South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s saw the widespread emergence of "people's courts." These informal structures of justice arose in the context of intense political conflict and struggle against the apartheid government, the collapse of institutional structures for resolving conflicts, and extraordinary state violence and repression. People's courts also often became a site within which individuals and groups, particularly young men, imagined a world beyond apartheid. In this sense they emerged as a kind of theater, ultimately a kind of modern political ritual, wherein people elaborated and disseminated new ideas of civil society, for example about what defines nation, citizenship, patriotism and dishonor.(1)
People's courts, and especially the "necklacing" deaths that came to be associated with them,(2) attracted considerable media attention. Yet relatively little in-depth work has been done on popular justice in South Africa, and virtually no research has examined people's courts in historical perspective. The literature has tended to see people's courts as recent, urban phenomenon that emerged de novo in the context of political struggle. In doing so the literature has stressed function over process, structure over history, snapshots of brief moments over sustained analysis of change over time.(3)
The lacuna is especially surprising given the work of historians of America and Europe. Studies of the Jacobin Terror, for example, are suggestive of the ways in which new structures of justice became crucial political spaces within which revolutionaries sustained revolutionary fervor and elaborated republican ideas about citizen and nation. In the more recent past, historians have investigated the trials and the purge of Nazi collaborators under the Vichy regime. This work has highlighted the relationship between the trials of collaborators and the creation of discourses on and around a "new" France. Special attention has been devoted to exploring not only the ways in which the trials became tied up with local and national political struggles but, also, the role of the trials in the constitution of post-war French memory.(4)
Part of the explanation for the relative lack of attention to popular justice in Africa lies in the fact that the literature on law and conflict since the colonial period has tended to focus attention on the two major institutional sites for resolving disputes. On the one hand there are the "traditional" courts of kings, chiefs and their councilors. On the other hand there are the "modern" courts headed by European colonial officials. This division neatly separates the culture and practice of dispute resolution into tradition and modernity, custom and contract. People's courts, as we shall see, complicate this division. They also complicate how we think of law, conflict and politics.(5) People's courts are complex and creative bricolages that appropriate critical signs from various sites, contest the dominant order, and become spaces within which people imagine, communicate and enforce ideas and visions of society and morality. These imaginings, moreover, are indissolubly linked to issues of pollution and purity, misfortune and contingency, authority and usurpation, as well as local critiques of the state.
This article places people's courts in historical perspective. My example is the Makhulu Span ("Big Span" or "Big Team" wink movement in the Tsolo and Qumbu areas of the rural Transkei, South Africa, during the 1950s and the early 1960s.(6) Formed by men in 1956 to combat stock theft, Makhulu Span became an important site for the critique of the state and the invention and articulation of new forms of political identity. Makhulu Span arose during an era of enormous political change and intense ideological struggle in South Africa. Most obvious was the genesis of apartheid, or separate development. Apartheid was based on the fiction that South Africa constituted a country of ethnically distinct nations, and that each nation deserved its own sovereign territory and state. Africans living in "white" South Africa did so as "temporary sojourners," as cheap laborers whose political domicile was supposed to be the ten impoverished and broken "homelands" scattered across the country. The 1951 Bantu Authorities Act, introduced into the Transkei in 1956, the same year rural men formed Makhulu Span, set forth the major principles and political structures of "separate development." Apartheid also involved a new regime of"betterment" policies aimed at reorganizing the rural economy. Seven years later, in 1963, Transkei received its first parliament. Formal "independence" came only in 1976, though the South African government provided virtually all of Transkei's financial support and tightly controlled the political and institutional structures of its puppet state.(7)
Makhulu Span became one of the region's most important agrarian social movements in the twentieth century. For this reason alone it is worthy of detailed study. Equally important, Makhulu Span points to a history of twentieth-century South Africa as one of intense and seemingly relentless civil conflict, at times even of civil war, but also a history of profound and sometimes potentially revolutionary non-elite imagining.( cool People's courts, and the social worlds that surround their emergence, offer the social historian a unique way of exploring politics and culture, identity and the imagination, that is separate from the more visible world of parties, elections, and politicians. They point to the importance of studying the intersection between the policies and cultural productions of the state, and the political imagining of those who are the objects of state policy but whose worlds often remain uncaptured by the powers that be. They unveil the centrality of violence, especially male violence, to the history of politics and identity in Africa. And, as the case of Makhulu Span demonstrates, they suggest a history of rural social movements that complicates conventional analyses of "peasant struggles" in the colonial and the postcolonial world.
THE COLONIAL CONTEXT
In the Tsolo and Qumbu many older people organize their understanding of history, and of their modern predicaments, around a quintessential act of violence: the 1880 murder of the first magistrate, Hamilton Hope, at the residency of the paramount Mpondomise chief. The death of Hope took place in the context of a rebellion that followed the 1877 colonial annexation of the region. People paid dearly for the killing of a colonial official and a white man. The colonial state deposed chiefs, doubled the hut tax, disarmed men, and confiscated land. Little wonder that people felt as late as the 1950s that "The Government still holds Hope against us."(9)
Most people in Tsolo and Qumbu define themselves ethnically as Mpondomise; in general the area is ethnically quite variegated. Politically these communities once comprised an island of what anthropologists have called "stateless societies" in a sea of more centralized polities. From the murder of magistrate Hope to the present, the region has been a place of great hardship and almost continual conflict. There have been, for example, struggles against headmen seen as unrepresentative of the people's sentiments or too close to the colonial state. In the early decades of this century there was violence that has been managed in the colonial archive as "tribal" conflict, mainly between those Bhele and Hlubi (typically referred to as "Mfengu" wink who did well out of colonial annexation, and the Mpondomise who suffered as a result of Hope's murder.(10)
While relatively far from the centers of organized political activity, the area has never been politically quiescent. Independent churches, often important sites of political struggle, have been very active in the area around Qumbu village and in Sulenkama, the traditional seat of the paramount chief and the location of intense political discussions for over a century.(11) In the 1920s, Garveyite discourses powerfully shaped political conflict. During this time the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union was active in the area. In the early 1950s the African National Congress held occasional meetings in Qumbu. More generally, throughout this century there has been near constant conflict over a variety of rural "betterment" policies aimed at controlling livestock, allocating land and reorganizing rural space, and preventing soil erosion.(12)
These struggles have become inextricably linked to the wider political economy of South Africa. Most importantly there has been the issue of land and the ability, or the inability, of households to produce sufficient food. The era following colonial annexation saw enormous differentiation and increasing landlessness. There have been fundamental shifts in the organization of land and in the settlement patterns of rural people. Disputes around land invariably became struggles over and commentaries on the organization of households, the role of headmen and, ultimately, the relationship between local political office and the colonial state.
Access to land declined precipitously in the twentieth century. The region has long been "very thickly populated."(13) In the 1920s a colonial official wrote of the "tremendous complaint amongst the people for having no lands."(14) Most of these complaints revolved around the politics of the commonage and headmen's control over the allocation of arable land, but there was also considerable tension between men who had access to arable land and those who did not. Locations generally were "very congested and many married men are without land."(15)
By the 1920s people in Tsolo and Qumbu had long been relying on migrant labor to support their households. Younger males typically first migrated to the sugar plantations of Natal, then in subsequent years north to the diamond mines of Kimberley and to the Rand gold mines.(16) This participation in a wider economy had four major impacts on communities. First, and most obviously, was the increasing dependence of rural households on wages earned in faraway places. Not only did men migrate north in very substantial numbers, over the course of the twentieth century they remained away for longer and longer periods of time.(17) Second, migrant labor increasingly became tied up with, and in turn reshaped, the dense web of on-going disputes over land and authority. These disputes took place not only within locations but also between them, especially in the context of population pressure and closer patterns of settlement. Third, stock, and especially cattle, became more valued. On the one hand migrants typically converted a substantial percentage of their wages into cattle, a preserve of men and an important ingredient in the constitution of social relations. Storing wages in cattle allowed men to maintain, however insecurely, patriarchal control of the homestead even if they were only there for a few weeks each year.(1 cool
Lastly, there were important changes in how households managed, or failed to manage, participation in the wider economy. In addition to disputes over land, the twentieth century has seen rising conflict between husbands and wives, and between fathers and sons and youths and their elders.(19) Older men struggled, and it seems increasingly failed, to maintain access to the bulk of wages earned by their sons. Younger men found it difficult or impossible to gain access to land. Inheritance not surprisingly became a highly charged matter, especially in a context in which many men stayed away for longer and longer periods of time. By the 1940s, in some areas perhaps even before, earlier practices aimed at socializing youth about sexuality, while still prohibiting and preventing vaginal intercourse, began to collapse. Illegitimacy skyrocketed. Men and women simply by-passed customary initiation ceremonies, eloped without paying bridewealth, and struggled to establish households independent of the control of their families.(20)
Many people came to associate these issues - poverty, differentiation, and household and generational conflict - with the presence of evil, specifically the work of witches. In the twentieth century witchcraft has become a constant, indeed a indissoluble, feature of social life in Tsolo and Qumbu.(21) Scholars have long noted that withcraft as a critique of the misfortune of everyday life is seldom very far away from power and politics. "The African conception of the witch," Austin has written, "is tied to various forms of belief in a world where the apparent production of new wealth depends upon appropriating the scarce reproductive resources of others while collaborating with an arbitrary and destructive external power."(22) Certainly Mpondomise did not erect a rigid distinction between the domestic disappointment and the political world. In the twentieth century people sometimes saw avaricious chiefs and headman, who had control over land and access to cash, as pursuing their selfish goals through witchcraft. If they were not themselves witches, these men often employed female witches to kill people, gain land, and acquire property. The state itself was becoming something of a witch. People referred to the poll tax, for example, as the impundulu, the lighting bird and the quintessential exemplar of witchcraft.(23)
Thieves, as we shall see, also deployed magic. Thieves were, and are, considered "evil," one man told me. Another man described how thieves "flew with the wind." He also pointed out that, like many animals associated with witchcraft, thieves could withstand "cold temperatures."(24) There is a sense that people believed the thieves were themselves cold, like the dreaded zombies (isithunzela) who descended upon homesteads in the dark of night to do the evil work of witches.(25)
By the 1950s, then, extraordinary poverty characterized Tsolo and Qumbu. The state was deeply implicated in this history of poverty, especially with regard to the allocation of land. Many men were either landless or nearly so. For most people the rural economy had long since collapsed. An overwhelming majority of households depended on long distance labor migration. Central to its continuation, migrant labor also created new tensions that threatened to destroy the household.
A perception of a world overrun by evil, a world of witches and magic, registered the social malaise and conflict of many peoples' lives. Witchcraft served as an important moral discourse concerning accumulation, jealousy and, ultimately, power and legitimacy. But witchcraft was only one of a number of discourses that shaped the political imagination of rural Africans. By the 1950s this region had a rich history of ideological change that included witchcraft beliefs, urban gang culture, working class militantism, the nationalism of the African National Congress, as well as the ever present memory of colonial conquest and the murder of Hamilton Hope. These sensibilities crucially shaped the epic battles between Makhulu Span and the notorious stock thieves of Tsolo and Qumbu.
MASCULINITY, THEFT, AND POPULAR JUSTICE
For centuries pilfering stock has been a common feature of masculine identity and male politics throughout the Transkei, indeed throughout much of Southern Africa. The deft seizure of beasts demonstrated one's prowess within the community. What happened in the 1950s, however, was altogether a different matter. By 1956, at the beginning of an economic recession that would last until the early 1960s, thieves stole hundreds of head of stock each month.(26) This epidemic of stock theft was no ordinary case of upstart young men erecting their masculinity within the community, an innocent raid on the unsuspecting. Stealing was one thing, robbery was quite another. What was especially evident in the 1950s was that thieving had, in fact, become a way of life, even an occupation passed from father to son.(27) As members of Makhulu Span wrote to the Resident Magistrate of Qumbu, three years after the formation of the organization in late 1956,
In Qumbu ... stock theft started in 1952 and by 1956 & 1957 ... it had reached outrageous proportions. A large number of stock (both large and small stock) was removed every week from many locations. It became clear that thieves not [only] stole in the old sense but robbed, coming as they did by night, eight to ten armed men, awakening the kraalhead and telling him they had come to remove his stock and that he should defend it if he could. The frightened kraalhead would only be too pleased that his life had been spared. Thieves were committed for trial but were acquitted through lawyers. In desperation, the people decided to punish them by burning their kraals. This move did not end stock theft but lessened its intensity considerably [my emphasis].(2 cool
Thieves typically attacked homesteads in the dark of night. This was especially outrageous because people were supposed to be indoors safely enjoying the comforts of their abode. The night was the time when witches did their evil work, when cold zombies walked the land. People sought the safety of their home precisely to protect them from malevolent beings. To attack at night, to sow evil and conflict under cover of darkness, was at best to commune with witches and, at worst, actually to be a witch or zombie.
We know virtually nothing about how thieves viewed the magical world of their nocturnal exploits. It seems clear that many thieves had their own ritual specialists who "doctored" them so that they would succeed in their pilfering and would be immune to the legal system of the whites. Certainly the thieves were exceptionally brazen. Doctored, and deploying the magic of the written word, thieves sometimes informed people by letter that they were going to be attacked. They would leave a "letter at your door" telling the person that "he must not attempt to look for his stock because it has been taken by" the thieves. If you looked for your stock you might be murdered. Thieves bragged about their exploits and extorted money from people who wanted to avoid having their stock stolen. They also burned down the kraals and huts of people, especially those whom they thought might speak to the police.(29)
By 1956 stock theft had become "unprecedented." A number of thieves were among the most wealthy people in the region. The Tsolo School of Agriculture "lost about [pounds]2000 worth of stock in the last two years." In most cases
thieves either cannot be detected or escape conviction when prosecuted. The Qumbu criminal roll is so heavy that cases often are not concluded until months have elapsed from the first arraignment. The accused must be allowed on bail, and by the time the trial takes place witnesses have disappeared and good evidence has deteriorated.(30)
Emboldened by magic, raiding during the time of witches and zombies, the nocturnal and notorious outlaws of Tsolo and Qumbu reigned victorious. So confident were they that the robbers "constituted themselves into a sort of aristocracy which did not mix with lesser folk and at beer drinks would sit apart. They blatantly called themselves stock thieves."(31) According to the chief colonial official in the Transkei,
The cult of the rural "Tsotsi" [thugs, gangs, from zoot suit] has become so acute that many parents and other Mules are now afraid of them. It is an unheard of occurrence for boys to attack men. Many influential Natives ... tell me that many boys evade or postpone circumcision which will convert them into men and so preclude their associating with the gangs [my emphasis].(32)
Thieves usually referred to themselves as the "Nephews" (abatshana, also abafana bomoya: "young men of the wind" wink .(33) So also did those who persecuted them. This deployment of kinship terminology points to the importance of masculinity, generational tensions and kin disputes in struggles over stock and theft. Mpondomise and most other patrilineal peoples in Southern Africa have privileged a male's relationship to his uncle's family on his mother's side. On the one hand this relationship comprised an important and distinct domain within which male youths tested and learned about the boundaries of civil conduct and respect in a way that extended beyond the orthodox and more obviously charged patrilineal politics and sanctions of the homestead. On the other hand a nephew's connections with his mother's brothers were far less formalized than agnatic relations. These relations allowed for a far wider range of behavior than would be acceptable to a male's father and his family. Nephews could be disobedient, for example by being impudent or by making selfish demands on the resources of the uncle's household. As one man told me, a nephew "could get anything" he "demanded or asked for."(34)
In the 1950s many people believed that young men willfully and permanently transgressed the boundaries of community. They were, in effect, out of control, a society of impudent lawless nephews. The thieves of Tsolo and Qumbu in effect engaged in the invention of new kinds of community that were for many others in direct conflict with conventional society. Thieves were "known by their balaclava caps and great-coats."(35) They deployed commodities and symbols associated with urban tsotsi and migrant worker culture. The Nephews bear close relation to rural indlavini male gangs in Pondoland and in the area around Mount Frere. Both groups adapted and modified older forms of social organization in ways that allowed them to flaunt the authority of senior men in the community, in many cases even their own fathers. In the past males participated in groups that provided ways of learning about, and controlling, sexuality. Indlavini groups, on the other hand, engaged in acts of sexual bravado and predation that left "respectable" people aghast. In many areas migrants participated in complex rituals that reaffirmed their responsibility to the household and to the ancestors. The Nephews, composed largely of people deeply entwined in South Africa's migrant labor system, effectively ruptured the social organization of migrancy that had become central to the economic life of the household.(36)
Oral evidence makes it clear that migrant labor and urban living were important parts of the thieves' world. The movement of pilfered stock out of the area followed along precisely the same paths that migrant laborers took to the mines. Yet instead of using incomes generated by migrant labor to acquire land and establish rural households, the Nephews stopped migrating and instead came to depend largely on theft of stock. The thieves, these "urban boys," "didn't plough."(37) Instead they used the money generated by theft to hold huge parties called tshawe or spolo, which one man defined as "to be free" or "to connect themselves freely." Both married and unmarried men and women, "loose and free" people, attended spolo. One informant described the females who attended these parties as "girls" and women who had "deserted from their kraal," by which he meant unmarried females and women who had left their husbands. In addition to drinking, eating, conversation and lovemaking, competition was at the center of spolo. On the one hand success was measured by ifashion, that is by wearing the most popular township clothes. On the other hand, masculinity and gift giving became inextricably linked. It was important to be decked out in the latest fashions and to lavish gifts on the women one desired; men would "steal rather than appear poor in the eyes of their girlfriends."(3 cool
Makhulu Span officially emerged in the closing days of 1956.(39) Initially residents living in a number of neighboring locations formed "committees" representing the ibandla, the term typically used to describe the following that acknowledged the authority of a chief but here deployed to represent the moral community of a number of contiguous locations. The leaders of Makhulu Span were "honest people of good record" who wanted to put a stop to stock theft.(40) Residents of a particular location elected a committee member, a fully constituted committee representing seven or more locations. Each committee was organized around the judge, secretaries and treasurers who took note of proceedings and collected dues that could be used in hiring lawyers. Most committees later appointed their own constable, detective, prosecutor, attorney, in addition to the "Judge of [the] people." Committees kept very precise written information that recorded not only the amount to be paid by those convicted before the courts of Makhulu Span, but also the names and amount of those who subscribed to the organization.(41)
In other words Makhulu Span appropriated categories and much of the institutional language and practice of the state. The organization of Makhulu Span also mirrored and even mimicked that of their enemies, the Nephews, and other forms of male organization in rural areas throughout the Eastern Cape. Nor was this all. On the one hand Makhulu Span deployed discourses and practices associated with the chief's and headman's court. On the other hand the movement's perception of thieves and their use of fire closely paralleled ongoing community attempts to control and eradicate witches.
In the spectacle of Makhulu Span we are reminded of the subversive possibilities of mimicry and of the carnivalesque as quotidian.(42) The trials became a kind of improvisational theater and ritual. As we shall see, the trials also became dramas which mocked collaborationist chiefs and headmen and exposed the false legitimacy of the apartheid state by borrowing its emblems of law and order.
The first Makhulu Span attacks on the Nephews may have taken place in the light of day, though these may have been largely spontaneous revolts against thieves. Upwards of a hundred or more people might descend on the homesteads of robbers. Their stock and property would be confiscated, the people driven from their homes, and their kraals and huts set on fire. Typically stock was redistributed among the locations, then slaughtered and eaten. Once dispossessed, thieves fled the area and, in many cases, attempted to seek safety within the locations of other comrades in crime. Nephews thus deployed a complex web of social relations and corporate networks that grew out of migrant labor and older forms of male association, but which now were sustained by robbery and affirmed in ritual and social practice.(43)
By March 1957, just a few months after its formation, Makhulu Span had burned down as many as four hundred huts in Qumbu and one hundred huts in Tsolo. The Nephews did not take lightly to the actions of Makhulu Span. Their nocturnal predations and arson continued. The entire area was described as being literally on fire. There is a sense in the records, and in oral testimony, of a fabulous, almost surreal war of the night, much of it organized around writing and the circulation of written texts, a storm of violence that engulfed the region in robbery and retribution, fire, and magic.(44)
The blowing of a whistle or the ringing of a bell indicated that the "Court of the 'mbandla' [ibandla]" was about to meet. Trials typically took place on hill tops from seven to eleven in the evening. Committee members seated themselves in a semi-circle. The spatial organization of the committee quite closely mimicked the meetings of headmen and chiefs. Most committee members, who were always male and like their enemies had participated in migrant labor to the mines, were in their thirties, with ages ranging from 25 to 60. By the time the accused, who had been summoned to appear before the court, had made his appearance one hundred or more people might have gathered to hear the proceedings. The presence of so many people provided Makhulu Span with the air of popular legitimacy. With the accused standing before Makhulu Span, a member of the committee announced the allegations. The accused was then asked to respond to the charges. He was then beaten and forced to provide stock and/or cash equivalent to the property he was alleged to have stolen. The accused also paid money for court fees and money and stock to "cleanse" his name of the evil he had perpetrated. The burning of huts followed the trial and conviction of thieves; the group also began murdering suspected robbers.(45)
Sitata Nontso, a secretary of one of the Makhulu Span committees, described the institutional architecture of the organization. Note the discipline and organization of Makhulu Span, its emphasis on writing and on purification, and the importance of appearing as a legitimate authority in the community.
I was once instructed to carry my books to the meeting.... In these books I was required to make entries of [the] subscription fees paid by various persons.... I also kept a record of payments made by the stock thieves for the cleansing of their names.... These bigger amounts had been paid by stock thieves for the purpose of cleansing their names. A total amount of [pounds]78-15/- was collected at the various meetings.... It had been decided by the committee that a fund should be available in the event of any member of the committee becoming involved in any prosecution.... The committee gave the appearance of being a lawful authority.... The original meeting referred to by me was called with a view to putting an end to the stock thieving that was prevalent. At this meeting the stock thieves undertook to restore possession to the rightful owners of the animals.... I am unable to say whether the committee members would be assaulted and fined by the community if they failed to carry out their mandate from the people. The subscriptions in the sum of 2/6d. were given voluntarily by the persons concerned [my emphasis].(46)
These were deeply gendered and violent spectacles of men trying men before the community. Sejossing, a member of the audience, recounted the case of Sibute who "was alleged to be a thief" and who
was tried before the committee on the same day when Natives Duma and Dasi paid their fines in the sum of [pounds]10-each. He was alleged to have stolen sheep.... He denied having stolen these animals. He was then assaulted. He was beaten with a stick across his buttocks.... After he had been beaten several times he stood up pleading for mercy. He still denied any knowledge of the animals in question. He was ordered to lie on the ground and was again assaulted. He continued to deny any knowledge of the sheep and lamb. On a whistle being blown by a member of the committee, all members at the meeting would be required to stand up and await further instructions from the committee. The committee instructed that on the whistle being blown the 4th time, all persons present should strike Sibute Tamako. When the whistle had been blown the 2nd time, a certain Native ... stood up and requested to be allowed to speak to Sibute. He was allowed to do so.... The latter [Sibute] then admitted the theft of the sheep and lamb. He offered to pay a sum of [pounds]12 - as compensation for the theft of the 5 sheep and the lamb. He also offered to produce a beast for the purpose of cleansing his name.
What is striking about Sejossing's statement is that, having been in the audience during the court's proceedings, he was subsequently tried and convicted by Makhulu Span. Like Sibute, Sejossing denied having stolen stock. Sejossing was forced to remove his trousers and was assaulted by the committee. He "then admitted the theft of the animals ... for the sole reason that I was being assaulted."(47)
It is difficult to discern if those who denied having stolen stock were, in fact, innocent. In some instances it is clear that such denials were disingenuous. It seems clear, however, that Makhulu Span did not only punish people whose guilt was unequivocal.(4 cool Certainly Sojossing's statement raises a number of important issues. First, participants in Makhulu Span trials also became its victims. There is the possibility that stock thieves were not only brought before the courts but were close observers of its proceedings, if only because not attending the meetings was seen by others as evidence that they were one of the Nephews. The very people who brazenly attacked homesteads and pilfered stock also may have watched, indeed participated in, the proceedings of Makhulu Span.
Second, some of the people who burned down homesteads did so out of fear. Lagamfula Gwazilitye, a victim of the burnings who had, in fact, been charged with stock theft in the magistrate's court, described how "a great friend of mine" informed him that his homestead was to be destroyed. Some two hundred people participated in this incident of incendiarism, including his "great friend." Following the burnings Gwazilitye and his companion remained "on friendly terms in spite of the fact that he burnt me out. He told me he was compelled to do so."(49)
People participated in the trials and the burnings either because of direct threats or because they believed that by not doing so they would themselves fall victims to Makhulu Span. Each man of the location "was supposed to be a member" of the organization. If not he was "threatened;" Makhulu Span "would come back to them."(50) Wilson Sitemela described how he had been "called upon" to pay his "contribution" which he also described as a "protection fee." By becoming a member of the "committee" Sitemela meant that his due allowed him to participate in the proceedings as an observer, not as a member of the court. He then witnessed the trial, conviction and beating of two of his paternal uncles, one of whom he described as a stock thief and the other as a suspected thief.
Sitemela added that "Any person defaulting on his contribution was warned or threatened with assault."(51) Failing to pay one's contribution meant that the person "would no longer be recognised as a member of the Ibandla,"(52) that he stood outside of and in opposition to the community. In fact people who failed to pay their contribution to the committee, neglected to carry their spear, or who failed to attend meetings of Makhulu Span, were subsequently brought before the court. They received much the same treatment as stock thieves.(53)
Even those members of the committee who failed to whip victims with sufficient severity were themselves beaten. Indeed the court sessions became mass trials, wherein all sorts of people - from stock thieves to people who for one reason of another did not want to participate in the trials, from those involved in land disputes to committee members themselves - appeared before Makhulu Span.(54) From the beginning the courts developed a number of authoritarian proclivities that had little bearing on larceny. Both the court proceedings and the incendiarism that illuminated the night skies of Tsolo and Qumbu were elaborate theaters, perhaps more accurately newly invented rituals, that concerned authority and community, purity and pollution, cattle sacrifice and morality, mendacity and masculinity, the night battles of men and their magic.
MAKHULU SPAN AND THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION
People's courts like Makhulu Span were, and are, punitive and often extraordinarily authoritarian and violent institutions. But they were also powerfully constitutive sites of imagining that arose at quite specific political moments. In the 1980s, for example, informal structures of justice emerged not simply in the context of the failure of customary modes of resolving conflict or competition for scarce resources but, rather, in the immediate context of the introduction of new political structures in urban areas. Likewise, Makhulu Span arose the very year the Bantu Authorities Act - the single most important piece of legislation in the formation of apartheid - effectively became law in the Transkei.
Importantly, the imagination of those who participated in Makhulu Span did not separate the domestic from the political, the private from the public, the world of policies and organizations from the world of intimate affective relations. Struggles over stock simultaneously and inextricably involved issues of masculinity and respect, power and authority, reciprocity and retribution, misfortune and legitimacy.
Ultimately the violence of the 1950s resurrected events of almost a century earlier: the 1880 murder of Hope and the Mpondomise rebellion. The assassination had taken place at Sulenkama, the location of the Mpondomise paramountcy of Mhlontlo. Hope was killed at the hands of Mhlontlo and Mditsha, the Mpondomise leader of Tsolo.(55) Colonial retribution involved the confiscation of substantial lands, the introduction of a range of policies and practices such as tax collection that insinuated the state into the most intimate domains of the household, but also the destruction of Mpondomise chiefship. As elsewhere in the Eastern Cape, state-appointed headmen became the most important holders of political office.
Beginning in the 1930s, however, the state began to reconstitute the Mpondomise "traditional" order. In 1935 it recognized Lutshoto as chief of Tsolo. Earlier, the state had accepted Isaac Matiwane as acting paramount. He sought to "wipe away" the blood of Hope. Certainly Isaac cooperated with the introduction of betterment policies. His son, Sigidi, was less sympathetic to the authorities. In the early 1950s, for example, Sigidi criticized the implementation of betterment policies. In 1954, in a context of near rebellion, the government dismissed Sigidi. The pliant Isaac Matiwane returned as paramount according to the recently introduced Bantu Authorities Act which, among other things, pivoted around ethnicity and the idea of "traditional" leaders. There were, however, constant "rumblings of discontent," especially at Sulenkama, "due to the dissatisfaction of the people with their being under the rule of descendents [sic] not of the direct Royal Line."(56)
Those who joined Makhulu Span associated the Nephews and their anti-social behavior with a political order that lacked popular legitimacy. Makhulu Span directed considerable energy to attacking chiefs, headmen and others viewed as collaborating with the state. For example, headman Mpiyonke Quvile, of Tsolo was "said to be one of the ring leaders of the stock thieves," but his powerful magic meant that "nothing can be proved against him." He was considered to be the "King of Thieves." But in 1958 this headman of roughly 60 years old feared for his life. Makhulu Span was out to get him. Quvile hired a bodyguard. The European magistrate suggested, and the headman agreed, that he leave the location for six months; in other words the state unwittingly became an accomplice in theft.(57)
In another example, people accused headman Velelo Mgobozi of siding with thieves. "There are many people attacked by night," they complained, but "the headman have [sic] never taken steps." Mgobozi's accusers lodged two other complaints in addition to the issue of stock theft. First, they argued that Velelo's authority was illegitimate "because according to our grandfather's custom of the Hlubi's one cannot be appointed to rule people whom they do not like." His authority was particularly illegitimate because Velelo replaced the sub-headmen with people "who are thieves."
Second, the headman appointed his son as a ranger and as the Registrar of Births and Deaths. Not only was Velelo's authority at best questionable, not only did he surround himself with thieves, but his son collected the very sorts of data required to bewitch the innocent. Velelo denied that he was "sympathetic towards" the Nephews, though he did "not permit" Makhulu Span "to burn out the suspected stock thieves." He knew that his legitimacy was questionable because he acted "without consulting [the] men of the location." He also knew that Makhulu Span "threatened to kill me as well as my son."
Certainly Velelo's accusers linked his son the ranger with the loss of stock. Nor was this case unique. In Balasi location, for example, a ranger's huts "were completely destroyed." The incendiarism had a powerful impact on the ranger who received a cash wage from the state, collected written statistical data on livestock holding, and enforced betterment. The ranger developed a "guilty concience [sic]. I was a ranger before and have arrested many people. I thought the people might want to get their own back."(5 cool
These examples point to the ways in which Makhulu Span became involved in disputes around authority and political office. These disputes became ever more volatile in the closing years of the 1950s and, especially, during the early 1960s. In 1957-8 the state arrested and convicted in very well-attended trials scores of Makhulu Span members on charges ranging from murder to arson and public violence. Subsequently Makhulu Span attacked people perceived as police informers. Makhulu Span continued assailing headmen defined as collaborators or seen for one reason or another as lacking popular legitimacy. Much venom was rained upon chiefs Matiwane and Majeke, whose rule was seen by many as based on subterfuge and wickedness. Both were threatened with violent death.
Throughout the early 1960s Makhulu Span remained active. Fire consumed the nights as the organization burned out suspected thieves, collaborators, informers and others. Makhulu Span continued its attacks on thieves and considerably expanded its critique of collaborators, the introduction of the Bantu Authorities Act, indeed the entire apartheid state. Chiefs Majeke and Matiwane constantly received death threats. There were other developments. In Qumbu, Makhulu Span began organizing workers on the South African Native Trust Etwa Plantation. Workers were told "to demand payment for days they were required to sleep on the plantation premises but for which they received no pay - failing payment they were advised to go on strike." A two-day strike ensued.(59)
The Chief Bantu Commissioner for the Transkei wrote to his superiors in Pretoria that, in Tsolo, "Makhulu Span is rapidly gaining control of this District." In one wave of arson the organization destroyed some 194 huts in just four locations.(60) By this time Makhulu Span had appropriated the nationalist language of formal African political organizations. Chief Mditshwa, Tsolo's equivalent of Isaac Matiwane, wrote that if the members of Makhulu Span did
not like a certain person in the district he is accused of stock theft, even if he has never been convicted.... Large sums of money is demanded from him and should he not pay his kraal is burned down.... [Makhulu Span] are also against the implementation of bantu authorities or any of the Government Scheme for the betterment of the Bantu in the Tsolo district. There object is that I be put in a bad light with the Government Officials so that they might think that I am incapable of ruling my people.... I have today gathered information to the effect that these three men [alleged leaders of Makhulu Span] have told the Pondomisis that all the bantu people, instead of having all these different Chiefs, should strive to be under one chief and that chief must be ALBERT LUTILI [then president of the ANC].... No european should rule them. Taxes are not to be paid to the europeans but to chief LUTILE, the bantu man, who should rule the whole of South Africa.(61)
By 1962 Makhulu Span had expanded to nearby Engcobo district, where a number of brutal murders by the organization raised considerable panic in the community.(62) Wherever Makhulu Span operated the organization quickly divided people into supporters and collaborators. The latter faced murder, the destruction of their homesteads and the confiscation of their property, even if they had nothing to do with stock thieving. In Tsolo, in a 1961 letter to the District Commandant a number of people wondered "Why does the Government set chiefs and heads of tribal authorities on us Bantu?" Clearly they did not support the introduction of apartheid into rural South Africa. But they were not supporters of Makhulu Span either, for they asked the official
Will you please investigate this extortious action or else we will be forced to defend ourselves against this barbarous rape of our scant pennies ... the so called secretary is the headman of Jenca location the headquarters of Makhulu span. He has already made a fat profit of over [pounds]1000 as fines.(63)
Makhulu Span disappeared after 1962, in large part because of the arrest and conviction of many of its members and the government's declaration of a state of emergency in the Transkei following the 1960 Pondoland Revolt. With the revolt much of the Transkei was, in effect, in a state of open rebellion.
CONCLUSION
We may be tempted to heroize the emergence of Makhulu Span and other movements that combatted stock theft and which founded anti-colonial struggles, much as an earlier literature tended to celebrate the actions of bandits.(64) Yet this evaluative language shifts attention away from what is most important about Makhulu Span and other moments in which people take the law into their own hands. Firstly, the movements suggest that informal structures of justice typically involve much more than the resolution of disputes or control over property. Makhulu Span involved an extraordinarily complex set of issues ranging from ideas of pollution, the culture of respect, masculinity, poverty and proletarianization, to critiques of the state and conceptions of community and nation.
Secondly, study of informal justice suggests new ways of thinking about law and society. Methodologies based on distinctions between "customary" and "modem" law and structures of dispute resolution, which have organized much of our understanding of the African past in the twentieth century, fall silent before the history of Makhulu Span. Thirdly, Makhulu Span points to a history of the political imagination that is only tangentially related to the dominant narratives of political organization and party that continue to structure our understanding of what we usually mean by "political history." The story that I have begun to sketch here suggests a history of the multiple sites of political imagining, the hidden arenas within which society and polity are made and remade in thought, conversation and action. In Tsolo and Qumbu people were inventing their own ideas about community, citizen and nation long before activists set out to "organize the people." They did so "looking over the shoulders" of the dominant forces in their lives, appropriating in often enigmatic ways symbols and social processes that cohered in new, enduring and potentially revolutionary forms.
These forms complicate conventional wisdom about peasant politics in South Africa and, indeed, elsewhere on the continent. Makhulu Span, with all its distinctiveness and concern with local issues, did not unfold as an autonomous movement separate and isolated from other political struggles in the country. Nor was its political language simply derivative of the nationalist struggles led by the ANC and PAC. Makhulu Span appropriated and reworked nationalist discourses in a way that brought together, among other things, nationalism, witchcraft and theft. Moreover, the idea that peasant movements emerge as a reaction to structural changes in the economy, and are simply about the restoration of lost worlds, seems suspect. Makhulu Span sought to preserve and to fashion creatively a social order by embracing visions of both the past and the future.(65)
Fourthly, the night battles between the Nephews and Makhulu Span unveil a history of twentieth-century South Africa as a history of civil conflict. These struggles, these moments in the "cultivation of hatred,"(66) were indissolubly tied up with broader structures of power and economy. Analysis of these largely undisclosed wars, and of the proximity of personal and political tragedy, suggests new possibilities for understanding social process and culture, especially the relationship between local society and the state and the creation of parallel structures in situations that border on revolution.
Fifthly, the ferocious battles between the Nephews and Makhulu Span indicate the great extent to which discourses of community and polity were masculine discourses. These fights were between men and about manhood and manliness, about the context and organization of the moral order of masculinity. At the same time they were about women or, more precisely, about the control of women and the signification of male relations with women. In the gender of the spectacle the conflict between the thieves and Makhulu Span concerned the social organization of patriarchy in rural South Africa. One is reminded in the many misfortunes of South Africa how politics inevitably ends up at home in disputes within and about the domestic community. The struggle between the thieves and Makhulu Span spoke to conflicts about home in a world which produced the homeless, about affective relations in a society living in a permanent state of emergency, about patriarchy and male fantasies, about the dreams and desires of the poor and the destitute, and about the culture of living in what has long been a landscape of death.
Finally, the night battles of men and their magic point not simply to the intimate dance of law and violence but, even more sharply, to the centrality and the pervasiveness of violence, both political and quotidian, in the constitution and reconstitution of society and polity. Most analyses of violence either concentrate on the political or on the violence of everyday life. Much is revealed at their intimate intersection. The truth of violence lies not only in its terrible destructiveness as acts inscribed on the bodies of people, and as discourse and memory. Violence also creates society, organizes memory, and weaves the past into the social fabrics of the present.
Coda
In June, 1993, on my way to conduct research on Makhulu Span, I gave a ride to a man whom I shall call "J. M." A very personable individual, J. M. told me how he had worked in the big city of Durban for a few years, then as a truck driver plying the roads of South Africa, now the owner of a small shop in Idutywa, one of Transkei's dusty towns. In a desperately poor area like the Transkei, J. M. is a successful, self-made man who is trying to make the best of the cards life has dealt him. J. M. is married and has two daughters. He spoke of his hopes that they would go to college, that their futures might be bright.
When I told J. M. that I was heading to Qumbu he seemed surprised, perhaps even a bit perplexed. He was born in Qumbu and still held a plot of land there on which he kept some stock. I told J. M. that I was conducting research on Makhulu Span. J. M. knew of Makhulu Span, but our conversation quickly turned to stock theft in the 1990s. I asked J. M. if he had lost stock. Yes, he nodded. He then told me that recently a wave of stock theft had swept across the area of Tsolo and Qumbu, just as had happened some four decades earlier. J. M. described the thieves as well-organized young men armed with AK-47s. He alleged that they were aligned with the militant Pan-Africanist Congress. J. M. then explained the purpose of his trip to Umtata. The apprehensiveness I had sensed when we began discussing Makhulu Span became clear. J. M. was to appear in court. Two months earlier, following a rash of larceny, J. M. and seventeen others had captured and, with exceptional brutality, murdered two men suspected of stock theft.
Since 1993 hundreds of people have met violent deaths in this small scrap of impoverished land. The violence has been so severe that the government appointed a commission to look into stock theft and political corruption. At night there are battles between thieves and their enemies. Men are shot down, thieves are captured. In a hidden place men suspend a suspected robber over a fire and demand confession. The man screams, flesh bums, the suspect dies. The night is filled with mysterious, dangerous movement, the motion of witches and the terrible, relentless violence of men. At the top of a cliff a woman has been accused of witchcraft. The belly of a live horse is slit open. The animal is disemboweled. The witch is murdered. The men force her warm body into the wet cavity of the horse, the gash is sutured, the horse's a**s sewn closed, the horse and witch pushed over the side of the cliff.(67)
And so, as politicians dismantle apartheid, in Tsolo and Qumbu witches are murdered, their warm bodies fixed within the cavity of dead horses. Everywhere there is great sickness. Machine gun fire and masculine anger possess the land. There is torture, murder, robbery, rape, a universe of shadows cast by the fires of hatred and retribution and a grinding poverty to which there seems no end. There are rumors of the beginning of a new era of frontier wars, a refighting of epic conflicts that took place over a century ago. There are apocalyptic and genocidal visions that demand the obliteration of the evil that is this world before the rebirth of worlds denied and suppressed and yet oddly proximate. In South Africa, perhaps in most political conflicts where there is also terrible poverty, violence has both ruptured temporality and produced too much history, too much memory, too much anger ... perhaps also too much hope.
Department of History Gambler, OH 43022-9623
ENDNOTES
This article would not have been possible without the funding and research support from the following agencies and institutions: the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University, the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, and Kenyon College. I would like to thank W. M. who helped me with interviews and to those people who shared their knowledge of the past with a distant visitor. I would also like to thank the Mall family and the Pickering family who opened their home and who shared valuable information on violence in the Transkei. I have provided only the initials of interviewees, many of whom requested anonymity. Interviews were conducted in two separate trips, in 1992 and 1993. Sean Redding very generously shared her own work with me. Thom McClendon provided additional material. Robert Thornton provided perspective. I presented a preliminary draft at the Symposium on Law, Colonialism and Property in Africa, held at Stanford University, on 19 May 1995. My colleagues at the Stanford Humanities Center were astoundingly helpful. Thanks also to Richard Abel, William Beinart, Jim Lance, Tim Lane, Meredith McKittrick, Don Moore, Vivek Narayanan, Pam Scully and Bill Worger. Special thanks to Richard Roberts, Reed Browning, and Ellen Furlough. The usual disclaimers apply.
1. For an overview see Anthony W. Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990 (Cape Town, 1992). People's courts typically "tried" collaborators, enforced consumer boycotts, and controlled problems such as theft, rape and gangsterism. For discussion of violence, informal justice and vigilantism, most of it not in historical perspective, see Richard Abel, ed., The Politics of Informal Justice (New York, 1982); William Beinart, Introduction: Political and Collective Violence in Southern African Historiography," Journal of Southern African Studies 18, 3 (Sept. 1992): 455-86; Hugh Corder, ed., Democracy and the Judiciary (Cape Town, 1989); Philip Frankel, Noam Pines, and Mark Swilling, State, Resistance and Change in South Africa (Johannesburg, 198 cool ; Desiree Hansson and Dirk Van Zyl Smit, eds., Towards Justice? Crime and State Control in South Africa (Cape Town, 1990); Nicholas Haysom, Mabangalala: The Rise of Right-Wing Vigilantes in South Africa (Occasional Paper, Centre for Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, 1986); N. Chabani Manganyi and Andre du Toit, eds., Political Violence and the Struggle in South Africa (New York, 1990). On violence in South Africa more generally see David Chidester, Shots in the Streets: Violence and Religion in South Africa (Boston, 1991); Brian McKendrick and Wilma Hoffman, People and Violence in South Africa (Cape Town, 1990).
2. In necklacing a tire filled with gasoline and rags is placed around the body of the victim (who usually has been severely, even mortally, beaten) and set light.
3. For an important exception see Wilfried Scharf and Baba Ngcokoto, "Images of Punishment in the People's Courts of Cape Town 1985-7: from Prefigurative Justice to Populist Justice, in Manganyi and du Toit, Political Violence and the Struggle in South Africa, 341-72. See also Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Unpopular Justice on Trial," and Wilfried Schaff, "Knitting Necessary Knots," in Democracy in Action 8, 4, (July 1994): 16-20. Sufian Hemed Bukurura has written on popular justice in Tanzania. See his "The Maintenance of Order in Rural Tanzania," Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 34 (1994): 1-29.
4. See Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989); Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). See also Jacqueline Dowd Hall," 'The Mind that Bums each Body': Women, Rape and Racial Violence," Southern Exposure 12 (1984): 61-71.
5. See Martin Chanock, Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, 1985); Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications: Customary Law on Kilimanjaro (Cambridge, 1986); Sally Engle Merry, "Law and Colonialism," Law and Society 25, 4 (1991): 889-922.
6. While a number of scholars have noted the Makhulu Span movement, until recently few have written in much depth about it. The anthropologist W. D. Hammond-Tooke was conducting fieldwork on local government in the Transkei during this period. His 1975 book Command or Consensus briefly discusses Makhulu Span. See W. D. HammondTooke, Command or Consensus: The Development of Transkeian Local Government (Cape Town, 1975). For other references see Roger Southall, South Africa's Transkei: The Political Economy of an "Independent" Bantustan (New York, 1983), 109; Colin Bundy, "Land and Liberation: Popular Protest and National Liberation," in Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, eds, The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa (London, 1987), 275. More recently see Sean Redding, "Government Witchcraft: Taxation, the Supernatural, and the Mpondo Revolt in the Transkei, South Africa, 1955-63," African Affairs 95 (1996): 555-79; Jeff Peires, "Unsocial Bandits: The Stock Thieves of Qumbu and Their Enemies," (paper presented to conference on "Democracy: Popular Precedents, Practice, Culture," University of the Witwatersrand, 13-15 July 1994).
7. For a history of the Transkei see Southall, South Africa's Transkei.
8. On violence see E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropology of Violence (Princeton, 1996). See also Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977). I explore these issues in greater detail in my forthcoming Not in a Distant Time: The Imagination in South Africa. For a useful comparative example see Orin Starn, 1 Dreamed of Foxes and Hawks': Reflections on Peasant Protest, New Social Movements, and the Rondas Campesinas of Northern Peru," in Arturo Escobar and Sonia Alvarez, eds, The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy and Democracy (Boulder, 1992), 89-111.
9. Quoted in Hammond-Tooke, Command or Consensus, 47. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the region formed part of a wider tableau of conflict, political centralization and destruction typically referred to as the mfecane. Zulu attacks reached well into this area of the Transkei. People anxiously observed the politics of an expansionist Zulu state to the northeast but, also, political centralization and expansion closer to home. By the 1830s two polities adjoined the Tsolo/Qumbu area; in many respects the region comprises a kind borderland or frontier. To the southeast people observed the rise of the Mpondo polity under Faku. To the north, as the hills of Tsolo/Qumbu became the mountains of Lesotho, Moshoeshoe founded a Sotho kingdom. See William Beinart, The Political Economy of Pondoland: 1860-1930 (Cambridge, 1982); Elizabeth Eldredge, A South African Kingdom: The Pursuit of Security in Nineteenth-Century Lesotho (Cambridge, 1993).
10. The evidence suggests that while chiefly genealogies stress linkages with the Mpondo especially, but also with the Bomvana and Xesibe polities, Mpondomise culture and society is distinctive for the ways it has borrowed cultural practices from its neighbors. In other words there has been a kind of precolonial bricolage that has affirmed, and continues to affirm, Mpondomise distinctiveness and their marginal position relative to the larger polities that surround them and threaten their sense of independence. The history of this area is discussed in Crais, Not in a Distant Time; William Beinart, Conflict in Qumbu: Rural Consciousness, Ethnicity and Violence in the Colonial Transkei," in William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987); Hammond-Tooke, Command or Consensus. For material on kinship see W. D. Hammond-Tooke, "Descent Groups Scatter in a Mpondomise Ward," African Studies 27, 2 (196 cool : 83-94; idem, "The Morphology of Mpondomise Descent Groups," Africa 38, 1 (Jan. 196 cool : 26-46. See also Heinz Kuckertz, Creating Order: The Image of the Homestead in Mpondo Social Life (Johannesburg, 1990).
11. (N)ative (A)ffairs 497, Rein to Chief Magistrate, Transkei, 27 Aug. 1902. Unless otherwise noted, all archival materials are located in the Cape Archives, Cape Town, South Africa.
12. See Beinart, "Conflict in Qumbu"; 1/QBU (Qumbu), RM (Resident Magistrate) to Chief Magistrate, 4 Aug. 1928; 1/QBU 7/1/70, Burg to District Commandant, 7 Dec. 1952. One man described in some detail the activities of the Garveyite leader Wellington Butelezi who "collected a lot of money from the people" in the area around Qumbu. Interview with R. T., 23 June 1993.
13. Interview with R. T., 23 June 1993.
14. (Umtata) C(hief) M(agistrate) T(ranskei) 164, Nqwili and others to RM, Qumbu, 7 Dec. 1924.
15. (Umtata) CMT 164, RM to [?], 23 May 1923. See also 1/QBU 7/1/8-9, Maraule to RM, Qumbu, 18 Jan. 1938.
16. Elderly men depict a situation in which a very high percentage of men spent time on the mines. R. T. described to me how he walked through the hills to the railhead at Maclear. He worked on the mines for "very many years." R. T. first went to the mines in 1929 on an eight month contract. Three years later he eloped with a woman. He continued migrating north for the next sixteen years, returning home for a short time each year. After 1945 he managed to gain access to sufficient land and stock to withdraw himself from the migrant labor system. Interview with R. T., 23 June 1993. Another man labored on the mines for about thirteen years before he married and headed to Langa, in Cape Town, where he worked for only a year. Interview with M. Z., 24 June 1993.
17. Six month contracts were typical during the late nineteenth century. From the 1920s, however, migrants might stay away for more than a decade with only the yearly week or two off to visit their kith and kin in the countryside.
18. There was, for example, considerable tension between people living in the older locations at Upper Tyira and Balasi and the inhabitants in the newer locations of Lower Tyira and Kwa-Nkese. (Umtata) CMT 164, Nqwili and others to RM, Qumbu, 7 Dec. 1924; (Umtata) CMT 164, RM to [?], 23 May 1923; Interview with E. K., 23 June 1993. The valorization of cattle became even more charged precisely because of their increasingly fragile existence. For a similar story see James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge, 1990), esp. 135-66.
19. Infant mortality rates of 50 percent or more for children two and under have not been uncommon. Childhood malnutrition has been chronic and endemic. Tuberculosis has long plagued the health of people, especially migrant laborers. Men often returned to their homes sick, injured and dying. Since 1900 the mines have accounted for 60,000 direct deaths and over one million injuries. See David B. Coplan, In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa's Basotho Migrants (Chicago, 1994), 130. See also F. William Fox and Douglas Back, "A Preliminary Survey of the Agricultural and Nutritional Problems of the Ciskei and Transkeian Territories with Special Reference to Their Bearing on the Recruiting of Labourers for the Gold Mining Industry," (unpub. ms., 1943), 40.
20. By the 1950s, especially with the rise of urban influx control that forced people back into the countryside, a sizeable class of people who were either landless, or virtually so, distinguishe
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