In the early 1950s in Nongoma, a district in Zululand where the heirs to the preconquest Zulu kingdom resided, Zulu leaders pressured the Department of Native Affairs (DNA) to delay or abandon unpopular soil rehabilitation programs. The government had hoped that if Paramount Chief Cyprian Bhekuzulu, heir to the precolonial Zulu kings, accepted these programs, other chiefs would follow. These controversial measures included stock limitations, the division of reserve land into arable, residential, and grazing zones, and a small number of forced relocations. The DNA saw these initiatives as necessary for the creation of economically and politically self-sufficient African reserves. However, a faction led by Isaac Zulu, grandson of Cetshwayo, the last independent Zulu king before British conquest, countered with an unexpected argument. Citing nineteenth-century promises from the British, colonial and union-era land tenure arrangements, and the newly passed 1951 Bantu Authorities Act, Isaac Zulu and others argued that rehabilitation violated the rights of the Zulu royal house to administer land in Nongoma. The DNA, therefore, could not impose development policies without violating past promises of successive white governments and the very principles of new apartheid legislation.
For elder royal family members, conquest and the colonial era were not distant times consigned to history books. The apartheid government passed the Bantu Authorities Act only 72 years after the conquest of the Zulu kingdom. Conquest, land dispossession, the creation of native reserves in Zululand, and the imposition of the Natal Native Code and other colonial laws shaped Zulu leaders’ views of the proper administration of land in the reserves. When Zululand became first a British colony and then part of the colony of Natal, the government redefined chiefly authority on a territorial basis. During the colonial and union eras, both in codified law and practice, the state conceded wide powers over land use and allocation to the chiefs.Footnote 1 Soil rehabilitation in Nongoma challenged the rights of chiefs to control land use in the reserves, at the same time that the government sought to strengthen the power of chiefs and promote African self-government through the Bantu Authorities Act.
This article explores this paradox. I argue that struggles over soil conservation programs in Nongoma from 1951 to 1954 emerged as critical sites within which African leaders debated the new political order with the state, asserting their claims to continued sovereignty over reserve land based on agreements, laws, and practices from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries along with new apartheid legislation. African leaders and apartheid officials utilized competing ideas about the boundaries of authority between Zulu people and the apartheid state to advance their positions. DNA officials saw rural development, primarily through soil rehabilitation, as a prerequisite to the creation of self-sufficient African spheres of life in the reserves. African leaders surrounding Cyprian Bhekuzulu called upon both the colonial past and the apartheid present to protest what they saw as violations of their land and authority and to articulate a vague vision of sovereignty for the Zulu kingdom nearly a century after conquest. They argued that government attempts to regulate land use violated treaties and promises from the era of Queen Victoria that protected Nongoma's land for the future use of descendants of the royal family. Moreover, they seized the language of the Bantu Authorities Act to proclaim the autonomy of their chiefs over land in the reserves, thus rejecting the idea that the government had the right to implement development schemes without their consent.
These struggles over rural development in Nongoma show how people used law and history to contest power arrangements under apartheid. Practices of strategically invoking the responsibilities and past promises of colonizing powers have been well documented in colonial legal history.Footnote 2 Across colonial New Spain, for example, indigenous peoples utilized colonial courts to protect access to land.Footnote 3 Indigenous litigants strategically appropriated the language of the colonizer, portraying themselves selectively as ‘good servants of the king’ or ‘indios miserable’, vulnerable members of society deserving protection, to assert their claims.Footnote 4 In the latter half of the twentieth century, indigenous peoples across the Commonwealth used their own interpretations of history, colonial law, and treaties to claim land and citizenship rights in independent settler states.Footnote 5
This article offers a new perspective on how rural development initiatives exposed fundamental questions about political authority and land tenure in the native reserves during the first years of apartheid. Scholarship on soil rehabilitation and betterment is vast. William Beinart has situated these programs within the rise of conservationist thought in South Africa's environmental history.Footnote 6 Scholarship on similar programs elsewhere in Africa has shown that technocratic soil conservation programs played out in the ambiguous space between scientific racism and ‘modern’ development imperatives.Footnote 7 Scholars have focused on displacement and villagization, including its effects on gendered social relations.Footnote 8 Others have argued that betterment, especially after the mid-1950s, functioned more as a mechanism of social control than one of rural development.Footnote 9 Social historians have shown how these programs sparked rural resistance to state policy, at times placing chiefs in a tenuous position.Footnote 10 This article, however, points to how soil rehabilitation during the first, uncertain years of apartheid led to new debates between African leaders and the apartheid state about the legal rights of chiefs over land.
Regional histories of land tenure and native administration are crucial to understanding local responses to soil conservation. The colonial and segregationist-era history of Zululand, including its relatively late conquest and legal history surrounding land tenure, brought forth an articulation of rural resistance rooted in the claim that chiefs and the Zulu royal family had the right to control land. Many cases of betterment planning, and much of the subsequent scholarship on these programs, were on South African Native Trust (SANT) land, where the state purchased new lands and began to implement conservation policies almost immediately in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 11 In the early years of apartheid, however, the DNA focused on convincing chiefs in native locations across Natal to accept betterment planning. Unlike SANT land, Zululand locations had been delimitated decades before and placed under government-recognized chiefs, who exercised broad control over land use and allocation. All land in Nongoma had been designated as locations under the control of chiefs before Zululand was even open to white settlement. Furthermore, the specific timing of these programs in Nongoma – immediately after the passage of the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act – meant that the government sought to control land use in chiefs’ locations at the very moment they sought to strengthen chieftaincies.
TERRITORY AND AUTHORITY IN NONGOMA
In Nongoma, the apartheid state attempted to implement soil rehabilitation on rural land with a particularly rich history of chiefly control. Elizabeth Eldridge has shown that during the height of Shaka Zulu's power, land allocation was officially a prerogative of the king:
Because the allocation of land for settlement and sites for building, gardens for crops, and pastures had always been the prerogative of the head of the ruling family of a chiefdom, the chief, the creation of a new layer of authority in the person of the king with comparative prerogatives was not disputed.Footnote 12
While Shaka Zulu allotted some land directly through patronage networks, much of the land distribution was carried out by local chiefs and indunas, on behalf of the king.Footnote 13
After the conquest of the Zulu kingdom, chiefs of government-recognized tribes were central to the land tenure system. While the Cape Colony marginalized chiefs at the expense of magistrates and headmen after conquest, in Zululand the British delimitated native locations under chiefs from the early years of colonial rule.Footnote 14 Moreover, the British initially left Africans in possession of most of their land after conquest, albeit under 13 government-recognized chiefs.Footnote 15 Zululand became a British colony in 1887, but it remained closed to white settlement for over 15 years. At the end of the Zulu civil wars in 1888, the British exiled Dinuzulu to St Helena.Footnote 16 In 1891, the British government in Zululand created a commission to define tribal boundaries between the Usuthu and Mandlakazi in the Ndwandwe district, which would later be renamed Nongoma. The location boundaries for the district thus were drawn years before Zululand was open to white settlement.Footnote 17
When Zululand became part of the colony of Natal in 1897, the British proclaimed that no land would immediately be alienated from Africans.Footnote 18 In 1898, Dinuzulu had been allowed to return to Nongoma, where he was recognized as chief over the Usuthu locations.Footnote 19 In 1902, the Zululand Lands Delimitation Commission was set up to ‘provide sufficient reserves’ for all 82 tribes that the government recognized in Zululand. These were to be ‘in-aliable without the consent of the Secretary of State for the Colonies’.Footnote 20 Ultimately, 40 per cent of Zululand was opened to white settlement. In Ndwandwe, however, the Commission chose to maintain the locations drawn in 1891 and prohibited white settlement with the exception of a small township surrounding the magistracy seat.Footnote 21
The 1891 Natal Native Code, which was eventually extended to Zululand, provided a basic legal framework for land tenure in the locations, leaving land use and allocation effectively in the hands of chiefs. The locations were to be ‘held in common by the respective tribes for the exclusive benefit and use of the members of the tribes lawfully residing there’.Footnote 22 Headmen were responsible for preventing new settlements without the permission of the chief.Footnote 23 Chiefs held the right to ‘direct and grant kraal sites to the people of his tribe, and when necessary afford agricultural lots and irrigation rights’.Footnote 24 Occupancy of kraal sites was vested in the kraalhead, ‘subject to his good behavior or that of his family, to actual occupancy, or to the mandate of the administration of Native Law, acting as deputy of the Supreme Chief’.Footnote 25 The Code protected commonage grazing for all location residents.Footnote 26 In 1905 during the South African Native Affairs Commission, Mr W. Windham, who had served as the assistant secretary for Zululand immediately after its annexation into Natal, confirmed that chiefs continued to practice widespread control over land:
it is within his right to indicate the particular site which each member of the tribe shall occupy for his kraal and the land which he may cultivate. Common rights are enjoyed throughout the location in regard to water, wood, and grazing.
Windham confirmed that the state exercised no restrictions on plot allocation, grazing, or cultivation in the Zululand reserves.Footnote 27
The principles were further articulated in the ‘Regulations for the Administration of Native Locations and Reserves in the Natal Province’, promulgated originally in 1931 and further amended in 1939. The regulations stated: ‘A chief or headman shall allot to each married Native or kraalhead resident within his jurisdiction sufficient land for the requirements of his house or houses for arable and residential purposes.’Footnote 28 The chief or headman maintained the power to settle land disputes. Occupation rights could be cancelled if the land was not cultivated for three years, if the land was used for purposes other than for which it was granted, or ‘in the interests of public order or welfare’.Footnote 29 The regulations did permit enquiries into the distribution of arable and residential allotments, including allowing the native commissioner to suggest boundaries to the chief and headmen.Footnote 30 Any person whose land was not in the correct zone was theoretically to be allocated new land within three months.Footnote 31 These regulations would have provided the legal support for resettlement under rehabilitation, but this was not used in Nongoma before apartheid.
The centrality of land control to chiefly authority made the government hesitant to interfere with land use in the 1930s. At a conference of Natal native commissioners in Durban in 1933, Secretary for Native Affairs J. F. Herbst strongly opposed a proposal that agricultural officers and native commissioners be allowed to dictate land allocation in the reserves: ‘the adoption of this proposal is practically going to kill the Chief. The right to dispose of land is essentially the chief's prerogative, the only binding thing between the chief and his people.’Footnote 32 Nongoma Native Commission E. D. Braatvedt also emphasized the relationship between chiefs, indunas, and land at this meeting, noting that indunas allocated land on behalf of chiefs in Nongoma. This practice, however, did not have universal support among government officials. The native commissioner from Nqutu in Zululand complained that native commissioners and agricultural officers exercised no control over land in the reserves, and too much power lay with the chiefs. Another official suggested that agricultural officers ‘point out the areas suitable for garden lands, kraal sites, etc., and the actual allocation be left in the hands of the Chiefs’. The conference passed a resolution that agricultural officers assist chiefs by pointing out preferable land use patterns, but actual allocation decisions were to be left up to chiefs and their headmen.Footnote 33
Chiefs in Zululand exercised greater control over land tenure than chiefs in many parts of South Africa. In the Midlands and South Coast in Natal, several recognized chiefs lived on white-owned farms or crown lands. This issue came up before the Natal Native Lands Committee. For example, in 1918, Chief Mngomeni in Umzinto on the South Coast reported that all of his followers were resident ‘either on Crown lands (71 kraals) or Private Lands (36 kraals)’, and he requested that the government give them a location.Footnote 34 In Ixopo, a farming region in the Natal Midlands, Chief Gcokoda reported that of his followers, 52 kraals were on private farmland and 2 were on Crown lands.Footnote 35 Aran S. MacKinnon has shown that through the 1930s and 1940s, even as chiefly authority came under challenge in southern Natal, most chiefs in central Zululand held onto popular support due to their control of land allocation in native locations. In the less densely populated districts in Zululand, including Nongoma, chiefs and other elites also used commonage grazing land to increase their herds to levels unseen since the nineteenth century.Footnote 36 In the Transvaal, white settlement preceded the establishment of native locations, and many chiefs also did not have recognized locations.Footnote 37 However, British administration recognized the locations and chieftaincies years before Zululand was opened to white settlement. While the Usuthu ward was temporarily divided among other chieftaincies after the 1906 disturbances, Solomon kaDinuzulu, Cyprian Bhekuzulu's father, was recognized as chief of the reconstituted Usuthu in 1916.Footnote 38
While in other areas the existence of multiple avenues for land access diminished the link between chiefly authority and land, colonial land arrangements in Nongoma left limited space for Africans to access land outside of the reserves. Nongoma's territory was clearly defined as native locations. In contrast, in the Molopo Reserve in British Bechuanaland on the northern frontier, although territories were officially reserves, they effectively became crown land after exemption from the 1884 Native Location Act in the Cape Colony. Chiefs acted as landlords, collecting rent from black and white tenants alike.Footnote 39 This ambiguity was in stark contrast to the historical development of the legal delimitation of Zululand's reserves.
Freehold land and labor tenancy were also not significant factors in Nongoma. After Natal received self-government in 1883, white settlers began to curb African land access, effectively ending African acquisition of freehold land by 1910.Footnote 40 Thus, while in the early history of Natal many Africans bought or rented land in freehold, this fell out of practice for the most part before the creation of the reserves and white settlement in Zululand. Africans were strictly prohibited from purchasing land in Zululand outside of the reserves.Footnote 41 While in Natal, over half of Africans lived as tenants on white-owned land, labor tenancy was not a significant practice around Nongoma, where nearly all land was defined as locations.Footnote 42 In the northern Transvaal, in contrast, there was a greater mix of locations, land bought by Africans, and white-owned farms. Furthermore, in the Ciskei, people often accessed land through four main avenues: locations, quitrent, freehold, and the SANT.Footnote 43 In Nongoma, the definition of the entire district as native locations meant that people primarily accessed land through chiefs.
Newly purchased trust land, rather than pre-existing native locations, were often the first affected by rehabilitation and betterment.Footnote 44 In the late 1930s, the DNA resolved that all land purchased by the SANT would immediately be protected and rehabilitated.Footnote 45 In 1943, the DNA proclaimed that SANT farms would automatically be proclaimed betterment areas. Chiefs were recognized in the trust lands, but in areas like Sekhukhuneland, that recognition often remained inconsistent and partial. About half of the land to be purchased by the SANT was in the Transvaal. In Pietersburg, the trust purchased 250,000 morgen from private holders. About 10,000 Africans already lived on the land, having obtained occupation through means other than chieftaincies.Footnote 46 In the mid-1940s, the DNA limited and culled stock, fenced land, demarcated plots, and regulated land use.Footnote 47 In Zululand's native locations, by contrast, the state avoided implementing betterment out of fear that it would undermine the chiefs.
Both the former legal framework of land tenure and the refusal of the government in the 1930s to implement soil rehabilitation meant that Nongoma's chiefs continued to exercise de facto control over land in native locations at the beginning of apartheid. Rehabilitation in Nongoma and many other native locations originated only in the 1950s, at the very moment the apartheid state sought to strengthen the power of chiefs through the Bantu Authorities Act. The history surrounding chiefs’ rights over location land clashed with the apartheid state's development imperatives. The long history of the chieftaincies in the area, and the district's position at the center of the historic Zulu kingdom, created an unexpected crisis for the apartheid state.
SOIL RECLAMATION AND NONGOMA'S CHIEFS: EARLY COOPERATION
In 1951, the same year the National Party government passed the Bantu Authorities Act, the DNA began planning anti-soil erosion programs in Nongoma in cooperation with chiefs Cyprian Bhekuzulu (Usuthu), Moses Zulu (Matheni), and Phumanyova Zulu (Mandlakazi). DNA officials considered cooperation necessary given both the Bantu Authorities Act's focus on cultivating African self-government and Nongoma's symbolic position within the Zulu kingdom. The unpopularity of betterment elsewhere in South Africa placed Bhekuzulu, who had not yet been recognized as Paramount Chief, in a difficult position between the government and his subjects. Scholars have argued that both Cyprian Bhekuzulu and his father, Solomon kaDinuzulu, utilized a politically moderate hamba kahle, or ‘go slowly’ strategy to straddle the demands of the state and the desires of their own subjects.Footnote 48 In the early 1950s, Bhekuzulu was close to Natal ANC leaders such as A. W. G. Champion, but his position and stipend still came from the government.Footnote 49 With considerations of his position likely in mind, Bhekuzulu and the other two chiefs in his district initially cooperated.
After 1948, economically and politically self-sufficient African reserves became a political imperative. Under the Bantu Authorities Act, governing authority would theoretically be transferred from national, provincial, and district level white officials to African chiefs, including, eventually, Cyprian Bhekuzulu. The tribal authority, at the base of the system, would hold administrative and executive powers in addition to the judicial powers already held by chiefs, and it was to govern ‘in accordance with native law and custom’.Footnote 50 Several tribal authorities would combine into a regional authority. In turn, regional authorities would combine to form a territorial authority supposedly reflecting a discrete ethnic unit. The government saw the tribal authorities as natural political structures to carry out development efforts.
Soil conservation had been central to rural development planning for over two decades. In 1929, Russell Thornton, the DNA's first director of agriculture, toured the African reserves and identified soil erosion as a crisis demanding immediate action. He identified northern Zululand as one of the few regions of South Africa without significant erosion.Footnote 51 This spared Nongoma from early initiatives. While the government did not undertake significant cattle culling until after the Second World War, efforts in the 1930s included donga filling, dam construction, grazing schemes, and animal husbandry.Footnote 52 After 1945, the government turned to more drastic strategies, including forced resettlement and villagization, revamped land-use systems, and cattle culling.Footnote 53 After the National Party's victory in 1948, these development schemes became linked to the larger project of Bantu Authorities. From 1951, the DNA committed with fresh zeal to soil rehabilitation programs, including a new focus on locations in Zululand.
By 1950, no area of Zululand had been declared a betterment area. In early 1951, the DNA turned its attention to Nongoma, believing that its position as the ‘headquarters’ of the ‘Zulu nation’ made it a powerful example for the rest of the region. The Nongoma Native Commissioner, R. Ashton, wrote to Chief Native Commissioner Liefeldt that Nongoma urgently needed anti-soil erosion measures.Footnote 54 His immediate recommendations did not include a full betterment proclamation. The more coercive and unpopular aspects of betterment planning, including cattle culling and mass displacement and resettlement, were not yet on the table. However, he proposed limits on new stock, the construction of dams, grass strips, and contour banks, the demarcation of arable and residential land, and the formation of an Ad Hoc Committee consisting of agricultural officers and the chief in each of the three wards.Footnote 55
The government believed that the state of agriculture in Nongoma had become dire. The district of 264,656 morgen was split evenly between high and low veld.Footnote 56 It had 37,000 people and 100,000 heads of cattle. The majority of the population was divided between the Usuthu and Mandlakazi locations, but about 3,000 people lived in the smaller Matheni location under Chief Moses Zulu. Households largely depended on migrant labor wages rather than agriculture.Footnote 57 The district was drought prone. Soil reclamation projects did hold some appeal for chiefs and local residents because they typically included water projects such as dam construction. However, the prospect of land reallocation and cattle culling, which had taken place in other regions, remained unpopular.
In April 1951, Secretary for Native Affairs Eiselen made a major decision involving the government in land management in Nongoma. He recommended that Native Commissioner Ashton proceed with an enquiry under section fourteen of Proclamation No. 123 of 1931. This entailed an investigation into the existing distribution of arable and residential allotments in Nongoma and the potential reallocation of these lands. Eiselen asked the Ad Hoc Committee to assess the local soil erosion situation and propose a program of action.Footnote 58 Ashton, in cooperation with three engineers and agricultural officers, drafted initial proposals to present to the chiefs.Footnote 59
On 19 May, Chiefs Cyprian Bhekuzulu, Pumanyova Zulu, and Moses Zulu met with Ashton to discuss the proposals, which included land demarcation, some small-scale resettlement, and the construction of dams, contour banks, and grass strips. This was the first time that the government sought to intervene in land use in Nongoma after years of de facto abdication of land management to chiefs. The chiefs were still cooperative at this point, agreeing in principle with the need to fight erosion. However, they requested that the power to carry out these plans be transferred to them, with the understanding that the DNA would assist when needed.
With this request, the chiefs attempted to assert their authority over land while still cooperating with government policy. Ashton, however, rejected their proposal. ‘I cannot think that the unfavorable reply of three people who are insufficiently intelligent for the position’, he wrote back to Chief Native Commissioner Liefeldt, ‘be allowed to unfavorably influence the decision in such an important matter as the saving of miles of country and the well-being of a large population.’Footnote 60 Ashton decided that chiefs would serve as ex-officio members of the Ad Hoc Committees in their respective wards, working under white officials. Beinart has argued that conservationist ideology in Southern Africa was propagated by ‘those who saw the future of capitalist agrarian development as dependent on rational planning and the application of technology’.Footnote 61 The chiefs’ cooperation was necessary given the focus on African self-government at the beginning of apartheid and the desire to use Nongoma as an example for the rest of Natal. The ideologies of conservation, however, painted African agriculture as inherently destructive. Under this logic, Africans could not be in charge of rehabilitation. For officials such as Ashton, only agricultural officers with scientific expertise were qualified to manage such programs.
The Ad Hoc Committee began its work with optimism. In early August, Ashton proposed that they begin rehabilitation in one corner of the district and then eventually demarcate the whole district.Footnote 62 He also proposed that the committee take Chiefs Bhekuzulu, Pumanyova Zulu, and Moses Zulu to the Zwartkop location near Pietermaritzburg to see an example of a successful anti-erosion project.Footnote 63 Ashton proposed that the Ad Hoc Committee immediately survey the 873 square mile district so that work could begin by the end of September. He submitted an application for equipment funds to Chief Native Commissioner Liefeldt, who forwarded it to Eiselen with a note that while ‘the location has not been declared a Betterment Area … the natives … are interested in the protection of demarcated arable land and the protection of springs’.Footnote 64 The government already had begun to beacon land into two-acre lots, which the chiefs were eventually supposed to allocate to their followers. No other land was to be cultivated and any landless residents were to receive smaller plots in village areas.Footnote 65
The manner in which officials undertook rehabilitation in Nongoma was an experiment in a less coercive method than had been undertaken in the 1940s on SANT land.Footnote 66 It was also significantly less coercive than the government's approach from the late 1950s onward, when betterment across South Africa was characterized by rapid resettlement and villagization without significant economic or ecological benefit.Footnote 67 Liefeldt optimistically wrote, ‘If conservation farming can be achieved in this manner, i.e. by development from within instead of by arbitrary imposition from without, as has been the case, in effect, up until now, it is felt an important step forward will have been made.’Footnote 68 However, while Liefeldt referred to the Ad Hoc Committee as a sort of development from below, the chiefs occupied a powerless ex-officio role.
After the Bantu Authorities Act came into effect in July 1951, officials in Natal and across South Africa accelerated anti-soil erosion efforts, placing chiefs at the center more than ever before. The erosion of the reserves’ soil and the ‘disintegration’ of the tribal system seemed intertwined as twin evils to DNA officials. In December, Eiselen traveled to Vuma, near Eshowe, to meet with chiefs attending lectures on law, administration, and agriculture.Footnote 69 He emphasized that it would be possible to transform ‘tribal forms of administration’ into an effective instrument of government in which chiefs would have a central role.Footnote 70 Eiselen emphasized:
The Bantu Authority must realize that its main function is not to deal with family feuds and courts cases but to deal with community life in all its ramifications just as in the tribal life of old but on a higher level, for example, the allocation of fields not to all and everyone but to those who are prepared to farm progressively… agricultural shows replacing or supplementing first fruit ceremonies; water conservation as the most effective rain ceremony; labour squads to replace regimental training; clinics instead of the witch-doctors; schools serving the community and so forth.
His further remarks demonstrate the tension between chiefly authority and rural development imperatives:
It is essential that the Bantu Authority should itself undertake such community services such as the dipping of cattle, culling of surplus cattle, control of grazing, contouring and anti-soil erosion measures, planting of trees, making of fire belts, fencing and so on, and that it should earn Government subsidy for these services by taking the initiative itself and by providing the necessary labour from the ranks of the community.Footnote 71
Under this proposal, however, white officials would make decisions about land demarcation and development, while chiefs would only carry out these policies. The Bantu Authorities Act would empower chiefs in certain arenas, but betterment and soil rehabilitation piloted by the apartheid government would strip them of their control over land.
Keeping with this emphasis on revitalizing tribal governance, Eiselen officially recognized Cyprian Bhekuzulu as the ‘Paramount Chief of the Zulus’.Footnote 72 The appointment did not define the limits of the ‘Zulus’, nor did it provide Bhekuzulu with any political authority beyond the Usuthu locations. The appointment recognized him as the ‘social head of the Zulus’, which meant he would be ‘consulted by the Government and asked to assist in matters which are of concern to the Zulus’.Footnote 73 The government prohibited Bhekuzulu from summoning other chiefs, attending meetings outside his own district without the consent of the Chief Native Commissioner, or making visits outside of Natal without the consent of the Secretary for Native Affairs in Pretoria.
At this point in 1951, the government continued rehabilitation planning in Nongoma without allowing Bhekuzulu or other chiefs to have any real role, thus undermining the long-standing relationship between chiefly authority and land. However, they simultaneously sought to empower the chiefs and strengthen frameworks of ‘tribal governance’ through the Bantu Authorities Act. Thus, the state's development initiatives undermined its principles of African self-government. Eiselen later wrote in Bhekuzulu's appointment papers that ‘What his future position and jurisdiction will be, will depend upon the development which will take place in terms of the Bantu Authorities Act and also upon Chief Cyprian Bhekuzulu's own wisdom and leadership.’Footnote 74 This made it clear that Bhekuzulu's position depended on his cooperation with government policy.
POLITICAL STRUGGLE AND PLANS DELAYED
The government's early optimism that Cyprian Bhekuzulu would be a useful ally in influencing the rest of Natal to accept government policy would be dashed by 1952. DNA officials tied Bhekuzulu's future position to his cooperation with policies that stripped him of his control of land allocation in Nongoma. In doing so, they ignored a long history of government practices that had largely left the control of land in the locations as a prerogative of chiefs. Placed in this impossible position, Bhekuzulu and other leaders began to use rhetoric of self-governance to delay rehabilitation.
While Ashton and Liefeldt sought to begin anti-soil erosion efforts in late 1951, they faced several administrative setbacks. After preliminary investigations in 1952, the Ad Hoc Committee in the Usuthu locations decided that it would be impossible to commence with most aspects of rehabilitation within the fiscal year. They recommended that only fencing be undertaken immediately.Footnote 75 In March 1952, the Ad Hoc Committee put forward a new proposal to Chief Native Commissioner Liefeldt and Secretary for Native Affairs Eiselen. The committee recommended starting rehabilitation at a section of the Usuthu ward comprising the Tokazi and upper Ivuna areas. The area was heavily populated, and 50 kraals would have to be removed into new residential blocks. The committee also recommended that significant land be seasonally put out of cultivation, grazing systems be put in place at the expense of arable land, and arable land be contoured to prevent further erosion.Footnote 76
Correspondence between Ashton and Liefeldt show that officials on the committee had to force Bhekuzulu's cooperation. By 1952, some residents began to express discontent over the prospect of any rehabilitation efforts. ‘The attitude of some of the residents concerned is hostile to the proposals’, Ashton reported, ‘but some are in favour of them, while others are prepared to follow the leaders. Only careful handling, liberal treatment and favourable conditions will ensure a successful outcome.’Footnote 77 Bhekuzulu objected to the committee's proposals. He cited the will of his people, saying, ‘if the people want to have the work done, I have no objection.’Footnote 78 At a moment when the government attempted to foster African self-government, he idealized consultation as the cornerstone of Zulu political culture to resist unpopular programs.
While in 1951 Bhekuzulu asked to be put in charge of rehabilitation efforts, by 1952, he changed course. He told the Ad Hoc Committee, ‘I want the people to be told and made to agree and co-operate with the proposals. The people should be told by the Native Commissioner and me, together and I will support the Native Commissioner.’Footnote 79 By placing Ashton at the forefront of rehabilitation, Bhekuzulu attempted to shift potential popular discontent from himself towards the government.
Ashton viewed this purely as an act of defiance. Bhekuzulu informed Ashton that while he agreed with the report, he was afraid to sign it because some of his people were opposed to rehabilitation. Ashton reminded Bhekuzulu that Secretary for Native Affairs Eiselen had emphasized the previous year that ‘Chiefs must lead their people’ and Bhekuzulu's future status and jurisdiction depended on his own ‘wisdom and leadership’.Footnote 80 This veiled threat served to remind Bhekuzulu that the future of the Zulu royal house depended on his cooperation.
By October 1952, more obstacles emerged. First, in early October, the director of native agriculture rejected the Ad Hoc Committee's proposal, claiming it did not include enough details on the district, and its costs were simply too high. The director of native agriculture also recommended that chiefs be put directly in charge of kraal removal. This countered Bhekuzulu's attempts to shift responsibility for unpopular aspects of rehabilitation to the government. Ultimately, he recommended that the committee undertake more investigations to produce a revised and comprehensive plan.Footnote 81 This effectively dashed any hope for a quick implementation of rehabilitation in Nongoma.
Second, there was growing discontent among Africans in the district. On 17 September, Theophilus Masondo informed Native Commissioner Ashton that rumors had been flying around the district that the government would soon seize arable lands and stock from residents.Footnote 82 In an issue of People's World, Mr E. Mate, an African National Congress organizer, reported that the ‘misery of the people in [Nongoma] was immeasurable’.Footnote 83 E. Mate was the son of Reverend Timothy Mate, a strong opponent of soil rehabilitation who often accompanied Paramount Chief Cyprian Bhekuzulu to meetings with government officials.Footnote 84 Mate claimed that in the face of mass starvation and famine, the government planned to cut the acreage of people's fields and reduce cultivation. Mate also claimed – incorrectly – that Bhekuzulu had refused to give his consent to rehabilitation and sign the report of the Ad Hoc Committee.Footnote 85 While several of Mate's claims were significantly embellished, the veracity of his report is less relevant than its testament to the political tensions brewing in Nongoma. While no mass relocations or cattle culling were immediately on the table, the statements from this Nongoma-born ANC organizer raised alarm among DNA officials. Ashton feared that ANC presence could incite violent protest once kraal removal began.Footnote 86
LAND OF CETSHWAYO'S CHILDREN
Dissatisfaction with this perceived government incursion on the land rights of Zulu people soon reached a tipping point. Chiefs Cyprian Bhekuzulu, Moses Zulu, and Pumanyova Zulu retreated from their earlier cooperative stances and firmly opposed all rehabilitation efforts. From late 1952 to the mid-1954, these chiefs and other African leaders utilized multiple delaying tactics to block rehabilitation. Bhekuzulu's non-cooperation was especially notable given that Eiselen had linked his cooperation with the future position of the Zulu Paramountcy. His followers and family members, most prominently Isaac Zulu and Timothy Mate, argued that rehabilitation would destroy the ‘Zulu nation’, break treaties made during colonial conquest, and violate the principles of self-government and legal rights of chiefs over land.
In December 1952, a delegation including Cyprian Bhekuzulu, Pumanyova Zulu, Moses Zulu, Isaac Zulu, and others travelled to Pietermaritzburg to bring a list of grievances, signed by prominent members of the royal family, to the government. The written statements demanded that the ‘tribesmen’ be shown the regulations governing rehabilitation and be allowed to send representatives to other reclaimed areas. Delegates at the meeting denied any knowledge of the regulations surrounding rehabilitation. Reverend Timothy Mate, the father of the ANC organizer E. Mate, protested that the delegation had not seen other areas where the government had implemented similar programs. He suggested that the government abandon rehabilitation altogether. Isaac Zulu, the last living son of Dinuzulu and the uncle of the Paramount Chief, requested authority to convene meetings in other rehabilitated areas to speak with residents.
Isaac Zulu, Timothy Mate, and the others claimed that soil conservation policies threatened both the letter and spirit of laws and agreements governing relations between Zulu people and white people. They cited overcrowding in the reserves as a result of colonial land dispossession and the ejection of Africans from white farms, asking, ‘The tribe would like to be enlightened as to whether in a period of a hundred years their generation would still have any land left to live in?’Footnote 87 In addition to asking the government to purchase more land under the 1936 Native Land Trust Act to add to the reserves, members of the royal family in the delegation invoked claims of treaties and promises from the era of colonial conquest.
The conversation between the delegation and government officials was full of misunderstandings surrounding the history each side invoked. While they did not seem to know the exact terms of the colonial-era peace treaties, the delegation believed soil rehabilitation programs violated these terms. It is likely that their understanding of the terms of the 1879 surrender was also shaped by subsequent government practices that had ceded control of land to the chiefs.Footnote 88 They demanded that the government produce ‘the position which was created by the terms at the end of the war between the British and the Zulu – these terms being between the late Cetshwayo and the late Queen Victoria’.Footnote 89 Liefeldt, who became very frustrated, countered that the Zulu kingdom had ceded the territory in Natal – likely referring to territory south of the Tugela River – decades ago and the matter could not be reopened.
Isaac Zulu, Mnyayiza Zulu, and Mgatsha Zulu, all elder members of the royal family, argued that the fencing of land in rehabilitation programs violated the territory allocated to them under British rule. Isaac Zulu protested, ‘We thought that the land given to Cetshwayo after the Zulu War would be his forever. We say that our land at Nongoma is getting less, first of all fences and now the rehabilitation. The fenced in area does not belong to the chief, because the stock-owners are fined for allowing their stock to enter the camp.’Footnote 90 Fencing was meant to enforce government land-use directives and prevent people, including chiefs, from grazing cattle outside of specified grazing areas. Given that the state believed cattle to be largely responsible for soil erosion, limiting grazing was a major part of rehabilitation. Previously, under the Natal Native Code and subsequent revisions to land tenure law, all commonage land was available for the grazing needs of residents and chiefs. In referring to ‘land given to Cetshwayo after the Zulu War’, Isaac Zulu may have referred to both the return of Cetshwayo to Zululand in 1883 and the subsequent definition of the Usuthu reserve in 1891. Regardless, he understood this land to be free from government interference. For these Zulu leaders, the idea of coercive attempts to repurpose land was anathema to the limited land rights they saw as accorded to them during conquest and colonialism. Mnyayiza Zulu went on to claim,
After Cetshwayo's defeat the Queen [Victoria] took him but afterwards returned him to his land. The Queen spoke good words to Cetshwayo and said that Her Government would not take anything belonging to him and his people; Her Government would allow him to keep the land and property because she desired that there be peace and friendship between the two Governments. These words are written in the old books and we know that those books do not get old. We want these old books to be referred to.Footnote 91
These statements articulated a belief that the Zulu kingdom held authority over the land in Nongoma even after colonial conquest and called upon the government to uphold its obligations. The written complaints also cited the Bantu Authorities Act, arguing that by seeking to divide the locations into arable, grazing, and residential lands, the government sought to co-opt the chiefs in violation of the principles of Act. The grievances warned that if the government compelled the chiefs to do its wishes, the integrity of the chiefs would be compromised.Footnote 92
At this meeting, Bhekuzulu put himself at odds with the government that had appointed him as Paramount Chief. As his followers denied that the community had been given any information about rehabilitation, Bhekuzulu stayed silent. Acting Chief Native Commissioner Cowan noted in his summary of the interview that even though Bhekuzulu was a member of the Ad Hoc Committee, ‘he did not admit to any knowledge of what work it planned to do there. It is clear that neither he nor the other Chiefs concerned are prepared to openly support these measures which are opposed by a large number of their people.’Footnote 93 Cowan expressed doubts about the potential position that future tribal and regional authorities in Nongoma would hold towards the ‘development’ of the Zulu people.Footnote 94 Eiselen responded that the DNA was disappointed with this opposition to rehabilitation, which the government believed represented a ‘great benefit to this and succeeding generations’, despite the ‘inconvenience’ it might temporarily bring to Nongoma.Footnote 95
Rehabilitation planning continued into 1953 and 1954 with little progress, and the government grew weary of the delays. While officials preferred to deal directly with Bhekuzulu and Chiefs Moses Zulu and Phumanyova Zulu, their followers in Nongoma continued to bypass what the government saw as the proper hierarchical channels of communication. On 4 June 1953, Bhekuzulu appeared with his followers, including the ones who had been present at the meeting on 28 November 1952, to speak with Ashton and submit a letter to him.Footnote 96 Bhekuzulu told Ashton that the delegation wished to speak with him, but the chief implied that he was not associated with either the actions of his followers or with the contents of their letter, which was signed ‘the Usuthu Tribe Nongoma District’.Footnote 97
Theophilus Masondo read the letter aloud, protesting the lack of government response to the demands they had made on 28 November the previous year. The deputation issued the following words of caution to Ashton: ‘Now as it appears that you persist in not agreeing with us we hope that you and the minister will remember that the district of Nongoma is the head of the Zulu people in Natal and Zululand.’Footnote 98 They then asked that the government convene a meeting of all Zululand chiefs to discuss rehabilitation. With this meeting, the leaders attempted to utilize the position of the Zulu paramountcy and the rhetoric of self-governance for a Zulu united political front to resist rehabilitation.
The proceedings troubled officials, who believed the cooperation of these leaders was necessary for the success of government policy both in Nongoma and across Natal. Ashton later reported that the deputation's letter was either ‘unhappily worded or is intentionally rude’.Footnote 99 He reported that while Bhekuzulu did not associate himself with the deputation, there was no way he was not involved in their actions.Footnote 100 After hearing of this meeting, Liefeldt re-emphasized that the cooperation of both chiefs and subjects was essential for the success of government policy in the reserves.Footnote 101 1953 ended with a continued back and forth of meetings and letters without any progress.
By March 1954, several officials began to consider abandoning talks with leaders in Nongoma. Liefeldt pointed out that replies had already been sent to their complaints, and he refused to grant another interview for them merely to repeat grievances.Footnote 102 Ashton disagreed with his superior, recommending that Liefeldt see the deputation in order to temper rural opposition.Footnote 103 By May, however, the attitude of the Undersecretary for Native Affairs, C. B. Young, had also soured. He wrote to Liefeldt:
In regard to the general question of the undertaking of rehabilitation work in areas where the people are uncooperative, our attitude generally is hardening towards a point that where people will not co-operate in our efforts to do things for their betterment, we will not lightly give them such things as water supplies, schools and other facilities, which they want. In other words, they cannot expect the Government to give them all the ‘pleasant’ things and then turn around and adopt an unco-operative or hostile attitude when it comes to things which may be ‘unpleasant’ but which are nevertheless, in the long run, for the ultimate benefit of themselves and their areas.Footnote 104
He judged that full rehabilitation would not be possible in Nongoma due to the uncooperative nature of the leaders and subjects, but smaller stabilization efforts should be made to prevent further soil deterioration. He suggested that Liefeldt meet with the deputation from Nongoma one last time, emphasizing that ‘if they will accept the principle of Bantu Authorities they can expect help and assistance in the betterment of their own areas by themselves’.Footnote 105
Secretary for Native Affairs Eiselen responded on 3 July with a similar recommendation that rehabilitation no longer be carried out in areas where people were uncooperative.Footnote 106 Liefeldt met once again with Bkekuzulu and his followers. In the meeting, Liefeldt took on a threatening tone. He reiterated that rehabilitation was entirely for the people's own benefit. He emphasized the large sums of money the DNA spent in this district, which was about four times the taxes collected. He specifically warned Isaac Zulu that the ‘Government's attitude now where people are uncooperative is not to spend any money in their areas … It will for example, not destroy termites, it will stop dam building and it will not make available any money for roads.’Footnote 107
While Liefeldt presented rehabilitation as a central responsibility of chiefs, Isaac Zulu and others situated their opposition as a complaint against violations of both their land and the autonomy of their leaders. In particular, they rejected the beaconing of land into grazing, residential, and arable zones. They submitted a written complaint, which Isaac Zulu read aloud:
land which was solely reserved for the occupation by Cetshwayo's children has been taken and surveyed. Where are the children of the Chief going to stay? Where is the Paramount Chief going to stay because the small Usuthu Area in which the Paramount Chief and his tribe live is small?… We now see ourselves being deprived of the small property without our consent.Footnote 108
In referencing the land reserved for the occupation by Cetshwayo's children, he is likely referring to the 1891 definition of the boundaries of the Usuthu area, which Dinuzulu, Cetshwayo's son, returned to as chief after his exile in St Helena. Surveying and beaconing occurred before the official designation and fencing of residential, arable, and grazing lands. Thus, Isaac Zulu saw these preliminary measures as a forerunner to curtailed land access.
While Liefeldt cited their position as the headquarters of the ‘Zulu Nation’ to attempt to persuade them to accept rehabilitation planning, Isaac Zulu saw this very position as a reason to reject the division of lands into arable, residential, and grazing areas. He seized on a long history of both law and practice that had ceded control of land allocation and use in Nongoma's locations to chiefs to argue that the land belonged to the descendants of Cetshwayo and Usuthu residents. The meeting, like others before it, adjourned with no real agreement reached. The new Native Commissioner Mr Ackron, who took over from Ashton in mid-1954, suggested a few months later that Bhekuzulu personally meet all of his followers to discuss the scheme.Footnote 109 However, Liefeldt replied that such a meeting would serve no purpose, claiming, ‘these people have no intention of cooperating with the Department’.Footnote 110 Rehabilitation was to be set aside as Eiselen and Liefeldt's great hope of using Nongoma as an example for the rest of Zululand was, at least temporarily, dashed.
CONCLUSION
Common historiographical themes emerge in this story of the failed attempt to implement soil rehabilitation in Nongoma in the early 1950s: displacement, rural resistance, and the failures of what might be termed a high modernist development program. In the following years outside of the scope of this particular article, shifts in local and national politics eventually led Bhekuzulu to accept betterment planning in 1957, which might yield another analysis of the tightrope politics that African chiefs navigated under apartheid. However, this article has argued that these struggles also tell a different story, one embedded in treaties over a century old, colonial land arrangements, and in the profound, but uncertain, political shifts occurring in the first years of apartheid.
Studying South Africa's hinterland with attention to these types of localized struggles over territory and power offers a new window through which to reconsider the complex processes shaping the apartheid political order. The years from 1951 to 1954 marked the beginning of a decades-long process in which the state attempted to transfer more power to African leaders and craft a new form of ethnically defined self-government. Ambiguities within rural native policy immediately after the passage of the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act yielded a situation in which massive state intervention in land use in Nongoma emerged at the same time as the apartheid government attempted to strengthen the power of chiefs. Chiefly power in Zululand, however, had rested in large part on the territorialization of authority and chiefs’ ability to distribute land. This was especially acute in Nongoma, where for nearly a century the state had ceded wide control of land use and allocation to chiefs. African leaders in Nongoma exploited these tensions within apartheid policy, calling on colonial treaties, prior land arrangements, and the very principles of self-government espoused by the new apartheid government to resist soil rehabilitation.
Soil conservation in Nongoma was never simply a matter of material dispossession. Instead, it became a site where various actors contested the division of power between the central government and chiefs under the new apartheid political order. The story told in this article preceded the creation of the Zulu Territorial Authority in 1970 by over 15 years, but it is in these localized interactions surrounding soil conservation that the government and African leaders in Nongoma first began debating the relationship between the apartheid state and Zulu leadership in the reserves. These debates would continue in various iterations for decades, having major implications for the creation of the Zulu homeland and ultimately rural politics in KwaZulu-Natal to the present day.
