The introduction of the extremely strict measures against Africans was meant to pacify European settler-farmers, especially those in the Transvaal and in the Orange Free State, says Dr Felix Muchemwa in his book The Struggle For Land in Zimbabwe (1890 – 2010) that The Patriot is serialising.
The foundation of apartheid on land ownership in southern Africa
RACIST South Africa’s influence on the land laws legislated by Southern Rhodesia was very significant.
In South Africa, the British had used considerably more military aggression to conquer the Africans and deprive them of their land than was the case in many other European colonies. (Diamond, 1997: Chapter 11)
After bloody and costly land wars against the Xhosas and Zulus in the southern and eastern parts of South Africa, as well as against Sothos, Ndebeles, Tswanas and Vendas in the central and northern part of South Africa, in particular in the north-west, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, the British and the Afrikaaners had expropriated huge tracts of land from these Africans by right of conquest. (Terreblanche, 2002: p.155)
And, by controlling power over land ownership during the 18th and 19th Centuries, the European settlers in South Africa had remained landowners and used their political and military power to turn indigenous African people into ‘an unfree and exploitable labour force’, which meant, virtual slaves. (Terreblanche, 2002: p.264)
This meant that for a period of almost 200 years, between 1700 and 1880, the European settler-wage-earning class did not exist as labourers in South Africa.
In that historical context, Cecil Rhodes personified high notions of the superiority of the English more than anyone else in British colonial history in Africa. (Thomas, 1996: pp.8-9)
When he was prime minister of the Cape Colony for the two terms spanning July 17 1890 to January 12 1896, it was his Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892, the Anti-squatting Act of 1892 and the Glen Grey Act of 1894 which introduced racism on land in South Africa.
The acts defined the beginning of ‘apartheid’ — a system of socio-economic and political segregation which included territorial separation of Africans and European settlers in both rural and urban South Africa. (Terreblanche, 2002: pp.251-253)
The Glen Grey was an over-populated district south of the Kei River in the former Kaffiraria i.e. the south-eastern part of present-day Eastern Cape.
The term ‘kaffir’ was Boer racist term for black people, and ‘Kaffiraria’ simply meant ‘land of the kaffirs.’
The Glen Grey Act of 1892 turned the district into the first ‘native reserve’ in the Cape, and it became the prototype of the ‘Native Land Act’ of 1913. (Terreblanche, 2002: p.258)
Every family in the ‘native reserve’ was compelled to pay a hut tax. (Bundy, 1988: Chapter. 4)
While white settlers were prohibited from acquiring land in the Glen Grey ‘native reserve’, some Africans, especially collaborators, were allowed to purchase small plots of eight acres in the ‘native reserve’, but were forbidden to subdivide or add any extra land to the purchased land.
Inevitably, by the end of the 19th Century, land had become severely scarce, especially in the Orange Free State and Transvaal, thus leading to the great treks north into Zimbabwe. (Olivier, 1975: p.1)
On that note, it is important to remember, as stated earlier in Chapter Four, that it was Rhodes who encouraged and sponsored the majority of these treks.
And, it is also important to note that the trekkers did not just come.
They brought with them the racism which Rhodes had introduced on land in South Africa.
Rhodes’s policy of active importation of white settlers did not die with him in 1902.
It was actively pursued between 1904 and 1921.
One message the British South Africa Company (BSAC) sent to its shareholders confirms this:
“It will be the company’s aim to assist settlers to take up farms already prepared for their occupation by the support and facilities offered them, rather than by giving them raw land at Prairie value,” (BSAC, C. D. Wise Report, p6, 1906).
Potential European settlers, in particular those from South Africa, after the Anglo-Boer war period of 1899-1901 (Hodder-Williams, 1967: p.46), were given assisted or free sea and rail passage, temporary accommodation, a piece of land cultivated before their arrival as well as assistance with stock for acquired farms.
The incentive worked, resulting in the rapid increase of the white settler-population from a figure of 12 576 in 1904 to
23 606 in 1911 and to 33 620 by 1921. (Schutz p.5-7)
And, almost 95 percent of the immigrants came from South Africa. (Hodder-Williams, 1967: p.46)
Native Land Act of 1913
Meanwhile, immediately after the Union of South Africa had been established in 1910, all unionist parties and Boer Republican parties agreed on a common ‘native policy’ based on land.
The policy was to become the rock upon which not only the political alliance between the Afrikaaner farming elite and the British business elite was built, but also upon which the ultra-exploitative system of racial capitalism was built and maintained. (Terreblanche, 2002: pp.260-261)
The common ‘native policy’ based on land yielded the ‘Native Land Act of 1913’ which the Union Parliament modelled on the Rhodes’s Glen Grey Act of 1894. (Terreblanche, 2002: p.288)
Out of a South African land mass of
302 658 782 acres (121 063 513 hectares), the Native Land Act of 1913 assigned only
23 630 077 acres (or 9 452 030 hectares) to a total of 4 417 665 Africans.
An additional 2 120 855 acres (848 342 hectares) was assigned as Native Purchase Area, thus bringing the total amount of land assigned to all Africans in South Africa to 25 750 932 acres (10 300 368 hectares) which amounted to exactly 8,5 percent of the land in South Africa. (Land Commission Report, p.19)
In future, the Rhodesian Morris Carter Commissioners of 1925 would, by comparison to their own proposal for Africans, feel extremely liberal and generous.
Like the Glen Grey prototype, the South African Native Land Act of 1913 stipulated that Africans could not own land outside the ‘native reserves’.
On the other hand, the act was extremely sensitive to the demands of white settler-farmers.
One of its objectives had been to allay fears among the white settler-farmers, especially those in the Transvaal and in the Orange Free State, about the amount of land Africans were entitled to purchase, and, from which area. (Bundy, 1988: pp.213-14)
The introduction of the extremely strict measures against Africans was therefore meant to pacify European settler-farmers, especially those in the Transvaal and in the Orange Free State. (Rich, 1996: p.18)
The other objective of the Native Land Act of 1913 was to create a large reservoir of cheap, landless and docile labour for white settler-farms and mines and, this also meant that through the Act, Africans in South Africa had lost not only their ancestral land, but even the potential power to purchase it back.
They would, up to 1994, remain prohibited by law from owning land of whatever size, even by right of purchase, in 87 percent of the country. (Terreblanche, 2002: p.261)
The Act made the African ‘not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.’ (Terreblanche, 2002: p.264)