Changing forms of resistance: Braklaagte and Leeufontein, 1906-1991
Date
1992-04-27
Authors
Manson, Andrew
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Abstract
On the 1st July 1989 Bophuthatswana police dispersed a meeting of villagers in Leeufontein,
situated about fifteen kilometres north of Zeerust in the western Transvaal who were protesting
against their forced removal into the Bophuthatswana homeland. The crowd was sprayed with
teargas and rubber bullets. In the ensuing confusion nine policemen and two civilians were killed
and almost the entire village fled to neighbouring white farms or made their way to Johannesburg's black townships to seek sanctuary with friends or relatives. The village immediately was surrounded by patrols of the South African and Bophuthatswana Police Forces who systematically searched and detained anyone suspected of complicity in the killings. Many suspects were routinely assaulted and over the next six months four residents were killed by progovernment vigilantes supported by the Bophuthatswana Police. Subsequently the nearby village of Braklaagte, whose fate was closely bound up with that of Leeufontein, was also abandoned. Most of the villagers found their way to Zeerust where they spent over six months as refugees living in tents in the grounds of the Anglican, Catholic and Methodist churches. Their plight became almost a cause celebre', gaining the attention of the international community and eliciting the personal intervention of the President of the A.N.C.who attempted to secure a safe return for
them back to their homes. Their defiance was held up as a symbol of the determination of rural
Batswana to resist the homeland system. These events were however the culmination of a long saga of opposition by the two communities to forces bent on undermining their political independence and social cohesion. This story stretches over eighty years and contains within it many of the elements which comprise the experience of rural communities in South Africa in this century. Also discernible are the shifts and moods of the modern South African state as it manoeuvered to control African rural society and
to execute more effectively its ideological goals. This paper then examines the history of these people and attempts to locate the changing pattern of their resistance in the context of twentieth century developments. Such a task requires a close examination of the dynamics of the internal political functioning of these communities, without which the pattern and intensity of their defiance has little meaning.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 27 April 1992
Keywords
Forced migration. South Africa. Transvaal, Tswana (African people). Relocation. South Africa. Transvaal