Black labour for white masters

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century the southern half of Africa was still occupied by three distinct and very disparate groups of people, with only very limited contact between them. In Cape Town and its vicinity there were the commercial interests represented by merchants and traders, and those few farmers who produced for the market. Further afield, and moving steadily away to the east and north, were the majority of white settlers, largely isolated and self-sufficient on their vast farms. In the rest of the territory, African subsistence farmers worked on the land as they had always done.

A century later the urban commercial interests had been powerfully reinforced by mine-owners in Kimberley and Johannesburg, the white community had been augmented by skilled artisans recruited from Europe to work on the mines, and the Africans had lost their independence. But the really crucial change was that all three groups had effectively been integrated in one single, rapidly modernizing economy and would continue to be irrevocably bound together, each making a vital contribution to the economic development of the country. It is this history of the incorporation of the African people to provide the indispensable labour for a modern economy that forms the central theme of this chapter.

As the process of conquest and dispossession was completed over the second half of the nineteenth century, Africans progressively lost the possibility of continuing to farm independently, either in their traditional way on communal land or as individual peasants.