Chapters Four and Five deal with the nature of life in the reserves of the former western Transvaal and northern Cape, which today form much of the North West Province. Reserves set aside for African occupation, were a common feature of the political and economic landscape of much of southern and central Africa. Initiated in Natal, the system was introduced by the British colonial administrations in other parts of the continent. But they were not only a British phenomenon: Moiloa's Reserve, as we have seen, was actually given to the baHurutshe by the Boers. The reserves shared a number of characteristics. Ideally, separate ‘tribes’ were meant to occupy distinct reserves; the land in them was allocated and used on a communal basis and it was generally inalienable – in other words, white farmers could not own land in the reserves. Legally, reserve-based Africans could technically not own land outside their designated areas, but the baHurutshe were able to expand onto farms bordering their reserve.

This account begins in 1910, the year of Union, and ends in 1955 with the enforcement of the Bantu Authorities Act which paved the way for the incorporation of the ‘Bechuanaland Reserves’ into the emerging bantustans. The reserves have possibly not received sufficent attention from historians and other scholars in relation to their importance, for they were home to millions of black people in South Africa, many being migrants who had families back home in the reserves. Hidden from sight, the inhabitants of the reserves or locations remained forgotten. For many years the perceived wisdom was that in the twentieth century the reserves simply became reservoirs of labour for South Africa's expanding capitalist system, and that economic production in the reserves collapsed after about the first three decades of the century. Such views were challenged subsequently by writers who recognised that the reserves (or former reserves) continued to offer a home to large segments of the rural population, who ‘were not entirely undermined during the colonial era’.