and capital resources at their disposal was a historical, that is, a mode-producing, advantage compared with the bottom — heavy communal land and labour, and the top-heavy state-class bureaucracies of communal societies; and, more so, over societies immobilised by the inertia of pre-commu-

nal and communal social relations of production and administration. In particular, the expanding, world-seeking proto-capitalists of Europe did not have to break through the communal monopoly of foreign trade and travel as was the case with Indian, Chinese, Mexican and North African and Arabian commercialists.

Nor

were they tied to the past and the present by the communalistic prohibitions on inher-

itance. Their private property in personal and capital goods could be passed on to their children and their class thus had a future. As Fernand Braudel has shown, this was almost impossible in communal cultures, such as that of the Ottomans, or in dynastic China.” Finally, whereas both communal and "communal’ communal societies were redistributive, the class-based modes in Europe — whether slavery, feudal or capitalist — privatised that part of the surplus not immediately needed by the state and this priva-

tised part was the bulk tributed by or through states. The privatised of state-communalism,

of the surplus. In the communal modes the surplus was redistheir custodians — chiefs, patriarchs, matriarchs, elders, or part — pocketed by families within the state class in the case or by chiefs or usurpers — was usually a minor part of the

total surplus. The major part was re-distributed either diurnally, or seasonally, or stored for distribution in bad times. The European capitalist did not have to hand over his surplus directly or indirectly to the community around him/her, but could dispose of it more or less at will. Thus private property in means of production gave the Europeans — or rather, at the stage between Marco Polo and Columbus, protoEuropeans, for Europe was bom only later — the elasticity and mobility which the

non-Europeans, by comparison, lacked. The above features and implications of private property in the means and labourforce of production gave “peripheral” and “backward” Europe the advantage over the

more" advanced” and also more “backward” nations and peoples outside Europe, (in that sense “Non -Europeans”). The history of South Africa after the landings of Diaz

The Conceptual Framework

11

in 1488 and the settlement of Van Riebeeck in 1652 is largely a consequence and part of this difference in property relations of production and distribution between what may, with due caution, be termed the “European” and “African” modes or systems.” Vill. The Coionialistic Nature of Capitalism in South Africa The capitalist world system was properly bom and also bred by a process of colonialism. Since then capitalism has remained by nature colonialistic. Since colonialism partitions the word economy and its entire systemic into dominant and subject peoples, this system became intrinsically racialistic. “Race” accompanied both class and nation in the structures and modus operandi of capitalism. Capitalism without colonialism and racialism never did and does not and cannot exist. The colonial process not only enabled the birth of capitalism, but was also the cradle of the division of the world which placed Europe, in the first instance, and later her spawns, the United States and the “White Dominions”, including “White South Africa’, into the “centre” or rather apex of the world system. Colonialism thereby created Europe itself, with its myth of a “European civilization” and, thence, the famous “civilizing mission”. Before capitalist colonialism there was no Europe in the political or cultural sense. Nor were there any Europeans. The very term arose only in the 16th century, after da Gama and Columbus and the other “discoverers”.* All the major racial concepts and terms were created by capitalist colonialism.”

The very divisibility and the resulting partition of humanity into sub-species or races was unthinkable and at most exceptional before capitalism. The main ideology of capitalist-colonialism on a world scale was and remains racialism or racism open or hidden, patent or latent, colonial or neo-colonial. Racial terms and concepts, such as

“race” (c.1500) “Negro” (c.1550), “native” (1450), “African” (c. 1564), “European (c.1603), “ghetto” (1611), “Coolie” (1598), "Negroid” (c.1859), “Negrophobe (c. 1833), “Negrophile” (c. 1842), had never existed before capitalist colonialism. The race-theory spread from all European colonialist classes, including settlers, slavers and conquistadores, into every branch of the social and even the natural sciences. The very term “race” came out of what the South African revolutionary scholar, B.M. Kies, called the ‘first plundering expedition of capitalism',”” namely the Crusades of the 11th to 13th centuries against the Arabs and North Africans. The divisibility and partition of human-kind into races is the first paradigm of racism and its praxis, racialism. This paradigm is still almost universally accepted by scholars, in the West, South and East. Probably | was the first to question and reject this first theorem of race theory and to define racism in terms of its first principle: the divisibility and division of humanity into races.” Only recently has biological science

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European Colonial Despotism

come to the same conclusion.

Thus, the US biologist, S.J. Gould, accepted, on bio-

logical grounds, what our use of historical materialism had uncovered from the actual colonialistic pre-history and history of capitalism.” The concept of the superiority of one or some races and the inferiority of others is merely the corollary of the above first principle. It is today discarded even by the governments and academia of apartheid in South Africa. They, however, while no longer insisting on the idea of superiority and inferiority, still insist on divisibility and do so in the concept: “the races are equal but different”. This principle has obvious political consequences which are due to play their part in the re-shaping of the face, if not the re-structuring, of the body-politic of South Africa. This re-shaping concerns the policy of reconciling “one person — one-vote” with some form of racial partition; in short, to reconcile “equal” with “different”. All this is a denouement of at least five centuries of racial praxis and thinking induced by colonialism into the capitalist system. This infusion, for a number of correlated geo-economic reasons, became most intense in real South African history. IX. The Racial Nature of Capitalist-Colonialism in South Africa

The modal or systemic dialectic which related South Africa to both Europe and the America — Africa — Asia complex rapidly resolved itself in a peculiar racial manner. Whereas in the rest of the the world of colour (and Czarist Russia) the Europeans both oppressed the conquered peoples racially and repressed their national aspirations, in short, imposed a racial-cum-national oppression. In South Africa they prevented the formation of nationalism and racially repressed the dispossessed peoples. In South Africa the colonialist polarisation was not between an oppressor, rich, nation (or group of nations) and an oppressed nation, as in the cases of India, Mexico, the Sudanese kingdoms, Ethiopia et al. Rather, the polarisation was between Europeans of all nations as a “race” and people of colour of all communist or communal communal social formations as another, different and inferior “race”. The colonialist polarisation took on not a national but a racial form. This occurred also for a long period in those parts of Africa, America and Asia where the prevailing modal systemic was of a pre -class or communal nature, rather than of the “Oriental state-

communalism’” type. During this period South Africa was not unique. But the rise of

national independence in America in the 19th century and, in the 20th, in Africa and Asia, eventually made the South African polarisation unique. X. The Dialectics of Colonial Racism

Capitalist colonialism and racialism became inseparable.

This proposition holds

The Conceptual Framework

13

true both for the dominating countries of the “West” and for the dominated countries of the “South” — and, as events in Eastem Europe showed in 1989 - 1990, also for the only semi-delinked countries of the “East”. This inseparability is strongest in South Africa where it has resisted and continues to resist all efforts to disentangle the capitalist systemic from its racial content. This intractability, which repeatedly manifests itself also in the world’s leading non-racial “democracy”, the USA, decades after the “Desegregation” of the 1950's and 1960's is the real subject matter of the ongoing “reforms” and negotiations in South Africa. It derives from the specific institutionalised racial way in which colonialism took root and spread in the South African case. Colonialism formed several kinds of colour bar (the Australian immigration type, also found in California and now in EEC countries; the South African type; the desegregation de facto form — which, in terms of common law, is also de jure, according to American anti-segregationist organizations like the NAACP). But the systematic, general, statutory, official colour bar was bred in only certain types of colony. The discovery of these types and of their origins is the key to understanding why South Africa became a colour-bar dominated colony, compared with, say, India or Egypt or Mexico or Nigeria. In 1960 we tried to treat this problematic in the following terms:* The usual explanation is that this colour bar accompanied large-scale European settlement. But this fails to explain the settlement itself. The latter is usually explained as being due to the attraction of a pleasant climate and habitat. But, apart from being an over-generalisation, this is itself an implicitly racist explanation, since it assumes there are different races, with different abilities to withstand heat and

humidity. The hypotheses that eumelanin pigment inhibits Vitamin D under weak sunlight and that hence dark-skinned children would suffer from rickets in Northern Europe; and that eumelanin-free pale-skinned people would suffer from skin-cancer under the sunlight of equatorial regions may partially explain global skin-colour distribution before capitalism. But skin-colour distribution is not climate-related under capitalist colonialism, being both light and dark in cold, hot, dry or humid climates.

Darwin observed that there was no necessary link between climate and colour. The “natural” explanation for European settlement fails also to explain why the Europeans did not settle in the congenial climes and habitats of North Africa (apart from Algeria after its conquest in 1830), China, and Japan; and why, on the other hand, there was heavy European settlement in the hot, humid equatorial regions of coastal "Latin America’ (itself a racist term) as well as in cold regions of North America. Evidently, a social rather than a natural explanation is called for.

Now, in general, change is the emergence of novelty out of the conflict of opposites which are themselves changed by their conflict. Thus capitalism became capitalism in the conflict between proto-capitalism from Europe and communalism and state-communalism outside Europe. Capitalism was largely the product of the colo-

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European Colonial Despotism

nial system it established. Thereby, a small cause of change was itself changed into a world system by the changes it caused. On the other hand, the communal and communal societies which capitalism changed into colonies stamped their own previous history on the colonies which resulted from their subjugation. Like all phenomena, colonies were the resultants of the intersections of the histories of all the forces bringing them about and metamorphosed by them.” Thus, the type of colony emerging from conquest and subjection had not only the general features of a capitalist colony (source of cheap labour and raw materials, markets for commodities and capital etc.). It had also specific features which came largely from the type of society which existed in each particular colony before it was colonised. The depth and scope of the colonial transformation of a particular area and its social formation was proportional to the degree of development of capitalist colonialism. But it was also inversely proportional to the degree of development of the precolonial civilization of the colonised country. There was, accordingly, a wide scale of transformations, ranging from a minimum in China (“despotic” according to Wittvogel and Trotsky; but according to J. Needham: bureaucratic-feudal) and to a maximum in lowly communal Australia. In China state-communal practices and structures ham-

pered colonialism. In Australia, the military and social weakness of communalism enabled the conquistadores to go so far that the colonial people were decimated and the colony was changed into an extension of the “mother country’, Britain. The same thing happened to Canada and the United States. The idea of change through the collision of history-bearing opposites reveals three broad types of colonised regions. Firstly, those where colonialism clashed with “state-communal” (American, Asian, African) modes or systems or “civilizations” at various levels (e.g., most of Asia, North Africa, Sudanese West Africa, Mexico, Peru)

The colonially corrupted or subjected state-communal upper class(es), like the Maharajah and Mogul rulers, became the social base in situ for the rule of the colonial powers. Without disturbing this convenient situation it was neither necessary nor possible for colonialism to introduce large numbers of European settlers into such ex“state-communal” colonies. European settlement filled a social and political vacuum where this existed and was a consequence of this, rather than of “climate”. In the ex-

state-communal type of colony, not only European settlement, but also capitalist slavery, was an impossibility on a general scale. For the state-communal societies which were colonised had long before either advanced beyond slavery as a practice or had never been preceded by slavery as a mode, or else had a non-privatised, statised or communalised form of slavery (e.g., captives who became slaves of the communalState) and the introduction of privatised slavery would have met (and, where attempted, did meet) general social resistance.

The Conceptual Framework

15

Thus, in this type of colony, two of the conditions for a general colour-racialismEuropean settlement and chattel slavery — did not exist on a sufficient scale (e.g., China, whose combination of husbandry and home industry even prevented the penetration of Lancashire textiles and of imperialism into the interior, let alone its introduction of a general structural racialism; India, whose caste system division of labour facilitated the passage of British manufactures but resisted the institution of nondomestic slavery; Java, Western Sudan, North Africa, Aztec and Inca America and

Ethiopia — all these had state-communal elements which inhibited the total enslavement as such of the population and the unrestrained entry of European settlers). To the extent that they overcame the state-communal impedance, as in South America, the colonisers introduced slavery and colour discrimination practices, such as the “White mantua”, property and literacy obstacles to the franchise for the “indigens” and residential and job colour bars which exist to this day. Indeed, there the semi-colonial rulers are mainly ex-European racist settlers. A second type of colony was that which had a pre-conquest civilization of foodgathering, fishing, hunting. In such areas (northem part of America, Australia, Brazil, the indigens were decimated by war, land-robbery and the destruction of their means of subsistence (e.g., the buffalo of the Americans) and the survivors herded into reservations. The result was that the colonisers deprived themselves of all largescale internal sources of cheap labour. Although they thereby gained vast landareas, they had no labour to work these lands, unless such labour was imported. The unsuitability of slave-labour to the type of farming in Australia and Canada, for example, plus the fact that the genocide was completed after the abolition of the British slave traffic (1808) and slavery (1834), plus earlier colour-discrimination laws, combined to rule out the substitution of imported colonial-type labour. In consequence, a type of capitalism developed in such countries which produced, not a colony, but its opposite: an imperialistic settlement — in effect a distant “county” of the “home country’. In the Southem States of what became the United States, and in Brazil, the physi-

cal annihilation of the indigens took place in a region where plantation slavery was possible. This genocide had, further, gone far enough before the system of slave labour became uneconomic or was destabilised by slave revolts. The colonialists imported slaves en masse from Africa and later bred them in their colonies. Settlers followed and ideal conditions came together for the emergence of a racialistically structured society.

Both the USA and Brazil, to this day, remain de-facto racially

structured. The fact that one, the USA, became an imperialism, while the other, Brazil, did not succeed to make the leap from “South” to “West”, is largely due to the

fact that the USA industrialised its plantation crops in New England and traded its manufactures in its own right (as Frank has shown, New England was the fourth ver-

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European Colonial Despotism

tex of a slave-cotton-rum-manufacturing (Africa-Caribbean-New England-Europe) quadrilateral; whereas Brazil's settlers exported their plantation products and imported mainly African slaves. This combination of settlers and slaves took place in and determined the third type of colony. But this had, in addition, a pre-colonial civilization which Morgan had called “barbarism” (herding and cultivation on communally held land). South Africa, with its highly developed Khoi-Khoi and Bantu communal civilizations (which Braudel calls no more than “cultures”** — as he did for the advanced pre-colonial American civilizations) became such a colony. On the one hand, these peoples could not, because of their greater resilience and social and economic versatility (compared with hunters and food-gatherers like the San) be decimated by the conquerors. On the other hand, their social order was a pre-class one and hence did not provide the

invaders with a ready-made upper class through which a class-divided society could be managed.

There was thus a political and a social vacuum which was, in fact,

gradually filled by European settlers. (Had they tried to enter India, for example, in large numbers, they would have been ruined in the military and economic — not to mention cultural — conflict with the Indian state-communal hierarchy.) At the same time, there remained a vast enslaveable labour force, which, augmented by slaves

imported from Java and elsewhere, provided a slavery base for the economy in its then mainly mercantile phase. A colour barrier was raised between masters (of all classes) and slaves, to prevent social diffusion. The confluence of “White” settlement and “Black” slavery on previously communal soil produced a systematic colour bar. This triple combination was unique to South Africa.

Chapter Two

SOUTH AFRICANS BEFORE CAPITALISM

U ntil the “bloody birth” of the triplets — Europe, capitalism and colonialism — Africa was a kind of mirror image of Europe, with the Mediterranean as the mirror: North Africa and Southem Europe had cultures at similar levels, and

the further north one went in Europe the more did it look like its image as one went southwards in Africa. On both edges of the Mediterranean were wide bands of classdivided social formations-feudal and proto — capitalist in Europe, from the Balkans to the Iberian, French and Flemish coasts; and trading, urban-centred and mixed farming communal — despotisms in North, Sudanese and Red Sea Africa. These class societies had opposite modes of production and distribution, including antagonistic property relations: private property dominated on the European side and communal property on the African side. But on both sides the privatisation decreased and the communal forms of property increased as one went away from the Mediterraneanbordered belts: northwards to Scandinavia and southwards towards and into South Africa. The southern African region was not less inhabited nor more riven by wars than the northern European one. Euro-racist historiography has been forced to retreat from, if not to abandon completely, this mythical rationalisation of the right of Europeans to settle in South Africa.’ In both, hunting and herding modes of production and distribution (in brief, systems or modes) predominated. In South Africa the hunters — and food-gatherers — were called “Bushmen” by the

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European Colonial Despotism

Europeans, who regarded these nature-preserving people as wild and who genocided them and first unbalanced and eventually devastated their nature-society eco-system. These Africans were known by themselves or their farming neighbours as !Ke, Batwa or San, which means hunter-gatherer “people”. The first herders of the south of Africa were called “Hottentots” by the Europeans, because they failed or refused to lear or understand the language of these people who called themselves “Khoi-Kho”, or “Men of Men’.

The San (Hunter-Gatherers) The word “San” is presumed to derive from a root “Sa” meaning “hunters of small animals and gatherers of small plants.? Taken in this socio-economic sense, “San” does not refer to a racial/ethnic group. These hunters and food-collectors were, of course, no more — and no less — the distant descendants of the hominids which frequented Southem Africa over 5.5 million years ago® than were the rest of “homo sapiens” and its members in America, Europe, Asia, Australasia, or the Oceanic islands. Even this is still questioned in some authoritative archaeological circles who do not regard all present humans as descending from and belonging to Homo Sapiens.‘ This racist view does not, however, enter into the still on-going debate between those who hold that “man’s orginal habitat... in our opinion, is a wide belt in South Asia that includes the regions of Malaya and Indo-China, and perhaps extends to part of northeast Africa"® and those who, led by the Leakeys, hold that the centre of dispersion was around the East/Central African Lakes. Both schools, however, see relevance in the finds in South Africa at Taungs in 1924 (first described by R. Dart), in a Swartkranz cave, in the Transvaal, by J. Robinson, in 1949-50, and in Sterkfontein and Krugersdorp.’

Although some archaeologists, (e.g., Oldeggar, from the USSR), regard the San as “physically” distinct from the Khoi-Khoi® others (e.g., |. Schapira) regard them as alike or akin.’ Some (notably R. Singer) used an analysis of contemporary blood-groups to conclude that the Khoi-Khoi and San were one physical” “group” which was part of a wider African “physical” “group”. Such studies, however, belong to race-classification methods based no longer only, or so much, on skeletons as on “gene-pools’, including blood-group genes. Using these procedures “groups” can be shown to belong to one “race” because they both lack certain blood-group genes or because they both share certain genes. The Khoisan “group”, taken biologically and not for the sociological-linguistic group it was or was part of, is presumed to have had numerous blood-genes in common with the “European”, “Asian” and other “races”. This renders the making of race-classifications both absurd and impossible, whether

ussng skeletons or gene-pools, unless they lead to only one conclusion: Either all

South Africans Before Capitalism

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“groups” belong to one single human race, and thence are not “groups”; or else there are as many “races” as there are possible combinations of blood-group alleles, i.e., at least thousands."" The San were not a “local race”? or members of a “Khoisan’, “African” or any other race-classified group. They were what their name implied: hunter-gatherers. It is not known whether the San language and social formation were among the socalled “Early Stone Age” tool-makers along the Vaal River, around 50,000 B.C. About the time early Americans are supposed to have come from Asia via the Bering Straits and the Australians to have made the crossing by sea from Indonesia, the San, or people who painted like the San, occupied parts of the Cape and Namibian coast before much of it was covered by the sea when it rose about 100 metres at the end of the glacial age lasting from 50,000 B.C. to 20,000 BC. Cave paintings in Namibia have been dated to 26,000 B.C. Skulls like others dug up around the Mediterranean and “Middle Stone Age” sites were found at Peers cave in the Cape, in Mossel Bay and at Hangklip, False Bay, on the Indian Ocean, and in Hopefield, Florisbad, Fouresmith, Pietersburg and the Cave of Hearths in the Transvaal. Wherever the sources of their migrations, the San were then already spread over all South Africa. Their occupation extended during the “Late Stone Age” (c.20,000 to 1000 B.C.) as sites at Wilton, Smithfield and Namaqualand revealed. It is possible that in this long period as the hunter-gatherers, many of whom were fishermen and some of whom had domesticated the dog, spread and slowly multiplied, the San languages diversified into probably four mutually distinct tongues."* Their geographic sources and migrations remain a matter of conjecture. H. Vallois, using a racial approach, suggested that they originated from a more highly developed culture north of South Africa and that they regressed socially in southward migrations. The pairing San family may be such a regression from a larger gentile form. Summers and Clark likewise suggest roots in East Africa, while Singer’s blood-group studies have shaken such hypotheses and been used to suggest a very ancient autocthenous geographic development."* It is likely that the San pairing family represents not a regression but a stage enabling and in fact, tolerating, polygamy and polygany. It is also certain that the San travelled “long distances in long time”, for “The whole system of the sun, moon and

stars enters simultaneously into their mythology’. All such linguistic groups practised an egalitarianism or primitive communism which reflected the given stage of technology and productivity. The labour-force acted more communally than is usually imagined. Cooperation was always more important than individualism, and some work was extensive. Thus, during an exploration in 1851 to Namibia, F. Galton, the father of the racist |Q theory in psychology (he wanted to “produce a gifted race of men by judicious marriages’)"* observing ani-

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European Colonial Despotism

mal-trapping on a large-scale by San constructors who used massive tree-trunks and pitfalls, wrote: “the scale of the undertaking would have excited astonishment in far more civilized nations”."” One person's labour could not support more than one person and those too young, old or infirmed to labour. Exploitation, including an unequal sexist division of labour, was impossible, for all were engaged in the struggle with nature and “the happiness of all was the condition for the happinesss of each’. Private property in means of labour did not exist and was, if anything, a disadvantage individually and communally. The land, rivers, forests, deserts, and all the mineral and vegetable fruits of the earth and the animals upon the earth belonged both to nature and to the San as nature’s custodian. The food hunted, fished and gathered was as free as the air and the water. These “harmless people”, or “hu twa si' as the Kung San call themselves,"® were not unique or exceptional, but, as Leo Frobenius wrote, “typical hunters of the world, the lovers of freedom and independence”."* Today the decimated, segregated, survivors known as “San” have neither freedom nor independence. The San social formation is dead, killed as it retreated from and

fought against the capitalist mode for 200 years.” 2000 years before Dutch, Boer and British colonialism destroyed the main body of the San and peripheralised the rest into the Kalahari, the San hunter-gatherer mode/system had suffered from a modal change which introduced sexism, including polygamy and an unequal division of labour, private property in domestic animals, and converted egalitarian administration first into matriarchal and then into patriarchal clan/gentile proto-hierarchies. This modal change did not eliminate the San society but subordinated it to a parallel and continguous society, which emerged from its own physical and social midst. That sexist, unequal, but still fundamantally communal, society called its dominant members “Men of Men”, or “Khoi-Khoi”. This self-change was probably promoted by the arrival north of and across the western Limpopo and the Chobe River, which today separates Botswana from the Caprivi Strip of Namibia, of iron-smelting and sheep and cattle rearing and herding Bantu and/or Khoi-Khoi speakers. That hunter-gatherers could, as they did, become hunter-herder-gatherers and these, in turn, herder-cultivators, was a tranformation

already latent even in communalistic San society itself. This possibility for inequality, derived from improved methods of hunting, fishing and food-gathering, whether such improvements involved better tools or a development of the social productivity of the labour force, including children. The transformation of the struggle with — but not necessarily against — nature was, sooner or later, converted into or supplemented by a struggle against nature, against women, and, in due course, against men. The pre-San society, like tribalism, "was neither idyllic nor permanent. It was a prolonged but developing stage in the unfolding of human civilization, a stage back to which no return is possible, imaginable or desirable.” At the same time, the San “left behind

South Africans Before Capitalism

21

them indelible paintings and engravings which neither time nor man could erase... Their art reflected their technical development. Yet this same art also reflected their immense backwardness. Since their art was a form of recording their personal or family history, a form of ‘writing’, it was a remote ‘step towards a real phonetic script’, although as paintings ‘increase in value as written signs, they deteriorate as natural representations’, wrote Frobenius.” The “backwardness” of the San is related by racists to their alleged small stature. But even Broome admitted that before the European conquest the Batwa were “men and women of quite ordinary size” and the Soviet scientist, Nesturck, viewed the alleged smallness as a “secondary feature’, not a “biological degradation” in comparing an average height of 1.5 metres with the 1.6 to 1.7 metres of “Pithecanthropus” and “Sinanthropus”. Tobias and others found a not surprising increase in height and weight with a change in diet and social environment, as had likewise been observed with the allegedly “small Japanese” who emigrated from Japan to the U.S.A. The San intermarred with the Khoi-Khoi who branched off from them, and with the Xhosa,

Thembu, Mpondo and Zulu whom they were forbidden to marry not by their own customs nor by those of the Zulu, but by the first Boer Republic of Natal.* But, although, in these and other ways, not gene-cided, so to speak, they were to be genocided. This genocide was to come not from the equally native Khoi-Khoi or Bantu but from the European foreigners. Although the San were not generally on equal modal, and hence social and individual, terms with the Khoi-Khoi and Bantu, they were not

enslaved, as they were — and their desperate descendants still are — by European farmers literally hunting for labour. The San hunter-gatherer belonged to a mode which suffered from inequality compared with the hunter-herder and herder-farmer mode of the Khoi-Khoi and Bantu. Kolb possibly plagiarising Grevenboek, described some of these inequalities, which Wikar later called a “client’ relationship.” Similar inequalities existed between the Nama and the (non-San) Dama smelters in Namibia, and between Tswana Bantu and Sarwa (San) pelt-collectors.* The Xhosa king, Rarabe, was reputed (by a missionary) to have once ordered a man-hunt against San who had slaughtered his head ox.”” Livingstone conceded that the Khoi-Khoi and Bantu never enslaved the San and that “never in any one case, within the memory of man, has a Bechuana

chief sold any of his people’*; the missionary, Campbell, said that the Harutshe “knew of no nation who sold men".” The missionary, Moffat, said that the “Tswana have a servile class” (including Basarwa) "but no slaves”; while the survivors of the wreck of the “Stavanisse” in 1689 reported of the Nguni-speaking chiefdoms: "It would be impossible to buy any slaves there". The sole reported pre-colonial exception in South Africa was the sale of 74 children in Natal Bay to Robert Drury, by

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European Colonial Despotism

Tsonga sellers acting for Delegoa Bay Portuguese slavers. The untrue concept that “Sarwa” means “slave”, and which persists to this day, is not Tswana but European, exploiting the Bantu-San modal inequality.” Nevertheless, this prejudice is part of a “memorial” going back to the slow modal change from hunting to herding which split the San mode and generated that of the Khoi-Khoi some two millenia before it was genocidally annihilated by the European-capitalist mode of production. The Khoi-San Modal Revolution

The absurdity of a racial classification separating San, Khoi-Khoi and Bantu is apparent in (a) _ the increasingly acknowledged probability that the Khoi-Khoi were a section

of the San who combined herding with hunting during a modal revolution (b) that major distinctions lie in language differences (c) _ the classification which places the San in a “Stone Age”, the Bantu in an “Iron Age” (and the Khoi-Khoi in a Limbo-Age) (d) that “race” has befogged genuine study, by anti-scientifically combining San (hunters) with Khoi-Khoi (herders) and separating Khoi-Khoi from Bantu herders. “Du Bois traces one wave of Khoi-Khoin migration back to 1000 B.C. when Abyssinian pressure on (in) “Ethiopia, where Khoi-Khoins lived, drove these people south.

Even before this, some 500 years before, however, Khoi-Khoin tribalists

appear to have been settled far from Ethiopia and to have been in close touch with this land. This is illustrated in a mural on the walls of the temple of Beir el Bahri built by Queen Hatshepsut, and designed by Tuthmosis Il. The mural shows an expedition to the legendary city of Punt, and on it ‘The King and Queen of Punt are represented as of the modem Hottentot type, and the Queen with the characteristic steotapygia’.*' More than 3500 years ago the Khoi-Khoin had built a stable monarchy. Through the succeeding thousands of years the Khoi-Khoin tribalists trekked southwards, reached South Africa, came in intimate contact with the 'Ke, and from about

1000 A.D. herded and traded in this country."” This picture has been modified by

archaeology, which brings the herding date back to at least 0 A.D., and queried by Singer and others. The northern origin is not incompatible with the theory that a section of the San, probably in northern Botswana, north-eastem Namibia and southeastern Angola, adopted cattle and herding when they came into contact with herders migrating from the north. These herder-trekkers could have been Khoi-Khoi speakers or Bantu-speakers. The Khoi-Khoi could have worked with copper, the Bantu with copper and iron, north

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of the Limpopo at around 0 A.D. Archaeology indicates that cultivation was practised in Zimbabwe by at least 1000 B.C., and that by 0 A.D. iron tools, copper and iron mining, and agriculture, probably of Bantu-speakers, existed not far north of the Kunene, Limpopo, Zambezi rivers and was spreading south of the Capricorn line (which bisects Botswana). Iron sites dated 100 AD, 185 (Mabweni), 330 (Kalomo), 530 (Gokomere, which had miners and stone-builders) were found in Zimbabwe, and folklore includes the claim that Mambo, great-ancestor of the Lobedu, was fathered by Mwanemutepa, Zimbabwe great-king. Sotho-speaking Bantu iron-users crossed the Limpopo by 700, marrying San and Khoi-Khoi, and transmitting copper-mining technology to Khoi-Khoi groups along the present Botswana-Transvaal borders. By the 8th century the new settlers mined copper — and later iron — at Phalaborwa. By 1050 there were farming settlements in Bambandyanalo, and from 1250 in nearby Mapungubwe, which traded on a widescale for about a century. By 1060 iron was mined at Melville Koppies and at Rustenburg and Zeerust, Transvaal, near the Botswana border. Settlements of 15,000 in some 300 rondavels multiplied after the 850-853 revolts in Zanj against Persian domestic slavers had promoted a wave southwards of Bantu mixed farmers, using iron tools for hunting and farming. The settlements traded via Zanj with India and China’s Sung dynasty — a link which was broken in the 16th century by the Portuguese colonialists.* These joined Bantu farmers who had crossed into the Transvaal and Natal already in the 3rd century, as carbon-dating revealed at Silver Leaves farm, Tzaneen, and at Soutpansberg, Transvaal, and St.Lucia Bay, on the Indian Ocean coast. Salt was extracted at Silver Leaves from at least 280 A.D. The confluence of these herders with the San hunter-gatherers probably gave rise to the linguistic herding group which called itself “Khoi-Khoi’. Part of this group probably came from north of the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers where, in any event, the San had lived and painted for ages.“ Another part would have come by segmentation of those San, both north and south of the two rivers, who were attracted to the herding mode of production of the new-comers, whether these were Khoi-Khoi, or

Bantu or both (or herders from another language cluster). This formation of the Khoi-Khoi from the San-Khoi-Khoi-Bantu “triangle of forces” was a social revolution, the birth of a new mode/system in and from the old San mode/system. This modal revolution included only in part a transition from “Stone Age” to “Iron Age”. The main change was modal. This was a social revolution which affected both society and nature. Whereas the San always regarded the deserts, waters, forests, plants and animals as friendly protectors or providors, the herding — and even more so, the agricultural — revolution initiated that unbalancing and destabilisation of the society-nature eco-systemic from which the world is still suffering. The erosion, deforestation, diversion of rivers and planting over of the earth was

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begun by domestication, worsened by agriculture and finally tumed into an ecological disaster, not only on the earth but also in the air and the waters, by the industnes of the capitalist mode of production.

"Stone Age" San and "Iron Age" Bantu? The “Stone Age” was a misnomer for powerful, cultured and high-technology communal-state class and statised civilizations such as those of the Pharaonic Egyptians, the Babylonians, the early Shang, the Aztec, Inca and others. It may be an equally crude-materialist description of the non-despotic "primitive"-communalist societies of the pre-colonial Americans, Australians, Polynesians, and most Asians and Africans. These societies, including the Khoi-Khoin ones, used many materials other than stone, even as the communalistic, non-despotic American societies used wood rather than stone.

To define societies in terms of the materials used as tools or for construction — stone, bronze, iron, as the case may be — would classify together very different, indeed opposite, modes of production and social formations; and, on the other hand, make distinctions which do not differentiate social formations using different matenals. Thus, the difference between San and Khoi-Khoi lay very little in their matenals: both used stone, wood, shells, ostrich eggs, poisoned arrows, and similar products of the flora and fauna of their surrounds; neither made nor used inorganic containers or

manufactured pottery, other than hollowed out stones, in the pre-Bantu period over a vast area ranging from the Cape to Tanzania. Nor did the fact that some Khoi-Khoi did metallurgy while few San worked with copper® delineate the San-Khoi modal differences. That the use of criteria related to language, religion and art has proved

more useful in this respect than the use of criteria related to materials of production and consumption is not a refutation of the principled method of “historical materialism’, but, indeed, its confirmation. For these superstructural elements often reveal more of the infrastructure than the crude materiality of the latter. What is relevant to historical materialists trying to probe South African history is not only — and , indeed, not so much — the forces of production and their materials, but rather the social relations of production within and between different modes.

Euro-Racist Chronicling of Pre-Colonial Societies The reports on the San and Khoi-Khoi of the colonialist Portuguese who landed in Namibia, the Cape or Natal from Diaz's voyage of 1487 to the collapse of the Portuguese hegemony around 1695-1700 in Asia, and also along the East coast of

South Africans Before Capitalism

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Africa furnished considerable information about the San and Khoi-Khoi — and also some about the Xhosa.* More detailed information was furnished by colonialist travellers/explorers during the Dutch occupation between 1652 and 1795.” With rare exceptions (Sprenger, Grevenbroek) these Portuguese and Dutch reports reflected and contained a racism which increased with time and made reports increasingly unreliable for their veracity. Whereas Sprenger’s accounts and drawings of Xhosa and other families,* like some of the works of Lopez and Grevenbroek, were less racial/racist than contemporary liberal histories, Dapper reflected an open racism only two decades after the Dutch bourgeoisie won its final independence from Spain in 1648.° The travel reports on the San and Khoi-Khoi in the British period were necessarily informative, but almost invariably racially at least as biased as the early Portuguese and Dutch accounts. Among these reports were those of T. Baines (notably his paintings, 1842-53), J. Barrow (1800), S.A. Broadbent (c.1850), W.J. Burchell (1822), J. Campbell (1813, 1822), F. Galton (1851), W.M. Kerr (1886), H. Lichtenstein (1803-5), R. Moffat (1820-1828), D. Moodie (1808-9), and by the missionaries J. Philip (1820's), Van der Kemp (1804-13) and T. Hahn (1881, 1883 reports). From these Portuguese, Dutch and British reports and official documents, including compilations by Moodie and by Theal,® rather, perhaps, than the work of Bleek, Hoemle, Schapera, Marshall, and Thomas“ on the 20th century human survivors of genocide,

a picture of the Khoi-Khoi society may be focussed. For these survivors are not part of a past hunting-herding mode, but belong to the capitalist racist mode. Khoi-Khoi and Bantu Hunters, Herders and Farmers

The Khoi-Khoi and the Bantu, “whom the Christian Europeans called “Kaffirs”

(unbelievers) because these people did not worship idols, crucifixes, virgin mothers or anthropomorphic gods’, enjoyed and suffered under the same mode, whether they lived together or separately. Race-classification and linguistic distinctions opacifies this common-ness. They had a common type of clan or gens structure, described by Dapper, Kolb, Ten Rhyne in the 17th and 18th centuries.* Centuries

later, first Hahn, then Hoemle, confirmed this clan structure, relying, however, on survivors who were no longer members of the old mode.“ Both lived in large clan-based communities. Marriage was usually exogamous, but even when it appeared to be endogamous, as among the Khoi-Khoi, Sotho and Tswana speakers, this was not really the case. Such exceptions (to Morgan’s grand tule, in his classic) were more apparent than real, for they allowed marnages between “cross-cousins’, that is, the children of brothers and sisters. When examined in the context of gentile patriarchy

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or matriarchy, cross-cousins clearly belong to different gentes or clans, as Thunberg reported after his 1772 joumey at the Cape. In addition to a fundamentally identical gens/clan structure, both herded, hunted and also tilled, and both had chiefs and elders and multi-clan communal aggregates. There were some Bantu who did not fish, hunt or till, and others who did. The same

was true of the Khoi-Khoi. In both herding was combined with hunting and both traded on a large scale in ivory and, from the 18th century, also in guns.* In the very year of 1652, San fishermen seized cattle from the Van Riebeeck settlement, herded

them and used them as articles of subsequent trade.’ Dapper reported on trading by the Nama with Portuguese via the Ovambo speaking Bantu. Cheap beads made in ltaly were sold for hunting and herding products and the Khoi-Khoi thereby fell into an early “unequal exchange” trap based on disadvantageous terms of trade, measured in use-values. The Khoi-Khoi, like Bantu herders, often rode their oxen, which facili-

tated trading.* Da Gama’s crew saw Khoi-Khoi riding oxen in 1497 and, 12 years later, oxen were ridden and used as “tanks” by the Khoi-Khoi against the punitive expedition fatally launched by D’Almeida at the mouth of the Salt River, in Table Bay. Trading with the Delegoa Bay Portuguese by Nguni herders around 1800 played a part in the Difaqane/Mfecane (consolidation of the Zulu kingdom and destruction of other chiefdoms) which we shall duly need to review. While trading with African and Asian societies did not imply or produce unequal terms of trade, economic, political or cultural subjection, trade with the European capitalist mode undermined the economies and societies of the San, Khoi-Khoi and Bantu. This erosion began long before the Dutch settlement in 1652. For example, in 1591 the African-Portuguese trading rate was 1 ox for 2 knives; but by 1691 it had fallen to 1 ox + 7 sheep for 3 iron barrel hoops (Dutch East India Comapny and Portuguese shippers’ reports). The Von Thunen-Braudel “World economy” centre-periphery model fails to show the distinction between pre-capitalist and capitalist trading. The former is not necessarily unequal and exploitative, whereas capitalist trading between rich and poor nations is inevitably unequal. The African-Asian pre-colonial trade and the trade between San,

Khoi-Khoi and Bantu with Europeans belong to different modal relations of production and distribution. This Marxist modal optic is required to enable trade to be historically periodised and interpreted. “The word Bantu is an exclusively linguistic label and has no other primary implications, either of race or culture”, wrote D.W. Phillipson.” He traced the movements of and in this “family of dialects’ (called “Bantu” by W.H.I. Bleek, a German philologist who worked in Africa in the late 19th century) to large “Early Iron Age” mixed farming settlements founded “from about 300 BC to AD 600" in “regions to the south of central Tanzania”, where previously “the indigenous population lived by hunting and gathering”, and where domesticated animals and metal working were unknown.*

South Africans Before Capitalism

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The new iron-using and mixed-farming settlers are presumed to have been part of an eastern stream moving towards the Indian Ocean from the "shores of Lake Victoria by 500 BC”. A western stream, from the same source in central Africa, is taken to have moved westwards and then southwards towards Angola, Namibia, Botswana

and the western Transvaal. By 400 AD this flux had crossed the Limpopo into South Africa. The work of J.H. Greenberg, B. Heine, D. Dalby and others has persuaded

most scholars that this iron-cattle-farming spread was the work of Bantu-speaking people. The source of this diaspora from the Great Lakes was presumed to have been constructed by previous migrations from the Cameroons in the region between the Niger and Zaire river-basins. These Great Treks (compared with the miniscule “Great Trek” of the Boers after 1834) brought with them sheep, goats, cattle and agricultural techniques developed in the West Sudan from about 2000 B.C.* An eastern stream moved down along or parallel to the Indian Ocean coast, probably impelled by class struggles in Zanj in the 9th century, including a “slave revolt” led by the “Lord of the Blacks” and the sacking of Basra. Commenting on this Bantu emigration from “Azania”, Schapera wrote: “We shall probably not be far from the truth if we place the great southem migration of the Bantu at about this period.” The final major migrations were caused by the Portuguese conquests, masacres, destruction of cities like Kilwe Kisiwane,® slaving® and commerce in Angola and Mozambique. These set in motion further southward movements, which accreted settlements to those already established in Botswana, the Transvaal, Natal and the

Eastem Cape. Among these pre-Portuguese-colonial settlements were Nguni in the Drakensberge foothills, from 1300, the Venda and their trading “clients”, the Lemba, in the Transvaal from 1370, the Baralong, founded by "Morolong,” "the iron forger’, and his son, Noto, “the hammer’, in the Zeerust area around 1300. The Xhosa, dis-

tantly descended from “Mnguni”, were in the Eastern Cape when Diaz built his “padrao” near the Bushman’s River in 1497, and their many head of cattle were seen by Da Gama when he passed the place in 1497. The accounts of reporters on da Gama’s ships and of his Arab guide, Madjid, reveal large settlements which grew sorghum, had goats and cattle, used iron weapons and the hoe. The San hunters and the Khoi-Khoi and Bantu herders were along the entire coast of Namibia, the Cape and Natal when the Portuguese first rounded and passed the Cape of Good Hope in the late 15th century. Among those who recorded these Khoi-Khoi-Bantu societies were: Saldanha (1503), D'Almeida (1509), the crews of the wrecks of the “Sao Joao” (who fought with “Kaffirs’ with large cattle herds, and met their Tsonga chief, Nyaka, in 1552), of “Sao Bento” (who, says Theal, reported in 1554 that “the country was thickly populated

and provided with cattle" — and goats, millet and iron tools), the “Santo Thome” (1589. The crew met a “Vamba kingdom, where our own people also carry on a

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trade in ivory’, said a document collected by Theal).

In 1591 an English trader,

Lancaster, faced hostile Khoi-San at the Cape, but traded for about 1000 cattle and

sheep. In 1593 the crew of the “Santo Alberto”, wrecked near Diaz's padrao, travelled through “thickly populated” settlements as they made their way towards Lourenco Marques. They wee received with traditional Nguni hospitality and some of such travellers became part of Bantu society. As Peter Kolb wrote of the herders in 1719: “They are certainly the most friendly, the most liberal, the most benevolent people to one another that ever appeared upon earth... The integrity of the Hottentots, their strictness and celerity in the execution of justice and their chastity are things in which they excel all or most other nations in the world."*’ The story continues in relations by the crews of the ship-wrecks of the “Sao Joao” in 1622, who met Khoi-Khoi fishermen near the Fish River, and later “an infinite num-

ber of kraals with herds of cattle and gardens’ in Bantu villages; of the “Noss Senhora de Belem” (the last name refers to the port of departure on the Tejo river mouth in Lisbon), whose crew in 1635 met Xhosa herders who hunted “buffaloes, tigers" (leopards), "lions and elephants” and who grew millet, maize (from the American colonies), sugar-cane (later to become vital for Natal’s colonialist economy), and used many milk products. The frontier along which the European-capitalist and the African communalist modes clashed was in the concept and practice of property in land and in labour. No chief could sell land. He/she was merely its custodian on behalf of the clan or society or kingdom. The most the chief could do was to grant usufruct. This did not stop the Europeans from repeatedly violating this law through false and falsified “treaties”, usually drawn up by missionaries. The Portuguese, Da Gama, violated such a law by using wood and water without communal consent and was wounded at St. Helena Bay as a result. A similar reason lies behind the lawful killing, in battle in fact, of Francisco D’Almeida and 65 of his men in 1510. In this case, as in others, “Property and organised society must be indicated as the factors that control and determine the

conditions of regular warfare".

Chapter Three

CAPITALIST SLAVERY VERSUS COMMUNALISM

T: phases of capitalist development defined according to the dominant form of capital — usurous/commercial, industrial, financial — have their nether sides in the colonial processes which enabled these phases. These same forms, however, from the viewpoint of the Africans, as of the Asians and Americans,

were not seen as forms of capital, but as forms of labour and dispossession. Thus usurous/commercial capital, which came past South Africa with the Portuguese from 1487, and which settled itself in the Cape in 1652 via the instrument of the Dutch East India Company (DEIC), appeared to the San hunters and the Khoi-Khoi and Bantu communalist farmers as slavery, dispossession and genocide. This view was objectively correct, for the Portuguese and Dutch capital adventurers had as their aim the winning of slaves, new lands, raw materials, precious metals, spices, luxuries and markets. Here, as elsewhere, the subjectivity of the conquered, dispossessed,

enslaved and dispossessed coincided with historical objectivity. Therein, too, lies the objectivity of anti-Eurocentric historiography.

The Portuguese "Navigators" Historiography has underplayed the colonialistic and enslaving role of Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), his school in Sagres, near Point Vincent, the south-west point of Europe, and his naval base at Lagos, on the Algarve coast of Portugal.

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Colonialistic mercantile forces were already at work during the racist wars of expulsion of the Moroccan Arab-Africans from Lisbon in 1150, and in 1189 fron their brilliantly cultured Algarve capital, Silves, founded in 711. English Crusaders hired by King Sancho | massacred 6000 Moors out of the 30,000 in Silves and the 2000-year old port of Lagos. Retaken in 1191 by the Sultan of Morrocco, both cities finally fell to the Portuguese King Alfonso Ill in 1249. From Lagos Henry seized Ceuta in Morocco in 1415. This opened the W. African coast to Portugal and Gil Eannes sailed to Cape Bojivar in 1434. Goncalves (or da Silva) brought African captives to Lagos in 1441, when the first capitalist slave market in Europe was opened. By 1440 the first colonialist Christian mission was built at Fadouth, Senegal. Insufficient attention, too, has been paid to the eroding effect of the Portuguese navigators on the African societies along the coasts of Namibia, the Cape and Natal. Already by 1484 Diego Cao planted a cross 100 kilometres north of Swakopmund. Portuguese landings for water and food cannot but have bruised the San-Khoi bodypolitic in Namibia — and Namaqualand. In February 1488, after landing a West coast captive at Wolfish Bay and “Angra Pequina’” to contact local herders, Bartholemew Diaz landed at “the Cape of Cowherds” (Mossel Bay), where a crewman shot a hunter (or herder) with a cross-bow — the first murder by capitalism in South Africa. Such a tragedy would soon become known over a wide area. Diaz’s padrao on False Island to S. Gregory' was broken up by the Afncans. Diaz then landed at the “River Infante” (the Fish or Keiskamma River), then erected a “padrao” (discovered by Axelson in 1938) near the Bushman River. He then is said to have erected another padrao, to St. Joseph (some reports say St. Filipe) on False Bay, and a cross at Hout Bay. Retuming in 1500, he was blown around Cape Point to a sea-grave.? Already by then Flemish and German capital had been accumulated from tribute passing over the Austrian Alps exacted by Venetian colonialists in Turkey and Egypt from the time of the Crusades. These capitalists had obtained from King John II Royal Concessions which financed the 15th century Portuguese search for a route to India. Martin Behaim, who was connected with Nuhremberg manufacturers, and J.

Munzer, brought details ot the African route to India from Germany to Lisbon between 1485 and 1495. Rhenish Hansa League capital gave “Portuguese” colonialism a “European” character. This proto-Europeanism necessarily found ideological expression. As shown elsewhere,’ Christianity and a supra-national European racism became twin banners of commercial capital's colonial expeditions. Anti-paganism alone could not serve as a banner, if only because there was, at the time of Diaz's first voyage, talk of “converting” the Coptic Christians in Ethiopia, and Islam and Jewry were old Mediterranean foes.’ The voyage of Diaz was parallel to a simultaneous one, by Alfonso de Paiva

Capitalist Slavery Versus Communalism

31

and Pero da Covilha, via the Mediterranean, to Prester’s Ethiopia.® In due course religious bigotry was subsumed in the race-discrimination which it had itself fostered in its Western and Eastern Crusades. The Inquisition made a racist blood theory which distinguished between “limpieza Y mala sangre” (“pure and bad blood”). 2000 Jews died in Lisbon in 1506 in a racist-religious massacre. The 12th-13th century anti-Arab wars in Portugal and the drive through Spain in the 15th century were waged with both religious and racist fervour.’ This religious racism was first brought to South Africa by the Portuguese, 150 years before the Dutch colonisation. The ship-diary of Alvaro Velho, from the “Sao Rafael’, in Vasco da Gama’s first voyage, of 1497-9, and the reports of Lopes de Castenhada, give detailed accounts of the stay of the men of Da Gama’s four ships in “Angra de Santa Helena” for a week, from 3 August 1497, and in “Angra de Sao Braz” (Mossel Bay) for two weeks, from 25 November.® “This land has dark men’, wrote Velho about St. Heiena. The indigens fished (there were also sea-lions and whales), hunted for “came de gazelas’, gathered root-foods, wore skins and refused barter for nails, cimmamon and gold. Some “40 or 50” came to the beach, and on the last day threw arrows which wounded a captain and three or four men.

After the ships rounded Cape Point they anchored in Mossel Bay — the scene of the first murder, as Diaz's son, who had been with his father at Mossel Bay (“Diaz Beach” still recalls that landing) and now a member of Da Gama's crew, recalled. Da Gama’s men feared that the news of their skirmish at St. Helena might have reached Mossel Bay. During their fortnight there they saw large groups of hunter-herders, whom they likened to those of St. Helena. The Mossel Bay settlement hunted elephants (in the present Knysna area). One such group numbered 90, another over 200, with oxen, cows and sheep. A captain, Afonsa, who knew some Bantu from slaving in Manicongo, was unable to communicate with the Africans, who were almost surely San-Khoi hunter-herders. They had flutes and danced, drank and ate together with the Portuguese. This conviviality indicates the low level of racism — but not its absence — at the time. The herders fled when the Portuguese fired cannon. After Da Gama raised a cross and a padrao, some “10 or 12 negros” “stole the cross as well as the padrao”. When Da Gama passed Diaz’s padrao on the island of “Chaos”, “15 leagues from Rio Do Infante” (Fish River), he saw two men. After passing and fishing off Natal on 15-28 December, Da Gama proceeded towards Mozambique, where he saw a populous town, “with a lord among them’. On his retum joumey from cities in India and Zanj, Da Gama once more stopped at Mossel Bay, where his crew fished anchovies and hunted sea-lion, staying for 9 days before retuming, without stopping at Table Bay, to Lisbon. In all, Da Gama’s first expedition spent a month on shore in South Africa.

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32

European Colonial Despotism

During a much debated second voyage, attributed to Vasco da Gama, from February or April 1502 to October 1503, stops were made in Mossel Bay to barter for supplies. This voyage was the occasion for intngue between Italian, German and Portuguese merchants, vying for the monopoly of the trade with Sofala, Melinde, Calicut and Cochim. This intrigue included a ruse that the aim of the voyage was not India but to attack the Turks in Mecca and Cairo. Italian merchants like Marchioni and Affaitadi had trading houses in Portugal. Among those interested were the Duke of Ferrara, Venetian and Florentine merchants, and diplomats (who met D. Manuel of

Portugal secretly in the palace of Sintra, outside Lisbon). In a subsequent voyage, that of d’Albuquerque in 1503-4, the Papacy in Bologne were among those involved. On the German side there were Conrad Peutinger, C. Welser, who had a factory in Lisbon, and the “Grand Company of Germania’.* These multi-nationals and their rivalries formed part of the birth-pains of “Europe”. This formative process was accelerated by da Gama’s 2nd Voyage, coming as it did soon after the voyages of Columbus and Vespucchi (1500-1-2), and the first voyage of da Gama, who, in tum, advised Cabral for his famous voyage to Brazil the year after da Gama returned to Lisbon in 1499. This voyage was fired by the vision of the “Mines of Salomon” (Monomotapa in Zimbabwe), source of the gold and gems of Sofala, and of spices and dyes from India and Indonesia. Although already bruised by the first landings, Southern Africa was not yet itself a target or prize. G. da Empoli gave a personal account of the voyage, from 6 April 1503 to 20 August 1504, of the future Governor of India, Alfonso de Albuquerque, and his brother Francisco. Merchants from Florence, Venice and Bruges took part in what da Empoli, a citizen of Florence, gave out to be his own voyage to India.'°Alfonso’s ship returned laden with “pimenta de Coulao e gengibre de Cananor’. Reports contain references to “African savages” seen at the Cape of Good Hope and Empoli described the herders, whom he saw at Mossel Bay, and who had ironpointed

weapons, as “brutal people”."" The ship anchored in a bay of “Santohiago”, 70 leagues from Cape Point, i.e., in the Eastem Cape, where the crew saw “people neither white nor brown, of great size, without hair, and all painted", with large herds of

cattle and sheep, and whom they described as “bestial people”: an early 16th century sign of race-prejudice. In Cochim Alfonso D’Albuquerque met up with Antonio Saldanha’s “armada”, which had already rounded the Cape. The heavily armed fleet of the Castilian, Antonio de Saldanha, had left Lisbon on 14 May 1503 in what was effectively an independent voyage, one option of which was an attack on Mecca.” The three ships of the fleet halted in the Bay of St. Helena and, for three days, at Mossel Bay (Angra de S. Bras), where the crew fished, took wood, meat and goats, probably by bartering with the Khoi-San there. Saldanha is reported to have anchored off Table Bay, to have climbed Table Mountain, and to

Capitalist Slavery Versus Communalism

33

have taken fresh water from the Salt River, flowing from the mountain into the Bay. When Francisco D’Almeida met his death there six years later, reports referred to the

place as “Saldanha Bay’. This name, however, was later given to the unwatered bay just south of St. Helena Bay, about 200 kilometres north of Table Bay. German Merchant — Financers of the "Discoveries"

The sixth Portuguese “armada” to intrude upon the South African coastal societies was that led by the first Viceroy or Governor of Portuguese India, Francisco D’Almeida. On 1 August 1504 D. Manuel authorized a society of German and Italian merchants to incorporate three ships in the fleet due to sail under the command of Tristan da Cunha, substituted by Francisco de Almeida. Among the conditions of this “privilege” was that a German agent should sail on each ship. Among these were Baltasar Sprenger and Hans Mayr. Of the capital of 66000 ducats the Nuhremberg and Augsberg merchants held 20,000 or 30%; Welser and Vochlin 3000 or 4.5%:

Gossenbrot 6%; the powerful Fuggers (mentioned in this connection in Marx's Capital) 6% each; 8.5% to Hochsetter, Hirschvogel, Imhoff and other Germans. Thus the German share of the capital was 55%. The remainder, 29,400 ducats, was subscribed by Genovese and Florentine capitalists.* This voyage of the Conquistador, de Almeida, marked the “take-off” of what we have called “hidden German colonialism’.* A leading financier of the Portuguese expeditions was Jacob Fugger, who was a banker to Charles V of Spain. In 1504 alone Antwerp received 1000 tonnes of pigment and spices from Calicut. The Affaitadi held a semi-monopoly for the Flemish spice trade from 1508 to 1514, when the monopoly fell to the FuggerWelser financial empire. It was to their houses in Augsburg that Tome Lopes was sent by the Portuguese monarchy. Thus, the ships sailing around the Cape and anchoring at St. Helena Bay, False bay, Table Bay, Mossel Bay, off the Eastern Cape River mouths and Natal-Swaziland bays, were vessels not only of Portuguese but primarily of German capital."® The weight of this “European” capital increasingly bore down on the San-Khoi and Bantu social order in a two-pronged assault. One came from Angola, where Portugal began slaving soon after Cabral’s “discovery” of Brazil in 1500; the other from Mozambique, where Portuguese-German-Flemish-ltalian slaving and unequal exchange trading increased and pressed upon the Natal population, draining both of their wealth and their resisance to slavery. The thrust from Mozambique, after accumulating for three centuries, and then joining forces with the land-seizures of Britons and Boers moving northwards from the Cape, was to become decisive in the socalled “Zulu Difaqane" after 1800. The de Almeida armada which left Lisbon with 6 ships and 1500 armed men,

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brought the total of ships leaving Portugal via the Cape for India from and including da Gama’s 1497 voyage to 114. Of these 55 returned. The number passing and anchoring at the Cape in these 8 years was, on average, one a month: a considerable influence on the fringes of South African societies. The three Germans in de Almeida’s ships corresponded with Dr. Conrad Peutinger (1465-1547), secretary of the City of Augsburg. Sprenger’s diary gives objective details of the people at the Cape, Mossel Bay, and along Zanj coast." A 1513 map of Waldseemuller, Strasbourg, drawn only 25 years after Diaz's pioneering voyage, names no fewer than 40 places along the South African coast. C.F. Mentzel’s 1785 records of the German-Portuguese trading expeditions show that, for fear of the San-Khoi along Table Bay, the Portuguese used to land on Robben Island, from where they got water and supplies while they raided or bartered with mainland hunters, fishermen and herders.'’ He wrote of the racism of the “boorish” Portuguese, and of their “brutality”: “the atrocities committed by the Portuguese in the East and West Indies are well known". In 1520, he wrote, “more than 100" (Khoi-San) “were killed or wounded by cannon grape-shot’. Khoi-Khoi and Bantu hatred deterred several Portuguese landings."® This antagonism came not only from numerous losses in life and barter, but also from news arriving slowly but surely from the West-coast and East-coast colonies of Portugal. De Almeida had atfacked Kilwe or Quiloa and Mombaca, which fell. On 13 September he entered the Isle of Augediva and began a series of wars against Calicut, Cochim, Maldivas and Ceilao (Ceylon). On 2 February, 1509 a major historical naval battle took place at Cambaia, giving victory to the colonialists. Portuguese Pressures on San-Khoi and Bantu Societies Forced to leave India in December 1509, after his replacement as Viceroy by de Albuquerque, de Almeida and 72 “fidalgos” were killed in a battle in Table Bay (old Saldanha Bay) with Khoi-Khoi, who used oxen as tanks and cavalry against an armed Portuguese punitive expedition." De Albuquerque continued the atrocities of de Almeida, invading Malacca in 1511, Aden in 1513, forcing a “Peace Treaty” with Calicut in 1514 and “consolidating” the Ormuz “Protectorate” in the Persian gulf in 1515.” These and other conquests and atrocities” cannot but have become known to the Nguni, Khoi-San and also Namibian communal peoples. Nor could the Nguni herder-farmers of Swaziland, Natal and the E. Cape not have known of the armed incursions and missionary treachery in “Monomatapa’” from 1506 to 1668. These followed a 1506 incursion along the Save river and the “Discovery” of Zimbabwe in 1514-1515 by Antonio Femandez, carpenter in a ship of a 1506 fleet led by Barbudo and Queresma. Among such invasions was that of Barreto's army which entered

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Zimbabwe in 1571, and which the Zimbabweans crushed in 1574.” These modal conflicts between communalism and capitalism sent shock-waves up the Savi River to Lake Kyle and Great Zimbabwe, capital of Mwena Mutapa. The combination of Christianity and Commerce, which 300 years later was to be writ on Livingstone’s banner, destabilized the several Zimbabwe walled settlements. The conversion of a Zimbabwe king led to an anti-colonialist revolt of the commoners. The Portuguese take-over of much of the ancient Zanj trade with Asia and Zimbabwe drained the latter. Its downfall is still being attnbuted to overpopulation on limited resources. Nature, however, was abundant for the 30,000 or so inhabitants and their cattle-herds when Great Zimbabwe decayed in the early 16th century: precisely the take-off time of the Portuguese destructions, invasions and slaving.” These and the anti-colonialist communal and class struggles in Zimbabwe and Zanj were bound to send ripples across the Limpopo. The Portuguese destruction of Zanj and its trade was sufficient to cause the imperial court of China, in 1508, to

break off age-old diplomatic and trading relations with “Zanj’, and to refuse to trade with the Portuguese “barbanans”, The colonial pressures on South Africa increased when the slave traffic from Guinea, Zaire and Angola to America began in 1515. Up to 1836 Portugal exported 4.5 million slaves from Angola-Zaire alone. These southward pressures intersected with the waves set up from each landing or anchorage of the Portuguese — and other European ships. After Houtman rounded the Cape in 1595, it was customary for 16 ships to leave together for India each Easter, Michaelmas and Xmas.* This gives a rate of a ship per week on the Cape coast. By that time many Portuguese wrecks had affected San-Khoi and Bantu settlements, from St. Helena Bay to Natal. About 1550 a ship-wrecked crew met Zwide, ancestral founder of the Thembu. In 1552 “Sao Joao” sailors wrecked off Pondoland fought “Kaffir’ cattle herders and the commander, de Souza de Sepulveda, with 200 men and 400 slaves, tried to barter

with the Tsonga chief, Nyaka. More and more ships bartered and tried to introduce money-trading. Da Gama himself led another armada in 1524. In 1527 Jean Ango reached the Cape with three ships. By 1591 the trading rate was 1 ox for 2 knives. During the rising phase of the Portuguese empire, from 1500 to 1550, no fewer than 458 “escudeiros’ left Portugal for India. Each may be taken to represent a vessel.” This would imply a rate of passage/landing of about one ship per month, usually at several beaches or off-shore islands. This rate continued until around 1600, when the Dutch began to take over most of the Asian possessions of Portugal, whose shipping continued, however, as they held on to Angola and Mozambique. In 1594 James Lancaster bartered iron for the huge total of 1000 sheep and 41 oxen. He repeated the barter-trade when he retumed in 1601. A Dutch ship trading the same year exchanged at the rate of 3 iron hoops for 7 sheep + 1 ox/cow. The

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Dutch traders became bold enough to try to take Mozambique from Portugal in 16047, but, for the moment, they failed. In 1608 a Dutch admiral, Comelis Matelief of Benlem, traded on a large scale for sheep in Table Bay. The failure of the Portuguese to colonise the Cape and the rise in the tonnage and percentage of Dutch shipping augured another era for the San, Khoi-Khoi and Bantu. It was to prove the last for the San-Khoi, and the penultimate for the Bantu farmers.

The Coming of the Frist Dutch Multi-National (The D.E.I.C.) In 1579 Holland achieved its national unification in the Treaty of Utrecht with Protestants and Catholics united against the declining Spanish Empire. In 1602 the Dutch East India Company was formed out of Dutch, Flemish and German Capital. In 1619 Holland began to drag slaves out of Africa to its American colonies. In 1641 the Dutch took Malacca from Portugal. The next year Tasman “discovered” Tasmania and New Zealand. In 1656 they broke the Portuguese power in Ceylon, and Holland now had 2 million square kilometres of land and millions of slaves in the East Indies.

However, in the Americas Holland lost out to England and the 1651

English Navigation Act provoked a war which was settled at Westminster in 1654. By the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia Holland’s sovereignty was recognised by the major European nations. For a century she was to be the hegemonic power in the world being constructed by capitalist colonialism. Only 100 years later did England dominate over Dutch sea and colonial power. The power that seized the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 was a super-power. This was the power now facing the San-Khoi and Bantu. The DEIC, like the Chartered Dutch Company operating in the Caribbean and America, was a parastatal multi-national financial, commercial slaving, “octopus” with intemational tentacles and capital inputs, but with a Dutch-Germanic head. In the case of the DEIC the “head” was the Chamber of 17, acting together with the Council of India. Many of the Directors and bureaucrats of the DEIC were Germans, who, as

the Welsers and Fuggers had done with Portugal before, represented Hansa League capital sited in the Rhine and North Sea cities. Thus, Hamburg and Bremen had strong financial interests in the Cape Colony of Holland. This was a fruit of “hidden

German colonialism’ during the hegemony of Portugal (and Spain) in the 16th centuty. Hamburg had a school for the children of its DEIC officials and this school celebrated the slave and anti-Khoi-Khoi fort at the foot of Table Mountain.* The German interest in the DEIC was indexed by the fact that 25% of the DEIC servants were German, and by the heavy German immigration to the Cape in the 18th century. There were also heavy Flemish and Scandinavian capital and bureaucratic interests in the DEIC.

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A Khoi-Khoi, Goree was the first victim of the hegemonic struggle between the Dutch and English mercantile slavers. Goree was seized and taken to London in 1613. He returned as a trading agent. Both the English and Dutch shippers tried to use him against Khoi-Khoi resisters to barter. Favouring the English, he was murdered by Dutch sailor-traders in 1626. By then, in 1620, Shilling and Fitzherbert had raised the British flag at the Cape. It was tom down by the San-Khoi. Between 1611 and 1621 117 Dutch ships had landed and bartered at the Cape, according to records of the DEIC — an average of one a month. From 1621 to 1650 460 Dutch ships landed at the Cape, mostly at St. Helena Bay, Saldanha Bay, Table Bay, False Bay, or Mossel Bay. It is probable that about 1000 European ships, flying mainly a Portuguese flag, made landings at beaches and islands of the Cape and Natal; and that some 600 Dutch ships alone landed before the van Riebeeck occupation in 1652. Many English, French and other ships landed from 1500 to 1652. The pre-settlement influence of these landings was corrosive of the hunting and herding modes/systems.

This influence was manifold: sometimes military, more often cattle-

thieving and trading in goods, and, at times also, in slaves, as many shippers carried slaves from West coast slave-depots off Dakar, Guinea and the Angola coast. In 1631 a Khoi-Khoi hunter-herder, Autshumao, whom the Dutch were to call “Herry’, took an English ship to Java. Clearly barter-trade was changing the habits of some hunter-herders; their society was being eroded at its coastal edges by the powerful Dutch-headed multi-national DEIC. So much was this the case that by 1647 a ship-wrecked crew reported that “wild pigs and goats on St. Helen" a (a supply-stop en route to Table Bay) "had almost been exterminated”.” Capitalist-induced marketeconomy was ruining the old social order. Its effect is indicated, too, in the report by

a crew wrecked off the Infante River that they saw hunters (San) who used iron assegais.” The Khoi-Khoi were importing iron, Knives, tobacco, beads (made in Italy, later also in Canada), alcohol, salt and dagger (cannabis sativa ), probably from Portuguese-dominated Zanj traders. Autshumao retumed to Table Bay as an interpreter and middle-man for the Dutch. That commerce could be violent was shown when the crew of the Nossa Senhora de Belem, wrecked off the Mthatha and Mbashi Rivers in June 1635, murdered a Xhosa Chief and others.” In 1648 the “Haarlem” was wrecked in Table Bay. For months Janz and Proot,

employees of the DEIC, lived in a Fort that segregated them from the 'Ke-Khoi of the Cape Peninsula. Their report to the DEIC saw the Cape as more than a refreshment station. They saw it as a potential slave-colony. They advocated trade, for The Natives, after we had lain there five months, came daily to the Fort which we

had thrown up for our defence, to trade with perfect amity, and brought cattle and sheep in quantities.”

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This “amity” turned to hostility when the Dutch stole caitle from the San-Khoi.*' Janz and Proot, proposed that their Company form a permanent slave-colony at the Cape, adding that “we shall be able in time to employ some of their children as boys and ser-

vants”,°? The DEIC adopted the main recommendations of the Janz-Proot Report. They placed Johan Van Riebeeck in charge of the first colonising expedition. He had previously visited Table Bay and reported to the DEIC, according to Mentzel.” He was prejudiced even before he set up the colony, saying of the Khoi-Khoi: “They are by no means to be trusted, but are a savage set’. Van Riebeeck had served the DEIC in Java, Sumatra, China and Japan from 1639 to 1649, when he was recalled and fined for trading on his private account in Batavia. He was suspended and went to Brazil, the West Indies and Greenland. On Xmas Eve 1651 he set sail with the “Reiger’, "Goede Hoop” and “Drommedaris” and landed with 116 men on April 6, 1652, with instructions to build a fort, trade with the Khoi-Khoi and “reconcile them in time to your customs”.® He was to use his 10 year experience as trafficker and corruptor in Tonkin, China, and Nagasaki, Japan, to buildie a DEIC trading post and slave colony. Free "White" or Slave "Black" Labour?

Van Riebeeck faced three choices to solve his labour problem: (1) to conquer and enslave the Khoi-San (2) to import more free Dutch labour; and (3) to import slaves from outside the settlement. The Dutch felt themselves ‘a handful against a landful."* There were at least 200,000 Khoi-San at the Cape.*’ Their fires rose at night around the Fort. Fearful, Van Riebeeck issued orders that any Company servant would be severely punished if he “ill-uses, beats or punishes any of the natives’.* “Trade with the natives” was forbidden to the Company labourers, because in this way they might have enriched themselves, left the Company and deprived the Dutch merchants of the only labour force they then had in the Cape. Barter was made a Company monopoly a day after the landing.* Van Riebeeck met communal fishermen who could talk a broken English picked up from wrecked or passing English ships. He began to trade with the strong, well-knit Saldanha KhoiKhoi, bartering copper, tobacco and arrack (brandy) for cattle. The communalists began to lose their “capital” assets. Van Riebeeck enviously exclaimed: “It is vexatious to see such an enormous quantity of cattle”,“° estimating 10,000 head of cattle only around the Fort. He thought of seizing the cattle by force, capturing the Khoi-

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Khoi herders and shipping them to India as slaves.41 But “Herry” organised resistance to unequal bartering. “He incites to mischief’, and was the “chief obstacle” to

favourable trade with the “Saldanhers”, wrote the Govemor.”* The anti-barter resistance made the DEIC order Van Riebeeck to free some Company servants so that they could explore and themselves breed cattle. The exasperated Govemor begged the Chamber of 17 to send him away to India, away from the Khoi-Khoi, whom he vilified racialistically as: “dull, stupid, lazy, stinking people”.“4 The Chamber refused. An incident in Autshumao’s life shows the helplessness of Van Riebeeck at this time (1653-1655). He refused to interpret and decamped in October 1653 with “wife, children and cattle”, including 42 claimed by the Company. Van Riebeeck was so powerless that he had to issue a proclamation that no revenge was to be taken on “Herry’. He ignored an order from the Chamberf of 17 to capture “Herry” and ship him to Batavia as a slave in order to “teach the Natives a lesson”. Two years later “Herry’ calmly returned and Van Riebeeck had no option but to “pardon” him instantly. Six months later Van Riebeeck was obliged to invite “Herry’ to dine with him at his table, and to have him served by Dutch Company servants.“ By 1657 there were only 12 slaves. A few Khoi-Khoi were domestic servants, but freely rejoined their etho-group/clans.*’ Among these was Krotoa (“Eva” to the Dutch), a niece of “Herry’, and sister in law of the Saldanha chief, Oedasoa. Van Riebeeck had to declare in 1657 that: “the natives here are not to be induced to work”. He could not enslave them because the law of Holland however hypocritically, “laid down that the aborigines of its colonial possessions should be left undis-

turbed in their liberty’. Many Company officials preferred to import free labour from Holland to the import of slaves. But all agreed that this labour was lazy, inefficient and non-productive. Van Riebeeck, though an ardent supporter of slavery, was to complain that the Dutch at the Cape “preferred like Seigneurs to spank about with the cane in the hand and

leave everything to the slaves”.*° The Company itself viewed the introduction of slaves with misgivings, “as our nation is so constituted that as soon as they have the convenience of slaves they become lazy and unwilling to put forth their hands to work".*’ The “lazy” workers complained that Van Riebeeck drove and cheated them. He was accused of “exaction and extortion”? and Gernt van Harn was sent out to take his place in 1660. He died en route, the dismissal was rescinded and Van Riebeeck remained a few years more. By then slavery had been introduced. Six weeks after landing he had asked the Company to send slaves.* They allowed it only when he wrote that he was failing

to cope with “Herry” and to defeat the Khoi-Khoi.* Finally on March 28, 1658 his prayers were answered when the “Amersfoort” brought from Angola 174 captives,

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seized from a Portuguese ship; and, in April, the “Hasselt” brought to Table Bay 200 from Popo on the Guinea coast. Further ships brought slaves from Madagascar, Bengal, Malabar, Ceylon and West Africa. The latter source was abandoned because itwas the exclusive preserve of the Chartered Dutch Company. A Class-Modal War on Two Fronts

In June 1653 Van Riebeeck proposed to visit Natal to promote “trade in gold, ivory, ebony and slaves’.®> The DEIC tried to take over the Portuguese monopoly in these “commodities” in Delegoa Bay where Lourenco Marques, a pilot and trader, had set up an ivory-trading — and hence also a slave-port — post in 1544-5. Van Riebeeck sent ships to explore Natal in 1654-5 and in 1660 equipped an expedition, under Dankrots, to “Monomotapa’ itself in search of its fabled gold-mines.*

The DEIC had enemies in a class-mode war fought on two fronts: against the slaves and the San-Khoi. Van Riebeeck was replaced in April 1662, ten years after what has become a “historic landing” for “White South Afnca”, by Wagenaar, who continued Van Riebeeck’s rudeness to the Khoi-Khoi by calling their leader, Ngounema, the “onbeskofte Gonnemma”.®””

Ngounema was to lead a resistance war

ten years later. Before Wagenaars arrival, Van Riebeeck had made virtual battle preparations by banishing “Herry’ to Robben Island in July 1658, ignoring Krotoa’s protests. Herry’s job as broker and interpreter was taken by Doman, whom Van Riebeeck had sent to Java in 1657, and who became “a worst pest than Herry ever

was to the Company’ and who combined with Herry to attack the Dutch in May 1659. The Dutch, however, strengthened the Fort and built a watch-house at the mouth of

the Salt River. This entrenched Van Riebeeck's segregation policy which took physical shape when he had an almond hedge built from what is now Kirstenbosch Gardens to Rondebosch and extended it with palings down to the Salt River, thereby dividing the Peninsula into a wooded, fertile, sheltered zone from Table Mountain to Table Bay,

and the semi-sandy, wind-blasted “Cape Flats”. So tough was the hedge that it remains to this day. At the time it segregated people, cattle and lands — the first “Group Areas’ barrier. Tuming to their “second front’, the slaves had been unchained, but “were put in irons again as it was found that some wanted to join the Hottentots”.°° The Dutch attacked villages, including a small settlement of 26 people, “killing two and capturing the Captain who used to be Herry’s comrade. We brought back the upper lips of one, and of the Captain, who would not come to the Fort, and it was too difficult to carry him over the mountains.” They threw the huts, weapons and skins of the destroyed village into the sea from

Ruosaen-FEvn

Anns

Fig.6: Map by Frederik De Wit, Amsterdam, 1675, of the Cape Peninusula, showing Robben Island, ised for three centuries as a political pnson camp, and barriers to segregate the "Hottentots" from the JEIC servants and colons.

= val kn or

SS. —

fot

ae

_

an

iw

as

-— | Os wee ai

oy« a

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the cliffs. One captured man “fell’ down a precipice." In April, 1660, Autshumao, who had returned from Saldanha, Doman, Oedosoa and Ankaisoa made a dignified peace, in which they accused their enemies of waging war for “the land which had

belonged to them from all ages”. The Dutch war-pretext, the supposed “theft” of 148 cattle and 113 sheep, was exposed when Van Riebeeck reported to his slaving merchant Company masters: “They had now lost that land in war and therefore could only expect to be henceforth entirely deprived of it...their country had thus fallen to our lot, being justly won in defensive warfare, and... it was our intention to retain it."°? Thus ended the first Land War in South Africa. It was all over by June 1659.% But, even then, Van Riebeeck became alarmed

when Autshumao escaped from Robben Island prison to Saldanha Bay in December . 1659. During the uprising, they were betrayed by Krotoa who, acting for Van Riebeeck, asked her brother-in-law, Oedosoa, to make a “non-aggeression pact’ with

the DEIC.® When Autshumao and Doman died in 1663 the Commander Wagenaar commented: “Both... were always considered as very mischievous and malicious men, and as the greatest opponents of the Hon. Company.”®” Eva Krotoa continued to serve the Dutch after her marriage in 1664 to Pieter Van Meerhof, who was promoted to “surgeon” as a wedding gift. They lived on Robben Island. When “Eva” was buried in the Castle in 1673, the Govemor referred to her as “This drunken swine, this Hottentot pig”. But in 1677 the children were sent to Mauritius by one, Borus, to be brought up as “Europeans”. This was evidently a case of “out of sight out of mind”, rather than of non-racialism. Free "White " or Slave "Black" Labour?

Van Riebeeck’s departure was followed by a succession of labour-policy debates inside the DEIC structures. Wagenaar referred to the Dutch and German farmers, who then numbered 104 Dutchmen, 40 Germans, 13 Flemish, 8 Scandinavians and 2 French-speakers, as “lazy Boers...drunken Boers”® and his successor, Van Qualbergen, told the Chamber of 17 in 1668 that “If the farmers in the Netherlands

drank like those here, neither cow nor plough nor harrow would remain on the land".”” He forbade hiring Khoi-Khoi labour, to stimulate the Boers to work with their hands” and re-imposed the ban on trade with the Khoi-Khoi, fearing they would outwit the Boers in trade and undermine the DEIC trade monopoly, saying “The Hottentots have been looked upon as very savage men, without any knowledge," an admission of colour prejudice "but we greatly suspect this to be a mistake, for, in our opinion, they are very arrogant, equal to our common people in natural understanding and more

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ciircumspect’.” The next Commander, Jacob Borghorst, held an equally poor opinion of the Dutch as workers, writing in 1669, “Some are not ashamed to go about like beggars, or to

spend their time in drinking”.”° Some DEIC directors felt this opinion led to the need to import more slaves. Sixty years later, after large scale importation of slaves, some still felt that more slaves would increase Boer indolence: “In order not to let the colonists slide into idleness... and make them unaccustomed to labour.” After full discussion, the Council of Policy confirmed the choice: “black slavery’. But one, Pasque de Chavonnes, brother of the Governor, called for free “White” labour instead of slaves,”* Liberals, like J.H. Hofmeyr, have praised de Chavonnes.” But, like Lincoln a century later, he disliked the slaves more than he disliked slavery. Among his reasons were fear of “conspiracies of slaves, running away of slaves”.” De Chavonnes’ view was repeated by Baron Gustaf Wilhelm Von Imhoff, Govemor-General of India, who passed through the Cape in 1743. He said that the “European” skilled worker at the Cape “does not do as much as a half-trained artisan in Europe...|t is a burden this Colony cannot bear....| believe it would have been far better had we, when this Colony was formed, commenced with Europeans and brought them hither in such numbers that hunger and want would have forced them

to work”,”” Von Imhoff likewise castigated the European farmers: “Having imported slaves, every common or ordinary European becomes a gentleman... The majority of farmers in the Colony are not farmers in the real sense of the word, but owners of planta-

tions”®° Von Imhoff's comments on European workers and farmers were to have a modem ring 250 years later.... But the argument had long become academic. The die was cast when slaves were imported en masse in 1658. The Second Land War

After the first land-battles Pieter Sterthemius, Commander of the Company's Return Fleet, issued a Memorandum to Van Riebeeck that “the free men should be encouraged and assisted”. The farmers were subsidised with sheep, cattle and vegetable farms. The rulers had begun to build a European social bulwark in South

Africa. This social base was to segregate itself, being forbidden to “suffer any of the savage men of this country to come about their farms or enter their homes”® This segregation policy was supplemented by a policy of making “treaties” with the San-Khoi chief, Sousa, “chief Lord of all the Hottentot race” The language, too,

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was becoming openly race-classificatory. Under cover of this Treaty, Van Riebeeck sent Van Meerhof to Namaqualand; he also sent Danckert to “Monomotapa”. Von Meerhof’s information was passed on to Wagenaar.™ The details on the Namaquas, Cochoquas, led by Oedosoa and Ngounema, and the Chainoquas, was to be used in the next land war. Cruse, Cruythoff, and Commander Goske used the information to

apply divide and rule tactics between the Cochoquas and Chainoquas.® Five of Ngounema’s men were sentenced to from 7 to 15 years imprisonment on Robben Island, after vain efforts by Ngounema to ransom them with cattle.® (In November 1673 they escaped by boat.) Ngounema seized Boers invading his lands, to which Goske declared war on “all who may with him “(Ngounema)” have raised their hands against our men, that their posterity may retain the impression of fear and may never

again offend the Netherlanders”.®” The war lasted for 6 years, during which the Dutch sent out 6 commandos, which used Khoi-Khoi allies won through divide and tule trickery, before Ngounema surrendered in June 1677. He was treated as “an African general” and the Govemor, Bax, ordered his victor, Cruse, to fete his envoys in Cruse’s own house.” Ngounema,s social group had lost 1600 head of cattle and 5000 sheep and had to pay a tribute of 30 head of cattle a year. In 1682 Governor Simon van der Stel reported that Ngounema had paid only six cattle a year and when he journeyed to “Amaqualand” in 1685-6, he found a whole community in mouming, for Ngounema, their leader, was dead.* Together with the war-booty, which became personal property of Europeans who went on commando, the burghers and Company had 14000 sheep, goats and pigs and 2300 cattle by 1681.” Effectively, they also had the south-west Cape up to Namaqualand. The European burgher population, 64 in 1672, before the Second Land War, rose to 537 in 1687, when there were 300 slaves and to 1000 in 1707,

when there were 1,100 slaves. Slavery and landlessness increased side by side with the settler population. This was the ideal combination conditioning segregation (apartheid in Dutch/Afrikaans) as the norm for the further development of capitalism at the Cape. Colour Slavery

The Governor under which this segregatory development first accelerated was Simon Van der Stel, son of a former Govemor of the Mauritius Colony, whose wife's

mother was an Indian woman, Monica da Costa. The pride of “pure Whiteism’, Stellenbosch, was named after this “Coloured” Governor. But this in no way stopped him, or his son, Willem Adrian, who was Governor from 1699 to 1707, from pursuing a comprehensive racist policy." In the same way promiscuity and “miscegenation” never impeded racism and often was its consequence and manifestation.” This was

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clear already before and between the 1st and 2nd Land Wars, and the laws and practices against slaves which accompanied “miscegenation” and “Mixed Marriages”. In 1902 Colinbrander traced only 2 European-slave marriages from 1657 (when J. Wouters was married to a slave, Catherine, whose mother came from Bengal) to 1720 and only 17 in the entire period of Dutch rule up to 1805.* One researcher, using racist criteria, “calculated” that the Afrikaners had 6.9 % “Coloured blood”. Manumitted slaves were given a racist name, “vry swartem’” (‘free blacks”) and the much-vaunted Liberal Ordinance 50 of 1828 later used the term “Free Persons of Colour’. Anti-"miscegenation” decrees were promulgated in 1678, 1681 (during Simon Van der Stel’s Govemorship), 1685 and 1718. When Baron Van Rheede proposed manumission of “mixed” slaves, it was because they had “no share in the fault of their parents” (our emphasis). The original Cape Matrimonial Law rested on the Batavian Statutes, based on the Politique Ordinantjie of 1580, which had no colour clauses, except a covert one: forbidding marriage between a free person and a slave. This did not affect Khoi-Khoi to European marriages. But in 1671, |. Goske, conqueror of Ngounema, recommended a ban on “mixed marnages’.* A Matrimonial Court was set up in 1676 to determine whether a would-be couple were blood related, unmarried, widowed, and free or

slave.*” But in 1685 Von Rheede introduced a colour bar in a law which forbade “illicit intercourse between European males and female slaves or natives’. He ordered that “the marriage of our ‘Nederlanders’ to freed slave women must be prohibited, except to daughters of Dutch fathers by slave women”* Finally, he ordered the death penalty for slaves and other “heathens” who had relations with Dutch women.'’® After these laws public European opinion hardened against “mixed marnages” and “miscegenation’.""" The extent to which sex proved stronger than iaw and “indicated that the fact that 330 years later, in 1992, the raceclassified “Coloured” group is only 20% fewer than the “White” one (3.5 million and 5 million respectively). Up to 1685 there was no segregation in schools.'* Governor Goske criticised the “mixed schools” run first by Van der Stael, then by Ernestus Bach.'® In 1685 Von Rheede introduced segregation into education, with an order to Jan Pasqual, teacher under the Church Minister, that “no white children shall be accepted in the (slave) school” (Instruction “G’)....and “no slave children of anyone shall be accepted” (into

the “mixed” school).'™ “Mixed” schools, mainly of Khoi-San and Europeans, continued in practice.

In

1779 there were 696 children in general schools, of whom 82 were slave children.

Another 84 were in special slave schools. But the policy of educational segregation was, in fact, the legal and official state policy. The Calvinist DEIC Church regularly offered up prayers for the welfare of the slave

Capitalist Slavery Versus Communalism

45

traffic." From 1664 “Heathens” were baptised'®, but in 1671 Goske deferred baptism until confirmation.” By 1722 slaves were forbidden to stand sponsor or in loco parentis at the baptismal font, or to wear adomments in church."® In 1754 Ryk Tulbach, the “Good Govemor’, forbade slaves from wearing special mouming clothes at funerals, from gathering in a group of more than 200 at a funeral, and from “hanging around” a church on a Sunday." Instructions came in 1770 prohibiting the sale of a Christian slave"? and slave-owners reacted by stopping conversions of slaves. For an asset that could not be sold was not a business proposition. This law was revoked by the British in Proclamation 15 of 1809, enabling slavers to freely sell all their slaves after the Abolition of the Slave Traffic in the British Empire in 1808. But the British continued to segregate congregations racially. In 1755 Tulbach opened segregated hospitals after a scarlet fever and small-pox epidemic in April 1755.'' Previously, even during a small-pox epidemic which decimated the Khoi-Khoi and took the lives of 200 out of 570 slaves, patients were not segregated. In the 1755 epidemic 1109 slaves, 963 Europeans and an untold number of Khoi-San lost their lives. In 1767 a Danish slave-ship brought in small-pox which killed 396 slaves and Khoi-Khoi. When, in 1881-2 a “Garonne and Drummond Castle” ship infected Capetonians, the “Coloured” and “Malay” patients had to die seperately from the “White” ones in Somerset and other hospitals. Colour laws took class forms: Thus in 1754 Tulbach forbade slaves from singing or whistling at night, from walking in groups in town at night and there was a 10 p.m. curfew, after which time slaves out, with special passes, had to carry a light. They could not bump a European, “answer back” or be “insolent”, and one who hit a master or mistress faced a death sentence.'” A 1765 Plakaat introduced “Sumptuary Laws’ which forbade freed slave women from wearing hooped dresses, coloured silk,

fineries, earrings or curled hair."* This was an overt colour-racist law. Plettenberg and other Governors continued Tulbach’s racial policy. In 1780 it became “undesirable” for “Black” police to arrest “Whites” and four “White” police were placed at the fiscal’s disposal so that Europeans were safe from the black arm of the law. “White” police could arrest a Non-European, but “Coloured” or “Malay” police could not arrest a European." Slave Revolts

The slave-capitalist class struggle ran parallel to the communalism-capitalism modal struggle. The Castle near the present Cape Town foreshore was a prison for slaves and Khoi-San resisters. In 1708 Jean de Thuile was sentenced to death for maltreating a servant and in 1767 Jurgen, Jansen and Van der Troek were punished for brutal treatment of their servants; and Braune was banned from owning slaves

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after his had burnt down his property. But these slaves, Clarinde and Fortuin, were burnt alive for arson." Farmers and the Castle and Robben Island prison wardens

used the rack, cross, stake, wheel, axe, thumb-screw, branding irons. There were individual and mass revolts. One form was to escape back to the homelands. In 1658 some newly landed personal slaves of Van Riebeeck tried in vain to escape to sea."® In 1660 15 slaves and 14 Company servants conspired to revolt, kill the guards at the Schuur slave lodge and the Fort, defeat the crew of the ship “Erasmus” then in the Bay, and escape in this vessel to another country. They were betrayed by the Fort doctor, an Englishman, W. Robinson.'” In 1686 a slave-rebel, “Pieter of

Batavia” was hanged “for inciting various other slaves to abscond”."® In 1707 “Augustyn of Batavia” led 8 slaves in a bid to reach Madagascar. Four were broken on the wheel and a Khoi Khoin, known as the “Queen”, who helped in the escape-revolt, was strangled.’* In 1717 a Javanese slave was executed for “inciting” the slaves to a large-scale rising'® and in 1714 16 slaves tried to escape to Angola. Their leaders, “Deuntjie”, “Hannibal”, “Caesar” and “Courage” fought a lastditch battle to the death at Wynberg. Slaves sometimes escaped, with Khoi-Khoi helpers, to the Stellenbosch mountains and even to the Hangklip caves across False Bay. To counter this communal-slave unity, Van der Stel forbade slaves and herdsmen from carrying knives or arms,’ and banned large assemblies after “Pieter of Batavia's rising.’ In 1719 600 slaves rose on the English tradership, “Elizabethian”, whilst at anchor in Table Bay, and in 1765 140 slaves rose on the old Dutch slaver,

“Meermin’. They killed 24 of the crew and forced the officers to tum the ship back, but the officers landed them not at Madagascar, but on the coast of Agulhas Point, where 14 slaves were shot down by local farmers and 112 of the others were gaoled at the Castle." The closing stages of capitalist slavery revolts, as later in the USA, became liberatoy. In October 1808 an Irish labourer, Hooper, an Irish sailor, Kelly, and two slaves, Abraham and Louis, rode out to the Swartland wheat farms to rally the slaves to revolt. On the 24th the Irishmen deserted the slave-leaders, who carried on, leading a march to Cape Town, expecting emancipation to come from the British abolition of the slave trade. On the 27th October the British arrested 326 slaves. Louis and Abraham, and even the deserter, Hooper, were hanged. Fifty slaves were flogged and many imprisoned by their British “emancipators”. A similar rising was suppressed in 1825 in Worcester. Two rebel leaders were hanged, others sentenced to flogging and life-long imprisonment. The 1808 rising was the first of a long series of class struggles betrayed by “White” labour in South Africa. Hooper and Kelly only belonged to the same class as Abraham and Louis inasmuch as all worked for capitalists. But the events in the Swartland in 1808 showed that this economistic definition of a class fails. For one group were free workers, the other slave workers for the

Capitalist Slavery Versus Communalism

47

capitalists and the two were demarcated by their masters and hence also by themselves according to their colour. There exists, at Macassar Beach, Faure, not far from Cape Town, the Kramat of a Ceylonese Prince, Sheik Yusuf, who became a hero to slave and Khoi-San alike. He was one of many Asian anti-colonial resisters exiled to the Cape: kings like Dora and Boels, the King of Goha (Goa), Radja of Tambora, the king of Madsura, Pangerang Loring Pasur. Joseph (Yusuf) was exiled in the ship “Voetboog”, in 1694, after defeat in the 1682-3 Bantam war. He and his entourage of 49 followers, 2 wives, 12 children were bome to Zandvliet, near the Eerste River. When his son came to claim his

fathers body for removal back home in June 1702, the DEIC refused, fearful of Yusuf's reputation as a resister and religious leader. Four of his followers lie buried next to him at the Macassar Kramat and 50 others around their grave. Settlers Versus Deic; A Family Quarrel?

The 1660 and 1671-7 wars dispossessed sections of the Khoi-San and on these expropriated lands plantation and artisan slavery grew up in the Western Cape. Further east pastoral farmers exploited enserfed communalists. Both operated within a capitalist market economy dominated by the DEIC and a rising local merchant class, centred in Cape Town. The Boers (European farmers) behaved in a crude feudal way, illegally assuming powers to sentence and punish their serfs and to conscript thern in commandos against the San, Khoi-Khoi and, later, Xhosa societies. The Boer-"feudalists” wanted unlimited land and opposed the fixing of a boundary line with the communal societies in August 1745 and again in November 1769. They refused to return across the Gamtoos River into the new Swellendam district in February 1770 and ignored Tulbach’s law of April 1770 forbidding them to graze cattle or settle east of the Gamtoos. The Governor punished them with confiscations and on their side they often refused to pay rent on loan-farms granted them by the Company.” |In 1770 the Boers opposed a law which forbade trading “with Hottentots or Kafirs”."% So fearful was the DEIC of losing its trade monopoly and of provoking a united San-Xhosa-Khoi-Khoi attack, that in 1770 Tulbach imposed the death penalty for barter with the Bantu people.’” But when the Company formed powerful commandos against the Africans “they fly to the district of Swellendam” to avoid commando

service.” However, had it not been for the DEIC’s commandos — and later the British at the Cape — the Boers would have been eliminated by the Africans. These rural Boers were continuing a 100-year old mini-class-war between the settlers and the colonial power, the DEIC.

In reality it was an intra-class war, since the

settlers were the social base of the colonial structures and both settlers and Company were united against the slaves and communalists. The Company, howev-

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er, acted for its global class interests and did so as a capitalist monopoly. Through this monopoly it imported slaves from Madagascar, tobacco from Brazil, copper from Namaqualand Khoi-Khoi, goods from New York (a Dutch colony founded by P. Stuyvesant in the 17th century), gold from Mexico and carried on a truly international commerce, already during the Govemorship of Simon Van der Stel." The DEIC was a military power which repeatedly dispossessed the Khoi-San, and later the westem Xhosa. It was a naval power, which the Van der Stels and Dominique de Chavonnes demonstrated in 1689 when their navy attacked the French vessel, “La Normande’, and, separately, the “La Coche”.'"* The DEIC trading monopoly embraced the importation of tin and ivory from Rio de La Goa and an attempt in 1729 to seize gold in Delegoa Bay in which the “30 Europeans” were “massacred” by the Africans."* The trade was extensive, including, in one cargo in 1755, over 2 tons of ivory and a kilogram of ambergis from Rio de la Goa and in another, in 1759, nearly 3 tons of ivory. Economic — and political pressure on the Natal and Xhosa societies of such

huge ivory transfers were to manifest themselves soon afterwards in the “Zulu Difaqane”’. By 1700 the Boers and urban free burghers numbered 1265 against 461 Company officials, soldiers and artisans. The Company controlled the prices of any burgher trade with Table Bay ships or the Africans. Company officials were banned from pnvate trading, but Simon and Willem Van der Stel used their offices to obtain huge land-grants and to make “salaries” from the growing of produce which would be sold by third parties to the ships and to the Company itself. Thereby the Governor, and his close social circle, held a virtual monopoly of large-scale trade. The political leader of the settlers at Cape Town, Adam Tas, led a struggle against Governor Willem Adrian Van der Stel, who had over 200 slaves, 1000 cattle, nearly 20,000

sheep, 18 ranches and vast vineyards.'* Tas did not regard his settler-group as antiDEIC, but as part of a colonialistic family. They were, he wrote, the “legitimate children of the Company’.'*” The Western Cape settlers were supported by frontier Boers engaged in a modal struggle against the Khoi-Khoi and Xhosa as far east as the Fish River.

These Boers had been defeated by the Xhosa, but had violated a

Khoi-Khoi settlement in 1702.'* The joint complaint to the DEIC of monopoly and corruption by Van der Stel caused his dismissal in March 1707. It was the first victory of the settlers against their Company “father”. It was to be the beginning of the political struggle of the Boers for the right to co-exploit, co-dispossess and co-rule with the local and foreign monopoly capitalists over the Africans. Nearly two centuries after Tas's fight with Van der Stel this “family quarrel” erupted into the full-scale AngloBoer War of 1899-1901. To this day this intra-European conflict continues, in the political form of Afrikaner Nationalists versus Liberals.

Capitalist Slavery Versus Communalism

49

The Genocide of the San

By 1657 the settlers and DEIC had occupied Khoi-San land in what is now Rondebosch. By 1679 they had reached the Hottentots-Holland, off False Bay and Stellenbosch, by 1688 Paarl, along the Berg River, and in 1688 the French Huguenots, fleeing from the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, settled in French Hoek and began a new persecution, this time as dispossessors of communal herders and as exploiters of serfs and slaves. In 1698 Wellington and in 1700 what was later Tulbach were seized from their former communal proprietors. In 1746 Swellendam fell and the Boers moved towards the lands of the Xhosa, Tembu and Mpondo. This eastward expansion was accompanied by northward expropriations. J. Coetzee crossed the Orange River in 1760 and returned in 1761 to settle in Keetmansdorp, 240 kilometres north of the Orange River. In 1762 W. Van Reenen reached Reheboth. On the total area expropriated the European population grew from 1500 in 1700 to 10,000, including 8500 Boers, in 1773. From 1768 to 1778 alone new loan farms numbered 729. By 1773 the Europeans had collected, by war, barter, theft and breeding, 40,000 cattle and 30,000 sheep.’ The dispossessed

had become their serfs or had fled. But their appetite for cattle, land and labour remained unsatisfied. In 1771 the Khoi-San complained to the Governor that the Boers were stealing their cattle in Swellendam/Stellenbosch."* They retaliated, seizing 900 cattle and attacking the household of a Boer, J. Joubert.

The DEIC replied with a commando, led:in April

1772 by van Jaarsveld, which killed 92 Khoi-San. A second commando, led by de Klerck, killed 51 San 160 kilometres north-east of Swellendam in reprisal for the allged theft of 102 cattle and 519 sheep. A third commando, led by G. Van Wyk, shot “31 Bosjesmans” (“Bushmen”) in the Roggeveld. 58 !Ke prisoners held in the Castle on a charge of murdering a Boer, Teutman, his wife and daughter, were “punished” (unreported, but at least whipped with a “sjambok”, a long whip made of rhino or hippo hide). From 1773 to 1776 the Governor, Plettenberg, using 150 and more forced Khoi-Khoi serfs as troops, launched a further seven commandos against the San, killing an officially recorded 1350 !Ke and enserfing a recorded 400."* Typical entries in reports to Commando leaders like Opperman, spoke of seizing “seven little ones”* and that “Jan Harran had a little Bush girl named Lina registered for 25 years’."® So intransigeant was the San resistance that the Dutch had to admit, in 1776 that “so many thousands of Bushmen have united their inward anger’”’ and a British militarist later reported that the San “have never been known to demand quar-

ter in any situation”."® In 1779, while the San, now accustomed to herding, recovered 750 catttle and 23062

sheep, according to DEIC records, the Governor was still busy ordering measures “for

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the extirpation of the said rapacious tribes”.' Van Raarsveld now asked the Stellenbosch Landdrost for a commando to prevent the Xhosa, under Langa, from sowing their com, and to abort a San-Khoi-Bantu alliance." Rarabe, son of Langa, settled since about 1740 on the Fish River, obtained a usufruct land-grant from the Khoi-Khoi Queen Hoho. A Rarabe group led by Ndlambe, had long had friendly relations with the !Ke hunters."*' Van Jaarsveld’s commando led to another which “killed a great number of Kafirs’ and one, under van der Merwe, which killed 65 'Ke and took “15 little ones”. In October the Govemor officially reinforced a commando which attacked Langa across the Great Fish River, and to restore the 1778 Fish River Dutch boundary line."* Van Jaarsveld tried in vain to draw the Xhosa into a peace-treaty in order to be “at liberty to put them' (the San) "to death and entirely destroy them’.'™ When this divide and rule strategy failed, it was reversed: “The still plundering Bushmen cannot be properly beaten unless the rebellious Kaffers are first forcibly

repelled’.'*° The ensuring commando claimed success over “Coba, Magoti, Thatthoe and Zieka” and took 4630 cattle as booty. Langa was forced back across the Bushman River towards the Fish River. In 1809 Collins wrote that the old residents of Camdaboo put the number of Xhosa killed in these wars at 5900."* Despite the loss of life and cattle, the San-Khoi-Bantu combination had frustrated the settlers and the mighty slave Company standing behind them. The long Third Land War resumed in 1790 when the Government directed a new commando against the San-Khoi combination.'*’ But divide and rule policy succeeded in aligning the Khoi-Khoi chief, Afrikaner (who later trekked to Namibia) against the San-Khoi resistance. In 1792 Governor Sluyskens sent out H.C. Mayner to the front. Maynier was, after de Chavonnes, perhaps, the first “Cape Liberal”. Filled with French Revolutionary ideas, he outlined a divide and rule policy for the Govemor to deal with the “noble savages”."* This policy was to exploit a drought which was weakening the Xhosa, exterminate the 'Ke, buy off the Khoi-Khoi, and contain the

Xhosa by means of treaties.'"* Not having the means of corruption to buy off the Khoi-Khoi or ensnare the Xhosa chiefs into treaties, Maynier sent Lindeque into the Xhosa lands in May 1793 and in June attacked on a wide front, seizing 2000 cattle. His commando had to retire and in August a Maynier-commanded force stole 8000 cattle and 120 women and children on the Buffalo River; another, in October, took

2000 cattle. In November two sons of Langa had to make a separate peace. The 'Ke resistance broke down. Many fled north, only to be pursued by the Boers and, later, by the British. Others were herded into missions, with the defeated Khoi-Khoi,

Capitalist Slavery Versus Communalism

51

by missionaries, thereby “tending to rid them" (the Govemment and Boers) "of the deprivations of the Bosjemans, and procure them servants.... | think the Bosjemen should not be allowed to have any communciations with the colony, except through the missions”. This was the view of Collins, after being convinced by the L.M.S. missionary, Rev. Anderson, of the value of the mission stations. During the 1790-3 war the Moravians had reopened a mission at Baviaanskloof begun in 1736, but abandoned after SanKhoi resistance in 1745. In 1792 on the eve of Maynier’s victory, Baviaanskloof Mission recruited Khoi-Khoi as servants for the wheat farmers and into military units. By 1809 this station had recruited 800 farm-serfs and mercenaries in the Cape Regiment.'” As for the !Ke, their long resistance had been shattered, at last, by the combination of the DEIC, the Boers and the Liberal-with-a-mission, Maynier.

The Conquest of the Khoi-Khoi The central slave government changed hands when the British landed in Muizenberg/Simonstown and took the Cape from Holland in 1795. A mighty imperial power now took the place, at the Cape and on a world scale, of a bankrupt declining power and its colonial companies. The vain efforts to rescue the company by the Governors Plettenberg, Frykenius (1792) and Sluyskens (1793) were finally made hopeless by the expenses of the 1790-3 war and a Boer Rebellion in 1795 against Maynier at Graaf Reinet, led by Coenraad Buys (who had Khoi-Xhosa concubines), Van Jaarsveld and other commando !Ke-hunters. The revolt was subdued by the British General Craig in August 1796 and one of the leaders, Bressler, reinstated as Landdrost of Graaff Reinet. In another rebellion, in late 1798, Buys tried to win Xhosa allies and hid among the Xhosa from British law. Ndlambe, regent for Ngqika, son of Rarabe, rejected Buys’s proposal and, instead, exploited the Boer-British quarrel, by harassing the Boers with sharp, swift sorties in 1799. Caught between the Xhosa and British forces, the Boers capitulated. Eighteen were charged for the rising, which ended in farce, with the accused blaming the still hiding Botha and Buys for the debacle.'* This family quarrel over, the British and Boers reunited in a com-

bined attack on the Khoi-Khoi and Xhosa. The British, masters before and in Clive’s wars in India, in the art of “divide and rule’, exploited a feud in May 1797 between Ndlambe and his nephew, Ngqika."* Ndlambe had to seek grazing land on the fringe of Swellendam. In October 1797 the British asked Chungwa to retum across the Fish River boundary, but he replied: “We won't retreat, but would continue to reside here in the wood and that he won't speak

any more about it’.

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European Colonial Despotism

The British ordered the Boers to dismiss all their Xhosa servants, although the Heemraden Enquiries showed that most Boers' claims that the Xhosa were stealing their cattle were false." In the end, Macartney and his successor, Dundee, recovered for the Boers 10 head for each allegedly “stolen”. When Dundas’s forces, under Vandeleur and Barrow, approached Bruintjies Hoogte, they met the Khoi-Khoi guerilla leader, Klaas Stuurman, himself on his way to join forces with Ndlambe, the Xhosa general/Regent. Barrow disarmed Stuurman’s company and gave Chungwa an ultimatum. When he refused, the British opened fire. The Xhosa stood their ground and Barrow had to retreat to Algoa Bay for reinforcements. With him he took Khoi-Khoi captives. But at Algoa Bay Stuurman decamped and joined Ndlambe with 700 men, 300 horses and 150 guns. As Marais commented: “The Hottentot-Xhosa combination which Maynier had foreseen and

wished to prevent, had become an accomplished fact.’"®” A party of 150 Khoi-Khoi and Xhosa routed a Boer party of 300 on 27 June 1799. News of the victory swept through Graaff Reinet and Swellendam and Khoi-San serfs ran away to join Stuurman."® Boer farmers and troops fled. The only man to admire them was the London Missionary Society missionary, van der Kemp, who comforted the fleeing Boers."® But Dundas complained that the Boers “were very unwilling to assemble under arms", and personally took over the command. With a background of experience in India, he advised Vandeleur to create division among the Xhosa

chiefs.'” The man for the job was the tried and tested Liberal, Maynier, who was installed as Resident Commissioner on Xmas Day 1799 for both Swellendam and Graaff Reinet. Maynier introduced a system of labour contracts for the Khoi-Khoi and drew 700 of Stuurman’s men away from their camp on the Sundays River. Four hundred were registered with farmers. Others were settled near Rietvlei, Western Cape, but this failed. His model was the Moravian Mission's role in the 1792 war. He created a Khoi-Khoi police force to protect the Europeans “against the attacks of the vagabond Caffres or Hottentots”, in a clear reference to the renewed Khoi-San-Xhosa unity. He met Ngqika in November 1799, but the king was then not prepared to tum traitor.’

He did this only after the missionary Van der Kemp had “worked among” the Ngqikas. At this failure of Maynier’s policy, the Graaff Reinet Boers revolted a third time and the misunderstood Maynier had again to leave the district. He was completely exonerated at a Commission of Enquiry in 1802, which proved him a loyal friend of the Boers.

The redoubtable San-killer, Van der Walt replaced Maynier, but Stuurman trounced him with a united Khoi-Xhosa force in February 1802." The Liberal, Maynier, and the Boer, Van der Walt, having failed, Dundas now sent out the L.M.S. missionary, Van der Kemp, to save the Eastem Frontier. He began by founding the Bethelsdorp

Capitalist Slavery Versus Communalism

53

Mission station at Algoa Bay (Port Elizabeth), but many of his “charges” deserted him for Stuurman in March 1802.'% The missionary agent for British colonialism now offered peace to Boesak, Trompetter, Boveland and Stuurman. The first refused out-

right; Stuurman feigned acceptance but joined Chungwa, the Xhosa resister, and the Khoi-Xhosa front remained unshaken by the missionary. They attacked the armed nucleus (Botha’s place) in Bethelsdorp in September 1802. In this first major attack on a colonialist mission, Klaas Stuurman lost a brother.'“ However, Van der Walt

attacked in May 1802 with 368 Boers and 132 Khoi-Khoi troops, including men recruited by Van der Kemp. Covered by 182 wagons, the commando shot 200 resisters and seized 12000 cattle.

On August 2, 1802, another Van der Walt com-

mando shot 27 men and took 3200 cattle, but this Boer Sulla met his own end in a Khoi-Xhosa ambush. Stuurman was defeated by superior forces at Langekloof and Boesak at Oliphants River and in February 1803 an uneasy peace treaty was signed, without the war having been decided either way.'° After the Treaty of Amiens of 1802 the Dutch returned, with Janssens as Govemor

and de Mist as Commissioner. They believed in the British policy of “fortifications in the interior ...for defence against the natives” and in finding out “how the goodwill of the natives may be won and trade with them advanced”.'”° They were advocates of the French Revolution and, like Napoleon, preserved slavery, and made it difficult for slaves to marry or become free. They built locations for the Khoi-San and issued a Proclamation in May 1803 to enforce Maynier’s Service Contracts.'” Many were forced to leave Stuurman and become serfs or low-wage labour, under the Maynier Contract system. In 1803 Janssens and de Mist forced Stuurman onto land on the Gamtoos River, far south of Ndlambe, to divide the Khoi-

Xhosa alliance and provide a labour supply for farmers. Klaas Stuurman died while out hunting with his brother, David. Collins called him a “monster’, but the peoplemoumed his passing. In 1806 David Stuurman “confirmed his independence”, gave refuge to his Xhosa allies, and defiantly “concluded an offensive and defensive alliance with Chungwa against the colony’.'” But a Boer “friend”, C. Routenbach, led David Stuurman into a trap and he was arrested, with his brother, Boschman (i.e., "San”) by Cuyler, the Landdrost. His clans

were settled as a buffer at the Bethelsdorp Mission of Van der Kemp. Cuyler took personal possession of Stuurman’s land, cattle and enserfed his children. He was taken to Cape Town and imprisoned on Robben Island. He escaped and travelled 1100 kilometres to rejoin his old friend, Ndlambe. After the defeat of Ndlambe in 1818, he re-entered the Colony, was arrested and imprisoned in the Cape Town Prison. From here, in 1823, the great old fighter was sent as a convict to New South Wales, Australia, where he died in 1828, his children enserfed across the Indian

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European Colonial Despotism

Ocean, a forgotten and unsung hero.'” His “hidden murderer’, Van der Kemp, was sent to corrupt Ngqika by Lord Caledon, first Governor of the Cape after the surrender in January 1806 of Janssens to Sir D. Baird and Beresford. Van der Kemp hid his real role by telling Collins that he “thought it better that the Natives should have no reason to suppose that he had any connection with the Colonial Government’.'® Van der Kemp had previously helped de Mist to make a separate treaty with Ngqika under which he agreed to stay north of the Fish River. While Ndlambe defied the Fort Frederick garrison and refused even to meet de Mist, Ngqika had fallen so much under Van der Kemp's influence that he betrayed Ndlambe and accepted the treaty. Later he told Collins that he wished to strengthen his friendship with the Christians and to come nearer to the colony. That the favours which they had almost exclusively bestowed on him had made every Kafir his enemy.'®" Having corrupted Ngqika, Van der Kemp frustrated Khoi-Xhosa unity negotiations being undertaken by Trompetter, Stuurman’s old comrade-in-arms and “noted chief of the former insurgents”. He recruited the shattered Khoi-Khoi into Bethelsdorp. He died in 1811. By then he had assured the victory of the British in the 1812 war against the Xhosa. The leading missionary, John Philip, paid tribute to Van der Kemp when he wrote that in this war the “Hottentots of Bethelsdorp...contributed

much to the success of the enterprise”. “The enterprise” was the ongoing Land War against the Africans. Van der Kemp, the missionary, completed the work of Maynier, the Liberal, on behalf of the colonial power and its “legitimate children’, the Boers. For the death of the Stuurmans marked the end of significant Khoi-Khoi resistance. Some of this resistance continued when Jager Afrikaner bumt the German Warmbad mission of the Albrecht brothers in 1811 and initiated a Nama-Herero-Ovambo resistance to German colonisation which was to continue for another century. The ten-year Land War which ended with the capture of Stuurman found the European population to be about 40,000 (double the 20,621 of the 1773 Census), that of the slaves about the same (thanks to the Slave Traffic and slave-breeding, this was four times the 1773 figure of 9902 slaves), and the Khoi-Khoi population

around the Westem Cape in 1806 to be a mere 20,000."* It had been reduced to 10% of the 200,000 which Moodie in 1809 and also the 1969 Oxford History of South Africa estimated it to have been in 1652.'* This literally genocidal decimation carried out the policy of “extermination” which was as much the “final solution" of Von Plettenberg in 1779 as it would be 150 years later for Hitler. Theal (1873-1918), Macmillan (1929), Walker (1928), Wilson (1969), Thompson (1969), Bundy (1988) and other historians have held that it was the 1713, 1755 and 1767 small-pox epi-

Capitalist Slavery Versus Communalism

55

demics which decimated the Khoi-Khoi.'% These epidemics, however, killed 30 % of

the slave population in 1713, and 4% of the slaves in 1767. Since the Khoi-Khoi were mostly out of immediate range of the disease, their losses would have been lower, their immunity being no lower than that of the slaves. These losses would account for not more than a total population loss of up to about 10,000, not for the 90% loss which did occur. Even the latter assumes no natural demographic increase. The fundamental cause of the genocide of the Khoi-Khoi was not the small pox epidemics but the racist land wars. The extermination orders of the DEIC and Boer commandos and their ruthless execution were not due to religion or “culture”, except inasmuch as both were racist, as was the case with the Inquisition and with the Nazis. The coming of British colonialism to the Cape in 1806 meant not only the Conquest of the Khoi-Khoi but the opening of a new era of capitalist dispossession, conquest and racist exploitation. It was already clear in 1806 that this new era belonged to a world system much more unified and purposeful than that to which the Dutch DEIC power had belonged. The old domination of usurous and commercial capital, with its conquistadores and slavers, was being replaced by the domination of industrial capital, with its plantation and wage slaves. No power represented this new form of the capitalist mode better than Britain when it seized the Cape in 1806.

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disarmament. Poshudi rose in anger thundering: "We are impoverished by you chiefs”. Hiding from the wrath of the commoners, the chiefs met in secret with Sprigg. Letlsie wavered. Jonathan, son of Molappo was willing to disarm. But Lerothodi, son of Letsie, and Masupha, son of Moshoeshoe, branded the others as traitors. Letsie now supported the resisters, and asked the East Griquas and

Tembus for support.’ Once again a Sotho-Xhosa-Tembu unity was being forged. Some Hlubi and Fingo traitors like Ramohlakoane were “abandoned by his whole clan, even his sons having gone against him’. Mhlontlo, Mpondomise general ambushed Hope and his party and waged guerilla war. A section of the Fingos “had actually joined the rebels”. The great impenalist, Cecil John Rhodes, then in Cape Town and Kimberley, confessed to the Parliament: “We were virtually licked by the Basutos’”,'2° The British and Boers got help from missionaries Morris and Brownlee, and from Hlubi and Fingo “loyalists”, as well as the Sotho traitor, Jonathan. In September 1881 Rhodes said that the Cape had wasted £ 4 million on this war and that England should take over. This would also protect his Boer “brethren in the Free State”. He declared in July 1883: “Nothing can be done with this uncivilized race until we show them that we are masters”, and England duly annexed Basutoland in 1883. Magistrates were installed on the model worked out by Philip in the Cape and by Shepstone in Natal. Pass Laws were made and arms controlled."* What was left of Moshoeshoe’s country was being converted into a cheap labour reserve of landless, rightless labour to serve on the farms of the Boers and the mines of Rhodes. Half the population of Thaba Nchu itself were forced onto farms and into urban locations. The Barolong themselves would recall Mzilikazi’s prophecy: They [the Boers] will despoil them [the Barolong] of the very lands they have rendered unsafe for us; [the Matabele] they will entice the Bechuana lads to war and the chase, only to use them as pack-oxen; yea, they will refuse to share with them the spoils of victory.... They will turn Bechuana women into beasts of burden to drag their loaded waggons to their granaries.... When the Kiwas [Boers] rob them of their cattle, their children and their lands, they will weep their eyes out of their sockets.'*

Shepstone's Policy and the Langalibalele War The Natal administrator, Sir Theophilis Shepstone, outlined his policy in a series of classic statements which revealed that this colonialist understood that the communal system rested not only on communal land whose dispossession was essential for its replacement by the capitalist mode; but that communalism had also an essential “political” institution: the chiefs. His statements showed, further, that the destruction

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of both pillars of the communal mode of production was compatible with the assimilation of “communal organisation” into capitalist colonialism. This was — and remains to this day — the essence of the policy of “Retribalisation” of successive governments from and since Shepstone. In statements of 1864 and 1874 he declared: When in 1846 | first undertook the management of Natives in Natal | at once found myself face to face with the difficulty that, taking the tribes generally, the Government could not command a balance of power: in other words, it was

uncertain of its ability at any time to put down disaffection among the Natives by means of the Natives themselves.... It was obviously impossible to do so by means of the White colonists alone. Instances constantly occurred, however, of individuals, families and even sections of tribes, becoming dissatisfied with their hereditary chief.... | observed that these malcontents were not unwilling to be placed under headmen of no hereditary rank... Thus the Government had at its disposal a large force upon whose services it could at any moment rely... It is by the gradual and judicious extension of this system, in combination with and under the control of white magistrates, that | think will be found the shortest and safest means of breaking

down the power of the hereditary chiefs, without losing the machinery, as yet indispensable to us, of tribal organisation’*... The chiefs and their subordinate chiefs and indunas are all in point of fact officers of Government in active service... They carry out the orders of the magistrates'”’... All their importance depends upon the breath of the Government.'°

In the framework of this policy Shepstone placed the chiefs, under Mpande, in charge of cheap labour locations, whence cheap labour was drawn off for the new sugar plantations (Rhodes’ brother was a pioneer of these), towns and public works. He said: Locations were formed for the Natives and they were removed into them by orders of the local Government, sometimes by force.... Each location should be under the immediate control of a White magistrate.'”

By 1882 40% of the Zulus outside Zululand (itself a potential labour-reserve), were in such locations. Magistrates "smoked out” labour by imposing a 7 shillings hut tax, raised to 14 shillings in 1876, and exrtended to Basutoland. “Over the years 1857 to 1874 a total amount of £ 57.557 was spent on Native development’, but in one year alone “direct Native taxation brought in as much as £70,000"."* Thus taxation, over this period, was about 20 times more than expenditure on health, schools, etc. The magistrate-chiefs system was linked to the system of cheap labour: “The magistrate

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will use his legitimate influence to cause the chiefs to induce their young men to enter into the service of the farmers”,'*’ and, in addition a labour-tax was imposed.

An

1852 Commission proposed a higher hut-tax, but “Kraals” willing to work for wages would be exempt: “By the above measure of Finance the Government would be put into possession of a large and regular supply of youthfuly Kafir labour’”.'® Missionaries taught that nakedness was sinful and the Commission stated: “..many would be obliged to work to procure the means of buying clothing" thereby widening the demand for British and also Cape textiles. This labour policy was coupled in 1856 with a segregationist education policy. “Native Education’ was placed under the missionaries. In 1858 the Central education Board comprised eight Europeans, including five Very Reverend Gentlemen.'® Judicial apartheid was adopted in 1849 when Shepstone adapted “Native Law’ for “those whose ignorance and habits of life unfit them for the duties of civilized life’.'* From 1879 chiefs had to administer Native Law and a Native High Court was set up. The “White” Govemor was, by law, the “Supreme Chief’, who could fine “communal groups” (now landless, chiefless and hence no longer real communal social formations). He could recruit corvee labour and was almighty: The Supreme Chief is not subject to the Supreme Court, or to any other Court of Law (Natal Act, 17 December, 1875; and Act 44, 1887).

The Cheap-Labour and "tribalisation" policies had a political arm: the 1856 Responsible Goverment Charter loaded the vote against Africans by imposing high income qualifications, private property ownership (to disqualify the majaority, who had communal land-tenure). The same anti-African racist laws applied in the 1852 Cape Representative Government Act. In 1865 the Natal Government announced: It is deemed inexpedient that Africans should vote... It is expedient by law to exclude such of the Native Population, as shall continue subject to Native Law, from claiming

the electoral franchise.'%

Thenceforth to the present day the Natal African population has remained disfranchised. lt was against this totalitarian system, shaped by Shepstone, that the chief Langalibalele revolted in 1874. His communal group had been settled at Weenen in 1849. After 1870 Shepstone tried to shift and disarm those who bought guns from wages earned on the Kimberley diamond mines. Fodo and Langalibalele resisted such laws, arrested Shepstone’s messengers sent to summon the chief to Durban, and Sir. B. Pine, Governor, despatched troops who drove the people off their already

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wretched settlement. Langalibalele fled, was arrested in Basutoland after being betrayed by a son of Moshoeshoe." He was tried, imprisoned at what is now the location of Langa, on the Cape Flats, and banished to Robben Island, from where he was released in 1875, after an outcry, in which Bishop Colenso of Natal took part.

His communal group's lands were “dispersed among the farmers”.'*’ Colenso defended Langalibalele’s innocence, but undermined the continued resistance of

Langalibalele by trying to induce in him faith in appeals to the Cape Liberals, Westminster and the Queen. Colenso had been a close friend of the tyrannical racist, Shepstone, for 20 years.’* Colenso broke with Shepstone over the Langalibalele atrocity and arrest,’® but the liberal nature of his defence during the trial was

criticised by resisters around Langalibalele. This kind of resistance and the resistivity of the tightly knit Zulu monarchic communal structures had forced Grey to call for Indian labour to be imported in 1859,"° from the unemployed left by the crushing of the 1857 “Indian Mutiny’. The Zulus were made to pay for part of the importation of the cheap Indian labour by higher tariffs on articles of “Native Consumption”. This was also a” divide and rule” device to turn the Zulu against their Indian co-exploited and co-dispossessed. By 1872 there were 5000 Indian labourers and by 1886 30,000. Ninety per cent of the sugar-plantation workers were now Indian. In 1880 the indenture term was raised from three to ten years, as the Zulu still reflused, despite their defeat in 1879, to work en masse for the Boer and British planters. Despite franchise, property and tradinglicence discrimination, many left the labour market and by 1891 67% were free from indentureship. A merchant class of Indians slowly formed, to be led by Gandhi before the end of the 19th century. Further Indian importation was difficult because of the rise of nationalism in India. But the rising labour-demands of the sugar-barons and mine-magnates made a new onslaught on the Zulu people and their still-extant mode of production imperative and urgent. The Victory and Defeat of Cetshwayo, 1879

In 1856 Cetshwayo overthrew Mbulazi and rivalled the traitor-king, Mpande. Against Grey's advice (he wanted to carve the Zulus up under Mpande’s sons), Shepstone declared Cetshwayo the heir to Mpande in 1861 and when Mpande died in 1872 Cetshwayo became the officially and traditionally recognised king of the Zulu. But Grey proved more correct than Shepstone. For the new king became not a magistrate-controlled “Inirect Rule” agent, but a centre of resistance, which grew with the demand for labour stimulated by sugar and diamonds. He tried to form an alliance with the Transvaal resister, Sekukuni, who routed the Boers in 1876, and

with the Mpondos, held military manouevres in 1877 and England now feared a

Fig. 13: The 1879 defeat of the Zulu king, Cetshwayo (1836-1884). The first picture shows his defeat at Ulundi after his victory over the British on January 22, 1879, at Isandlwana, then his forced embacation prior to visiting

Queen Victoria in London.

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“combination between Zulu, the Bapedi and other Native tribes against the Whites

generally”.'“'_

Shepstone annexed the Transvaal in 1877, to save the Boers from

Sekukuni and from a general uprising and Lord Camarvon told Queen Victoria: “That we have escaped a great and serious war up to this time is entirely due to him'

(Shepstone).'” The Governor, Sir Bartle Frere sent a gun-boat patrol up the Zululand coast. Sensing an attack, Cetshwayo expelled the missionaries from his midst. But “White chiefs”, like John Dunn, had undermined Zulu social defences with unscrupulous trading and labour-recruiting from 1856 to 1873." Bishop Colenso, who had known Cetshwayo since 1855, encouraged the king to believe in the “protection” of Queen Victoria and the Cape and British Liberals, and this was to prove fatal to the communal monarchy.

For the Queen did not, as

Cetshwayo was led to hope by Colenso, join Colenso in opposing the invasion of Zululand by Frere in 1879."* Colenso, the Liberal Bishop, had already, with whatever intentions, caused Cetshwayo to be white-anted by Grant, a trader chosen by Colenso to act for Cetshwayo (Colenso believed the king needed a “White” interpreter and advisor and sent him Grant, when the latter needed an income after being in financial distress). Cetshawayo’s faith in “British justice” had been fostered, to no end, by Colenso’s support, in public, for Langalibalele in 1874-5. Cetshwayo believed Colenso’s theory that the 1879 war was brought on by Natal and Cape officials who misled the British Government into invading Zululand. Cetshwayo’s faith in Colenso's theory was strengthened by Colenso’s previous support for Frere’s policy." Colenso broke with Frere (but not his racist policy) only in January 1879." Colenso, who is held out to be a genuine liberal, thus politically helped the 1879 war of Frere which he was publically condemning, albeit to his own social, personal and political discomfort amidst English society throughout Natal and “at home’.

In January 1879 Lord Chelmsford invaded Zululand through Rorke’s Drift. Cetshwayo lured the British from Isandlhlwana and routed 1800 troops, exploiting the “demoralisation of [British] Native contingents” on 22 January, 1879. England shook with indignation when she heard that the nephew of Napoleon Ill, then in exile in Kent, had been killed by the Zulus. But Marx and Engels defended the Zulu resistance against the “more advanced” capitalist mode of production (an object lesson — a century ago — against Euro-Marxist “class analysis’). The victory is still celebrated, together with that of the Ethiopian army over Italy at Adowa in 1896, as historic highlights of the long African anti-colonial resistance. The retreating British, helped by “Coloured” and Sotho (under Col. Domford) and Mcuni (under Chief Pagodi) allies, held the Zulus at Rorke’s Drift.” While “White” Natal trembled behind barricades in Greytown, Pietermaritzburg and patrols in

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Durban, Cetshwayo won another battle at Hlobane, where Piet Uys was slain. But Wood held Kambala against the cream of Cetshwayo’s army. In March the Zulu troops had to retreat, using mainly shortened assegais, under heavy fire from MartiniHenrys and seven-pounder cannon, and Chelmsford defeated them at Ulundi. Cetshwayo was captured in August and taken by boat to Cape Town. There he was visited by Colenso in the Castle, in November 1880. He was moved to Oude Moulen

farm, where Langalibalele had also been detained. From Cape Town, he sailed to pay a courtesy visit to his Queen, Victoria. He retumed to rule, without real power, and with his country under the feet of the Boers and British. When Colenso died in 1883, Cetshwayo had little but praise for him. But Colenso, before dying, had supported a cession by his old friend, Grant, who in 1884 held more power than the Zulu king himself, of chunks of Zululand to the Boer “farmers”."* Kimberley could now

boast: "The Zulu power has been broken”. The British hounded the Zulus to work for them, cut out locations south of the Umhlatsi from Zulu lands, propped up thirteen petty chiefs and one of them, Sibebu, curbed even the shattered powers of Cetshwayo when he was reinstated in 1882. In 1884 the grand old resister-king died at Eshowe. The Dispossession of the Tswana The dispossession and absorption into capitalism of the Zulu, Sotho and Xhosa communal social formations was accompanied by an insiduous, apparantly less violent, but equally destructive, assimilation of the remaining Sotho and of the entire Tswana society. The Transvaal Boers led by Paul Kruger, helped by the informer Magota, attacked the Sotho resister, Sekwati, in December 1851 and Sechele and Moila in March 1853. In 1854 the men of the resister hero, Makapane, killed the

hated H. Potgieter and when attacked by P. Potgieter, M. Pretorius and P. Kruger, they took refuge in the famous archaeological caves. There they were trapped and the Boers shot down 1000 in cold blood as they ran out. Thousands more of Makapane’s commoners died of famine." The Boers now attacked the Tswana. Guided by the Taungs missionary spy in Gasibon’s capital, Rev. Ross, the Boers killed Gasibon in 1858 and then rode on to his successor, Mahura, with 414 men. Carrying out Pretorius’ order “To act in the most prudent manner, so that no offence shall be given to Black or White’, Kruger

told Mahura “I am not bloodthirsty’. Then, backed by O.F.S. troops, he attacked Mahura at the Hertz River in August, took 2800 cattle and 23 wagons and made him pay the cost of his own conquest. In July 1865 Kruger reported that a British force had “driven back” 5,000 “Makatesh” warriors. Together the Boers and Britons drove the Transvaal Tswana into Bechuanaland. There old Mahura fell victim to David

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Arnot's intrigues. On his death in March 1874 his son Mankoroana was installed by the British, via the Cape, as “Paramount Chief of the Batlopin” and was used to keep the diamond lands in England’s hands."*" Having driven out the western Sotho-Tswana, Kruger asked the President for 2000 men in March 1868 to fight Mapela, chief of the far-northem communal groups. |n June Boer commandos killed over 300, burnt Mapela’s town, took 2000 cattle and fired the crops of Mapela, Machem and Callacal. Mapela was forced to trek and Makapan, still resisting, to abandon his cave-strongholds.** When Mapela replied: "It is no small thing to change one’s abode”, Kruger promised, in July 1869, to let him occupy part of his old lands. The promise was empty, for in October Mapela complained that surveyors were cutting up his land. The resisters were enserfed when Pretorius annexed land in the east and north of the Transvaal. The Boers now threatened the Matabele.

Long before, Robert Moffat, based in

Kuruman from 1820, had “gained the friendship of Mzilikazi" and when the old king died in 1868,'* the Matabele chief, Matsheng, called for British help on the advice of the L.M.S. missionary, J. Mackenzie. Britain forced the Boers to withdraw, only to take the Matabele lands for themselves. They similarly “aided” the Tswana when Pretorius tried to annex land north of Kuruman in December 1869. The conquest of the Northem Tswana is as much part of the story of the Transvaal as it is of Bechuanaland. In 1876 the Tswana king, Khama, told England: “We are like money...they" [the Boers] “sell us and our children”. In October 1881 Massouw, Boer vassal, fought Mankoroana, now a British vassal. Boer J.G. Van Niekerk took the disputed land from both chiefs and set up the Stellaland Republic in July 1882. A like “Republic” was formed at Goshen. Rhodes, by then in power, made Van Niekerk recognise a British Protectorate over Bechuanaland, but allowed the Boers to have titles in their “Republics”, for he looked upon them as the Empire’s “younger and more fiery sons’. With an eye already on what would, within a decade, become “Rhodesia”, he saw Bechuanaland as “the

Suez Canal of the trade of this country’. He put a magistrate over Mankoroana, got “Stellaland” ceded to the Cape Colony and, with the aid of Warren and Rev. Mackenzie, annexed “Goshenland”, and thus a thief robbed a thief."

The former Boer vassal, Massouw, now resisted S.A.R. annexation, but was defeated by Joubert in 1885 and his communal group was dispersed and enserfed in the Transvaal. In September 1884 the Boers annexed Montsioa’s lands, but in October the British drove them out of this part of Bechuanaland. Thus the annexation and counter-annexation of Tswana communal groups and lands defined the Bechuanaland — Transvaal border as much as the Limpopo River did. Khama, of whom Milner, later to be an architect of “White Union”, was to say: "I liked the Old Man”, was the dupe of missionaries Moffat and Mackenzie and surrendered without a

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struggle. In November 1895 Britain formally annexed Bechuanaland and Rhodes gloated: “| see Kruger sitting in Pretoria with Bechuanaland gone”. The Tswana commoners, however, resisted until 1897. Col. Dalgety and Vryberg Boers attacked Tswana rebels, led by the chief Gatishiwe, in the Langeberg. Milner, the real conquistadore of the Tswana, wrote: “It took a four-months’ campaign and more than 2000 well-armed men to get the better of some hundreds of starving Bechuana’”.'®° The Resistance and Defeat of Sekukuni

From 1870 on the wars of conquest were fought under the mounting aegis of monopoly finance capital pouring into and being regenerated by the newly opened diamond, and, soon afterwards, in the 1880's, the gold mines. This was the age of imperialism which no one personified better than Cecil Rhodes. He, too, was the main organiser and beneficiary of the penultimate and final conquests. What the Boers and the “liberal” commercial-industrial capital-driven Cape and Natal governments did or could not do, he, his bureaucracy and army, using “Black” (as he called them) collaborators, acting on behalf of and in the interests of his De Beers and Chartered companies, completed. This completion was swift and total. It was achieved against the background of inter-imperialist haste and rivalry. When the European powers carved Africa up on paper at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, the fate was sealed of those communal societies of South Africa which had not already gone under the imperialist land and labour bloodbath. The conquest of the Transvaal Sotho resistance fell into this imperialist period. In 1877, Sekukuni, son of Sewati, resisted Boer inspectors entering his lands in North Transvaal. He had sheltered one, Johannes, who had left the communal group due to missionary influence, but had then repented and come back. The Republic used the “fugitive” pretext, used also in the “War of the Axe”, to declare war on Sekukuni.

The real fighting was done by the Swazi allies of the Boers. Though Johannes was killed, Sekukuni routed the Boers, who took to their heels, and “The Swazis ...were so disgusted with the cowardice of their white allies that they left them afterward”. President Brand pleaded with his heroes, but 1000 out of 1400 deserted. Sekukuni routed another commando, killing its leader, Van Schlickman.

The Boer

state, then also in a state of financial collapse from the inefficient farming and trading of the Boers, the impact of British rivalry and comeptition, and the cost of the Sotho resistance, panicked and Shepstone came in from Natal on 11 A pril, 1877 to save

"6650 Boers from one and a half million Natives”.'® The Boer President, Burghers, on Kruger’s suggestion, complained to Russia,

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Prussia and the U.S.A., but said he did not want to fight Shepstone, because “The

Government ...by no means wishes to take a step by which the white inhabitants of South Africa would be divided”.'®’ Noting the incapacity of the Boers to defeat Sekukuni and the danger of a general revival of a united resistance in all the colonies and republics, Shepstone mourned the “decay of power and ebb of authority” in the Republic” and in his Annexation Address declared: That the Sicocoeni war...has not only proved suddenly fatal to the resources and reputation of the republic, but has...disclosed for the first time to the Native trbes outside the Republic, from the Zambezi to the Cape, the great change that has taken place in the relative strength of the white and black races. That this disturbance at once shook the prestige of the white man in South Africa and placed every European community in peril. That this common danger...has imposed the duty upon those who have the power to shield the enfeebled civilization from the encroachment of barbarism and inhumanity.'*

Sekukuni rejected British Paramountcy in February, 1878. Sir Gamet Wolseley mounted 450 troops and 1000 Swazi and other allies in 1879, captured his royal capital, cleared the famous caves, stormed his mountain fortress, captured him, murdered his family, put a magistrate over his lands, and deposed him.

His

successor, Mampura, is said to have been persuaded to kill the grand resister in 1882, but was himself defeated by an army of 2000 burghers after eight months’ resistance, together with the “Mapoch Njabel”. Before Sekukuni’s defeat, Shepstone

had heaped new apartheid laws on the Transvaal communalists and workers.

His

policy, in his own words, was: Equal justice is guaranteed to the persons and property of both white and colouredbut the adoption of this principle does not and should not involve the granting of equal civil rights, such as the exercise of the right of voting by savages or their becoming members of a Legislative Body, or their being entitled to other civil privileges which are incompatible with their uncivilized condition.'®

From 1877 to 1881 his son, H. C. Shepstone, was Secretary for Native Affairs, a new state department. Once again, liberal England had constructed the basic machinery of apartheid. He introduced his father's system of magistrates, locations and “Native Law’. All these were retained by the Boers'® after they defeated their British rivals and masters at Laingsnek and Majuba in January-February 1881 and regained their independence in the Pretoria Convention of August 1881. Clause 13 of this Anglo-Boer Convention read:

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Natives will be allowed to acquire land, but the grant or transfer of such land will in every case be made to and registered in the name of the Native Location Commissioner, who would hold the land ‘in trust for the Natives’.

Clause 14 was a Pass Law, made by Kruger at the behest of the Anglo-German mining multi-nationals. The Boers were learning fast from England how to build an apartheid capitalist state. The German War For Namibia

In as much as the invasion of Namibia was part of the general War of Dispossession, and inasmuch as Namibia, under the name of South West Africa, was

handed over by the Versailles Treaty of 1919 to the White Union of South Africa, and was ruled by that Union for 70 years, until its formal Independence in 1990, the history of its conquest was part of the history of South Africa. This continuity of Namibian with South African history was expressed in the League of Nations Covenant of 1919, and the League’s Mandates of 1919, 1921 and 1925 gave the White Union the full power: “to apply the laws of the Union of South Africa to the territory’."*" . This and the 70-year South African occupation, followed a bloody German colonisation which lasted 30 years, from 1888 to 1918, which, in turn, came in the wake of the “civilizing mission” begun by the Albrecht brothers at Warmbad from 1805 to 1811. Their own path had been broken by “explorations” by Jacobus Coetzee, Willem van Reenen and Pieter Pienaar into Keetmanshoop, Reheboth and

further northern San-Khoi settlements.'? The mission was destroyed in 1811 by Jager Afrikaner, who had led slaves and herders away from the Cape after 1800." In 1815 missioanry J.H. Schmelen went to Namaland, founded Bethanie mission and made a careful study of the communal customs and way of life."* In 1842 the Rhenish missionaries Hugo Hahn and Heinrich Kleinschmidt settled at Windhoek, which had been founded by Jonker Afrikaner. In 1844 Hahn formed a mission among the Hereros at Barmen and in 1845 Kleinschmidt did likewise at Reheboth among the Nama. The stage was now set for the first battles of a land war that was to destroy two generations of Nama, Herero, Ovambo and other resisters. In 1842 Jonker Afnkaner and the Namas were drawn into a battle with the Hereros under Tsamuaha. The peace-treaty they made"® was broken by the effects of Boer and British traders, for Afrikaner fell into debt with them, needed cattle to pay his debt, and in August 1850 attacked the Hereros to get the means to square his creditors. In this way the presence of the missionaries, themselves traders, the Boers and the British, provoked “inter-communal war’ by economic means. The

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subsequent German invasions were assisted by the careful surveys and studies made in Namibia in 1850 to 1852 by F. Galton,'® the British scientist, who acted for the Royal Geographic Society, and advised the colonialist explorations of Burton and Speke in East and Central Africa. Later, in the heyday of the carving up of Africa at the 1884-5 Berlin Conference, the meticulous work of the German missionary, T. Hahn, concerning especially the San and Khoi-Khoi,"® was used by the first Nazis, the German generals and officers who waged the genocidal wars of dispossession in Namibia. In 1860 Afrikaner attacked the Ovambo further north, towards the Portuguese Angolan frontier, from which another colonial power was economically pressurising and destabilising the coexistence of Nama, Herero, Ovambo, Damara and other communal societies.

In 1863, after Afnkaner’s death, his son Christian fought with

Maherero, son of Tjamuaha, now also dead. Each communal group was increasingly influenced by missionaries “in their midst’, and in this way the “divide and rule “game could not only be played, but be given every appearance of “pre-colonial’” conflictuality. In 1863 the copper mining prospectors, Kleinschmidt and a Swede, Andersson, armed Maharero and incited him to defeat and kill Christian Afrikaner.

Andersson and the Rhenish missionaries now became Maherero’s “advisers” and formed a “buffer” at Reheboth against Christian's successor, Jan Jonker Afrikaner. In January 1864 the Germans, Hereros and Reheboth “buffer’ attacked Jan Jonker

Afrikaner and took 3000 cattle. Andersson himself became the “Herero” general and again attacked Afrikaner’s people, who, at this, rose against the Reheboth mission and destroyed it." The fleeing Kleinschmidt died, followed two years later by Andersson. Afrikaner followed up this victory against German colonialism by attacking the Walfish Fishing Station in December 1867. Bismarck, German Chancellor, now asked the Cape Government of England to

protect the Rhenish missions. The Governor at Cape Town, Sir Philip Wodehouse, sent reinforcements to the harassed Germans and these, together with the Rhenish

missionary, Hahn, traders, Boers and Herero allies, attacked Afrikaner in strength. The Nama, however, adopted “scorched earth” tactics, and the Herero had to “eat

scorpions” (hence the war was called the “Scorpions War"). In September 1870 Hahn organised a “peace” agreement at Okahandja and this treaty placed Afrikaner under missionary “care” in Windhoek. In 1871 the missionaries tricked Maherero into asking the Cape Government for “White officials”, and in 1876 Palgrave was duly sent up. In this way England helped her German rival to police the resisting Africans. In 1872 the Rhenish mission built a “powder-tower’ fort at Otjimbingwe. It was to be assailed 30 times by Nama resisters to the German genocide. Like the German Mission at Okahandja, 70 kilometres north of Windhoek, this fort became a historical monument under the South African occupation.

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European Colonial Despotism

The British seized what they could under the nose of the Germans when they annexed Walvis Bay in 1878, confirming the annexation in the 1884 Berlin Conference. In December 1880 Maherero fell while fighting a “divide and rule” battle against the Nama. The Afrikaner clan now yielded its leadership of the Nama to the Witbooi clan. Hahn left his pulpit in June 1882 to persuade Witbooi and Afrikaner to accept a new “peace”. They rejected his terms, and Witbooi was killed by a traitor on his own side. He was succeeded by the famous guerilla general, Hendrick Witbooi, who became virtual king of the resistance against German colonisation. Witbooi was joined by wage-eamers on German farms and in the new German-dominated towns. These settlers were now joined by German troops armed with machine guns made by Krupps. In May 1883 F.A.E. Luderitz, from Bremen, “bought” from the Nama chief, “Joseph Frederick” in Bethanie, land by illegal treaty, converting usufruct into purchase. In August he “bought” the whole coast from the Orange River to 26 degrees south, and 30 kilometres wide. In April 1884, Bismarck wired his Consul-General, Lippart, in Cape Town, that Luderitz’s “purchases” were under the Protection of the German Government.'® Luderitz promptly “purchased” the rest of the Namibian coast. Dr. Naghtigall, Consul-General for the West Coast of Africa, made “defence” alliances with African chiefs and placed them under German Protection. Maherero signed. Witbooi refused. But in October Maherero signed a treaty with an Englishman, Lewis, repudiating his treaty with Naghtigall, but, under pressure from the missionaryscholar, Hahn, rescinded the British in favour of the German treaty, and became a German instrument until his death in October 1890, when he was succeeded by his

son Samuel. In July 1889 German troops under Curt Von Francois landed to quell Witbooi’s intransigence. More troops landed in 1893 and Witbooi was defeated. He sought to make an alliance with Samuel Maherero, but, thanks to the influence of the

missionaries and settlers, failed. In September 1894, after an attack by Leutwen, he had to submit. More land was illegally “bought” from Samuel Maherero. German settlers poured onto the lands of the Namibians. They were now under one of the major imperialist powers. In terms of the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference and over their dead bodies, their country had become a German colony. The German colonisation concluded the main modal struggle between capitalist

colonialism and the communal pre-communal and communal San, Khoi-Khoi and Bantu social formations. As this modal struggle radiated outwards from its focus in the Cape Peninsula its wake became a class struggle between the dispossessors and the dispossessed. The modal struggle completed itself during the imperialist period epitomised by the 1884-5 Berlin Conference, the Scramble for Africa among the European powers and the mining revolution in the Cape and Transvaal. From then onwards, while the modal struggle flickered,on with resistances led by Dinizulu in Natal and Hendrik Witbooi in German South West Africa during the late 19th

The Killing of the Cattle and of the Communal Mode (1850-1885)

111

century, it was becoming entwined with a ever-widening and deepening class struggle. By the end of the Wars of Dispossession this class struggle was already taking over from, continuing and at the same time replacing the modal struggle.

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aa" Awl). Bantustans, 4-5, 94, 118, 141, 149, 150, 154, 156, 171, 176 Bapedi, 77-78, 103

Athlone, 188, 191-192, 214

Baralong, 27, 47, 99, 138

Atlantis, 203

Barberton, 115

Atrocities, 34, 69, 80, 21, 34

Barcelona, 224

Atteridge-ville, 191 Augsburg, 33-34 Augustyn, 4 Australasia, 8, 18 Australia, 205, 211, 221, 224

Barclays, 187, 202, 204 Barends, B., 75 Barker, 35, 64 Barkley, 98 Barlow, 187, 197

Australia, 6, 14-15, 54 Australian, 196, 204 Austria, 186 Autshumao, ['Harry], 37, 39, 41, 57 AWB, 223, 225 Awerbach, M., 151 Ayliff, Rev., 61, 80 Ayliff, 95 Azania, 27, 194-196, 211 Azapo, 201, 204, 211, 214, 219-220, 222-224 Aztec, 8, 15, 24 a-tlokwa, 74 Be

Barnato, B., 114 Barnet, 97 Barolong, 68, 71, 74-75, 78 Barotseland, 115 Barreto, 34 Barrow, J., 25, 52, 63 Basarwa, 21 Basner, 158 Basra, 27 Basuto, 83, 88-89, 98-99, 120, 127, 138, 150 Basutoland, 77, 81 Bataung, 74 Batavia, 38-39, 46 Batgotla, 78

Baatjies, 84-5, 88

Batlhaseng, 74 Batlokwa, 78, 97

Babangida, Ibrahim, 221

Battuta, Ibn, 2

Babylonia, 1, 9

Batwa, 18, 21, 74, 76

Bach, 146, 150, 158

Baviaanskloof, 51

325

Index

BBC, 226 BCM, 201 BCMA, 219 BCP, 186 Beaufort, 75 Bechuana, 21, 180

Beir, 22 Beje, 69 Belem, 28, 37 Belgian, 223 Belgium, 190, 206 Bellville, 173, 188, 213-214 Bengal, 40, 44 Berea, 85-86, 88, 98 Bergstrasser-Institute, 195 Berlin, 106, 109-110, 146, 199, 212, 220, 227 Bethelsdorp, 53, 62 Biafra, 185, 207 Biggar, 69, 72 Biko, Steve, 184, 186-187, 192, 194, 200 Bisho, 224-225 Bismarck, 109-110, 120 Blaauwberg, 65 Bleek, W.H.|., 25-26 Bloemfontein, 77, 181, 195 Blyden, W., 185

Boas, Franz, 4 Boer-British, 51

Boer-missioanry, 74 Boer-Portuguese, 67 Boesak, 53, 63

Boigny, Houphouet, 207, 220 Boipatong, 224 Bojivar, 30 Boksburg, 225

Brezhnev, 196

Britain, 14, 55, 57, 69, 73 British-Boer, 68 British-German, 114 British-Indian, 163 Britsih settlers, 64, 70-2 Broadbent, S., 25, 74 Brockway, Fenner, 147-148 Broederbond, 215, 219, 223 Brookes, E., 153 Broome, 21 Brownlee, C., 61, 71, 79 Bruges, 32 Brussels, 150

Brutus, D., 218 Bryant, A.T., 68 Buchanan, 161, 167 Bucharin, 150, 206 Buirski, 145

Bulgaria, 212 Bulhoek, 120, 142 Bultfontein, 98 Buluwayo, 116, 123

Bulwer-Lytton, 93 Bundesrat, 195

Bundy, Colin, 6, 55, 59, 96, 173, 195, 214 Bunga, 118-120, 143 Burchell, W.J., 25 Burger, Die, 189 Burma, 169, 175

Burton, H., 109, 136-137 Bush, President, 221, 223 Bushman, 27, 30, 50, 62 Buthelezi, Gatsha, 120, 187, 213

Butterworth, 118-119

Bologne, 32

Bophuthutswana, 192, 213, 226 Borghorst, Jacob, 42

oa

A., 8, 32-33

Boschman, 53

Bosjemans, 51 Bosnia, 212 Botha, Pik, 194, 220, 224 Botha, Pres., 128-129, 131, 135

CAC, 132, 162, 167, 171, 173 CAC-CAD, 162 Caesar, 46 Cairo, 2, 32

Botha-Smuts, 139 Botswana, 20, 22-23, 27, 72, 176, 187, 188, 206 Boyce, Rev., 61, 71 Boydell, T., 137, 147 BPA, 192 Braudel, Fernand, 2-4, 10, 16 Braudelian, 3-4 Braune, 46 Brazil, 15-16, 32-33, 38, 48, 196, 205 Brazzaville, 207 Brazzaville-Cairo-Pretoria, 193 Bremen, 36, 110

Calderwood, 61, 81 Caledon, Gov., 54, 58, 97, 173, 175,

Breytenbach, 220

Capitalism-imperialism, 212, 227

California, 13 Callacal, 105 Cameron, Rev., 85 Cameroons, 27, 125

Campbell, J., 21, 25, 75 Canada, 6, 14-15, 37, 142 Canadian, 206, 221

Canterbury, 181 Cao, Diego, 30 Capitalism, 95, 104, 114, 176, 212, 227

326

Capitalist, 176, 187, 212, 222, 227-228 Capitalist-colonialism, 1, 11-12, 212, 227 Capitalists, 9, 30, 33, 47-48,124, 204, 224, 227 Cardiff, 140 Caribbean, 36, 60, 146

Carlyle, T., 3, 62 Carnarvon, Lord, 103, 125 Carneson, F., 154, 172 Caselis, Rev., 61, 74, 83, 85

Castenhada, Lopes de, 31 Cathcart, Sir George, 85-86, 96 Catholics, 123 Césaire, Aimé, 178

Cetswayo, 102-4 Ceuta, 30 Ceylon, 34, 36, 40

Ceylonese, 47 Chainoquas, 43

Index

Communism, 2, 6, 19, 165, 171, 173, 176, 177, 184, 200, 228 Communist, 7, 12, 183

Conakry, 204 Conquistadores, 3, 11, 14, 55 Cooper, J.R., 156 Cradock, Gov., 59, 62

Craig, Major, 51, 62 Creswell, W., 128, 137, 144 Crewe, 131 Croat, 212 Croat-Muslim, 212 Croatia, 212 Crusades, 6, 11, 30-31

Cuba, 176, 193, 207 Cuban, 207 Cunha, Tristan da, 33

Cuyler, L., 53, 62-64, 80

Chamberlain, Joseph [Colonial Secretary], 126, 128 Chavonnes, D.P. de, 42, 48, 50

Czarist, 12 Czech, 220 Czechoslovakia, 176, 212

Chelmsford, Lord, 103-104 Chien, Tssuma, 2

[es

Chalmers, W., 61, 87, 93

F., 28, 32-3

Chile, 226 Chilembwe, John, 120

China, 116, 150, 153, 159, 175 Chinese, 3, 9-10, 116, 128, 176, 177, 199 Christianity, 30, 35, 60 Chungwa, 51-53, 62

CIA, 190 CIS, 227 Ciskei, 149, 171, 208, 216, 225 Ciskeian, 119

Clark, J.A., 87, 141 Clarke, Sir M.,126-127 Cochim, 32, 34

Cochoquas, 43 Codesa, 202, 222, 224-227

Coetzee, K., 108, 218 Colenso, Bishop, 102-4

Collins, R., 50-1, 53-4, 62 Colonialism, 85, 95, 100, 109-110, 175, 188-9, 219, 223, 228 Colonialist, 99, 109

Colonies, 179, 186, 194, 199 Colonists, 92, 100, 126, 135 Colour-bar, 13 Colour-discrimination, 15, 182, 189, 227

Coloured-African, 182 Columbia, 138 Columbian, 228 Columbus, C., 8, 10-11, 32 Commonwealth, 161

Communal-capitalism, 122 Communalism, 99, 120

Communalists, 95, 107

D'Urban, Benjamin, 79 Da Gama, Vasco, 31-32 Dadoo, Dr. Y., 160, 166, 180 Dakar, 37, 217 Daresalaam, 209, 220 Dart, R.A., 18 Darwin, 13 Darwin, C., 178 Da Silva, 30 Davidson, B., 178 Davies, Rev. H., 62 Davis, Rev., 61, 80

De Beers, Anglo, 180, 197, 202-203, 206, 227 De Gaulle, General, 176 De Klerk, F.W., 205-220, 225-6 Delegoa, 22, 24, 40, 48, 65-66, 68 Denmark, 204-205

De Souza de Sepulveda, 35 Deuntjie, 46 Diagne, Blaise, 178 Diaz, B., 30 Difaqane, 48, 68, 73-77 Diliza, 184, 188 Dingaan, 184 Dingane, 61, 66, 68-73, 76, 78-9

Dingiswayo, 67-70 Dinizulu, 110, 129 Diodorus, 1 Donkin, Sir R., 64-65, 79 Drakensberg, 27, 68, 70, 73 Du Bois, W.E.B., 178

Index

Du Plessis, 161 Dube, 138-139, 147, 154, 156-157 Dudley, R.O., 163, 175, 213, 214, 222 Duncan, P., 129

Dundas, 52-53 Dundee, 52 Dunn, 69

Durban, 71, 101, 104, 130, 145, 147, 149, 164, 169, 172

Fascism, 113, 136, 153, 155, 158 Fascist, 156, 158, 169 Fataar, Alie, 175 Ferreirastown, 225 Fisher, Bram, 176, 183 Fitzgerald, Dr., 93 Fitzherbert, 37 Florence, 32

Durkheim, E., 3 Durkheimian, 188

FRAC, 172

Dutch, 180, 191

France, 186, 205, 207, 224, 226 Francois, Curt Von, 110 Frederick, Chielf Joseph, 110 Fredericksburg, 64 Freiberg, Institute of, 195 FRELIMO, 188, 193 French, 83, 120, 160, 175179, 196, 206, 215 French-NATO-South, 207 Frykenius, 51 Fu-Chih, Wang, 2 Fugger, Jacob, 33

Dutch-Germanic, 36

E

221-223, 227

EC-backed, 212 Edendale, 176 Edward, 121-122, 130 EEC-made, 180 EEC-s, 196 Egypt, 1, 8-9, 13, 30, 72, 199, 205

Egyptian, 2 Egyptians, 9, 24 Eiselen, 154, 170-171 Eiselen-de-Vos-Malan, 177 Elliott, Rev., 64, 124 Elsiesriver, 191 Emancipation, 46, 60, 63

Emancipationists, 58 Emancipators, 46 Engels, F., England, 179 English, 190, 201 Erasmus, 179-180 Eritrea, 212 Eritrean, 185

France, 141, 155

G aborone, 188, 222

Galton, F., 19, 25 Gamtoos River, 47, 53, 65 Garankuwa, 191 Garvey, [Marcus], 178 Gawler, J.C., 88-89, 93 Gazankulu, 223 Gcaleka, 61-62 Gdansk, 203 Genadendal, 227 Genadendal, 86, 119 Gencor, 202, 220 Geneva, 147

Essen, 196 Ethiopia, 8, 12, 15, 22, 30-31, 146, 153, 156, 159, 185, 208, 212 Ethiopian, 103, 120-121, 160 Euro-marxist, 103

Genocide, 15, 21, 25, 29, 49, 55, 67 Georgia, 221 German-African, 194

Euro-Trotskyists, 189 Eurocentric, 95

196, 205 Germany, 30, 95, 113, 148, 153, 160 Gerwel, 214, 217

Eurocommunism, 146

Europe, 95, 127, 145, 158 Europeans, 177, 179, 195, 197, 215 Ex-FIOSA, 172 Ex-ICU, 157 Ex-USSR, 212, 225

Fe" J., 59, 61

German-backed, 212 Germans, 33-34, 36, 41, 75, 94, 108-110, 120, 124-5,

Ghana, 179 Gibbons, 3 Glasgow, 79, 121

Glenelg, Baron C.G., 71, 81, 93 Goa, 47-48, 67, 133, 48 Godlo, 154, 157 Godongwana, 67 Gokomere, 23

Goldberg, D., 183, 218 Faku, 61, 80-81 Falkland, 205”

Goldreich, 183 Gomas, J., 147, 150, 158, 163

328

Index

Goncalves, 30 Goncharov, 120

Gonnemma, 40, see Ngoumema Gool, Cissie, 158, 163, 172 Gool, Fatima, 215 Gool, Goolam H., 158, 172 Gool, Janus, 159 Goree, 37 Goshen, 105, 119 Goske, A., 43-45 Gossenbrot, 33 Gould, S.J., 12 Gow, Rev., 172 Gqozo, 216 Grahamstown, 62-64, 71, 79-80, 92, 122 Gramsci, A., 183

Gray, SirG., 61, 215, 218 Greek, 9 Greenberg, J.H., 27 Greenland, 38 Grevenboek, 21, 25 Griffiths, Sir Charles, 120

Griqua, 68, 70, 75-77 Griqualand, 75, 81, 95, 98, 119, 127 Gromyko, 219

Guguletu, 209, 214 Guinea, 35, 37, 40 Guinea-Bissau, 205 Gumede, J., 150, 214 Gunukwebes, 81 Gwala, T.H., 226

| aarlem, 37

Hertzog-Smuts, 149, 153 Hintsa, King, 61-2, 76-7, 80 Hitler, Adolph, 55, 124, 151, 160, 196 Hitler-Stalin, 160 Hlubi, 99, 140 Hluhluwe, 73 Hobson, J., 6 Hochsetter, 33

Hodgson, [Ballinger], M., 74, 147 Hoernle, 25 Hofmeyr, J.M., 42, 117, 125, 131, 135, 153 Hofmeyr, M., 220 Holden, Robert, 190

Holland, 36, 39, 51, 57 Holland, 90, 148 Holomiso, 215

Hottentot-Xhosa, 52 Hottentots, 47, 61, 64 Hottentots-Holland, 49, 58 Houston, 220 Houtman, 35 Hudson, H., 69 Huguenots, 49 Hungarian, 199

Hungary, 176, 203, 208, 212, 220 Hunter-gatherer, 18, 20-21, 23 Hunter-herder, 21, 31, 37

Hussein, Saddam, 206, 223 berian,17

IDAMASA, 185 IDASA, 212, 217 Ikwezi, 177

Hahn, T., 108-110

Halstead, 71 Hamburg, 36 Hammarsdale, 186 Hani, Chris, 225-226 Hannibal, 46 Hansa, 30, 36 Harare, 217-218, 220, 222, 224 Harrison, Alfred, 141

Harutshe, 21 Hassim, Kader, 183

Hatshepsut, 22 Havenga, 162 Heemraden, 52, 58 Heke, 92 Hendrickse, Rev. A., 212” Henecke, 162

Hermanus, [village of] 180, 192 Herodotus, 1 Herrenvolk, 180-181

Hertzog, J.B., 120, 130, 137, 143-144, 147, 153

llanga, 201 IMF, 192 Imhoff, Baron G.W. Von, 33, 42 Imperialism, 6, 15, 203, 212, 227 Imperialist, 7, 196, 215, 227-8 Inboeken, 58 Inca, 15, 24 India, 102, 117, 140, 161, 193, 206, 221 Indian, 180, 207, 211, 213 Indian-African, 169 Indians, 9, 219 indo-China, 18, 175, 176, 199 Indonesia, 19, 32, 169, 221 Inhambane, 66 Inkatha-ka-Zulu, 187 Ipuwer, 1 Iran, 206 Iraq, 204, 212, 223 Iraq-Iran, 206 Irish, 46 lron-smelting, 20

Index

lron-users, 23 Isandlhlwana, 103 ISCOR, 220 Islam, 30 Israeli, 206, 219 \sraeli-British-French, 199 Israelis, 193 Israelite, 142 Italian, 32-33, 146, 176, 183, 204 Italy, 26, 37, 103, 153, 159, 196, 205, 226

329

Kaufmann, Dr. [designer of SA's Partition Plan],192, 194196, 223 Kaunda, K., 205, 207 Ke, 6, 18, 22, 49-51 Ke-hunters, 51 Ke-Khoi, 37 Keetmansdom, 49, 108 Kei River, 64-65, 81-82, 85, 87, 91 Keiskamma River, 30, 64, 81, 85 Kentani, 95, 118

Kenya, 120, 148, 162, 175, 183 alts J.T., 179

Jackson Commission, The, 188 Jackson, Jesse, 204 Jacob, Chief, 70-1 Jaffe, Hosea, 163, 166, 175 Jaffeites, 175 Jagersfontein, 140 Jameson, [military man and administrator]123, 129, 131 Jansen, 45 Janssens, Gov. 53-54 Janssens-de Mst, 58 Janz, [employee of DEIc] 37-38 Japan, 13, 21, 38, 95, 159, 176, 199, 202, 205, 221

Japanese, 21, 153, 169, 175, 199, 202-4 Java, 15-16, 37-38, 40 Javanese, 46 Jayiya, Saul, 163, 175

Jenkins, [missionary] 74 Jewish, 4, 115, 145, 193, 221 Jews, 31

Johannesburg, 6

Jonathan, [Chief] 206 Jones, D. lvon, 141, 143, 146-147, 153 Jordan, A.C., 172, 175

Jordan, Pallo, 226

K” 115

Kenyatta, Jomo, 120, 176, 205 Kerr, W.M., 25

Khaldun, Ibn, 2, 3, 7 Khama, King, 61, 105, 127 Khamiesberg, [a place] 75 Khoi-Khoi, 18, 36, 38-9, 85-6, 109-110 Khoi-Khoi-Bantu, 27 Khoi-San-Xhosa, 52 Khoi-Xhosa, 51, 53-54, 62, 85-6 Khoisan, 18-19, 85

Khomeni, [Ayatollah] 206 Kies, B.M., 11, 159, 162-3, 169, 172, 175, 177, 192, 211 Kilwe, 27, 34 Kimberley, 6 Kingwilliamstown, 92-94, 121-122, 189 Kirstenbosch, 40 Kitchener, Lord, 128

Klaasjagersberg, 171 Kleinschmidt, H.,108-109 Klipdrift, 98 Kliptown, 177 Kobie, 218 Koevoet, 207

Koinange, P., 120 Kok, Abraham, 75 Kok, Cornelius, 75, Kok, Adam, 48, 61, 75-77 Koka, Drake, 187 Kokstad, 61 Kolb, P., 21, 25, 28

Koper, [fought against Germans] 124-125

Kaddie, C., 142, 147, 157 Kaffir, 35, 54, 62, 81, 88, 90, 94, 101, 118, 120, 127 Kaffirs, 25, 27, 47, 50, 62, 78, 88-91, 128-9 Kaffraria, 81, 90-94, 130 Kagiso, [place name and imperialist trust fund] 190, 201, 215 Kahn, Sam, 146, 154, 167 Kajee, [Indian leader] 160, 164, 166

Korannas, 78 Korea, 175-6

Kornhoof, [minister in SA government] 194 Kotane, Moses, 158, 167 Kreli, 80, 86-91, 94 Kremlin, 151 Krotoa, 39-41

Kruger, 188-190 Kruger-Portugal, 136

Kalahari, 20 Kalk, [cPsa racist trade unionist] 159-160

Krugersdorp, 18

Kant, 3 Kapuo, ChiefC., 192

Krushchev, N., 210 Kthadra, 183

Karlsruhe, [site of SA's atomic training centre] 196

Kuang, S., 2

Krugersdorp, 190

330

Index

Kumalo, the, 69

Lozi, 138

Kun, Bela, 140 Kunene, 23, 113 Kung, 20 (see also Ke) Kunwana, 74 Kuruman, 61, 68, 70, 75-76, 105, 122

Luderitz, F.A.E., 110 Luderitzburg, 125 Lumumba, Patrice, 190 Lusaka, 177 Lusaka, 197, 208, 210-211, 217, 219-220

Kwa-Zulu, 187

Lusikisiki, 174

Kwa-Zulu-Natal, 226 Kwamashu, 203 Kwathema, 211 Kwazekhele, 211 Kyalitsha, 203, 213, 223 La Guma, 187

Lutheran, 185 Luthuli, Albert, 122, 155, 173, 176 Luxembourg, 115, 127 Lydenberg, 78 M aasdorp, 195

agos, 29-30, 225 Mabwenii, [iron sites] 23 MaCartney, 52 Laing, Rev., 61, 80, 84, 89

Macassar Beach, 47

Laingsnek, 107 Lake Victoria, 27, Lancaster, James, 35 Lancaster House, talks, Independence, 182, 197, 206207, 210 Langa, Chief, 50, 74; place, 102, 167 Langekloof, 53 Langeni, 67 Langham, Dale, 170 Langilabelele, 70 Lawrence, H., 161-162 Lebowa, 191

Machel, Samora, 206-207 MacKenzie, J., [missionary] 105 Mackinnon, Col., 84 Maclean, 88-89, 93 MacMaharaj, 226 Macmillan, Harold, 55, 59, 173, 176, 180, 206 Madagascar, 40, 46, 48, 67 . Madeley, W., 137 Madjid, 27 Mafeking, 74, 182, 191 Magdoff, H., 227 Magongo, [place of Dingane's defeat] 73

Leibnitz, 2 Lemba, 27

Magoti, 50 Mahabane, Rev. W., 141, 169

Lembede, A., 178

Maharajah, 14

Lenin, V.I., 6, 91, 142, 151, 155, 159, 203, 220 Lerothodi, 99 Lesotho, 176 Leutwen, 110, 124-125 Liberia, 121 Libya, 146

Maharero, 109 Mahura, 98, 104 Maitland, 77, 81 Majeke, N. [Dora Taylor], 60 Makanda, 129 Makanda-Tshaka, 142

Lichtenstein, 25

Makapan, 105

Liebenberg, 78 Liefeld, 154 Limpieza, 31

Makapane, 104 Makgatho, 141 Makiwane, Elijah, 121

Limpopo, 105, 113, 122-123 Linchwe, 126-127

Malabar, 40 Malacca, 34, 36

Lincoln, Abraham, 138 Lindequest, 125 Lippart, Consul-General, 110 Livingstone, David, 21, 35, 122-3, 147

Malagasy, 206 Malakhaza, 93 Malan, D.F., 123, 131, 142, 161-162, 168-169, 171 Malawi, 67, 147, 206-207

LMS, 61-63

Malay, 45, 81

Lobengula, 5, 61, 78 Lopes, T., 33 Lopez, 25, Lourenco Marquis, 28, 40, 66-67, 78, 116 Louw, 177, 204

Malaya, 18 Maldivas, 34 Maledi, 190 Malendela, 67 Malunghu, Solomon, 210

Lovedale, 80, 121, 191

Mambo, 23

Index

Mamelodi, 191 Mampura, 107 Mamre, 119

331

Merriman, Archdeacon N.J., 92, 95, 130-131, 137 Meme, F. Van der, 226 Metal-working, 5, 26

Manchu, 116

Metallurgy, 24, 26

Mandela, Nelson, 175, 205, 210, 215, 217-8, 220

Mexican, 10

Mandela-Buthelezi, 226 Manetho, 2

Mexico, 8-9, 12-14, 48 Meyer, Lucas, 129,

Mangena, Alfred, 138

Meyer, Roelf, (Constitutional minister] 225-6

Manicongo, 31

Mfecane, [Difaqane] 26, 68

Mankoroana, 105

Mfengu, 88, 95

Mann, Tom, 147

Mfutsanyana, 154, 157, 161

Manthatisi, 68, 74 Manuel, D., 32-33 Manuel, T., 217 Maori, 92-93

Mgijima, 120, 142 Mhlakaza, 87, 89-93 Mhlangana, 68 Middelberg, [Peace Talks] 128

Mageba, Mariam, 224 Maqomo-Matiwane, 79, 84-5, 89, 94

Milner, Lord, 105-6, 114-6, 126-9, 144, 154 Mini, Vuyisele, 184

Marabastad, 163 Marais, 52

Mitterand, Francois, 220 Mii, Diliza, 184, 188

Marchioni, [Italian merchant] 32 Marionhill, 184 Marshall, 25 Martini-Henrys, 104 Marx, 103, 114 Marxist, 2, 26, 115, 127, 145, 177, 217, 220

Mkwetha, 225 Mlanjeni, [Prophet, mystic] 85 Mngqingo, [leader of rebellion] 174 Mobutu, President, 190, 196 Modiakgotla, 157 Moffat, J.S., 122-123

Marxist-Leninist, 220

Moffat, Rev. R., 21, 25, 61, 68, 70, 105

Maseru, 98

Mofolo, Thomas, 190

Mashinini, 187 Masomela, 216

Moi, Arap, 223 Mokone, Mangena, 121

Massabalala, [ICU trade unionist] 142, 147 Masudi, El, 2 Masupha, [son of Moshoeshoe] 99 Matabele, 61, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76-78, 99, 105, 115, 123,

Molema, Molemu, Mololyi, Molopo,

139 Matabeleland, 123 Matanzima, K., 174, 215 Matatiele, 140, 174 Matiwane, 68-69, 79 Matshebane, [father of Mzilikazi] 77

Molteno, Donald, 95-96, 153, 167-168 Mombasa, 65, 205 Mondale, Walter, 193 Mondi, 202 Monomotapa, 32, 34, 40, 43, 66 Monrovia, 121

Matthews, 154 Matthews, Dr., 172,

Montagu, (colonial functionary] 76 Montshiwa, [place name] 191

Matthews, Joe, 181, 229 Mauritius, 41, 43, 194 Mbeki, Gowan, 174-175

Montsioa, Paramount Chief, 105, 138 Moodie, D., 25, 54 Moorish, 66

Mbeki, Thabo, 183, 210 Mbozamboza, 71 McCarthyist, 199

Moors, 30, 66 Mopele, Commander, 97 Mopeli, Paulus, 98, 174

Mda, Sastri, 175, 178 Mass Democratic Movement, 219

Moravian, 52, 58, 62 Moravians, 51, 61

Mdushane, 63, 65 Meadowvale, 180 Mecca, 32 Mediterranean, 9, 17, 19, 30-31 Meer, Fatima, 215 Meerhof, Baron Von, 41, 43 Melinde, 32

Morenga, [resister] 124 Morgan, L. H. 2, 6, 16, 25 Morocco, 30 Moroka, 180 Morolong, 27, 74 Morosi, 97 Morris, [missionary] 99

Joshua, 74, 138 Dr., 156 183 (peasant leader] 68

332

Morris, [resistance leader] 124, 142 Moscow, 120, 143, 148, 150, 155, 158-159, 219-220 Mosega, [place name] 78 Moshesh, [Moshoeshoe] 75-76, 83-8 Moslem, 4, 57 Mossad, 206

Mothopeng, Z., 216 Motlana, Dr., 192 Mozambican, 67, 147, 193, 207, 209 Mpahlele, Ezekiel, 171, 188 Mpande, 100, 102

Mpande, King, 66, 73, 76 MPLA, 188, 193 MPLA-UNITA, 220 Mpondo, [ethnic group] 21, 49, 65, 80-81, 138 Mpondomise, 99, 102, 120

Msimang, Richard, 138, 154 Mthatha, 37, 68 Mthethwa River, 65, 67 Mugabe, Robert, 197 Muizenberg, [place name] 51 Mulele, Pierre, 190 Munich, 195 Munzer, T., 30 Mussolini, Benito, 156 Muzerewa, 189-190

Mwanemutapa, [Zimbabwian king] 23, Mwane Mutapa, 35, 65 Mzilikazi, 99, 105, 122 Mzimba, Z.,172, 175 Mzimkulu,[place name] 68

Index

Nationalism, 177, 179 Nationalist, 175-177, 201

NATO, 179, 199, 205 Nazi, 182, 183 Nazi-like, 196 Nazism, 178 Nehu, 61, 74-77

NEF, 160, 162, 166, 176, 178 Négritude, 187 Nehru, Jahawarlal, 161 Neo-colonial, 175, 182, 206-208, 220, 222 Neo-colonialism, 175, 189, 227 Neo-colonies, 190, 193-4, 205-6

Neo-fascist, 185 Nesturck, M., 21 Netherlanders, 43 Netherlands, 41

NEUF, 178 NEUM-backed, 224 New York, 207 Ngcayiya, Henry, 121 Ngounema, 40

Ngqika, 84, 89, 95 Ngqikas, 52, 63 Ngugi, Wa Thiong’o, 221 Ngundle, Solwandle, 183 Nguni-speaking, 21, 95 Niger, 27

Nigeria, 13, 148 Nixon, President R., 200, 205 Njoma, Sam, 192

Nkomati, [accords, agreements] 193, 207

N” 137, 139, 156, 171, 173-174, 179, 194

Nkomo, Josua, 197 Nkosi, Johannes, 149 Nkrumah, Kwame, 176

Nagasaki, 38

NRC, 201 Nuhremberg, 30, 33 NUSAS, 184 Nxele, [see Makanda] 63-64 Nyaka, Chief, 27, 35 Nyanga, [place name] 179-180, 191 Nyasaland, 115, 120, 142

Naghtigall, Dr. [Consul-General] 110 Naicker, Dr., [Indian Congress] 166 Naidoo, 140 Nairobi, 180, 209, 221 Nama, 21, 26, 108-110, 124-125 Nama-Herero, 124 Nama-Herero-Ovambo, 54 Namaland, 108

Or

Namaqualand, 19, 30, 43, 48 Namaquas, 43 Namas, 108, 125 Namibian, 19, 34, 108, 110, 176, 186, 192-3, 207, 222 Nandi, [mother of Tshaka] 68

OAU, 182, 194, 204, 222 Odinga, Oginga, 221 Oedasoa, Chief, 39, 41, 43

Nantes, 49

Napier, Lord, 71-72, 76, 81, 83, 86 Napoleon, 53, 67, 103 Nassau, 217 Nasser, Gamal, 205, 210 Natal-Swaziland, 33

Natalspruit, [place name] 179

221

Ojukwu, Lt. Col., 207 Oppenheimer, H., 115, 181 Opperman, [commando leader] 49 Orlando, [place name]177, 180, 185, 190 Otrag, 196 Ottomans, 10 Ougadougou, 217

333

Index

Ovambo, 108-109, 125 Ovambo, 26

Ree

18, 25

p™ (place name] 182, 216-217 Race-discrimination, 31

PAC-in-exile, 179

Padmore, George, 178 Palestinian, 221 Palindaba, 196, 206 Papacy, 32 Paris, 74-75 Pasqual, Jan, 44 Pasur, Pangerang Loring, 47 Pentagon, 206

Racists, 215

Ramaphosa, Cyril, 226 Ramsamy, 224 Rarabe, King, 21, 50-51,

Relly, G., 211 Reenen, Van, 49

Persia, 2 Persian, 23, 34 Peru, 8-9, 14

Reeves, Bishop Ambrose, 93

Phalaborwa, [early copper mining town] 23 Philippines, 169 Philips, John, 64

Philips-Shepstone-Rhodes-Smuts, 175 Phillipson, D.W., 26 Pietermaritzburg, 69, 103 Pietersburg, 19, 119-120 Piketberg, 75 Pinelands, 187 Pinetown, 186 Pitso, 98 Plaatje, Sol, 137, 139, 141, 155

Platberg, [place name] 74, 97 Plettenberg, 45, 49, 51, 55 Pliny, 1 PLO, 207, 209, 219, 221

Podbury, P., 169 Polynesians, 24 Pompideau, G., 205 Pondoland, 35, 95, 119, 174, 181 Portugal, 205, 209 Portuguese, 109, 114, 136, 188 Portuguese-Brazilian, 67

Portuguese-British-Boer, 70 Potekhin, I.l., 188, 167, 177 Potgieter, Andries, 75, 78, 104 Poto, Chief, 174 Powell, Baden, 123 Pre-colonial, 5, 9, 14, 16, 21, 24, 26 Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal, 215 Princeton, 226 Punt, 22

Gans

Race-prejudice, 32 Rachidi, Hlaku [BPC president], 190 Racial, 179, 219, 222, 224, 226 Racialism, 189, 219, 228 Racism, 183, 188

Von, 41

Queenstown, 122, 142 Qwabe, [place name] 65, 67-8

Rheede, Baron Von, 44 Rhenish missionaries, 108-109, 200 Rhodes, Cecil John, 8, 95, 184

Rhodesia, 105, 115, 120, 122-124, 176, 183, 187, 190193 Ricci, Matthew, 2 Richter Brothers, 146, 158 Riebeeck, Van, 169 Rio de Janeiro, 67 Rive, Richard, 211

Rivonia, 183, 211, 219 Robben Island, 34, 40-41, 43, 46, 53, 64, 80, 94, 102, 174, 183-4, 211-2, 217 Robinson, J., 18, Robinson, W., 46 Roman, 8-9 Romania, 203, 212 Rome, 9 Rondebosch, 40, 49 Roosevelt-Churchill, 161

Ropp, Van der, 193-195, 200 Rose-Innes, R.W., 117-119, 121, 156 Ross, Van der, 188 Routenbach, C., 53 Roux, E., 150 Rubusana, 138-139 Rudd, [partner of C. Rhodes] 123 Russia, 12, 92, 106, 198, 227 Russian, 120, 142, 90

Rustenburg, [a district] 23, 119, 127

eel

Sachs, Sachs, Sacos, SACP, SADF,

176, 182-183, 192, 209

Albie, 210 E.S., 158, 160 211, 218, 224 209, 225 204, 208-209, 214, 223

334

Index

Saldanhers, 39 San-Khoi-Khoi-Bantu, 23, 50, 228 San-killer, 52 San-Xhosa-Khoi-Khoi, 47, 108-110

Sandile, [Chief] 65, 80-81 South African Police [sar], 204, 208, 214, 223 Saracens, 179-180 Sareli, [see Krell] 80-81 Sartre, J.P., 178 SASO-BPC, 189 SASOL, 209 Saudi Arabia, 206 Savimbi, Jonas, 214 Scandinavia, 17, Scandinavian, 36, 205 Scandinavians, 41 Schapera, 25, 27, 68 Schmidt, Helmut, 192, 196 Schmidt-Kissinger-Vorster, 193-194 Scotland, 225 Sebe, President Lennox, 216

Sebokeng, [a district] 223, 225” Segregated, 20, 37, 40, 45, 61 Segregation, 40, 42-44, 62 Sekgoma, 77

Sekukuniland, 174 Sekwati, Chief, 77-78, 98, 104 Selborne, Lord, 64, 115, 128-131 Senegal, 30

Smithfield, 19 Smuts, J.C., 123, 128, 199 Smuts-Botha, 176 Smuts-Lawrence, 162 Snyman Commission, The184, 188 Sobhuza, King, 73, 138 Sobukwe, Robert, 175, 177-8,184, 192 Soga, J.H., 87-88, 91, 94, 121 Solodovnikov, V., 219 Solojee, Suliman, 183 Somabulane, Chief, 124 Somalia, 146, 176 Somerset, Lord Charles, 85, 138 Sontonga, Enoch, 121 Sophiatown, 182

Sotho, 25, 67-68, 72-74, 76-77 Sotho-Tswana, 105

Sotho-Xhosa-Tembu, 99 Sothos, 87, 97 Sousa, Chief, 43 Southey, 80 Soutpansberg, 23 Soviet, 148, 155, 160-161, 167, 207-8, 219-220, 223 Soviets, 181 Soweto, 172 Soya, Tlyo, 94, 177 ; Sparta, 9

Spencer, H., 3

Senghor, Leopold Sédar, 176 Senzangakhona, 67 Shah, Pahlavi, 206 Shang, 2, 24

Sprenger, B., 25, 33-34 Sprigg, Sir J.G., 98-99, 121 Springbok, 161 Stakesby, Lewis, 162 Stalin, 146, 155, 159, 167

Shangani, 123

Stalin-Potekhin, 219

Sharpville, 162, 177, 179, 180-1, 185, 192, 195, 197, 200-

Smith, lan, 189, 193, 196

Stalin-to-Gorbachev, 227 Stalin-Trotsky, 150 Stalinism, 146, 158, 227 Stalinist, 178, 216 Stalinist-CPSA, 168 Stanford, W., 88, 94, 128 Stanley, Colonial Secretary, 77 Starushenko, 219 Stellaland Republic, 105 Stellenbosch, [place name] 159, 175, 180, 214, 219-220 Sterkfontein, [place name] 18 Sterthemius, Pieter, 42 Stockenstroom, W., 122 Strasbourg, 34 Stuttaford Bill, The, 159 Stuurmans, Klaas, Stuyvesant, 48 Sudan, 15, 27, 185 Sudanese, 12, 14, 17, 185 Suez, 6, 199, 205 Sumatra, 38 Summers, 19

Smith-Muzerewa, 197

Suthu, [see also Sotho] 61, 80

1, 204 Shaw, Rev., 71, 79, 83-4, Shepstone, Sir Th., 66, 73, 99 Shiloh, [place name] 86, 119 Shona, 123-124 Siberia, 203

Sicocoeni, [Sikhuhhuni] 107 Siculus, 1 Sigcau, Chief, 174 Sihlale, Leo, 172, 183-4, 215 Sikonyela, 71-72, 74, 77-78, 83-4, 86-8 Simonstown, 51, 171, 206 Sisulu, Walter, 175, 178, 183, 216-217, 219 Siyanvala, E., 183 Slabbert, Vanzyl, 214, 217 Slavic, 9 Slovenia, 212 Slovo, Joe, 219, 226

Sluyskens, Govenor, 50-51

Index

Suzman, Helen, 207, 214, 217 Swakopmund, 30 SWAPO, 192-193, 207, 209, 214 Swartland, 46 Swazi, 67 Swaziland, 34, 73 Sweden, 209 Sweezy, Paul, 227

Swellendam, 47, 49, 51-52, 58 Swiss, 202, 204, 223 Switzerland, 187, 205 lee

78, 84

335

Trotskyism, 146, 151, 165, 216 Trotskyist, 159, 205 Trotskyists, 146, 151, 155, 158, 160 Tsamuaha, 108

Tsarism, 120, 175 Tsars, 120 Tshaka, 5, 63, 66-70, 74, 79, 142 Tshatshuo, Jan, 86 Tshipinare, [Boer collaborator] 97 Tshombe, M., 190 Tshombe-Mobutu, 205 Tshwane, [place of massacre] 68 Tshwete, Steve, 225

Tsiranana, President [of Malagasy] ,206 Tsonga, 22, 27, 35, 65-68 Tsotsi, W., 163, 175-176

Tabata, |.B., 163, 169, 171, 174-175, 177 Tambo, Oliver, 175, 178, 180, 204, 210, 221, 226 Tambuza, 73 Tanganyika, 125 Tanzania, 24, 26, 121, 162, 187, 207, 209

Tswana, 21-22, 25, 67, 74, 76, 78 Tswana-Sotho, 68 Tswana-Sotho-Matabele, 77 TUC, 148

Taoist, 2 Tas, Adam, 48 Tasmania, 36

Tulbach, Ryk, 45, 47, 49 Tunis, 2

TATA, 171 Taylor, Dora, 60 Tejo River, 28 Tembu, 49, 65, 68, 81, 85, 88, 99, 113, 119-120, 138 Tembuland, 95, 119, 174 Thaba Bosigu, 61, 72-77, 86, 97-99, 119, 137 Thatcher, M., 205, 208, 210, 215, 219, 221 Thatcher-Carrington, 210 Theal, G.H., Thema, Selope, 141, 154-155, 157

Thembu, 21, 35, 67-68, 70, 80,139 Theopolis Mission, 61, 63-64, 86 Thompson, L., 55, 59, 66, Thorez, M., 226 Thunen, J.H. Von, 4 Thunen-Braudel, 4, 26

Tugela, [place name] 72, 122, 186, 191

Turfloop, 173, 184, 188-9, 211, 214 Turkey, 30 Turks, 32 Turner, L.M., 160 Turnhalle, 192

Tuskegee Institute, 139 Tuthmosis, 22 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond, 211, 213-214, 217 Twa, 20 Tyhali, [brother of Maqomo] 79-80, 85

" 184-185

Toynbee, A., 2-4 Transkei, 194-195, 208, 215-216 Transkei-Ciskei, 167 Transkeian, 119, 153, 174, 177, 189 Tranvaal, 166, 187, 211, 224 Treurnicht, Andries, 215, 226 Trichart, L., 78-79 Trotha, Von, 124-125

Uganda, 208-209, 223 Ugandan, 207 Uitenhage, 63-64, 191, 211, 223 UK, 203 Ulundi, 104 Umhala, 91-92 Umhlakaza, 89 Umkhonto We Sizwe, 183, 207-208 Umlazi Technical College, 191 UMSA, 177, 211 Umtata, [place name] 119 Umizilikazi, 71 UN, 194, 204, 207, 222-223 Ungungunhlovo, [Dingane's capital] 71-73, UNITA, 214 USA, 13, 15, 46 Utretch, 36, 78

Trotsky, Leon, 14, 151, 155, 194

Uys, P., 78, 104

Tielman, Roos, 143, 145 Tiro, O., [SASO president] 184, 187-188 TLSA, 178, 186, 188 Tobias, P.V., 21 Togo, 221 Tokazi, [place name] 174 Tolstoy-Gandhi, 187 Toure, Sekou, 176

336

Index

Vallois, H.V., 19 Vamba Kingdom, 27

Winburg, [place name] 97, 140 Windhoek, 108-109, 182, 192 Witbooi, Hendrik, 110, 124 Wittvogel, 14 Witwatersrand, 114-115, 136, 180, 195, 214 Witzi, 85, 88, 96, 98

Van Riebeeck, Johan, 38-43

Witzieshoek, 191

Vandana, Chief, 80

Witzieshoek, 98, 119, 149, 169, 174

aal River, 19, 68, 77 VJ

Vatican, 201

WNLA, 136

Vechtkop, [place name] 78, 96-7 Venda, 27, 67, 208, 216, 223 Venetian, 30, 32 Venice, 32 Venn, Henry, 185 Vereeniging Peace Treaty, 127-128

Wodehouse, Sir P., 96-98, 109 Wolfson, |., 158, 160 Wolpe, Harold, 183, 219 Wolseley, Sir Garnet, 107 WOSA, 222 Wright, Abraham Kok, 75

Versailles, 108, 140-141

Verwoerd, H., 171, 174, 183-4, 196 Vespucchi, 32 Vienna, 193

x

esibeland, 95

Viljoen, G., 161, 224-5 Voltaire, 3

Xhosa-German, 92 Xhosa-Khoi, 86

Vorster, J., 123

Xhosa-Sotho, 85

Vryheid High School, 191

Xhosa-Sotho-Khoisan, 83

Vundla, P., 185

Xhosa-Tembu, 121 Xhosa-Tembu-Mpondo, 121 Xhosaland, 81 Xuma, Alfrred, 154, 156-157, 161, 166

Wie

Commander, 40-41, 43

akovlev, 208

Wakefield missionaries, 92

Wakiti, [resister] 92 Waldheim, Kurt, 186 Wales, 54 Walker, Eric, 55, 59, 80 Wallerstein, |., 2, 4, 6

Yeltsin, Boris, 227 Yin-Yang, 2-3 York, 217 Yorkshire, 58

Walvis Bay, 109-110, 207

Yugoslavia, 146, 204, 212

Warmbad mission, 54, 70, 108 Warsaw, 220 Washington, Booker T., 139

Yukalov, Y., 219 YWCA, 185

Waterberg, 124-125

abantsundu, 119

Waterboer, Andries,75, 98 Weber, Max, 3 Weinbren, B., 148

Vs

Weinstock, G., 141

Zaire, 27, 35136, 196

Welser, C., 32-33 Welsh, 153

Zambezi, 23, 107, 117, 125 Zambia, 207, 223

Wepener, [Boer leader] 97 Wesleyan, 68, 74-75, 79 Wesleyans, 61, 74, 77, 83, 85, 123

Zanbantsundu, 121 ZANU, 189 ZANU-ZAPU, 210

Wessels, Rev., 163, 175

ZAPU, 189

Wessels, Victor, 183, 192 Westminister, 36 70, 102, 130-32, 138

Zeerust, 23, 27 Zimbabwe, 122, 176, 189, 205-7

Williams, Rev., 61, 63 Wilson, M., 55, 66

Zimbabwean, 176 Zimbabweans, 35

Wilson, Harold, 140

Zion, 121, 221

Wiltshire, 64, 81

Zionist, 140, 151, 158,

Zainunissa, 158

Index

Zoutpansberg, 78 Zulu, 23, 21, 71 [Zooloos], 100, 102-4, 129, 191, 211, 225 Zululand, 63, 100, 103-4, 129-130, 149, 174, 183, 191, 210 Zuurveld, 62 Zwelithini, ‘King’, 216 Zwide, 35, 67-68

337

EUROPEAN COLONIAL DESPOTISM

KARNAK HISTORY/

HOSEA JAFFE

AFRICAN STUDIES

SAMIR AMIN

Jaffe's views are stimulating and contain formulations

which should reopen

E struggle for egalitarianism is a struggle

Te contesting social systems in South Africa, and, by extension, the rest of Africa, in which modes of production such as slavery, serfdom and wage-labour | characterise European social history, while

their existence in South Africa is a result of

discussions of | successful European penetration and _ great | imposition. From the earliest settlers to the imporaintce.”_| various ethnic groups which now make up South Africa, the author offers an unrelentingly close scrutiny of the social, cultural and political history of South Africa. Going beyond the European rationale of conquest and despotism — that of bringing “civilisation” to the barbarians — here contested, deconstructed and banished, the author unravels the motives for control in materialism. Possessing a world historical comparative method, the author examines modes of production, social formations, and the minute examination of South African history, allowing the reader the information by which to see beyond the lies, innuendos, and fabrications which define capitalism as a mode. The author offers extensive political insights not only into the machinations of capitalism and all its interconnecting parts, but also of the development of political movements, their orientation, political position, programme and the extent to which divide and rule compelled collaboration of many resisters and accommodationists. The book offers a view of South Africa from the prehistorical to the historical, up to the period of 1994,

HOSEA JAFFE WAS born and educated in South Africa and was one of the seminal members of the Unity Movement, and has been steadfast in his resistance to capitalism and racism which has made him an exile for over 30 years. He is a lecturer and auth, of several books and now spends his time between Italy England. =

ISBN 0- imi

EUROPEAN COLONIAL

(£13.95, US $20.00

x= = bs 30

ANAM WANK

G66"