Abstract
Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa tells two stories about land and belonging in South Africa. Complicated by moments of contest, collaboration, and coercion, these are not straightforward stories. But they are worth telling in order to reveal some of the continuities definitive of South African conflict, and to offer some points of comparison with other settler societies established across the globe in the last few centuries.
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Notes
See, for instance, D. J. Jooste, A frikaner Claims to Self-Determination: Reasons, Validity, and Feasibility (Pretoria: Technikon Pretoria/Freedom Front, 2002). My copy comes with a proud sticker on the cover testifying that it was ‘Gekoop in Orania’; the author and his wife formerly lived in the dorp.
‘You can claim that something is yours until you are blue in the face’, relates property expert Carol Rose, ‘but unless others recognize your claims, it does you little good’. See Carol M. Rose, ‘Economic Claims and the Challenges of New Property’, in Katherine Verdery and Caroline Humphrey (eds), Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 279.
See especially Carol M. Rose, Property and Persuasion: Essays on History, Theory and Rhetoric of Ownership (Boulder: Westview Press, 2004).
Robert C. Ellickson, ‘Property in Land’, Yale Law Journal 102 (1992–93), p. 1319.
See, for an introduction to some of these debates: Harold Demsetz, ‘Toward a Theory of Property Rights’, American Economic Review 57, 2 (1967), pp. 347–59;
Richard A. Epstein (ed.), Economics of Property Law (Cheltenham and Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishers, 2007);
Peter Garnsey, Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
Garrett Hardin, ’The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science 162 (1968), pp. 1243–8;
Richard Schlatter, Private Property: The History of an Idea (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1951);
J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds), Ethics, Economics, and the Law, NOMOS series 24 (New York: New York University Press, 1982). See also notes 2, 3 and 4 above.
See especially Morris Cohen’s famous claim that modern property is a form of sovereignty, in ‘Property and Sovereignty’, Cornell Law Quarterly 13 (1927–28), pp. 8–30. Otherwise for a useful review see Jacob Metzer and Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Some Considerations of Ethno-Nationality (and Other Distinctions), Property Rights in Land, and Territorial Sovereignty’, in Stanley L. Engerman and Jacob Metzer (eds), Land Rights, Ethno-Nationality and Sovereignty in History (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 7–28.
Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 128.
See also Francis Jennings, ‘Virgin Land and Savage People’, American Quarterly 23, 4 (1971), pp. 519–41.
Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 6–7.
See also Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1987);
Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003), p. 139. Emphasis in original.
Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. pp. 30–2.
John L. and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Volume Two, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 365–404;
John L. Comaroff, ‘Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa’, American Ethnologist 16, 4 (1989), pp. 661–85.
Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
See especially Scott D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
See also Janice E. Thomson, ‘State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Empirical Research’, International Studies Quarterly 39, 2 (1995), pp. 213–33;
Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Two recent attempts to problematise the singularity of sovereignty by analysing the politics of custom include Clifton Crais, ‘Custom and the Politics of Sovereignty in South Africa’, Journal of Social History 39, 3 (2006), pp. 721–40;
Sean Redding, Sorcery and Sovereignty: Taxation, Power, and Rebellion in South Africa, 1880–1963 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006).
The archaeological reality of staggered human occupation in South Africa is elaborated in Chapter 2 of this book. An interesting comparison may be made to Canada and the USA here. Despite recent archaeological and genetic evidence that the Americas were settled in three waves between 14,000 BPD and the voyage of Columbus, ‘indigeneity’ as a construct is far less fragile in North America than it is in South Africa, due to the different ratios between minority and majority in sub-Saharan Africa. This difference probably also extends from a greater prevalence of ethnic cleavages that can be seen today between African polities vis-à-vis those that can be seen in indigenous North America, and the differences between the two continents with respect to the popular acceptance of scientific theories of human origins. For the ‘three waves’ thesis, see: Dennis L. Jenkins et al., ’Clovis Age Western Stemmed Projectile Points and Human Coprolites at the Paisley Caves’, Science 337 (2012), pp. 223–8;
David Reich et al., ’Reconstructing Native American Population History’, Nature 488 (2012), pp. 370–74. For an entertaining indigenist argument that this kind of science is just a great big ‘white lie’,
see Vine Deloria Jr, Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (New York: Scribner’s, 1995).
Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
See also the interesting but outdated W. M. Macmillan, Complex South Africa: An Economic Footnote to History (London: Faber & Faber, 1930).
For an introduction to these issues in a wider African context, see Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 138–79.
For South Africa specifically, see Martin Chanock, The Making of a South African Legal Culture, 1902–1936: Fear, Favour and Prejudice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Though the nominal bestowments of settlers unto indigenous peoples have ever proven impermanent constructions, the term ‘Bantu’ seems to have disappeared especially quickly from South African discourse — a fate that we could only attribute to a distance from the apartheid classificatory regime if the term ‘coloured’ were no longer popular either. Whatever the reasons for this shift in the language, it is appropriate now to explore new terminology. The word ‘Briqua’, recorded a few times in the seventeenth century, according to Landau, ‘apparently meant not only highveld chiefdoms but also the ornamented, elaborate chiefships associated with seventeenth-century Zimbabwean-related sites. Essentially, briqua were “populous settled farmers”, so far unseen’. See Paul S. Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 4. One of Landau’s main arguments in this book — that there are difficulties associated with the transposition of modern identities onto the past — is relevant to this study, and deserves more discussion than I am prepared to deliver in a footnote; readers are directed to his book instead, and, no doubt, the interpretative upheavals it will leave in its wake.
The best starting point is Pieter Jolly, ‘Interaction between South-Eastern San and Southern Nguni and Sotho Communities c.1400 to c.1880’, South African Historical Journal 35, 1(1996), pp. 30–61.
See also David B. Coplan, ‘People of the Early Caledon River Frontier and their Encounters’, African Historical Review 44, 2(2012), pp. 55–77.
Elizabeth A. Eldredge, Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870–1960 (Madsion: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), pp. 25–70.
Sandra B. Burman, Chiefdom Politics and Alien Law: Basutoland under Cape Rule, 1871–1884 (New York: Africana, 1981), pp. 128–36.
That most recent ‘age of Empire’ — the one which spread out across most of the globe, hauling select portions of it into ‘modernity’ as it went — ends, according to the textbook reading, with the coming of ’decolonisation’ after World War II. In this version of history, colonies of all shapes and sizes seem almost predestined to transform into nations (each of them commencing their own journey along the pathway of development, ever choosing between communism and capitalism along the way). See, for an introduction: R. F. Holland, European Decolonization, 1918–1981 (London: Macmillan, 1985);
James D. Le Sueur (ed.), The Decolonization Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003);
Raymond F. Betts, Decolonization (New York: Routledge, 2004);
Dietmar Rothermund, The Routledge Companion to Decolonization (London: Routledge, 2006).
Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Poetics and Politics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), p. 2. For a historiographical explanation of the emergence of settler colonial studies, see Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Settler Colonialism: Career of a Concept’, Journal of Imperialism and Commonwealth History (forthcoming).
Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, 4 (2006), p. 388.
For an introduction to this debate, see Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Ann Arbor, 2006);
Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008);
Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, pp. 403–4. As Wolfe put it in an interview with indigenous Hawaiian scholar J. Kehaulani Kauanui, South Africa is ‘just a colony that happens to have settlers in it. It is not a settler colony in my sense [of defining settler colonialism by its logic of native elimination]’. J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism Then and Now: A Conversation between Interview between J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Patrick Wolfe’, Politica & Società 2 (2012), p. 249. For the argument that widespread reliance upon black labourers in South Africa meant that the colonised population was preserved rather than murdered, in keeping with the interests of white capital,
see Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 107–21.
The term also has its origins in Zionist discourse. For this, see: Israel Shahak, ‘A History of the Concept of “Transfer” in Zionism’, Journal of Palestine Studies 18, 3 (1989), pp. 22–37;
Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882— 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992). Even Herzl, elsewhere in his Returns discussing the strategies required by settlers when competing with others for land, writes: ‘In the distribution of land every precaution will be taken to effect a careful transfer with due consideration for acquired rights.’
Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), p. 127.
Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 33–52.
W. M. Macmillan, The Cape Colour Question: A Historical Survey (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927), pp. 29–30.
J. A. I. Agar-Hamilton, The Road to the North: South Africa, 1852–1886 (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937), p. 86.
Martin Legassick, The Politics of a South African Frontier: The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries, 1780–1840 (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2010 [1969]), pp. 328–9.
J. S. Marais, The Cape Coloured People, 1652–1937 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1939). For the argument that Marais’s understanding was in line with a broader interpretative trend in historical studies to homogenise Griqua experiences within a broader, pan-South African Coloureddom,
see Edward Cavanagh, The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902–1994 (Oxford: Peter Lang Publishers, 2011), pp. 34–40.
Robert Ross, ‘Griqua Power and Wealth: An Analysis of the Paradoxes of their Interrelationship’. Seminar Paper, Societies of Southern Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (London: Institute of Cornmonwealth Studies, 1972);
Robert Ross, ‘Griqua Government’, African Studies 33, 4 (1974), pp. 25–42;
Robert Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas: A Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Karel Schoeman, The Griqua Captaincy of Philippolis, 1826–1861 (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2002).
Karel Schoeman (ed.), Griqua Records: The Philippolis Captaincy, 18251861 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1996);
Karel Schoernan (ed.), The Griqua Mission at Philippolis, 1822–1837 (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2005).
The term ‘genocidal moments’ originates in the work of A. Dirk Moses, and provides a way to disaggregate isolated incidents of human killing within colonial contexts. Even if historians can identify a common pattern in each of these killings, they do not necessarily comprise a singular ’genocide’ (although this depends on one’s definition of the term in the first place). See A. Dirk Moses, ‘An Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in the Colonization of Australia’, Journal of Genocide Research 2, 1 (2000), pp. 89–106. For the intersection of settler colonial studies and genocide studies more generally,
see A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004);
A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008).
Lindi Renier Todd, ‘What’s in a Name? The Politics of the Past within Afrikaner Identifications in Post-Apartheid South Africa’. D. Phil Dissertation (University of London, 2007);
Terisa Pienaar, ‘Die Aanloop tot en stigting van Orania as groeipunt vir ‘n Afrikaner-volkstaat’. M.A. Dissertation (Stellenbosch University, 2007);
F. C. de Beer, ‘Exercise in Futility or Dawn of Afrikaner Self-Determination: An Exploratory Ethno-Historical investigation of Orania’, Anthropology Southern Africa 29, 3–4 (2006), pp. 105–14.
Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Afterword: Orania as Settler Self-Transfer’, Settler Colonial Studies 2, 1 (2011), pp. 190–6.
See, for example, Chris McGreal, ‘A People Clutching at Straws’, The Guardian (29 January 2000), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/jan/29/books.guardianreview3, date accessed 20 October 2012;
Paul McNally, ‘Come Gawk at the Racists’, Thought Leader (1 February 2010), http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/paulmcnally/2010/02/01/orania-tourism-come-gawk-at-the-racists, date accessed 20 October 2012. This kind of journalism, for all its purchase among the self-righteous, offers little insight into the land and lives of Orania.
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Cavanagh, E. (2013). Introduction: Land, Sovereignty, and Indigeneity in South Africa. In: Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305770_1
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