Traditionalists, traitors and sell-outs: the roles and motives of ‘amaqaba’, ‘abangcatshi’ and ‘abathengisi’ in the Pondoland Revolt of 1960 to 1961 by Jimmy Pieterse Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree MAGISTER HEREDITATUS CULTURAEQUE SCIENTIAE (HISTORY) at the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies Faculty of Humanities University of Pretoria 2007 Supervisor: Dr J.E.H. Grobler Co-supervisor: Prof A.S. Mlambo CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Historiography...................................................................................................... 9 2. THE LAY OF THE LAND, EASTERN PONDOLAND CIRCA 1960 .............. 25 2.1. Geography, demographics and resource endowment......................................... 25 2.2. Political organisation........................................................................................ 344 2.3. Socio-economic organisation........................................................................... 411 3. ORIGINS OF THE REVOLT................................................................................ 51 3.1. Thus the antebellum ends................................................................................... 51 3.2. Chiefly Realpolitik............................................................................................. 53 3.3. The Bantustan Behemoth ................................................................................... 55 3.4. Awful Twins: ‘Red Menace’ and ‘Black Peril’ ................................................. 60 3.5. Imposed ‘development’ and ‘Witchcraft of the State’....................................... 66 3.6. An altogether different kind of Ducktail............................................................ 74 3.7. The special case of the Reserves/Bantustans ..................................................... 80 3.8. Tactical mobility ................................................................................................ 84 4. EVENT HISTORY.................................................................................................. 87 4.1. Sporadic and disjointed violence........................................................................ 87 4.2. The violence becomes organised........................................................................ 90 4.3. Doomed attempts at arbitration and reconciliation .......................................... 100 4.4. The government reacts ..................................................................................... 104 5. RURAL DIFFERENTIATION ............................................................................ 108 5.1. Hypothesis........................................................................................................ 109 5.2. The data set: following the arsonists’ trail ....................................................... 110 5.3. Calculation and interpretation.......................................................................... 118 6. CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 121 7. BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................. 122 SUMMARY i LIST OF MAPS Lusikisiki………………………………………………………………………………27 Bizana………………………………………………………………………………….28 Flagstaff………………………………………………………………………………..31 Tabankulu……………………………………………………………………………...32 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe my thanks to many people indeed. First of all, I am sincerely grateful to my supervisor, Doctor Jackie Grobler and my co- supervisor, Professor Alois Mlambo. Doctor Grobler took on the Herculean task of supervising a notoriously disorganised student. I wish to thank him – above all – for his unsurpassed patience. I also owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for the amount of freedom he afforded me to investigate my interests and develop my theories. Professor Lize Kriel was (and is) a mentor and a friend. I am grateful to her for vast quantities of quality advice and support. I am truly indebted to Professor Charles van Onselen, who first suggested the Pondo revolt as a possible topic to me. His door always stood open when I needed advice or wanted to talk about the ideas I had cooked up. On such occasions he readily ladled out the kind of advice that only the master craftsman can dispense. He also introduced me to a social anthropologist, Professor Isak (Sakkie) Niehaus, when I came to him with questions pertaining to culture. The resulting meeting would turn out to be most fortuitous, and I will always remember it fondly. As luck would have it Sakkie became my research coordinator at the Centre for the Study of AIDS (CSA) at the University of Pretoria, where I worked as a researcher for the duration of this project, shortly after we first met. Under his guidance I was introduced to fieldwork, methods and techniques of oral interviewing, and – above all – to social theory in abundance. Cleo certainly smiled on me at the time. Mary Crewe, director of the CSA, went out of her way to accommodate my sometimes strange office hours and was always willing to give me time off when I needed to go to the archives or to write. Her insightful comments during our numerous discussions most certainly contributed to the way I would come to think (although she should most certainly not be held responsible for it). Numerous colleagues at the CSA deserve a iii mention. Johan Maritz, Pierre Brouard, Peris Jones, Palesa Mphuthing, Vuyokazi Kuboni and Sthembiso Msweli all contributed to this project in different ways at different times. For this I thank them. Personal friends that made valuable contributions include Johan Steenkamp, who read many draft chapters and made many insightful comments, and Gusti van Zyl, who expertly helped with statistical calculations. My family, of course, had a significant part to play. Both my little sisters, Elfreda and Marna Pieterse, were – at different times – diligent research assistants. Without the help of my father, Jan George Pieterse, I would most certainly have starved before this project reached the halfway mark. I wish to thank him from the bottom of my heart (and not my stomach for, due to his efforts, it was always full). My mother is probably solely responsible for my love of history. She imbued a little boy with a love of reading and learning and a fervent desire to try and understand what makes people tick. Without her unconditional love and support this dissertation would never have materialised. I dedicate this work to her. In conclusion it needs to be categorically stated that the people listed above are in no way responsible for the inadequacies in this text. All the mistakes to be found here are entirely my own. Jimmy Pieterse August 7, 2007 iv 1. INTRODUCTION The period between the late 1940s and early 1960s was an extremely turbulent time in the history of South Africa, because the newly elected National Party government directed all its efforts towards consolidating the apartheid state. The subsequent plethora of legislation attempted to entrench apartheid in all walks of life and in all spheres of South African society.1 The result was an increased incidence of urban black protests such as the women’s protest movements in the 1950s, the bus boycotts in Evaton and Alexandra between 1955 and 1957, and the Sharpeville crisis to name a few.2 But it was in the rural reserves where the changes were most acutely felt. The state started to increasingly interfere in the countryside when H.F. Verwoerd was appointed minister of Native Affairs on 18 October 1950. According to the historian D.M Scher this appointment, along with that of W.W.M. Eiselen3 as secretary of Native Affairs, ‘marked the elevation of the apartheid ideologies over the more pragmatic administrators of previous years.’4 In his early days as Minister Verwoerd sought to foster his policies on a tribal base for he believed that he could weaken the appeal of modern, western ways to young Africans by strengthening the tribal system. He therefore tried to rejuvenate what he considered ‘the black man’s traditional way of life’ and Bantu Authorities were thus born. This was in fact nothing more than indirect rule, amounting to a perverted 1 D.M. Scher, ‘The consolidation of the apartheid state’, in B.J. Liebenberg & S.B. Spies (eds), South Africa in the 20th century, pp. 321-355. The full details on sources, including publishers and publication dates, are provided in the source list at the end of the study. 2 T. Lodge, Black politics in South Africa since 1945, pp. 139-201. 3 Werner Willi Max Eiselen established anthropology as a university subject at Stellenbosch University and would, as Secretary of Native Affairs (later Bantu Administration and Development) under Verwoerd, play a leading role in the formulation of apartheid. As the son of German Moravian missionaries raised between North Sotho peoples in a British colony, Eiselen felt himself a foreigner in ‘a double sense’ and was pushed in the direction of Afrikaner nationalism. As a contemporary of Verwoerd at Stellenbosch Eiselen came to share Verwoerd’s preoccupation with the poor white question. Like Verwoerd he became totally fixated with race, and constructed arguments for the separation of blacks and whites on what he saw as ‘cultural’ criteria. (W.D. Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect interpreters: South Africa’s anthropologists, 1920-1990, pp. 57-65) 4 D.M.