1 Title: “I See You” in the Soil: The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) in the Western Transvaal, 1926- 1934 Laurence Stewart A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts - Masters in the Department of History, School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand. April 2021 2 Declaration This study represents an original work by the author and has not been submitted in any form to another university. It is being submitted for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts - Honours at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Where use has been made of the work of others it has been duly acknowledged in the text. _______________________ Name: Laurence Stewart Date: 30 April 2021 _______________________ Name: Arianna Lissoni Supervisor Date 3 A b s t r a c t This dissertation focusses on the history of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) in the Western Transvaal and northern part of the Cape Province (what is today the North West Province) between 1926 and 1934. By employing archival research and an extensive set of archived interviews, the research unearths the trajectory of the ICU and its character as a political organisation in this region, which has been overlooked in the scholarship. Histories of land dispossession and capitalist expansion framed the ICU’s emergence in South Africa and indeed its unfolding in the Western Transvaal as the capitalisation of agriculture pushed black sharecroppers and labour tenants into wage labour and onto employment on the diamond diggings. In Lichtenburg, where the economy centred on alluvial diamond mining, the ICU played a crucial role in a strike in June 1928 which saw 35 000 black workers down tools and helped spread its message spread across the Western Transvaal. The ICU’s success in this region was uneven and dependent on the local political economy of towns and farming districts, as well as the presence of dedicated leaders in the face of hostile town administrations and malevolent white farmers. In the South-Western Transvaal, in Wolmaransstad, Makwassie, Ottosdal, Schweizer-Reneke and Bloemhof, the ICU rallied farmworkers against proletarianisation and took up the struggles of location residents in towns against passes and poor living conditions. In other parts of the Western Transvaal, like Klerksdorp, Potchefstroom, Rustenburg, Mafeking, Taung and Vryburg, whose economies were linked to the Rand or Reserves, the ICU failed to make significant inroads and was affected to a greater extent by its general organisational decline. Throughout the region, the ICU held meetings where they articulated languages of freedom and subversion, calling for economic freedom and subverting the discourses related to the political and economic context of the region. Through the theory of Henri Lefebvre, this dissertation argues that the ICU’s meetings and activity disrupted spatial segregation and played a critical role in reshaping the political economy. While charismatic leaders like Jingoes, ‘Mote, Makhatini, Maleke, Modiakgotla and Kadalie kept the union going in the South-Western Transvaal up until 1934, the ICU’s presence ultimately buckled under the pressure of repression, violence and the ICU’s own organisational problems that included ideological contradictions and corruption. This dissertation concludes that the ICU’s experience in the Western Transvaal, which included fighting for political and economic freedoms, defies the overall trajectory, according to which the organisation was a spent force by the 1920s, and sheds new insight onto its character which is best characterised through the label union-cum-protest movement. 4 Table of Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................... 6 List of Images .................................................................................................................................. 7 List of Biographical Profiles ............................................................................................................ 9 List of Abbreviations ..................................................................................................................... 10 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 13 Background and Aims of the Research ..................................................................................... 13 Research Question(s) ................................................................................................................. 18 Rationale .................................................................................................................................... 19 Literature Review ...................................................................................................................... 20 Thinking Space: Lefebvre and the Ordering of Space in the Western Transvaal ................... 27 Method ....................................................................................................................................... 30 Note on the Chapter Structure, Maps and Biographical Profiles ............................................ 36 Chapter One – A Wildfire from the Embers: The Rise of the ICU in the Western Transvaal in the Context of a Changing South Africa: c. 1500s-1930s ............................................................. 38 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 38 The Rise of Modern South Africa: 1500s-1930s........................................................................ 38 African Land and Colonial Expansion in the Western Transvaal, 1500-1880 ..................... 38 Minerals, Masters and the Making of the State, 1864-1910 ................................................. 41 Black Politics, Segregation and the Pact Government, 1910-1927 ....................................... 47 The Rural Revolt, 1927-1929 ................................................................................................. 54 The Development of a Radical, African, Working-Class Movement: The Rise and “Fall” of the ICU, 1919 – 1931 .................................................................................................................. 58 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 69 Chapter Two – Diamonds in the Rough: the ICU’s Activism on Diamond Diggings in the Western Transvaal, 1927-1931 ...................................................................................................... 71 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 71 The Political Economy of Diamond Diggings in the Western Transvaal ................................. 72 Economic Expansion and Depression in Lichtenburg, 1926-1928 ........................................... 76 Manipulation of the Market: Intervention by the State and De Beers..................................... 84 Pittance and Police Persecution: The ICU and the Lichtenburg Strike................................... 88 The ICU in the Aftermath of the Lichtenburg Strike: Internal Splits, Liberal Intervention and Declining Prosperity on the Diggings ............................................................................... 102 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 109 Chapter Three – “You Cannot Stop a River”: Expansion and Repression of the ICU in the Towns and Farms of the South-Western Transvaal, 1927-1934. ............................................... 111 5 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 111 Wolmaransstad ........................................................................................................................ 114 Makwassie ................................................................................................................................ 120 Ottosdal .................................................................................................................................... 133 Schweizer-Reneke .................................................................................................................... 139 Bloemhof .................................................................................................................................. 153 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 160 Chapter Four – Ideological Paradox, Poor Praxis, Corruption and Dwindling Funds: the ICU’s Struggles in Other Towns of the Western Transvaal, 1926-1929 ............................................... 163 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 163 Klerksdorp ............................................................................................................................... 164 Potchefstroom .......................................................................................................................... 173 Rustenburg .............................................................................................................................. 182 Mafikeng .................................................................................................................................. 186 Taung ....................................................................................................................................... 193 Vryburg ................................................................................................................................... 195 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 196 Chapter Five – Reflections On/Of the ICU: The ICU’s Impact on the Ideological, Spatial and Political Realities in the Western Transvaal, 1926-1934 ............................................................ 198 The ICU’s Language of Freedom ............................................................................................ 199 Languages of Subversion and Ridicule ................................................................................... 207 The ICU as a Mediator and a Substitute for the Chieftaincy ................................................. 211 Democratising Public Discussion: the ICU and the Public Sphere ........................................ 214 Space and Spatial Politics: Rethinking the ICU’s Impact on Space and Spatial Relationships in the Western Transvaal ........................................................................................................ 216 The Spatial Politics of Farms............................................................................................... 218 Perceptions of Spatial and Political Divisions in Town and Countryside .......................... 219 Transforming Space ............................................................................................................ 221 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 224 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 226 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 232 6 Acknowledgements I am completely thankful to all those loving people around me just like Tweety, Pops and Ma. Shap-lifters and sports fanatics, dancers and unending food. A jovial space, serious, but also unserious. For the sunrises and sunsets and the !Kamma to never forget. Tipi has been well immersed in all the vacillations of mood and hunger and, although some claim it has been a pleasure, the maybe my blood sugar could have taken a slap on the wrists. I love you and shall never leave that. For the Sundays and Fridays, and the Briscola and Scopa. The same goes for those who are there very often to distract me and talk to me about all the raving issues of the day; Dyl (for competition and jokes!) T (oh! for the world and love) and Lu (for pressing questions about the monsters that be). The lesson, as always is and was throughout the process: “you don’t live to work, but you work to live”. Perhaps I have been on a holiday for fourteen months! There are those clamouring like Srix, Gul, Tus and Doc who have shared some parts of this process and have greatly informed my conclusions. Then there are those who deserve formal acknowledgement. Dr Arianna Lissoni was a superb supervisor, who was dedicated to every part of the process (until the final day) and provided wonderful guidance. A perfectionist at heart for sure. To all the students and academics in the History Department and History Workshop, who gave feedback on the proposal and helped shape the overall outcome of the research. Noor Nieftagodien encouraged me to do the Masters in the first place, and only now I can agree it was a good idea! The National Research Foundation provided funding for this project under the “Local Histories, Present Realities” which helped me conduct all the relevant research with comparable ease. Despite having never met him, and living thousands of kilometres away, Henry Dee has provided excellent sources on the ICU; including newspapers, archival documents and journal articles. I thank him for this support. While Graeme “Umlungu” D’or certainly lost his first touch, he put a great final touch to this dissertation through the maps he made. Through a weekly writing group, Laura Phillips has helped me write this dissertation (perhaps too much writing in the end...) Of course, all the staff at the National Archives and Wits Historical Papers have been crucial to the completion of this dissertation as well. It was Gabriele Mohale who introduced me to the interviews which opened up a new world. 7 List of Images Figure 1: A stamp created by the South African Post Office in 2019 commemorating 100 years since the ICU was founded………………………………………………………… p.13 Figure 2: Front Cover of a pamphlet on the ICU produced by the Labour History Group……………………………………………………………………………………… p.15 Figure 3: “There is Fire Here”, poster produced by the Labour History Group in the 1980s …………………………………………………………………………………………….. p.15 Figure 4: “African Trade Unionism is Undergoing Persecution Under the Nationalist-Labour Government of South Africa”……………………..……………………………………… p.53 Figure 5: Image of Keable ‘Mote and Thomas Mbeki in March 1926…………………… p.64 Figure 6: Thousands of motor cars at the proclamation of the Grasfontein diamond digging…………………………………………………………………………………….. p.77 Figure 7: Black workers on the Lichtenburg diggings……………………………………. p.78 Figure 8: Deep Diamond Digging, Grasfontein, Lichtenburg…………………………….. p.82 Figure 9: Mining gear at Welverdiend, Lichtenburg……………………………………… p.82 Figure 10: Diamond production in alluvial diamond fields as opposed to kimberlite deposits, years 1925-1933…………………………………………………………………………... p.85 Figure 11: The outside of the ICU’s membership card…………………………………… p.118 Figure 12: The inside of the ICU’s membership card…………………………………… p.118 Figure 13: Jason Jingoes………………………………………………………………… p.128 Figure 14: Jacob Lebone………………………………………………………………… p.128 Figure 15: Mphaka Maine……………………………………………………………… p. 128 8 List of Maps Map 1: Map of South Africa, including former boundaries of provinces and Bantustans…p.11 Map 2: Map of the Western Transvaal and northern part of the Cape Province………… p.12 Map 3: Alluvial Diamond Fields in the North West Province……………………………. p.73 Map 4: Map of farms in Lichtenburg where diamond digging was prevalent……………. p.94 Map 5: Farms in the South-Western Transvaal………..………………………………… p.113 9 List of Biographical Profiles Conan Doyle Modiakgotla…………………………………………………. p.83 Alexander Maduna………………………………………………………… p.90 Robert Makhatini…………………………………………………………… p.115. Jason Jingoes……………………………………………………………… p.126 Keable ‘Mote……………………………………………………………… p.168 Henry Daniel Tyamzashe…………………………………………………. p.171 Thomas Mbeki……………………………………………………………. p.177 10 List of Abbreviations ANC African National Congress CID Criminal Investigation Department CPSA Communist Party of South Africa HPRA Historical Papers Research Archive IASR Institute for Advanced Social Research ICU Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union IWA International Workers of Africa NAD Native Affairs Department NASA National Archives of South Africa NP Nationalist Party SAP South African Police TAC Transvaal African Congress TNC Transvaal Native Congress PEICWU Port Elizabeth Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union SANNC South African Native National Congress 11 Map 1: Map of South Africa, including boundaries of the former provinces and bantustans, by Graeme D’or (2021). 12 Map 2: Map of the Western Transvaal and Cape Province. Towns in bold are discussed in this dissertation. Graeme D’or (2021). 13 Introduction Background and Aims of the Research Figure 1: A stamp created by the South African Post Office in 2019 commemorating 100 years since the ICU was founded. Source: South African Post Office, https://www.postoffice.co.za/Philately/NewStamps/workersunion.html accessed on 13 May 2020. In 2019, on the centenary of the establishment of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), a stamp was commissioned by the South African Post Office. In the description, they noted that “the history of South Africa cannot be narrated without the acknowledgement of the role played by trade unions and one has to start with the ICU”.1 An ode to the legacy of the ICU as both a national (in the sense that it is commemorated by the South African Post Office) and a transnational movement (in that this stamp represents a travelling identity), the stamp is a reminder some of the struggles the ICU undertook in southern Africa’s towns and countryside. The ICU was one of the largest and most versatile union-cum-protest movements to represent the everyday grievances of black people in twentieth-century Southern Africa. The travelling identity of the ICU meant that within a space of a year from its inception in 1919, it had spread 1 128 kilometres, from Cape Town to Luderitz. As the ICU criss-crossed over Southern Africa, it opened branches from as far south as Port Elizabeth to as far north as Northern Rhodesia. 1 South African Post Office, Dineo Poo, Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union, Technical Information, https://www.postoffice.co.za/Philately/NewStamps/workersunion.html accessed on 13 May 2020. https://www.postoffice.co.za/Philately/NewStamps/workersunion.html 14 The historiography has followed the ICU on its journey: the first to write on the ICU were the communists and contemporaries of the movement like Eddie Roux, Henry Daniel Tyamzashe, Ernest Gitsham and James Trembath and later Jack and Ray Simons.2 In the 1970s, the resurgence of the black labour movement and the Soweto uprising renewed interest in South African labour history and the ICU.3 Phil Bonner, who was part of Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) and a founding member of the History Workshop at Wits University, also wrote a seminal paper about the rise and fall of the ICU.4 The formation of the History Workshop (HW) in 1977 signalled a new turn to “history from below” which focussed on “how colonized peoples have been drawn into a capitalist society and have resisted their incorporation”, which also included the history of the ICU.5 The expanded focus of radical history extended towards rural South Africa, with Helen Bradford pioneering the study of the ICU in the South African countryside.6 During the 1980s, growing trade union activism meant that trade unionists and leftist collectives also took an increased interest in the ICU reflected in a number of popular publications (see figures 2 and 3).7 2 See Eddie Roux. Time Longer Than Rope: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964 [1st edition, 1948]); and Jack Simons and Ray Simons. Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950, (London: IDAF, 1983 [1st edition, 1969]). 3 See Sheridan Johns. "Trade Union, Political Pressure Group or Mass Movement? The Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa" in Robert Rotberg and Ali Mazrui. eds, Protest and Power in Black Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970): 695-755. Peter Wickins. "The Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa", PhD Diss., University of Cape Town, (1973). This renewed interest in the ICU included a focus on biographies of ICU leaders. See Edward Webster. "Champion, the ICU and the Predicament of African Trade Unions." South African Labour Bulletin 1 6 (1974): 6- 13; Clements Kadalie. My Life and the ICU: The Autobiography of a Black Trade Unionist, edited by Stanley Trapido (London: Frank Cass, 1970) and Stimela Jason Jingoes. A Chief is a Chief by the People: The Autobiography of Stimela Jason Jingoes (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). 4 Philip Bonner. "The Decline and Fall of the ICU: A Case of Self-Destruction?" in Eddie Webster. eds, Essays in Southern African Labour History. vol. 1. (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1978): 114-120. 5 Belinda Bozzoli and Peter Delius. "Editors' Introduction: Radical History and South African Society", Radical History Review 1990, 46-47 (1990), p. 34. 6 Helen Bradford. A Taste of Freedom: the ICU in Rural South Africa, 1924-1930 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1987). 7 Pamphlets and posters were produced for example by the Cape Town based Labour History Group (LHG) on a variety of historical topics in the 1980s. The LHG included a number of university- educated economists, sociologists and historians who wrote “inexpensive post-literacy books”, some of which were on the ICU. (Figure 2 is the front cover of one of the booklets produced by the LHG which included a brief history of the ICU in 1986. Figure 3 is a poster produced by the LHG, probably also in the 1980s. The writing in isiZulu on the left-hand side reads “The ICU mobilized thousands of black workers in the 1920s. The ICU mobilised farmworkers, factory workers and dock workers together. There was a lot of panic and grievances. People were saying ‘I See You White Man!’”. 15 In the years post-apartheid, the scholarship on the ICU has been temporally scattered and heterogeneous in its focus. In 2007 the HW launched the “Local Histories and Present Realities" programme, which generated new research on the ICU in a local context. Other members of the HW have studied the ICU in a transnational context.8 Sylvia Neame has made Callinicos gives a brief history of the LHG in: Luli Callinicos. "Labour History and Worker Education in South Africa", Labour History 65 (1993): 162-178. 8 For research with a local focus see Tshepo Moloi. "The Emergence and Radicalisation of Black Political Formations in Kroonstad, 1915 to 1957", New Contree 67 (2013): 167-186. Van Der Walt has written on the ICU’s transnationalism; Lucien Van der Walt. "The First Globalisation and Figure 2 (Left): Front Cover of a pamphlet on the ICU produced by the Labour History Group. Source: South East Academic Library Systems (SEALS) Digital Commons, http://vital.seals.ac.za:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/vital:27739?site_name=GlobalView, accessed on 11 April 2021. Figure 3 (right): Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union “There is Fire Here”, poster produced by the LHG in the 1980s showing images (clockwise) of farmworkers, Clements Kadalie and aggrieved factory Workers. Source: South African History Archive (SAHA), AL2432, SN537, South African Labour History Group, unknown date. http://vital.seals.ac.za:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/vital:27739?site_name=GlobalView 16 a major contribution to our understanding of the ICU in her three-volume The Congress Movement, published in 2015.9 In 2019, the ICU centenary created new momentum for reassessing the historiography and generating new research, and this dissertation fits into the thrust to re-enliven the history of the ICU. While the ICU spread “like wildfire”10 through much of Southern Africa, and much of the literature has followed it, one region where its trajectory and character remain relatively unknown is the former Western Transvaal and also including the northern part of the Cape Province – in what is today the North West Province. The reasons for this are multiple: they include dispersed and sparse source materials, the ICU’s own organisational decline and increasingly moderate political outlook after 1929, as well as the fact that most of the literature, with the exception of Bradford, has tended to focus on urban centres. While these remain challenges, it is significant to note the appeal of the ICU in the late 1920s in this part of the country: between November 1928 and April 1929 the ICU’s branch at Makwassie (a small farming town in the then Western Transvaal) came second only to Johannesburg in income received from membership fees (during this period, the Makwassie branch had a membership income of £93 while Johannesburg had an income of £94) corresponding to between 250 and 400 members with regular subscriptions.11 The ICU began to develop in the Western Transvaal in 1926, initially opening branches in Potchefstroom, Mafikeng and Lichtenburg. Both a strike in June 1928 in Lichtenburg and a “rural upsurge”, which was a response to proletarianisation among classes of farmworkers across the country described in detail by both Bradford and Neame, were catalysts for the growth of the ICU into a mass movement in this region. Riding on these upheavals, the ICU became active in Klerksdorp, Rustenburg, Taung, Vryburg, Wolmaransstad, Makwassie, Schweizer-Reneke, Bloemhof and Ottosdal. Map 1 shows the division of South Africa into four separate provinces prior to 1994; these were the Transvaal, Natal, Orange Free State and the Cape Province. The geographical boundaries of this dissertation are what is today the North West Province (encompassing the Western Transvaal and a northern portion of the Cape Transnational Labour Activism in Southern Africa: White Labourism, the IWW, and the ICU, 1904– 1934" African Studies 66, 2-3 (2007). 9 Sylvia Neame. The Congress Movement: The Unfolding of the Congress Alliance 1912-1961, volumes 1-3. (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2015). 10 Helen Bradford. "Mass Movements and the Petty Bourgeoisie: The Social Origins of ICU Leadership, 1924–1929", The Journal of African History 25, 3 (1984), p. 295. 11 Wits Historical Papers Research Archive (HPRA), Ballinger Family Collection, A410, C2.3.7, Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union, Membership figures, 29 December 1928. 17 Province). For the sake of brevity, “Western Transvaal” will be used to capture the region that is the focus of this dissertation. The towns whose names appear in bold in Map 2 are the collection of towns in which there is archival or oral evidence of the ICU’s presence.12 There are a number of distinctive features of the Western Transvaal in the early decades of the twentieth century, foremost among them are the economies of white commercial farming (linked to sharecropping and labour tenancy) and alluvial diamond mining. From the inception of the mineral revolution, the development of the capitalist economy both in rural towns and the countryside was unfolding on the stoep of labour tenants, sharecroppers and workers on the diamond diggings. Proletarianisation was reconfiguring relationships between landowners, tenants and workers. This was coupled with the government’s turn to poor whites, land dispossession and the creation of legislation to segregate urban areas and police black organisations. The struggle that the ICU attached to was thus not merely against proletarianisation, it was also against the massive upheavals in the countryside through which African people were being dispossessed of land; this restructured relationships in chiefdoms and forced African people into poorly paid work. These processes forced many black people into locations and introduced new kinds of spatial relationships; local administrations policed the flow of workers between farms and towns through controlling and prohibiting ICU meetings, they demanded passes and rigidly enforced spatial segregation. This research will trace the ICU’s uneven emergence in this region through reference to different loci of power and struggle. This will entail charting the local dynamics of farming, capitalist penetration, the development of the segregationist state at the local level and the declining power of chiefs. This political economy shaped the variegated character of the ICU in the Western Transvaal. The title of this dissertation, “I See You in the Soil” aims highlight the significance of the ICU in this rural region. It refers to black people who had been dispossessed of their land and worked as labour tenants, sharecroppers and diamond diggers, those who were made to live in locations, in whose name the ICU fought for. 12 There were other towns where the ICU had a definite presence, but the archival and oral sources provide no indication of the extent or character of this presence. For Leeudoringstad, see Jingoes. A Chief is a Chief by the People, p.111. For Coligny and Delareyville, see Wits HPRA Ballinger Family Papers A410 “Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union”, C 2.3.7, Letter from Henry Maleke to William Ballinger from the Delareyville location, 11 March 1931. ICU organiser Henry Maleke had taken over the branch, and notes that Jason Jingoes made promises to people he could not fulfil. Kadalie held a pass burning in Ventersdorp, see Bradford. A Taste of Freedom, p.164. 18 The period that this dissertation will focus on is from 1926 until 1934. In 1926, the ICU opened branches in Mafikeng and Potchefstroom. In 1934, ICU organiser Jason Jingoes sent a letter to the Native Affairs Department (NAD) complaining that he was being persecuted by the Makwassie local authority. It was within this eight-year span that the ICU was most active in the Western Transvaal. Research Question(s) This dissertation aims to understand and analyse the ICU through its development in the peculiar and particular political economy of the Western Transvaal, which included paternalism, violence, proletarianisation, a high prevalence of Reserve areas and segregationist town administrations. It is within this context that the ICU entered and began to address people’s diverse set of needs, grievances, desires and hopes. The main question framing this research is: what was character and trajectory of the ICU in the Western Transvaal? To answer this question, a number of further questions guide the research with regards to the local political economy which gave rise the ICU’s emergence in the Western Transvaal, and the way the ICU related their protest to this context and the grievances of farm dwellers, wage labourers and location residents. Moreover, how did the local political economy shape the character of the ICU on the ground? How was the ICU’s trajectory in this region affected by the organisation’s fortunes and internal problems at the national level? In connection with this, the dissertation will interrogate why the ICU in the Western Transvaal was able to gather support, and even expand into the 1930s, while elsewhere in the country it experienced a marked decline in organisational and political terms in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This dissertation probes the way in which the ICU used the interconnectedness of farms and towns and spatial flows to facilitate their political activism. Moreover, it asks: How did the ICU’s presence shape the spatial politics of the region? Speaking to the overall character of the ICU in the Western Transvaal, this research analyses the kinds of messages it articulated: what kinds of speech did the ICU use and how did it relate to the local political economy? 19 Rationale This research comes out of my Honours research project13 where the history of a small North West town – Ottosdal – was explored. Letters in the National Archives of South Africa (NASA) sent by Jason Jingoes (one of the leading figures of the ICU in the Western Transvaal, who was a Basotho chief and the leader of the ICU’s Makwassie branch) to the Ottosdal municipality on behalf of the ICU in 1933-1934 piqued my interest in the ICU within the broader North West Province. These letters protested the poor conditions in the town location as well as poor economic conditions on the alluvial diamond mines in the area.14 These documents suggested a significant presence of the ICU in the region into the 1930s, when the ICU had generally declined. Despite a wealth of literature being produced on the ICU, it still occupies a marginalised position in South African History. The African National Congress (ANC) government, has produced “exclusionary languages of liberation” and constructs the ANC as the movement for national liberation.15 Phil Bonner suggests that up until the 1940s, people “viewed the ANC as largely irrelevant to their own most pressing needs of life” and that organisations like the ICU better articulated people’s needs, if only under the auspices of “undefined freedom and the hope that they might regain access to their lost lands”.16 This dissertation helps broaden the political history of the Western Transvaal through uncovering the history of the ICU in this region. The Masters’ scholarship that I have been awarded as part of the History Workshop’s “Local Histories and Present Realities” programme aims to centralise the place of the “local” in South African history and challenge the urban bias in much of South Africa’s resistance history. Noor Nieftagodien criticises the notion of describing the local according to a national template – in 13 Laurence Stewart. “The Ferment of a Rural Economy: Beer Brewing and its Socio-Historical Context in Ottosdal, North West Province”, Honours Diss., University of the Witwatersrand (2019). 14 For instance, see National Archives of South Africa, NTS, 4934, 313/313, Letter from JJ ka Jingoes and JL Diniza to the Native Affairs Department, 14 August 1933. 15 Sara Dorman. “Post-liberation Politics in Africa: Examining the Political Legacy of Struggle”, Third World Quarterly 27, 6 (2006), p. 1092; and Alexander Beresford. "The Politics of Regenerative Nationalism in South Africa", Journal of Southern African Studies 38, 4 (2012), p. 863. 16 Philip Bonner. "First Keynote Address: Fragmentation and Cohesion in the ANC: The First 70 Years", in Arianna Lissoni, Jon Soske, Natasha Erlank, Noor Nieftagodien and Omar Badsha. eds, One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today (Johannesburg: Wits University Press and SAHO, 2012), p. 3. 20 essence, reading local histories without reference to local specificities.17 While there are differences in scale of what “local” means, the concept allows for a “critical engagement with meanings of ‘the local’, including its spatial dimensions (where does the local start and end), its relationship to the national and its production over time”.18 These concerns also animate the research for this dissertation. Literature Review This literature review focusses on three main features; the historiography of the ICU, key literature on the political economy of industrialising South Africa (with special reference to the Western Transvaal) and Lefebvre’s theory on the interconnectedness of space. Chapter one provides a detailed description of this scholarship to sketch a broad outline the twin processes of colonial expansion and capitalist development in the South African interior and their effects on African people. Furthermore, the chapter will discuss overall development of the ICU from 1919 until the mid-1930s from a historical (rather than historiographical) point of view by drawing on the existing literature. The review of the literature below is therefore meant to provide a general introduction and overview, as this literature will be discussed in greater detail in chapter one. The earliest literature used in this dissertation are early histories of towns in the Western Transvaal, produced by white missionaries and white town historians. These include the chronology of the establishment of towns and of the black location and provide insight into their local political economy and the formation and the character of the local state.19 This literature is used in chapters three and four to describe the particular political and economic conditions in Western Transvaal towns. As mentioned above, the first authors to write about the ICU were trade unionists, communists and liberals who were contemporaries of the movement. Ernest Gitsham and James Trembath chronicled the history of the ICU, with a strong focus on Clements Kadalie in A First Account 17Noor Nieftagodien. "The Place of ‘The Local’ in History Workshop's Local History." African Studies 69, 1 (2010), p. 44. 18 Ibid., pp. 57-58. 19 Examples of this are: Cornelius Johannes Kriel. Goue Jubileum: Ned. Geref. Gemeente Ottosdal, 1913 – 1963 (Cape Town: Paarl Drukpers Maatskappy, 1963); Coetzee, G.J.M. “Die Geskiedenis van Onderwys van Blankes in die Wolmaransstadse Distrik, 1876-1952” MA Diss., Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, (1953). 21 of Labour Organisation in South Africa in 1926.20 Together with Gitsham and Trembath, activist scholars intellectuals like Eddie Roux and later Jack and Ray Simons, who were politically active during the 1930s and engaged with the Union – both in the course of struggle and later in their research – also wrote on the ICU as part of broader studies researching black political organisation.21 Trinidadian communist CLR James and pan-Africanist George Padmore reflected on the ICU in their transnational accounts of black political organisation. In 1931, James likened the ICU’s activism to the revolution in Haiti, quoting “there is the same instinctive capacity for organisation, the same throwing-up of gifted leaders from among the masses…”; one-year later, Padmore labelled Clements Kadalie as a “reformist” and a “black traitor”.22 In 1933, Albert Nzula (who was an ICU branch secretary in Aliwal North, and in 1929, after communists were expelled from the ICU, became the first black secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA)), published a collection of essays called The Struggles of Negro Toilers in South Africa (which shares a title with Padmore’s book) which included an account of the ICU. The editor of the ICU newspaper, Workers’ Herald, Henry Daniel Tyamzashe, published A Summarised History of the ICU in 1941 giving an overall history of the ICU from its inception until its disintegration.23 Other contemporaries of the ICU were the white liberal advisors who had begun to engage with the union in the late 1920s - notably William Ballinger, Winifred Holtby and Ethelreda Lewis. The biographies of Ballinger and Holtby thus partly deal with the history of the ICU.24 This early literature on the ICU contains contrasting accounts of the ICU, in part because the perspectives were ideologically determined and also because many of these intellectuals 20 Ernest Gitsham, and James Trembath. A First Account of Labour Organisation in South Africa (Durban: E. P. and Commercial Printing, 1926). 21 Roux. Time Longer Than Rope and Simons and Simons. Class and Colour. 22 CLR James, A History of Negro Revolt (Chicago: Research Associates School Times Publications, 1931) p. 62; George Padmore, Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (London: Red International of Labour Unions, 1931), p. 81. 23 Wits HPRA, Ambrose Saffery Collection, AD 1178, unpublished mimeograph, H.D. Tyamzashe, "A Summarised History of the ICU by Henri Danielle Tyamzashe who was Complaints and Research Secretary ICU and Editor of ICU Newspapers”, 1941; Alfred Nzula, "The Struggles of the Negro Toilers in South Africa" in Albert Nzula, I. I. Potekhni and A. Z. Zusmanovich, Forced Labour in Colonial Africa. Edited by Robin Cohen. Translated by Hugh Jenkins (London: Zed Press, 1979 [1933]), pp. 19-213 (for an account of the ICU, see pp. 206-210). 24 Vera Brittan. Testament of Friendship: The Story of Winifred Holtbv. 2nd ed. (London: Virago, 1980 [1940]). Alex Mouton, Voices in the Desert: Margaret and William Ballinger. A Biography (Pretoria: Benedic Books, 1997). 22 witnessed the ICU’s problems themselves. For instance, while Nzula saw Kadalie as a “tool of the bourgeoisie” and Roux saw him as “intelligent, versatile and passionate”.25 Characterising the wide range of grievances that the ICU attached to, Roux suggests that the ICU was a “general union”. Many of these authors wrote in the late 1920s, where the ICU’s meteoric rise was punctuated by corruption, mismanagement of funds, ideological conflicts with communists and internal splits. This contributed to the idea that the Union was a spent force by the late 1920s, and undoubtedly informed the accounts of Bradford and Van Onselen which suggest this in relation to the Western Transvaal. This research argues that despite the organisational decline of the ICU in this period, the ICU’s activism in this region stretched up to 1934. The political context of the 1970s generated renewed interest in South African labour history, including the ICU. Speaking in an interview with Gail Gerhart on the topic of the South African Students Organisation (SASO) in 1972, Steve Biko believed the ICU’s struggle was instructive for the struggles to be waged in the 1970s. He stated that he engaged in an “extensive study” of black political movements in South Africa for his leadership training courses which focussed on: […] the early so-called religious breakaways of 1890, the Ethiopian movement; concentrating on the foundation of ANC and reasons for the foundation of ANC; concentrating on the ICU, its operation, its growth, its cause of growth and its death, its cause of death.26 At a scholarly level, Sheridan Johns and Peter Wickins offer general organisational accounts of the ICU. Wickins’ work is especially useful for this dissertation because he provides a chronology of the establishment of ICU branches across South Africa and information on the ICU’s growth and collapse. The autobiography of Clements Kadalie was published in 1970, Stimela Jason Jingoes’ in 1975 and a brief biographical account of Alisson Wessels George Champion was published in 1974.27 Jingoes’ biography is a crucial source for this study as he recounts his tenure as an ICU organiser in the South-Western Transvaal between 1928 and 25 David Johnson, "Clements Kadalie, the ICU, and the Language of Freedom", English in Africa 42, 3 (2015): 43-69. See footnote 1, p. 65. 26 Gail Gerhart, “Interview With Steve Biko”, in Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel Gibson, eds, Biko Lives!: Contesting Legacies of Steve Biko (Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), pp. 26-27. 27 See Sheridan Johns. "Trade Union, Political Pressure Group or Mass Movement?”. Peter Wickins. "The Industrial”. Clements Kadalie. My Life and the ICU. Eddie Webster. "Champion” and Jingoes. A Chief is a Chief by the People. 23 1934. Furthermore, Jingoes suggests a link between the ICU’s success and the absence of chiefs in the Western Transvaal, which this dissertation explores in chapter five. This dissertation adopts a political economy approach in a broad sense. This has its roots in Karl Marx’s critique of the classical economists, who viewed a linear and harmonious accumulation of capital through rent and profit, suggesting instead that the proletariat is subordinated to capital through the appropriation of unpaid surplus, producing conflict rather than harmony.28 Marx’s critique led to a radical reinterpretation of the political and the economic and a more critical understanding of the production process; as Lefebvre has noted “political economy is also a critique of [classical economist’s representation of] political economy… and of their supposed unity or syndissertation”.29 In South Africa, the political economy tradition had its most clear articulation in the 1970s and 1980s among the radical historians; first from a structuralist perspective, which was subsequently critiqued and rethought by social historians influenced by the work of E.P. Thompson.30 For the purposes of this research, it is sufficient to note that political economy includes the politics of the state and civil society within a broader economic context of economic practices and institutions, and the contestations over power within these spheres. The ICU’s protest and activism in the Western Transvaal are linked to both South Africa’s general political economy and the local political economy of the region and its towns, linked to farming and alluvial diamond mining. During the 1980s, radical social historians began to examine how the process of industrialisation was shaped increasingly by the African societies at the centre of it. Bozzoli and Delius sum up this approach: rather than viewing early capitalist development as co- ordinated, linear and complete, “the processes of capitalization and industrial revolution on land and in cities were seen as having made what they could of the society at their disposal, against ever-resurgent resistance”.31 The scholarship of Shula Marks, William Beinart, Stanley 28 Karl Marx, translation by Eden and Cedar Paul. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928 [First Edition in German, 1867]), p. 885. 29 Henri Lefebvre and Donald Nicholson-Smith. The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 323. 30 Patrick Bond. "A Half-Century of Competing Political Economic Traditions in South Africa", Conference Paper, Race, Class, and the Developmental State Conference, Port Elizabeth, 16 November 2010 at http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/Bond%20Legassick%20poli%20econ%20conference%20paper.pdf accessed on 23 June 2020, pp. 8-11. 31 Belinda Bozzoli and Peter Delius. "Editors' Introduction”, p. 31. http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/Bond%20Legassick%20poli%20econ%20conference%20paper.pdf 24 Trapido, Charles Van Onselen and Peter Delius offer histories of capitalist development from the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886, with a focus on how African resisted and adapted to these changes. 32 Other authors like Timothy Keegan have shown the contradictory nature of capitalist development, as he explores the proliferation of sharecropping and labour tenancy relationships between dispossessed black peasants and inexperienced white farmers.33 The control of urban areas, which took the form of segregation, was a central theme of town administration and local governance. Both Paul Maylam and Saul Dubow characterise this as the contradictory imperatives of capitalist expansion and racism.34 Authors also focussed on the effect of these changes on the Western Transvaal. For example, Timothy Clynick’s unpublished paper on the diamond diggings provides information on Lichtenburg’s political economy.35 Charles Van Onselen expertly lays out the race and class relationships between white farmers and black workers, which included paternalism on farms in the South-Western Transvaal.36 Graeme Simpson provided an overview of the politics of chiefdoms in the Western Transvaal.37 The work of these authors illustrates the political economy of the Western Transvaal which is indispensable to this dissertation. 32 Examples of this scholarship includes: Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone. “Introduction”, in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone. eds., Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa (London and New York: Longman, 1982): 1-61, pp. 3-12; William Beinart and Peter Delius. “Introduction” in William Beinart, Peter Delius and Stanley Trapido. eds., Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa, 1950-1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986): 1-56, p.1; Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido “The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism” in Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido. eds., The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa (London: Longman, 1987 [2nd Edition, 1993]): 1-71, p.2, p. xi. 33 Timothy Keegan. Facing the Storm: Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa (Cape Town: David Phillip, 1988). 34 Saul Dubow. Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1989); Paul Maylam. "Explaining the Apartheid City: 20 years of South African Urban Historiography", Journal of Southern African Studies 21, 1 (1995): 19-38 35 Tim Clynick. "The Lichtenburg Alluvial Diamond Diggers 1926-1929", Unpublished Seminar Paper, African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, 21 May 1984. At: http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10539/8515/ISS-86.pdf?sequence=1 accessed on 20 May 2020. 36 Charles Van Onselen. "Paternalism and Violence on the Maize Farms of the South-Western Transvaal, 1900–1950" in Alan Jeeves and Jonathan Crush, eds. White Farms, Black Labour: The State and Agrarian Change in Southern Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 1997): 192-213; Charles Van Onselen. “Race and Class in the South African countryside: Cultural Osmosis and Social Relations in the Sharecropping Economy of the South Western Transvaal, 1900-1950”, The American Historical Review 95, 1 (1990): 99-123. 37 Graeme Simpson. “Peasants and Politics in the Western Transvaal, 1920-1940”, MA Diss., University of the Witwatersrand, (1986). http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10539/8515/ISS-86.pdf?sequence=1 25 The scholarship of Bonner on the “Rise and Fall” of the ICU, Beinart and Bundy (writing on East London), Bradford (Northern, Eastern and Western Transvaal, Transkei, Natal, Orange Free State), and La Hausse (Durban) illustrate the interest of the radical historians in the ICU during the late 1970s and 1980s. Further interest in the ICU in the 1980s and 1990s came from Hirson (whose focus is Bloemfontein), Baines (Port Elizabeth) and Breckridge, who discusses the ICU on the gold mines. Breckenridge argues that the ICU contributed to, and participated in the making of, a public sphere on the South African gold mines during the 1920s, this theory is used in examining the character of the ICU’s meetings in the Western Transvaal, discussed in chapter five. The focus of radical history began to look into rural South Africa and Helen Bradford’s influential study on the ICU is characteristic of this shift.38 Bradford posits the ICU as primarily a rural movement, a claim which she backs up with an account of the ICU in every nook and cranny in the country, and importantly disturbs some of the early historiography which saw the ICU waning in the second half of the 1920s. Bradford’s typological insights of the ICU as a “rural movement” are useful for this dissertation and she provides an account of the ICU in the Western Transvaal which includes details of some of the ICU’s campaigns and meetings. Added, she also provides a strong account of farm conditions across the country, including the farming context in the Western Transvaal.39 Bradford suggests that the ICU’s trajectory in this region was determined by the burgeoning context of “embezzlement and disintegration”. In connection with this, Simpson regards the ICU as being unable to articulate the grievances of reserve-based Tswana peasants in the region.40 Charles Van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine contains the life history of a sharecropper, Kas Maine, who traversed the Western Transvaal during the first half of the twentieth century South Africa and encountered the ICU. Van Onselen explores the ICU from the perspective of Maine and his family through interviews which are part of the Sharecropping and Labour Tenancy Project, one of the sources for this dissertation further discussed in the methodology section below. 38Belinda Bozzoli and Peter Delius. "Editors' Introduction”; Bradford. A Taste of Freedom. Bradford’s work emerged out of the turn to labour history and a renewed interest in rural histories. See Jon Lewis. "South African Labor History: A Historiographical Assessment", Radical History Review 1990, 46-47 (1990), p. 227. 39 Bradford. A Taste of Freedom, pp.1-64. 40 Simpson. “Peasants and Politics”, pp.185-191. 26 Despite a wealth of qualitative sources, Van Onselen too regards the ICU as being finished in the South-Western Transvaal by 1929.41 The radical scholarship of the late 1970s and early 1980s generated a fresh regional focus, and highlighted the uneven development of capitalism across the country, as well as the varied regional character of the ICU and other resistance movements. The ICU’s development was different across the country and shaped by the local political economy and in relation to a diverse set of factors including, but not limited to, race, gender, religion, millenarianism, proletarianisation, economy and tradition. What characterises this scholarship, which will be outlined in more detail in chapter one, is the attention to the dynamics of capitalist expansion and the ramifications for class and labour relationships in particular local contexts, which the ICU tried to use to its advantage and was shaped by. This dissertation aims to relate the ICU’s activism in the Western Transvaal to the peculiar and particular political economy of the Western Transvaal. Post-apartheid research on the ICU has been dispersed.42 An indispensable unpublished paper by Phil Bonner discusses the character of the ICU’s language, which in this dissertation is used to characterise the ICU’s subversive and ridiculing language.43 New research on the ICU came up as part of the HW’s programme on “Local Histories and Present Realities”. Tshepo Moloi’s work on black politics in Kroonstad, where the ICU had a presence in the 1920s, is an example of this.44 Other members of the HW like Lucien Van Der Walt have analysed the ICU’s anarcho-syndicalism and transnationalism.45 Henry Dee’s PhD dissertation on Clements Kadalie argues that the politics of migration and race are central to understanding Clements Kadalie and the ICU’s experience in South Africa.46 Dee gives excellent insight into the character of Kadalie as well as a clear chronological account of the ICU’s development, which is useful for the periodisation of this dissertation. He also posits that “no scholar has addressed 41 Charles Van Onselen. The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894- 1985 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996). 42 Desmond Phiri. I See You: Life of Clements Kadalie: The Man South Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Namibia Should Not Forget (Johannesburg: College Publishers, 2000); Allison Drew. Discordant Comrades: Identities and Loyalties on the South African Left (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 43 Bonner, Phillip. “Home Truths’ and the Political Discourse of the ICU”, Unpublished Paper presented at the Biennial Conference of the South African Historical Society, UWC, July 1999. [unpublished paper in author’s possession, courtesy of Henry Dee]. 44 Moloi. “The Emergence and Radicalisation”. 45 Van der Walt. “The First Globalisation”. 46 Henry Dee. “Clements Kadalie, Trade Unionism, Migration and Race in Southern Africa, 1918- 1930”, PhD Diss., University of Edinburgh (2019). 27 the implications of what it meant to be a general trade union in Southern Africa”, and explores the idea of a “general union” in the context of unionising migrant workers.47 David Johnson has argued that the ICU espoused a distinct “language of freedom” and this is applied to the context of the Western Transvaal in chapter five. John Higginson, who discusses the prevalence of violence on farms in the Rustenburg and Marico districts, and Andrew Manson and Bernard Mbenga, who provide an overview of the politics in the chiefdoms of the Western Transvaal, have produced the most recent works on the political character of the Western Transvaal and are used throughout the dissertation. 48 While Neame is somewhat an outlier to the historiographical trends described here, she has made a major contribution to our understanding of the ICU in terms of its links to other political organisations, typology and progression.49 She provides a consummate account of the ICU that places it as an integral part of the Congress Movement in the fight for national liberation.50 Neame further suggests that the ICU developed a radical-democratic tendency in the countryside. Neame’s research provides a crucial history of the rural upsurge and the way the ICU related to it. This is described in more detail in chapter one, which aims to assess the ICU’s response and actions in relation to the upheavals in the countryside. Drawing on the typological insights provided by Roux, Bradford and Neame, this dissertation adopts the label “union-cum-protest movement”. In the forthcoming chapters, ideas surrounding the ICU as a “general union”, a “rural movement” and as “radical-democratic” will be explored. Thinking Space: Lefebvre and the Ordering of Space in the Western Transvaal French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space provides a useful theoretical springboard to explore the social and associated spatial relationships in the Western Transvaal. Lefebvre argues that political change is “as much a matter of politics as it is a matter of 47 Dee. “Clements Kadalie”, p.311. 48 John Higginson. Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900– 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Andrew Manson and Bernard Mbenga. Land, Chiefs, Mining: South Africa's North West Province Since 1840 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2014). 49 Neame went into exile in 1967 after serving a prison sentence for membership of the SACP. She lived and worked in the German Democratic Republic for over three decades, and her work remains somewhat isolated from the currents shaping South Africa’s historiography in this period. 50 Neame. The Congress Movement, vol 1-3. 28 space”.51 The political economy of the Western Transvaal produced a particular spatial organisation (and vice versa); towns were segregated between the white town and black location, farms were isolated and the links between town and countryside were controlled and policed. The ICU’s presence in the Western Transvaal affected the spatial divisions between town, farm, location and diamond digging and in turn influenced the spatial outlay and politics. In this dissertation, Lefebvre’s theory of the interconnectedness of space helps probe how the ICU both used the already present links between town and countryside, and created new ones. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre aims to delineate a “unitary theory” of space, where space is understood as being physical, mental and social.52 For Lefebvre, the “underpinning” of society is space because it is within space that, for instance, the production or social relations occurs. In this regard, the material underpinning of space is necessary but not sufficient to define space,53 in that space is neither a result of nature, nor simply a product of its history, nor does it bear a direct causal relationship to the forces of production.54 Space encompasses elements which are in essence material but exist beyond their materiality.55 For Lefebvre, space is not static and acted upon; it is rather bound to the changes of “mediators and mediations” as well as “networks and pathways that facilitate the exchange of material things and information”.56 How space changes is thus not dependent only on factors inherent within it; rather spaces and elements within spaces “interpenetrate”, where “great movements, vast rhythms, immense waves – these all collide and ‘interfere’ with one another; lesser movements, on the other hand, interpenetrate”.57 These “movements”, “rhythms” and “waves” are different factors (people, events, social and productive relationships) within spaces which are intimately “intertwined”. But what happens when spaces “interpenetrate” and “collide”? For Lefebvre, at its most dramatic, a process of “fission” takes place; and at its least dramatic, a process of interpenetration takes place.58 The clashes and interpenetrations do not have a determined outcome; and for example, “no space 51 Anne-Maria Makhulu. “The “Dialectics of Toil”: Reflections on the Politics of Space After Apartheid," Anthropological Quarterly, 83, 3 (2010): 551-580, p.551. 52 Henri Lefebvre and Donald Nicholson-Smith. The Production of Space, pp.11-12. 53 Ibid., p.403. 54 Ibid., p.77. 55 Ibid., p.403. 56 Ibid., p.77. 57 Ibid., p.87. 58 Ibid., p.87-88. 29 disappears in the course of growth and development: the worldwide does not abolish the local”.59 Rather, there is a constant ebb and flow as a result of the interactions between spaces, All these spaces, meanwhile, are traversed by myriad of currents. The hyper-complexity of social space should be now be apparent, embracing as it does individual entities and peculiarities, relatively fixed points, movements and flows of waves – some interpenetrating, others in conflict and so on.60 In South Africa, legislative measures like the Native Land Act of 1913 and the 1923 Urban Areas Act determined where black people could live and own land and deemed them unwanted in urban spaces. The segregation period in South Africa was characterised by “enforced geographies of separation” and Paul Maylam elaborates that segregation was the solution to manage the “demand for black labour in cities and towns and the racist desire to keep them out”.61 Pass laws were a key legislative measure created to control the movement of African people,62 and throughout the country in both the big urban areas of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town as well as small rural backwaters, spaces of “European modernity” were shielded from the “uncivilised ‘outsides’” through rigidly-enforced segregation.63 Spatial divisions were also present between town and countryside. With particular reference to southern Africa’s migrant labour system, segregation was justified through the “healthy rural and degenerative urban African lifestyle”.64 Lefebvre suggests that “visible boundaries such as walls [which in the South African context could be the trees or dams separating township and town] or enclosures in general, give rise for their part to an appearance or separation between spaces where in fact there is an ambiguous continuity”.65 Noor Nieftagodien suggests that in South Africa conventional historiography has tended to understand black townships, adjacent white towns and rural hinterlands as “separate entities”.66 Belinda Bozzoli’s edited book, Town and Countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist 59 Ibid., p. 86. 60 Ibid., p.88. 61 Melissa Steyn and Richard Ballard. "Diversity and Small-Town Spaces in Post-Apartheid South Africa: An Introduction", Diversities 15, 2 (2013), p.1; Paul Maylam, “Explaining the Apartheid City”. 62 Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall. Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia (London: Routledge, 1996), p.14. 63 Popke, Jeffrey and Richard Ballard. "Dislocating modernity: Identity, Space and Representations of Street Trade in Durban, South Africa", Geoforum, 35, 1 (2004), p.101. 64 John Dixon, Don Foster, Kevin Durrheim and Lindy Wilbraham. "Discourse and the Politics of Space in South Africa: The Squatter Crisis'", Discourse & Society 5, 3 (1994), p.278. 65 Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith. The Production of Space, p.87. 66 Noor Nieftagodien. "The Place of ‘The Local’”, pp.57-58. 30 Penetration and Popular Response, shows the links between towns, farms and reserves in the Transvaal and seeks to grapple with the variegated and urban and rural experiences connected through the capitalist economy and migrant labour.67 The book shows the tight-knit relationship between town and countryside and strongly stresses the “interconnectedness of rural and urban”.68 In the context of South Africa’s spatial divisions, Lefebvre’s theory of interconnectedness space is useful. In chapters two and four, instances where the ICU aided or used the interconnection of space are noted. When the ICU entered the Western Transvaal, they drew workers from towns, farms and diamond diggings and challenged the predominant spatial politics of spatially-policed towns and isolated farms. A full application of Lefebvre’s theory of space to the Western Transvaal is reserved for chapter five. Central themes of this chapter are that the spatial organisation of the Western Transvaal greatly inhibited the ICU’s efficacy through drawing divisions between towns and isolated farms (which limited the ICU’s ability to reach their constituency). Yet, migrant labour between towns and farms and the prevalence of ICU meetings changed the political organisation from individualised to collective protest as the ICU disrupted set divisions between town, farm, diamond digging and location. Method John Thompson has defined in-depth social research as being divided into two different methods; social-historical analysis and discourse analysis. Social-historical analysis is a practical method through which primary evidence is placed within its broader political economy and socio-historical conditions. Thompson argues that this method leads to a “reinterpretation” of the material in a way that is critical and practically relevant.69 Thompson’s social-historical analysis provides a means to critically engage with primary evidence (both archival and oral) and place it within the political economy of the Western Transvaal. This research relies heavily on archival sources. The Wits Historical Papers Research Archive (HPRA) holds information on the ICU as part of several of its collections.70 Particularly 67 Belinda Bozzoli. eds., Town and countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist Penetration and Popular Response (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983). 68 Nieftagodien. "The Place of ‘The Local’”, p.45. 69 John Thompson. Ideology and Modern Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 290. 70 These include AWG Champion’s (leader of the ICU Yase-Natal) papers, Kadalie’s papers and other miscellaneous documents on the ICU. Sylvia Neame’s papers in the HPRA are currently under re- organisation, and due to Covid-19, this process has been protracted. They include her own 31 relevant are the documents and correspondence kept by Scottish trade unionist William Ballinger, who came to South Africa as an advisor to the ICU in 1928, a time when the union was expanding in the Western Transvaal. Trade unionist Ambrose Saffery worked in South Africa between 1920 and 1940 and kept personal archives on the ICU (as well as retail and food unions). His collection contains correspondence between ICU officials, copies of the Workers’ Herald, and the Workers’ Herald Weekly News Bulletin, published sporadically and fortnightly in the latter years of the 1920s (more below) and some other ICU-related material. The library at the University of Cape Town (UCT) holds a number of collections containing material on the ICU.71 Most useful for this project are the documents kept by Lionel Forman, a journalist and member of the CPSA who kept extensive information on the ICU and on other political bodies. The Rand Daily Mail started publishing in 1902 and houses articles on the ICU in the Western Transvaal and Cape Province; these are stored in an online repository which has been accessed online. Henry Dee has collected digital versions of all known copies of the ICU’s newspaper Workers’ Herald as part of his PhD.72 The Workers’ Herald was started in 1923 and was published monthly. It was edited by Clements Kadalie “only in name”, with sub-editors James Theale (edited form 1923-1925) and H. D. Tyamzashe (1925-1929) doing the actual job.73 What is unique about the Workers’ Herald is that it dedicated a larger portion of its pages to trade unionism and politics than other black newspapers.74 This has proved an invaluable resource in terms of recovering the voices of ICU leaders and a rich account of their ideological correspondence with leaders of the ANC and ICU, like Selby Msimang, who championed workers struggles as part of the ANC and was president of the ICU in 1920, and AWG Champion. She also has interviews with Ray Simons as well as other CPSA members. I have not been able to access these papers because she was reorganising them and then Covid-19 struck, making it difficult to view them. 71 Ray and Jack Simons’s papers at UCT also have documents on the ICU: these includes Ray’s own research and notes on the ICU as well Kadalie’s own writing. The University of South Africa (UNISA) has a large collection of material kept by AWG Champion worked both in Natal and the Transvaal. He kept archives relating to ICU meetings, campaigns, documents, photographs and speeches as well as personal biographical information. I haven’t used either of these collections because of the restrictions placed on travel and research because of Covid-19. 72 I thank Henry Dee for his help in this regard, especially considering the limitations placed on archive visits because of the Covid-19 pandemic. 73 Les Switzer. eds., South Africa's alternative press: Voices of protest and resistance, 1880-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997), pp.153-157. 74 Ibid., p.156. 32 outlook. The paper also helped provide detail about ICU events and a chronology of the ICU in the Western Transvaal. Umteteli wa Bantu, which was a moderate black newspaper established by the Native Recruitment Corporation and had a clear anti-communist ideology, provides a conservative critique of the ICU.75 Copies of the paper are kept at the Pretoria campus of the National Library of South Africa (NLSA). The Workers’ Herald Weekly News Bulletin, contains more practical information than the Workers’ Herald newspaper, such as ICU branch meetings and branch reports. The study also draws on a few articles from the CPSA’s mouthpiece Umsebenzi (or The South African Worker in English). In the National Archives of South Africa (NASA) in Pretoria, archived under the Department of Native Affairs (NAD), “location” files include information that helped reconstruct the political economy and the material conditions in particular towns and locations, as well as the political activities of the ICU. The archives of the Director of Local Government are also useful to give general context to town formation. Files of the Department of Justice form the largest body of evidence from the NASA used in this dissertation. They comprise of transcripts of speeches and meetings held by ICU officials and notes on their activities, which were gathered by the authorities as evidence to prosecute ICU leaders for sedition under the Native Administration Act of 1927. Debates abound about the use of archival material which focus on the interaction of the researcher with archival material, the conditions under which archives are accessed, the ownership of archives, who controls their use, the way archival information is interpreted, the way it is presented, the arrangement of archival information and the political implications of archiving and using archives.76 Bhekizizwe Peterson argues that South Africa’s state archives 75 Natasha Erlank has suggested that Umteteli Wa Bantu developed a degree of editorial independence from the Native Recruitment Corporation, and developed a rapport between the paper and its readers. This was especially in the instance where editions were “co-produced” between audience and editors. Natasha Erlank. "Umteteli wa Bantu and the Constitution of Social Publics in the 1920s and 1930s." Social Dynamics 45, 1 (2019): 75-102. 76 Archives rely on a decoding and formation of meaning by the historian herself, which means that archives are brought to life through the ideology, assumptions and thoughts of the historian. The writing of history from archives, is in a sense the “resuscitation (of) life” and is a subjective experience. Mbembe argues that when archives are opened to be used by the public and the historian, a “fundamental” and irreversible process occurs, death: a distance from the original author and the original subject. The historian is merely “engaged with a battle against ghosts”, with the historian being the only path to existence. Achille Mbembe. "The Power of the Archive and its 33 were created by “successive white oligarchies” chronicling certain histories, which exclude black working-class people.77 Verne Harris further suggests that the State Archival Service (SAS) was for the twentieth century controlled by white officials and bureaucrats who created linguistically and physically segregated archival spaces and effectively “oiled the wheels of Apartheid bureaucracy”.78 This also entailed a side-lining of marginal groups: “black experiences were poorly documented [and the] voices of women, the disabled, and other marginalised people were seldom heard”.79 Laura-Anne Stoler shows how the interpretation of the colonial archive, such as some of the repositories used in this dissertation, needs a close reading of what is being said prior to ascertaining whether what is being said represents reality. She argues for a twofold process whereby one reads both “along the archival grain” as well as “against it”, to find both the “regularities”, “omissions” and “consistencies” and to reveal the contradictions, manipulations and intentions.80 This two-fold process entails, as John Tosh notes, “understanding an age on its own terms” while simultaneously going “against the grain” by remaining critical and scrutinising facts.81 The archive of the Justice Department and Native Affairs Department (NAD) include the reports of state officials who reflected on ICU meetings. I have reflected on any evident bias in these reports and have tried to note and counteract any omissions and mischaracterisations of ICU officials. Hamilton, Harris and Reid, argue that in order to “refigure the archive”, archival collections should be expanded and have new organising criteria (political) and hold new kinds of objects (expanding beyond just documents). They suggest that the South African History Archive (SAHA) (which provided figure 3), as well as the Wits HPRA constitute new and oppositional archives.82 I have attempted to “refigure” the archive in a different way; the reports of Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officials attempted to surveil the ICU and quell protest. I have Limits" in Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Michèle Pickover, Graeme Reid, Razia Saleh, and Jane Taylor, eds. Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: New Africa Books, 2002), pp.21-25. 77 Bhekizizwe Peterson. “The Archives and the Political Imaginary” in Carolyn Hamilton, et al. Refiguring, p. 31. 78 Verne Harris. "The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa", Archival Science 2, 1-2 (2002), p. 71. 79 Ibid., p. 73. 80 Ann Laura Stoler. "Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance", Archival Science 2, 1-2 (2002), p. 100. 81 John Tosh. The Pursuit of History (London: Routledge, 2013), p.118. 82 Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris and Graeme Reid. “Introduction” in Hamilton et al, Refiguring: 7- 19. 34 used these reports to bring light to the ICU’s struggles and to access the different voices ICU officials, location residents and black farmworkers. Oral sources also form an important part of this research, although no interviews were conducted specifically for this research. As part of the Institute for Advanced Social Research collection held by HPRA, Charles van Onselen’s “Sharecropping and Labour Tenancy Project” includes over 300 life-history interviews conducted with farmworkers in the Transvaal, many of whom were in the Western Transvaal, as sharecropping was still prevalent in this region when the interviews were conducted in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.83 The interviews were conducted by Charles van Onselen and a team of researchers: M Nkadimeng, T Matsatsala, T Couzens, E Kgomo and J Phiri. Forty of the interviews in this collection contain information on the ICU in the Western Transvaal including on branch secretaries, the political outlook of the movement, popular attitudes towards the ICU and personal memories about ICU meetings.84 These interviews are used in Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5. They form an intrinsic part of this dissertation and help fill in the factual, ideological and political complexities of the Western Transvaal and Cape Province. In the same collection, twenty further interviews include a mix of information on the ICU in surrounding regions like in the Free State and Eastern Transvaal, as well as on issues like diamond mining and farm brutality. These interviews are used primarily for contextual information. The 1980s were a period of heightened state repression in South Africa. Dee notes that old ICU members were “cautious” when interviewed and that the police confiscated and “lost” a number of the tapes.85 This may have impacted the memory of interviewees could have omitted commentary on the ICU for fear of persecution. Almost all of the interviews were in Southern Sotho or Setswana and undoubtedly some of the subtle idiom of Setswana was lost. That being said, this dissertation does not overly dissect the interviewees reflections and tries to quote them in full where possible. The final point concerns the consent of the interview participants, as the norms of the 1980s did not require interviewees to verbally indicate their consent to be interviewed. There are three reasons why I have chosen to use the interviews and include the original names of the interview participants; firstly, they are held in a public archive; secondly, 83 Some of these interviews were used for The Seed is Mine, and can be found at Wits HPRA, Institute for Advanced Social Research (IASR), AG2738, Interview Transcriptions, Aa1-Aa326. 84 The topics of these interviews include information on a range of topics, including life histories, cultivation of black sorghum, World War One, the influenza epidemic, women’s subsistence production and migrancy. 85 Dee. “Clements Kadalie”, p.55. 35 many of the interviews I have used appear in Van Onselen’s book The Seed is Mine; lastly, I limited the use of personal information from the interviews. Oral history has been well defended as an historical methodology and it has been used in many of South Africa’s most important historical works. For example, Sekibakiba Lekgoathi notes that it has played an important role in documenting the history of South Africa’s countryside where few archival records are available.86 Charles van Onselen’s book on Kas Maine has oral history as its central source.87 The same is reiterated by Paul la Hausse who argues that oral history in South Africa has created the foundations of important topics of interest in South African history – at the very least by recording the personal experiences of African people who have been ignored in archival records.88 As Alessandro Portelli suggests, memory “is not a passive depository of facts but an active creation of meaning” and much of the debate around the validity of oral history rests on the ideas about memory and narrative construction.89 For instance, while Charles van Onselen’s The Seed Is Mine was a phenomenal work of oral history, according to Rassool and Minkley, it paid little attention to the debates on memory that were common at the time of the books’ publishing. Kas Maine’s memory was not analysed as a complex collection of fact, fable and selection, it was rather used for factual content that it provided. This, according to Rassool and Minkley, “collapses memory into a realist narrative”, suggesting the importance of theorising memory and orality in oral history narrative.90 In this dissertation, farmworkers’ reflections and memories are quoted throughout chapters two to five, and they add rich accounts of how people viewed and experienced the ICU. I have tried to pay attention to instances when the memory of farmworkers’ is clearly mistaken, selective or intentionally omissive. 86 Sekibakiba Lekgoathi. “Voices of Our Past: Oral Testimony and Teaching History”, in June Bam and Claire Dyer. eds, Educator’s Guide to the UNESCO General History of Africa. (South Africa: New Africa Education (NAE), 2004): 41-51. 87 Van Onselen. The Seed is Mine. 88 Paul La Hausse. "Oral History and South African Historians", Radical History Review 1990, 46-47 (1990), pp. 354-356. 89 Alessandro Portelli. “What Makes Oral History Different?” in Robert Perks, and Alistair Thomson, eds. The Oral History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 37. 90 Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool. "Orality, Memory and Social History in South Africa" In Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee. eds, Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press: 1998), pp. 96-99. 36 Note on the Chapter Structure, Maps and Biographical Profiles A considerable amount of the chapter structure has already been provided in the earlier part of the introduction. The organising logic of the chapters is as follows; chapter one gives a contextual account of the history of South Africa, with a particular focus on the North West province and the rise of the ICU. This provides an overall regional political and economic context for the remaining chapters. While the ICU had branches in the Western Transvaal and Cape Province prior to 1928, chapter two discusses the growth of the ICU which began in earnest after the strike in Lichtenburg in June 1928, in which the ICU played an important role. At the same time, a rural revolt was occurring in South Africa’s countryside districts, and chapter three looks at the ICU in the primary maize producing district, the Bloemhof- Schweizer-Reneke-Wolmaransstad triangle. At the onset of the ICU’s organisational decline in 1928 (with corruption and internal splits beginning to emerge), the ICU actually defied this national trend by growing in strength in this region in the face of state onslaught. This general context of organisational decline had more of an impact on the ICU outside of region’s maize growing districts. Chapter four sketches the ICU in an array of towns where its trajectory was greatly affected by the inability of the ICU to respond to the local political economy of each of the towns and the union’s internal organisational problems. Chapter five discusses the ICU’s languages of freedom and subversion, its role in helping with civil cases and in creating a public sphere and the Union’s role in reorganising the space of the Western Transvaal. Throughout chapters two, three and four biographies of ICU activists that were active in the Western Transvaal will be provided. These appear in the narrative inside boxes placed which take up between half-a-page and one-page. They are not positioned at first mention of the leaders, but rather where a leader was most active, i.e., the biography for Jason Jingoes is placed in the section on Makwassie because of his consistent presence there. Many of these leaders are fairly unknown, or have biographies that are lean. Included in this dissertation are the biographies of Thomas Mbeki, Keable ‘Mote, Alexander Maduna, Doyle Modiakgotla, Robert Makhatini, Jason Jingoes, H. D. Tyamzashe and Bennet Gwabini. Their biographies illustrate a number of key points about the ICU activists in the Western Transvaal; their class position, their role in the ICU, their place of origin, their skills and their political affiliations. The 37 biographies of figures like Clements Kadalie and William Ballinger have been omitted because a fair amount of work has been published about them.91 Scattered throughout the dissertation are photos from different sources. Many of them come from the Workers’ Herald, which published photos of ICU leaders (which are mainly kept in the biographical profiles) and cartoons. An online archive of photos taken at the Lichtenburg diamond diggings are used in chapter two. Since there are very few photos of the Western Transvaal in the 1920s, a handful of miscellaneous images have been used. These include pictures in The Seed is Mine which were taken as part of Sharecropping and Labour Tenancy Project. Two general maps have been created to sketch the geographical setting of this dissertation. Map 1 situates the Western Transvaal and northern parts of the Cape Province in relation to the whole of South Africa. Map 2 sketches the Western Transvaal and northern parts of the Cape Province, which together form what today is the North West Province. In chapter two, Map 3 shows the spread of diamond diggings across the Western Transvaal. Map 4 provides the specific farms where diamonds were found in Lichtenburg. In chapter three, Map 5 indicates the farms that are part of the Bloemhof-Schweizer-Reneke-Wolmaransstad triangle. 91 For Clements Kadalie, see Dee. “Clements Kadalie”; Kadalie. My Life and the ICU. For William Ballinger, see Mouton. Voices in the Desert. 38 Chapter One – A Wildfire from the Embers: The Rise of the ICU in the Western Transvaal in the Context of a Changing South Africa: c. 1500s-1930s Introduction This chapter has two aims: the first is to outline the history of the region that became known as Western Transvaal (see Map 1) in the context of a changing South Africa between the 1500s and the 1930s, with particular emphasis on the period following the mineral revolution and the Western Transvaal region; the second is to narrate the history of the ICU between its inception in 1919 and its organisational decline by the start of the 1930s in relation to these transformations. The nature, character and trajectory of the ICU nationally, including a discussion of its organisational, political and ideological vacillations, are key to understanding its specific path in the Western Transvaal. The chapter’s title seeks to elicit the dire economic and political conditions in the post-World War One period which spurred on the growth of workers’ organisations, amongst which was the ICU, which spread across southern Africa like a “wildfire”. Secondary sources are the backbone of this chapter, and they outline the effects of the industrial revolution on South Africa and the Western Transvaal. A handful of primary sources are also used, mainly from the Workers’ Herald. The Rise of Modern South Africa: 1500s-1930s African Land and Colonial Expansion in the Western Transvaal, 1500-1880 Three-hundred years prior to the first mineral discoveries, diffuse communities of Sotho- Tswana people lived in decentralised communities with little cattle wealth or long-distance trade in what today is the North West Province.92 In 1500 a fission occurred in the primary Sotho-Tswana chiefdom in the Highveld, after which a distinct group of Sotho-Tswana speaking people formed (this rupture has since been revised to have been slightly later than 1500).93 Members of the chiefdom were spread throughout southern Africa from as far north 92 Jan Boeyens. "The Late Iron Age Sequence in the Marico and Early Tswana History." The South African Archaeological Bulletin 58, 178 (2003): 63-78, p.75. 93 Ibid., p.68. 39 as Brits to the borders of the Kalahari (a few kilometres west of the North West’s western border) and as far south as the Caledon river (which is in the southern Free State).94 It was characteristic of Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms to reproduce the political, judicial, administrative and economic structure of a chiefdom on a smaller-scale, and smaller polities reproduced the “parent” chiefdom structure; newly formed groups like the BaFokeng, BaKwena and BaKgatla crossed the Vaal river into the western and north-western parts of what today is the North West Province; the BaKgatla moved close to Rustenburg; the BaKgatla ba Kgafela moved to Pilanesberg; and lastly the BaTlokwa moved into present-day Mpumalanga.95 Some chiefdoms had had a degree of cultural assimilation with the Nguni. As a result of growing populations within chiefdoms and a growing ivory trade in the interior, a process of amalgamation took place around 1800.96 The most notable examples of this consolidation, although they did not produce culturally homogenous groups,97 are the Pedi in Mpumalanga and the Hurutshe west of the Pilanesberg. Fred Morton suggests that from 1820 onwards Tswana settlement patterns were greatly changed by the primitive accumulation of white settlers.98 The northward movements of trekboers into southern Africa’s interior had forced Africans – through frontier wars, land dispossession and speculative land buying – to work in white productive sectors of farming and diamond mining.99 Many of these settlers came from the Cape and settled in the southern Orange Free State and Western Transvaal. Robert Ross suggests that the “large, owner- operated farm” which was “worked by a harshly exploitable black labour force” was a “distinct social form” which emerged during struggles in the Cape over two centuries.100 The legal 94 Martin Legassick. “The Sotho-Tswana Peoples Before 1800”, in Leonard Thompson. eds., African Societies in Southern Africa (London: Heinemann, 1969): 86-125, p. 100-101. 95 Ibid., p.103-105. 96 Ibid., p.107. 97 Ibid., p.97. 98 Fred Morton. “Settlements, Landscapes and Identities Among the Tswana of the Western Transvaal and Eastern Kalahari Before 1820,” The South African Archeological Bulletin, 60, 182: 72- 78. 99 Doreen Atkinson. Going for Broke: The Fate of Farm Workers in Arid South Africa (Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2007), p. 25. 100 Cited in William Beinart and Peter Delius. “Introduction” in William Beinart, Peter Delius and Stanley Trapido. eds., Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa, 1950-1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986): 1-56, p.21. 40 boundaries and social expectations of this social form was loosely reproduced on farms in the Transvaal.101 There were also other forms of “capital accumulation and dispossession” during the nineteenth century which characterised Boer capitalist expansion. Veldcornets and Boer accumulators plied their trade in the interior through a variety of income earning activities; one being the Harts river irrigation project in the Northern Cape which spanned over a century (and subsequently, in the late 19th century, displaced the BaTlokwa leading to their revolt).102 Boer Commando raids throughout the Transvaal, most easily identifiable in Potchefstroom and Rustenburg, resulted in Sotho-Tswana communities being made to work as inboekselinge (people registered as “apprentices” who were allotted to a particular master and often sold). As inboekselinge they did miscellaneous work on farms for Boer owners and were beaten and seldom manumitted even after the Boer declaration to suspend slavery north of the Vaal in 1852.103 Botlhale Tema’s historical novel Land of My Ancestors tells the story of her relatives who were inboekselinge captured in the 1850s.104 The disruptions to African societies were further exacerbated with the opening of the diamond fields in Kimberly in 1867. Kevin Shillington shows that Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms experienced considerable economic and ecological changes as a result of the new economy in Kimberly.105 Shillington discusses how members of the BaTlhaping (a Tswana polity based close to Kuruman) managed to eke out a living in Kimberly, either working on the mines or in an associated industry transporting wood. New class cleavages began to develop among the BaTlhaping and as a result fragmentation of the political structure followed. Colonial taxes and land annexation as well as environmental degradation coupled with an already compromised 101 Ibid., p.21 The authors note that while these links are evident, they need not be claimed too strongly. 102 Ibid., pp.27-29, 30-31. 103Fred Morton. "Slave-raiding and Slavery in the Western Transvaal After the Sand River Convention." African Economic History 20 (1992): 99-118, pp.99-101, pp.104-106. 104 Botlhale Tema. Land of My Ancestors (Cape Town: Penguin Random House South Africa, 2019 (1st Edition 2005)). Tema’s ancestors, Polomane, Christina and Maja were part of a lucky few who managed to avoid the trappings of life-long labour on a white farm. They found providence and subsistence on Welgeval; a mission station set up by Swiss missionary Henri Gonin inside what today is the Pilanesberg National Park. 105 Kevin Shillington. The Colonisation of the Southern Tswana, 1870-1900 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985). 41 political structure eventually proved too heavy a burden for the BaTlaping to bear, as their political structure largely collapsed by the turn of the century.106 Minerals, Masters and the Making of the State, 1864-1910 Diamond mining and farming drew many African people into migrant labour as subsistence economies declined and land became increasingly scarce.107 The mining of gold in the Witwatersrand, which was discovered in 1884, drew many more men into the migrant labour system. As Van Onselen writes, “in less than thirty years, a republic [the South African Republic] founded on a[n] agricultural economy was transformed into a colony boasting the world’s largest and most technologically-sophisticated gold mining industry”.108 The coordination of the mining industry and the colonial state meant that a workforce was ripped from southern African agrarian societies, leaving trails of destruction in town and countryside alike.109 By the turn of the twentieth century, colonial encroachment and the development of the mining industry had displaced African communities. According to Manson and Mbenga, in the Western Transvaal, chiefs of the BaFokeng, BaTlhaping and BaHurutshe used tactics ranging from “outright resistance to accommodation of colonising forces” to “preserve their land, their independence and ethnic unity”.110 Affiliation to mission stations provided a considerable degree of shelter from the low wages and dangerous working conditions. One example is chief of the BaHurutshe, Moiloa II, who had developed an affiliation to the Hermannsburg Missionary Society which helped his chiefdom gain access to land.111 During the South African 106 Kevin Shillington. “The Impact of Diamond Discoveries on the Kimberly Hinterland: Class Formation, Colonialism and Resistance Among the Tlhaping of Griqualand West in the 1870’s”: 99- 119 in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone. Industrialisation and Social Change, pp.99-119. 107 See Peter Delius. The Land Belongs to Us: the Pedi Polity, the Boers