African Economic Experiments in Colonial Natal 1845-1880

Abstract

Recent investigations of African economic life in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony have opened the way for the destruction of much conventional wisdom concerning the course of South African development.1 The emerging story of the rise and fall of black peasant communities challenges the deeply entrenched belief that Africans were hide-bound traditionalists slow to adapt to a dynamic settler economy which they neither liked nor understood--that they were late starters in a race they were bound to lose. This challenge can be strengthened by a review of African economic initiatives in the early decades of the Natal Colony.2 By the time of the Zulu War, African Christian communities had not only established a flourishing peasant economy but had also embarked upon entrepreneurial capitalist ventures on a significant scale. Their story suggests that the well-known curbs placed by white legislators upon African economic activity after the Zulu War were not so much designed to safeguard whites against potential black competition but aimed rather to undo progress which had already been made.3 Moreover, it is at least arguable that the rise of political activism and religious separatism at the end of the nineteenth century owed more to the loss of valued economic opportunities than to a newly-awakened desire to compete on equal terms in the dominant society. Christian missions in Natal provided a favorable setting for African economic experiments. Well-financed operations by nine different missionary societies made Natal one of the most heavily evangelised territories in the world.4 Because Congregational, Methodist, and Anglican missionaries had easy access to influential officials in the early years of the colony, missions benefitted greatly from the land arrangements made by the locations commissigns of the eighteen forties and by Sir George Grey's scheme of Mission Reserves. In addition, Lutheran, Methodist, and Anglican missions purchased extensive farms when land was cheap which served the needs of their converts adequately until about the time of the Zulu War.6 From these bases where the small black Christian population (between eight and ten thousand by 1880) enjoyed a privileged status, missionaries moved immediately to effect an economic revolution. The clothing which missionaries recommended for the sake of modesty was for many of their converts an introduction to a new system of production and exchange. Whether the convert earned his new clothes by wage labor or fabricated them with European looms and needles, he was entering into new kinds of economic relationships. The upright which rose on all mission stations embodied materials and demanded the use of tools unknown in the pre-colonial period. Indeed, on the assumption that the builders of such houses had become importers of dutiable goods, African Christians won exemption from Natal's hut tax.7 Missionaries knew what they were doing when they sought to accelerate the transition to a capitalist economy. Very much under the influence of T. F. Buxton and David Livingstone, missionaries of all denominations agreed that Civilisation and Christianisation would reinforce each other.8 By 1861, a pioneer American missionary could cite facts to support his theory: