THE MANAGEMENT OF BLACKS

Afrikaner Sovereignty
The desire for land and labour, the need for security, and an impulse to master explain the attitudes and conduct of the Boers who migrated into the interior; their views, conditioned by experience in the Cape, that blacks were savage and heathen, were hardened by the African resistance they now encountered. As yet these views had not been elevated into theory or written up but the proceedings of the Natal Commission of 1852 give an insight into the Boers' perception of blacks.¹ More than half the witnesses before the Commission were Boers, who referred to Africans as lazy and stupid Kafirs, inveterate liars, incapable of gratitude and ignorant of their own true interests. If blacks were to be improved, they would have to be put to work for the whites. As one witness told the Commission:

The Kafirs are lazy by nature and accustomed to do their work under the influence of fear.... I consider it with respect to their civilisation, as well as to their own improvement, as an act of justice to the white inhabitants that they should be compelled to go into the service of the Boers.²

Assessing black life as unproductive and characterized by idleness had remained a consistent theme in the Boer discourse on blacks since the seventeenth century. Idleness was regarded as a root cause of all the problems of black society: hence the idea of providing a pedagogy of work. Since blacks by 'nature' resisted labour, they must be compelled to work,³ if necessary by instilling a sense of fear into them. As one witness told the Natal Commission: 'There are no other means to rule the kafirs but by fear; and kafirs will not work for the white men unless they know that they will be punished when they refuse.'⁴ The Boers had no patience for the more refined techniques that the English were to deploy in subjugating blacks. Sheer physical force was their answer. As another witness remarked,

I would make a law for the kafirs that every man having a kafir should be allowed to flog him when he misbehaved... when this law was in force in the old colony the farmers had plenty of hands, and then the Hottentots were comparatively rich.⁵

'Fear' was to be the guiding functional element to achieve a docile black population. Fear would also remind blacks of the awesome force of the Afrikaner himself, necessary in view of the dangers that the migrating Boers faced in the highveld: the constant threat from hostile black societies as well as the ravages of disease and hunger. The imperatives of survival and of security were born of this state of permanent aggression and violence in which the Boers lived. When the Boers raided African communities, James Chapman describes how they

were accustomed to organise commandos and the cattle were swept off, villages burnt, the inhabitants murdered, and what was perhaps the worst feature of the case, the women and children, and often the men, were dragged away to become forced labourers, in fact, slaves on the Dutchman's farms.⁶

Violence and brutality were the hallmarks of Boer raiding expeditions by which black labour was acquired, as this graphic account given to Robert Moffat by an elderly black shows:

a party of armed Boers came and demanded of the chief.. . the children of the people. The mothers ran to hide their children; the Boers began to seize them and to put them into their wagons; the men interfered; the Boers fired, and in the result most of the men were killed defending their families, and the wagons were loaded with children and driven off as booty.⁷

The Afrikaner's need for labour overruled any concern for the well-being of the black. In this period the dehumanization of blacks was accompanied by the crude exploitation of their bodies. As Fanon puts it, the initial phase of colonialism 'corresponds to the crude exploitation of men's arms and legs' .⁸

The relationship between Boer and black, constituted through the experience of war and the struggle for land, was accepted as unavoidably brutal. As the Zuid-Afrikaan stated in June 1856, dealing leniently with blacks was not possible since 'leniency which savages never fail to ascribe to a sense of weakness, has engendered contempt'.⁹ As the struggle was not between two 'civilized' nations, but rather between a civilised and a savage peoples, 'the savage must learn to fear the punishment which will follow upon an act of aggression committed by him.'¹⁰ It was a war of a special type, where defeating the enemy in battle was not enough. Any breach of the peace thereafter had vigorously to be stamped upon; disobedience had to be treated as an act of hostility, and given no quarter. At stake was the power and sovereignty of the Afrikaner. Blacks had to be made to see that the Afrikaners would brook no opposition. As Retief warned the Griqua chiefs, 'no nation or tribe, of whatever class or colour' would be permitted, unpunished, to defy his power.¹¹

The Afrikaners' assertion of power should also be seen in the context of the organisation of their own societies. Leadership among the Afrikaners was based on a patriarchal family structure, in which leaders of the trekker parties had absolute authority. The main role of the Trek leader, sometimes referred to as 'frontier commandant', was that of military organizer. Afrikaner society thus took on an autocratic form in which the senior patriarch was invested with sovereign political authority. His power was asserted militarily, was inextricably connected with the conduct of war, and the rules and obligations it imposed were regarded as personal bonds. According to Retief, Afrikaners, on pain of death or expulsion, had to sever all allegiance to outside institutions, and take an oath actively to obey and honour the elected leader.¹² In this way Afrikaners achieved a degree of political cohesion and solidarity; more importantly, they created a model of authority, reinforced by ritual display, which was to influence their view of 'sovereign power'.

When elected 'Governor' of the trekkers, Retief claimed that he had been chosen by God.¹³ Sovereign authority was conferred by God upon the leaders to 'direct' and 'protect' the community. In the trekker view of sovereignty, the leader was God's instrument and the followers had to respect a social order in conformity with God's laws. Sovereignty was established in order to achieve submission to sovereignty itself. Within this circular argument, the purpose of sovereignty was its exercise. The good was obedience to the leader; and the people had a duty to obey him. These ideas were elevated into a political ritual; any offence against the rules was an offence against the ruler, whose rights included the exercise of absolute sovereignty over blacks, including the right to declare war upon them. Thus Afrikaner power-relations, in their religious and moral justifications and practical workings, aimed at affording the leader's sovereignty.

During the thirty years between 1840 and 1870, a new group of blacks, known to the Boers as 'Inboekselings', or servants of white households, became a familiar feature of the South African interior. 'Inboekselings' were:

children and to a much lesser extent young women formally apprenticed - ingeboek - to Boer settlers and they were acquired by these households either as a result of being taken captive by Boer commandos, or they were handed over by African societies as tokens of political and diplomatic assurance, or they were sold by settlers or by some African societies. They were also an unknown number of clients-cum-servants who had remained with the Boers when they migrated from the Cape in the eighteen-thirties and eighteen-forties.¹⁴

The Boers' relationship with their servants was both personal and direct. As early as 1841, the trekker leader Pretorius had called together his followers to settle their ways of dealing with black servants; in many respects, the relationship they established was similar to that of slavery.

The Boer's relation to his servants depended upon a system of physical punishment. In the Thirty-three Articles drawn up by the Boer leader Potgieter, each master was allowed to 'exercise a reasonable discipline over his servants.'¹⁵ The broad interpretation placed by Boers on the limits of 'reasonable discipline' can be seen in an 1853 law against the ill-treatment of blacks. It laid down that masters could not longer put their servants into irons.¹⁶ This suggests that black servants as a matter of course were treated brutally. But it also reveals that Afrikaners subjugated and dominated blacks in terms of what was most accessible, their bodies. The instruments were forced labour, penitentiary measures, and corporal punishment.

Captured women and children were bound by a system of apprenticeship, another typical feature of the Afrikaner relationship with their black servants. Boys were indentured to a master until the age of 25 and the girls until they reached the age of 21. Chapman observed that the Boers

purchased many children, who with those captured in their wars with the tribes, remain in a condition of slavery until released by death.... But not only are children thus acquired: men and women, of any age, taken by illegitimate means, are sold or exchanged for cattle or goods.¹⁷

This signified a proprietorial relationship: Afrikaners owned black servants. In the same way as territory acquired through conquest and settlement belonged to the Boer by right, so also the bodies of the blacks. He could rightfully dispose of them as he wished.

The Boers secured the black labour they needed through various coercive measures. The apprenticeship system helped to ensure that the requirements of the Boer household for labour were met, and these apprentices, often trained to be skilled workers, came to be essential to the Boer communities. Captured and trained from an early age, child apprentices were alienated from their own societies and were absorbed in the 'inferior' or 'lower' black culture which Boer society had created. The Boers ensured the servile position of their servants by denying them full participation within their society. Servants thus experienced simultaneously the twin processes of incorporation and of exclusion in their transition from being captive blacks to becoming servile members of the Boer community. After their capture by Boers the

children soon realised that each had a Boer as a master and these gave them new names. Mozane who was then eight years old was from thenceforth called Valentyn. His brother Nzunza was called Kibit and his sister Lutika was called Kaatje. Valentyn and Kaatje belonged to a Boer called Gerrit Schoeman. Eventually they became used to their new masters and their new life and were no longer as distressed as they had been when they were seized. Valentyn was given over to play with and attend to the young Hermanns Steyn whose father had been murdered by Dingaan. The young white Hermanns and the young black Valentyn soon got to know one another and were always together.... The one learned from the other, bad as well as good.¹⁸

This was not untypical of the kind of relationship which developed between some 'inboekselings' and the Boers whom they served.

Boer masters did not usually set free their apprenticed servants, and there was no regular mechanism which ensured their freedom upon maturity. Also most servants had no way of proving when their apprenticeship had actually begun,¹⁹ and it was generally accepted that freed apprentices had no right to leave the local community in which they had been raised.20 The apprenticeship system resembled slavery in many ways. It was a form of master-servant relation which was firmly entrenched in Boer attitudes to blacks; it remains at the heart of Afrikaner racism to this day, and its residuals can still be found in contemporary practices.

The essential feature in the Afrikaner relationship to blacks was the subordination of the blacks. Since the Afrikaner had acquired his territory by conquest, he was its rightful owner: Thus 'we have in our opinion acquired the land by right and in accordance with the tenets of God's word', and consequently 'we ask, which country is in more rightful possession of the descendants of Europeans than our country.'²¹ The links that bound the Afrikaner to his territory were forged by violent conquests, by 'treaties' with African chiefs, or by the assertion of Boer independence from British rule.²² Characteristically pragmatic in their reactions, Afrikaners saw survival and security to be their priorities. The exercise of power had as its prime objective the protection of their territory, and this helps to explain their relationship with the blacks.

Control over territory and its inhabitants was a fundamental element in the Afrikaner view of sovereignty. The local people (including black servants) were constituent elements of the territory and had to be governed, in much the same way as a household in which everything belonged to the Patriarch whose duty was to rule and to protect his family and its property. Since the land and its people were deemed to belong to the Afrikaner, he assumed that he had absolute power over them. This was the context in which blacks came to be regarded by Afrikaners as mere possessions. By contrast, the British regarded governing blacks as a matter of understanding the people, their forms of alliances, their relations to each other, their resources, means of subsistence, customs, habits and ways of thinking, and of deploying that understanding to achieve the ends of government.

The British Approach
In contrast to the Boers, the British approach to the management of blacks was characterised by procedures that gave rights and imposed obligations. These were inscribed in civil law and moral codes, grounded in the universal laws of reason. When Sir Harry Smith brought Xhosa chiefs under British sway, he laid down a set of rules:

1. To obey the laws and commands of the high commissioner, as great chief and representative of the Queen of England;
2. to compel their people to do the same;
3. to disbelieve and cease to tolerate or practice witchcraft in any shape;
4. to prevent the violation of women;
5. to abhor murder, and to put to death every murderer;
6. to make their people honest and peaceable, and never to rob from the colony or from one another;
7. to acknowledge no chief but the Queen of England and her representatives;
8. to abolish the sin of buying wives;
9. to listen to the missionaries and make their people do so.²³

These rules were directed explicitly against the powers of the chiefs and cut at the roots of traditional society. In content, tone and style, they aimed at a systematic reconstruction of African society.

It is not far-fetched to see in these rules a mirror of the Ten Commandments, not only in number, but also in the prohibition of such crimes as adultery, theft and murder. God was replaced by Queen Victoria, who, in the biblical tradition, was portrayed as the shepherd of her flock. This notion of governing, as Foucault points out, owed much to the Hebrew pastoral theme, in which God assigns to David the task of assembling and leading his flock. Giving the Queen pastoral power over her flock was a specific technology of power, appropriate to the colonial situation. In the treaties by which the British imposed their notions of how Africans should be governed and how they should conduct themselves, African symbolic systems were transformed and obedience was enjoined to ensure that the flock complied with the shepherd's will and his law. Rules and regulations were presented as truths, and their aim was to encourage blacks to accept European rule and renounce their traditional systems and beliefs.

When white traders, followed by Boer trekkers, migrated from the Cape to Natal, they found in the territory they entered scattered groups of Africans devastated by Shaka's wars. Their settlement at Port Natal after 1824 attracted northern Nguni refugees who came to cultivate crops for sale or to find employment with the settlers. The number of Zulus in Natal soon increased; on one occasion, an entire Zulu regiment defected from Dingane to the settlers. By 1838, the African population was somewhere between 5,000 and 11,000, numbers which grew rapidly as a consequence of the Boer conflicts with the Zulus and Mpande's revolt against Dingane.²⁴ When the British annexed Natal to the Cape in 1844, they had to formulate a policy to govern a large African population and the new administration swiftly took steps to settle the African land question and establish a system to administer Africans.²⁵

For the colonial administration, knowledges of Man, a process involving the objectification of Africans, were now to serve a technological function in the domination of blacks. Understanding the political and social organization of blacks was to provide the basis for their administration. It was knowledge of these societies that would enable the European administrator to dominate blacks. 'Native Policy' was a singular product in the history of racial practice, where programmes were constructed for the formation of a social reality for Africans. These programmes were elaborated in certain discourses (e.g. Africans are uncivilized and belong to a 'lower race') which were integrally transposed to the domain of actual practices (e.g. suppression of traditional African practices such as witchcraft and polygamy) and certain techniques of social domination were forced upon the African population as a whole (e.g. the introduction of European law, recruitment of African labour and their segregation from whites).

The report of the Locations Commission, published in March 1847, established the preconditions for a system of administering the Africans. It was posited on a view of the 'universal' or essential character of Africans:

Their universal character, as formed by their education, habits, and associations is at once superstitious and warlike; their estimate of the value of human life is very low; war and bloodshed are engagements with which their circumstances have rendered them familiar from their childhood, and from which they can be restrained only by the strong arm of power; their passions are easily inflamed, while at the same time they have grown up in habits of such servile compliance with the wills of their despotic rulers that they will show ready obedience to constituted authority.²⁶

In the past, African identity had been defined primarily in terms of a negative judgement, its exclusion from European identity. By contrast the African was now made a British subject and his identity was viewed from an administrative perspective. Admittedly the black was 'superstitious and warlike', the creature of 'passions', with little regard for 'the value of human life', but he did show 'ready obedience to constituted authority'. The conclusion was self evident: it was essential to establish firm control over blacks. But this control had to be imposed upon traditional societies which were organised around symbolic systems in which all the arrangements-economic, education and juridical - were different from those in the west, where there was no state. Consequently, relations of domination could be set up and maintained by colonial administrators only by the use of strategies which were repeatedly renewed, and exerted in a direct and personal way.²⁷

The Shepstone and Grey Strategies
Theophilus Shepstone in Natal and George Grey at the Cape devised markedly different strategies to administer and dominate the black populations which were rooted in their differing view of the nature and history of the Zulu and Xhosa societies that they encountered, and in the different conditions of Natal and the Cape.²⁸ Shepstone sought to marry the techniques of colonial domination to African symbolic structures, whereas Grey, by eradicating traditional African systems, hoped to transform them at a stroke. Both strategies had this in common: they aimed to reorganise black life in order to exert British control.

The task of constructing the system of African administration in Natal was assigned to Theophilus Shepstone, the Colony's Secretary for Native Affairs. Shepstone was the son of a Wesleyan missionary who had learnt to speak Zulu and Xhosa in his youth, and had helped to produce both a Xhosa grammar and a bible in Xhosa.²⁹ His anthropological insights into African culture and history enabled him to construct a specific programme for the management of Africans. He saw this as 'the worthy project of Christianising and civilising 100,000 degraded human beings.'³⁰ Aware that the people of Natal were different from those in the Cape, and that Zulu society had imbued them with 'notions of most implicit obedience to their rulers', he now set to manipulate these notions to the advantage of the administration.³¹ The key was to make use of chieftainship, an institution with which Africans were familiar, to administer the blacks. Since by his estimation between one third and one half of the African population were without chiefs,³² Shepstone created artificial tribal units and appointed chief to rule them as the agents of the Natal Government.

It is necessary for [chiefs] to understand that in all things, the Government must be supreme; that smelling out people and punishments on account of witchcraft must cease, that no human life must be taken nor stealing be practised whether from each other or from people beyond; that assembling in arms must cease, except on the order of the proper Government officer; the dance of the first fruits must not be celebrated by any chief except on special permission; in short, that everything affecting life and property and the peace of the country which the chiefs have hitherto done on their own responsibility, must now be done on the authority of the Government appointed over them....³³

The chief's role was to be a subordinate one, as can be seen in Shepstone's policy towards the first-fruit festivals, a ritual which involved displays by armed warriors and symbolised the power of the chief over his people. It was precisely this aspect of the festivals which Shepstone wanted to suppress since chiefs were to be agents, not masters. Shepstone arrogated to himself the role of Supreme chief, and assumed the prerogative of the Festival. This was a way of claiming allegiance from his black subjects and of symbolising that sovereignty lay with him. The festivals were now used for government purposes. In this way Shepstone cut down the powers of the chief by absorbing the symbolic ritualization of their power into the administrative scheme of things. 'The Government must be supreme', 'assembling in arms must cease', and 'property and peace of the country... must now be done on the authority of the Government appointed over them': these imperatives removed every vestige of real political authority from African leaders. Clearly then, Shepstone's paramount concern was the circumscription of African power, by organising and limiting it on the one hand and on the other investing the substance of authority in institutions of British government. White magistrates, not black chiefs, were required to explain to the people their obligations, and to enforce the new laws.³⁴

But Shepstone also wanted to reconcile the traditional African systems of government and British administration. A memorandum of instructions sent to all magistrates in 1850 set out the framework of how this was to be done:

whilst humanity, and especially the injunctions of our religion, compel us to recognise in the natives the capability of being elevated to perfect equality, social and political, with the white man, yet it is untrue now as it would be unwise to say that the Native is even now in this position, or that he is in the present state capable of enjoying or even understanding the civil and political rights of the white man.

Her Majesty's Government has most wisely recognised and acted upon these principles by providing a form of government for the Natives in this District, which, while adapted to their present position, is capable of being so modified as to advance their progress towards a higher and better civilization.³⁵

The process of acculturation was to be gradual. Africans were to go through various stages of development before they could be fully incorporated into civil society and given all the rights, civil and political, of the white man.

In the reserves (which were territories allocated to the Africans) customary law ruled and outside the reserves, the chiefs were also given some judicial powers.³⁶ The chiefs had jurisdiction in civil cases involving blacks, but criminal cases were placed under Roman and Dutch law. Shepstone skilfully explained that a man's life was the property of the Supreme Chief, and that the Lieutenant Governor as Supreme Chief would demand the murderer's life in compensation.³⁷ Shepstone's strategy throughout was linked to the project of achieving a transformation of Africans, to be achieved through the exercise of power, with law as its instrument.

Shepstone had a shrewd understanding of the African world he encountered. When asked by the 1852 Commission whether dismantling the powers of hereditary chiefs would evoke opposition, he replied that it would and told the Commissioners a cautionary tale of how the hard facts of tribal loyalty could break administrative fiat:

(The Chief Fodo) was deposed by me on behalf of the government, and his uncle nominated in his stead. For a while the people obeyed the uncle, and the uncle himself consented to administer the government of the tribe; but he soon found that the strength of public opinion was so great as to render his influence and rank only nominal; and the real power reverted to Fodo, when the Government also found it advisable to pardon and allow his reinstatement.³⁸

Looking back in 1892 at his long experience in Natal, Shepstone summed up the policy to which he had contributed so much:

Hereditary chiefs may be officially deposed by the paramount power; may be refused recognition; may be sent into exile; or placed under personal disabilities. These are the means which civilised governments generally use... but they have succeeded only in making martyrs.... The effect is to inflame the tribal sentiment and to strengthen attachment to its representative member.... The answer is, use them as they have been used during the last 45 years in Natal; use their influence, their system of tribal management, their principle of mutual responsibility; make room for these in your own system. Let the chiefs understand that they rule as your Lieutenants; that they carry out your behests, subject to your general supervision, even in tribal matters. Pay them fairly. They will prove loyal and zealous,....³⁹

Shepstone had grasped the terms of the understanding between rulers and ruled which has been the condition of colonial rule everywhere. Domination was to be achieved through enlisting the collaboration of the men who mattered among the subject peoples, and the terms of that collaboration required that subject elites be allowed to retain some authority in their own backyards. It also required that traditional African forms of political cohesion and methods of social control be understood so as to be capable of being deployed for the purposes of the colonial regime. By encouraging and promoting these networks of cohesion within the dominant structure of British rule, Shepstone planned not only to enlist African cooperation but actively to promote it. At the same time blacks were denied autonomy in the rituals which symbolised effective independence:

Forbid, except by special leave, the performance of any function devised to keep up the idea of tribal independence. Prohibit absolutely accusations of witchcraft. 'Witch dances' as they are called, such accusations being their purpose, are the great political engine of the hereditary chief; they take public opinion by storm, they make it easy to strike down, without trial or defence, the most formidable rival; they are what a standing army is to the military chief. Take away this engine and nothing will be left to lean upon but the power of the Government.⁴⁰

Chiefships were to be retained since they had their uses, but rituals such as the 'witch dance' which symbolised the independent power of the chief and might challenge British rule had to be stamped out. In Shepstone's view, chiefship, cut down to size, had a place under British rule, but his policy drove a wedge between the two dimensions of power and legitimacy which previously Africans in Natal had regarded as indissoluble. Previously the chiefship had been the epicentre of the social and symbolic world; now it became one of two divided foci of authority.

By using pre-existing forms of African authority, Shepstone believed he had found an instrument by which black insubordination might be contained and revolt prevented. It was a subtle strategy to use the power of the chief over his people and at the same time to direct it towards the goals of discipline, order and obedience to the British. Yet in spite of this reliance on the influence that chiefs exercised over their people, Shepstone predicted its gradual decline:

I believe that the power of the Chiefs will become extinct from the force of circumstances; as a rule, their people precede them in civilization, the nature of the questions before them become complicated in proportion to their progress and in the same proportion the inability of the chiefs to deal with them will be felt, and they will be practically superceded by the people themselves, hence the policy and necessity for the presence of a white functionary....⁴¹

At the heart of Shepstone's strategy for governing blacks was the notion to which he consistently held that progress in Africa required supervision and guidance by white men.

This can be seen in the matter of judicial powers. Ordinance 3 of 1849 placed minor judicial powers under chiefly control. Twenty years later Shepstone characterised the judicial powers of chiefs as

a proper and harmless jurisdiction |by which| the dignity of the Chief is saved from any rude shock; native ideas of right in such matters are very much guided by their own peculiar customs and habits, and none are better able to understand these than the Chiefs.⁴²

Appeals from chiefs' courts were heard by white magistrates, who could thus correct the manifest injustice of any custom. But chiefs had the authority to summon any of their people to appear before them, and refusal to comply vas a punishable offence. If an African was charged with a criminal offence, the chief could send a messenger to bring him in, and resistance was punishable by seizure of cattle. By being given these privileges and powers, the chief had been enlisted by the colonial authorities as an agent to maintain law and order. In other words, he became a useful instrument of surveillance on behalf of the colonial government.

In Shepstone's strategy, the apparatus of chieftainship also served the economic imperatives of the colonial regime. The chief's prerogative to call upon his people to provide labour was interpreted by Shepstone as 'a prerogative which all native chiefs enjoy, of requiring their people to build their kraals, cultivate their fields, and discharge military duties; feeding but giving them no pay.'⁴³ This system was known as 'isabalo' and was first used only to provide labour for public works.⁴⁴ But in 1852 magistrates were asked to use their 'legitimate influence to cause the chiefs to induce their young men to enter into service of the |white| farmers.'45 Taking a traditional African way as his model for the organisation and discipline of labour, Shepstone transformed it by requiring the chiefs and headmen to become the intermediaries between government and the people. Consequently these measures changed the traditional relationship between the chief and his people, since the chieftainship became an engine of central control, and the enforcing agent for a much hated system.

The restructuring of chieftainship was reinforced by isolating, arranging and identifying 'tribal' distinctions.⁴⁶ By constituting blacks into distinct tribes, Shepstone created another effective means of discipline and surveillance. By partitioning and re-distributing blacks along these invented identities, an administrative and political space was imposed upon the black population. By isolating them into individual tribal units, fragmenting and spreading them out, a powerful means had been created of observing, assessing, supervising and controlling blacks. These were increasingly sophisticated tactics to achieve the aim of deriving the maximum advantages by administering blacks through their own leaders, while neutralising by the same means the dangers of black solidarity and revolt. Controlling blacks through mechanisms of differentiation and spatial ordering and encouraging the autonomy of divided units and small localities were essential elements in Shepstone's technology of colonial management. By utilising some aspects pre-existing power-relations within African societies, Shepstone transformed them; he converted chiefs into a neutered constitutional monarchs, subject to rulers imposed by Government House. By governing the African population wherever possible through its own chiefs and headmen, Shepstone used the African past as a deceptively familiar road along which blacks would be driven into the divided compartments of a 'disciplined colonial future.

The Natal Government's need to raise resources by taxing the people led to measures for the more effective management of blacks. A tax of seven shillings per hut had been introduced in 1849. It was designed to raise revenue and to encourage blacks into the labour market. Maitland has reminded us that Domesday Book was a geld book, and the imperatives of taxation in South Africa provided a powerful motive for counting the population as accurately as possible. In the transitional stage, it proved easier to count huts not heads, and hence the hut tax was an early essay in direct taxation. But even the rudimentary statistical knowledge which the hut tax required proved to be a useful tool in administering the black population. The next stage was to count heads, and in the early twentieth century the census brought to South Africa, as it had to India, inflexible categories and classifications into which the subject populations were fitted. This hardened the conceptualizations of blacks into rigid tribal identities which did not always accurately reflect social fact or the 'functional solidarities of black society.

Taxation also was seen as an instrument to regulate the practice of polygamy. As Shepstone could see, a tax on huts would be a disincentive for black men to possess several wives and several huts. Since monogamy was a central tenet of western civilization, polygamy among blacks was regarded as a deviation from the norm, and a threat to the civil and religious ordering of white society. It was especially abominable since it was perceived as an infringement of the sanctity of marriage. From this it was a natural step to make polygamy the subject of legislation, not merely the object of moral criticism. Introducing a 'Bill to discourage Polygamy' in 1857) Lieutenant-Governor Scott stated, 'Amongst the many objectionable customs of the Kafir, it is, perhaps, the most repugnant to our own laws, and most obnoxious to civilization'.⁴⁷ Polygamy was a threat to 'family relation; and this lies at the basis of the whole fabric of society'; it made blacks 'unquiet subjects of Government... bad citizens, and disinclined to labour'.⁴⁸ Sexuality, 'love between man and wife', was acceptable only within the monogamous unit; polygamy was a threat to these proper sentiments and values. And since polygamy was seen to be 'the keystone of the social fabric' among blacks, it was singled out as the practice above all others which, if eradicated, would radically improve the social relations in that society.

On a more prosaic level, polygamy was also regarded as a threat to the labour supply which the reserves might potentially yield. Having many wives, it was held, enabled the African man to sit idly while his women did the work. With an unconscious irony, a public meeting of the colonists in 1863, denounced polygamy as; '... essentially a system of slavery involving as it does the bartering of women for cattle, and their subjection for life to a state of degrading bondage....'⁴⁹ There followed a series of regulative interventions to discourage polygamy. In due course, Shepstone proposed a scheme whereby African marriages, births and deaths had to be registered at the magistrate's office, with chiefs and headmen responsible for the accuracy of the information registered.⁵⁰ To control the African population, administrators realised they had to understand it. Taxation and registration provided the means to gather information about the black population, its forms of subsistence, potential labour capacity, its resources and its growth. Blacks were no longer simply subjects, but a population which needed to be grasped in all its specificity: birth rates, marital arrangements, forms of kinship, and relations. This knowledge would give the administrator the know-how on which to base specific techniques to manage African societies.

Shepstone's policy of demarcating reserves for African occupation and retaining the chieftainships was criticised by Sir George Grey, Governor of the Cape, and by the school which shared his thinking. Lieutenant Governor Pine, who was among the critics, enquired:

what is the condition of the natives within this district, and what steps have they made towards civilization? Mr. Shepstone admits... that they have made no such advance, and such I believe to be the case. The power of the chiefs has increased, and along with it their tyranny. The belief in witchcraft is unshaken and it is used as an engine of grinding oppression by the chiefs....⁵¹

Owen, a Commissioner of the British Government, believed that the Natal system allowed blacks to pursue 'their savage customs and superstitions', and 'So long as the present system is pursued... no confidence can be placed in these savages; by indulging them too much they become dangerous.'⁵² Grey and his supporters demanded the abolition of reserves, chieftainships and traditional practices. In their view, reserves were sites for African resistance and revolt, in which the power of the chiefs was ritualised and reinforced. The autonomy of the reserves obstructed administrative access to blacks and prevented the reordering of African life.

Soon after assuming office in December 1854. Grey gave the Colonial Office an outline of his strategy:
The plan I propose to pursue... is to attempt to gain an influence over all the tribes included between the present north-eastern boundary of this colony and Natal by employing them upon public works which will tend to open up their country; by establishing institutions for the education of their children and the relief of their sick; by introducing among them institutions of a civil character suited to their present condition; and by these and other means to attempt gradually to win them to civilization and Christianity, and thus to change by degrees our at present unconquered and apparently irreclaimable foes into friends who may have common interests with ourselves.⁵³

In Grey's view, African society was a wilderness, awaiting the cultivating hand of Europe. Blacks were to be reformed and rehabilitated by a process of acculturation; they would learn civilised principles and habits through corrective procedures inculcated by local sites of instruction such as schools, missions and public works, which would bring British influence to bear upon the minutest aspects of African life.

If African society was to be radically reorganised, blacks would have to be persuaded to acquire 'habits of industry'⁵⁴ To get blacks to work regularly, and to accept the work ethic, required white supervision: 'The majority of the natives may be, at the best, qualified to do the rough work of artisans; but 'even this work must be under the direction of the guiding eye and hand of the skilled European....⁵⁵ Scrupulous surveillance was a key element in the reformation of blacks.

Grey's purpose in 'civilising' blacks was to lift them to a new level of existence, where reason and refined norms of conduct would prevail, and prejudice, superstition, ignorance and barbarism would be driven out. 'Civilised' blacks would collaborate with the British in promoting their joint interests. Industrial and missionary schools would be the instruments.⁵⁶ The project of 'civilizing' the black constructed its adversary (the blacks) in oppositional terms; they were seen as heathen, barbaric, ignorant. The aim was to transform the thoughts and actions of the antagonists. The civilising mission was, in effect, a power struggle. At stake was the power and the right to rule over the thoughts of blacks. Education was the key site in the struggle to gain access to, and dominance over, the minds of blacks, and the most powerful weapon by which their souls were to be captured. By assuming that western constructs were universal principles, Grey's educational system proposed to replace superstition and 'heathen' practices with western forms of knowledge. Tribal systems produced ignorance, wrong morality and false ideas. Progress was impossible until 'tribalism' had been razed to the ground and chiefs and 'witch-doctors' stripped of their influence. Thus the civilising mission became a total war against tribal authorities and traditional practices, with its network of customs, rituals and festivals, and the objective was to attack and destroy every pocket of African cultural authority or resistance which remained in place.

The civilising ideal which lay behind Grey's policies presupposed a belief in the infinite potential and malleability of the black; it also assumed that the black was immature and needed white direction to achieve his potential. The project of transforming Africans into civilised beings was grounded in a fundamentally negative view of blacks and in the belief that western civilization was the model for mankind. Schools, the mission and the workplace had the task of achieving the physical and moral reformation of blacks. For an 'intellectually inferior race... such as the South African aborigines', who had no "love of bodily toil', the 'only available agencies for transforming the native savage into a citizen, capable of understanding his duties and fulfilling them, are the school, the workshop and the Christian Church'. But mere 'literary' instruction was not enough: 'the teaching... needs... an industrial substratum';⁵⁷ so special schools were needed which would give blacks basic literacy, discipline and manual skills.⁵⁸ In such schools blacks would remain under the constant surveillance of white supervisors, each hour marked out for study, manual labour, eating or resting. The keynote in educating blacks was the meticulous regulation of the totality of life and incessant surveillance. In this way, 'the aboriginal youth' would be humanised, weaned from 'their fondness for an idle and dissolute life'; they would be trained to 'habits of orderly obedience to the law of the country that protects them, and to the master who may employ them'; and they would generally be fitted 'for the busy life on lines which in our civilised society are regarded as moral'.⁵⁹ Grey's educational policies were founded on the assertion of dominance of white society. Blacks were allowed to learn only the rudiments of their master's tongue. Their place in white society was as 'useful servants'; girls were brought up to be 'domestic servants' for white households and boys were trained to be manual workers, indoctrinated with a servile mentality appropriate to their inferior status. Blacks were brought into the colonial order not as equals but as a subordinate group distanced socially and excluded politically from their white overlords.

These strategies also had a bio-political dimension. Schooling in industrious habits were intended to make blacks docile and productive. Strict discipline in workshops imposed a new regime of order upon blacks who, by conquest or emancipation, had been cast adrift from their social moorings. In response to the question: 'Do you prefer to spend public money on police, prisons and other repressive and protective agencies, or on the workshops and teachers of handicrafts?',⁶⁰ Grey and his followers took it for granted that spending money on workshops and schools was justified on the grounds both of economy and efficiency.

Introducing new institutions of a 'civil character', with white magistrates taking over from chiefs who were pensioned off, was part of Grey's plan to reform black society. In this way,

the worst part of the Kaffir policy is broken down. Every chief of importance will receive a certain regular income, for which he will be dependent upon the Government of the country and will therefore have the strongest interest in its maintenance and success. European laws will, by imperceptible degrees, take the place of their own barbarous customs, and any Kafir Chief of importance will be daily brought into contact with a talented and honourable European gentleman, who will hourly interest himself in the advance and improvement of the entire tribe, and must in process of time gain an influence over the Native races which will produce very beneficial effects.⁶¹

By putting in magistrates to 'advise' and 'assist chiefs', the chiefs were stripped of their real power, and institutions dominated by whites rather than traditional institutions had become the focal points of loyalty.

Grey's attempts to destroy chiefly power met with Xhosa resistance in the Cattle-Killing of 1856-7, in which grain-pits were devastated and cattle slaughtered.⁶² As a result, the Xhosas faced the alternatives of starvation or complete submission to government. When some missionaries appealed on their behalf, an editorial in the King Williams Town Gazette, emphatically urged that the appeal be rejected: 'Is the Kafir a fit and proper subject for the receipt of Charity? .... we answer "No".... Sir George Grey has distinctly given them to understand that there is plenty of work for all those who would be industrious but there is no bread for the idle.'⁶³ This was in line with Victorian attitudes towards the poor. The idea of correction and the Benthamite principles embodied in the 1834 Poor Law report suggested that no relief should be given to 'the able-bodied or their families, except in return for adequate labour.'⁶⁴ Poverty was not to be pitied; some writers argued that deprivation was in fact good for the idle poor, since 'it is hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour.'⁶⁵ In a convenient symbiosis of moral and economic imperatives, all forms of social uselessness were condemned, and labour was seen as the universal panacea.

After the cattle-killing incidents of 1857. Grey ordered that the Xhosa:

must be widely dispersed over the Colony and... thus brought under the charitable influence of individual employers [so that] they will become a settled and valuable rural population attached to their employers and homes, and... trained to habits of industry and imbued with Christian principles.⁶⁶

Commissioner Maclean took the same line: the destitution of the Xhosa was self-inflicted. The provision of relief would 'assist the chiefs, encourage the able bodied to live idly without labouring to support their families'.⁶⁷ In short, the Xhosa preferred to be supported in idleness, for he 'has no desire for work, and we know that idleness is their besetting sin'.⁶⁸ The refusal to provide aid was seen as an opportunity to correct a grave moral fault among the Xhosa, their reluctance to work. The Kafir Pass Act prohibited the Xhosa from entering the Colony except to work. The Kafir Employment Act required the registration of contracts between Xhosa and employers. When the contract expired, the Xhosa had fourteen days to renew it or to leave the Colony.⁶⁹

Work assumed moral overtones; it would serve as a corrective to the fundamental African weakness, the disposition to avoid work. As de Kiewiet has summed up, the ethics of the administration were that:

To labour was to learn. How could savages better acquaint themselves with white civilization than by becoming its apprentices? Within the tribe they could only remain the prisoner of their own primitive habits. The more completely they were withdrawn by 'holy ennobling labour" from the influence of chiefs and witchdoctors, the swifter would be their emancipation.... There was a genuine belief that service with Europeans was a means to escape barbarism.⁷⁰

The requirement to work was viewed as a moral imperative, which rejected 'savage existence', and justified the Colony's 'civilising mission'.

It can be seen that Grey's measures to transform the blacks prepared the ground for many of the institutions of the future, whether the compound systems in the mining industries and factories, black locations, hostels or 'Bantu Education', with their specific techniques of discipline, control, surveillance and indoctrination. However much these institutions differed from each other in their ostensible function and declared purpose, they had the common aim of transforming the blacks, and they shared similar methods. Above all, they were inspired by the determination to regiment conduct, make the conditions of black life uniform, and in this way to constitute and mould a subjugated black population. Grey's promot