Southern Africa - European and African interaction in the 19th century
Southern Africa encyclopedia encyclopeadia britannica article
Shula E. Marks
Southern Africa - European and African interaction in the 19th century: By the time the Cape changed hands during the Napoleonic Wars, humanitarians were vigorously campaigning against slavery, and in 1807 they succeeded in persuading Britain to abolish the trade; British antislavery ships soon patrolled the western coast of Africa. Ivory became the most important export from west-central Africa, satisfying the growing demand in Europe. The western port of Benguela was the main outlet, and the Ovimbundu and Chokwe, renowned hunters, were the major suppliers. They penetrated deep into south-central Africa, decimating the elephant populations with their firearms. By 1850 they were in Luvale and Lozi country and were penetrating the
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“Legitimate” trade and the persistence of slavery

By the time the Cape changed hands during the Napoleonic Wars, humanitarians were vigorously campaigning against slavery, and in 1807 they succeeded in persuading Britain to abolish the trade; British antislavery ships soon patrolled the western coast of Africa. Ivory became the most important export from west-central Africa, satisfying the growing demand in Europe. The western port of Benguela was the main outlet, and the Ovimbundu and Chokwe, renowned hunters, were the major suppliers. They penetrated deep into south-central Africa, decimating the elephant populations with their firearms. By 1850 they were in Luvale and Lozi country and were penetrating the southern Congo forests.

The more sparse, agricultural Ovambo peoples to the south also were drawn into the ivory trade. Initially trading in salt, copper, and iron from the Etosha Pan region to the north, and supplying hides and ivory to Portuguese traders, the Ovambo largely had been able to avoid the slave trade that ravaged their more populous neighbours. By the mid 19th century the advent of firearms led to a vast increase in the volume of the ivory trade, though the trade collapsed as the elephants were nearly exterminated by the 1880s. By then, traders from Angola, the Cape Colony, and Walvis Bay sought cattle as well as ivory. With the firearms acquired through the trade, Ovambo chiefs built up their power, raiding the pastoral Herero and Nama people in the vast, arid region to their south.

The continuation of the slave trade

British antislavery patrols drove the slave trade east, where ivory had been more significant. In the first decades of the 19th century, slave traders for the French sugar plantations in Réunion and Mauritius, who had previously drawn the majority of their slaves from Madagascar, turned their attentions to the coast of Mozambique, while the demand from Cuba and Brazil also escalated. Thus, by the late 1820s Mozambique’s slave exports were outstripping those of Angola, with demand from the French islands rivaling that of Brazil by the 1830s. The flow of slaves was augmented by turmoil in the interior of Southern Africa and by slaves captured by the Chikunda soldiers of the Zambezi warlords; by the 1840s rival Zambezi armies were competing to control the trade routes to south-central Africa.

The most important area of slave raiding appears to have been in Malawi and northeastern Zambia, where predatory overlords devastated a wide area from bases in the Congo. To the east of Lake Nyasa, the Yao—keen ivory traders from the 17th century—turned to slave raiding, obtaining firearms from the Arabs, subjugating the Chewa agriculturalists, and building up powerful polities under new commercial and military leaders. Displaced from northern Mozambique by the Ngoni in the 19th century, the Yao in turn pressured the Manganja peoples of the Shire Highlands. The Bemba also were able to increase their power through the slave and ivory trade, raiding the loosely organized Maravi peoples to the west of the lake from their stockaded villages on the infertile Zambian plateau. Although they never became large-scale slave traders, preferring instead to incorporate their captives, the Ngoni invaders added to the turmoil. While the first European observers probably exaggerated the extent of the depopulation, the political geography of the region was transformed as people moved into stockaded villages and towns and began to raid one another for captive women to work the fields while the men engaged in warfare. Vast numbers of people, especially women, were torn from their social settings, and earlier divisions based on kin came to matter less than new relationships between patron and client, protector and protected.

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Geography of Africa Quiz

British pressure on the sultan of Zanzibar to ban the slave trade was easily circumvented, and, though the abolition treaty forced on the Zanzibaris in 1873 was more effective, the reduced coastal demand for slaves led to even more ruthless methods in the interior of east-central Africa; slaves were no longer needed for export and thus were exploited locally. East coast Arabs began to play a much more active role in the interior. Initially operating through local chiefs, they came to exercise wide military and political jurisdiction over the northern routes from strategically placed commercial centres; many of these became slave-based plantations.

Effects of the slave trade

It is not possible to compile an exact balance sheet of the devastation caused to Southern Africa by the slave trade, and historians differ in their estimation of the numbers involved and of the extent of the damage inflicted. In the 17th century some 10,000 to 12,000 slaves were exported annually from Luanda. Although this figure includes captives from both north and south of the bay, it does not include those smuggled out to escape official taxation. In the 18th century about a third of the slaves exported to the Americas probably came from Angola. The figure probably represents a relatively small proportion of the total population of a huge area in any one year, but it was a significant proportion of economically active adults. The figure also does not take account of the depopulation and social dislocation resulting from incessant warfare and banditry, resulting famine and disease, and the intensification of slavery within African society, where it was usually the young women who were taken as captive “wives” because of their utility as kinless and therefore unprotected agricultural labour.

The better-watered regions may have recouped their population losses within a couple of generations, supported by the introduction of new food crops such as manioc and corn (maize), which the Portuguese imported from South America. Nevertheless, the effects of the slave trade were, in social terms, incalculable. Accounts of Ndongo as rich and populous in the 16th century gave way to lamentations about its desolation in the 17th. The processes of border raids, wars of conquest, and civil strife, which affected the Ndongo and then the kingdoms of the Kwango River valley in the 17th century, were repeated to the south and east in the course of the 18th century as the slave frontier expanded. The ending of more overt violence as the slave frontier moved on left the weak—women, children, and the poor—vulnerable to innumerable personal acts of kidnapping and betrayal, a process exacerbated by the indebtedness of local traders to coastal merchants and the dependence of the traders on the transatlantic economy.

Neither Portugal’s attempt to ban its nationals from slave trading in 1836 nor even the abolition of slavery in Brazil in the 1880s ended slavery in west-central Africa. Local merchants, chiefs, and elders turned to slaves to produce the tropical products demanded by Europeans and to serve as porters for the growing quantities of wax and ivory from the 1840s and ’50s and rubber from the 1870s. By 1910 wild rubber accounted for more than three-quarters of Angola’s exports by volume. Although the rubber trade was successful in the short term, excessive collection of wild rubber destroyed an irreplaceable natural resource, while new concentrations of population upset the ecological balance of a drought-prone environment.

The “time of turmoil”

Causes of the Mfecane

Given the turbulence caused by slave raiding in east- and west-central Africa, it is tempting to blame this for the unprecedented warfare in Southern Africa in the second and third decades of the 19th century; the Mfecane, or Difaqane (“Crushing”), as this warfare is known, is currently much debated. As yet, however, there seems little evidence for extensive slave trading south of Quelimane until the 1820s, and the slave trade from Inhambane and Delagoa Bay remained paltry until 1823–44; the trade from these ports thus seems more a consequence than a cause of the wars.

Demand for cattle and ivory at Delagoa Bay seems rather more important in the emergence, by the late 18th century, of a number of larger states in the hinterland of Delagoa Bay. Trade gave chiefs new ways of attracting followers, while elephant hunting and cattle raiding honed military organization. In the early 19th century, however, the number of European ships calling at Delagoa Bay appears to have contracted, and this may have increased competition for the cattle and ivory trade. Together with a series of devastating droughts (in 1800–03, 1812, and 1816–18), this competition may better account for the debilitating wars in which the larger northern Nguni chiefdoms in Zululand were embroiled by the second decade of the century; indeed, oral sources attribute the first battles to conflicts over land. These battles occurred even before the rise of the Zulu king Shaka, whom an early historiography holds almost solely responsible for turmoil as far afield as the Cape Colony, Tanzania, and western Zambia.

Shaka and the creation of the Zulu

Shaka, who until about 1817 was subject to the Mthethwa king, was thus the heir to, rather than the originator of, the intensified warfare in Zululand. Nevertheless, his military brilliance led to the emergence of the Zulu as the most important power in southeastern Africa. Within a few years Shaka had consolidated the numerous chiefdoms between the Tugela and Pongola rivers into a centralized military state. However, divisions within the royal family culminated in his assassination in 1828.

Initially, Shaka’s most formidable rivals were the Ndwandwe, under the leadership of Zwide, who had driven the Ngwane people led by Matiwane onto the Highveld and the Ngwane led by Sobhuza north across the Pongola river, beyond the Zulu orbit. There Sobhuza established the new conquest state of Swaziland (named for his successor, Mswati). In 1820 and again in 1823 Shaka defeated Zwide’s armies, which broke into several groups. Zwide himself retired, but his generals fled northward. Clashing with one another and with the peoples in their path, the Ndwandwe (or Ngoni, as they became known) eventually established military states in northern Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, while the Ndwandwe general Soshangane established the extensive Gaza kingdom in south-central Mozambique. At its height, the Gaza kingdom stretched between the Zambezi and the Komati rivers; Soshangane engaged in slave trading with the Portuguese and reduced neighbouring Shona to tributary status. Adding greatly to the social dislocation of east-central Africa, Ngoni movements were dictated by the need to avoid more powerful African polities and to find new food resources after local cattle and crops had been exhausted through their raids. Within their military states, the Ngoni aristocracy monopolized cattle, incorporated the women and children of conquered peoples, and exacted tribute from those whom they were unable to permanently subdue.

Increasing violence in other parts of Southern Africa

As in eastern Africa, where violence intersected with the intensifying activities of slave raiders, so in Southern Africa the violence of this period is multifactorial and needs to be more closely analyzed. Warfare among the northern Ngoni preceded the expansion of the Zulu kingdom, and its rise does not sufficiently explain the violence in the hinterland of the Cape Colony. There the destructiveness of the settler presence was increasingly felt from the mid 18th century, as displaced groups of Khoisan and escaped slaves, carrying with them the commando system and the guns—and sometimes also the religion and the genes—of the white man, fled beyond the confines of the colony. In central and northwestern South Africa and southern Namibia these heterogenous groups of people, known variously as Basters, Griqua, Korana, Bergenaars, and Oorlams, competed for land and water with the Tswana and Nama communities and traded for or raided their ivory and cattle in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. By the 1800s the extension of the firearms frontier was disrupting the Orange River valley and intensifying conflict between the Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms beyond.

The Mfengu and the Mantatee

The upheaval affected the southern chiefdoms and rebellious tributaries attacked by Shaka as far away as Pondoland. Many of the refugees fled either into the eastern Cape or west onto the Highveld, although their precise number is a matter of dispute. In both areas the arrival of the refugees added to upheavals of very different origin. The Mfengu, as the refugee population was known in the Cape, included in their ranks starving Xhosa victims of the 1834–35 frontier war, while the Mantatee or Fetcani (as the displaced population was known in the interior) were probably largely the product of labour raids by Griqua and Korana allies of frontier farmers.

Moshoeshoe

Others shattered by the dual impact of the wars emanating from Zululand and the activities of labour raiders from the south scrambled to safety in the mountain fortresses of what is now Lesotho. There Moshoeshoe, the Koena leader, built a new kingdom at Thaba Bosiu, defeating and then incorporating his main rivals. Moshoeshoe quickly appreciated the utility of firearms and horses in the new warfare and of missionaries as diplomatic intermediaries. Shrewd diplomatic marriages extended his sway, and by the mid 19th century he had attracted some 80,000 followers, based on his ability to provide them with cattle and protection.

Mzilikazi

Other dislodged Highveld peoples joined the Griqua polities along the Orange River or continued raiding along the Vaal and into the western Transvaal region, where the disorders prepared the way for the coming of Mzilikazi. Originally one of Shaka’s commanders, Mzilikazi fled from Zululand in 1823 with some 300 of his followers, known as the Ndebele (or Matabele). Over the next 15 years Mzilikazi created a 20,000-strong raiding kingdom in east-central South Africa by absorbing local Sotho-speaking peoples into his regiments. Nevertheless, he was constantly harried by Griqua raiders from the south, Zulu armies from the east, and the Pedi kingdom, which was establishing itself as the most formidable power in the northeastern Transvaal region. In 1837, harassed by his many enemies and defeated by expanding white farmers from the Cape Colony, Mzilikazi retreated across the Limpopo into southwestern Zimbabwe.

There Mzilikazi established himself relatively easily, for the Shona polities were ill-prepared for the new form of warfare and were already weakened by the earlier incursions of the Ngoni and by drought. As in northeastern South Africa, the local populace was absorbed into Ndebele age-set regiments; a castelike society evolved, with the original Ngoni on top, Sotho in the middle, and Shona at the bottom. The relationships that the Ndebele established with groups beyond their immediate settlement ranged from friendly alliances to the regular exaction of tribute and random raiding. Beyond the range of Mzilikazi’s armies, however, many Shona chiefdoms remained independent; by the 1870s they were trading firearms to resist Ndebele incursions.

The Kololo

Yet another group dislodged by the warfare of this time, the composite Sotho group known as the Kololo, made its mark in west-central Africa. Defeated in warfare among the western Tswana, about 1840 Sebetwane led his followers across the Zambezi into northwestern Zambia. There they conquered the Lozi kingdom, which had been built up in the 18th century, and then dominated western Zambia. The Kololo triumph was short-lived, however; by 1864 the ravages of malaria, the accession of a weak and diseased king, and the revival of Lozi royal fortunes put an end to their hegemony. Nevertheless, a variant of Sotho is still the language of the region.

British development of the Cape Colony

Britain occupied the Cape Colony at the turn of the 19th century. During the Napoleonic Wars the Cape passed first to the British (1795–1803), then to the Batavian Republic (1803–06), and to the British again in 1806. The main impulse behind Britain’s annexation was to protect its sea route to India. However, the British demands that the colony pay for its administration, produce raw materials for the metropole, and provide a market for Britain’s manufactures and a home for its unemployed ineluctably drew Britain into defending the colonists, expanding their territory, and transforming the Cape’s mercantile economy. The displacement of Dutch East India Company rule by an imperial state in the early stages of its industrial revolution greatly expanded local opportunities for trade and increased demands for labour, just as the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire.

In its constitutional development the Cape Colony followed the pattern set by Britain’s other settler colonies in the 19th century. It was initially a crown colony governed by an autocratic governor, whose more extreme powers were modified by the presence in Cape Town of an articulate middle class and by the arrival in 1820 of some 5,000 British settlers. These groups demanded a free press, an independent legal system, the rooting out of corruption, and more representative institutions. After intense political struggle, Cape men were granted representative government in 1853, with a nonracial franchise that included a low property threshold, which, it was hoped, would defuse the discontent of both Afrikaners and the rebellious creolized Khoisan/Coloured population.

Changes in the status of Africans

In 1872 the Cape gained full responsible government. The colour-blind franchise was retained but came under increasing attack. As a strategy for incorporating the more prosperous Black peasants and artisans, it had been supported by white merchants, professionals, and officials. With the annexation of African territories and the creation of a mass Black working class, however, it proved vulnerable, and in 1887 and 1892 the franchise qualifications were changed in order to restrict the number of Black voters.

Initially, imperial protection expanded Cape wheat and wine production, while the British did little to alter existing social and property relations. By the mid 1820s, however, imperial attempts to create a “free market” in labour—including the abolition of preferential tariffs and reform in the system of land tenure—had an explosive effect on the class relations of a colony dependent on slaves and serfs. New regulations ensured standards of treatment and established equality before the law for “masters” and “servants.” Ordinance 50 of 1828, which ensured Khoisan mobility on the labour market, caused an uproar; in 1834 slaves were finally emancipated. Despite their formal equality before the law, however, newly emancipated slaves received only modest protection, from the handful of mission stations, against exploitative and often brutal conditions. By 1841, largely through “masters and servants” legislation, settlers had reimposed much of their old authority.

Although the underclass received only limited benefits, the British land and labour policies—together with a restructuring of local government—threatened many Afrikaners. Between 1834 and 1838, in a movement known as the Great Trek, parties of Voortrekkers (“Pioneers”), with their families and dependents, departed the Cape Colony. Their exodus was to become the central saga of 20th-century Afrikaner nationalism. Beyond the confines of the colony, they established separate republics in Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal, outflanking the Xhosa along the southeast coast, where the British were confronted by a series of interlocking crises.

Continuing settler-Xhosa wars

The first of these crises had erupted in 1799 shortly after the British first occupied the Cape. This was the third war between settlers and Xhosa in the Zuurveld and coincided with a mass uprising of Khoisan in Graaff-Reinet. Although peace was restored in 1803, the Xhosa remained in the Zuurveld until British troops drove them east of the Great Fish River in 1811–12; subsequent near-constant skirmishing again exploded into war in 1818–l9, 1834–35, and l846. For most of the century the Cape was dependent on British troops for its defense and for the further conquest of African territory.

By mid century the western Xhosa were formidable foes who used firearms and adopted guerrilla tactics. Thus, the eighth war (1850–53) was the most drawn-out and costly of all. As in 1799, a simultaneous uprising of Khoisan/Coloured people at the Kat River settlement in the eastern Cape north of Fort Beaufort (established as a buffer for the colony in 1828) weakened the colonists’ position. In the end, it was not British arms or settler prowess that defeated the Xhosa but internal tensions resulting from the activities of white traders, missionaries, and settlers. These pressures were increased by the confiscation of Xhosa land and cattle, the apportionment after each war of captives as labour to settlers, the arrival of refugees from wars beyond their frontiers, and the expansion of commercial sheep farming, which was the most important sector of the Cape economy by the 1840s. The Cape’s northern frontier was now the Orange River, while in the east the land between the Great Fish and Great Kei rivers was appropriated for white settlement.

In 1857 the internally divided Xhosa, exhausted by years of attrition, in the midst of severe drought and cattle disease, and undermined by the aggressive policies of the British governor Sir George Grey, turned to millenarian prophecies. They slaughtered their cattle and destroyed their crops in the belief that doing so would raise their ancestors from their graves and drive the whites into the sea. When the awaited salvation failed to materialize, some 30,000–40,000 Xhosa streamed across the frontier to seek work in the colony. An equal number died of starvation. Although Xhosa farther east fought the colonists again in 1877 and 1879, the slaughter of the cattle marked the end of Xhosa political and economic integrity. Thereafter the annexation of the remaining African territories proceeded peacefully, if piecemeal. The last of the independent kingdoms to pass into Cape hands was Pondoland, in 1895.

Growth of missionary activity

From the end of the 18th century, European missionaries were crucial in the transformation of African society at the Cape. With Christianity came Victorian notions of civilization and progress. Progress meant that Africans produced agricultural products for export and entered into the labour market. The first converts in the Cape were the Khoisan, in the east and north, and the Griqua, who by the 1820s had formed a series of independent if schismatic states in the Vaal-Orange confluence. By the late 1820s these states were seen by the missionaries as destined to have a vast “civilizing” influence in the interior. The neighbouring Sotho-Tswana communities were also early sites of missionary activity. Two of the most famous 19th-century Scottish missionaries to Southern Africa, Robert Moffat and David Livingstone, worked among the Tswana. The most notable of the Tswana converts were the Ngwato, under the king Khama III (reigned 1875–1923), who established a virtual theocracy among his people and was perhaps the most acclaimed Christian convert of his day, while in the eastern Cape the Mfengu were in the forefront of mission activity and peasant enterprise. In the second half of the 19th century, increasing numbers of Xhosa also turned to Christianity. In Zululand and on the Highveld the missionaries both preceded and paved the way for white settlers and were sometimes their fiercest critics.

Initially Christianity tended to advance most rapidly among the disaffected and dispossessed, and especially among women, with those who depended on the slave trade less enthusiastic. It was usually only after a major disaster undermined their belief systems that considerable numbers of men turned to the new religion. By inculcating individualism and encouraging the stratification that was to lead so many of their converts onto the colonial labour markets, the missionaries attacked much that was central to African society and developed an ideology to accompany colonial subordination.

The first European missionaries to south-central Africa, inspired by Livingstone, set up their Universities Mission in 1861. Although this mission ended in tragedy and failure, after Livingstone’s death in 1873 other missionaries followed. In 1875 the Free Church of Scotland established the Livingstonia Mission in his memory, while the established Church of Scotland began work among the Yao at Blantyre the following year. From Lake Nyasa the Scottish missions spread inland to northeastern Zambia and were followed by a large number of representatives of other Christian denominations in the last decades of the century. By the last quarter of the 19th century, European missionaries and African evangelists of almost every denomination were working among the peoples of Southern Africa, eroding chiefly authority and inculcating the new values and practices of the colonial world but also bringing new modes of resistance and educating many Christian Africans who later became outspoken critics of colonialism.

The expansion of white settlement

If the expansion of white settlement under the British led to a vast expropriation of African land and labour, it also led to a rapid expansion of unequal trading relations. Black-white exchange existed in the frontier zone from the early 18th century. British traders soon crossed colonial frontiers and were at Shaka’s court by the early 1820s. They exchanged African cattle and crops for beads and brandy and on occasion may have purchased slaves, although even settlers well beyond colonial boundaries now disguised this as “apprenticeship” and “indenture.” The establishment of republics throughout the 19th century meant that Black Africans continued to lose land and ultimately their independence to white-dominated governments.

The Republic of Natalia and the British colony of Natal

The establishment of trekker republics in Natal and on the Highveld greatly expanded the frontiers of white settlement. The Voortrekkers, however, did not display any sense of national unity, and the parties soon fell out and set off in different directions. The trekkers enjoyed some spectacular successes as a result of their firearms, horses, and use of ox-wagons to form laagers (protected encampments), as well as their strategic alliances with African chiefdoms; they found it far more difficult to establish permanent hegemony over the region.

Victory over the Zulu at the Battle of Blood River on December 16, 1838, and divisions in the Zulu kingdom enabled the establishment of the short-lived Republic of Natalia, bounded to the north by the still-powerful Zulu kingdom and to the south by the Mpondo. In 1843, however, the British, anxious to control the sea route to India, fearful of trekker negotiations with foreign powers, and concerned that trekker raids would spread to the eastern frontier, annexed Natal, leaving the Zulu kingdom north of the Tugela River independent until its disintegration in the civil wars that followed its defeat by the British army in 1879.

For most of the 19th century, British Natal was surrounded by powerful African states and was heavily outnumbered by Africans within the colony. Constitutional development in Natal was slower and more erratic than in the Cape; colonists received responsible government only in 1893. Unlike the Cape, Natal never had a viable nonracial franchise: at the century’s end few Africans had the vote, despite the existence of considerable numbers of mission-educated Black Christians. Racial practices in Natal—including the reservation of lands for African communal occupation, recognition of tribal authorities, codification of customary law, and control over urbanization through labour registration and influx control—were born out of the colony’s weakness and provided precedents for 20th-century segregationist policies.

Absentee landowners bought up land claimed and vacated by the Voortrekkers and extracted rent from African producers, hoping increased white immigration would raise land prices. Like the weak colonial administration, the absentees were anxious to avoid the conflict that would have resulted from the expropriation of land occupied by Africans demanded by smaller settler-farmers. When in 1860 sugar was exploited successfully for the first time, indentured labour had to be brought from India to do the arduous work, because Africans—many of whom still had their own land and cattle—refused to work for the low wages offered on the plantations. By the last decades of the 19th century, however, a land shortage and high taxes had forced large numbers of Africans to seek work in colonial labour markets.

Voortrekker republics in the interior

With the British annexation of Natal, most of the Voortrekkers rejoined their compatriots on the Highveld, where separate communities had been established in Transorangia (the region across the Orange River) and the western and northeastern Transvaal. Apart from a brief period in the mid 19th century, the British left them alone, controlling external trade and security threats through the coastal colonies. On the Highveld the Voortrekkers entered a vibrant and complex African world. To ensconce themselves in the interior, they fought major wars and established a series of accommodations with those Africans whom they were unable to conquer.

Compared with the British colonies, the racially exclusive republics between the Vaal, Hartz, and Limpopo rivers were weak members of the world economy, dependent on cattle ranching and hunting. Bitterly divided politically and ecclesiastically, these republics were unified in 1860 as the South African Republic, annexed as the British colony of the Transvaal between 1877 and 1881, and reconquered as the Transvaal during the South African War (1899–1902). The trekkers staked a claim to Black lands, provided a framework for speculation and the beginnings of commerce, and established formal legal title to territory, though these claims were as yet barely effective. The incapacity of the settlers to wrest the indigenous inhabitants from their land resulted in the development of several types of labour coercion and control: slavery, clientship, indenture, debt bondage, and various forms of rent and labour tenancy.

The struggle to transform formal claims into actual landownership and control continued well into the 20th century. Money was short, and government officials were paid in land, usually along with its African occupants. The settlers’ accumulation of wealth was often the result of random looting and forcible, though sporadic, extraction of tribute, tempered by the limited physical capacity of the commando system. Surrounded by a horseshoe of powerful African chiefdoms, it was only in the last third of the 19th century, during a period of renewed imperial interest in the interior, that the balance of power shifted decisively in favour of white farmers.

The Orange Free State and Basutoland

Farther south, in Transorangia, a far greater proportion of the small settler community was tied to Cape and British markets through wool production. Of a population in 1875 of some 125,000, only the 26,000 whites had citizenship, but many European observers considered the Orange Free State, with its parliament and written constitution, a model republic. Despite the Dutch ancestry of the majority of the settlers, English was the language of commerce and education into the 20th century.

The existence of Moshoeshoe’s Basuto kingdom on the settlers’ eastern flank meant constant friction. With the restoration of peace on the Highveld in the 1840s, many Africans attempted to return to their lands, only to find them occupied. Despite Moshoeshoe’s attempts to keep the peace, cattle raiding by his dispossessed subjects, together with increasing demands for land and labour from settler sheep farmers, led to war in 1858 and again in l865–69. On the first occasion, the Orange Free State was forced to sue for peace. On the second, Basutoland, internally divided and starved of arms by the British decision to sell weapons to Afrikaners but not Africans, was beaten. Some chiefs, especially in the north, offered their allegiance to the Afrikaners and, with their followers, became labour-tenants on their farms; others moved into the Transkei. In 1868, in response to repeated appeals from the Sotho, the governor of the Cape annexed Basutoland, leaving the Orange Free State in possession of the fertile Caledon River valley. In 1869 the frontiers of Basutoland were delimited, and shortly thereafter it was handed over to the Cape. In 1881, however, when the Cape government tried to disarm the Sotho, a war that the colony could not control broke out, and in 1884 Basutoland reverted to British rule.

The Orange Free State also constantly encroached on the better-watered land of its western neighbours, the Griqua and southern Tswana states, which were also under frequent attack from the South African Republic. These attacks led to a growing alliance among the Tswana kingdoms and to protest from the missionaries and Cape traders, who feared the Afrikaners would block the main route to the interior. Nevertheless, the area came under colonial rule only after the discovery in 1867 of diamonds in Griqualand West.

Minerals and the scramble for Southern Africa

From the 1860s it was known that there was gold in the interior of Southern Africa. In 1867 diamonds were discovered at Kimberley in Griqualand West to the north of the Cape Colony, followed shortly thereafter by discoveries of outcrop (surface) gold in the Transvaal and deep seams of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. The conjuncture of speculation in mining futures and land, the imposition of colonial or company rule, and an industrial revolution based on mineral extraction meant that the last third of the 19th century was one of the most traumatic in the history of the region. The language of racial domination, though hardly new, was now buttressed by social Darwinism and was particularly well suited to an era of intensified land and labour exploitation.

The mineral discoveries led to dramatic economic development. Roads, railways, and harbours were built. New coal mines were exploited. Manufacturing, though in its infancy, responded to the new markets, while the creation of an internal market for food was crucial in the commercialization of agriculture and the spread of African cash crop production. Land prices soared, and the demand for labour became insatiable. A working class—consisting of both whites and Blacks—was created out of the preindustrial societies. Colonial conquest subjugated the remaining independent African societies and destroyed the bargaining power of Black workers.

The diamond industry

Although most scholarly attention has focused on the gold mines, it was the diamond industry that pioneered many of the characteristics of Southern Africa’s labour control policies. People from all over the world came to Griqualand West to seek their fortune; between 1871 and 1875 more than 50,000 Africans from all over the subcontinent came each year, many of them lured by the prospect of purchasing firearms. Within a few years there was hardly an African chiefdom, from the Transkei to the Limpopo, that was not armed with guns. Combined with the progressive encroachment on African lands and the intensifying demand for their labour, the rearming of Africans was a major source of the instability of these years.

Initially, claims on the diamond fields were limited, technology was primitive, and small-scale Black diggers could compete with whites. In the mid 1870s, however, chaotic production conditions, a flooded world diamond market, and labour shortages made the transition to larger units of production necessary. Joint-stock companies were created, bringing international capital and a transformation of mining technology. By 1888 the thousands of claims of the previous decade had been monopolized by the De Beers Mining Company. For Black and white workers the establishment of the De Beers monopoly was of immense significance. African migrant workers were now more rigorously controlled by pass laws, which limited their mobility, and by confinement to compounds for the duration of their work contracts. Many white miners lost their jobs or became overseers, and wages for all workers were sharply reduced.

The discovery of gold

With the discovery of the Witwatersrand, attention switched from Kimberley to the South African Republic, which was quickly transformed from a ramshackle and bankrupt agrarian outpost to the most important state in the subcontinent. The coastal colonies competed to control the lucrative Witwatersrand trade, and immigration mounted: in 1870 the total white population of Southern Africa was probably less than 250,000; by 1891 it had increased to more than 600,000; and by 1904 it was more than 1,000,000. When local capital proved inadequate, funds flowed in from Britain, Germany, and France. From the late 1880s gold outstripped diamonds as the region’s most important export, and by 1898 the Witwatersrand produced about one-fifth of world gold output.

In 1889 the Chamber of Mines, an organization of mine owners, was formed to drive down the costs of production. This became even more important once deep-level mines were opened in the mid 1890s, because development costs were high, the ore low-grade, and the price of gold controlled. Skilled, unionized white workers from the mining frontiers of the world were able to protect their high wages, while the chamber formed two major recruiting organizations, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (Wenela) and the Native Recruiting Corporation, to extend, monopolize, and control the Black labour supply throughout the subcontinent.

Throughout the region it was usually young men who were the first migrants, often sent by homestead heads, who tried to control their movement and their wages, or by chiefs who received a recruitment fee or a portion of the labourer’s wages in tribute. For many young men a period of labour migration could bring independent access to bridewealth. Although the process had its roots in the migration of Africans to colonial labour markets earlier in the century, migrant labour expanded after the mineral discoveries and had profound ramifications for the control of senior men over juniors and colonial administrators over taxpayers. Chiefs thus became increasingly anxious over their lack of control over young men and women and struck alliances with colonial administrators and recruiting agents to secure the return of migrants.

The annexation of Southern Africa

The first move in the scramble for Southern Africa came with renewed assertions of British supremacy in the interior. After much dispute, Britain annexed Griqualand West as a crown colony in 1871, transferring it to the Cape Colony in 1881. The multiple crises following the diamond discoveries led during the 1870s to failed imperial schemes to confederate the Southern African territories, but imperial wars between 1878 and 1884 effectively ended the independence of the major African kingdoms. Of these conquests the best-known was the war in 1879 against the Zulu, which included a spectacular defeat of the British army at Isandhlwana; nevertheless, wars against the southern Tswana and Griqua, the Pedi of the eastern Transvaal, the western Xhosa, and the southern Sotho were the essential precondition for the creation of a unified South Africa.

The mineral discoveries whetted German imperial ambitions, and in 1884 Germany annexed the vast, sparsely populated territory of South West Africa (now Namibia). The annexation challenged British hegemony in the region, raised fears of a German-Transvaal alliance, and accelerated the scramble for Southern Africa. The possibilities of mineral wealth in the interior also revived Portugal’s dream of uniting its African colonies. Portugal received short shrift from the other powers, however. At the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–85, Portugal secured the Cabinda exclave and a portion of the left bank of the Congo River on the Atlantic coast—considerably less than it claimed—and in 1886 the Kunene-Okavango region went to Germany. Portugal gained even less in Mozambique, which remained a narrow coastal corridor.

With the discovery of gold, the remaining independent African polities south of the Limpopo were conquered and annexed, and both within and beyond colonial frontiers concessionaires were spurred by prospects of further discoveries and the availability of speculative capital. The Limpopo constituted no barrier, and between 1889 and 1895 all the African territories south of the Congo territory were annexed. In south-central Africa the British competed with the South African Republic, Portugal, Germany, and Belgium, while in east-central Africa, to the west and south of Lake Nyasa, the thrust from the south encountered the less powerful but still significant antislavery missionary and trading frontier from the east.

For many of the peoples of the subcontinent, the first phase of colonialism may have been overshadowed by the series of disasters that struck rural society in the mid 1890s, including locusts, drought, smallpox and other diseases, and a disastrous rinderpest epidemic that decimated African cattle holdings in 1896–97. Whereas before the colonial period such natural disasters would have killed large numbers in the short term but probably would have had little long-term consequence, the disasters of the 1890s drew considerable numbers of Africans into dependence on colonial labour markets for the first time and thus permanently changed the structure of African society.

From the 1860s it was known that there were “ancient gold workings” beyond the Limpopo, and by the mid 1880s Lobengula, the Ndebele king, was surrounded by concession hunters. In 1887–88 the high commissioner at the Cape, fearful of Transvaal expansion northward, declared the region a British sphere of interest. It was at this point that Cecil John Rhodes entered the arena.

Cecil Rhodes in Southern Africa

The story of how Rhodes came to South Africa to repair his frail health and stayed to become a millionaire on the diamond fields before he was 30 is legendary. In 1880 Rhodes entered the Cape parliament, and in the 1880s he played a key role in securing the British annexation of the Tswana kingdoms that straddled the road to the interior. One of the leading mine owners in Kimberley, by 1888 he had bought out his rivals and created the De Beers consortium. In 1890, when he became the Cape’s prime minister, he was the most powerful man in Southern Africa.

Rhodes hoped to find in south-central Africa a “second Rand” to outflank the South African Republic. In 1888 his agents secured exclusive mining rights from Lobengula for Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (BSAC), which was granted a royal charter by the British government to exploit and extend administrative control over a vast area of south-central and Southern Africa. Across the Zambezi, where the British were anxious to preempt European rivals, Rhodes engaged the newly appointed British consul for Malawi and Mozambique, Harry (later Sir Harry) Johnston, to establish his company’s claims.

A flurry of treaty making in 1888–89 left the BSAC with land and mineral concessions throughout present-day Malawi and Zambia. Despite the dubious legality of the treaties, the chiefs agreed to accept British jurisdiction over non-Africans in their domains and over external relations. In the European chancellories, where the frontiers of Africa were being decided, the treaties played an important role in negotiations. In 1890–91 British, Portuguese, and German conventions established the frontiers of many of the modern states of Southern Africa.

For Britain the BSAC’s great advantage was its promise to make British occupation effective against contending European powers and to bring capitalist development at minimum cost. In 1890 Rhodes sent a “Pioneer Column,” consisting of 200 white settlers and 150 Blacks, backed by 500 police, into Mashonaland; the real goal was the Ndebele kingdom, which was conquered in a deliberately provoked war in 1893. Although Matabeleland’s conquest brought an anticipated boom in BSAC shares, by the end of 1894 it was clear that there was no “second Rand” in south-central Africa and that the future lay with the new deep-level mines coming into operation farther south.

Expropriation of African land

As their hopes of discovering gold waned, settlers and the BSAC began expropriating African land, labour, and cattle. Settlers who participated in the war were granted lavish farms and mineral claims, both of which soon passed to speculative syndicates. A land commission perfunctorily set aside two reserves for the Ndebele on poor soils. In 1896 the Ndebele rose in revolt and were joined by a number of eastern Shona polities. Only the arrival of imperial troops and the collaboration of other Shona groups saved the company state. The uprising led the British to intervene directly in BSAC affairs by appointing a resident commissioner in Bulawayo responsible to the imperial high commissioner in Cape Town.

These events left few resources for occupation north of the Zambezi until the late 1890s. Opposition from missionaries and the African Lakes Company ensured that the region around Lake Nyasa and the Shire River valley was separated from the BSAC sphere; it was declared the British Central African Protectorate in 1891, with Johnston as commissioner. Even before Johnston’s arrival the British had been embroiled in open warfare with Arab slave traders, and during the early years of the protectorate Johnston engaged in a spate of wars against the Swahili and Yao slave and ivory traders, who feared the loss of their livelihood. Given the fragmentation and social divisions of the region, he found little difficulty in implementing a policy of divide and rule. Johnston’s antislavery wars had the advantage of releasing labour for European employers. Wary of creating a landless proletariat, Johnston, like Rhodes, nevertheless believed that the protectorate’s future development should be based on the marriage of white enterprise and Black labour, assisted by Asian middlemen.

West of the protectorate, Africans were drawn more gradually under colonial rule, despite pleas from the Lozi king Lewanika that the British provide technical and financial assistance in exchange for mineral concessions, as promised in an 1890 treaty. Lewanika’s scramble for protection in the 1890s was dictated by the same circumstances that initially had led him to invite whites into his kingdom in the mid 1880s. The 20 years following the restoration of the Lozi monarchy after the Kololo interregnum had been filled with civil war and succession disputes. By inviting the missionaries, and subsequently the BSAC, to Bulozi, Lewanika, like the Ngwato king Khama III to his south, hoped to bolster his internal position and gain the skills to enable him to deal with the intruders.

In 1897 the BSAC sent an administrator to Bulozi. Contrary to Lewanika’s expectations, this spelled the end of Lozi independence. Despite Lewanika’s “protected” status, over the next decade the powers of the king and the aristocracy were whittled away. British insistence on the abolition of serfdom and slavery in 1906 undermined the cultivation of the floodplain on which Lozi agriculture depended, and Lewanika’s hopes to control the modernization of his state were not fulfilled. Bulozi became a protectorate within a protectorate, tied to the Southern African political economy.

In northeastern Zambia, too, the process of imposing colonial rule came later, but in the end it was swifter and less violent than it had been to the south or east. The natural disasters of the 1890s diminished the ability of the more powerful groups to resist, while weaker peoples at first welcomed the end of Bemba, Ngoni, and Swahili exactions. A lack of resources spared the region major confrontations with colonialism (by contrast, among the Ngoni led by Mpeseni, where gold was believed to exist, the onslaught was as dramatic as in Zimbabwe and the expropriation as brutal). Nevertheless, attempts to impose closer settlement, interfere with local agricultural techniques, and extract forced labour combined with natural disasters to produce extremely high morbidity and mortality rates in the early years of company rule.

Portugal and Germany in Southern Africa

Colonists in Angola and Mozambique

For much of the 19th century, Portuguese colonists in Angola and Mozambique were fewer in number and weaker in authority than those in the interior of South Africa. At the beginning of the century, fewer than 1,000 settlers in each colony huddled on a number of estates around inland forts, along the Bengo and Dande rivers in Angola, and along the lower Zambezi in Mozambique. Most of them had intermarried with local peoples and were independent of Portugal. The metropolitan Portuguese were unable to control either the coastal trade or the activities of the merchants and warlords in the hinterland, who often acted in their name. In the absence of regular taxation or an effective system of customs and tariffs, the economies of the territories were poor and their administrations weak and corrupt. Despite a mythology that held that the Portuguese, unlike the northern Europeans, did not differentiate according to race, from early times it is clear that whites had superior status and prestige—if not always greater power—in Angola and Mozambique. Although both territories gained somewhat from the Napoleonic Wars, it was not until the end of the 19th century that Portugal regained any of its colonizing energy.

From the mid 19th century, Portuguese capital began to enter the colony. The Portuguese made land grants in the Luanda hinterland, and planters experimented with raising coffee, cotton, cacao, and sugarcane, using the slaves who could no longer be exported. In the absence of an adequate administration or communications network, the plantations in Angola were never highly successful, although coffee cultivation spread among African peasant farmers in the region. The appropriation of African land for plantations was resisted, and Portuguese attempts to expand their colonial nucleus led to a series of wars with African peoples, followed by famine and epidemics. The instability of the last decades of the 19th century paved the way for the colonial period that followed.

Portuguese attempts to develop Mozambique met with even less success, given the lack of investment and prevailing disorder, as escaped slaves, soldiers, and porters formed bandit bands in broken country and attacked Portuguese settlements and African villages. In many areas domestic slavery underpinned the migration of young men to the labour markets of the south by the 1850s. Liberal governments in Portugal from mid century were anxious to outlaw the feudal aspects of the prazo system but were unsuccessful, despite four military campaigns and a declaration in 1880 that the prazos were crown property.

Until the 1890s the Portuguese had little authority beyond their coastal enclaves. The only bright spot in their fortunes in southeastern Africa was the growing prosperity of Delagoa Bay, as trade with the Transvaal increased. In 1875 Portuguese rights to Delagoa Bay were recognized internationally. With the discovery of gold in the South African Republic, the bay acquired a new importance as its closest outlet, and in 1888 Lourenço Marques became the capital of Mozambique.

Angola and Mozambique in the late 19th century

Although Portugal failed in its major territorial ambitions in the late 19th century, it nonetheless acquired about 800,000 square miles (2,000,000 square km) of African territory, of which it controlled about one-tenth. In both Portuguese territories “pacification” became a sine qua non of economic development, and there were military campaigns or police actions in almost every year between 1875 and 1924, a measure of Portugal’s weakness as a colonial power. The greatest resistance came from those people with the longest experience of Portuguese rule and with the necessary firearms. In Angola the major campaigns were against the Kongo, Mbundu, and Ovambo peoples; in Mozambique against peoples of the Zambezi valley, the Islamized Makua and Yao, and the Gaza kingdom, which was finally defeated in 1895.

The majority of Portuguese troops in both territories were Black, a situation that turned every campaign into a potential civil war. Fragmentation of political authority, resistance of traditional elites threatened by colonial rule, and the precipitate introduction of taxes and forced labour policies also made resistance in the Portuguese colonies the most prolonged in early 20th-century Africa.

Colonial markets were of particular importance to Portugal, and tariff barriers were erected to protect its manufactures. Starved of capital and racked by financial crises, Portugal planned to develop the colonies by attracting immigration and foreign capital and by fostering plantation agriculture. In Mozambique, however, local employers could not compete with the Witwatersrand. Since the 1850s, Mozambican migrants had traveled to the farms and sugar plantations of South Africa, while by the 1870s sterling had begun to replace cattle and hoes as bridewealth. By 1897 more than half the mine workers on the Rand came from Mozambique, while thousands worked on South African farms.

Germans in South West Africa

The Germans were the last imperial power to arrive in Africa. Their annexation and control of South West Africa was eased by the intense cleavages that had opened up between the local Nama and the Herero chiefdoms, a result of their increasing involvement in the world economy during the 19th century.

Throughout the 19th century, displaced communities of Khoekhoe and Oorlams from the Cape had made their way into South West Africa, competing for the sparse water and grazing land. At first they settled peacefully on land granted them by the local populace, some of them establishing mission communities. The advent in the 1830s of the Oorlam chief Jonker Afrikaner and his well-armed followers significantly altered the regional balance of power. Responding to an appeal from the Nama, who were being driven from their grazing lands by Herero expansion, Afrikaner settled at Windhoek. By gaining control over the all-important trade routes from Walvis Bay and the Cape Colony, he ensured, until his death in 1861, Nama dominance over the Herero. Wars between the Nama and Herero were exacerbated from the mid 19th century by the increasing cattle and ivory trade and the availability of firearms; apart from a breathing space between l870 and 1880, the Nama-Herero wars continued from 1863 to 1892.

Initially Germany hoped to exploit the territory through a concession company, but it could not raise sufficient capital. The government was increasingly forced to intervene in local affairs, especially when settlers appropriated Herero cattle and grazing lands. The most formidable opponent of the Germans was Hendrik Witbooi, a Nama chief who tried unsuccessfully to unite the Herero and Nama against the Germans. After a lengthy guerrilla war, he was defeated in 1894.

The rinderpest epidemic, the alienation of the better-watered highlands, unfair trading practices, and increasing indebtedness led to an uprising by the Nama and Herero peoples in l904–07. They were crushed in a genocidal campaign: the Herero population fell from about 70,000 to about 16,000, with many dying in the desert while attempting to escape. The Nama were reduced by two-fifths. The handful of settlers had to turn for labour to the Cape Colony and Ovamboland, which was formally brought under colonial rule only when the South Africans took over South West Africa during World War I.