GOVERNMENT WITCHCRAFT: TAXATION, THE SUPERNATURAL AND THE MPONDO REVOLT IN THE TRANSKEI, SOUTH AFRICA, 1955-1963

Abstract

WHEN THE MPONDO REVOLT broke out in the Transkei in 1959-60, white South African authorities were caught off balance. Magistrates and officially appointed chiefs and headmen all over the Transkei not just in Pondoland were in the process of implementing Bantu Authorities legislation that would eventually bring apartheid-generated 'self-rule' to the territory in 1963. Low-level unrest had been simmering for several years, particularly in those locations where 'betterment' and 'rehabilitation' schemes had already taken effect. Yet white officials consistently acted as if this unrest were of little consequence and could either be ignored or defused. The revolt proved them wrong. Students of colonial history in Africa have often grappled with the issue of why Africans did not rebel more frequently against imperial rule. Yet when analyzing the revolts that did occur, scholars sometimes find the causation unproblematic) arguing that colonial states provoked the revolts by being discriminatory and exploitative. While this was manifestly true, revolts should not be studied out of context. The question of why people revolted at one historical moment may be linked to why they did not revolt previously. To present the analysis in these terms is immediately to delve into a discussion of the political) social and cultural consciousness of the Africans involved. For, although the brute force at the command of the South African state did play a crucial-if comples-role in the nineteenth century subjugation of the Transkei) South Africa maintained its control in the twentieth century without an army of occupation, with local protests only occasionally upsetting its subsequent rule.l In fact, it was only after many months of sporadic violence in the Transkei that, in 1960-63! the state did send in military force to resubjugate the countryside. If brute force was not the sole basis for rule, then we are left with the issue of African acquiescence. Karen Fields has discussed this question with regard to British-controlled central Africa in the colonial period, a region that provides some useful comparisons with South African history. Fields notes that the British, once they took control of various regions, did not maintain that control through the constant use of military force;