This thought-provoking study of the Eastern Cape traces the roots of rural poverty to colonial violence, a hot topic in the history of European empires worldwide. By any measure, the region formerly known as the Transkei suffered exceptional losses during the century-long series of nine frontier wars. Crais calculates a net reduction of 50 per cent in population – 100,000 individuals – during the 1850s alone due to death and outmigration. Disaster continued to pile on disaster for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, Crais points out, these hammer blows coincided with the supposed emergence of prosperous market-oriented producers charted in Colin Bundy's immensely influential Rise and Fall of a South African Peasantry (1979). How could prosperity and catastrophe run side by side?
The answer, Craig argues, is twofold. First, only a small minority of mainly Christian Africans prospered while others languished. Second, production for colonial markets was no certain road to riches. The adoption of maize as the principal cash crop held hidden perils. In individual homesteads, overreliance on maize led to malnutrition, especially the disease pellagra, and even to starvation when rains failed and the drought-prone crop commodity shriveled in the fields. At the best of times, maize was ill-suited to the ecology of the Eastern Cape. By the beginning of the twentieth century, many maize growers were caught in a vicious cycle. Dependent on crop sales to generate cash for taxes and other purchases, poor people sold their immature corn to dealers at low prices. Later in the year, as food supplies ran short, they bought mature corn from those same dealers at much higher prices. With self-sufficiency beyond their reach, the rural poor flowed ever more heavily into labour migration. By this somewhat circuitous route, Crais arrives at the same place as earlier historians who emphasized dispossession and mining capital as the main engines of proletarianization in South Africa. Because ‘the region's colonial experience had a resounding impact on the rest of Britain's African empire, from Southern Rhodesia all the way to Kenya's White highlands’, Crais argues that ‘what began in the Eastern Cape would spread to other areas of the continent’ (p. 125).
The emphasis on war and other forms of violence points to a lacuna in earlier studies of African poverty. John Illiffe's groundbreaking survey, The African Poor (1986), focused on relationships to the land and paid scant attention to warfare. Even violence associated with the West and East African slave trades was passed over in a few brief paragraphs. Crais's novel and convincing treatment of maize as a negative force opens the way for a general reappraisal of this foodstuff in Africa. More controversially he reopens a debate of the 1970s about the nineteenth-century emergence of the peasantry. Some, like this reviewer, emphasized mission experience, while others like Bundy and William Beinart posited a wider response to developing market opportunities. Crais takes the view that Christian Mfengu men were the main beneficiaries in the Eastern Cape. Citing some little known evidence, he paints a surprisingly dark picture of the ‘school people’. In one reported incident, about a thousand men with red handkerchiefs wound round their heads attacked defenceless homesteads, looting cattle and other property. ‘They were the very same men who represented the “civilized” elite in places like British Kaffraria and Glen Grey, church-going men with land under the plow who believed in the empire's spirit of conquest and progress’ (p. 118).
Where Crais may encounter most scepticism is in his attempt to establish a clear and direct chain of causation from the frontier wars to the adoption of maize and the development of a permanently impoverished rural population. Warfare and depopulation are terrible but in connection with the slave trade in West Africa they also laid the foundation for strong new states, wealthy trading elites, and peasant producers of cocoa and groundnuts. Apart from the Northern Cape and the western Highveld, few regions of South Africa experienced anything like the sustained warfare and violence endemic in the Eastern Cape. Yet rural impoverishment gradually extended a grip over practically all the subcontinent. Precisely how war and violence caused an uptake in maize production is not demonstrated, except by analogy with the consequences of social disruption in the American South and Italy after 1865. Crais's attempt to generalize from the experience of the Transkei to all of Central and East Africa rests on a shaky foundation. While it is true that the colonial administrative framework developed in the Eastern Cape was extended northward by British officials, the sequential pattern of bloody conquest, social disruption, maize dependence, and poverty does not seem to have been generally replicated. Nevertheless, all readers will find food for thought in this innovative and beautifully written study.
