UNDERDEVELOPMENT IN EASTERN BECHUANALAND: THE DYNAMIC ROLE OF THE MAFIKENG – BULAWAYO RAILWAY, FROM THE LATE 1800s to 1960s

A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies

in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

in the Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario, Canada © Bafumiki Mocheregwa, 2016 History M.A. Graduate Program May 2016

ABSTRACT

Underdevelopment in Eastern Bechuanaland: The Dynamic Role of the Mafikeng – Bulawayo Railway, From the Late 1800s to 1960s.

Bafumiki Mocheregwa

This thesis offers a comprehensive look at the changing roles of a colonial built railway in what is now eastern Botswana. It was built for the extraction of mineral wealth and migration of cheap African labour in Southern Africa but it later assumed a different role of shaping the modern Botswana state. The thesis deals with several other issues related to the railway in Bechuanaland including land alienation, the colonial disregard of the chiefs’ authority, racial discrimination and the economic underdevelopment of

Bechuanaland.

Since there were no other significant colonial developments at the time of independence, this thesis argues that the railway was the only important feature of the

British colonisation of Bechuanaland. From early on, the railway attracted different cultures, identities and religions. It was also instrumental in the introduction of an indigenous capitalist class into Bechuanaland.

Keywords: Bechuanaland, colonisation, railway development, racial discrimination, underdevelopment, society, capitalism and capitalist class, labour migration, Botswana, trade, Rhodesia, the Rand.

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PREFACE

On September 30th, 1966, Bechuanaland was declared an independent country. The discussion to make that move had begun a few years prior. The British colonial administration had lasted for about eighty years but left very little in terms of development. At that time the whole territory had less than four kilometres of tarred road, education was barely in its infancy, and the new Tswana society hardly had a capitalist class. Botswana was among the poorest countries in Africa with a GDP of about $70, according to the World Bank.1 This measure of underdevelopment was alarming but it was primarily because from the beginning, the British Colonial Government had no interest in the territory. While its neighbours had some mineral deposits, Bechuanaland had no known minerals at the time so the colonialists did not waste time and effort investing in a barren desert country.

There had long existed a trade route: the Road to the North, which linked the Cape to the interior of Southern Africa. It cut across the eastern side of what became

Bechuanaland because to the west of Bechuanaland lies the Kalahari Desert, a geographical barrier which would make any sort of travel difficult. The Road to the North was very important in the trade of late iron-age goods. During the early years of colonialism, this iconic route became pivotal in the extraction of resources from neighbouring countries such as Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. Early pioneers and magnates such as Cecil John Rhodes became attracted to, and pursued the idea of building a railway line to link the Cape to Cairo. This line would be strategically important for the British but most importantly it would serve Cecil Rhodes’ economic

1 http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/botswana/overview accessed 27 February 2016.

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gains. Bechuanaland was therefore only colonised because the famous “Road to the

North” traversed its eastern margin.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No work of this magnitude is completed by a single individual without any help from others, for that I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to a few people who have been instrumental in the writing of this thesis. Professor Timothy Stapleton, my supervisor and mentor, has worked tirelessly from the day we met to the completion of this work. It would not have been completed without his vision and supreme knowledge of the subject matter. My thesis committee members, Professor David Sheinin and Dr.

Van Nguyen-Marshall have also been pivotal in the entire writing process of this work.

Their advice has truly been immeasurable for which I am grateful. Professor Jennine

Hurl-Eamon, and Dr. Michael Eamon have both supported me throughout my study at

Trent University and I am deeply grateful for their efforts. The staff at the Botswana

National Archives and Records Services (BNARS) have also been kind to provide the primary material cited in this thesis.

I am also deeply grateful for the advice and support I received from Mrs. Nilima

Bakaya of Livingstone Kolobeng College as well as Professors Part Themba Mgadla and

Ackson Kanduza. I also wish to send a special word of gratitude to Rre Mokotedi

Sentsho, Ms. Thabang Boemo Emmanuel, Mr. We-Bathu Kwele as well as my good friend Mr. Reuben Ntuluki of the Carbon Environmental Awareness Society (CEAS) for the outstanding support rendered to me throughout my studies. My good friends Nathan

Gardiner, Cory Baldwin, and Catherine O’Brien also deserve a pat on the back for the support they have given me throughout my stay in Peterborough.

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This work is dedicated to my mother Faniki Seoleseng,

and my great-grandmother Mma Phenyo Tumo.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT II

PREFACE III

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS V

TABLE OF CONTENTS VII

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 1 METHODOLOGICAL SYNOPSIS AND LIMITATIONS 8 LITERATURE REVIEW 8 COLONIAL BOTSWANA: AN OVERVIEW 24 THE POLICY OF INDIRECT RULE 27 CONCLUSION 32

CHAPTER 2 – RHODES, THE DIKGOSI AND THE RAILWAY ENTERPRISE 33 CECIL RHODES AND THE MAFIKENG - BULAWAYO RAILWAY 34 THE RAILWAY IN BECHUANALAND: THE CHIEFS AND THE PEOPLE 39 COLONIAL EDUCATION, COMPASSION AND ENTERPRISE 48 CONCLUSION 58

CHAPTER 3 – THE BECHUANALAND RAILWAY IN THE SOUTHERN AFRICAN MINERAL REVOLUTION 60 THE TSWANA PEASANTRY AND THE NEW RAILWAY ECONOMY 61 RAILWAYS POLITICS AND LIMITATIONS 69 THE JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN AND MIGRANT LIFE AT ‘EGOLI’ 74 TSWANA WOMEN WITHIN A MIGRANT SOCIETY 82 CONCLUSION 89

CHAPTER 4 – THE TRACKS OF MODERNITY AND CULTURAL NUANCES 91 NEW RAILWAY HUBS AND THE RISE OF A CAPITALIST SOCIETY 92 THE SOUTH ASIAN TRADERS OF BECHUANALAND 94 CAPITALISM AND SOCIAL INTEGRATION IN RAILWAY VILLAGES 103 TSWANA FARMING COMMUNITIES WITHIN THE RHODESIA RAILWAY MONOPOLY 114 CONCLUSION 127

CONCLUSION: THE BECHUANALAND RAILWAY AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT 129

BIBLIOGRAPHY 131

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The existing scholarship on development and underdevelopment is voluminous and has for a long time captivated scholars across the world. Consequently, one must be conversant with this body of knowledge before crafting a work based on any of them.

Since this work hinges on some of these theories, it is pivotal to explore some of them. A very good summary of these is Ronald Chilcote’s examination of the dichotomy of certain explanations of development and underdevelopment. He argues, on the one hand, there are interpretations that emphasize the positive achievements of capitalism, which he calls diffusionist theories of development. On the other hand, those that stress the negative consequences of capitalism he refers to as theories of underdevelopment.2 His analysis of diffusionist theories suggests that they can be categorized in at least three types; the first associates Western models of democracy with the political aspects of development in advanced capitalist nations. He credits early writers such as James Bryce and Carl Friedrich, whose works emphasize the values of Western democracy and its important role in the economic progress of the West.3 The second diffussionist theory deals with the significance of cultural traditions as symbols of nationalism beginning with the French Revolution and taking different forms over time until it reached Africa around the 1960s. Although he concedes that there are different forms of nationalism, Chilcote states that “a basic assumption runs through the literature: Nationalism provides the

2Ronald H. Chilcote, Theories of Development and Underdevelopment, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), 10. 3 James Bryce, Modern Democracies Volume 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1921), see also Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Democracy, 2nd ed. (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1950).

2 ideological impetus and motivation for development.”4 Though some may argue that capitalist countries usually led the pursuit for nationalism, it can also be argued that certain communist societies have also actively participated in nationalist movements and pursued development. The last diffusionist theory deals with the role of the Western world in spreading its values, technology and modernisation in general. It is from this last explanation that the dependency theory of development arises. Dependency theory is the notion that resources flow from a periphery of poor and underdeveloped societies towards the centre of wealthy states enriching the latter while leaving the former impoverished.5

This thesis shall employ this theoretical explanation to analyse the dynamics of underdevelopment in Bechuanaland. It shall demonstrate that the colonisers carefully crafted situations where the colonised became dependent on them and at the heart of that dependency was the use of the Mafikeng – Bulawayo railway.

According to Chilcote, underdevelopment theory is a phenomenon characterised by various trends. One of its dominant characteristics is what he calls internal colonialism, which he suggests focuses on the dominance of the metropolitan centre of a nation over peripheral areas that have remained marginal to national development.6 This was an idea presented by Paul Baran in 1957. Baran claimed that the role of imperialism was to penetrate the core of underdeveloped countries and create a political, social and economic dependency on imperial powers. Using this neo-Marxist critique to refer to the relationships between the United States of America and Latin America as well as Europe

4 Chilcote, Theories of Development, 10. 5 For a detailed explanation on dependency theory see for example: Ian Roxborough, Theories of Underdevelopment, (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 55 – 59, 69; B. N. Ghosh, Dependency Theory Revisited, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2001), 18, 21, 30; Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 359, 398, 488; Jorge Larrain, Theories of Development: Capitalism, Colonialism and Dependency (London: Polity Press, 1989), 112 – 133. 6 Chilcote, Theories of Development, 11.

3 and its African colonies, Baran suggested that the traditional way of life had been broken by imperialism, which destroyed any chance of self-sufficiency and prospective development.7 Baran argued that pre-colonial societies were self-reliant until the process of colonialism created a long lasting dependency on the imperial powers. Based on these ideas, it shall be established that one of the main reasons for the underdevelopment of

Bechuanaland was the use of the railway to exploit labour and other resources and develop some places in South Africa. In the same vein Andre Gunder Frank in 1966 applied Baran’s idea of underdevelopment with examples from various countries around the world.8 Frank believed that the complex relationship between the periphery and the metropolis was a product of mercantilist and capitalist growth since the sixteenth century.

Underdevelopment, he held, was not a new phenomenon, but a result of the destructive nature of capitalist expansion.9 Samir Amin in his 1977 book Imperialism and Unequal

Development, also carried forward the same arguments raised by his predecessors, Baran and Frank, but used specific examples from Africa. Amin agreed that the growth of capital separates an area into two unequal sections: highly urbanised areas, which, thrive in capitalist development, and peripheral areas, whose main function is to provide resources to the urban areas whilst they suffer the brunt of underdevelopment. 10 The classic example of this was migrant labour in Southern Africa, which left marginal areas inactive and underdeveloped.

7 Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), 3, 11. 8 Chilcote, Theories of Development, 11. 9 Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Monthly Review, (September 1966): 18 – 20. 10 Samir Amin, Imperialism and Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 89. See also Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale, Volume 1 and 2, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Paul Baran, “The Political Economy of Backwardness” in Robert Rhodes, ed. Imperialism and Underdevelopment: A Reader, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 285 – 301.

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Globalisation is another theory of development that emerges from the notion of international cooperation and the integration of world economies. One of the most important characteristics of this theory is its focus and emphasis on cultural aspects and their worldwide interactions rather than just the economic, financial and political ties.11

Scholars of globalisation, such as A.G. Hopkins and Barbara Kaplan, argue that the essential elements for development are the cultural associations shared amongst countries. Unlike diffusionist theories, the use of modern day technology contributes significantly to the flow of ideas between countries.

Informed by these theories, the central aim of the thesis is to weigh the conflicting positions of the British Colonial Government and the Rhodesia Railway Company in the economic development of eastern Bechuanaland from the late 1800s to the 1960s. Apart from Baran and Hopkins, the thesis also draws insights from Walter Rodney’s 1972 work,

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in which he describes theories of development and underdevelopment within the African context. Rodney suggests that development has different levels. First he states, “development in the past has always meant the increase in the ability to guard the independence of the social group and indeed to infringe upon the freedom of others – something that often came about irrespective of the will of the persons within the societies involved.”12 This suggests that development has always been an inevitable phenomenon regardless of the people who would receive the developments.

In other words, this means that development was an agenda forced on many of the

African territories. According to him, economic development is the ability of a society to

11 See for example: Barbara Hockey Kaplan, Social Change in the Capitalist World Economy, (California: Sage Publications, 1978), A. G. Hopkins, Globalisation in World History (London: Pimplico, 2002), see also Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt and Jacques Hersh, introduction to Globalisation and Social Change, edited by Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt and Jacques Hersh (London: Taylor and Francis, 2000), 1 – 16. 12 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 2nd ed. (Washington: Howard University Press, 1982), 4.

5 achieve the means to increase their capacity to deal with their immediate environment.

This can only be possible if the members of societies are able to understand and interact with their natural environment by using tools that they created. Development is a very broad term that describes an occurrence that has been present in the world since time immemorial. Informed by Rodney’s explanations, the thesis shall argue that the few colonial schemes of development introduced to the colony were never meant for the indigenous people but they were tailored for the very small white minority, particularly white farmers along the eastern side of Bechuanaland. The railway, which was built for economic reasons, became a symbol of segregation and disparities among Africans and

European settlers. Much of what Rodney argues is in line with what this thesis shall discuss. Many of the developments implemented in colonial Botswana did not necessarily cater to the colonised, but were used to satisfy a greater colonial agenda.

Rodney makes it clear that underdevelopment is not merely a mirror image of development but should be used as a means of comparison. He states, “underdevelopment makes sense only as a means of comparing levels of development across economies. It is very much tied to the fact that human social development has been uneven…”13 In other parts of the world, the euphemistic term ‘developing countries’ is used instead of

‘underdeveloped.’ According to Rodney “one of the reasons for so doing is to avoid any unpleasantness which may be attached to the second term [underdeveloped], which may be interpreted as meaning underdeveloped mentally, physically, morally, or in other respects.”14 However, since his book was first published in 1972, there has been a lot of economic progress in most of the former colonies and this factor could render some of

13 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped, 13 14 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped, 14

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Rodney’s arguments obsolete. It is worthwhile to mention that when the work was published most of Africa was still on the training wheels of sovereignty with less than a decade of self-governance.

Rodney views the colonial administration as the main economic exploiter, which hid behind the disguise of developing the colonies in order to extract wealth for their own gains. According to him, the introduction of taxation systems in the colonies was one of the major ways to gain profit while the colonised remained impoverished. He adds,

“When colonial governments seized African lands, they achieved two things simultaneously. They satisfied their own citizens (who wanted mining concessions or farming land) and they created the conditions whereby landless Africans had to work not just to pay taxes but also to survive.”15 This was the case in Kenya and later some colonies in Southern Africa. The purpose of colonial taxation was to compel Africans to join the capitalist economy as wage labour or peasant producers and therefore creating profit for the colonial powers.

There are significant overlaps between Rodney’s work and Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, which are worth discussing. Frantz Fanon, who can be credited as one of the earliest post-colonial theorists, was “born in 1925 into a middle- class black family in Martinique in the French West Indies”16 and became deeply mindful of his people’s suffering as well as their potential to rid themselves of such affliction.

What is important to note is the fact that Fanon criticised the educated intellectuals or

African elites, stating that they had attained the means to remove their own people from

15 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped, 165. 16 Edmund Burke III, review of The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, The MIT Press 105 No.1 (Winter 1976): 127, see also Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965).

7 affliction but continued to act like the colonial bourgeoisie.17 This, he argues, contributed to underdevelopment of the colonies. Fanon’s work on the elite minority in Africa and its dependencies on the metropolitan is referred to as revolutionary by Rodney. He suggests that the presence of an African elite or ‘sell-outs’ is at the core of Africa’s underdevelopment. 18 Fanon’s argument is applicable selectively to places where the colonial powers established a strong presence such as the French colonies in North

Africa. In the south, particularly in Bechuanaland, there was a different picture altogether.

The British colonisers hardly established schools to create an educated African elite. Even if there were African elites, they would have been too small in number to create any sort of change within the Protectorate.

In order to clearly illustrate its arguments, the thesis shall constantly refer to some of the above theoretical explanations. This is so because the phenomenon of underdevelopment occurred at different stages and resulted from varying stimuli.

Sometimes, the colonial policies, which were marred with racial connotations and prejudice, were too stringent upon the Africans. At other times, the natural catastrophes that totalled an already struggling African economy led to the shift from an agrarian to the pursuit of capital. At other times it was sheer ignorance and the total disregard of African life by the colonisers that diminished African societies. In the end, the combination of these occurrences resulted in the lack of developments in Bechuanaland. Because these reasons are different, they require different theoretical perspectives.

17 Gail M. Gerhart, review of The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, Foreign Affairs 76 No. 5 (1997): 236 – 237, see also Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Algeria, Grove Press, 1968), 62 – 63. 18 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped, 26-27.

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METHODOLOGICAL SYNOPSIS AND LIMITATIONS

This thesis has utilised primary sources from the Botswana National Archives and

Records Services. Most of them were letters, journals, notes and annual reports written by colonial officials. The use of this material has been very instructive in the way the thesis is shaped. However, most, if not all of these documents were missing the voices of the colonised. This usually results in an uneven picture of the extent of imperialism in

Bechuanaland. However, to augment the lack of African voices from the colonial files, the thesis turned to published and unpublished secondary sources, which range from books, journal articles, theses and dissertations. The thesis has tried to balance the use of both primary and secondary material in order to clarify its arguments. Some of the primary materials at the archives of Botswana were either missing or too dilapidated to use, which curtailed some of the primary research.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Railroads in World History

Historians who wrote about railroads in the Western world celebrated and depicted them as the most significant means of building nations. Early scholars such as William H.

Moore, Leslie Fourner, and Pierre Berton among others stand out as historians whose works venerate the role of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in connecting eastern and central Canada to the western territories. Moore, whose book was published in the 1917, argues that Australia thrived from railway construction and nationalisation and thus recommended that Canadians needed to replicate the example of Australian railways on a

9 much larger scale in order to increase its population.19 He argues that around 1819, the population of Canada was very small owing to the fact that some areas were unexplored.

His emphasis on population growth is centred on the position of the Canadian railways in expanding the dominion westwards.20

Fourner carries this notion of expansion and nation building forward by stating that the objective of the Canadian Government Railways dates back to the 1867

Confederation when the government undertook construction of the inter-colonial railways to connect the Maritime Provinces and Lower Canada.21 Leonard Bertman Erwin and

Pierre Berton whose works appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s refer to Canada as a pioneer country with a population that grew westward at an accelerated pace. They both suggest that the inter-colonial railways were at the centre of realising the Canadian national dream.22 After the Second Industrial Revolution, Britain assumed the role of spreading new ideas and technology to the rest of the world while expanding its overseas empire. The works of two colonial historians, Daniel Thorner and Thomas Keefer portray

British-built Indian and Chinese railways as pivotal to the development of new nations and identities outside of Britain.23 Thorner, though not critical, introduces an economic outlook on these railroads by suggesting that manufacturers and merchants only became

19 William H. Moore, Railway Nationalisation and the Average Citizen (Toronto: McLelland, Goodchild ad Stewart Publishers, 1917), 41 – 42. 20 Moore, Railways Nationalisation, 57 – 60. 21 Lesley T. Fourner, Railway Nationalisation in Canada: The Problem of Canadian National Railways (Toronto: Macmillan, 1935), 72 22 Leonard Bertman Erwin, Pacific Railways and Nationalism in the Canadian American Northwest (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968) see also Pierre Berton, The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881 – 1885, (Toronto: Mclelland and Stewart Limited, 1971); Pierre Berton, The National Dream; The Great Railway, 1871 – 1881 (Toronto: Pierre Berton Enterprises Limited, 1970) 23 Daniel Thorner, Investment in Empire: British Railways and Steam Shipping Enterprise in India, 1825 – 1849 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950) 22; see also Thomas Keefer, “Philosophy of Railroads”, in Philosophy of Railroads, ed. Michael Bliss, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 13 – 14.

10 interested in investing in India and China after the construction of railroads.24 These publications suggest that the railways were assembled specifically to shape nations by connecting different places.

Economic historians such as Robert Fogel, Albert Fishlow and Harold Innis provide a consistent analysis of rail transportation and the economic development of

North American economic practices. Their works were informed by Thorstein Veblen’s philosophy and suggest that the economic progress of USA and Canada was reliant upon the railways.25 Similarly, Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro Garcia whose focus is Cuba’s economic growth also carried forward the relationship of colonial railroads to development of the Cuban sugar exports. 26 Not much economic progress can be mentioned for Bechuanaland because the railway line there was not extensive enough to hinge an economy upon nor did it cater for common people.

In recent years historians have been more critical of the outcomes of rail development in different countries. This post-colonial historiography perceived railways as a form of oppression. Richard White, Ian J. Kerr and Marian Aguiar’s works come to

24 Thorner, “Philosophy of Railroads,” 1. 25 Both Albert Fishlow and Robert Fogel had some interaction with Innis during his study at Chicago and it was there that they shared research interests. It is therefore easy to see a link between their works and those of Innis. For further reading see for example, Harold Adams Innis, A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, LTD, 1923); Harold Adams Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Harold Adams Innis, ‘Transportation as a Factor in Canadian Economic History’, in Essays in Canadian Economic History, ed. Mary Quayle Innis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956); Harold Innis, The Idea File of Harold Innis, ed. William Christian, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); Harold Adams Innis, The Problems of Staple Production in Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press Limited, 1933), 12 – 15, see also Robert W. Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1964) and Albert Fishlow, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-Bellum Economy (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965). 26 Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro Garcia, Sugar and Railroads, A Cuban History, 1837 – 1959,trans. Franklin W. Knight and Mary Todd (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 7 – 10, 194, see also Jonathan Curry Machado, Cuban Sugar Industry: Transnational Networks and Engineering Migrants in Mid-Nineteenth Century Cuba (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Christian Wolmar, Blood, Iron and Gold: How Railroads Transformed the World, (New York: Public Affairs, 2010); Alan Dye, Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929 (California: Stanford University Press, 1998).

11 mind. White is critical of the construction of transcontinental railways of the United

States while Kerr and Aguiar deal extensively with the railways in relation to socio- economic hardships in the lives of the common people of India.27 Adopting some of the explanations from this school of thought, the thesis explores the implications of a railway that was built for an economy outside the territory of Bechuanaland.

Colonial Literature on Railways in Africa

Most colonial historians tend to follow a diffusionist model of explaining development in the African colonies. That is to say, their focus is on the role of the imperial West as the bringer of civilisation to the African continent. This approach is based upon the assumption that the colonies were important to the West and therefore their history should reflect the good impact of imperialism, such as the spread of technology. For historians such as E.B. Worthington, Mervyn F. Hill, and Anthony M. O Connor, rail transportation was an efficient mode of communication and a vital link between the coast and the interior in East Africa, particularly for Kenya and Uganda. Worthington stressed the economic importance of providing a link between what he called the valuable fisheries of the lakes with the traders at the coast of Kenya. He writes, “Apart from communications the East African lakes are of great value for their fisheries. Lake Rudolf contains an

27 Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011), see also a chapter by Ian J. Kerr, “The Dark Side of the Force: Mistakes, Mismanagement, and Malfeasance in the Early Railways of the British Indian Empire,” in Our Indian Railway, Themes in India’s Railway History, eds. Roopa Srinivasan, Manish Tiwari and Sandeep Silas (New Dehli: Foundation Books, 2006), 187 – 213; Ian J. Kerr, Engines of Change: The Railways that Made India (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2007), Ian J. Kerr, “British Rule, Technological Change and the Revolution in Transportation and Communication: Punjab in the Later Nineteenth Century,” in Textures of the Sikh Past, New Historical Perspectives, ed. Tony Ballantyne (New Dehli: Oxford University Press, 2007), 157 – 184; Ian J. Kerr, “On the Move: Circulating Labour in Pre-Colonial, Colonial and Post- Colonial India,” in India’s Labouring Poor, Historical Studies, c.1600 – 2000, ed. Rana P. Behal and Marcel Van Der Linde (New Dehli: Foundation Books, 2007); see also Marian Aguiar, Tracking Modernity, India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

12 enormous potential fishery which is at present quite untouched and, until communications to the lake are improved, likely to remain so. In Uganda there are other large untouched fisheries in Lakes Albert, Edward, and George…”28 For Worthington, building this rail link would be beneficial to the fisheries as it would not only provide a means for communication with the coast but also sufficiently aid the economic practices in the interior of Uganda and Kenya. Hill in the same vein emphasizes the importance of imperialism and rail transportation in the economic development of colonial East Africa.

His grand narrative takes the reader from the beginning of the discussions of constructing the railway to the actual day-to-day work on the rail link between the Indian Ocean through Kenya and Lake Victoria where the resources were located. As an official history of British East Africa’s railways, the book is narrow, biased and misleading. Hill adds,

“this damosa hereditas (Uganda) is 600 miles from the sea coast, and to send up goods it would cost £500 per ton. It is therefore impossible to organize a trade there … unless a railway is built there.” 29 Raising capital, conducting lucrative trade and political dominance were the main components of the imperial agenda and O’Connor’s two works on colonial East Africa clearly demonstrate this. He suggests that the building of railways in Uganda became most significant to the development of the Ugandan cash economy.

Commodities, such as cotton, coffee, tobacco, groundnuts and livestock, could be moved with ease across the country and across borders. These railways in turn shaped Uganda’s import-export relationship with her neighbours. He states, “The country thus depends on

28 E. B. Worthington, “The Lakes of Kenya and Uganda,” The Geographical Journal 79 No. 4 (April 1933): 290 29 Mervyn F. Hill, Permanent Way, The Story of the Kenya and Uganda Railway (Aylesbury: Hazell Watson and Viney LTD, 1949), 95 – 96.

13 the railway as much for its import as for its export trade.”30 O’Connor links this trade with the social development of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania in his second publication.

His argument is that the railways built in the three countries created employment opportunities and a culture whose life was based upon the railway.31 It can then be argued that he represents a slight shift from conventional colonial history to a more social or perhaps materialist perspective as he focuses on the capitalist economies of colonial East

Africa and how they were hinged on colonial railways. Unlike in East Africa, the railway in eastern Bechuanaland was hardly exploited for trade. It only served the colonial agenda of extracting resources and moving labour from the interior of Southern Africa to the mines in South Africa. This resulted in a narrow economy and stunted growth of a local or Tswana capitalist class.

Several colonial apologists of the 1960s and early 1970s depicted railways as the answer to many of Africa’s problems. The works of Lewis H. Gann, P.E.N. Tindall, and

A.J. Wills on the history of Central Africa and the works of F.A. Wells and W.A.

Wormington, as well as G.B. Kay on West Africa come to mind. Tindall and Wills concur that the railways of Central Africa were built for the economic interests of the

Europeans.32 Gann is of the idea that the railways were a necessity to African economies and were the answer to archaic wagon transport that Africans used prior to colonialism.33

Though the railways were a mark of innovation, efficiency and industrialisation, the

30 O’Connor, Railways and Development, 30. 31 Anthony M. O’Connor, An Economic Geography of East Africa (London: G. Bell and Sons LTD, 1966), 183, see also Anthony M. O’Connor Economic Development of Kenya (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1963), 12, 19. 32 P.E.N. Tindall, A History of Central Africa (London: Longman Green and Co. LTD, 1967), 132-133, see also A.J. Wills, An Introduction to the History of Central Africa: Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 33 Lewis H. Gann, Central Africa: The Former British States (Englewood Cliffs: Prince Hall Inc, 1971), 107.

14 thesis shall demonstrate that they did nothing to improve the wagon economy of

Bechuanaland. The railway replaced wagon transport that had been booming throughout the late pre-colonial times. It shall be demonstrated that the common African who had benefitted from wagon trade was cut out of that lucrative enterprise. In West Africa,

Wells, Wormington and Kay have also traced the economic success of colonial Ghana,

Nigeria and the Cameroons to the railway networks that often connected distant places to economic hubs of those respective countries. For instance, places such as Kano in the underdeveloped Northern Nigeria were able to access markets in places where trade happened such as the port of Lagos due to efficient transport. 34 Simon

Katzenellenbogen’s work demonstrates the importance of imperial motives in the construction of the Benguela Railway of Angola. This railway linked one of the most commercially significant parts of Angola, southern Belgian Congo (today’s Democratic

Republic of Congo) and some parts of the copper rich Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

In his book, he states, “the expansion of Africa’s agricultural and mineral production to meet the demand from growing industries of Europe and America was the key to generating sufficient local revenue.”35 A key factor to have in mind is the role of railways in colonial conquest and economic exploitation of the African continent and

Katzenellenbogen clearly expresses this. Anthony Sillery explains that though the colonial government at the Cape had faced great difficulties in moving large numbers of

34 F.A. Wells and W.A. Wormington, Studies in Industrialisation: Nigeria and the Cameroons (Oxford University Press, 1962), 109-110, see also G.B. Kay, The Political Economy of Colonisation in Ghana; A Collection of Documents and Statistics, 1900-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 20; for background reading on the dynamics of the colonization of Nigeria see John E. Flint, “Nigeria: The Colonial Experience from 1800 to 1914” in Colonialism in Africa, Vol. 1, The History and Politics of Colonialism, eds, L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 220 – 260. 35 Simon Katzenellenbogen, Railways and the Copper Mines of Katanga, (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1973), 10.

15 people across the territory, the railway enterprise was meant to serve the British South

Africa Company’s financial needs. 36 It is clear that colonial historians focused on imperial motives of railway construction and ignored other railway related issues that were not considered as important.

Underdevelopment Historiography

By the 1970s, historians moved away from the colonialist’s perspective of history and toward exploring the negative impacts of colonialism on the subjected peoples. It can be argued that it was Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, and perhaps more closely, Kwame

Nkrumah’s ideas about neo-colonialism37 that inspired many of these historians to be critical of colonisation. While some historians from the nationalist school of the 1960s were critical of colonialism, they tended not to focus on economic history. By the 1970s, this historiography became more economic and perhaps socially charged. Historians such as E.A. Brett, Colin Leys and later Samuel M. Muriithi, Goran Hyden and Lasana Keita deal with a wide spectrum of development and underdevelopment in colonial and post- colonial Africa. Brett and Leys explore the connection between colonialism and underdevelopment, arguing that the railways of East Africa were an apparatus of uneven development particularly in Kenya where the colonial government had clear policies of

36 Anthony Sillery, Founding a Protectorate: History of Bechuanaland, 1885 – 1895 (London: Mouton and Co. 1965), 164 see also Anthony Sillery, Botswana; A Short Political History (London: Methuen and Co. LTD, 1974), 97 – 99. 37 There are numerous publications on neo-colonialism. See for example, Kwame Nkrumah, Neo- Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1965); Vasilii Vasil’evich Vakhrushev, Neo-Colonialism Today (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1987); Samir Amin, Neo- Colonialism in West Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974) and Chernoh Alpha M.Bah, Neo- Colonialism in West Africa (Bloomington: iUniverse LLC, 2014).

16 segregation.38 Brett suggests that the economic development of East Africa was unequal from the beginning of colonialism. It was western technology that enabled the west to dominate the African continent and eroded the traditional socio-economic structures of pre-colonial societies. This outer domination and the dependence by African countries formed a condition that “inevitably transformed the entire social fabric of the people whose countries are now underdeveloped. Export oriented economies had to be created, traditional social structures modified and existing political authorities made to accept their subordination to the foreign invader.”39 Leys and later Hayden, support Brett’s argument by suggesting that Africa has always been able to develop its own measure of economic growth instead of being compared to already highly industrialised economies of the West. Frantz Fanon had earlier recommended that for Africans to progress, they must develop their own models. 40 Leys concludes by emphasizing that certain economic practices were primary and key to developing East Africa while others contributed to its underdevelopment. Consequently, the economic development of certain East African colonies was only confined to some areas, which led to an uneven accumulation of capital and the underdevelopment of most areas.41

38 E. A. Brett, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa: the Politics of Economic Change, 1919 – 1939 (London, Heinemann, 1973), 1, 163, 210. See also Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism, 1964-1971 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 1, 28. This historiography continued to change beyond the 1990s. For more nuanced arguments on underdevelopment of colonial East Africa see for example, Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania; Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), and chapters by Soulemayne Bashir Diagne, Lewis R. Gordon, and Lansana Keita in Philosophy and African Development, Theory and Practice, ed. Lansana Keita, (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2011), 37-56, 57-68, 69-86. 39 Brett, Colonialism and Underdevelopment, 1. 40 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1963), 252 – 253. 41 Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya, 271.

17

Materialist Historiography

Historians writing in the 1970s and 1980s such as Ian Phimister argued that railways were built solely to introduce capitalist ideas and economy into colonial Africa. Phimister argues that Cecil John Rhodes’ motives in building the railway are best understood as capitalist. He examines Rhodes’ attitude to railway development before 1897 as cheap and highly cautious. He suggests that Rhodes only started pushing construction on rapidly after 1896, when “the collapse of the speculative boom and the African risings threatened capitalist investment in Southern Rhodesia.”42 Because Rhodes had earlier received a mining concession for Southern Rhodesia, his plans were to secure as much investment for the territory as possible but with a new focus on agriculture because the Second Rand of Rhodesia did not materialise.43 Phimister’s argument is firmly placed around Rhodes’s capitalist expansion into Southern Rhodesia. He argues that earlier colonial historians perceived Rhodes as a visionary and that he had the best intentions for developing the colonies in the name of the crown. Paul Maylam had made a similar argument against that biased colonialist explanation of Rhodes’s motives. He stated that these accounts provided by colonial historians “obscured other important aspects of [his] Rhodes’s

Bechuanaland Railway enterprise.” 44 Maylam and Phimister suggest that Rhodes had bigger economic incentives to build railroads across Bechuanaland and Southern

Rhodesia. Both use a Marxist approach for their arguments, and for that they can be seen as materialist historians. Gordon Pirie also argues that the mining companies mobilised

42 Ian Phimister, 'Rhodes, Rhodesia and the Rand', Journal of Southern Afr. Studies, I (1974): 84-6 quoted in Jon Lunn, “The Political Economy of Primary Railway Construction in the Rhodesias, 1890-1911,” The Journal of African History 33, No. 2 (1992): 241. 43 Ian Phimister, An Economic and Social History of Zimbabwe, 1890-1948: Capital Accumulation and Class Struggle (London and New York: Longman Publishers, 1988), 4. 44 Paul Maylam, Rhodes, the Tswana and the British: Colonialism, collaboration, and conflict in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1885 – 1899 (Greenwood Press: Westport, Connecticut, 1980), 78.

18 potential employees by offering relatively inexpensive, quick, long-distance mass transport as an incentive to establish a capitalist economy in the colonies.45 There is no denying that the railways moved massive numbers of people across Southern Africa during the Mineral Revolution from as far as Nyasaland (Malawi). Pirie agrees entirely with other social historians of his time such as Elliott, Yudelman and Barber who suggest that the railways were an essential part of establishing a capitalist economy in Africa.

Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore in 1972 argued that African labour appeared as an attractive solution to colonial governments in search of revenue in the colonies. In order to control this new capitalist class, the Uganda Railway from Mombasa to Kisumu had to be built. Taxation and the availability of the railway would encourage Africans to migrate in search of wage labour in settler farms.46 Tiyambe Zeleza gives a clear and concise summary of the construction of railways throughout East Africa. He writes, “The impact of the railways cannot be overemphasized. They facilitated colonization and incorporated these countries into the world capitalist economy, altered patterns of trade, reduced transport costs and rendered human porterage obsolete.”47

The Central and Southern African regions were well known for contributing immense manual labour towards the south during the colonial period. Issues of land, labour and economic problems are always linked to the migration of peoples towards wage employment in South Africa. Montague Yudelman attributes the development of a capitalist class in Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa societies to migrant labour. Like

Barber and Elliot, Yudelman acknowledges that railroads were at the centre of mass

45 Gordon Pirie, ‘Railways and Labour Migration to the Rand Mines: Constraints and Significance,’ Journal of Southern African Studies, 19, No. 4 (Dec. 1993): 713. 46 Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Africa Since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 138 – 140. 47 Tiyambe Zeleza, A Modern Economic History of Africa, Volume 1, The Nineteenth Century (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1993), 316.

19 migrations of peoples to the mines in South Africa.48 This resulted in a sudden shift from subsistence farming at home to wage labour in the urban areas. Some African men from

Nyasaland had to travel all the way to the mines in South Africa in the pursuit of wage labour. He points out that by 1961, close to 660 000 Africans from the Rhodesias,

Nyasaland and a few from East Africa had migrated to the south and joined the capitalist economy.49

Newer Cultural Histories

In more recent publications, social and cultural historians have shown how the colonial railways influenced the lives of the people in colonial and post-colonial Africa. Terence

Ranger, Jamie Monson, Christiane Reichart-Burikukiye, as well as Tokunba Ayoola’s studies focus on different influences of these railways on different societies. Terence

Ranger, one of the leading historians in Southern Africa, views the Rhodesia Railways as a symbol of oppression that created and intensified tensions between the elite minority and the ‘second hand’ citizens of Bulawayo. 50 Monson explores issues related to settlement formation and movement of peoples towards the railway in post-colonial

Tanzania. According to her, new villages were established along the railway while some moved towards it, which resulted in rapid and significant social and cultural changes across rural Tanzania.51 Reichart-Burikukiye argues that the railways played a significant

48 Montague Yudelman, Africans on the Land: Economic Problems in African Agricultural Development in Southern, Central, and East Africa, with special reference to Southern Rhodesia (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964), 130. 49 Yudelman, Africans on the Land, 130 – 131. 50 Terence Ranger, Bulawayo Burning: The Social History of a Southern African City, 1893-1960 (Harare: Weaver Press, 2010), 24-26 51 Jamie Monson, Africa’s Freedom Railway: How a Chinese development project changed lives and livelihoods in Tanzania (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2009), 72 – 74. Not many African social historians focused on railway related issues. Most early Marxist historians focused on African slavery

20 role in the process of colonization and oppression in Africa. They were mechanisms of

“economic exploitation and control and encapsulated the ideas of European expansion and domination.”52 She argues that previous accounts of European travellers were used to present a dichotomist viewpoint that always placed the colonized in the shadows of their colonial masters. Africans, mostly labourers and merchants who used the railway did in fact adopt the use of the railway for everyday transportation. She concludes that African agency was pivotal in the construction of the railways of colonial East Africa and the lives of African travellers became centred on it. Ahmad Alawad Sikainga agrees with

Reichart-Burikukiye in his 2002 publication, which employs a Marxist critique to explain the social changes of railway workers in Sudan’s biggest railway town. According to him, the workers in Atbara became closely related to the communist party, which sympathised with their struggle against the colonial and post-colonial governments.53

Many different social historians have looked at more nuanced topics relating to rail transportation. While most focus on socio-cultural change, some such as Tokunbo A.

Ayoola attribute the spread of disease to the Nigerian Railway networks. He suggests that trade routes particularly the Nigerian Railways were the primary channel through which the influenza virus was transmitted. He states:

As a result of the fact that railroad transportation was the predominant means of travel before the 1930s, it is reasonable to conclude that the influenza virus could only have spread more quickly and over a wider land area in 1918 by it. The virus was therefore able to travel quickly and within a short period of time to major towns and cities, which were nodal points on the Nigerian railroad network. From these urban areas and through during colonialism while later historians focused on social differentiation of peasants, traders and workers. For a concise explanation of this, see Martin A. Klein, “African Social History,” African Studies Review 15, No.1, (1972): 97 – 112. 52 Christiane Reichart-Burikukiye, “The Railway in Colonial East Africa; Colonial Iconography and African Appropriation of a new Technology,” in Landscape Environment and Technology in Colonial and Post- Colonial Africa, ed. Toyin Falola, Emily Brownwell (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2012), 62. 53 Ahmad Alawad Sikainga, City of Steel and Fire: A Social History of Atbara, Sudan’s Railway Town, 1906-1984 (Portsmouth: Heineman, 2002), 1, 12.

21

the coastal shoreline, the virus spread very fast across the colony.54

Ayoola’s illuminating hypothesis illustrates the negative aspects of colonial developments in Nigeria by showing the biological impact of railways as a fast means of spreading diseases. This was not mentioned in the earlier histories that focused mostly on the economic impacts of colonialism.

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is clear that colonial developments in Africa were inconsistent across the continent. This is because the continent had different colonial powers whose policies contrasted considerably and different economies and resources. For instance, Todd J. Moss states that the British

Empire on one hand asserted its dominance through indirect rule because it never had the aim to establish a large European presence in the colonies except in Kenya and Zimbabwe where Europeans were encouraged to relocate and settle. In essence, this means that

“Kenya and Zimbabwe each saw greater investment in infrastructure, better-quality schooling, and at independence each had much more advanced and diverse economies.”55

The Europeans sought to extract minerals where possible. The French, like the British, also had a more indirect way of ruling most of their African colonies but unlike the

British, we see a closer relationship between the French colonies and France than Britain and its colonies. Though it was limited, the French, like the Portuguese in Angola and

Mozambique, tried to employ the rhetoric of assimilation. For Moss, the Portuguese colonies were worse off because Portugal itself was a poor colonial power.56Across the

54 Tokunbo A. Ayoola, “The Price of Modernity? Western Railroad Technology and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Nigeria,” in Landscape, Environment and Technology in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa, ed. Toyin Falola, Emily Brownwell (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2012), 154 55 Todd J. Moss, African Development: Making Sense of Issues and Actors (Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers Inc, 2007), 22. 56 Moss, African Development, 22 – 23.

22 colonies railways were used to assert power and dominance but most importantly they were essential to the extraction of resources. With time though, they became important in the formation of social and cultural identities of post-colonial Africa.

Railroad Literature on Botswana

There has never been a full scholarly study of the history of rail transportation in

Botswana except for Neil Parsons’ work on the Ngwato of Khama III and a few academic papers. However, the works of a few materialist historians such as Neil Parsons, Andrew

Murray, Richard Dale, and Barbara Ngwenya in the late 20th century mentioned that the railway in eastern Botswana was purely economic in nature. Parsons and Murray are of the view that the railway had negative effects on the economic development of the territory because its construction undermined the powers and roles of the chiefs. They also make significant references to the deforestation rail construction caused with its early wood-burning locomotives. 57 Ngwenya and Dale essentially agree with Parsons and

Murray that Botswana’s capitalist economy originated from South Africa, and the railway was the main link to the development of that economy. However, Dale states that the ownership of the railway line in eastern Bechuanaland by the Rhodesia government complicated matters when Rhodesia declared its unilateral independence in 1965.

According to Dale, this meant that Bechuanaland was held hostage because the Rhodesia government controlled Bechuanland’s only means of trade.58

57 Andrew Murray and Neil Parsons, “The Modern Economic History of Botswana,” in Studies in the Economic History of Southern Africa, Vol. 1, The Front-line States, eds, Z.A. Konczacki, Jane L. Parpat and Timothy M. Shaw (London, Frank Gass, 1990), 182, see also Barbara Ntombi Ngwenya, “The Development of Transport Infrastructure in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1885-1966,” Botswana Notes and Records, Vol. 16 (January, 1984): 73-84. 58 Richard Dale, Botswana’s Search for Autonomy in Southern Africa, (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995), 100. A similar argument had been made in a chapter by H.C.L. Hermans, “Botswana’ Options for

23

Deborah Ann Schmitt also sees the construction of the railways by the British

South Africa Company as a means to exploit the mineral wealth of Southern Africa. As a response to the various cattle diseases such as rinderpest that devastated the cattle economy of Bechuanaland, many Batswana sought wage employment in the mines so as to join the capitalist economy and keep up with their taxes. The railway had been made available to transport labourers to and from the mines so it was easy for a lot of them to migrate. 59 Wazha Morapedi, like Schmitt, has discussed the role of railways in the migration of able-bodied men and their shift from an agrarian to a capitalist economy.60

He suggests that the availability of efficient transportation and the migrant labour experience made it possible for the lower class of society to rise through the emerging stratifications of the Tswana, and made positive changes to the lives of the peasants in

Botswana's reserves.61

In a recent publication, Part Mgadla has challenged the role of the railway in the social development of colonial and post-colonial Botswana. Terence Ranger had earlier argued that the racial segregation of the Rhodesia Railways in Bulawayo followed similar models to South Africa. In the same light, Mgadla suggests that the racial tensions in

South Africa had spilled over to Bechuanaland. In essence, there was no real difference between the railways in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and Bechuanaland in terms of racial segregation. 62 The historiography of rail transportation in Southern Africa and

Independent Existence”, in Landlocked Countries of Africa, ed. Zdenek Cervenka, (Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1973), 197-211. 59 Deborah Ann Schmitt, Bechuanaland Pioneers and Gunners, (London: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006), 39. 60 Wazha Morapedi, “Migrant Labour and the Peasantry in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1930 – 1965,” Journal of Southern African Studies 25 No. 2 (1999): 198. 61 Morapedi, “Migrant Labour and the Peasantry”, 1. 62 Part Mgadla, “Racial Discrimination in Colonial Botswana, 1946-1965,” Southern African Historical Journal, 66, No. 3 (2014): 486.

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Botswana specifically continues to grow and with time, we might see the emergence of topics relating to the environmental impacts of railways.

COLONIAL BOTSWANA: AN OVERVIEW

Botswana is a landlocked country about the size of France and with a population just above two million. The country today is made up of ten districts from where the various groups of Bangwato, Bakalanga, Bakgalagari, Batawana, Bakgatla, Bangwaketse,

Bakwena among others descend. The largest in terms of the land mass is the Central district where the Bangwato people reside. The Ngamiland district boasts the Okavango delta, a tourist attraction rich in wildlife. The Ghanzi and Kgalagadi districts border

Namibia to the west and are the country’s driest where the Bakgaladi and various groups of Khoe and San people or inaccurately referred to as Bushmen reside. The Chobe district to the north is yet another tourist attraction where Botswana shares a border with Zambia across the Zambezi river. Other districts include Northeast, Kgatleng, Kweneng and the

South East district where the capital city, Gaborone is located. The official languages are

Setswana and English but across the entire country, there are well over 25 languages.

“Most of the country is uninhabitable with the Kalahari Desert accounting for 84 percent of Botswana’s land mass. Consequently, 80 percent of the population lives along the fertile eastern border of the state.”63

Before the 1800s, the trade route for cattle, ivory and other goods that linked the

Cape to the interior of Southern Africa ran through what is today eastern Botswana. For instance, the late Iron Age settlement called Toutswemogala, which is located near

63 Scott A. Beaulier, “Explaining Botswana’s Success: The Critical Role of Post-Colonial Policy,” Cato Journal 23, No. 2 (2003): 228.

25

Palapye in the eastern part of the country is said to have existed for about five hundred years until the fourteenth century. This settlement relied on this route for trade with other groups in the interior of Southern Africa for artefacts such as shells from the Indian

Ocean and glass beads made in Arabia.64 It later became significant to the Cape, as it was the most efficient link it had to the interior of Southern Africa. After the 1800s, control over the route became highly contested as various groups tried to monopolise it in order to expand international trade. Various Tswana groups became involved in these tensions as Griqua slave raiders who also wanted cattle invaded them.65

Unlike other territories in the region, the territory north of the Molopo River, which became Bechuanaland after 1885 had no known mineral wealth for the colonising powers to exploit so there was no reason to colonise the territory. The shift in the British perception towards Bechuanaland was primarily due to several factors: their defeat by the

Boers in the Anglo-Boer War of 1880-1881 and the 1884 arrival of the Germans in South

West Africa (today’s Namibia). The Boers had successfully defended the Transvaal from the British and they continued to raid the Southern Tswana for cattle and slaves. 66

Another reason for the colonisation of Bechuanaland was the British imperialist dream to construct a railway and to control Africa from the Cape Colony to Cairo in Egypt.67 Cecil

Rhodes was a British imperialist, mining magnate and Cape politician who founded of the

De Beers Mining Company in 1880. Rhodes had long called for intervention of the

64 Natasha Erlank, “Iron Age (Later): Southern Africa: Toutswemogala, Cattle and Political Power,” in Encyclopaedia of African History, ed. Kevin Shillington (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005), 702. 65 Kevin Shillington, The Colonisation of the Southern Tswana, 1870 – 1900 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985), 20. 66 Norman Etherington, Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa (London: Longman Publishers, 2001), 160 – 166. 67 Monageng Mogalakwe, “How Britain Underdeveloped Bechuanaland Protectorate: A Brief Critique of the Political Economy of Botswana,” Africa Development 31 No. 1 (2006): 70 - 71. See also Scott A. Beaulier, “Explaining Botswana’s Success: The Critical Role of Post-Colonial Policy”, Cato Journal 23, No. 2 (2003), 229.

26

British in Bechuanaland, north of the Molopo because he saw it as vital link between the

Cape Colony and the Suez Canal, which the British had gained control over at the time.68

This move was clearly a result of military and strategic considerations rather than the availability of wealth in Bechuanaland. Mogalakwe suggests that the threats of annexation of the territory north of Molopo into the Boer Transvaal Republic were not enough to warrant protection from the British government. Following a Boer incursion in

Batlhaping and Barolong territories between 1883 and 1884, “a British expeditionary force under the command of Sir Charles Warren was dispatched from London in 1885 to reassert control in the area and declare British protection over Bechuanaland south of the

Molopo River.”69 This came to be known as British Bechuanaland, an area that was later incorporated into the British controlled Cape Colony and later became part of the Union of South Africa in 1910. After growing fears of annexation by South Africa, the three

Tswana chiefs, Kgosi Khama III, Kgosi Sebele and Kgosi Bathoen with the help of

William Charles Willoughby, a British missionary in Bechuanaland, appealed to the

British for help. The territory north of that river became the Bechuanaland Protectorate, which after independence in 1966 became Botswana.

According to Anthony Sillery, Kgosi Khama “had asked for British protection as early as 1876 and he accepted the announcement wholeheartedly, only questioning the northern boundary [of Ngwato territory], which, he complained, cut his country in half.”70

Gaseitsiwe, chief of the Ngwaketse another dominant Tswana group is said to have made no fuss with the new arrangement while the chief of the Bakwena, Setshele [Sechele] was sceptical of it. Sillery points out that Warren’s plan was to make the protectorate

68 Maylam, Rhodes, the Tswana and the British, 78 – 79. 69 Mogalakwe, “How Britain Underdeveloped Bechuanaland Protectorate,” 70. 70 Anthony Sillery, Botswana: A Short Political History (Suffolk: Methuen & Co. LTD, 1976), 76 – 77.

27 dependent on the crown for aid though he relied on “customs duties, hut tax, postal charges and especially on rents from a settlement scheme on the land offered by the chiefs … [but] this was the type of close administration that the British government wished to avoid and Downing Street recoiled from it in horror.”71 As mentioned before, the British government had no interest in Bechuanaland itself. Quoting Edward Farfield at the High Commissioner’s office who made it clear that the British had no interests on

Bechuanaland:

It would keep us in the interior of South Africa forever … we have no interest in the country north of the Molopo except as a road to the interior. We should therefore do as little there in the way of administration as possible and simply content ourselves with preventing it from being overrun by freebooters and foreigners.72

Mogalakwe argues that although military and strategic interests were the main reasons for declaring Bechuanaland a protectorate in 1885, the British colonial government actively followed commercial practices across the territory that mostly suited a small white settler community. Economic policies introduced by the colonial powers such as taxation became the most important ways to collect revenue from Batswana and forced them to become involved in the colonial capitalist economy. As a result of this, at independence in 1966, “the country did not have a nucleus of an indigenous capitalist class. Botswana’s present capitalist path did not grow originally from pre-colonial Tswana civil society, but was imposed by the departing colonial power.”73

THE POLICY OF INDIRECT RULE

During pre-colonial times, the chiefs of the various groups across the territory are said to have enjoyed control over their people. There was no single kingdom to mount a

71 Sillery, Botswana: A Brief Political History, 76 – 77. 72 Sillery, Botswana: A Brief Political History, 77. 73 Mogalakwe, “How Britain Underdeveloped Bechuanaland Protectorate” 67.

28 significant resistance against other invading groups of people within the region but rather autonomous groups of people spread cross the territory74. They often struggled for control of trade as previously mentioned. This also meant that it was easy for the British government to claim dominion over the people due to the lack of unity amongst the

Tswana groups. Zibani Maundeni writes:

Local governance in colonial and post-colonial Botswana was crafted cautiously in ways that incorporated the traditional features of the old administrative set up that it replaced, avoided the re-drawing of boundaries and maintained existing domination arrangements over ethnic minorities. Initially, with the establishment of a Protectorate by Great Britain in 1885, these independent Tswana kingdoms and other ethnic minorities were protected, re-united in some loose way, and downgraded to chiefdoms. This meant that their independent kings came to be regarded as chiefs, recognising only one queen or king, of England. Political decisions had to be ratified by the British Government.75

This argument relates largely to the alienation of existing pre-colonial principles of governance and the adoption of new and foreign ways of leadership. The state of affairs across Africa during colonial times changed in this manner but in some parts this change was more radicalised. According to Morton, “Colonial rule was not built on the principle of democracy. It was built on the belief that the British alone had sufficient knowledge and ability to rule. Africans were thought to be incapable of progress without generations of western education and imitation of British ways.”76

In theory, the system of indirect rule was founded upon the hierarchical system of authority, which combined military discipline, and Britain's own class system.77 This system of governance was pioneered in British colonial India and later applied to Africa

74 Zibani Maundeni, “The Evolution of the Botswana State: Pre-Colonial, Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods,” Online Journal of African Affairs 1 No.2 (2012): 19 – 21. See also a very detailed study of this policy in Christian John Makgala, “The Policy of Indirect Rule in Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1926-1957” (PhD diss, University of Cambridge, Selwyn College, 2001). 75 Maundeni, “The Evolution of the Botswana State,” 25. 76 Morton, introduction to The Birth of Botswana, 2. 77 Schmitt, Bechuanaland Pioneers and Gunners, 17.

29 by Frederick Lugard who implemented it in Uganda and Northern Nigeria.78 This was because the nature of imperialism itself was militaristic. The chain of command did not have any code of representation or consultation. At the top was the crown or parliament in

London, which gave orders to the Dominion Secretary in London (later Commonwealth

Secretary after 1948). Next in the chain of command was the High Commissioner who after 1931 became High Commissioner for South Africa and in charge of High

Commission Territories, which included Bechuanaland. A Resident Commissioner stationed at Mafikeng, in the Cape, dealt with Divisional Commissioners in the North

(Francistown) and the South (Gaborone). The Resident Magistrate, who became District

Commissioner after 1935, was the lowest European figure in the hierarchy before the dikgosi (chiefs).79 Communication had to strictly follow this protocol. In Bechuanaland the roles of the dikgosi was reduced to being mere mediators between the colonial government and the people. “At the bottom of the colonial order sat the Kgosi (chief).

During the colonial period, the British expected dikgosi to serve the government in much the same manner as white officials. Dikgosi were delegated tasks of controlling their people, collecting tax and implementing changes introduced from above.” 80 In the protectorate there were nine clearly marked reserves to which the various groups

78 Frederick D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1922) see also Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, Legal Regimes in World History, 1400 – 1900, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 164, Assa Okoth, A History of Africa, Volume 1; African Societies and the Establishment of Colonial Rule, 1800 – 1915, (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2006), 322, and Jeffery Herbst, States and Power in Africa, Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 83. 79 Morton, introduction to The Birth of Botswana, 3. 80 Fred Morton, introduction to The Birth of Botswana: A History of the Bechuanaland Protectorate from 1910 to 1966, ed. Fred Morton and Jeff Ramsay, (Gaborone: Longman Botswana, 1987), 3.

30 belonged.81 The chiefs had no option but to accept these local borders as a means of controlling movement of peoples as well as ethnic identity.

This new model of administration did not sit well with some chiefs such as Kgosi

Linchwe of Bakgatla, but because there was no single unified kingdom, there was little or no resistance from the Tswana peoples. The lack of coherence among the chiefs sparked tensions that led to the 1889 Kopong Conference where the various leaders as well as common people expressed their dislike of the new colonial government. The biggest issue discussed at this conference was defence and the incorporation of their individual standing armies into one single regiment under the British military command. According to Schmitt, Deputy Commissioner Sidney Shippard used his influence to coerce the

Tswana chiefs into accepting arbitrary agreements regarding the division of authority. In

Schmitt’s view, “As long as the region remained peaceful, the British government was inclined to leave defense issues in the hands of the protectorate’s few appointed administrators, a trend which would continue into the twentieth century.”82

Though Batswana did not wage any significant armed resistance against the implementing of developments such as telegraph lines, Batswana chiefs remained vocal that they did not authorise any sort of developments in their territories. By that time the chiefs had lost control over the territories that they previously ruled. Schmitt writes:

In 1890 Shippard again sought cooperation from the diKgosi to construct additional police camps and build telegraph lines with local labor. DiKgosi Sebele, Bathoen, and Linchwe protested against the extension of the telegraph through their territories. Bathoen had already granted concessions for the railway and telegraph rights to the Kanye Concession Company and he refused under any conditions to part with land for a police camp. Linchwe actually attacked the telegraph crew and refused to allow a telegraph office to be built in his territory. Shippard was then authorized by Carrington to deploy an additional 100 BBP in the southern part of the protectorate. Their presence was justified

81 Morton, introduction to The Birth of Botswana, 1, 6. 82 Schmitt, Bechuanaland Pioneers and Gunners, 47.

31

to the Colonial Office by exaggerated reports of local resistance, as a manifestation of the true source of local authority.83

The Bechuanaland Border Police (BBP) played a very important role in keeping the peace within the territory as well as guarding the borders for any suspicious activities of the Boers and any other invading party. According to Schmitt, the BBP was modelled after the Cape Mounted Riflemen (CMR). “Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Carrington, formerly of the CMR, commanded the new frontier cavalry unit. Much like the CMR, the border police were used for imperial military duties, including town and village patrols, guard and escort duties, and operations against the troublesome merafe (groups of people).”84 Apart from these duties, the BBP was a way for the Cape government to avoid direct involvement in the protectorate matters. In other words, the BBP would be sent to deal with internal Tswana matters without the intervention of the Cape government.

83 Schmitt, Bechuanaland Pioneers and Gunners, 47. 84 Schmitt, Bechuanaland Pioneers and Gunners, 44-45.

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CONCLUSION

The purpose of this section was to introduce the wider spectrum of theories of development and underdevelopment as well as the context of the colonisation of

Bechuanaland. It has been demonstrated that the literature on rail transportation has shifted over time and continues to change to incorporate more nuanced ideas. Most if not all of the colonial railways in Africa were constructed purely for economic reasons with the aim of using them for the extraction of minerals and perhaps fresh produce, as was the case in East Africa. It should be pointed out from the onset that the railway in eastern

Bechuanaland was never seen as an entity on which the Tswana nation would be built nor was it ever meant to establish a local economy. Its construction focused on the narrow economy of mining. Samir Amin, Walter Rodney and Ronald Chilcote have pointed out that the development of metropolis such as Johannesburg resulted in the underdevelopment of places in the periphery. Significantly, the extraction of resources in

Southern Africa meant that the railways would be used to carry cheap migrant African workers from the interior of Southern Africa to the mines of South Africa. This shall be dealt with in detail in a later chapter.

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CHAPTER 2 – RHODES, THE DIKGOSI AND THE RAILWAY ENTERPRISE

Introduction

This chapter deals with several issues concerning Cecil Rhodes’s primary motivations for constructing the railway from Vryburg through Bechuanaland to Bulawayo in the late

1800s. Ian Phimister has argued that these reasons were purely economic in nature.

According to him, the railways were meant to advance the imperial agenda of gaining capital in Southern Africa. This chapter adds that there was a complex relationship between the colonial government, the British South Africa Company (BSA Co), and the local dikgosi. Initially, the dikgosi were not included in the railway negotiations, which resulted in issues of land depravation and their total rejection of colonial developments.

Over time however, this relationship evolved as the chiefs began to gain profits from what was established by the colonial government and made possible by the BSA Co; taxation and labour migration. These economic changes encouraged many of the able bodied men in the protectorate to seek wage employment and because the dikgosi stood to benefit from collecting tax, they began to promote it. This however was not always uniform due to resistance from some chiefs, and thus the formation of an indigenous capitalist class took long to materialise. This chapter also deals with the later changes to the uses of rail transportation in the Protectorate. Apart from being economic in nature, the railway in eastern Botswana started being used for social programmes, which in most cases benefitted the European settlers and ignored the Africans.

34

CECIL RHODES AND THE MAFIKENG - BULAWAYO RAILWAY

The history of Cecil John Rhodes has captured the imagination of many historians in the past primarily because without his involvement in Southern Africa, British imperialism would have taken a different shape. While many colonial historians have seen him as a pioneer of colonial development, others have depicted nothing more than a money- grabbing opportunist whose vision of connecting the Cape to Cairo was imposed upon the colonial government. Whatever the case may be, the story of Rhodes’s work holds significant value in the imperial history of Southern Africa.

In 1888 Lord Gifford who owned the Bechuanaland Exploration Company, sent a request to the colonial officials at the Cape to build a railway through British

Bechuanaland a project that would connect Vryburg to Mafikeng. According to Paul

Maylam, Cecil Rhodes’s wallet and influence on imperial administrators in Southern

Africa consequently toppled Gifford’s claim when Rhodes bought the Bechuanaland

Exploration Company’s rights and took over the negotiations with the British

Government.85 Sir Henry Loch who in 1889 succeeded Sir Hercules Robinson as High

Commissioner at the Cape, later proposed to Rhodes the building of a railway line that ran from Vryburg into Bechuanaland north of the Molopo River to as far as Palapye.86

Knowing that the main incentive for the colonisation of Southern Africa was the extraction of resources, the reasons for constructing that railway can be seen as purely economic. To build this railway, the British South Africa Company (or BSA Co) is said

85 Maylam, Rhodes, the Tswana and the British 78. See also Jon, The Political Economy of Primary Railway Construction in the Rhodesias, 1890-1911,” The Journal of African History, 33, No. 2 (1992): 241 – 242; John S. Galbraith, Crown and Charter: The Early Years of the British South Africa Company, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 107, 110 – 111. 86 Ngwenya, “The Development of Transport Infrastructure,” 73 – 74.

35 to have teamed up with limited liability companies such as the Bechuanaland Railways

Company.87

Established in 1889, the BSA Co was a merger of Cecil Rhodes’s Central Search

Association, the London based Exploration Company and several other companies owned in partnership with Charles Rudd who in 1888 convinced Lobengula, leader of the

Ndebele peoples in what is now Zimbabwe to sign a concession for the exploration of minerals. 88 It quickly gained momentum mainly because of Cecil Rhodes’s with and financial prowess. Four years after its formation, the Bechuanaland Railway Company was incorporated as a limited liability company and its first job was to assist the BSA Co with the building of the northward line to Mafikeng.89 Rhodes’s interest to build this railway line is best described as purely capitalist according to Ian Phimister. However, in a letter from Cecil Rhodes to the Colonial Office dated April 22, 1892, Rhodes explained the several ways in which the railway could be important to the Bechuanaland

Protectorate:

Were the proposed railway to be built, the number of police might be largely reduced, as in case of necessity reinforcements could be rapidly supplied by rail, and the necessity of outpost duty would be much curtailed, while the expense connected with the force which would have to be maintained would be enormously reduced by the diminished price of transport. In the second place, without a railway, it seems hopeless to expect any substantial development in the protectorate. There is, at present, no market for produce

87 Charles Mbohwa, “Operating A Railway System Within A Challenging Environment: Economic History And Experiences Of Zimbabwe’s National Railways,” Journal of Transport and Supply Chain Management, 2 No. 1 (November 2008): 25 – 26. See also Colin Newbury, “Out of the Pit: The Capital Accumulation of Cecil Rhodes,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 10 No. 1 (1981): 25-43, Colin Newbury, “Cecil Rhodes, De Beers and Mining Finance in South Africa: The Business of Entrepreneurship and Imperialism” ed. Raymond E. Dummet, Mining Tycoons in the Age of Empire, 1870 – 1945: Entrepreneurship, High Finance and Territorial Expansion, (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009), 85 – 108. 88 See for example Robert I. Rotberg, The Founder, Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 500- 502, G. Lockhart and CM. Woodhouse, Rhodes: the Colossus of Southern Africa, (New York, 1963), and Lewis Michell, The Life of the Right Honourable Cecil John Rhodes, 1853-1902 (London: Bibliolife, 1910). 89 Botswana Railways Timeline, www.botswanarailways.co.bw/timeline Accessed 28 October 2015 see also Lunn, “The Political Economy of Primary,”243.

36

within its borders, and the transport to the nearest available market is altogether prohibitory.90

Whether his motivations to construct this line were capitalist or political, the process of rail construction had to be financed somehow. This was no easy task for Rhodes with a company that had just been incorporated. According to Lunn, Rhodes was eager to build this line because it was directly linked to his company’s earlier acquisition of the Royal

Charter 91 for the extraction of minerals in Mashonaland. 92 Summing up Rhodes’s financial plan, Maylam adds that Rhodes had initially estimated that the BSA Co would require about £500,000 for the project, money that Rhodes and his company could not come up with at the time. Lunn writes, “Capital for construction was painfully difficult to find.” 93 As a result, he then turned to colonial officials such as Sir Henry Loch to persuade the Cape Government to provide the bulk of that sum. He promised that upon completion of the railway, the Cape government would have the option of purchasing the line.94 This means that Rhodes was able to convince the Cape government to finance a project that they would eventually have to buy back.

The railway itself was built in sections and after completion of each section the

BSA Co would hand it over to the Cape government. After reaching Vryburg in 1891, the

90 Botswana National Archives and Records Services, (hereinafter referred to as BNARS), BNB. 427, Correspondence Respecting Proposed Railway Extension, 1893, Great Britain – Colonial Office, letter from Cecil John Rhodes to the Colonial Office, (April 22, 1892,): 12 – 13. 91 For a detailed discussion of this, see for example, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Mapping Cultural and Colonial Encounters, 1880s – 1930s,” in Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from Pre-Colonial to 2008, eds. Brian Raftopoulis and Alois Mlambo, (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2009); David Beach, The Shona and their Neighbours, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 164 – 165; Terence Ranger, “African Initiatives and Resistance in the Face of Partition and Conquest,” in Africa Under Colonial Domination, 1880 – 1935, ed. A. Adu Boahen, (California: Heinemann/UNESCO, 1985), 45 – 62; D. Chanaiwa, “African Initiatives and Resistance in Southern Africa,” in Africa Under Colonial Domination, 1880 – 1935 ed. A. Adu Boahen, (California: Heinemann/UNESCO, 1985), 197, 204 – 206. 92 Lunn, “The Political Economy of Primary,” 241. 93 Lunn, “The Political Economy of Primary,” 242. 94 Maylam, Rhodes, the Tswana and the British, 59, 83 – 86.

37 construction was delayed because Rhodes had started to lose interest in the interior. His hope of a Second Rand seemed to have gone adrift because of disappointing reports concerning the lack of gold in Mashonaland and Matabeleland. 95 A few years later however, he managed to fulfil his contractual obligations connecting Vryburg and

Mafikeng by 1893, though that section of railroad was opened for traffic in October 1894.

Rhodes and the BSA Co were running several railway projects across Southern Africa.

By December 1894 the eastward line towards Portuguese East Africa (today’s

Mozambique) reached Chimolo, 119 miles from Fontesvilla. In July 1895, Rhodes started to link Port Beira with Fontesvilla. 96 This route to Mozambique gave Rhodes an alternative access to ports and harbours other than South Africa and would put the BSA

Co in a better position to compete with the Portuguese in Mozambique.97 It was in this same year that his greed and urge to gain control of the mineral wealth in the Transvaal grew. At the same time Rhodes had completed a large portion of the northward line from

Mafikeng to Palapye. According to Lunn, he wanted a piece of land to establish a military base within the Bechuanaland Protectorate from where he could launch his futile attack on the Boers in the Transvaal. This came to be known as the Jameson Raid of December

1895.98 It was not easy for Rhodes to acquire the land used to launch this raid because it originally belonged to the Ngwato Tswana under Chief Khama, who was always vocal against Rhodes. After some difficulty, Rhodes succeeded in persuading the Cape government to transfer ownership of the land and the railway line to the BSA Co so he

95 Lunn, “The Political Economy of Primary,” 242. 96 BNARS, BNB 1288, Rhodesia Railways; Historic Milestones, Dates of Main-Line and Branch Line Construction and Change of Control, (1968), 2 – 3; see also Haskins Bulawa, “The Political, Economic and Social Impact of the Railway on Botswana, 1895 – 1970” (BA diss, University of Botswana, 1985), 5. 97 Arthur Keppel-Jones, Rhodes and Rhodesia, The White Conquest of Zimbabwe, 1884 – 1902 (Kingston: McGill Queens University Press, 1983), 305 - 306 98 Lunn, “The Political Economy of Primary,” 243. See also Eric Walker, “The Jameson Raid,” The Cambridge Historical Journal 6, No. 3, (1940): 283 – 306.

38 could use it to make military advances on the Transvaal. It is here that we see the militarist and perhaps political motivations for his construction of the railway. I agree with Phimister and Galbraith who have explained Rhodes’s reasons for mounting the raid as economically driven because his dreams of a Second Rand in Mashonaland had not materialized so he wanted to control the mineral wealth in the Transvaal.99 Due to a lack of preparation and perhaps poor communication, the raid failed. After its failure, Cecil

Rhodes lost his reputation in the eyes of the Cape and British governments. In describing his position after the failed raid, Lunn writes:

In particular, it was a devastating blow to his political power and credibility; the very future of the BSA Co. was thrown into doubt as the Imperial government was forced to reconsider whether it really was such a cheap and painless way of extending the Empire. Rhodes regularly slipped the imperial leash in pursuit of his own political goals; he was an unreliable proxy for the British imperium.100

After this poor showing in the Transvaal, Rhodes retreated to what he knew best, building the railway across the rest of Bechuanaland. He after all still held the charter for the mineral exploration of Mashonaland and had conquered Matabeleland in 1893 and this urged him to forget the events of 1895 and push much further into the interior. Between

March and November 1897, he completed the Mafikeng to Bulawayo section of the railway through Bechuanaland.101 Jon Lunn states that throughout the period of main construction, the Bechuanaland railway was popularised as part of the great ‘Cape to

Cairo’ railway intended ultimately to link the British colonies of Africa.102 But with the various obstacles that Rhodes faced, his imperial dream did not see daylight.

99 Ian Phimister, “Rhodes, Rhodesia and the Rand,” Journal of Southern African Studies 1, No. 1 (1974): 75 – 77. 100 Lunn, “The Political Economy of Primary,” 243. 101 BNARS, BNB 1288, Rhodesia Railways; Historic Milestones, 2 – 3. 102 Lunn, “The Political Economy of Primary,” 239.

39

THE RAILWAY IN BECHUANALAND: THE CHIEFS AND THE PEOPLE

According to A.J. Dachs, after the BSA Co received the Royal Charter for Mashonaland and Matebeleland in 1889, the Colonial Secretary Lord Knutsford insisted that the charter include all territory lying immediately north of British Bechuanaland. Dachs writes;

The [British] government did this deliberately to reduce its own responsibilities in the area with the hope that the company might in the future prove sufficiently strong and wealthy to undertake the supervision of not only the more northern territories but also the Bechuanaland Protectorate.103

Rhodes had entertained the idea of annexing Bechuanaland north of the Molopo River on behalf of the Cape government since 1893 but faced some significant difficulties because the government never wanted the territory in the beginning. He saw his construction of the railways across Bechuanaland as an investment that would go to waste if the territory was not given over to the BSA Co. Furthermore, he had felt threatened by Lord Gifford’s mining concession in Chief Khama’s Ngwato territory. According to Dachs, Khama was initially antagonistic to the idea of mining in his territory but was convinced by the prospect of creating local employment and thus reducing the problem of labour migration. 104 However, Gifford’s concession did not hold much value because the

Ngwato people were very vocal and opposed to any scheme that involved them moving from their traditional land to give way to mining projects. Dachs writes, “Any search for land and administrative titles following mining rights was however a different position…

Khama himself would not tolerate [any] diminution authority among his people.”105 In all fairness, the other two chiefs, Bathoen I and Sebele I had also been very vocal against this

103 Dachs, “Rhodes’s Grasp for Bechuanaland, 1889 – 1896,” Rhodesian History, 2 (1971): 2. 104 Dachs, “Rhodes’s Grasp for Bechuanaland,” 4. 105 Dachs, “Rhodes’s Grasp for Bechuanaland,” 4-5

40 idea of being incorporated into South Africa for a very long time.106 Rhodes used the railway undertakings and his sway over the colonial officials to try to gain control over

Bechuanaland. By November 1895 it seemed like the chiefs would lose power in their territory. Bechuanaland was faced with imminent seizure by the BSA Co, unless the three chiefs who had gone to England to seek protection signed a land agreement. Barbara

Ngwenya describes the situation surrounding the signing of the settlement as unjust. She states that the Secretary of Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, bulldozed the three chiefs into accepting the Railway Agreement of 1895. In other words, the chiefs were forced to cede the most fertile piece of land on which they had originally lived. It was the same piece of land in 1896 that was described in a report by Malcolm W. Searle, an attorney based at the Cape, as “an unimproved wasteland with no commercial value.”107 At that time, the

Tuli area had no significant commercial value to the colonial government but it became important for Cecil Rhodes’s Jameson Raid. Ngwenya also suggests that the BSA Co officials, Rochfort Maguire and Dr. Rutherford Harris, in a pre-arranged contract with the

British missionary Willoughby, had demanded Tuli Block in eastern Bechuanaland.108

Fanny Sonia Arellano Lopez, however, suggests that the chiefs had willingly agreed to

“cede a strip of land for the north-south railway construction, demarcate the boundaries of the different chiefdoms, establish legal jurisdiction of the chiefs and enact payment of the annual government tax, the hut tax.”109 Whatever the case was, this meant that the chiefs felt like they were losing influence over the people, and they could not do much to

106 Sandra Disung, Traditional Leadership and Democratisation in Southern Africa; A Comparative Study of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, (Hamburg: LIT Verlang Munster, 2002), 184. 107 BNARS, RC, 2/12/6, Railway between Mafeking and Bulawayo, Report by M. W. Searle, 25 November, 1896. 108 Ngwenya, “The Development of Transport Infrastructure,” 74. See also Alec Campbell, “Khama III, Missionaries and Old Palapye Church Building”, Botswana Notes and Records Vol. 40 (2008): 172. 109 Fanny Sonia Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade in the Bechuanaland Protectorate” (PhD diss., State University of New York, 2008), 111 – 112.

41 dispute this. It should be made clear that most, if not all railway negotiations that took place did not include any sort of consultation with the chiefs. For instance, in 1892, Lord

Ripon, Secretary of State for the British colonies held meetings with Sir Henry Loch to discuss the policies of the railway line across eastern Bechuanaland.110 These meetings bypassed the chiefs because the BSA Co and perhaps the colonial government did not recognise traditional leadership even though the meetings concerned land held by the chiefs. After the failed Jameson Raid, the land taken from the chiefs was not returned.

Ngwenya writes, “The present Tuli Block was temporarily held by the colonial government which in 1904-5 transferred it to the BSAC. Subsequently, they sold it off at a profit to individual white farmers.”111 Neil Parsons has argued that the loss of this land, which was under Khama’s jurisdiction, gave sanctuary to Bangwato vagrants, criminals and squatters who could easily use the railway strip to hide from the law. Because the chief had lost control of this particular strip, the vagrants took advantage of that and intermingled with other people in the strip so they could not be identified. However,

Bulawa’s informants were of a different view to what Parsons had posited about this land.

Citing a certain Mr. Ewing, he states that despite the fact that the railway strip was under the jurisdiction of the railway company, nobody was above the law because they could be easily be found and arrested.112 It should be pointed out that this land was now privately owned by the BSA Co and its owners would have considered trespassing by the said

Ngwato vagrants to be a serious crime.

110 Dachs, “Rhodes’s Grasp for Bechuanaland,” 7. 111 Ngwenya, “The Development of Transport Infrastructure,” 74. 112 Neil Parsons, “Khama III, the Bangwato and the British with special reference to 1895 – 1923, (PhD diss. University of Edinburgh, 1973), 131 quoted in Haskins Bulawa, “The Political, Economic and Social Impact of the Railway on Botswana, 1895 – 1970” (BA diss, University of Botswana, 1985), 11.

42

Schmitt and other historians have amplified the outbreak of cattle diseases between 1896 and 1897 as well as the excessive drought and famine as the main drivers of labour migration in the Protectorate. 113 It is true that most of Bechuanaland relied heavily on its cattle economy and when these natural disasters stuck, it was devastated.

As a result, this compelled a paradigm shift among many of the cattle herders/owners as they were forced to seek wage employment in order to sustain themselves. Furthermore, the colonial government had introduced taxes and levies for people living in the reserves.

For that reason, a majority of the able bodied men joined the working class in search of wages so to keep up with the taxes. It is, however, argued that taxation had very little effect on the lowest social levels such as malata or servants who continued to herd the remaining cattle belonging to their overlords.114 Anthropologist Isaac Schapera had, in the

1930s, tried to demonstrate that new European models of life had failed to alter the structure of the traditional Tswana society. Comparing the Tswana to their African communities in neighbouring South Africa, he gave several factors relating to the situation in Bechuanaland. For Schapera, the South Africans who found wage employment were better off socially and economically but they had lost the essence of traditions and culture. He writes:

The many thousands of Natives constantly employed by the mines, railways, municipalities and other industrial organisations, on the farms and in the households of the Europeans, inevitably acquire new tastes, new habits and new vices. They return to- their homes profoundly altered, and with an increasing detachment from the old tribal system. The great majority of them are no longer pure herdsmen and agriculturists but rely to a considerable extent upon their wage-earnings to satisfy the needs to which they have now become accustomed and to pay the taxes, which have been imposed upon them. Their regular absence at work leads to a weakening of family ties and to the disintegration of tribal society. They cannot participate in the relative freedom of civilised life and then come back to submit tamely to the authority and exactions of their tribal superiors. Their old standards of morality have changed as well, and the sanctions which used to prevail

113 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 118. 114 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 112.

43

have largely broken down.115

Bechuanaland’s situation was much different because the territory was a predominantly

“native” territory with each primary “tribe” having a large reserve of its own. Also, the area where Europeans resided in the protectorate was too small to cause any sort of change or influence on the major reserves. There was no significant contact by the

Tswana with the Europeans who resided in the Tuli area. Lastly, Schapera added that since the colonial government did very little in terms of administration in the protectorate, many Batswana remained in their traditional life.116

It is quite clear that the ecological disasters that struck the territory accelerated the turn towards wage labour for many Tswana men but Arellano-Lopez cautions that the outcomes of the disaster were not uniform throughout Bechuanaland and therefore should not be used as a blanket justification for the pursuit of wage labour. In the same vein, it should be added, as observed by Peter Landel-Mills, that Schapera’s explanation of labour migration is questionable because he did not give evidence of labour migration coming from the poorest sections of the territory.117 There was another important factor that led to the pursuit of wage labour. The availability of rail transportation has somewhat been overlooked by historians though without it, migration in the first place would have been a very difficult task. Though his argument deals with much later events, Ashley

Jackson has explained that the increase in colonial revenue was largely due to excessive use of the railway. “Increased customs and excise revenue, due largely to the heavy use of

115 Isaac Schapera, “Labour Migration From a Bechuanaland Native Reserve: Part 1”, Journal of the Royal African Society, 32 No. 129 (October 1933): 387. 116 Isaac Schapera, “Labour Migration From,” 386. 117 Peter Landell-Mills, “Rural Incomes and Urban Wage Rates,” Botswana Notes and Records, 2 (1970): 79 – 84.

44 the railway line that ran through the Protectorate, also contributed to increased revenue.”118

Arellano-Lopez like Schmitt suggests that new developments such as the search for wage labour did spark significant changes across the Bechuanaland reserves. At the time when the railway was being built many Tswana men were compelled to seek employment in railway construction and fencing of the railway strip to earn some income.

Their reasons for this movement to wage labour within the Protectorate and outside vary.

As discussed previously, the outbreak of cattle diseases such as Rinderpest and Foot and

Mouth Disease in the late 1800s, prolonged dry seasons and the lack of proper crop yields meant that the Tswana farmers needed alternative sources of food and income. The imposition of Hut Tax in 1899 further drove men from their traditional way of life to a modern capitalist economy. Ngwenya adds that other chiefs following Khama’s example, may have likewise encouraged their people to seek employment and provided a headmen to supervise the work.119 This, according to Deborah Ann Schmitt, had to happen in order to introduce Batswana to other forms of gaining capital.120 By seeking wage labour,

Batswana slowly had started to abandon their traditional forms of wealth and began to adapt to the modern ways of gaining wealth. The emergence of an indigenous capitalist class is clearly explained by Onalenna Selolwane. She writes:

The history of imperialist penetration into the Bechuanaland Protectorate can be meaningfully analysed only within the context of the character of capitalism in the Southern African region as a whole. The emergence of an indigenous capitalist oligarchy in the Cape Colony and the economic transformations that followed reverberated into and shaped the socio-economic structures of the neighbouring territories. Without this context the historian might be led to make analytically useless assertions like ‘the history of

118 Ashley Jackson, Botswana, 1939 – 1945: An African Country at War, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 128. 119 Ngwenya, “The Development of Transport Infrastructure,” 74. 120 Schmitt, The Bechuanaland Pioneers and Gunners, 41 – 42.

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Bechuanaland Protectorate is a series of accidents.’121

Lopez and Schmitt see the pursuit of wage labour not only as a means for the

Tswana men to keep up with the annual hut tax, but also resulting from the introduction of a capitalist economy, which would shape indigenous societies. It also reshaped the social structure within the various Tswana reserves as common men could now become employed outside of these reserves, which could lead to their social advancement.

Though the chiefs were initially opposed to the hut tax, as recognised authorities in their reserves “they were exempt from paying the tax, but were responsible for collecting and maintaining the tax registers.”122 The chiefs are said to have received some commission for the revenues they collected and the Bangwato, Bakgatla and Bakwena chiefs did very well under this system.123 This was a monopoly enjoyed by the chiefs and it can be argued from this that the chiefs urged their people to seek wage employment so they could benefit more from it. Not all wages were attained through employment but the railway encouraged enterprise among the Tswana. Between 1896 and 1897 many

Batswana appear to have expressed their wish to acquire stores along the railway line by applying for hawkers’ licences. The Imperial Secretary at the Cape granted applications to “people of good character.”124

The chiefs experienced other important economic changes, which were pivoted on the railway. Some changes were good and some were not necessarily beneficial to them.

121 Onalenna Selolwane, “Colonisation by Concession: Capitalist Expansion in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1850 – 1950,” Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies 2, No. 1 (Feb, 1980): 79-80. 122 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 111; see also Christian John Makgala, “Taxation in the Tribal Areas of the Bechuanaland Protectorate,” The Journal of African History, Vol. 45 No. 2, (2004): 280 and Schapera, “Labour Migration From a Bechuanaland Native Reserve: Part 1”, Journal of the Royal African Society 32 No. 129, (October 1933): 387. 123 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 111, see also Olufemi Vaughan, Chiefs, Power and Social Change: Chiefship and Modern Politics in Botswana, 1880s – 1990s (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2003), 29. 124 BNARS, RC. 2/12/7, Government House Dispatches, Letter from Imperial Secretary, 1897.

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Before the railway was constructed, the chiefs controlled the wagon routes used for trade.

Ngwenya writes, “Wagon trade routes developed as a response to intensified economic demands for externally generated supply of European commodities.”125 She suggests that the years between 1886 and 1895 were characterised by prosperous wagon trading.

However, when the railway opened this trade collapsed.126 On the other hand, Chief

Khama III of the Bangwato is said to have used the railway to his advantage by supplying the Kimberly mines with timber. The Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899 – 1902 provided economic opportunities to the Tswana, particularly the Ngwato under Chief Khama. They used the railway to supply the British military with beef. 127 In many ways, the railway presented new markets for the Tswana though this destroyed, in some ways, the customary way of life.

The importance of the rail connection between Rhodesia and South Africa at the time of the Second Anglo-Boer War cannot be stressed enough. The local chiefs, particularly Khama of the Ngwato became involved in defending the railway line within his territory. Because of tensions between the Boers and the British, a trade embargo had been put in effect ceasing all commercial freight between Rhodesia, Bechuanaland and

South Africa. During this war, the Boers laid siege to the town of Mafikeng, which was a key point in the railway route between the three countries. To cut the economic lifeline and connection between Rhodesia and South Africa the Boers destroyed the bridge over the Metsimasuane River.128 As a result, the Rhodesia Railways operated armoured trains that patrolled the line between Mafikeng and Bulawayo though they too were

125 Ngwenya, “The Development of Transport Infrastructure,” 73. 126 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 118. 127 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 118. 128 Keppel-Jones, Rhodes and Rhodesia, 593. See also Don Strack, “Railroads or Southern and Central Africa,” http://utahrails.net/articles/central-africa-railroads.php accessed 05 Feb, 2016

47 occasionally attacked.129 Further north in Khama’s territory, the Boers also attacked a telegraph line near Palapye to try to halt communication between Rhodesia and South

Africa. Deborah Ann-Schmitt writes:

Boer commandos invaded Khama's country and cut the telegraph line near Palapye on the first day of hostilities. The railway between Gaberones and Mafeking became another prime target and armoured trains patrolled the tracks to prevent Boer sabotage. A week after the outbreak of the war, Khama sent his brother, Kebailele, and two regiments to guard the railway bridge at Mahalapye to the south. Eventually his men guarded the whole length of the railway through BaNgwato country. Khama's capital of Palapye became a major defensive position manned by three to four thousand armed BaNgwato.130

Khama’s position in this debacle seemed two faced. At first he was antagonistic of the

British government and Rhodes’s attempt to develop his territory. After he saw the importance of the railway in bringing capital to his land, his position slightly shifted and he became a supporter of what the British colonial government had intended. His effort at defending the railway evidences that. Also, he had always been clearly antagonistic to the

Boers, for that he had to reaffirm his position on the side of the British in defending the railway.

As discussed previously, the railway was completed in sections and the BSA Co would hand over its ownership the Cape Government. In 1899, Rhodes reasserted control over the entire railway line when the Bechuanaland Railways Company changed its name to Rhodesia Railways Limited.131 This was not really a change of proprietorship because the Bechuanaland Railway Company was an entity of the British South Africa Company from the beginning, so the change of name did not come as a shock to the colonial government. It meant that the railway that was completed just a few years earlier was now a privately owned entity.

129 Schmitt, The Bechuanaland Pioneers and Gunners, 69 – 70, 130 Schmitt, The Bechuanaland Pioneers and Gunners, 69. 131 BNARS, BNB 1288, Rhodesia Railways; Historic Milestones, 4.

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The absence of statistics showing employment of Tswana men in the various railway projects makes it difficult to know the employment opportunities presented by the railway. Given what Ngwenya describes as a lack of coherent evidence, it makes it difficult to paint a clear picture of the nature of employment of the Tswana. She states, “It is likely that few Batswana were employed during the colonial period. It appears that the largest portion of unskilled workers were immigrant labour drawn from Malawi,

Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe.” 132 It is known that Africans working on the railways and indeed the mines performed all the unskilled jobs and were not allowed to learn skilled jobs because this would warrant an increase in their wages. The available evidence points out that some Tswana men were employed in and earned some wages from railway construction. A chapter on the dynamics of the railway in labour migration shall follow and discuss this issue in detail.

COLONIAL EDUCATION, COMPASSION AND ENTERPRISE

The development of education in Bechuanaland was a haphazard matter from the beginning because it was never in the colonial programme. Between the time of declaring protection over Bechuanaland and the late 1920s, missionary education prevailed. Then in the early 1900s, Reginald Balfour, a representative of the new British Military

Administration of the conquered Transvaal following the Anglo-Boer War, who toured and inspected European schools in the Protectorate and arrived at a segregationist conclusion that European children should be taught separately. 133 It seems that the only

132 Ngwenya, “The Development of Transport Infrastructure,” 74, see also Haskins Bulawa, “The Political, Economic and Social Impact of the Railway on Botswana, 1895 – 1970” (BA diss, University of Botswana, 1985), 11. 133 Part Mgadla, A History of Education in the Bechuanaland Protectorate to 1965, (Lanham, University Press of America, 2002), 88 -89.

49 thing systematic in the dissemination of education in the Protectorate was to maintain the racial divide in education. Then in the early 1930s, the Director of Education for

Bechuanaland, H. J. E. Dumbrell, who was well known for being sympathetic towards

Africans, suggested to the Resident Commissioner that it would benefit the people, both

European and Tswana, if the colonial government would consider educating the children of railway workmen. 134 This did not mean that Dumbrell wanted both Tswana and

European children to be taught in the same classrooms. Part Mgadla’s comprehensive work on the development of education in Bechuanaland suggests that Dumbrell

“endorsed the idea of separate schools.”135 His argument was that the railway stretched from Bechuanaland’s southern Ramatlabama border with South Africa to the northern

Ramokgwebana border with Southern Rhodesia running along several isolated homes of a number of railway workers who were married and had children of school going age.136 He stated that the colonial government had constructed Government Aided European schools

[exclusive to European Children] in villages along the railway line at sub-centres such as

Lobatse, Tshesebe, Mahalapye and Francistown. However, a few of the children of

European employees of the railway companies attended school owing to the fact that their homes were far too removed from the mentioned places. In responding to the Dumbrell’s letter, the Resident Commissioner stated that he had been in communication with the

Railway Missionary, Reverend H.J.A. Rusbridger, who perhaps used the efficient mode of transportation to reach many areas in the east and ascertained that indeed there was a

134 BNARS, S. 459/9, Education: European Children of Railway Workers in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Letter from Director of Education, H.J.E. Dumbrell to Resident Commissioner, (21 March, 1936). 135 Mgadla, A History of Education in the Bechuanaland, 101 136 BNARS, S. 459/9, Education: European Children of Railway Workers in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Letter from Director of Education, H.J.E. Dumbrell to Resident Commissioner, (21 March, 1936).

50 number of children, European and coloured (mixed race) that were isolated and unable to attend school. Rusbridger suggested that “employing a teacher who could travel along the railway and teach children at sub-centres” would rectify the problem.137 However, a letter from the Department of External Affairs in Pretoria stated that the South African

Railways was not in a position to hire itinerant teachers and suggested boarding schools for the European children. The letter also suggested the use of farm schools where if an average attendance of at least five students could be guaranteed, the South African

Railways would be able to provide conveyance and boarding grants to them. 138 In responding to a letter from the Administrative Secretary to the High Commissioner, P.R.

Botha, a spokesperson for the South African Railways reiterated that they would only offer free transport to children of its European employees and expressed that it would be impossible for them to offer transport to African children.139 Though Bechuanaland was not as racially divided as South Africa, Dumbrell would have anticipated this negative response. From here, it is not clear how Dumbrell responded to Botha’s refusal but we can assume that the non-European children were taught separately. In his earlier letter, he had noted that it would be best, at that time, to resort to what he called the Belton Plan of teaching, a system in which “children would be trained to carry on with their studies whilst their teacher is busy at another centre or centres.”140 The Resident Commissioner showed his support for this model of education and perhaps this is why it is safe to

137 BNARS, S. 459/9, Education: European Children of Railway Workers in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Letter from Resident Commissioner to H.J.E. Dumbrell, (24 April, 1936). 138 BNARS, S. 459/9, Education: European Children of Railway Workers in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Letter from Department of External Affairs to Resident Commissioner, (23 September, 1936). 139 BNARS, S. 459/9, Education: European Children of Railway Workers in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Letter from P.R. Botha to Administrative Secretary to the High Commissioner, (28 September, 1936). 140 BNARS, S. 459/9, Education: European Children of Railway Workers in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Letter from Director of Education, H.J.E. Dumbrell to Resident Commissioner, (21 March, 1936).

51 assume that non-European children continued to be educated in this manner until formal education was introduced. We cannot blame rail development for this but we can point out that its presence deepened the wedge between whites and non-whites as its use only benefitted the former. Dumbrell, at about the same time, made several attempts to establish an education system for the Indian Muslim children who had settled at

Ramotswa. The details to these negotiations are discussed later in the following chapter.

Another significant use of the railway was to transport the Principal Medical

Officer along the eastern side of the territory to monitor and curb malnutrition of African children during periods of great famine and drought.141 Just like the Railway Missionary used it to travel, the Medical Officer in the 1930s also took advantage of its efficiency.

This can be seen as a good gesture by the colonial government though its use was only limited to the east.

The introduction of this modern mode of transportation attracted numerous individuals from the interior of the protectorate. In the early 1900s, the Rhodesia and

South African Railway Companies described the presence of beggars along the railway line as a social ill that had to be dealt with. However, not all were beggars, amongst the throngs of people were licensed indigenous curio sellers as well as European shop owners who conducted trade at the railway sidings. At some of the bigger railway stations, it became increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the African curio sellers and the beggars. Apart from that, the South African Railways had received numerous complaints from its European passengers regarding the problem of theft of property at railway stations by people disguised as curio sellers. Correspondence between Herbert .H.

141 BNARS, S. 428/3 and S.428/4, Malnutrition in Bechuanaland Protectorate, Correspondence relating to the use of rail transport and establishment of a dairy industry in the Protectorate, (1930 – 1943).

52

Price, the Assistant Government Secretary of Bechuanaland from 1935, and the South

African Railways shows that begging along the railway line in Bechuanaland had been increasing rapidly therefore the South Africa Railways required assistance from the

Railway Police to arrest the so-called beggars turned mob. Chief Seboko Mokgosi of

Bamalete responded in a letter stating that while he understood the instruction to remove all people from the railway sidings to prevent begging, he requested on behalf of the blind that they be allowed to seek charity from railway passengers.142 This request was denied because the chief had failed to provide sufficient justification for his proposition. Another letter from G. E. Nettleton, the Resident Magistrate further stressed the point that “the frequenting of beggars at the railway premises to solicit assistance from passengers was not an advertisement to this country nor was that at all desirable.”143 This threatened not only the image of the both railway companies but also its economic applications because it was unsafe. As a result the Bechuanaland Railway Police was established in 1924 to curb numerous reports of thievery, disorder and begging along the railway line.144 Whilst the railway was intended to serve Rhodes’s economic practices and the colonial government, it was at the heart of other social problems within the territory. Railway sidings as a result became havens that harboured what the colonial government called devious behaviour. Though on one hand the railway symbolised economic development and European progress in the protectorate, it depicted a different picture for the many unemployed Africans on the other hand. It did not create employment opportunities, which drove them to acts of begging and thievery.

142 BNARS S.204/3/1, Begging by Natives along the Railway Line and the Licensing of Curio Sellers, Letter from H. Cheadle on behalf of Chief Seboko to C.L.O.B. Dutton, (7 April, 1931). 143 BNARS S.204/3/1, Begging by Natives along the Railway Line and the Licensing of Curio Sellers, Letter from G. E. Nettleton to Chief Seboko, (5, August, 1933). 144 BNARS, S.94/1, Appointment of Railway Police in Bechuanaland Protectorate, Letter from C.L.O.B. Dutton to the Divisional Superintendent, (March 20, 1925).

53

By the early 1900s, two companies operated the railway across eastern

Bechuanaland. The northern line running from Mahalapye northwards through to

Bulawayo was operated by the Rhodesia Railway Company, while the South African

Railways ran the southern line from Mahalapye to Vryburg.145 It is not clear how the

South African Railways acquired the operation of the southern line but Jon Lunn suggests that between 1911 and 1912, they proposed to purchase the entire line from Vryburg to

Bulawayo but the BSA Co turned down the offer.146 The economic opportunities for controlling this railway were endless and perhaps the South African government wished to monopolise that.

As explained before, it was difficult for the Railway Police to distinguish between beggars and non-European curio sellers at railway sidings. Speaking at a Native Advisory

Council Meeting held in March 1937, Acting Chief Mmusi of the Bakgatla stated that some of the people at the railway sidings selling their curios had nothing else to do. He mentioned that they had to sell whatever they had so that they could find money for their taxes and to buy clothes. Most Batswana could not afford to keep up with the payments required for the trade licences while European curio sellers could afford to pay for both the trade licence and a lease to open a shop at the railway sidings. For example, a

European merchant called Mr. T.W. Shaw held since 1927, the leases at Artesia and

Palapye while Mrs. Maclean and Mr. G. Seaman held two other leases for Mahalapye.147

Though the railway encouraged many Batswana to engage in enterprise, a lot of them were faced with challenges of racial prejudice and impenetrable monopolies such as this

145 BNARS, BNB 1288, Rhodesia Railways; Historic Milestones, 4 see also Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 115 and Susan Williams, Colour Bar: The Triumph of Seretse Khama and his Nation, (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). 146 Lunn, “The Political Economy of Primary,” 251. 147 BNARS S.204/3/1, Begging by Natives along the Railway Line and the Licensing of Curio Sellers, Letter from Systems Manager of South African Railways to C.L.O.B. Dutton, (31 August, 1937).

54 one. However, the issue of partiality regarding lease applications needs to be dealt with carefully. In 1938 the Bechuanaland Government Secretary wrote a letter stating that he had decided to terminate all European held leases in order to invite new tender applications from all people irrespective of colour. According to his report, he had only received applications from Mr. Seaman and Messrs’ Dennison and Sons LTD. 148 It appears that no indigenous people made applications to lease land or attain new licences to sell along the railways. It is from this evidence where we can argue that the opportunities for enterprise for Batswana along the railway were made available, but they failed to seize them. Perhaps the procedure of sending the applications through the chiefs prolonged the progression of these applications for the Africans and vanished somewhere along the line of communication. As the presence of curios sellers indicate, Africans were enterprising and willing to take part in commerce around the railway stations. The fact that only a few of them applied for trade licences suggest that there were probably other barriers such as lack of communication, high costs of application and perhaps distrust of the system.

Not all Batswana ventured into selling curios along the railway. Most remained cattle herders and sold raw or dried beef (biltong) at railway sidings. The problems with cattle herding near the railway were the endless possibilities of stock being injured or killed by a passing locomotive. As a way to compensate for the loss of cattle, the colonial government between 1904 and 1928 implemented measures to compensate any owners who claimed that their beast had been struck by a train. They were paid £40.00 for a horse, £20.00 for a mule or cow, £12.00 for a donkey or ostrich and only £2.00 for a goat

148 BNARS S.204/3/1, Begging by Natives along the Railway Line and the Licensing of Curio Sellers, Letter from Government Secretary to Systems Manager of South African Railways, (15, December, 1938).

55 or sheep.149 This was of course a gesture by the colonial government but it did very little in terms of replacing the lost stock. Those prices were far less than the actual price of small stock or livestock in the market. Most of the farmers who received this type of reimbursement used the money for other things such as paying their taxes. This type of compensation only existed in the eastern side of the country and targeted only farmers whose animals had been affected by the passing locomotives, as it would not apply to areas without a railway. The colonial government had taken note of some of the negative aspects of rail development in the territory and sough to rectify them. Though this compensation was far from enough, to a certain extent it showed the Tswana the monetary value of livestock and was therefore a step in the right direction in encouraging them preserve their livelihood. We should not overlook the fact that it was the same colonial government that took land from the chiefs and allowed it to be sold to the BSA

Co without compensation. For that reason, the compassion that the colonial government had for the Africans in Bechuanaland was very selective and based on people’s discretion.

This shows the lack of uniformity and the bias in carrying out developments in the protectorate. It is therefore worthwhile to reiterate that the process of colonisation and the introduction of rail transportation in the protectorate disrupted the Tswana way of life.

In the years that followed the declaration of Bechuanaland as a protectorate of the

Crown, the colonial government was slow to implement a clear socio-economic policy. In most cases, a problem was identified and then measures were taken to eradicate the problem, and this was often a very slow process. As a response to that the colonial government established the “Native” (which later changed to African) Advisory Council

149 BNARS, S.100/1, Compensation for Stock Injured on the Railway, Letter from Resident Magistrate, Serowe to G. E. Nettleton, (November, 1927).

56 in 1920. Its membership consisted of mainly the chiefs of the major groups of people in

Bechuanaland. It dealt with issues relating to racial discrimination in the protectorate, agricultural improvement and above all preventing the transfer of the protectorate to the

Union of South Africa.150 Most significantly, after being formed, it became very vocal against racial segregation in public spaces such as hospitals and railway stations. The

Union of South Africa was undoubtedly racially biased and some of that bias spilled over to neighbouring Bechuanaland. According to Part Mgadla, the Advisory Council held a meeting in 1946 where Chief Bathoen II of the Bangwaketse lamented that the effects of racial discrimination in the Union of South Africa had impacted Bechuanaland. Mgadla writes, “The Kgosi proceeded to give examples of discrimination by race and colour, citing examples emanating from railway stations where Africans were allocated third class train tickets through a small window even though they had preferred and could afford, first or second class tickets. ‘Entrance through the front door’, the Kgosi continued, was clearly out of bounds, as that place is not for Africans.”151 In other words,

Africans who used the trains for transportation had a tough time because of the discrimination. Kgosi Bathoen’s argument was that the people who had fought in the

Second World War on the side of the British needed to be recognised as heroes and also be given priority in the trains like all other Europeans. Though there were not necessarily laws of segregation in Bechuanaland, the South African Railways (SAR) operated locomotives had to strictly follow the laws of the Union even when they crossed into the protectorate. Manungo adds:

The delegates [of Bechuanaland] attacked the Administration for the unequal treatment of

150 Kenneth R.D. Manungo, “The Role of the Native Advisory Council in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1919-1960,” Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies 13 No. 1&2 (1999): 24. 151 Mgadla, “Racial Discrimination in Colonial Botswana,” 490.

57

people who had faced equal hazards. In this session the Resident Commissioner defended the policy of the Administration, claiming it was "class discrimination" and not racial discrimination. He said that the different treatment [on trains] was based on social and economic differences and not colour. He added that European salaries were "rightly" more than African salaries because the Europeans used more money than Africans due to different consumption patterns. This was a naive reply to demands that were so concrete. The Resident Commissioner could not explain why colour coincided with class. He even told the delegates that they themselves as educated people would not want to mix with noisy and unbehaved people who always were shouting and pushing others. He concluded by saying that in his administration he would not allow racial discrimination; but socio- economic discrimination, he added, would be allowed.152

In many ways then it can be argued that the concerns of the African Advisory Council represented public opinion and perhaps sparked the beginning of political awareness in the protectorate.

152 Kenneth R.D. Manungo, “The Role of the Native Advisory Council,” 31.

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CONCLUSION

This chapter has examined Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company’s reasons for building the railway across eastern Bechuanaland. These reasons like Phimister has argued were purely economic in nature though there were some instances such as the

Jameson Raid, which could be seen as Rhodes’s attempt to gain political control of the

Transvaal. However, as stated, this raid was staged so as to gain control of the mineral wealth in that area. Several other things took place in the early period of construction such as land alienation and the colonial government’s disregard of the power of the chiefs. As demonstrated, Tuli Block was one such piece of land, which was never given back to the people after the failure of the raid. Removing this land from the hands of the

Africans meant that most of them had to be moved to the reserves where life was not as favourable and soils not as fertile to sustain their agrarian lives. Across most of eastern

Bechuanaland, there were other privately owned blocks such as the Gaborone, Tati and

Lobatse blocks, which shall be discussed in detail in the next chapter.

This chapter has also demonstrated that although the railway was constructed primarily for economic reasons, it had unforeseen results and became the centre of some racially biased social programmes such as the education of children of railway employees and the selling of curios at railway sidings. The racial prejudice of South Africa was a widespread and deeply rooted European thought that spilled over to Bechuanaland and made most of the social programmes inaccessible to non-whites. The underdevelopment of Bechuanaland was therefore not a carefully crafted occurrence but rather an unfortunate result of a series of events, biased policies, and the actions of a few colonial officials. It only appears more systematic when we look at the outcomes of imperialism in the Protectorate. The Transvaal and the Cape, for example, had significant infrastructure

59 developments, growing economies and policies that supported growth because of the significant investments made by the imperial powers. Though South Africa struggled with a racist government until the early 1990s, it was, at the time of Botswana’s independence, significantly more developed. This was because the land itself had and abundance of mineral wealth so there was a good reason to make such investments. As mentioned earlier, Bechuanaland was nothing more than a passage for labour resources. It was a barren piece of land, which was more of a burden because there were no known mineral deposits. This resulted in all the efforts being diverted to developing places of economic significance.

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CHAPTER 3 – THE BECHUANALAND RAILWAY IN THE SOUTHERN AFRICAN MINERAL REVOLUTION

Introduction

Like most countries in the interior of Southern Africa, Bechuanaland was not immune to the brunt of the late 19th century mineral revolution. Within this period of rapid industrialisation and economic changes, the Protectorate played two significant roles first as the rail corridor that carried the tides of labour headed to the south from the interior, and second as a constant supplier of some of this labour itself. Scholars have in the past dealt with labour migration as a result of the ecological disasters such as rinderpest (cattle plague) and locusts that befell Bechuanaland as well as the colonial policies of taxation.

These are all valid points and this chapter does not refute them but it tries to highlight the role of rail transportation in Bechuanaland’s shift from an agrarian to a capitalist economy. It has been stated by Neil Parsons that the effects of the rinderpest pandemic were geographically uneven and that the Ngwato in particular were almost unaffected by it and actually improved their wagon trade economy. However, at the end of 1897 with the opening of the railway, the Ngwato wagon monopoly collapsed, which created a dependency on the colonial government for employment. In essence, the reasons for labour migration varied across the regions of the territory but can be assessed as a combination of ecological disasters and taxation, both of which coincided with the railway age. This chapter also humbly adds to Gordon Pirie’s argument that the railway was key in continually replenishing the workforce as Africans in the hundreds of thousands arrived at the mines of South Africa. It also examines the distant and immediate effects of labour migration on family life, and argues that the movement of

61 labour to the south and the backward flow of capital were never balanced, which resulted in the underdevelopment of a labour supplying country.

THE TSWANA PEASANTRY AND THE NEW RAILWAY ECONOMY

To understand the paradigm shift that occurred in most of central, south and eastern

Bechuanaland between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one must first attempt to explain the Tswana economy prior to the railway age. The key points we should keep in mind include: how well established this economy was before the use of rail transportation came to the territory, how the dawn of the railway age changed that, and how the Tswana together with their dikgosi responded to those changes. Neil Parsons has tried to explain that the Ngwato under Khama III (c. 1835 – 1923) had enjoyed substantial profits from wagon trade along the road to the north in the years prior to rail construction.153 He suggests that Khama was able to establish and nurture a notable economy through long and short distance wagon trade that was independent of the colonialists. As explained previously, this wagon route had existed long before and is what connected the Cape to the rest of Southern Africa. Furthermore, not only the Ngwato enjoyed the profits of the wagon monopoly. Parsons states that “three [other] social groups may be mentioned as particularly benefiting from the demand of the Road to the North – the big cattle-owning royals or aristocrats who sold cattle on the hoof (for Kimberley) and for meat and hides, waggoneers such as the Khurutshe, and cultivators like some Kalanga groups [of the

North East].”154 In the same vein, David Massey carries this point forward by suggesting that the Ngwato, who resided along the trade route to the north, had previously prospered

153 Neil Parsons, “The Economic History of Khama’s Country in Botswana, 1884 – 1930,” The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa, ed. Robin Palmer and Neil Parsons, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977), 125. See also Ngwenya, “The Development of Transport Infrastructure,” 84. 154 Parsons, “The Economic History,” 123.

62 in the trade and wagon transport that saw a great influx of Europeans into their area.155 As a result, villages such as Shoshong and Palapye thrived due to traffic of itinerant traders and merchants between 1888 and 1894.156

However, things started to change between 1896 and 1902. There was a rapid decline of the profitable wagon trade, which was largely due to the outbreak of rinderpest, or cattle plague, in most of the Protectorate. This is said to have halted the once booming wagon operation as “hundreds of wagons were abandoned with oxen rotting in their yokes.”157 That which was once familiar for the Ngwato, Kalanga and Khurutshe had now become a distant memory. The outbreak of rinderpest affected Southern Africa. Pule

Phoofolo states that it ravaged Bechuanaland travelling at an astonishing twenty-five miles per day. It also devastated other places including British Bechuanaland, South West

Africa, Lesotho, and South Africa.158

It is therefore impossible to imagine anything gainful coming out of the territory at the time of the plague yet, Parsons claims that this outbreak “gave rise to rampant inflation,”159 which at the end stood to benefit the Ngwato whose leader Khama is said to have sold his remaining cattle to traders at exorbitant prices. He is also believed to have

155 David Massey, “The Development of a Labor Reserve: The Impact of Colonial Rule on Botswana,” Boston University African Studies Center Working Paper (Boston University: 1980), 6. See also Schmitt, Bechuanaland Pioneer and Gunners, 41. 156 Massey, “The Development of a Labour Reserve,” 6. 157 Parsons, “The Economic History,” 126. Several other historians have documented this. See for example Schmitt, Bechuanaland Pioneers and Gunners, 41, Wazha G. Morapedi 158 A few notable studies on the epidemic in the region include Pule Phoofolo, “Epidemics and Revolutions: The Rinderpest Epidemic in Late Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa,” Past and Present, 138, (1993): 112-143; Shillington, The Colonisation of the Southern Tswana, 112-3,203, 209, 230; Pule Phoofolo, “Face to Face with Famine: The BaSotho and the Rinderpest, 1897-1899,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 29, No. 2 (Jun., 2003): 503-527; Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890 – 1923, (Oxford: James Curry Ltd, 1999), 130-131; Nils Ole, Oermann, Mission, Church and State Relations in South West Africa under German Rule, 1884 – 1915, (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999), 84-85; Phuthego Phuthego Molosiwa, “White Man’s Disease, Black Man’s Peril?: Rinderpest and Famine in the eastern Bechuanaland Protectorate at the end of the 19th Century,” New Contree, 71, (December, 2014): 1-24; 159 Parsons, “The Economic History,” 126.

63 replenished some of his livestock from Lewanika, leader of the Barotse (Lozi) people, whom he had befriended a few years prior.160 He adds:

Khama’s country emerged relatively unscathed from the rinderpest. It was spared the locust of the south and the revolts of the north and received better rains than its neighbours in the 1896-7 and 1897-8 seasons: in mid-1898 Phalapye was selling plentiful mealies at 20s per bag of 200lb to buyers from abroad.161

The mere idea that Khama’s economy stood firm after the cattle plague therefore made him a very prominent figure in the eyes of the colonial government and perhaps the entire protectorate. He had established himself as an independent entity and therefore could survive without his people seeking mine labour.162 This resulted in Khama placing a ban on all labour migration from his territory. The mining companies could not recruit labour from his lands until the impact of the railway started to be felt. He only allowed most men, in age regiments, or mephato between 1896 and 1897 to work in the construction of the Mafikeng – Bulawayo railway. The age regiments were traditional military structures that would often perform tasks unrelated to defence or military during the dry seasons. It was also within these structures that Ngwato men were later recruited by the BSA Co to construct the railway line along the road to the north. After that line was completed, those regiments collected firewood for export to Kimberley and to fuel the locomotives themselves.163

Clearly there were environmental issues related to rail development within the territory and Parsons links the rapid causes of deforestation along the Bechuanaland line

160 See for example Gerald L. Caplan, The Elites of Barotseland; A Political History of Zambia’s Western Province, 1878 – 1969, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1970), 40 – 42, and Mutumba Mainga, Bulozi under the Luyana Kings: Political Evolution and State Formation in Pre-Colonial Zambia, 2nd ed. (Lusaka, Bookworld Publishers, 2010), 124 – 5. 161 Parsons, “The Economic History,” 127. 162 Schmitt, Bechuanaland Pioneer and Gunners, 41. Schmitt agrees with Parsons that the effects of the cattle plague rose more than a few eyebrows and the obsession of labour recruiters. Even missionaries in the Protectorate supported the idea of a capitalist economy. 163 Parsons, “The Economic History,” 126.

64 of rail between 1897 and 1904 to the use of wood burning locomotives. “The greatest demand was from the ‘ravenous maw’ of the Kimberley mines and it was rejoiced in

1897 that Khama’s country would not be exhausted of wood for fifteen years.”164 It is therefore clear to see that this set up the foundation for the significant development of the

South African metropolis at the expense of the Protectorate. The building of Kimberley at the expense of Bechuanaland resulted in adverse effects on the environment such as the deterioration of pastures due to soil erosion. Parsons points out that by the end of 1902,

Khama’s country, particularly Old Palapye, was heavily eroded, which led to its abandonment.165

When rail transportation started gaining momentum it replaced the now obsolete wagons and Khama lost control of trade along the route to the north. Although the

Kalanga could still sell their produce along the railway strip, the Khurutshe wagon drivers were cut completely out of the more lucrative north to south route as well. Their only means for wages was ferrying goods and people towards the railway considering that

Khama’s land “covered 130 000 sq. km. and had developed infrastructure of wagon roads.”166 The railway then dealt a heavy blow to Khama’s economy to the point where he was forced to raise his restriction on labour recruitment from his land after 1904.167

“As a result, within a year, 600 Ngwato were recruited through Khama to work on the mines, railways and cantonments of the Transvaal.”168

John Taylor states that the first record of labour migration from Bechuanaland dates back to the Tswana’s earliest contact with white settlers. “As early as 1844,

164 Parsons, “The Economic History,” 129. 165 Parsons, “The Economic History,” 129. 166 Parsons, “The Economic History,” 131. 167 Parsons, “The Economic History,” 131 see also, Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 714. 168 Parsons, “The Economic History,” 131

65

Bakwena, were hired as farm hands by Boer farmers in the western Transvaal and migration to work as labourers, guides and porters in the farms and towns of the Cape

Colony was not uncommon.”169 It is worth mentioning however that the numbers of migrants involved were too insignificant to warrant any sort of documentation. According to Taylor, who cites David Livingstone’s missionary travels and Gary Okihiro’s doctoral work, such migration was not common and only took place during times of drought and famine, “a practice consistent with the Tswana cultural tradition of pereko or food for work.” 170 So from early on, the Tswana were not necessarily exposed to wage employment.

From the beginning of the railway negotiations, Cecil Rhodes had highlighted the efficiency of the railway in moving large numbers of people across the subcontinent. In a letter to Sir Henry Loch, he also reiterated the political, military and commercial advantages of using rail transportation. 171 Rhodes had also convinced the colonial officials that the railway in eastern Bechuanaland would benefit economy of the Tati area, around what is today’s Francistown. He stated that the Tati Company possessed gold reefs which were not being mined because of the lack of transportation.172 From this evidence we can reiterate that Rhodes had always carefully planned for his railway to capitalise on the mineral boom of Southern Africa. His ideas started to take shape as soon

169 John Taylor, “The Reorganization of Mine Labor Recruitment in Southern Africa: Evidence from Botswana,” International Migration Review, Vol. 24, No. 2, Special Issue: Labor Recruiting, Organizations in the Developing World, (Summer, 1990): 251. 170 David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, (London: John Murray 1857) and Gary Okihiro, “Hunters, Herders, Cultivators and Traders: Interaction and Change in the Kalahari, Nineteeth Century,” (PhD diss, University of California, Los Angeles), 1976, both quoted in John Taylor, “The Reorganization of Mine Labor Recruitment in Southern Africa,” 251 - 252. Organizations in the Developing World, (Summer, 1990): 251. 171 BNARS. BNB 427, Correspondence relating to Proposed Railway Extension in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Sir Henry Loch to Lord Knutsford, (September 19, 1891): 1. 172 BNARS. BNB 427, Correspondence relating to Proposed Railway Extension in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Enclosure No. 1, Sir Sidney Shippard to Sir Henry Loch, Cape Town, (September 1891): 3

66 as the railway project in eastern Bechuanaland was completed in 1897. Over the following years his Bechuanaland railway and indeed other Southern African railways would ferry massive numbers of African labourers to and from the South African gold mines. This however should not mislead people into thinking that the railways easily collected people from railway stations and transported them to the mines. From the early stages, a systematic way of acquiring labour involved the chiefs and informal labour recruiters in the various reserves across the territory. Later, recruiting agencies were established and built labour recruiting offices. Gordon Pirie points out that shallow gold mining on the Rand had a slow start therefore the railway was yet to prove its worth which means that labour recruitment in the Protectorate had not yet intensified.173 It is suggested that even though the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) was established in 1901, formalised labour recruitment in the Protectorate did not commence until the incorporation of the Native Recruitment Agency (NRC) in 1912 by the Chamber of Mines.174 Both these labour recruiting agencies were bodies of the Chamber of Mines, which itself was an employers’ association that dealt primarily with consolidating their authority in the Transvaal gold fields.175 By 1912 the Vryburg to Bulawayo railway had been operational for at least fifteen years therefore it was a wise move for the Chamber of

Mines to harness its potential to move massive numbers of African workers. It was also a time when the NRC employed European recruiters who according to Taylor, “provided recruits with cash advances and rail tickets to Mafikeng where formal attestation took

173 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 714 174 John Taylor, “The Reorganization of Mine Labor Recruitment,” 252, see also R. Mansell Prothero, “Foreign Migrant Labour For South Africa,” International Migration Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, International Migration in Tropical Africa, (1974): 385. 175 Jonathan Crush, Alan Jeeves and David Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire; A History of Black Migration to the Gold Mines, (Boulder, Westview Press, 1991), 5.

67 place.” 176 Also, the South African legislation at the time restricted these European recruiters to villages in south-eastern Bechuanaland or what is known as ‘below the 22° south latitude’ but does not clearly state why there was a focus on those areas. He only alludes to the proximity of the diamond-mining town of Kimberley in Griqualand West to those areas of Bechuanaland. It seems that the thinking behind such a recruitment pattern was to create an economic system whereby labour supplying villages were in the margins while Kimberley turned into a diamond-mining metropolis. Such an economic system is what developmental historians such as Walter Rodney and Samir Amin have incessantly associated with the underdevelopment of the labour supplying territories.

Though the migration to Griqualand West was not necessarily distinct from the migration of the Tswana men to the Transvaal gold mines, it should be noted that the acquisition of labour from Bechuanaland for the Kimberley diamond mines predated and was not as intensive as that of gold mining at Witwatersrand. This is perhaps due to the fact that there was more gold to be mined. After all, the Mineral Revolution of South

Africa occurred in phases and had varying impacts across South Africa and the rest of the subcontinent. It began with the early mining of copper in Namaqualand in 1852, which was followed by the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in 1867 and then gold in the

1870s and 1880s.177 The majority of African labour was obviously channelled towards the more profitable resources. It is important to note that at a later stage, following the scattering of the WNLA recruiting offices across the Protectorate, enlistment of labour was not as intense as it was in other places such as Mozambique and the Rhodesias

176 Taylor, “The Reorganization of Mine Labor Recruitment,” 252. See also Schapera, Migrant Labour and Tribal Life, A Study of Conditions in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, (London, Oxford University Press, 1947). 177 Tiyambe Zeleza, A Modern Economic History of Africa, Vol. 1: The Nineteenth Century (Senegal, CODESRIA, 1993), 227.

68 because of its small population. Evidence suggests after the discovery of diamonds at

Kimberley in Griqualand West in the late 1860s, recruitment expedition was put together by the Griqualand administration “to grant assurances of protection for migrants in transit and secure promises of labour supplies from the various Tswana chiefdoms lying between

Kimberley and GaBulawayo.” 178 It was necessary for the recruiters to grant these assurances of protection, and in many ways it guaranteed that the labourers would arrive in the same numbers as they departed from the Protectorate. Pirie explains that desertion was a common occurrence among many men but it was due to two reasons; first, some men would just simply evade the recruiters, and second, some farmers and other employers would seize the labourers as they made their way to the mines.179 To curb this, in what Zeleza refers to as a systematic dejection of African labourers, certain restrictive laws were enacted which essentially increased the companies’ control over the workers.

In the mid-1890s, the pass law in the South African Republic required African workers to carry a document containing his personal and employment information; they could not go anywhere without it.180 It made it impossible for Africans to search for the best paying jobs and as a result, they had to settle for less. This, as Zeleza suggests, represented an attack on the rights of African workers and was systematic because the racist government of South Africa introduced it to help secure good paying jobs for the white mine workers.

To the mining magnates, the railway could be used to secure cheap labour from the

178 Taylor, “The Reorganization of Mine Labor Recruitment,” 252. 179 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 715, see also Zeleza, A Modern Economic History,” 235. 180 Zeleza, A Modern Economic History,” 235. See also Frederick Johnstone, Class, Race and Gold, A Study of Class Relations and Racial Discrimination in South Africa, (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), 24, 35-39. This is one of the most notable works on the issue of systematic segregation of non- whites in South Africa. He suggests that laws such as the Master Servant Law, Native Land Act of 1913 forced non-whites into economic compulsion. See also Andre Proctor, “Class Struggle, Segregation and the City: A History of Sophiatown, 1905-1940,” Labour, Townships and Protest, Studies in the Social History of the Witwatersrand, ed. Belinda Bozzoli, (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1979), 49-89 and John Pampallis, Foundations of New South Africa, (Cape Town, Maskew Miller Longman, 1991).

69 territory without fear of desertion while to the African it resembled a removal of all of their civil liberties and a downturn in their lives.

RAILWAYS POLITICS AND LIMITATIONS

The development of a modern South Africa was always dependent on the exploitation of its mineral wealth. “If large numbers of low wage unskilled migrant miners had not been recruited from throughout the subcontinent there would never have been deep level gold mining in South Africa.”181 The shape of the subcontinent would be different altogether.

In order to recruit these many people, the railway had to play a key role but there were several other factors that hindered the use of this new mode of transportation despite all its benefits. Pirie writes;

Steel and steam did not constitute a handmaiden to the mining industry: the part that trains could play in filling the compounds, mills, stores and stopes with men from remote corners of the subcontinent was neither straightforward nor unlimited. Notwithstanding their awesome power, railways could never mobilise labourers who evaded recruiters and resisted mine work. In addition, there were dimensions and contexts of railway operations, which were even inimical to mobilising cheap, plentiful labour.182

Amongst the many restraints that the railway faced was the lack of harmony between the railway companies and the mining companies. These were at times in conflict with one another resulting in the irregular flow of railway traffic. Nonetheless, both of these had a single objective of making revenue so those disagreements should not have lasted long.

Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman state that the Chamber of Mines controlled most of the proceedings regarding recruitment, so presumably it was a body that settled conflicts

181 Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire; A History of Black Migration to the Gold Mines, (Boulder, Westview Press, 1991), 1. 182 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 715.

70 between companies.183 Another limitation was their locations. Pirie states that a few of the railways in Southern Africa gave a ready access to labour markets. In Bechuanaland for instance, the railway ran only through the east, which greatly curtailed recruitment of labour from other remote areas. Officials in places far away from the railway such as the

Chobe and Ngamiland reserves in the north and northwest of Bechuanaland had to find means of getting the labour to the railway hubs. For instance, in 1905 labour recruiters and traders were at Makalamabedi, a very small village on the edge of Khama’s country attempting to induce Samuel Maherero, leader of the Herero who had just migrated from

German South West Africa.184 These recruits had to be transported from that area towards the east where they would be carried by train to the mines. Perhaps the daunting journey from the village to the railway town is what led some men to evade labour recruiters.

Pirie also adds that “labour did not feature in passenger traffic calculations that were overwhelmed by catering for settlers, government officials, business people and holiday makers; labour was not even a ‘factor of production’ equated with farm, industry and building supplies.”185 This was because the labour was treated as third class citizens with very limited rights.

Further, the line from Vryburg to Bulawayo was completed in 1897, over a decade after the gold mining had started and the railways did not immediately pick miners up. It also took several years for the rest of the railway to reach other places in Southern Africa.

Pirie states that the railway line from Krugersdorp reached Zeerust in 1904. In most cases, the journey between Mafikeng and Krugersdop lasted a painful six days due to the

183 Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire, 3. 184 Gewald, Herero Heroes, 180. 185 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 715.

71 continuing construction on it that lasted until 1912.186 There were gaps between labour supplying places too, which made the railway ineffective in some areas. For instance, the

Umtali to Beira line had been completed by 1898 and two years later, the Salisbury railway line was connected to Umtali, which according to Pirie enabled Mozambican labourers to use that link. It wasn’t until after 1900 that the railway across Bechuanaland was used to its full potential but in the end, it formed part of an enormous railway network that covered a very significant part of the sub-continent. As mentioned before, it was the only rail link between the mines of South Africa and sources of labour such as

Northern and Southern Rhodesia (Zambia and Zimbabwe), Nyasaland (Malawi), and

Mozambique. However, the number of Tswana men employed in the Rand mines between 1903 and 1920 barely made 5000, which amounted to about 3% of the total workforce.187 These numbers were far less than the hundreds of thousands coming from

Mozambique alone.188 Perhaps this was due to the fact that Bechuanaland was scarcely populated, and had no internal roads, which made recruiting a tough job. Table I shows the number of Tswana men employed in the labour districts of the Union of South Africa between 1910 and 1940. After 1920 there is a clear increase resulting from the intensified efforts of the Chamber of Mines to expand its labour pools with migrants from the tropical regions. Earlier, it could not recruit from these areas due to a ban by the South

African government resulting from disastrous rates of mortality of migrants from tropical

186 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 717. 187 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 717, see the migrant labour statistics in Alan H. Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South Africa’s Mining Economy; The Struggle for the Gold Mines’ Labour Supply, 1890 – 1920, (Kingston, McGill-Queens University Press, 1985), 265-70. See also Camilla M. Cockerton, “Less a Barrier, More a Line: The Migration of Bechuanaland Women to South Africa, 1850 – 1930,” Journal of Historical Geography, 22 No. 3, (1996). 188 J.S. Harrington, N.D. McGlashan and E.Z. Chelkowska, “A Century of Migrant Labour in the Mines of South Africa,” The Journal of the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, (March, 2004), http://www.saimm.co.za/Journal/v104n02p065.pdf Accessed on 26 February, 2016. This brief study details the extent of labour migration to the Rand mines from 1896 to 1996.

72 areas.189

Table I: Tswana men employed in the labour districts of the Union of South Africa between 1910 and 1940.190

Year Number Percentage Increase

1910 2266

1920 2578 13.7

1925 3820 48.2

1930 4712 23.4

1935 10314 118.9

1940 18411 78.5

Although it seemed that there was a reciprocal relationship between the mines and the labourers, the scales were not balanced. For instance, the sharp increase of Tswana labourers between 1930 and 1935 indicates that labour migration was the answer to the many economic problems in the territory. But because the table does not reflect the number of Tswana men who returned from the mines it can be assumed that many of them chose either to stay there for longer periods or settle permanently. That leads us to the assumption that labour migration aided in the displacement of many Tswana people.

In the Chamber of Mines, everything was led by whoever had the most capital.

“Monopoly capitalism held sway, and the Chamber of Mines controlled everything. Thus the WNLA and the NRC developed smoothly, almost inevitably as instruments of the

189 Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire, 33 – 34. 190 Schapera, Migrant Labour and Tribal Life, 32. See also BNARS. S. 436/22, Labour Migration, Social, Moral, Economic and other Effects in Bechuanaland Protectorate, (1935- 43).

73 industry’s control of black labour.”191 With time it became relatively easier to recruit people because migration served the interests of more than the workers. The chiefs for instance, Khama III of the Ngwato, Sebele I of the Bakwena, as well as Maherero of the

Herero in Bechuanaland were all induced at some point to supply labour to the mines. For

Khama and Sebele, it was their role as tax collectors that drove them to encourage many of their subjects to join the capital class and earn wages. This meant that the more men enrolled, the more revenue for the colonial government and more commissions for them.192 “Very often, it was the regional governments, African chiefs, and local recruiting interests rather than the Chamber of Mines which determined the way black labour was mobilised and used at the Rand.” 193 Knowing the benefits of wage labour, “fathers contracted their children; chiefs their followers; traders their indebted customers.” 194

Throughout the subcontinent, colonial governments ended up supporting the mining industry. Jeeves adds:

Hoping to secure for their territories a share of the bonanza by delivering contract labour to the mines … in doing much to promote labour migration to the Rand from Basutoland (Lesotho) and Bechuanaland from the turn of the century, the British administrations there worked not primarily to promote the interests of the mining industry, but rather to serve their own desperate need for revenue.195

Even then, the scale of recruitment from Bechuanaland reserves was small, which meant that the flow of capital back home was also minimal and led to very few socio- economic improvements of Tswana life. At most, the only development that occurred from wages of mine labour was largely sporadic and at an individual level.

191 Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South Africa’s Mining Economy, 6. 192 Makgala, “Taxation in the Tribal Areas,” 282. 193 Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South Africa’s Mining Economy, 5. 194 Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire, 5. 195 Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South Africa’s Mining Economy, 4.

74

THE JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN AND MIGRANT LIFE AT ‘eGOLI’

Placing different migrants within the socio-economically contested environment of South

Africa was of course a ticking time bomb. The mining corporations did not care much about the living conditions of the workers nor did they care about their wages. Their main concern was to maximise profits and at the heart of that was the railway. As mentioned earlier, its availability made it easy for the mines to replenish workers and access the most remote migrant pools. It “offered a reliable and speedy way of taking migrants to eGoli, or Johannesburg returning them home when their contracts terminated, and replenishing the temporary mine workforce consistently.”196 This means that they were simply tools in the eyes of their employers. Despite the fact that the development of gold mining in

Witwatersrand symbolised an achievement of high-level “ore-extraction, technology, corporate organisation and financial arrangements, by contrast, the industry’s management of its workers, for most of its history, was characterised not only by a lack of compassion but by gross inefficiency and wastefulness.”197

The ill treatment of African labourers epitomised an inescapable, prejudiced and draconian society. It soon “became the industry’s most notorious feature”198 with the exploitation of black labour being assured by the racial division of South Africa. Gordon

Pirie had suggested that future works on labour migration need to focus on the importance of the journey by rail on the migrant worker; a probe beyond the mechanical role of the railway in ferrying workers. He states that the migrant workers were “often treated as animals, or worse, as pieces of cargo, but they were not unconscious. Before the abominable conditions began to improve in the 1920s, the trek in overcrowded and badly

196 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 714 197 Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire, 3. 198 Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South Africa’s Mining Economy, 5.

75 equipped cattle cars was not just anaesthetised relocation; at the very least it was enervating and disillusioning.”199 He suggests that life for the migrant worker began to change as soon as he entered the rail car. In moving between the periphery and the metropole, “men changed more than just their address”200 but the lack of oral evidence heavily curtails what we can say exactly about the psychological effects of migration on the labourer. Pirie adds:

The notion that migrancy was a masculine rite of passage holds true irrespective of how migrants actually went to the mines. The particular social experience of a train journey is a supplementary issue. In the absence of oral testimonies, one can only speculate that the depersonalisation with which railway ticketing was universally associated was exaggerated in batch-register transport. More particularly, the possibility exists that the appointment of gang leaders for the Rand rail journey initiated social stratification among mine workers, and that crowded railway wagons were the incubators of new social and gender identities.201

Labour migration did not occur because of the excitement of moving to a new place to find wages. It happened because the Tswana had very few options. Rinderpest had wiped out their livelihood, the colonial government had imposed annual taxes and levies, crops had been failing for years in some parts of the Protectorate, and for that they had nowhere else to turn but pursue wage employment in the Rand mines.202 Labour migration was not a last resort for Africans, it was the only option. Though Nyasaland’s agrarian economy had been relatively good, it was a very small but densely populated country. 203 In

Southern Rhodesia and Bechuanaland, many Africans were thrown into unfertile reserves where the rains hardly came and crops failed. Many of them had very little left, and had to turn to the pursuit of wage labour.

199 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 729. 200 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 729. 201 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 729. 202 Mogalakwe, “How Britain Underdeveloped Bechuanaland Protectorate,” 75 – 79. 203 Kenneth Good, “The Direction of Agricultural Development in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi,” Studies in the Economic History of Southern Africa, Volume One; The Frontline States, eds. Zbigniew A. Konczacki, Jane L. Parpart and Timothy M. Shaw, (London, Frank Cass, 1990), 149.

76

The African migrant labourer was portrayed as a “raw but willing peasant, attracted by city lights, eager to prove himself, save enough money to acquire cattle and land, and, on his return, marry and start a family.”204 Although most men would have had this wish, it was hardly the reality for them. All the excitement and anticipation of a new and bright life was wiped out as soon as they reached the trains and realised what sort of transportation had been waiting for them. The overcrowded cattle cars they travelled in would have presented a grim and gloomy sight of what lay ahead. In these fourth class coaches, it was lamented that men had to stand for long hours and suffer indignity. This led to lewd and undesirable behaviour resulting from drunkenness, which most men often turned to in order to numb the pain of the journey.205 Furthermore, Jonathan Crush, Alan

Jeeves and David Yudelman state, “this view concealed a darker reality of dispossession, social dislocation, disease and death.” 206 It promised dreams but instead delivered nightmares to the families left behind. Many of these men were trying to escape hunger and famine in the reserves but only followed a path into an unappealing setting, the most treacherous living conditions, immense health risks both in the mines and at the townships and even imminent death. This, in many ways, damaged the moral fibre of the

Tswana society. “Young men frequently left the rural homestead to escape dependency relationships with their elders … migrancy’s varied causes and ambiguous impacts help explain why so many of them were unrecruited ‘voluntaries’ who made their own way to

204 Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire, 3. 205 BNARS. S. 535/4, Accommodation on trains for Africans, “Minutes of the Joint Advisory Council held in Mafikeng, (May 1953). In the prior years, some of the trains operated only fourth-class coaches across the territory. Some migrants had earlier complained that they were being transported in coaches that they had not paid for and it seems that the South African and Rhodesia Railway Companies ignored that. At this meeting, Kgosi Bathoen II of Bangwaketse had asked that the colonial government provide special coaches with necessary accommodations for the labour recruits. 206 Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire, 3. See also Schapera, Migrant Labour and Tribal Life, 80.

77 the mines.”207 After a while, the new recruits would have learned of the perils at the mines from those that returned. This did not reduce the number of recruitments in any way so we can assume that most men who went to work in the later years were making rational decisions based on situations in the reserves.

Pirie adds that the shared spaces and anxiety on the trains are what began the idea of worker bonding and solidarity across all migrants irrespective of origin. In his attempt to give insight on the personal and social effects of rail transportations, he asks a few key questions:

Was it perhaps that the switch from slow walking to speedy trains diluted social coherence and delivered a relatively divided and more pliant workforce to the Rand mineshafts? Was it on trains that the characteristic regimentation and social control of mine life and work became second nature? In all probability the sociology of railway travel meant that migrants' first encounter with the industrialised world was telling despite its brevity.208

By 1910, more than 200,000 unskilled workers were carried yearly by rail to the mines of

Witwatersrand.209 They landed in a place where a strict Colour Bar had to be maintained.

In the realm of statistics, which we cannot escape when dealing with numbers of people carried by rail, about 600,000 train journeys would have been made yearly by the African labourers. “Official railway statistics are that an annual average of 638,000 Africans were transported ‘in batches’ or ‘by goods trains’ between 1911 and 1920; for the period 1921-

1930 the figure is 708,000.”210 Pirie states that rail transportation was inexpensive and easily accessible by most migrants. He argues that with its continued access of distant labour pools from as far as Angola, Katanga (southern Congo), Nyasaland (Malawi) and even southern parts of Tanganyika (Tanzania), it is therefore tough to imagine these pools

207 Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire, 3. 208 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 729. 209 Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South Africa’s Mining Economy, 3. 210 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 728. Here Pirie cites the South Africa (Union), Annual Reports of the General Manager of Railways and Harbours, Statistical Appendices.

78 being exhausted entirely “and sustained by weary men filing along footpaths in the veld.

Animal-propelled carting would have been seasonal, slow and too limited in capacity.”211

On that note, rail transport had to be inexpensive. Though I do not disagree with Pirie’s focus on the importance of rail transportation in the region, I differ with the notion that it was inexpensive. In the first instance, there was a gap of control between the railway companies that operated the different rail lines across the subcontinent, which means that there were different railway tariffs. Even Pirie agrees, “the special rates at which migrant miners were transported varied from one administration to another and were altered periodically.”212 He also mentions that the dynamics of negotiating the right carrying capacity, frequency and schedules for the trains was a complicated task because of these carriers, which often operated within their inherent national interests.213 For instance,

South Africa and perhaps Southern Rhodesia were likely to be more racially segregated, which would have affected their railway policies. Adding to that, other carriers such as the Bechuanaland Railways worked within a very small population and there were no large-scale economic practices except trade of certain commodities so in order to make profits, they had to hike their tariffs.214 That being said, we should not suggest that railways provided inexpensive transport. Secondly, it is well known that the migrant labourers received very minimal wages, which meant that expenses such as travel exhausted most of their funds. For instance, between 1910 and 1919, an African mine

211 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 728 212 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 723; see also Yonah N. Seleti, “The Development of Dependent Capitalism in Portuguese Africa,” Studies in the Economic History of Southern Africa, Volume One; The Frontline States, eds. Zbigniew A. Konczacki, Jane L. Parpart and Timothy M. Shaw, (London, Frank Cass, 1990), 40. 213 BNARS. S. 123/1 Railway Control Legislation, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, (1926-1929), see also BNARS. S. 302/8 Railway Legislation, (1932), and Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 721-22 214 BNARS. S. 535/4, Accommodation on trains for Africans, “Minutes of the Joint Advisory Council held in Mafikeng, (May 1953).

79 labourer made on average 23.4 pence per shift.215 A report by Leonard Barnes in 1933 stated that in order to maintain a reasonable economy, the Bechuanaland colonial administration required close to £170 000 a year from labour abroad. On average, a mine worker earned £14 a year, a third of which was used on travel fees while some of it was used on personal and living expenses. 216 Travel for the average Tswana man was therefore expensive based on the wages they earned. At times, some of the migrant workers did not even receive payments, which means that they were left with very little money to send back home, which made a small difference in the homestead. It also meant that a lot of them failed to return home because of expensive travel.217

In an economic system where the core or metropolis became developed at the expense of the periphery or villages that supplied labour, there was bound to be inadequate diffusion of capital. As Walter Rodney has pointed out, “the kind of relationship which Africa has had with Europe from the very beginning has worked in a direction opposite to integration of local economies.”218 The workings of this economic structure made sure that many of the Africans were deprived of everything including the little wages they had earned. This is what would result in the eventual underdevelopment of many of the labour supplying countries such as Bechuanaland.

eGoli, or at the place of gold, the miners had very little liberties and they were only to provide unskilled labour because the society they found themselves in could not allow any sort of growth for Africans. The South African Colour Bar or the Mines and

215 Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South Africa’s Mining Economy, 122. 216 Leonard Barnes, “The Crisis in Bechuanaland,” The Journal of the Royal African Society, 32, No. 129, (Oct. 1933): 344 – 345. 217 BNARS. S. 436/22, Labour Migration, Social, Moral, Economic and other Effects in Bechuanaland Protectorate, (1935- 43). See also Schapera, Migrant Labour and Tribal Life, 61. 218 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped, 109.

80

Works Act of 1911, was a legislation that helped protect the labour interests of white mine workers.219 Though it had very little to do with the essence of rail transportation, it was a complementary element of migrant labour and continued to haunt African workers for a very long time. Marginalised at the workplace and everywhere else, the black miners started to rekindle the solidarity they had established in the trains. They began to identify themselves as separate from a system that protected white mine workers. “Although largely rightless and unorganised, black miners resisted with a long series of strikes, work stoppages, go-slows (work slowdowns), and riots that showed they were far from passive or oblivious to the erosion of their position.”220 For Walter Rodney, “the notions of revolution and class consciousness must be borne in mind when it comes to examining the situation of the modern worker and peasant classes in Africa.”221 Rightly so, the

African labourers became frustrated and took to the streets222 but in most cases, this fell on deaf ears mainly because the rail network built originally by Cecil Rhodes allowed the workers to be easily replaced. With very few options and a system that worked against them, the African labourers had to concede defeat and continue working in a crooked system

Apart from the dreadful living conditions, there were numerous health issues connected with working in the mining environment. The railways of Southern Africa were instrumental in carrying diseases back to the homesteads. Charles van Onselen’s

219 Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire, 7. 220 Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire, 7. 221 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 8. 222 Philip Bonner, “The Black Mineworkers’ Strike,” in Labour, Townships and Protest, Studies in the Social History of the Witwatersrand, ed. Belinda Bozzoli, (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1979), 273 – 297. It is important to note that the white mine workers protested even more about the perceived advancement of Africans. In 1922 white mine workers rose up in arms against their employers and the state. This was the outcome of fears of black consciousness in the mines. See a very good study of this by Jeremy Krikler, White Rising, The 1922 Racial Killing and Insurrection in South Africa, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).

81 two-volume work, Studies in the Social History of the Witwatersrand has documented some of the negative impacts of rail development in Southern Africa, in particular, the rise of prostitution in the late 19th century. From as early as 1896 Witwatersrand attracted prostitutes from as far as Germany, Belgium and New York.223 This encouraged the spread of sexually transmitted diseases within the townships of Johannesburg that were later carried by rail across the borders back to the homesteads.

Pneumonia was also a cause for great concern in the mines. In 1913, the South

African government imposed a ban on the recruitment of workers from tropical areas or north of 22° south latitude because it was the main cause of their mortality.224 Other health issues included tuberculosis, miners’ phthisis or silicosis caused by prolonged exposure to rock dust. To the Africans, these were major killers.225 Morapedi’s work has clearly documented the severity of these diseases in Bechuanaland after the opening of recruitment from areas above the 22° south latitude in 1933:

In 1934, there were 348 cases of tuberculosis and this was viewed as a ‘very disturbing state of affairs’. In 1935, Resident Commissioner Charles Rey warned that ‘there is a risk of the Protectorate becoming a hot-bed of the disease if preventative measures are not taken’ In the first five months of 1940, 1,446 new cases of tubercular infection were reported, while in 1956 there were 1,673 new cases. By 1959, the number of new cases was reported to have gone up by 148 per cent over the 1956 figure.226

Certainly, the railway facilitated the spread of tuberculosis in the Protectorate. In cases where death was the ultimate result, the railways were used to repatriate bodies of the deceased and became, to those at home, a symbol of abhorrence and death. The legendary

223 Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social History of the Witwatersrand, Volume One, New Babylon, (New York, Longman Group, 1982), 16-17. See also Schapera, Migrant Labour and Tribal Life, 174-175. 224 Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire, 10. 225 Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire, 41. 226 Wazha Morapedi, “Migrant Labour and the Peasantry in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1930 – 1965”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 25 No. 2, (1999): 212. He also cites a note from the Resident Commissioner, Charles Rey BNARS S. 438/2/1, Note from the Resident Commissioner’s Office, 18 June 1934.

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South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela, in a song called Stimela narrates a haunting yet captivating verse concerning the symbolism of hatred and loathing attached to the train by those who had gone to seek employment in the Rand. Many had left in search of a better life but returned with nothing, some never returned at all while for some, they returned in coffins. The trains were at the heart of this social displacement of people and this symbolism resonated in the minds of those who lost loved ones much like the noise made by the steam engine. Railways as the carriers of civilisation brought to many people dreadful consequences. Pirie accurately likens the noisy and disorderly passage by train to the mines to an inorganic and dangerous underground where most workers spent the rest of their lives. For the women remaining at home, it was the beginning of a new life.227

TSWANA WOMEN WITHIN A MIGRANT SOCIETY

The effects of labour migration on societies of the subcontinent have been well documented by a number of historians. The focus has been on the removal of able-bodied men from traditional life. The report by Barnes stated early on that migrant life ruptured the very nature of traditional life. It affected the moral structure of an individual while ripping open the conventional way of life.228 In the patriarchal society of Bechuanaland, it was well known for the men to do as much as they could in providing for the homestead even though it means that women were automatically subordinates of their spouses.229

Traditionally, the men tended to the cattle while women cultivated crops and at the end, both provided sustenance for the family. When male labour migration became the trend

227 Pirie, “Railways and Labour Migration,” 729. 228 Barnes, “The Crisis in Bechuanaland,” 345. 229 Throughout history, Tswana women had a very limited social role which was cemented by the patriarchal restrictions of society. Traditionally and legally, the status of women in Bechuanaland was very minimal and centred around their subordination to men. See Lily Mafela, “Botswana Women and Law. Society, Education and Migration, (c. 1840 – c.1980), Cahiers d'Études Africaines 47, Cahier 187/188, Les femmes, le droit et lajustice (2007): 523-566.

83 among the Tswana, the burden of agriculture was thrown onto the hands of the women, children and the elderly.230 This is by no means the only problem that befell the territory resulting from migration. Colin Murray has reiterated this point and stated that the lengthy absence of spouses and fathers was linked to the increased rates of “conjugal breakdown and desertion; it induced a repetitive cycle of illegitimacy and instability in arrangements for rearing children.” 231 He also mentions that the earning capacity of returning young men disrupted the authority of the elders as they now wielded some monetary power. They forgot their cultural definitions and identities as they learned new ones at the mines. They even developed Fanakalo/Fanagalo, a pidgin used for everyday communication. In essence, labour migration according to Murray drove deeper the wedge between traditional and modern principles of social life in Bechuanaland.232

Barbara Brown’s work on The Impact of Male Labour Migration on Women in

Botswana has noted that labour migration greatly reduced the numbers of marriages. She highlights Isaac Schapera’s work, which suggests that in the 1920s Tswana people married when they were very young. Spouses were selected for the children at an even earlier age during pre-colonial times. Though it is not within the scope of this thesis,

Brown states that by 1970 this had changed dramatically due to migration of men to the

Rand.233 Isaac Schapera also suggests that Tswana women, as a response to the migration of their spouses became liberated from the bonds of marriage. He suggests that after

1918, or the end of First World War, many women opted to leave the harsh situations in

230 Ruth First, “The Gold of Migrant Labour”, Review of African Political Economy, (1982): 15. 231 Colin Murray, “Migrant Labour and the Changing Family Structure in the Rural Periphery of Southern Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 6, No. 2, (1980): 140. 232 Murray, “Migrant Labour and the Changing,” 140. 233 Barbara Brown, “The Impact of Male Labour Migration on Women in Botswana,” African Affairs 82, No. 328, (1983): 371. see also Isaac Schapera, Married Life in an African Tribe, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 38, 62

84 the reserves though “the chiefs prohibited women from leaving the ‘reserve’ by rail”234 without their permission. This means that since most of the labour recruiting happened through them, from early on, the chiefs had control over who could access rail transportation. It also means that the migration of women is more likely to have happened independently unlike the men who were recruited. It was in the interests of the chiefs for the women to remain behind because the livelihood of the society now remained in the hands of the women. Their departure would have meant a total disruption of traditional life. Perhaps that is why some chiefs such as Linchwe of Bakgalta had rejected rail development in the first place. Nevertheless, the urge to provide for their children and the low productivity from arable agriculture is what eventually drove some rural women from the reserves. Defying orders “some women left anyway, sometimes sneaking away with a female friend to go to Johannesburg to see the life there and look for work.”235 The railway then was important in the migration of women to the Rand.

A study by Camilla Cockerton mentions the substantial number of women who had migrated from the villages along the south-eastern part of the Protectorate including

Lobatse and Barolong farms.236 This reinforces both Schapera and Brown’s assertions that indeed there was a sizeable presence of Tswana women employed as domestic workers in South Africa and the Rand in particular. Cockerton also indicates that these women had started migrating earlier to the Kimberley diamond mines, which sometimes was a response to the absence of their spouses. She adds:

This movement augmented the network of Tswana women’s migration streams. African

234 Schapera, Migrant Labour and Tribal Life, (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 90, see also Brown, “The Impact of Male Labour Migration,” 384. 235 Brown, “The Impact of Male Labour Migration,” 385. She cites a personal interview with one informant who had snuck and travelled by train to Johannesburg in search of labour. 236 Camilla M. Cockerton, “Less a Barrier, More a Line: The Migration of Bechuanaland Women to South Africa, 1850 – 1930,” Journal of Historical Geography, 22 No. 3, (1996): 296.

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women’s movement to South African mines was small, perhaps a few women accompanying husbands and a few early “runaways”. Throughout Africa where industries or mines were set up, women appeared to seek jobs, often outnumbering the male job- seekers in the early years of industrialization.237

Cockerton adds that between 1911 and 1921, the recorded number of Tswana women in

South Africa had increased by 2536.238 She argues that most of these women crossed the border by foot or by ox-drawn wagons and completely ignored that the railway was at that time available to transport people between borders.239 There is no other plausible way of explaining the mode of transportation used by these women except rail. It is a very substantial number considering that the numbers of Tswana men in the mines between

1903 and 1920 barely made 5000. Table II shows the number of adult females absent from home by 1943 according to Schapera.240

Table II – Numbers of Adult Females Absent from Home by 1943.

Ethnic Numbers in Sample Estimated Totals group Number of Number away % Women Number away women Ngwato 1332 36 2.7 33 300 900 Kwena 529 19 3.6 10 300 370 Ngwaketse 737 56 7.6 9 000 685 Tlokwa 520 55 10.6 590 60 Malete 475 71 14.9 2 450 365 Kgatla 833 106 12.7 5 500 700 Totals 4426 343 61 140 3 080

237 Cockerton, “Less a Barrier, More a Line,” 296. 238 Cockerton, “Less a Barrier, More a Line,” 292. 239 Cockerton, “Less a Barrier, More a Line,” 293. 240 Schapera, Migrant Labour and Tribal Life, 65. He also stated that a majority of these women went to seek employment in the Rand and Western Transvaal while a select few went elsewhere in the Union of South Africa.

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Though I do not necessarily refute Cockerton’s assertions regarding these movements, it is difficult to imagine alternative ways of travel apart from the railway. Another thing to point out is that these numbers reflect the absentee women from the groups of people that lived in the eastern side of the country where rail transport was easily accessible. It is important to reiterate that Bechuanaland had just emerged from a cattle plague that almost wiped out the entire cattle herds, which would have made ox-drawn transport difficult.

The areas she focuses on, Borolong, Lobatse and Gangwaketse and Kgatleng were among the most severely stricken. Lewis Mtonga added that Chief Sibele [Sebele] of the

Bakwena lost all but seventy-seven head of cattle from a herd of ten thousand.241 It has also been demonstrated that the Ngwato wagon trade was severely paralysed by the arrival of rail transportation as well as rinderpest to some extent. Ox-drawn transport would have been very minimal at that time leaving rail transportation as the plausible explanation for the migration of women.242

Cockerton also disregards the significance of the Vryburg to Bulawayo railway line when she mentions the presence of Tswana school going girls at Tiger Kloof after

1919. Though less significant to the migration of women to the Rand, it is worth mentioning that school-going girls at Tiger Kloof used this colonial railway line. Tiger

Kloof was an institution of higher learning located in South Africa where a large number of Tswana students, including females, learned various trades. In its establishment by the

241 Lewis Mtonga, “A Southern African Society under Stress: The Southern Tswana in the Rinderpest Pandemic of 1896-1897,” Communities at the Margins; Studies in Rural Society and Migration in Southern Africa, 1890 – 1980, eds. Alan Jeeves and Owen J. Kalinga, (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2002), 28. 242 BNARS. S. 535/4, Accommodation on trains for Africans, “Minutes of the Joint Advisory Council held in Mafikeng, (May 1953). At this meeting, it was stated that African women who frequently travelled at night with children required better accommodation on these trains. The available archival evidence suggests that indeed some women employed rail transportation to travel between Francistown and Mafikeng.

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London Missionary Society, the railway was said to be of key significance.243 The school was built in such a way that the railway line passed right through.

Apart from responding to hunger in the reserves, some women migrated to the mines under orders of their spouses. Prolonged separation and perhaps the lack of conjugal liberties or isolation led the men to ‘order’ their wives to migrate to the mines.

Cockerton adds:

Most of the early female Tswana migrants to South Africa in the early-twentieth century were married women. They rarely migrated alone to South Africa unless their husbands were already there. As Motlapele Tabane explained, “Those married women who went that side it was because their husband called them. They had to obey their husband.” Married women also accompanied or followed their husbands to South Africa’s urban areas. Most of the early female migrants were married and probably fell into this category. These wives “called” to particular towns and farms by their husbands formed another migration stream.244

That being said, some women who migrated to South Africa during the years of labour migration were responding to their husbands’ requests. Perhaps because the miners earned very little wages, they could not afford to travel back and forth so they asked their women to join them and perhaps settle in the Rand permanently. However, authorities at the Rand and the entire South Africa did not want the creation of an urban black working class. They made life difficult for them and wanted to keep the men away from their families.245 The railways made this position even stronger by keeping the husbands away at work. While this resulted in dislocation of the Tswana society, it added to the

243 Part Mgadla, “The Relevance of Tiger Kloof to Bangwato, 1904 – 1916,” Pula Botswana Journal of African Studies, 8 No. 1, (1994): 33. 244 Cockerton, “Less a Barrier, More a Line,” 299. 245 See for example, John Pampallis, Foundations of New South Africa, 202-203; Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social History of the Witwatersrand, 5 and Kelwyn Sole “Class, Continuity and Change in Black South African Literature, 1948 – 1960, in Labour, Townships and Protest, Studies in the Social History of the Witwatersrand, ed. Belinda Bozzoli, (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1979), 143-182.

88 population of South Africa. The intention of this economic system was after all geared towards improving the metropolis at the expense of the periphery such as Bechuanaland.

In the end, the most pertinent question to ask is why there was migrant labour in the first place because South Africa had a large number of blacks that could have been employed in the mines themselves. Why was it necessary for the railways to bring in other Africans in those massive numbers? Zeleza has addressed that question by stating that “South Africans were generally reluctant to work in the mines. For many of them it was work of last resort. This is one reason why the Chamber [of mines] turned its attention to neighbouring countries.”246 It seems that the Chamber of Mines had struggled to compete with private recruiters within South Africa so it had to focus on recruiting from neighbouring countries. Another reason, as explained earlier, was that the railways had been laid across the subcontinent, and labour was relatively cheaper to acquire.247

Though it might not have been Rhodes’s initial intention, his Southern African rail network made it seem like the mine economy of South Africa had deliberately created reservoirs for labour in different countries of the subcontinent. Poor places such as

Nyasaland and Mozambique certainly became mainly labour pools due to their abject poverty. Foreign labour was cheaper and more vulnerable and open to whatever opportunities even though they almost guaranteed hardships and misfortunes for the labourers.

246 Zeleza, A Modern Economic History of Africa, 237. 247 Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South Africa’s Mining Economy, 57.

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CONCLUSION

Though the railways across the subcontinent were built for economic reasons, there were numerous unforeseen consequences. The migration of labour across most of Southern

Africa formed a key part of Rhodes’s master plan, which was to maximise capital for his company and improve his position in the eyes of the colonial government. All of a sudden, his credibility and reputation grew. It has been demonstrated that the railways were indeed vital in the migration of not only African male mine workers but women as well who mostly followed their spouses. Migration from Bechuanaland occurred not because of a single reason but because of a sequence of occurrences including ecological disasters and the imposition of taxes and levies. However, this chapter highlighted the fundamental function of the railway in moving people from the few reserves to the mines.

Despite the fact that the railway was limited by its location in the east of the territory, it still managed to move massive numbers of people from Bechuanaland and elsewhere. It should also be noted that in the migrant economy, there was never a focus on developing labour supplying areas such as Bechuanaland. This point shall be reiterated throughout the thesis! The railways were never meant to serve the common people in any way. They disrupted the Tswana economy in some ways and also contributed significantly to the separation of families.

Pirie has lamented the haphazard manner in which railways were used and stated that they would have been better effective in a narrower economy. That was never the objective! They were never built for the development of nations. They were instead tailored for the extraction of resources. Not all was negative however; the railways did introduce an efficient way of transport, which provided better means for trade. Though this demonstrated a notable adaptation of rail transportation, the fact that the line was

90 privately owned reinforced disparities among the people. It shall be demonstrated in the following chapter that the Tswana for instance were almost always marginalized and would hardly be allowed to conduct trade around railways. The large-scale employment of foreigners in the mines meant that the subcontinent was dependent on the South

African economy.

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CHAPTER 4 – THE TRACKS OF MODERNITY AND CULTURAL NUANCES

Introduction

This chapter grapples with the diverse social aspects of railway development in colonial

Botswana, which includes the migration of people towards rail resources, the formation of new settlements as well as the expansion of old ones. With the introduction of rail transportation to Bechuanaland, significant changes to the traditional socio-economic practices of the indigenous people resulted. While there were many benefits to adopting rail transport for economic practices such as trade, many people were often barred in one way or another by the colonial government from using it. This chapter argues that the expansion of certain settlements was due to the direct and indirect influence of rail development. In trying to describe the causes of economic underdevelopment in eastern

Bechuanaland, this chapter attributes the failure of various schemes introduced by the colonial government to the way they were tailored for the European settler elites and not the African farming communities that settled along the railway. There were a few notable but minor attempts between the early 1930s and late 1940s aimed at improving the way of life of the Africans that eventually failed due to the uneven manner in which they were implemented resulting in African underdevelopment. It concludes with the argument that the colonial government deliberately structured the dairy industry and other social programmes of Bechuanaland in a biased manner, which led to their eventual demise a few years after being implemented.

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NEW RAILWAY HUBS AND THE RISE OF A CAPITALIST SOCIETY

Paul Baran once wrote, “For it is not railways, roads, and power stations that give rise to industrial capitalism: it is the emergence of industrial capitalism that leads to the building of railways, to the construction of roads, and to the establishment of power stations.”248

This means that in order for infrastructure to be established in an area, there must be an industry stimulating that development and not the other way around. In other words, for

Bechuanaland, which had no known mineral wealth during colonial times, the incentive to develop and build towns did not exist. It is for this reason that we see the railway cutting straight across the eastern side of the country. The incentive for the colonial government and the railway companies was the emergence of industrial capitalism in the mines of South Africa and the acquisition of cheap labour in the interior. No major towns, power stations or any significant infrastructure developments could be made in

Bechuanaland. As explained before, the purpose of the territory was to serve as a passage and nothing more. However, the pace and brunt of industrialisation in South Africa somehow stimulated the growth of a few places in eastern Bechuanaland. It would be unwise to assume that the emergence and expansion of modern settlements, villages and towns in the east were not reliant upon the railway. Certainly, the growth of modernity and civilisation in some of these places occurred without much influence from the colonial government, but they needed the railway to do so. There were no town plans, nor were there grand schemes to introduce a local capitalist class into these places. This however, does not mean that the people could not do it themselves. In most cases, the emergence of capitalism in villages such as Mahalapye, Francistown and Lobatse happened because the common people saw its necessity.

248 Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), 193.

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Haskins Bulawa states that one of his informants asserted that some of the major towns such as Palapye, Mahalapye, Mochudi, Tonota, Lobatse, Francistown and

Gaborone were not in existence or very small before railway construction.249 I agree with some of what Bulawa suggests; however, it needs to be noted that before the railway was constructed, the trade route to the interior of Africa from the Cape lay along the same path. Another thing to keep in mind is the fact that during the railway negotiations, places like Palapye, Mochudi and Mahalapye were mentioned therefore acknowledging their existence prior to construction. The now deserted settlement, Old Palapye and the later

Iron Age settlement of Toutswemogala for instance, predate the railway therefore it would be unwise to suggest that these places did not exist completely. Present day

Palapye is not where Old Palapye was. The settlement is believed to have moved west towards the railway sometime after 1902.250

The railway did attract people of different colours, creeds and identities to settle nearby, which broke the conventional settlement patterns. Many communities of

Bechuanaland only migrated towards the railway to seize the opportunity to use it for trade and by doing so it simultaneously changed their way life. Most of the communities of colonial Botswana prior to their relocation had lived largely sedentary lives and engaged in short distance trade with other groups within the region.251 Even though smaller settlements mushroomed along the railway, they never turned into permanent villages because people were attracted to major villages or railway hubs such as Palapye and Lobatse. For instance, small settlements such as Sese in the early 1900s were only

249 Haskins Bulawa, “The Political, Economic and Social Impact of the Railway on Botswana, 1895 – 1970” (BA diss, University of Botswana, 1985), 13. 250 Alec Campbell, “Khama III, Missionaries and Old Palapye Church Building”, Botswana Notes and Records Vol. 40 (2008): 172. 251 Stefan Goodwin, Africa’s Legacies of Urbanization: Unfolding Saga of a Continent, (New York: Lexington Books, 2006), 222,226.

94 temporary and existed to serve as railway sidings but soon became deserted because people or moved towards these larger railway hubs. As the traditional socio-economic practices declined, new identities and improved methods of raising capital wealth were introduced to Bechuanaland.

THE SOUTH ASIAN TRADERS OF BECHUANALAND

The history of South Asians or Indians in Bechuanaland has not been given much attention by historians though it forms an integral part of the British imperial history of

Southern Africa. Also, the historical development of South Asian enterprise within the protectorate is unique and noteworthy for several reasons. Firstly, I argue that it was the

South Asian diaspora that introduced modern forms of enterprise to what is now

Botswana. Their business acumen and ingenuity were arguably very influential to the introduction and development of trade in the territory. Secondly, they managed to harness the negative and often ambivalent attitudes from the colonial government and establish a firm affinity with locals. This, as a result, is what led to the success of their businesses. A third but not final aspect relates to the fact that they came from different parts of British

Colonial India where rail transportation had probably been employed for various socio- economic facets of their lives. In this case, their migration into the protectorate was directly linked to the availability of the railway in eastern Bechuanaland. They were amongst the first people to migrate into the protectorate but life for them would not be easy. Arellano-Lopez’s doctoral work documents numerous hurdles and loops they had to overcome in their attempt to establish themselves in early Bechuanaland. She states that the South Asians of Bechuanaland were part of the South Asian community of traders

95 who had arrived earlier in South Africa as “free passengers” unlike the indentured labourers from various places:

Although, it is possible to affirm that the first [South] Asian settles who arrived in the Protectorate were “free passengers,” there are no historical records that can document certainly their birthplace. When indentured labourers and free passengers arrived to South Africa, for the British colonial administration as well for the South African white population, they had the legal identity of a homogenous immigrant group, but they were in fact religiously and culturally heterogeneous. They included Hindus of different sects, Muslims, mainly Sunni, and Christians most of whom were Catholic.252

She goes further to explain that there were differences amongst these South Asians but they were often looked at as a collective by the Cape government. It appears that they came from the different Indian castes and amongst them were the Sudra, who were mostly artisans and labourers, Vaisya or merchants, Kshatriya who were mostly military or government officers and Brahmins who were elites.253 Perhaps it was the lack of interest or plain ignorance of the colonial government that led to the lack of knowledge and proper documentation regarding their places of origin and socio-cultural backgrounds. This is what Bala Pillay’s 1976 work had decried about the Indians of the

Transvaal and perhaps the entire South Africa. Pillay locates their arrival into the South

African Republic or the Transvaal around the early 1880s as an extension of the South

Asians who had established businesses in the Cape and Natal.254 Goolam Vahed agrees with Arellano-Lopez that the title Gujaratis, which has been used synonymously with traders and free passengers in the literature of South Asians in South Africa, does not correspond to a homogenous community. He suggests that it instead refers to merchants from different regions of Gujarat in India, (Kutch, Kathiawar, Surat), whose religious

252 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 186, see also Bala Pillay, British Indians in the Transvaal, Trade, Politics and Imperial Relations, 1885 – 1906, (London: Longman Publishers, 1976), 1. 253 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 186,. 254 Pillay, British Indians in the Transvaal, 1.

96 backgrounds varied from Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity.255 It is suggested that a portion of the passenger Gujaratis who were largely Muslim had begun to expand their

“commercial operations from Durban into the hinterlands of the Transvaal and Northern

Cape since the 1870s, with the expansion accelerating during the mineral revolution.”256

From here onwards the work by Lukas Spiropoulos seems to suggest that South Asian families arrived from Gujarat to join their relatives who had earlier immigrated to South

Africa. He writes:

In the 1880s, a group of men of the Chand family arrived from Gujarat to join their relatives in Dinokana, a niche rural area in northwestern South Africa near to the border of the Bechuanaland Protectorate and the railway from the Cape to Bulawayo. Shortly after arriving they were advised to follow the leapfrog pattern from Dinokana into a new and untouched niche market in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. They would settle in Moshupa and Ramotswa, and proceed to expand in a similar pattern further inland. Once settled in each location, the family would then have other members of the family and other families join them and proceed in similar fashion. Many people who came to the Protectorate also operated on both sides of the border. They would set themselves up first on one side, around Dinokana, Zeerust, Mafikeng or other nearby towns and then try their luck on the other side. Alternately, they would expand their own businesses from one area into the other either personally or through a relative or other representative.257

It is suggested that the Chand family was one of the pioneer families to find a market in the protectorate though it was never an easy task to expand further into Bechuanaland.

Standing in their way were several factors such as the small and sparse population of the protectorate and the strict legislation put in place by the colonial government, which greatly curtailed the livelihood of the South Asians.258 Though it may not have been as noteworthy, the harsh and unforgiving reality of racial tensions in neighbouring South

255 Goolam Vahed, “An ‘Imagined Community’ in diaspora: Gujaratis in South Africa,” South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 1 No. 4 (2010): 615. 256 Lukas Spiropoulos, “The Business of Belonging: Indian Migration, Settlement and Trade in Botswana, 1880-2012,” (MA diss, Witwatersrand University, 2014), 27. This study is very interesting, detailed but not at all exhaustive. It is one of the very few that discuss the significance of Asian trade in the protectorate. 257 Spiropoulos, “The Business of Belonging”, 27-28. 258 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 186

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Africa, the Transvaal in particular, often spilled into the protectorate and presented a daunting task of penetrating these new markets for the South Asians. Areas with larger

European settler communities such as Tuli and Gaborone blocks were almost impossible to access for South Asians. The white settler farmers of these areas had for a long time enjoyed a lucrative beef trade via the railway with the mining towns of Kimberley,

Witwatersrand and perhaps Southern Rhodesia.259 It was their monopoly, which could not be shared with common Africans, let alone South Asians who had arrived in the protectorate around 1886.

Spiropoulos states, “Indian immigration into the Bechuanaland Protectorate was fundamentally a response to opportunities for trade” 260 but suggests that in order to understand the presence of South Asian immigrant traders in the territory one has to put it in the broader context of trade within the region. He goes back to explain that apart from railway development, the people of what became Bechuanaland traded in skins, ostrich feathers and some ivory. Cattle or beef only became an important trade commodity after the South African War (Second Anglo-Boer War) and the development of the

Witwatersrand. He cites and agrees with Arellano-Lopez that while capitalist expansion in Southern Africa was led by the discovery of minerals, its development in

Bechuanaland was reliant on the railway.261 This suggests that the South Asian traders grew wise about the trade activities at the mines of the Witwatersrand and possibly traced it back to the protectorate and eventually migrated there.

Arellano-Lopez laments the South Asian hardships once they landed in the

259 Spiropoulos, “The Business of Belonging”, 25 260 Spiropoulos, “The Business of Belonging”, 25 261 Spiropoulos, “The Business of Belonging”, 25. See also Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” iii.

98 protectorate. She points out that most of them usually after some serious hardships were provided with hawkers and retail licences which allowed them to buy commodities from

South African wholesalers and travel great distances to deal directly with the African consumers.262 There were similar hardships for Africans who aimed to conduct some trade in the protectorate. Spiropoulos is of the view that Africans were denied the right to engage in trade altogether.263 This assertion is risky and perhaps farfetched because he inaccurately refers to all Africans in the protectorate. I believe that the evidence needs to be closely examined before such conclusions are drawn. He suggests that the colonial government had policies that denied all Africans the right to trade, particularly along the railway because the “issue of licences was seen as beyond the capacity and willingness of

Africans.”264 However, some evidence suggests that African curio sellers were indeed encouraged to apply for hawkers and trade licenses through their local chiefs but none of them applied for these licenses perhaps due to a lack of knowledge.265 For that reason they could not be allowed to trade at railway sidings. The colonial government may have deliberately put in place strict conditions that Africans would not live up to, but it needs to be acknowledged that there were some efforts to engage Africans in trade at the sidings. That being pointed out, it can be correctly mentioned that Africans encountered difficulties in establishing themselves as traders in the protectorate but were not completely barred from trade practices. These difficulties in accessing trading rights and the reality of the unwillingness of white settler traders to share their markets with

262 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 187. 263 Spiropoulos, “The Business of Belonging”, 25. 264 Spiropoulos, “The Business of Belonging”, 25. 265 BNARS S.204/3/1, Begging by Natives along the Railway Line and the Licensing of Curio Sellers, Letter from H. Cheadle on behalf of Chief Seboko to C.L.O.B. Dutton, (7 April, 1931) see also BNARS S.204/3/1, Begging by Natives along the Railway Line and the Licensing of Curio Sellers, Letter from G. E. Nettleton to Chief Seboko, (5, August, 1933).

99 everyone else created a market opportunity for South Asian traders. Though “with certain administrative factors, [the railway] encouraged some small scale Indian trading operations to expand into the territory and ultimately, consolidate their positions there.”266

This is what led some of them northwards to places such as Mahalapye.

With the slow influx of South Asian traders into the territory, Islam and Hinduism were introduced to the territory. Utlwanang Maano and Muhammed Haron state that a large number of Muslim traders settled in Ramotswa, a small village in the South East district of Botswana as early as 1886 where they engaged in trade and other businesses with the local people.267 Most of them are likely to have engaged in trade by opening shops along the railway siding at Ramotswa, which connected them to the already large markets of Lobatse and Mahalapye in the north. As far as Maano and Haron’s informant could recall, “these individuals, who came from different parts of India, were the ones who unknowingly planted the seeds of Islam in the village of Ramotswa that eventually became the centre for Muslims during the early period.”268 As a result, the village became one of the most multicultural and religiously tolerant places from the late 1800s to today.

While serving their adopted communities and spreading Islam and Hinduism, they also employed locals in some of their shops and shared the knowledge of enterprise with many of them. Though they were hit with many stringent laws, they responded positively to their various communities.

Spiropoulos suggests that most of the South Asians who migrated into the protectorate were of Gujarati origin who found ways to “enter, settle and prosper in new

266 Spiropoulos, “The Business of Belonging”, 25 267 Utlwanang Maano and Muhammed Haron, “Botswana’s Muslims in the Towns of Ramotswa and Lobatse: Their Arrival, Settlement and Current Demographics,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 31 No. 2, (June, 2011): 263. 268 Maano and Haron, “Botswana’s Muslims”, 263.

100 territories.”269 He suggests that upon establishing trade connections with people, usually close to a border or key transport infrastructure such as the railway, the business would begin to serve a local market. He writes, “Family and shop assistants could then be summoned or recruited to work in the store. In many cases these shop assistants, brothers and cousins would use the opportunity of the income, bed and board at the shop as a springboard into new markets either across the border or further down the railway line or road.”270 With their numbers constantly rising, their children had to be educated within the proper confines of their culture. According to Maano and Haron, the Director of

Education, H.J.E. Dumbrell in 1936 wrote to the Resident Magistrate at Gaborone to request a South Asian teacher from the Union Government. Again, the emphasis on ignorance needs to be noted here. They had arrived in the late 1800s but it was only in

1936 that someone in the colonial government took note of their needs. While awaiting a response, the South Asian community in Ramotswa started seeking land to establish an

Islamic based school with the hope to receive a teacher for their children. Their efforts at acquiring land were however not successful due to the stern legislation regarding land ownership that was conveniently put in place by the colonial government.271 Those who had aimed to move into the protectorate to establish their businesses struggled to do so because “the colonial administration enacted a proclamation for the prohibition of any type of land transfers to [South] Asians. Therefore no land could be registered in the name of any [South] Asian trader/settler unless [South] Asians had written approval of the colonial authorities.” 272 This kind of problem was nothing new to them. The

269 Spiropoulos, “The Business of Belonging”, i. 270 Spiropoulos, “The Business of Belonging, 28. 271 Maano and Haron, “Botswana’s Muslims”, 265 272 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 201-202.

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Transvaal government, which shared its border with Bechuanaland, had always been antagonistic towards them and had earlier enacted laws that banned them from entering, settling and trading in the Transvaal. The ripples of racial segregation in neighbouring

Transvaal reverberated and crossed into the protectorate. This presented yet another obstacle for the South Asians. They were hit with tight migration, movement and working policies that made it difficult for the colonial government to dispatch a teacher into the protectorate. After nearly twenty years of waiting for a response, they managed to obtain some land for a school in 1950 at Lobatse. 273 Arellano-Lopez states that the

Bechuanaland colonial government was not openly biased against the South Asian community and that their voices in the protectorate, usually through petitions, were responded to with ambiguity and ambivalence.274 This further frustrated their effort to develop themselves and the communities in which they had landed.

According to Arellano-Lopez, the colonial government and other Europeans considered hawking, which was done by South Asians, an inferior type of trade. It required learning the African languages, customs and culture of the people and dealing with them in person. She says, “white traders could not lower themselves to cross class and race boundaries in their relations with Africans; but [South] Asians could because they were neither black nor white, and their relationship with Africans was tolerated.”275

Initially, these South Asian traders were attracted to the protectorate by the railway and had hoped to establish shops along the line at sidings and railway stations such as

Ramotswa, Lobatse, and perhaps Mahalapye. After their arrival, the laws governing them made it immensely difficult for that to happen, so instead, they turned to building a local

273 Maano and Haron, “Botswana’s Muslims”, 264-265. 274 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 201. 275 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 187 – 188.

102 market for their goods and enjoyed close relationships with the various Tswana people.

As a result, the chiefs usually advocated for them in matters relating to renewal of trade and hawkers licenses. Arellano-Lopez states that even the chiefs’ petitions were met with great ambiguity. “The colonial administration first verified that no British traders’ economic interests would be harmed by the [South] Asian trader presence.”276 Because the colonial government disregarded the authority of the chiefs, they did not consult them, which made them helpless to the South Asians. All matters had to be reported to the colonial administration.277 These deliberate restrictions led to the minimal establishment of trade centres and the eventual underdevelopment of some of the major railway hubs.

For Walter Rodney, the integration of various societies is essential to development because of the exchange of ideas, culture and trade amongst the groups.278 In other words, the interaction of South Asian merchants and traders with the Tswana people across the territory was also essential to the development of new ideology. This in many ways contributed to the formation of the modern Botswana state. As they traded closely with the Tswana, they shared their religion, culture and most importantly the knowledge of enterprise and encouraged them to venture into trading. This was one of the major occurrences that created an indigenous capitalist society, introduced class relations as well as cultural diversity to Bechuanaland. Integration did not happen because the colonial government implemented it; it instead happened because of the circumstances that both South Asian traders and the Tswana found themselves in. Furthermore, the travel and immigration restrictions led to a shortage of Asian women and as a result it

276 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 210-211. 277 BNARS. S. 7/11, “Resident commissioner report to the High Commissioner at the Cape,” March 1927, and reply from High Commissioner at Cape Town to Resident Commissioner at Mafikeng, BNARS S. 7/11, 24, March 1927. 278 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped, 3.

103 pushed “the [South] Asian traders to look for temporary concubinage with Tswana women. These liaisons had the consent of the ward headmen.”279 The white settlers snubbed this and many other practices that Asian traders engaged in and considered anything relating to South Asian traders as crude and unwanted.280 The main agenda for the imperial powers was the extraction of minerals and the use of African labour. Walter

Rodney suggests that this single-minded focus on capital wealth led to the economic backwardness of Africa. 281 The colonial government implemented these restrictions because it was never in their agenda to develop places of no value to them.

CAPITALISM AND SOCIAL INTEGRATION IN RAILWAY VILLAGES

This section argues that the concept of modernity was tied to the everyday use of the railway in the later years of colonisation. The emergence of a capitalist class in these railways villages was spurred by the movement of people via rail along many of these villages.

Mahalapye is located in today’s Central District of Botswana, an area that was referred to as part of Ngwato Territory under Khama. It lies halfway between Plumtree, in

Zimbabwe, and Mafikeng in South Africa along the railway line and thus became a convenient spot for the Bechuanaland Railways and Rhodesia Railways to establish it first as a railway siding and later turned into a major railway station.282 Because of its central location, Mahalapye also became a place where official mail from both directions changed hands. The usage of the railway for postage services made significant

279 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 211. 280 Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,” 211. 281 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped, 14 282 Boammaruri Bahumi Kebonang, “The History of the Herero in Mahalapye, Central District: 1922 – 1984”, Botswana Notes and Records 21 (January, 1989): 44.

104 contributions to reduction of mail tariffs.283 In other words, the railway was used as an efficient mode of communication. Lauri Kubuitsile writes that the train used Mahalapye to restock its coal supplies. “When it stopped, Batswana from surrounding areas came to sell cattle and milk. Over time some set up temporary and then permanent homes to do business at the railway station.”284

The railway line itself had reached Mahalapye as early as 1897; in addition, the then Bechuanaland Railways attained a strip of land alongside Mahalatswe River for maintenance and residential purposes. Kubuitsile states that the Rhodesia Railway

Company needed someone to tend to the property they had attained and they chose a

Xhosa man, Samuel Giddie. Giddie had been employed in the construction of the railway and chose to remain in Mahalapye with his family. In order to settle there Giddie had to travel to Serowe to seek a resident permit and some land from Kgosi Khama III.285 He became one of the first people to be employed by the railway company and settle at

Mahalapye. As a result of the minor developments in the village it began to attract a continuous migration of people from various parts of Bechuanaland and other parts of

Southern Africa.286 Kubuitsile states further, “The Bakaa and Baphaleng from Shoshong were some of the first larger groups of settlers in the area. The Batalaote, the tribe from which Kgosi Tshipe is from, and Bakonyana, both tribes who had followed Khama III from Old Palapye to Serowe, decided to move back to the Mahalapye area, primarily because they had cattle posts east of the village.”287 It is these farmers that had hoped to

283 BNARS, HC. 149, High Commissioner Files, Letter from Resident Commissioner to High Commissioner at the Cape, 25 January, 1899. 284 Lauri Kubuitsile, “Mahalapye: Ko Diponeng,” mmegi.bw, 17 August, 2007, http://www.mmegi.bw/index.php?sid=6&aid=53&dir=2007/august/Friday17 285 Kubuitsile, “Mahalapye: Ko diponeng” 286 Kebonang, “The History of the Herero,”44. 287 Kubuitsile, “Mahalapye: Ko Diponeng”

105 engage in beef and dairy trade along the railway. A discussion on the importance of the railway to European and African cattle farmers will follow later in this chapter.

Moreover, a few of the Bangwato of Khama, some Lozwi from as far as Nyasaland

(Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), as well as a few Xhosa from South Africa, who were said to have been employed in Khama’s cattle post to tend to his horses, inhabited the area prior to the 1922 arrival of the Herero from German South West Africa

(Namibia).288 Zibani Maundeni is also of the view that Khama III had grown fond of the

Barotse (Lozi) who hailed from western Zambia. He cites a report of a local democracy workshop held by the Serowe Administrative Authority in August 2010 when he states:

It was also reported that Khama III liked the hardworking Barotsi people and invited their young and strong men from Barotsiland Protectorate in Zambia to come and work on the railway line that was being constructed in the Bechuanaland Protectorate in the 1890s and onwards, ending up establishing villages along the railway line. Most of these Barotsi men married local women and were also incorporated into the Maaloso Ward in Serowe.289

Furthermore, Gerald L. Caplan states that Lewanika, King of the Barotse people of

Zambia had grown fond of Khama because of his leadership models and wished to follow that example.290 For that he wanted Khama’s friendship and in 1883, he sent a letter to

Khama through his missionaries and Khama is said to have replied positively. The two leaders began to collaborate on various occasions and also exchanged gifts.291 Up to 1893

Khama and Lewanika also had a common enemy in the Ndebele of Lobengula.292

288 Kebonang, “The History of the Herero,”44, see also a chapter by Deborah Durham, “Uncertain Citizens: Herero and the New Intercalary Subject in Post-Colonial Botswana,” in Post Colonial Subjectivities Africa, ed. Richard P. Werbner, (London& New York: Zed Books, 2002), 145. 289 Maundeni, “The Evolution of the Botswana State,” 22. 290 Gerald L. Caplan, The Elites of Barotseland; A Political History of Zambia’s Western Province, 1878 – 1969, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1970), 41. 291 Mutumba Mainga, Bulozi under the Luyana Kings: Political Evolution and State Formation in Pre- Colonial Zambia, 2nd ed. (Lusaka: Bookworld Publishers, 2010), 125. 292 Richard Brown, “Aspects of the Scramble for Matabeleland,” The Zambesian Past, Studies in Central African History, ed. E. Stokes and Richard Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), 63 – 93.

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Mahalapye then from the onset became a heterogeneous community of which the railway company employed many of these people. According to Kebonang, many of the immigrants eventually intermarried with Tswana women and opted to settle in Mahalapye permanently.293 For the Herero under the leadership of Samuel Maherero, it was the devastation of rinderpest of 1897 and their unsuccessful rebellion against the German colonial government and the genocide of 1904-1907 that forced many of them out of what is today Namibia eastwards into north-western Bechuanaland.294 According to Jan Bart-

Gewald, “to escape raiding, debt collecting, hungry relatives, hunger, new legislation, evictions, forced labour and disease, many of the Herero [rinderpest] survivors abandoned their ancestral homes and sought a future elsewhere.”295 Some of those who fled found themselves in Ngamiland, where according to Kebonang they were later expelled by

Kgosi Sekgoma and migrated southwards into Khama’s territory. Kebonang adds that they were attracted to Khama because they had learned of his good reputation and the size of his land from the leadership of Ngamiland. He adds that other sources have stated that they left Ngamiland because Maherero was not recognised as the legitimate leader of all

Herero in Bechuanaland. For that reason he left with some of his followers and ended up as far as Serowe where Kgosi Khama resided while his eldest son Frederick led others to the railway village of Mahalapye.296 With them came their customs, traditions, and socio- economic practices, which had to be altered to suit the new environment, in particular, the

293 Kebonang, “The History of the Herero,”44. 294 See for example, Jeremy Sarkin, Germany’s Genocide of the Herero: Kaiser Wilhem II, His General, His Settlers, His Soldiers, (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2011), Michael LeMahieu, Fiction of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism, in American Literature, 1945 – 1975, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 164-165, Paul R. Bartrop and Steven Leonard Jacobs, Modern Genocide: The Definitive Resource and Document Collection Volume 2, (Santa Barbara: ABC – Clio, 2015), see also Helmut Bley, South West Africa Under German Rule, 1894-1914, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971). 295 Gewald, Herero Heroes, 130. 296 Kebonang, “The History of the Herero,” 45-46

107 use of the railway. The Herero have always been known to be excellent cattle herders, and when they arrived in Mahalapye they continued this practice though it is said that they had to purchase cattle from the Ngwato.297 Some of them are said to have been encouraged by Maherero himself to move further south in pursuit of wage employment in the Transvaal mines and join the capitalist class while others remained behind and became involved in hawking believed to have taken place at the railway station where there was an endless stream of clientele.298

The Herero of Mahalapye have a very rich history, most of which has not been documented. Their interaction with other groups of people in the village steered the formation of modern day Mahalapye, Botswana’s railway centre. Isaac Schapera and

Kebonang agree that the Herero voluntarily placed themselves under Khama because of his good leadership and the fact that he allowed them to maintain their cultural practices freely.299 Kebonang also suggests that Mahalapye was selected for the Herero because

Khama had known about their diligence and excellence in cattle herding. They had been already exposed to a cash economy from the Germans in Namibia and the Boers who lived in the Bechuanaland border. For those reasons, it was only right for Khama to place them in a location where they could re-establish their economy and perhaps trade with the white farmers of the east.300

The village was truly diverse. As Kubuitsile states, foreigners almost exclusively owned the first businesses in the area. Referring to the first South Asian settlers there he writes, “The Bhamjees originated from Johannesburg. [Mohammed] Bhamjee heard that a

297 Kebonang, “The History of the Herero,”49. See also Gewald, Herero Heroes, 180-181 298 Kebonang, “The History of the Herero,”49. 299 Isaac Schapera, The Ethnic Compositions of Tswana Tribes, (London School of Economics and Political Science, 1952), 22 – 23, and Kebonang, “The History of the Herero,” 49. 300 Boammaruri Bahumi Kebonang, “The History of the Herero,”41.

108 certain man named Milan had a shop in a village in Bechuanaland that he wanted to sell.

Much to the surprise of their family, Mohammed decided that he would move to

Bechuanaland and take up ownership of the shop.” 301 The railway was key to their migration and survival as one of Kubuitsile’s informants, Aneesa Bhamjee, the daughter to Mohammed, recalls how they had to be at the railway station at midnight to collect bread from the passing train.302 The presence of South Asians in Mahalapye seems to have grown steadily soon after the arrival of the Bhamjees. According to Kubuitsile, most of them established shops along the railway siding.303 Today Mahalapye still boasts a similar kind of diversity but at a much larger scale. There are more Asians who still run the same types of shops and serve the community in various ways.

Unlike Mahalapye, the situation further north in Francistown was entirely different. It seems that historians don’t agree about when it was founded. Part Mgadla suggests that it originated in the 1870s with the discovery of gold deposits in the Tati and

Ntshe rivers.304 Paul Landau suggests that it was founded in 1880 while Boga Thura

Manatsha gives a much later date of 1897.305 According to Landau;

In 1880 Daniel Francis founded Francistown, subsequently known for its ‘hordes of ruffians and desperadoes’ cantering through the town and sacking the general store. After the railway arrived, missing the all but dead Tati Town ‘capital’ by fifty kilometres, Francistown benefitted, but still remained a place visited by men intending to go somewhere else.306

301 Kubuitsile, “Mahalapye: Ko diponeng” 302 Kubuitsile, “Mahalapye: Ko diponeng” 303 Kubuitsile, “Mahalapye: Ko diponeng” 304 Part Mgadla, “The North-East and South East,” The Birth of Botswana: A History of the Bechuanaland Protectorate from 1910 to 1966, eds. Fred Morton and Jeff Ramsay, (Gaborone: Longman Botswana, 1987), 136. 305 Boga Manatsha, “The Politics of Renaming Colonial Streets in Francistown, Botswana,” Botswana Notes and Records 44 (2012): 70. 306 Paul Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 146.

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Martin Legassick describes early 1960s Francistown as a place where South

African refugees from apartheid found temporary solitude before filtering into Northern and Southern Rhodesia. According to him, it was common that the refugees converged at

Francistown from the south on their way to Tanganyika (now Tanzania).307 To him it was one of many towns that sprung up along the easterly railway that ran through the fertile part of the territory. In essence, Legassick tells us that its strategic location next to the border with Rhodesia made it a convenient pit stop for many people who were on their travels. In a chapter by Part Mgadla, he alludes to the crowding of Africans in reserves as a result of Europeans taking all the fertile land along the railway.308 Most of the North-

East was owned by the Tati Concession Company, a European owned mining organisation that had won the mineral rights around the same time of Lobengula’s signing of the Rudd Concession in 1888.309 This land belonged exclusively to European farmers.

(See Map. 1 below)

307 Martin Legassick, “Bechuanaland: Road to the North,” Africa Today, Vol. 1 No. 4, (April 1964): 7. 308 Mgadla, “The North-East and South East,” 134, see also Alan Pim, “The Question of the South African Protectorates,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1931-1939), Vol. 13, No. 5, (Sep-Oct. 1934): 669 and Richard P. Werbner, “Local Adaptation and the Transformation of an Imperial Concession in North-Eastern Botswana,” Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Jan., 1971). 309 For further reading on the Tati Concessions and ownership of land, see for example, Arellano-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Trade,”109; Paul Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 177- 178; Richard P. Werbner, “Local Adaptation and the Transformation of an Imperial Concession in North Eastern Botswana,” Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 41, No. 1, (1971): 32-41.

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Map 1. The North-East District (Tati District)310

According to George Winstanley, early Francistown had only one street adjacent to the railway station and a few small houses belonging to colonial administrators mostly to the east of the railway line. Racial discrimination defined most of Francistown as there were hotels and other areas reserved for white people only. It seemed like what was taking place in neighbouring white minority ruled Southern Rhodesia was spilling over into

Bechuanaland.311 In Sir Charles Rey’s memoirs, he points out that Francistown was very

310 Mgadla, “The North-East and South East,” 135. 311 George Winstanley, Under Two Flags in Africa: Recollections of a British Administrator in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1945 – 1972, (Blackwater Books, 2000), see also Richard P. Werbner, Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana; The Public Anthropology of Kalanga Elites, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 162 – 123.

111 secluded with a distinct racial divide. A wealthy European family called the Haskins owned and ran most of the Francistown enterprises.312 Mgadla agrees with this and states that the place was a mainly a trading town because of the railway, which brought many passengers and created a good market. It served the interests of the Company and

Europeans of that area. “All trade was in the white hands, the terms of trade were arranged to favour them and all land was reserved for their businesses and homes.”313 The trains were not only used for economic purposes. The white minority at times used them for leisurely travel and sightseeing. In Rey’s memoir, he explains how the affluent whites travelled between Francistown and Mahalapye to attend the annual sporting events in

June 1930. Those who could afford to pay for a train ticket entered the competitions, which included “shooting at the ranges, pigeon shooting, golf, tennis, dancing, concerts and general merriments.”314

Further south was a small town called Lobatse, which was one of the major economic hubs of the territory. This was perhaps due to several reasons; its proximity to the border with South Africa, a large population of white settlers and the availability of an efficient mode of transportation, the railway, which linked Bechuanaland and South

Africa. According to Mgadla, Lobatse was a haven for local European farmers and traders. “The latter took advantage of the railway station and set up business to serve the farmers in the block.”315 He states that most of the settlers who had come from South

Africa in the early 1900s were not well off. They were among the poorest of Boer farmers from the Transvaal and perhaps migrated north in search of new means to overhaul their

312 Charles Rey, Monarch of all I Survey; Bechuanaland Diaries, 1929-1937, eds. Michael Crowder and Neil Parsons, (Gaborone: The Botswana Society, 1988), 31. 313 Mgadla, “The North-East and South East,” 138. 314 Rey, Monarch of all I Survey, 27. 315 Mgadla, “The History of the Town and Area of Lobatse from Pre-Colonial times to 1965,” (BA diss, University of Botswana and Swaziland, 1978), 9.

112 economy. This might have been due to them losing their farms in the South African War of 1899-1902. They however had the necessary farming skills to survive and eventually thrive in new areas such as Lobatse.316 Mgadla however does not mention how they attained land for growing crops and raising livestock. Perhaps it is safe to assume that since they were European or white, they joined the ranks of the settler elites thus it was easy for them to gain land. (See Map. 2) Mgadla mentions that their agricultural enterprise succeeded not only because of their skills but also because they depended on cheap African labour in their farms. We can already see the link between the migration of the Boers into Lobatse, their farming establishments and their use of rail transportation to facilitate the movement of their commodities. 317 Though the railway station employed most Africans in Lobatse, the low wages meant that the Europeans took the bigger share and left Africans impoverished. Mgadla writes:

Between 1905 and 1920, small European owned shops sprang up around the railway station to serve the European community and Africans of the area. One of the first European traders was R.G. Transveldt. Himself a farmer, Transveldt took advantage of the railway station and opened up a wholesale shop that later came to be known as the Bechuanaland Store. Transveldt also collected and sold timber by rail to Mefeking and organised transport for miners to and from the platinum mines of Zeerust.318

316 Mgadla, “The History of the Town and Area”, 7. 317 Mgadla, “The History of the Town and Area”, 9. 318 Mgadla, “The History of the Town and Area”, 7-8.

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Map 2. The South East District319

Furthermore, more businesses between 1907 and 1910 grew around the railway station.

Mgadla states that Lobatse Hotel was built partly to serve the white train passengers and the European community of the Lobatse area. Many of these businesses thrived and consequently, African squatter settlements or townships sprung up along the railway

319 Mgadla, “The North-East and South East,” 143.

114 station.320 In many ways, the settlement of the Europeans in Lobatse and the manner in which African settlements later responded was centred on the railway. According to

Mgadla, Europeans were encouraged to migrate and settle in Lobatse “to resolve the contradiction of their economic dependence on South Africa and their political dependence on Bechuanaland Protectorate.”321

TSWANA FARMING COMMUNITIES WITHIN THE RHODESIA RAILWAY MONOPOLY

Not a lot of the Tswana and other local African communities knew the economic potential of the railway prior to its construction. They had knowledge of trade but may not have known how to maximise the use this new mode of transportation. According to Barbara

Ngwenya, the use of the wagon for long and short distance trade was common among the

Tswana some years before the railway was constructed.322 During pre-colonial times the

Tswana may have used horses, donkeys or just long distance walking to conduct trade.

With the construction of the railway however, the many local communities started to see its importance in bringing capital. For instance, some of the men who had been earlier employed by the BSACo earned wages from its construction. A majority of the Tswana men who worked on railway construction were believed to be cattle owners from

Khama’s land.

I now focus on how elitist cattle farming, colonial schemes of cattle improvement as well as dairy production from the early 1900s were hinged on the use of rail transportation. The focus will be on dairy produce because beef production has been dealt

320 Mgadla, “The History of the Town and Area”, 8. 321 Mgadla, “The History of the Town and Area”, 8. 322 Ngwenya, “The Development of Transport Infrastructure,” 76.

115 with in the past while crop production has always been trivial in the semi-arid climate of

Bechuanaland. In most cases, white settlers enjoyed easy access to outside markets because their cattle and cattle by-products were preferred to what was referred to as substandard African produce. In order to explain this, we need to look at the intentions of the African Dikgosi as well as the prejudice and attitude of the colonial government towards African enterprise. This is no easy task because after a careful examination of archival material, it is clear that there was an ambiguous relationship between the two. At certain times, the colonial government expressed interest in attempting to improve the lives of the Africans while at the same time other colonial officials took no part in it. This is because colonialism was justified as a civilising mission, which some colonial officials believed in, but there were limits to these as racism and economic greed became more important. I concur with Makgala and carry his argument forward that in the early 1920s, it was Kgosi Isang Pilane, a Bakgatla regent who initiated the idea to improve the cattle of his people by sending a request to the colonial government for bulls that would breed with the Tswana cattle in his community. 323 The idea behind that was to introduce different breeds of cattle and perhaps more importantly for his people to start trading cattle and cattle products just like the white settlers had been doing for many years.

Pilane, a village named after Kgosi Pilane and Mochudi in the Kgatleng district are some of the many places that could have benefitted from access to an outside market due to the railway running through. Kgosi Pilane grew wise of this and like Khama tried to use the railway to introduce a local capitalist economy by encouraging trade and diversity among his people. A letter from W. H. Chase, the Chief Veterinary Officer in the Protectorate to

323 Christian John Makgala, ‘The policy of Indirect Rule in Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1926-1957’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2001), 263.

116 the Resident Commissioner describes Kgosi Isang and his people as “intelligent and more energetic than other tribes.”324 Mafela has however observed that the idea of importing new breeds for cattle improvement had very little success because “these animals needed special care, and the African population did not have sufficient knowledge and means of providing this; nor did the colonial administration have enough manpower to go around teaching about this.”325 Phuthego Molosiwa has argued that these schemes of cattle and dairy improvement brought disillusionment among the African farming community because they were not tailored for them in the first place.326 They only meant to serve the settler elites as previously stated. Apart from those schemes, Hut Tax and several other forms of taxation had been in effect from the late 1800s meaning that Africans had to seek the means to raise capital and keep up with their payments. 327 As previously explained, a response to these taxes was the pursuit of wage employment in the South

African mines. On the other hand some farmers started to see that the Dikgosi were implementing new strategies of cattle improvement and hastened their desire to access new markets for their products as alternative means to raise capital. With the availability of the railway, and the 19th century mineral revolution, many of the African cattle owners in the protectorate had high hopes for a boom in the demand of beef and dairy from the mines. This is after all what the settler farmers were doing. Lily Mafela writes, “Cattle

324 BNARS, S.130/11 “Mr Jousse’s interview with the Resident Commissioner at Mahalapye during Bisley: Matters connected with the Diary Industry, 1930. 325 Lily Mafela, ‘Colonial Initiatives and African Response in the Establishment of the Dairy Industry in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1930-1966,” Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1&2, (1999): 78. 326 Phuthego Molosiwa, ‘Illicit Trade in Botswana; The Case of Cattle Smuggling in Kgatleng, 1920-1960’ (MA thesis, University of Botswana, 2003), 30. 327 See for example Makgala, “Taxation in the Tribal Areas,” 279-303, Schmitt, Bechuanaland Pioneer and Gunners, 47,59, 68; O. Selolwane, “Colonization by Concession: Capitalist Expansion in Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1885-1950,” Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, (Feb. 1980): 75-124 and David Massey, “A Case of Colonial Collaboration: The Hut Tax and Migrant Labour,” Botswana Notes and Records, Vol. 10, (1978): 95-98.

117 and cattle products were to play an important role in the export - import commodity exchange in order first to raise the necessary tax levy, and later on as a simple response to capitalism which gained momentum during the twentieth century.”328 While it seemed like most African cattle owners had no systematic mechanism in place, Europeans whose large farms were spread along the railway line in the east engaged in what Mafela called dairy ranching. She adds:

This practice was even more pronounced in the Lobatse blocks where the Boer settlers had arrived as early as 1904. Lobatse's proximity to both the South African market and the railway line gave these settlers, in particular, more advantage in marketing their products.329

As previously mentioned, the colonial government had no clear economic plans to develop Bechuanaland. There were a few individual officials who tried to implement some changes aimed at helping the Africans but working within an antagonistic system eventually overwhelmed their efforts leading to stunted and uneven development.

Between the late 1920s and mid 1940s there was a complex relationship of

Bechuanaland’s cattle economy and a colonial government that never made any solid plans to improve the lives of people.

I concur with Lily Mafela’s analysis of the meagre dairy industry of the territory and posit that it was the deliberate effort of the colonial government to sabotage whatever attempt the African dairymen aimed for. In any situation, the objective of the dairymen was to get their produce to external markets through railway hubs at Mahalapye, which was the midpoint between to two entry points: Francistown in the north and Lobatse in the south. Walter Rodney alludes to economic inequality in colonial Africa as another mechanism used by the imperialists to grab as much resources for themselves while

328 Mafela, “Colonial Initiatives”, 77. 329 Mafela, “Colonial Initiatives”, 80 – 81.

118 depriving the African an opportunity to overhaul himself.330 Mafela, who explains that it was hard for Africans to beat the white monopoly of dairy trade in the protectorate, demonstrates this very clearly. She states, “Tuli block farmers had, in the late 1920s, managed to get the colonial government to build a road along which they transported their

331 dairy products to Debeeti (Dibete) railway station, then to Lobatse Creamery.” This would not have happened if Africans had made the request. Leonard Tarr, a settler farmer and businessman, had started a chain of milk-buying depots along the railway line which would buy milk from African dairymen and hold it temporarily while waiting for the next train.332 European farmers such as Mr Leonard Tarr and Hoare controlled the dairy monopoly in the east, and this encouraged Africans to abandon their own milk handling areas due to competition:

Leonard Tarr owned in all 32 milk-buying cream depots in the Mahalapye-Palapye area and constructed a road from Sefhare to Mahalapye to link his depots to railhead; while by the end of 1935, Hoare had established over 70 milk-buying depots in the Bamangwato Reserve and Tati area. Hoare served an area of 5,000 square miles. Over a thousand Africans supplied milk to his depots and in the process, abandoned their own premises. This was a symptom of colonial government policy of encouraging European economic domination of African enterprise. Africans were discouraged from owning private dairies because "it was inadvisable to encourage the production of cream in individual dairies as apart from the capital outlay, the product was invariably of low quality.333

The necessity of the railway in the dairy monopoly of the east cannot be overemphasised.

It was the only means of access to outside markets for dairymen but at the same time it became a symbol of bias and discrimination. Though it has been argued that milk-buying depots helped some African dairymen economically and that there was some form of cooperation between them and settler farmers such as Tarr, it goes without saying that

330 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 5, 39. 331 Mafela, “Colonial Initiatives”, 81. 332 Mafela, “Colonial Initiatives”, 81. 333 Mafela, “Colonial Initiatives”, 81 see also BNARS, S.451/1/1, ‘Dairy Industry of the Bechuanaland Protectorate: E. G. Hardy’s tour of Bechuanaland Protectorate, August 1942.

119 most of the Africans, like Mafela mentions, were put out of work due to pressures by the colonial government as well as economic competition.

There were even bigger dairy corporations in Francistown and Lobatse. These were the Rhodesia Cooperative Creameries (RCC), a European owned company based in

Southern Rhodesia and the Imperial Cold Storage Company based at Lobatse. The inner workings of those two major dairy companies in colonial Botswana are not the main topic of discussion. This thesis is rather concerned with their ease of access to rail transportation and how they wielded control of trade through the railway as well as the restrictions put in place by the colonial government that favoured these companies while depriving the Africans of the equal opportunity to expand their capitalist endeavours. It is however worth mentioning that the RCC by the early 1930s had a well-established dairy trade network between Southern Rhodesia and Bechuanaland. It had opened a butter factory in Francistown that purchased milk at low prices from Africans in the Tati areas and processed it before exporting it to Southern Rhodesia at a profit.334 In 1935 the company was then taken over by Mr. P. Lavin, a settler farmer and businessman who had been successfully running Tati Creamery LTD and several other ventures in Lobatse including the Imperial Cold Storage Company.335 Some months before the de-registration of the RCC, its Managing Director Mr Gordon Cooper wrote a letter expressing the desire for Mr. Lavin’s company to attain control of the factory at Francistown.336 At that time of course no African could compete against Mr Lavin’s financial muscle. His intentions were to control all creameries of the east as a pool thus destroying all competition and

334 BNARS, S.451/1/1, ‘Dairy Industry of the Bechuanaland Protectorate: E. G. Hardy’s tour of Bechuanaland Protectorate, August 1942. 335 BNARS, S.255/13, ‘Cold Storage at Francistown; De- Registration of, Agreement with Tati Creamery Limited’, August 1935. 336 BNARS, S.255/13, ‘Cold Storage at Francistown; De-Registration of, Agreement with Tati Creamery Limited’, August 1935.

120 controlling the dairy market.

In his 1931 report on the state of the Bechuanaland dairy industry, Dr. Thornton, the Director of African Agriculture, stated that the reason African produce was not preferred was because it took a long time for his milk to fill up the container. Because it is so perishable, its grade would decline within a day or two while waiting to be picked up by the passing train.337 Even after a long wait, it is believed that some of that milk was inadmissible on the trains, as it would have already started to turn. If it were accepted it would have passed as low-grade milk and be used for things such as butterfat, which gave the Africans very little returns.338 Making matters worse was the Dairy Control Board and the new customs agreements between the governments of Southern Rhodesia,

Bechuanaland and the Union of South Africa in 1930. These new agreements put in effect the Dairy Products Marketing Scheme, which blocked individual dairy producers from selling milk or any other dairy products. The new scheme stipulated that dairy producers would only be recognised if they sold in pools.339 This scheme was put in effect after there had been several complaints in Rhodesia and South Africa that dairy products from

Bechuanaland had been found to be unhygienic. An article in the Bulawayo Chronicle decried the dangers to public health of milk imported from the protectorate and suggested that it was contaminated. It linked the outbreak of Tubercular lesions prevalent among children to the unhygienic milk from Bechuanaland.340 It would not be wise to assume that this was a deliberate move by the colonial government to eliminate African produce

337 BNARS, S. 218/8, ‘Agriculture Dairy Industry; Reports by Dr. Thornton’, (1931): 1. 338 BNARS, S. 218/8, ‘Agriculture Dairy Industry; Reports by Dr. Thornton’, (1931): 1-3. 339 BNARS S. 427/9/1, Customs Agreement: Bechuanaland Protectorate – Southern Rhodesia, Letter from C.H.A. Clarke to Resident Commissioner titled “Entering of Butter into Southern Rhodesia (1930) see also BNARS. S. 151/3 Dairy Control Board, Letter from Charles Rey to High Commissioner, 20 September, 1930. 340 BNARS, S. 451/1/1, “Drastic Reorganisation of Dairy Industry, “The Bulawayo Chronicle, Saturday, February 7, 1936

121 but it can be said that the government officials knew that Africans did not have the ability to sell in pools. They were distrustful of cooperation and always chose to venture individually into dairy trade.341

I argue that the colonial government had always known about this and adopted this new policy either to deceitfully single them out or to encourage growth through cooperation. In any case, this was the new law, cooperation amongst African dairymen never happened and the colonial government never made any efforts to encourage it. The dairy industry in the protectorate was stratified in this manner; the settler farmer was at the top and so were his products while the African producer remained at the bottom. For this reason, the Africans were not able to access external markets through rail resources.

Mafela adds to this point by stating that “In most cases, African-produced cream ranked half a grade lower than European produced cream because the determining factor between a high grade and lower grade product was the amount of time cream spent in a depot before transportation [via rail] to the creamery.”342 This meant that African dairymen had to move their operations to within the vicinity of the railway in order for their products to not go to waste or they had to rely on the European middleman who often bought their milk at very low prices and sold it at a profit directly to his already established markets in

South Africa and Rhodesia. Margery Perham observed that the African dairymen produced mostly low-grade milk and “their internal communications are scanty; markets and ports are far away; and they are embedded among countries which compete with the same products and control the lines and conditions of export.”343 The African farmers had

341 BNARS, S. 218/8, ‘Agriculture Dairy Industry; Reports by Dr. Thornton’, (1931): 1. 342 Mafela, “Colonial Initiatives”, 82. 343 Margery Perham, Colonial Sequence 1930 - 1949: A chronological Commentary on British Colonial Policy in Africa (London: Methuen 1967), 7 cited in Mafela, “Colonial Initiatives”, 82

122 the means of production in terms of cattle but they lacked the access to markets. Another reason for grading African milk in that fashion was that they did not have the means to pasteurize their milk. There had been numerous cases of outbreaks of cattle diseases such as Foot and Mouth disease that usually devastated the Tati and surrounding areas. After

1930, any milk that came from the north had to be accompanied by a signed note from a northern divisional veterinary official that it had been pasteurized.344 This was another disadvantage to African dairymen as they lacked the knowledge and the tools to pasteurize their dairy products.

The attitude of the colonial government towards African dairymen is shown in what they called Kaffir creameries. This was the name given to all native creameries that were always described to be in a state of chaos. In the inspector’s report, “a majority of them were not able to maintain standards prescribed by the dairy regulations.”345 Of course the high standards of cleanliness and hygiene when handling dairy had to be maintained. However, there is no indication that the colonial government made any effort to teach the Africa dairymen what was expected. Stemming from racial prejudice, this was a mechanism for the European dairymen to control the dairy monopoly. By 1933, the amount of dairy carried via rail from Bechuanaland, which was mostly from European farmers, was more than double the amount of dairy produced in South Africa and sold to the mineworkers, army camps and naval bases of South Africa.346 This dairy produce was carried by rail from large European farms in the Tati, Tuli, Gaborone and Lobatse blocks towards Mafikeng. From there it moved along the rail stations between Mafikeng,

344 BNARS, S.255/12/1, Colonial Government notes, Letter form Department of Animal Health, Central Research Station. 11 August 1933 345 BNARS, S. 8/7, Kaffir Cream: Inspector Reports, The economic position of the Butter Industry in the Protectorate, 1926. 346 BNARS, S. 151/16, Dairy Control Board, 14th and 15th Conferences, Payment of Butter and Cheese Levies, Report by Stuart Bennie, 20 June 1933.

123

Vryburg, Maribogo and many other places until it reached Kimberly. This formed a very lucrative distribution line that was essential to the European enterprise. In 1931, it had been estimated that a total of 3 million pounds of cheese would be required by the entire mining industry of South Africa. Bechuanaland dairy producers, mostly European, would supply a large portion of this cheese, which would be carried by rail to the mines. The transport costs of this large amount of cheese was about £ 375 000 of which African dairymen did not have.347 The rail network across the subcontinent also meant that the

European dairymen were able to sell their produce as far north as the Congo. About half a million pounds of butter, valued at £ 45 000 was carried to the Union while 110 000 pounds of cheese valued at £ 7 000 was exported to the Rhodesias and Congo. 348

Essentially, the inability of African dairymen to penetrate these external markets led to them being deprived of tremendous business opportunities.

Another problem with the so-called Kaffir creameries had to do with malnutrition and the dissemination of health services in the protectorate. It appears that most African dairy producers, with a lack of proper knowledge of nutrition had taken to engaging in dairy trade while they deprived their children of the essentials in milk. A lot of the milk producers as a result of dairy restrictions chose to sell to other local Africans and even illegally to creameries so as to earn some profit. As a result, in the 1930s, malnutrition and diseases such as scurvy and tuberculosis were cited by the Principal Medical Officer,

Dr. Dyke as major problems in the protectorate that were caused by a lack of calcium in

347 BNARS, S. 151/2, Dairy Control Bill, Union Government and the question of Bechuanaland Protectorate Cooperation, 28 February, 1931. 348 BNARS, S. 151/3, Dairy Control Board, Letter from Charles Rey to High Commissioner, 20 September, 1930.

124 the children’s diet.349 He held the view that the owners of indigenous creameries became preoccupied with selling milk and ignored that they also had to eat. 350 Though he supported the development of the dairy industry in the protectorate, Dyke encouraged the

Resident Commissioner to stress to the chiefs the need to inform their people of the importance of reserving some milk for children’s consumption. Dr. Dyke’s task together with the Agricultural Department was to employ the railway services to travel along as many villages as possible checking on the health of the population though in most cases this task was overwhelming. Considering Dr. Dyke’s 1935 report, the colonial government agreed that it would be feasible to obtain supplies of milk and cheese at reasonable prices and distribute to schoolchildren. Serowe was not along the railway route, but its close proximity to Palapye allowed its school going children to benefit from the distribution of dairy products. However, this project would see the European schools at Serowe, Lobatse, Pitsane, Francistown and several others benefit first from this even though they had a total of 209 pupils compared to the 4500 African pupils in other schools.351 Because these villages lay along the railway line, it was easier for the colonial government to transport those supplies to the school going children. Dr. J.W. Stirling,

Russell England and H.J.E. Dumbrell all agreed that it was necessary to combat malnutrition and scurvy in the protectorate through the distribution of diary products to school going children. These individuals felt at heart, “the intention to build up the national health through increased consumption of dairy products by the children of school

349 BNARS, S. 428/3, Malnutrition in the Bechuanaland Protectorate – Cream Industry, Letter from Acting Resident Commissioner, R. Reilly to High Commissioner, 3 April, 1935. 350 BNARS, S. 428/3, Malnutrition in the Bechuanaland Protectorate – Cream Industry, Dr. Dyke’s Annual Medical and Sanitary Report - 1934. 351 BNARS, S. 428/4, Malnutrition in the Bechuanaland Protectorate – Cream Industry, Native – Danger of developing to the detriment of native health, Notes of Conference held at Mafeking, Feb, 1936.

1 25 going age.”352 Evidence suggests that the problem of deficiency diseases in school going children persisted until the late 1950s.353

It was easy for colonial officials such as H.J.E. Dumbrell, Dr. Dyke and perhaps

Sir. Charles Rey to sympathise with the Africans because they spent a significant amount of time travelling to and from African reserves and railway towns. This allowed them the first-hand experience of African life unlike the colonial officials at the Cape who made decisions based on little or no experience. I do not refute the fact that the semi-arid conditions and the persistent natural disasters that plagued Bechuanaland led to the collapse of the dairy industry. Those were natural occurrences that could not be impeded but the introduction and collapse of this industry was primarily caused by the negative attitudes of some colonial officials and the uneven manner it was put in place. Many of the African farming communities who had aimed to trade failed at this because of those attitudes as previously mentioned. The use of the railway to aid the trade of dairy could have proven profitable for individual Africans.

Lastly, it is worth mentioning that within the colonial government there were some people with good intentions such as H.J.E. Dumbrell and perhaps Sir Charles Rey who surely stood out as champions of social change in the protectorate. They deserve to be credited for their attempts to instigate social and economic integration. However, some historians have described Rey as a power hungry dictator whose interest was to further the settler agenda. It might be worth mentioning that Philip Steenkamp suggests that the development policies of Bechuanaland under Charles Rey set the foundation of what

Botswana is today. He writes:

352 Ibid 353 BNARS, S. 418/1/2, Milk Buying Depots in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Letter from Director of Medical Services to the Government Secretary at Mafeking, 28 June 1955

126

Rey's intention was to promote a large, prosperous ‘middle’ peasantry. The fact that his development projects instead enhanced socio-economic differentiation is evidence, not of underdevelopment, but rather of the uneven development of capitalism in Botswana. The development policy, along with programmes of administrative reorganization and political reform, confirmed Botswana’s autonomy, and the Territory, until then an imperial ‘envelope’ of heterogeneous African polities, began to assume the character of a coherent state. The foundations for a democratic capitalist order were laid in this period.354

Several other historians and social scientists have weighed in on this issue and have varied opinions of Rey’s economic policy.355 This debate around the effectiveness of

Charles Rey’s developmental policies in the protectorate during his tenure is not the primary concern of this chapter. However, moving forward, Rey’s policies were well known to most people and some important economic changes happened during his tenure.

These did not last because he left the post after seven years and even Steenkamp points out that “colonial policy was therefore discontinuous and often inconsistent.” 356 As argued in the earlier chapter, the underdevelopment of Bechuanaland was therefore a result of its unfortunate lack of known mineral wealth so there were few efforts to improve its local societies.

354 Philip Steenkamp, “Cinderella of the Empire? Development Policy in Bechuanaland in the 1930s,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 17, No. 2, (June 1991): 292. 355 See for example Neil Parsons, “The Economic History of Khama's Country in Botswana, 1844-1930”, in R. Palmer and N. Parsons (eds.), The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 113-143, Jack Halpern, South Africa’s Hostages: Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), Louis Picard, The Politics of Development in Botswana, (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1987), see also Mogalakwe, “How Britain Underdeveloped Bechuanaland Protectorate,” 66-88 356 Steenkamp, “Cinderella of the Empire”, 307.

127

CONCLUSION

This chapter has tried to highlight several social aspects of railways development in eastern Bechuanaland. It has been put forward that the railway contributed significantly to the formation of the local capitalist class through trade and attempts to access external markets. It has also been explained that the migration of various peoples from across the territory as well as neighbouring countries such as German South West Africa in the case of the Herero and South Asians from as far as Gujarat was reliant upon the railway. It was not the main reason for migration in the case of the Herero but it became economically significant to them and other settlers of colonial Botswana. The presence of the South Asian traders brought more significant changes to the local communities than the colonial government itself. Through economic cooperation and spirit of togetherness, they managed to introduce the Tswana people to modern forms of trade while bringing in a new capitalist class. Furthermore, the railway linked small settlements, villages and large towns such as Francistown in the north, Mahalapye in the heart of the territory and

Lobatse in the south to the rest of Southern Africa. Urbanization of these places could not have happened without rail developments. It needs to be reiterated that the colonial government had no formal plans for town developments and as a result people just migrated towards these railway hubs and settled haphazardly. As Mgadla highlighted in

Lobatse, squatter camps or townships, which later became formalized wards, mushroomed next to places where enterprise was booming because of trade along the railway. The relative proximity to either the South African or Rhodesian borders also seems to have influenced the pattern of urbanization.

Lastly, it has been demonstrated that the underdevelopment of the Bechuanaland dairy industry was a result of several antagonistic ideas and actions. Its survival depended

128 on access to efficient rail transportation in order to sell produce to the Union of South

Africa and Southern Rhodesia. These were all good markets that African producers were denied. It may not have been written explicitly but certain restrictions, which the colonial government doctored, made it almost inaccessible for Africans.

129

CONCLUSION: THE BECHUANALAND RAILWAY AND

UNDERDEVELOPMENT

The phenomenon of underdevelopment, as demonstrated, takes various forms. The overlap between Paul Baran, Walter Rodney and Frantz Fanon’s notions on underdevelopment is that it is the crafting of conditions where a nation is unable to haul itself out of a despairing situation. They all seem to suggest that the arrival of a stronger colonising power destroyed the traditional norms and economic practices of the colonised and created a dependency of the latter on the former. However, because Bechuanaland’s colonisation was based on its strategic position rather than its economic potential, the imperial process distinctive from the onset. The British government, mighty as it was, did not have the funds to invest in the territory; they also expressly stated that they had no interest in the desolate desert land that became Bechuanaland.

The geographical position of Bechuanaland, along the route to the north was one of the key reasons behind its annexation by the British government. It was seen as the passage for Cecil Rhodes’s vision of building a line of rail that connected the Cape to

Cairo. This railway of Bechuanaland became symbolic in many respects. First, it served its intended purpose, which was to aid in the extraction of resources from Southern

Africa. In the Mineral Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries for instance, the railway was instrumental in the moving of large numbers of migrant workers to the mines of South Africa and back. It has been demonstrated that there were certain constraints and unforeseen circumstances around the adoption of rail as the mode of transportation. Like

Baran, Rodney and Fanon have argued, the use of rail for transport eroded the traditional economic practices of the Tswana and created a dependency on the colonial government

130 for employment. There were other ecological factors that led to the migration of peoples but all of those elements were tied to the use of rail transportation.

The emergence of a local capitalist class was also centred on the use of rail transportation for the success of trade. The thesis has established that the arrival of South

Asians to Bechuanaland was hinged on their use of the railway for trade. In their places of settlement, enterprise, cultural diversity and religious tolerance are held with high regard.

Their inability to trade freely was somewhat a blessing in disguise as they later established sturdier networks with the locals within a short time of their arrival. It can then be argued that the few developments of railway villages such as Mahalapye and

Ramotswa were done without the colonial government. There was never any fair treatment of people, though racial tensions were not as pronounced as South Africa, there were definitive undertones of segregation throughout the territory. In most cases the colonial government supported these through strict and restrictive policies and legislations. For instance, the laws that governed the movement of the South Asians and their ownership of land led to the stunted growth of their merchant based economy. The ambiguous colonial plans resulted in the abandonment of farming areas in eastern

Bechuanaland and the haphazard sprawling of townships near railway centres. Many

Tswana dairy farmers had hoped to be able to use the train to sell their goods to larger markets. This would have created a self sufficient and self-reliant Tswana economy and capitalist class. However, these hopes vanished not because the Tswana were unable to see them through, but because the railway of Bechuanaland was meant to focus on a narrow mining economy. All of these conditions and a colonial government that paid very little attention to the people, led to devastating effects of underdevelopment.

131

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