Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948

Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948. By Paul S. Landau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xvi, 300; maps, photographs, bibliography, index. $90.00. The history of the South African highveld- defined as the region the Middle or Willow River (Mohokare or the Caledon)- shows sovereignties and mobilizations. The African rulers were anything but politically naive, using basic rationality and sensical and effective ways (p. xii) to create movements that were unique. The forebears of people known today as Coloureds, Sothos, and Tswanas mastered institutions that served them well. They learned to embrace and absorb the flow of strangers and create alliances. Indeed, this principle of hybridity (metissage) was central to their traditions, and despite efforts to stamp it out, has survived through the twentieth century in independent Christian churches, popular movements, rural resistance, and African National Congress (ANC) politics. This seminal idea is developed in a scholarly book whose range and depth of primary and secondary sources is extraordinary. The book starts with the Borderland, an open area beyond the Orange River governed by interactive, overlapping, and incomplete authorities (p. 3) occupied by maroon communities, Khoikhois, briquas, metis, Koranas, the Dutch and other whites. Dithakong was a multhingual trading post, so named by Bitjuanas (Bechuanas), meaning mixed where mateships and metissage were tolerated without reference to tribal identities. Ethnic differences existed, but chiefly politics made and remade ethnicity, not the other way around (p. 41), the author maintains. Chiefs found open-ended solutions by adopting two or more names to create multiple alliances. Indeed, the people of southern Africa were unusually connected in speech and traditions from the fifth century forward (p. 49). Related chiefdoms controlled important watersheds in the region to nurture traditions capable of accommodating and embracing strangers ... (p. 73). The start of the nineteenth century shows indigenous political institutions that included the prominence of past chiefs or ancestors, twin-courts (divided authorities), and alliances in times of war and peace, even during the great turmoil of the early 1820s. So, how did all this change? The author attributes this to outside agents, the first among whom were the missionaries. They generally denied Africans politics of their own and promoted tribal identifications. In addition to their direct role in political matters, missionaries midwived out of highveld speech and ideas that had farreaching and unintended consequences. For example, Robert Moffat helped people to integrate into their lives unforeseen frameworks and patterns that facilitated the greater project of exploitation (p. 74). His concept of God was translated by interpreters within realities consistent with their unselfconsciously commonsensical view of the world (p. 94). Christian transcendental views clashed with those of the farmers. He, like other missionaries, introduced paradoxical ideas, including the Millennium, relating the growth of one's wealth, crops, cattle, children, and the power and authority of the chief. This is the backdrop against which we should follow the history of Chief Moroka who reigned from 1828 to 1880 over an ethnic mix of Bechuanas and Griquas. For him, hybridity was the foundation of alliances. He moved his people from the Vaal-Harts confluence to Thaba Nchu. Despite the political turmoil of the 1850s and 1860s- during which two Boer republics emerged- Moroka survived through key alliances. Ultimately, however, Boer and British colonial ambitions and the privatization of highveld lands eroded his chiefly autonomy. Tribalization grew with the erosion of chiefly powers, and together with such ethnic identification, Christianity grew in the Caledon valley. …

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