Tensions in the Colonial Restructuring of Local Environmental Authority, 1880–C
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Tropp.1-122 8/17/06 10:21 AM Page 31 1 w Tensions in the Colonial Restructuring of Local Environmental Authority, 1880–c. 1915 As the colonial government appropriated Transkeian resources through annexation and the establishment of new administrative institutions, intense disputes emerged over the nature and scope of environmental au- thority. Paramount chiefs were demoted, commoner headmen were elevated to new ranks, magistrates took over the helm of newly demarcated districts, and the Forest Department increasingly exerted its influence on the lives of African communities. From the 1880s to the mid-1910s, as colonial personnel, chiefs, headmen, and commoners negotiated control over natural resources across the Transkei, they simultaneously contested the meaning of these col- lective transformations in local political and environmental relations. In KwaMatiwane negotiations over environmental authority were embed- ded within the region’s unique histories of political and environmental restruc- turing. Following the final major Transkeian rebellion of the nineteenth cen- tury, officials expanded the colonial domination of both local populations and resources, viewing them as mutually supportive agendas. From the early 1880s onward, controlling forests became a key ingredient in official strategies to sta- bilize the social order, consolidate colonial rule, and resettle local populations. The settlement of diverse populations into newly created subdistrict locations and the appointment of government-salaried headmen to oversee them served the twin causes of political stability and expanded resource regulation. As colo- nial conservation was formally established and expanded from the late 1880s on- ward, officials more systematically empowered and obliged headmen to help enforce governmental forest schemes in their locations. Over the course of the 1890s, the government also expanded the activities of European forest officers and African forest guards in local areas, who worked alongside headmen in 31 Tropp.1-122 8/17/06 10:21 AM Page 32 controlling location forest access until the late 1900s, as a new management pol- icy emerged for location forests. From this point forward, foresters’ patrols were confined to only demarcated government reserves, and headmen took over the daily supervision of newly defined “headmen’s forests” in their wards. Differently situated chiefs, headmen, and commoners brought their wider personal experiences of social, economic, and ecological transformation to bear on their responses to these changes in environmental authority. The com- plex relocation policies of the postwar 1880s, including the resettlement of eco- nomically and culturally differentiated groups into common locations, exacer- bated ongoing tensions and magnified such lines of difference. As such groups competed over land and forest resources, intralocation factions settled their scores in heated disputes over headmen’s political and environmental author- ity. African authorities’ ambiguous participation in colonial forest policies particularly generated uneasy and unpredictable relations with both location residents and officials, as newly subordinated chiefs and newly appointed headmen often exploited their hand in forest control to derive various political and economic benefits. With the expansion of forest patrols and personnel in the region in the 1890s and early 1900s the politics of resource negotiations be- came even more complex and intense, as headmen jockeyed to maintain their influence over popular resource access and location residents felt and ex- pressed their deeper frustrations with the colonial state, particularly in a period of acute rural stress, through struggles with forest officers and guards. At the same time, headmen, residents, and forest guards each brought deeper personal histories and vendettas to their negotiation of these shifting power relations. Over the course of the late 1900s and early 1910s, as location forests were placed under headmen’s exclusive control, negotiations over forest access continued to involve a combination of various social, economic, and envi- ronmental stakes for differently situated actors. Officials still faced ambigu- ously positioned headmen who often exploited their limited sphere of au- thority for the benefit and protection of themselves and the people of their wards. Simultaneously, many men and women contended with headmen who extracted demands and constrained local forest access according to per- sonal interpretations of their environmental prerogatives. rebellion and its aftermath: stabilizing colonial resource and population control By the late 1870s colonialism had already begun reshaping the political land- scape of KwaMatiwane and adjacent areas. From the early 1860s onward the 32 w Chapter 1 Tropp.1-122 8/17/06 10:21 AM Page 33 Thembu paramount Ngangelizwe developed increasingly closer ties with Cape authorities, strategically weathering multiple frontier wars in the wider re- gion, and by 1876 Thembuland was divided into four new magistracies.1 Across the Umtata river, the Mpondomise chiefdom under Mditshwa began negoti- ating for colonial “protection” in the early 1870s, particularly as a means to de- fend against raids from neighboring Mpondo groups. By 1877, the chiefdom came under complete colonial control when the Cape formally annexed the entire area of East Griqualand, with a magistrate based at Tsolo overseeing Mditshwa’s territory.2 Just as Cape rule began to unfold, however, the rebel- lion of 1880–81 redefined the terms of colonial engagement with local peoples and environments. Restoring order and resettling populations in the war’s af- termath forced colonial authorities to refine their political and environmental strategies. More intensive schemes to restructure boundaries of local political authority and assume control over essential natural resources worked hand in hand. Besides its anticolonial dimensions, the rebellion in the early 1880s brought to a head escalating tensions between African groups with various political motives, cultural affiliations, and economic positions.3 In Thembuland, Kwa- Matiwane populations in the two magistracies of Umtata and Engcobo were predominately comprised of Thembu clans, Hala and Jumba, as well as ama- Qwathi under Chief Dalasile, all of whom had formally recognized Ngange- lizwe’s authority as paramount.4 Yet the paramount’s courting of Cape ties in the prerebellion period exacerbated strained relations with Dalasile, who re- sented both Ngangelizwe’s use of authority and the expansion of colonial power in the Qwathi chiefdom.5 Another source of tension in both Thembu- land and Mditshwa’s territory was the accelerating influx of Mfengu and other immigrant populations from the Eastern Cape and other parts of the Trans- kei.6 Many of these newcomers, with much longer and closer interaction with colonial society than the majority of their new African neighbors, had already incorporated “progressive” economic ideals and Christian beliefs and prac- tices into their culture and thus were viewed much more favorably by the co- lonial government. Various missionary groups—Free Church of Scotland, Anglican, Wesleyan Methodist, and Moravian—also expanded their local ac- tivities in the late nineteenth century, deepening lines of cultural and eco- nomic differentiation within and between many African communities.7 The combination of such competing interests and allegiances exploded into open conflict in 1880. Those Mpondomise, Qwathi, and Thembu groups who rebelled, led by such prominent chiefs as Mhlontlo, Mditshwa and Dalasile, directly opposed the colonial government’s imposition of taxation, threats of disarmament, and broader exercise of power over their chiefdoms.8 The war Tensions in the Colonial Restructuring of Environmental Authority w 33 Tropp.1-122 8/17/06 10:21 AM Page 34 itself was relatively short-lived, however. By April 1881, colonial forces had broken the backbone of the resistance, and officials began the difficult task of stabilizing colonial control among the region’s now incredibly fractured and war-torn populations. In restructuring the social landscape of KwaMatiwane in the rebellion’s aftermath, colonial officials combined three immediate and interrelated goals: the establishment of social control and political stability in the Territories, the interspersing of officially designated “rebel” and “loyalist” African communi- ties across the region as a means to prevent future outbreaks, and the opening up of particular lands for the expansion of white settlement from the Cape Colony. In defensively redesigning the region, government leaders resuscitated a well-worn tradition in colonial expansion on the Eastern Cape frontier: the creation of human “buffer zones.”9 Following the war, colonial authorities strategically located African groups that had allied themselves with the Cape government as “buffers” between former rebel groups or independent African polities, on the one hand, and European settlements along the widening Cape Colony border. European and African populations in much of the Engcobo, Umtata, and Tsolo districts, as well as populations in the adjoining Qumbu and Maclear districts, were reassigned specific territorial boundaries. Nodes of European settlement and colonial administration at Tsolo, Umtata, and Engcobo, as well as the expanding European farming populations in the El- liot and Maclear districts, would be “protected” by corridors of loyalist Mfengu, Thembu, and Mpondomise groups; former rebels