Sustaining Life. Theodore Powers
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in the Cape Colony.15 In turn, British ownership increased the production of cash crops, reconfiguring the agricultural sector. As the economy and demography of the Cape transformed, the movement of Dutch settlers northward reverberated throughout Southern Africa as the settlers came into contact with established African polities and secured access to land and resources through varied means, including warfare.16
While Dutch settlers moved northward, British expansion of the Cape Colony eastward ran up against Xhosa lands, leading to conflict. Since 1779, Dutch and subsequently British settlers had engaged in intermittent conflict with the Xhosa social formations on which they had encroached in what are known as the Xhosa or Cape Frontier Wars.17 Xhosa cattle raiding and reclamation of former lands were central to intermittent conflict between Xhosa peoples and colonial settlers. British and Dutch forces fought together in many of these conflicts, as their political and economic interests aligned relative to the expropriation of African land.18 Continued conflict with the Xhosa on the eastern front enriched British traders and farmers who supplied the British Army, further entrenching the economic power of British settlers in the Cape Colony.19 However, conflict between settlers and the Xhosa came to a head via unforeseen means. A Xhosa prophetess named Nongqawuse experienced a vision that indicated that the gods would send settlers into the sea if the Xhosa people killed their cattle and destroyed their crops.20 The vision was presented to a paramount chief in 1856; however, the cattle killing expanded beyond the scope of his region to encompass Xhosa society. This millenarian response to British encroachment and violence was devastating, leading to famine, death, and the destruction of Xhosa society’s economic foundations.
Cattle had been a central component of Xhosa society, and were particularly important for social reproduction, as they were used to the pay bride price (ilobola) necessary to consummate marriage. Without cattle, Xhosa people migrated westward, seeking wage labor in the Cape Colony’s agricultural sector, now primarily under British control.21 The cattle-killing crisis also moderated conflict along the Cape Colony’s eastern frontier, leading to the increased influence of Protestant missionaries. The missions established in Xhosa areas later known as the Transkei and Ciskei brought access to Western education, English-language training, religious conversion, and medical treatment based on Western conceptions of health and healing.22 The establishment of missions in what is today South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province transformed social dynamics among the Xhosa and African resistance to colonization. Children sent to receive mission education, learn English, adopt Christianity, and take on Western styles of dress became known as “school Xhosa.” Those who raised their children according to traditional modes of socialization were characterized as “red Xhosa,” as they continued to adorn their bodies with red ocher, along with other customary cultural practices (Mayer and Mayer 1971 [1961]). The increased exposure of Xhosa people to wage labor, education, and Christianity led to their involvement in early campaigns for African equality that took a political, rather than military, approach.
The missionary movement contributed to the emergence of an educated class that sought to transform colonial society by expanding the political and economic rights of black South Africans.23 For example, Lovedale Missionary Station offered education to both white and black South Africans while also providing medical care via an adjoining mission hospital.24 Those who attended classes at Lovedale Missionary Station include Z. K. Matthews, who went on to study at Yale University and the London School of Economics before becoming a leading member of the ANC. Govan Mbeki, a leading figure within the SACP and father of future president Thabo Mbeki was also educated at Lovedale Missionary Station. In addition, Steve Biko, a leading figure in the Black Consciousness Movement traced his roots to the same rural mission. While many more attended and were educated at Lovedale Mission Station, the historical import of these figures underscores the influential role of rural missions in educating those who led early efforts for equality and justice.
Settler Expansion and Colonial War
Alongside early movements for African equality, the nineteenth century saw an increase in export-oriented productive activities and growing economic power for the Cape Colony’s British settlers, which transformed the colonial state. A growing economy enabled infrastructural investment and the expansion of state institutions throughout the Cape Colony. The Cape Colony’s development was financed internally through the expropriation of land and resources from South Africa’s indigenous peoples, the maintenance of a low-wage labor environment to ensure profitability in the agricultural sector, and continued expansion of the colony’s productive base.25 Here, one can see corollaries with the experiences of other British colonies, where the land, labor, and resources of indigenous peoples served as the basis for colonial development (Rodney 1972).
A bias toward the needs and interests of European colonists permeated the development of colonial state institutions, including those that focused on public health. The dynamics of colonial health in South Africa were based on a clear distinction between those who were defined as citizens (European settlers) and those whose health outcomes were seen as peripheral to public health (black South Africans). As with other colonies across the continent, health facilities were developed in urban areas and focused on providing curative services to white colonists (Packard 2000). When African people did receive medical care, it was often due to their proximity to white settler populations, as was the case for those who worked in the domestic sphere, or their significance for the colonial economy, in the case of mine workers. British control of the Cape and Natal Colonies led to the development of medical services in the cities of Cape Town and Durban, respectively, with the latter expanding on the heels of a large-scale colonial war with the Zulu Kingdom.26
As the British Empire transformed the social, political, and economic characteristics of the Cape Colony, the Zulu Kingdom expanded from South Africa’s eastern coast inland. Under the leadership of King Shaka, the Zulu polity subsumed autonomous regional kingships into one. One effect of Zulu expansion was the dispersal of contiguous social formations—known as the mfecane, which roughly translates to “the crushing”—from what is today known as the KwaZulu-Natal Province.27 Subsequent conflict between ethnic groups displaced by Zulu warfare spread across the central and northern reaches of the region (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, 167). The mfecane led to new territorial borders for established social formations, the consolidation of new groups such as the Mfengu, and the restructuring of regional power dynamics. The aftermath of the mfecane saw widespread warfare and conflict led by the Matabele in the northern reaches of present-day South Africa, displacing other indigenous peoples and compounding the impact of Zulu expansion. War and migration depopulated a region that would soon be settled by the Dutch displaced from the Cape Colony.
The Dutch population that left the Cape Colony following abolition traveled northward into the South African interior, moving into the wake of the mfecane and contributing to the restructuring of African social formations. In what was far from a homogenous process, Dutch populations had slowly expanded out from the Cape Colony since the early eighteenth century. The early wave of Dutch migration had consisted of “trekboers” (trekboere), who had moved to the eastern periphery of European settlement to escape oversight and taxation from Dutch colonial authorities.28 The trekboer population first oriented around a variant of pastoral nomadism and attempted to establish their own independent republics before later developing the eastern farmlands. This group made up a significant segment of the Dutch population that departed after the abolition of slavery. Known as the voortrekkers, which roughly translates to “pioneers,” Dutch people of different class orientations and backgrounds traveled north from the eastern areas of the Cape Colony, across the Orange River, and onto lands historically occupied by African social formations.
The area directly north of the Cape Colony’s eastern region was settled by Dutch migrants and subsequently become known as the Orange Free State (Oranje-Vrijstaat). The areas immediately north of the Orange River were inhabited by Khoisan hunter-gatherers who had moved northward following the earlier wave of colonization and slavery in the Cape Colony. The Khoisan were once again displaced by European settler expansion. Further north, the migrant Dutch moved into the sociopolitical vacuum that emerged during the mfecane. There they established the Vaal Republic, which encompassed